Think of human life as divided into three stages.
The first stage is childhood. This is where the individual develops a sense of identity, who they are, and where they fit into a family. The individual lays the foundation for how they’re going to show up in the world at large.
Adolescence is the stage where the individual starts to form a sense of where they fit into society. Relationships with peers become all-important as a kind of incubator for all future relationships. It becomes socially important to fit in and to be seen as doing what everyone else is doing.
Adulthood is the stage where the individual should have ideally already built the structure of their own identity. They should have already learned who they are, why they’re here, and where they fit into society as a whole.
Individuality takes the foreground in adulthood. We care less and less as we age about conforming to what everyone else is doing.
We establish ourselves as unique from everyone else with our own identities, our own gifts, and we learn to leverage these so we can make a contribution that society will value.
The process of growing from childhood through adolescence to adulthood teaches us many lessons.
One of the most important lessons we learn in the process of growing up is that it isn’t advisable, beneficial, or productive to copy everyone else around us.
We learn that the world values us for our individuality, not for turning ourselves into robots exactly like every robot coming off the assembly line.
Copying others is not a way to establish our own identity. Our identity as individuals is rooted in our points of difference—the things that make us completely other than what everyone else is.
We find out as we age that the world only values our points of difference. The world doesn’t need or care about things it can get from every other person out there. In fact, the world despises those things and shuns them.
Offering a unique valuable contribution to the world means showing our unique individuality and offering something no one else can offer. These are the only things the world values.
The same goes for relationships. No one wants to love a robot. No one can love a robot.
No one can love us if we aren’t showing up as unique individuals. In fact, our uniqueness is the only thing we have that anyone could possibly love. No one can love the things about us that every other person on the planet already has.
A wise man once said, “A normal person is someone you don’t know very well.”
As we grow and gain wisdom in life, we come to realize that there is no such thing as the status quo. There is no such thing as average. There is no such thing as normal.
Everyone goes through a crisis of identity when they enter adolescence. This crisis is in fact what adolescence is. Everyone goes through exactly the same thing. It would be abnormal and worrisome if someone didn’t go through it.
Every child goes through the crisis of letting go of their child self, rebuilding their identity from the ground up, and trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world.
A adolescent who appears to have it all together on the outside is covering up their insecurities to make themselves blend in. They have no idea who they are or how they fit in.
They have no established identity of their own, so they try to make themselves a cookie-cutter copy of everyone else in the hope that no one will notice anything objectionable or unusual about them.
Adolescents have an irrational phobia of anyone considering them weird, different, or unusual.
We find it easy to look around at the people near us or in the media and think they’re normal. We find it easy to think these people are living the way societal rules tells us we should live.
The truth is that these people are going through all the same stress, anxiety, insecurity, and internal questioning that we’re going through on a daily basis.
This is called being human. No one escapes it.
Having a bunch of money doesn’t make it go away. Achieving any kind of success in business or society doesn’t make it go away. It can’t go away because this is a necessary part of being human.
Anyone who claims not to be going through these things is lying and putting on a false front. They do this to try to trick everyone into thinking the person is normal and everything is the way it should be.
A person would only need to do this if they’re struggling on the inside and want to hide that struggle. This is the paradox of viewing someone else as more normal, more acceptable, and more popular than ourselves.
Most of the time, the more normal and put-together someone looks on the outside, the more insecure, anxious, and troubled they are on the inside.
There is no such thing as the social status quo. There is no such thing as normal.
It isn’t possible for us to be perfectly average and to exactly fit into what “society” says we should be.
The reality is that there is no society that might say this. Society is made up of individuals who all fall into two categories.
The first category consists of the people who are following all the other people around them, copying trends, trying to keep up with what everyone else is doing, and trying to blend in so no one sees anything unique or different or individual about them.
The second category consists of the people who have gone through the fire to discover their own unique identity, mission, and gifts. These people embrace who they are and market it to the world as a unique offering no one can get from anywhere else.
We need to understand that everyone in the first category is living with the strain and anxiety of NOT knowing who they are, where they belong, or what they’re really doing here.
These people aren’t making it easier for themselves by blending in. They’re actually making it harder because we’re all born with an innate drive to ask these questions and to seek the answers.
These people are deliberately shutting themselves off from the one source of information that would actually make them happy. They think being accepted by society will ease the tension and anxiety of not belonging.
In reality, following others and copying them is a recipe for disaster. We’ll constantly feel like we don’t belong because no one will ever be able to accept us for who we truly are. No one will ever even find out who we truly are.
These people spend their entire lives locked in the adolescent need to belong to some outside notion of the status quo. These people avoid the path of identity at all costs.
These people spend their lives chasing trends, finding out and following what everyone else is doing, and blocking out all drive to discover themselves and what their own unique path in life might be.
Lasting happiness, acceptance, belonging, and a sense of purpose can only be found through embracing our individuality. This is in fact the essence of maturity. It is in fact the secret that makes life worth living.
___________________
All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.