If all I ever did with my life was watch television and read magazines, this is how I would envision my life should be: I should marry a white heterosexual man, have a few rambunctious children, stay at home and use my new Swiffer WetJet and Dyson vacuum, go to the gym for yoga, buy the newest beauty products, sell my clothes when they go out of style and eat Special K cereal until I have the right measurements.
Luckily, watching television and reading magazines is not all I do with my life.
There is a lack of variety in our media culture that has put pressure on our civilian culture to fit to these so-called standards of living.
Although we can chalk it all up to our social behavior, there is something programmed within us that drives us to follow a specific path. You don’t see too many organisms genetically hardwired to “do their own thing.”
We are pack animals, and so we thrive on camaraderie and acceptance from others. This is why we seek lifelong partners in love and friendship. We need acceptance. Since we need this nod of approval to feel good about ourselves, it often leads many in the wrong direction.
Our culture establishes something that we deem normal. We pick an in-trend color, a genre of music, a cool celebrity, a religion or even a sexual orientation, and we call that “normal.” We take these things and cling to them tightly. The closer we stay to that norm, the more accepted we become. Our culture is quite literally forcing us to conform. Since many want to be accepted by the masses, even if they don’t agree with these synthetic standards, they overcompensate and adopt all of the accepted practices.
Trends are fleeting and meaningless. They depreciate almost instantly, and once they do, nobody cares about them anymore. Yes, we are pack animals, but that does that mean we must be a pack of Nike-North-Face-jacket-Croakie-wearing animals? A new concept we must learn is that appearing the same does not make us the same.
That being said, it may not be incredibly scientific to say, “We are all unique snowflakes” because many of us are more similar than we like to believe. The human race is one of the most homogenous species in the world. That means if you line up people from Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Vietnam, Canada and Brazil, there would be less variation between them than most birds of the same species. All humans are 99 percent identical biologically. Our minds are all hardwired differently, allowing us to express ourselves as individuals, which manifests in our culture. There is a saying in Japan, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”
As Americans, we too have this idea that standing out is only asking for action against it.
Expressing yourself in any form is incredibly important to your own psychological well-being. Dressing or acting like everybody else should not be the goal. I don’t know about you, but I get embarrassed when I’m wearing the same outfit as someone else. I do not take pride in blending in with the crowd, and neither should you. Appeal to your own personal preciosities. Being the same makes you incredibly replaceable.
There is a poem by Robert Frost in which he is at a fork in the road. He sees one road completely overgrown, green and desolate and the other worn and better used. He knows if he takes the one trodden upon and worn, he will get to where he needs to go. Yet he chooses to take the one less traveled since he wants to discover new things for himself.
The last line of the poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/I took the one less traveled by,/and that has made all the difference.”
[Rachel Kalisher is a UF anthropology and classics junior. Her columns appear on Tuesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 4/15/2014 under the headline "The road less traveled: Avoid our culture of conformity"]
