(March 29, 2019 at 4:31 pm)IWNKYAAIMI Wrote: I've been thinking about a conversation I had with someone in a different thread. I'm now wondering, what is the standard for being normal?
I have my issues, but see myself as being pretty normal. The thing is, maybe I'm not. I'm thinking about diagnosis of people broadly, and society claiming to know what is normal.
Maybe humans are supposed to be depressives and unhappy. We fight against it in loads of different ways, we imagine Gods that love us, we drink alcohol, we pop pills, we have pet cats, we pursue happiness.
Maybe those that we categorise are the only people being true to themselves IDK.
Can anyone point to someone and say "There goes Dave, he's completely normal."
I think "normal" is mostly an unthought-out image we have of what people should be like. I mean to say, it's a neutral-sounding word we use for our prejudices.
Look at how strictly behavior is scolded when it falls outside certain norms.
I grew up in a small town in the midwest. It seemed normal to me at the time. The last few times I went back there it seemed as if it was full of pod people. For example, everybody drives and nobody walks. When I walked five blocks to the supermarket, people in cars would yell at me. Because I wasn't normal, in their view, I deserved to mocked from moving cars.
The only people I saw outside were men working in their yards. They were all wearing the town's inevitable uniform: jeans or khaki pants, T-shirts or checked shirts, shoes that would be appropriate for camping. I was wearing a black sport coat and leather shoes (I was there for a funeral) and every single one of those men doing lawn work made sarcastic comments about my clothes.
In such towns, and often on this forum, the unspoken rules for conformity are strictly enforced, not by authorities, but by the people themselves.
