The Case for Being Extremely Weird

While you still can.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

A few years ago, this one bro adjacent self-help writer—something of an arch nemesisof mine—got super heavy into a computer game. He posted an article about how it almost destroyed his life. It disrupted his work routine. He spent several hundred bucks on a new graphics card. Then he got nervous about it taking over his life, so he quit cold turkey. His big takeaway was that he needed to find a “healthier” hobby, something he didn’t enjoy as much.

Can you guess my reaction?

Leave it to Americans to invent things like computer games and apps to entertain us all and then immediately chase it with a big shot of judgment. For what it’s worth, my dives into psychology over the years have led me to the opposite conclusions. As a society, our various addictions often have very little to do with personal failings or indiscipline. They have everything to do with a culture that shames and stigmatizes normal, healthy behaviors that simply look “weird.”

Since we’re often punished for being ourselves and doing what we want, we have to sneak around. That creates guilt and anxiety. It also creates the problems the self-help writer was encountering. If you love computer games, it seems like the answer is to integrate them into your life. Write about them. Make friends who like computer games. Date someone who enjoys games.

Play them together.

Learn how to make your own…

Instead, the self-destructive response is to forbid yourself from doing things you enjoy and then wait for the desire to spill over into binges. It’s a familiar story. Depriving yourself of something only enhances the desire. So most Americans live in a relentless loop of binges, purges, and moral panics.

You don’t have to be an expert in sociology to see how other cultures have consistently outperformed us in terms of health and happiness. Look at Europe. They can engage in recreational drinking, drugs, and sex without destroying their lives. They can even play computer games. They still have problems, but not nearly as many as we do. As we near the end of industrial civilization, there’s no end to the prescriptions for mental health. Here’s one I haven’t heard:

Be weird.

Addiction is a real thing. It calls for a team of licensed professionals. That said, there are tons of people going around thinking they have an addiction when the truth is that they just live in a heavily repressed culture that has turned individual freedom into a political weapon, not an actual thing to enjoy.

That’s what I’m trying to do. Be weird. When I read that article about gaming, it inspired something of an equal and opposite reaction. Once and for all, I was done hiding or denying my own weird hobbies and interests. I wasn’t going to keep them locked in a drawer anymore. I was going to integrate them.

I’m happier for it.

Nobody is saying you should feel free to talk about your deep, personal secrets out in public every day. Nobody is saying you can do them to the exclusion of your other responsibilities. We’re just saying that once you stop internalizing the judgment heaped on you by society, you are free.

It’s not easy to integrate weirdness into your life in a system that often punishes you just for having tattoos and blue hair, but it’s a helluva lot easier when you’re not feeling bad every minute you think about something you enjoy.

Let’s just use the example of computer games. First, we know humans face the possibility of extinction by the middle of this century—in other words, about ten or fifteen years. We also know there’s only so much you can do to prep and build community for an extinction level event. We know that a single afternoon of a billionaire’s “guilty pleasures” contributes more to the world’s problems than an average person over the course of a lifetime. And finally, we know that instead of fighting billionaires, the vast majority of Americans have decided to fight climate activists. They don’t want to stop billionaires.

They want to be more like them.

Not to go on a rant, but that adequately sums up the crises we’ve explored together on this newsletter for the last few years. That puts all of your decision making into a different context, doesn’t it?

I find myself asking a different set of questions lately. When it all hits the fan, sure, I want to be ready. I want to know a little field medicine. I want to understand how a gas mask actually works and what can possibly save my family’s life when we can’t get them to a hospital in time.

But ten years from now, am I going to wish I’d spent more time trying to build community with neighbors I can’t stand anyway, or am I going to wish I’d written and illustrated that weird fantasy graphic novel?

Sometimes, I lean toward Option B.

We’re all going to die, and most of us are going to die sooner than expected because of the actions of a handful of billionaires. So, are you going to beat yourself up over playing a computer game or owning a nice computer while you can? Are you going to waste your time doing things and being around people you actually don’t like, just so you can call yourself mentally healthy or normal?

Personally, that feels like the mistake.

Do something different.

Be weird.