A Sea of Counter Conformity

We live in a sea of conformity and signaling. We are drowning in it, and, to some degree, this is okay. We are a social species, and we need to accept that the social nature of the species expresses itself in this way. I am on the far side of the spectrum that feels moderately comfortable being unacceptable, but I am an aberration. Even in myself, I feel the same social impulses everyone feels.

Anyway. I read a post from a cousin that I don’t know (I just went to his profile and he had public posts). He talked about gender as an oppressive cultural construct. He talked about conservative values as oppressive social constructs that hamper our individuality. I don’t exactly wish to disagree, but it is weird to observe this sort of signaling.

My cousin had a bunch of counter culture (if you were born in the 1980s) representations in their profile. There was a bunch of things representing a certain culture, and a bunch of demarcations that showed that they were confirming to that culture. This experience triggered a thought … It is irritating to live in the culture that believes that conformity to a certain set of prescribed narratives is oppression and anti-individualistic, while simultaneously pushing a view that we ought to be apart of other cultural prescriptions that we ought to conform to in order to be acceptable.

It’s irritating to see these people super pushing these ultra conformist narratives truly believing they are the noble anti-conformist. It gets even more irritating that these “anti-conformist” and “counter culture” views are actually what is truly popular and mainstream.

I get that we are social and conformist by nature, However, I long for the olden days where we could be mildly honest in our perception of what mainstream and counter culture actually is and what it represents.

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Aaron White, married to a swell girl, is a business owner and unschooling father of two, going on three. His hobbies are music and poker. He resides in Southern California.