Why we chase unrealistic standards like cute pets on hamster-wheels

Last week I started posting on the subject of social average and conformity, but I realised that cohesiveness of the message can get easily lost across scattered posts.

So I'm putting it all together here, and I will also continue my thought process in this article.

Last week I took an online test for prosopagnosia, or “face blindness”.

I never thought of it before and to be honest, I didn’t even know it existed. Until I met my fiancee, who’s very passionate about movies.

I am a big fan of TV-shows and in there, the characters remain pretty much the same for multiple seasons.

But when we started watching movies (sometimes even 2 or 3 per day), he noticed that I often don’t recognise actors if they have different hairstyles, hair colours or even if I see them in movies they played at different ages.

I always had difficulties recognising people on the street, at school or outside the contexts I’m usually seeing them (like, co-workers in a bar) but once they got closer and, particularly if we started talking, I would immediately know who they are.

So I always blamed that on my nearsightedness (myopia).

Anyway, I go online, take a test and it turns out I have the face-recognition of a 60 year old. So I freak out. OMG there’s something wrong with me.

I mean, things were like that my whole life and it didn’t impact my relationships, money or life experience in any way, but suddenly, by comparison to other people under a label, OMG there’s something wrong with me.

Then, he points out that the test we just took was with famous people & their doppelgangers and, since I rarely watch movies or the news, how on earth would I be able to recognise them properly?

So we took another test, with random faces of strangers, and turns out we scored pretty much equally (and he would recognise almost ANY actor - he really loves movies).

And then it hit me: what a rookie mistake I just made!

In every social experiment / survey, the end results represent the average of all the individual points of reference. This means the points of reference are very different from each other.

And, of course, their average is only relevant for the points as a whole group, not for each of them individually (social sciences nerd alert).

For example, if we survey 100 people on the length of their hair, as a general description of that group we’ll find out that women have longer hair than men.

Now that doesn’t mean that all women have long hair, or that all men have short hair. It also doesn’t mean that if you have long hair you’re a woman and if you have short hair you’re a man.

Just as it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to have short hair as a woman or long hair as a man.

This average is completely irrelevant to all individual men and women in the world and it’s only relevant to defining the individuals who took the survey as a group.

If we were to take each woman, individually, we’ll find out that their hair length can vary from 0 to over 100 cm. Same would apply for men, by the way.

For the sake of my nerdy example, let’s say we have a sample of 10 women and their hair length is around 50 cm. If one woman out of those 10 shaves her head, the average drops at 45 cm. Now, if another woman has instead 100 cm length of hair, the average goes back at 50.

If that woman’s hair is not 100 but 200 cm long instead, the average goes at 60 cm - but we would still have 8 women with 50 cm length of hair and 1 bald one in the group.

The average does not actually represent any of the 10 women in the group. Needless to say, the same would go for men. Or children. Or pets. Or anything, really.

As I'm writing this, I'm keeping in mind particularly the intrinsic traits that we own and are not as easy to change as a hair-style (such as core body structure, emotions, needs - the reference to the cover photo of the article will most likely start to make sense now).

Why am I writing this long post about it, though, right?

Because it goes the same in every aspect of our life. How many times we hear people saying stuff like - Actually, I want to be living out of this, but this is so different from the average. Actually, I want my relationship to look like this… but it’s so different from what I see around me. Actually, I want to come across like this, but that’s like… so susceptible to not fitting in.

These are amazing people who feel their potential in their bones, but go instead for that “average” that doesn’t really represent anyone.

And then they feel disconnected and trapped and purpose-less, craving for fun and passion and can’t seem to understand why it doesn't come their way, because they’re doing “everything right”.

For me, this hits close to home. I was one of the people who do that. And I felt like a crazy person because I kept forcing myself to excel at “the average”. But despite having a well paid job, a house, a car, a predictable group of friends to hang out with, I still felt suffocated by it all.

I couldn’t find myself in my life. And f!#k, it looked like an “excellent on paper” life. So back then, my conclusion was that I’m being spoiled and ungrateful for everything I have and that I should start appreciating it more, otherwise I deserve to lose it.

It took me yeaaaaaaaaaars - long and painful a**-years - to realise that there’s no “average” in real life. In real life, there’s billions of individual points of reference (unique individuals) and there’s no “standard” that can represent us all.

Maybe it can’t even perfectly represent a single one of us.

And here’s what else crossed my mind:

We are the individual points of reference that will create tomorrows’ average. The “standard” has changed over the past 5, 10, 100, 1000 years, hasn’t it? Do we live today by the same standard we used to live in back when we lived in tribes? No.

So what is this average anyway? It’s not even constant in time. It’s completely meaningless for each of us, as individuals and it’s only relevant for studying us as a group.

My point is, the average changes through the actions of the individuals. If women did their best to tame their curiosity and don’t acquire more knowledge because the average concluded that’s a sign of witchery, perhaps we wouldn’t have had social media today.

The person who owns a successful business can be just as passionate and as valuable (and as happy) as the person who is training dogs for a living. Same goes for the person who aces customer support. Or the one traveling & leading a nomadic lifestyle.

The family who goes to brunch on Sundays and the family who camps out in the wilderness every other weekend.

The 2 friends who raise a kid together. The couple who doesn’t want children. The partners in mutually agreed upon open relationships. The couples who spend 80% of their time together. The long distance couples who cook dinner together over Skype.

The woman who’s looking to adopt a child in her 50s and the woman who’s giving birth in her early 20s.

The highly achieving business man and the guy who plays guitar every Friday at the corner pub. The gamers who spend their nights learning strategies for that upcoming tournament. The boudoir photographer and the poetry writer.

They can all raise equally happy and successful children if they chose to. They can all have equal wealth if they chose to. They can all have equal fun if they chose to. They can all serve as examples for the right kind of people and they can all leave something valuable in the world. They can all feel free.

As long as they’re passionate about the existence they’ve chosen to act on.

What do you think, you guys? Does this make sense?