We're Never Going to Feel Normal Again

So just be weird.

Photo by Elijah O'Donnell, Pexels

A while back, psychologists at UVA locked people in a room and gave them two choices. They could sit and think for 15 minutes, or they could administer mild electric shocks to themselves. About 67 percent of the men chose the shocks, and so did 25 percent of the women. It explains a lot about the world.

When you can’t understand why Person X would possibly do Y crazy thing, remember that a large percentage of humanity would rather shock themselves, for whatever reason, than spend 15 minutes alone thinking.

Maybe you’re wondering, maybe they were just curious. Well, read the study. None of these folks said they were completely fine being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes, and figured they would just shock themselves once to see how it felt. The vast majority of them explained they were so bored, it was so unpleasant, shocking themselves was the only way to pass the time.

So most of the people you know would probably rather harm themselves than spend a little time alone with their own thoughts.

This is considered normal behavior.

Normal.

It’s almost funny when you think about it.

Everyone’s been trying to get back to normal for five years now—whatever their version of normal was before all this.

Now we have Nazi robots praising Hitler on a platform that many of us once thought would usher in a new era of democracy. It cost billions of dollars to build that robot, and lord knows how many gallons of water. Our government is building concentration camps. We’re at risk of losing weather forecasts. On a related note, the U.S. endured four thousand-year flood events. Not one, not two, not three. Four. Each storm had .1 percent odds, and they all happened in the same week. Statistically, we left normal in the rearview a long time ago.

And yet, we’re constantly told to smile.

You can even take a class on smiling now. A robot will rate your smile and give you a grade. It can flunk you. Imagine getting flunked by a robot over your smile. That wouldn’t hurt anyone’s mental health at all.

That’s normal.

It just goes to show you how desperate 90 percent of humanity has gotten to get back to normal. They’ll let robots teach them how to smile.

Many of these same people have sacrificed so much to regain any sense of normal, even if it’s fake. They’ve rushed back to jobs they hate in offices they can’t stand. They’ve resigned themselves once again to a life of traffic jams and overpriced fast food. They’re posting harder than ever on social media and drowning themselves in self-improvement. They’re risking their mental and physical health to go out and have a good time with people who would steal their liver.

They’re sending their kids back into death traps.

Not everyone who did this wanted to. They were forced, but over time they started pretending it was good for them.

A psychologist named Leon Festinger had something to say about this. He wrote a number of books and articles on a concept you’re familiar with. It’s called cognitive dissonance, but maybe you didn’t hear all the details. For example, Festinger found that if you paid someone less for doing a meaningless job, they expressed more gratitude for the opportunity. So, it shouldn’t surprise us that many of the people who’ve had normal shoved down their throats the last few years pretend to be grateful, even if they’re crying on the inside.

But if you stop and say you actually kinda liked how things were five years ago, you liked spending more time with your family, you liked hearing “we’re all in this together” ten times a day, you liked saving money on gas and food, you’re the weird one. You’re the one who needs therapy.

Okay, sure.

What’s normal, anyway?

For someone like me, normal was dropping a child off at daycare or picking them up. It was going to a physical classroom and holding physical office hours. It was going to physical meetings. There was misery, but it didn’t feel like dread. Every day, we looked forward to life getting easier, not harder.

Normal was eating sushi in my car.

It was going to a gym that was open 24 hours. It was hiring a babysitter every now and then so we could go to a movie theater.

Even when you were tired, you had a little reserve energy. You thought it was worth it to give nights and weekends to your job. You thought if you hustled hard enough for long enough, you’d eventually got to relax.

You trusted strangers.

Take the weirdest, worst day of your life from last decade and stack it up against your average day since the pandemic started. Most of us have to admit, even if we weren’t making enough money, even if we had lousy jobs, even if you lived in a crappy apartment with loud neighbors…

You kinda miss it.

Now, all that’s gone. Your trust in strangers, your faith in any kind of merit system, your hope for the future, it eroded one event at a time. You saw a side of your friends, your coworkers, even your family that you’ll never unsee. You saw what they were capable of rationalizing, or just ignoring.

We’re all weird now.

Survey after survey shows that the average person still doesn’t feel normal. It’s no mystery why. Every week, there’s a new emergency to deal with. There’s a new set of tragedies. There’s more outlandish garbage landing on us every day than we ever thought possible. Even if someone’s life was never easy, even if it was riddled with injustice, it’s gotten that much harder.

And yet, the podcast class only gets more obtuse and obnoxious in their advice. Smile more. Talk to strangers. Do these stretches. Buy this sleep aid. Try this one little breathing trick. Develop a healthier relationship with your finances.

Yes, it’s all been said.

A few months ago, I watched a podcast guru get up in front of a room full of women and tell them the reason they struggle financially is because they hate money. She actually said that. Do you hate money?

We have a president who throttles the economy back and forth solely for the benefit of his own inner circle. What’s his decision making process? It’s not even what’s best for investors anymore. It follows the interests of his transnational crime organization, and good luck cracking their code.

So, what do we do?

If you want my advice, stop trying to feel normal. It was all a lie anyway. Maybe it felt good to sit in a dark theater for a couple of hours and pretend The Avengers were going to save us, but…

Those days are over.

Nobody can make a good superhero movie anymore because nobody wants or needs superheroes anymore. Nobody feels normal anymore because they shouldn’t. Beneath all the fake smiles, beneath all the curated nonsense, everyone knows what’s going on. For the first time in history, we’re watching a genocide online and no matter how much we protest, call, tweet, it continues. The journalists at the forefront of this warn us—it’s just the beginning. They’re testing out new weapons and new forms of warfare, and it’s all coming to a town near us.

I’m not telling you to give up hope.

More than ever, hope has to become a much harder, much more intentional act. It can’t just be some passive feeling that helps you cope with the world. Hope is something we have to earn.

It just kills me when someone says, “Have hope.”

Hope for what?

The thing you hope for, that matters. If someone’s hoping we’ll all eventually get to live like it’s 2019 again, sorry, that’s not gonna happen. They need to hope for something a little more practical. Try hoping we can forge a movement that beats back fascism and makes life a little less cruel. Try hoping that even if we’ve lost any chance to keep global warming under 2C, we can still save enough of the planet to deliver a future to a handful of thoughtful humans.

Anyway, I’m writing this for myself, too.

So often in life, and especially now, what’s weird feels normal and what’s normal feels weird. Doing the right thing can feel weird. Then it feels normal. Then it looks weird to everyone else. Some of us have been called weird our entire lives. Weird things have happened to us. We’re used to feeling weird.

When I catch myself romanticizing the old normal, I’m going to remember: There’s nothing inherently meaningful about normal. We didn’t get much of a choice in deciding what counted as normal anyway.

You don’t have to feel normal to feel good.

Just be weird.