Everybody's Weird

There are times in my life where I’ve spent a lot of effort trying not to be weird (High School tends to stick out). The problem is that “weird” is relative and entirely based on reference points. At a traditional african funeral, you’re weird if you are not wailing at the top of your lungs. If you wailed at a funeral in Western Europe, you would be very weird (and highly disrespectful).

It’s good to be aware of reference points for human behavior, because the crowd can lead you astray. When we look in retrospect at Nazi Germany, we ask ourselves how humans could have possible committed the atrocities they did. But from their perspective, it would have been weird to behave otherwise.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like trying not to be weird is a fickle basis for determining your behavior. I think that if we all decided to be ourselves, uninhibited, we’d find that everybody’s weird. That’s healthy, and that’s ok.