Why Can't You Just Be Normal?
Here's an idea: just do the things you're supposed to do
There’s this little thing millions of us do, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s called being normal. It’s great, I highly recommend it. Get this—first you get an education, then you get a job, then you get married/buy a house/have kids, and then you live the rest of your life in relative bliss.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still problems. You know, people get cancer, car accidents; all sort of awful stuff. But you know what makes it easier? Being normal. Like, with cancer for instance, it turns out you can afford to pay medical bills way easier if you have a full time job that pays you a decent salary plus health insurance. What they don’t tell you about ~adulting~ is that health insurance is important.
Except they do, don’t they? It’s kind of just screamed at us from the rooftops and popular media and parents and grandparents and teachers and… You get the picture. The concept of a 9 to 5 job and the importance of a college education are hammered into us from a young age. At least I got the message, and so did a whole bunch of other people, but maybe not you?
Oh, you’re a tortured soul? You’re making your own way in life? You don’t want to work a cushy office job where you sit on your phone in a cubicle? You want to be ~different~? You’re upset you can’t make ends meet financially because you’ve opted out of literally every reasonable path to success out of a misguided belief that you’re too special to simply do the bare minimum required? You’re too good to be normal?
Folks, I don’t get it. I see writers and journalists complaining they can’t find full-time employment in their desired area of work, being forced to take demeaning positions like (ugh) Uber driver or (ew) waitress. No shit. You fucked up, buddy. Why’d you do that? No one made you do that. You did that. You know, you could’ve done what the rest of us did and get a normal job and take up writing on the side as a hobby, but nooo, you just had to be ~special~, you just had to be Not Like The Other Girls.
Well, now you reap what you sow. We all reap what we sow, don’t we? I reap an employer match on my 401k contributions and you reap past due bills. I reap a house in the suburbs and you reap some shitty apartment in the crime-ridden part of town. What happened? Did you get one-shotted by angsty Gen X movies? Did you watch Fight Club at an impressionable age? Did you deeply internalize Office Space? Did American Beauty get to you?
This isn’t about me, this is about you. Because there’s millions of me out there. I’m not the only one making all the right choices that lead to all the positive outcomes. It’s pretty common, buddy. It’s pretty widespread. You know what’s not common? Thinking that you’re gonna be, like, a super successful artist. You know how many of them there are? Раз, два и обчёлся.
You’re not going to Make It. You don’t have rich parents who can front you the money for rent in Williamsburg, or whatever. You’re gonna struggle to pay rent for an outhouse-sized cupboard. You’re going to die a nobody with nothing to your name if you keep this up. There won’t be plaques devoted to you, no busts of your image, no Wikipedia article about your achievements. You’re banging your head on a wall in hopes you break through one day, but it’s your skull that’s gonna crack first. I guarantee it.
Here’s an idea: just be normal. Just embrace the fact that you’re nine hundred thousand out of one million instead of one. There’s fifty-five of you walking around in your home town. You’re a dime a dozen, just like me. What a relief, what a weight off your shoulders. You can just… be free, be normal. Finally, no more forcing yourself into the archetype of a struggling artist by refusing to do the bare minimum to make life easier. No more hating yourself for having to take a part-time job to afford rent. You can finally embrace your true nature as one of the millions of people who recognized the value of being normal, and get to ride off into the sunset knowing that they’ve done pretty well, all things considered.
This is the kind of lukewarm take that is perfectly calibrated to cause maximum outrage.
Even as a guy who is “normal person maxxxing” this isn’t really scalable advice. I can only imagine that you had a particularly unnerving experience with someone who thinks they’re special but really isn’t.
Surely it’s good advice for some individuals - but as a “told you so” after someone fails it’s usually kinda half baked. At a society wide level if everyone just was normal we’d all still be in mud huts rubbing sticks and stones together. Or there’d be nothing interesting to do on the weekends.
This is like when people tell a failed businessman he should have just invested in an index fund. Conveniently ignoring that that’s just offloading a lot of effort and risk, for someone else to do basically the same thing - build+run a business and try to generate value.