That's a lot of food for thought! Well...heh one of my good friends just says "Normal is a setting on a washing machine." I like how you put all this philosophy together though.

Life is always complicated.

FB and social medial contributes to this sense as well. Lets say you have 100 friends. You scroll through and see post after post of vacation, birthday parties, evenings out with friends or amazing views and all you did tonight was pay some bills and heat up leftovers for dinner. But it's a distortion. Even if it's only 25 friends posting on a given night; I see the majority of my friends doing something exciting or fun and I'm not. Nobody posts that other stuff. Nevertheless a good deal of our other friends didn't post because they weren't at a party/concert/vacation. They gave the dog a bath, argued with their significant other over household chores, kicked themselves for forgetting to go to the grocery store and then went to bed with or without their significant other, and very likely without any form of hanky-panky despite being in bed by 9:30. We are far more similar than we are lead to believe if we surf the internet and watch the news. I appreciate the reminder that, while we may all be a unique individual flavor ice cream, we're still all ice cream. Our commonality outweighs our differences for the most part.

You're right; we are more average and normal than we think and normal is relative--not what the specific channels that the media tells us it should be. The things I struggle with are the things my neighbor struggles with too. Another similarity even if we never talk about it with each other (though that can certainly help).

[/Soapbox] Its worth remembering that most media wants to persuade you of something; whether to buy something, or act a certain way or fear/love something/someone. One of the most powerful methods to do this is fear. Fear of loss, fear of falling behind the 'jones' or by creating this imaginary 90% majority of 'normal' that has something advertisers know we do not have. FB is free because we are the commodity, not the customer. Advertisers are their customers. Google? Same deal. I can be a real struggle to stop, and lay out exactly what you said above, that we are all a bit weird, a bit messed up, and a lot more similar than we are told. But its important that we do. Because otherwise, we're just a herd being 'Shepparded' by wolves. [/end soapbox]

Thanks for the share! I enjoy this kind of journal as it makes me think and reminds me why I'm part of a community like FA.

My housemate's talked about that as a demo reel effect. You see other folks' lives as a demo reel - highlights, stuff they've been working on for ages, that sort of thing - you see your own life 24/7.

You get this biased picture that your life is dedicated a lot to bad stomach upset, insomnia, feeling cranky at other people on the bus, looking for pornography, saying not much of everything on social media, and meanwhile other people are out there windsurfing with dolphins in Hawaii, selling their art at three different comic conventions this month, or celebrating their 8000th watcher on FA. Meanwhile because dramatically terrible stuff gets mentioned too, half of the other people you know are losing jobs, homes, relationships, relatives, or grappling with bad mental health issues. And all the time, everyone's thinking the same sort of thing. Twitter's pretty much the only place people suddenly share that they had a particularly good falafel sandwich for lunch or they hate the loud people two seats away on the same subway car.

One of the biggest things that internet has taught us, is the sheer variety and ubiquity of "weirdness" in people. The often stultifying norms of the past are an artifact of a world of limited communications and small, geographically circumscribed social circles. When you can talk of your interests and kinks and obsessions online, in quasi-anonymity, and find like-minded people all over the world, it becomes obvious that the "normality" of past was only a thin veneer over all the glorious variety and oddness of excitable, curious, horny and creative humanity.

Well the best circulation among the "vapid" magazines is People at 3,527,541. It is more like 1%. However, they are loud.

Which gets more attention, the ten people quietly sitting and reading or the yahoo acting crazy?

The loudest person.

Which is the part with mental, internalized consensus reality. Sheer frequency and volume turns "some people like this" into "everyone likes this." The younger you are, the worse this is, because you have less data to work with.

And self-hate turns "some people like this but I don't, which eh, not everyone's the same person" into "everyone likes this, but I don't, which means I'm terrible, and any moment someone will figure out that I don't like What's Good so I'll be punished, and worst of all, I can't stop liking this other thing which presumably one is not supposed to like, instead!"

The solution is to get old and run out of fucks like me. I don't give a damn what the rest of the world thinks is right and proper. I do as I do and "they" can stick it where the sun don't shine. "Sit and spin" as one friend put it.

We are social creatures. So the best we can do until the above point is reached is to support each other with a tribe that is like unto ourselves.

Then you send the ones like me out to give them Hell.

You are a a good hyena and i like you

There is a certain amount of comfort to liking the same songs as my friends, wearing the same clothing styles as my friends, watching and liking the same TV shows as everyone I know does, or maybe even disliking the same films, songs, or clothing styles as most everyone I know does.

However I have had enough people telling me that because of what interests me, of what I like, or what makes me smile to know that I am not average. “Weird” is a descriptor that more often used to describe me. It’s happened enough times for me to understand that I would be hurt if someone came up to me and told me honestly that, “The thing I like about you the most, Lionus, is that you are no different from the average person. You are just like everyone else.”

Everyone's weird. We're just all weird in our own way. Some of us are just weird in a lot of the same ways but it doesn't make us any less special. There's nothing wrong with being a special snowflake or considering yourself one as long as you're not expecting people to treat you like you're better than everyone. I also don't think it's wrong to think yourself better than people if the people you think you're better than are assholes who enjoy treating others like shit.

You've got so much right.
We're hurting and lonely and feel bad about ourselves, why can't we find each other? How do we connect when everyone seems afraid of each other?

I never expected to be "normal" or even happy for along time, but i shouldn't be alone like this.
In my late teens i got to know many people on line that i would never meet. I hate that. The internet show us there are others like us out there but they're off in some other fucking province or country.

I'm not alone, yet I am literally alone and lonely as hell.

Humanity is defective bullshit.The majority of us have no reason to live. No purpose, no love, no mate, just the fear of death keeps us alive.

Please forgive me if I try to be compassionate and fail badly.

Being social takes energy and sometimes that energy isn't there. All it takes is an especially long workday, chores, being sick, broken sleep, or having no car and your energy to go be social can really disappear. Worse, socializing is a repeated thing - you don't just show up at a [whatever] meeting once when you're feeling less shy and suddenly people adore you, you show up at weeks and months worth of [whatever] and try to be friendly when you can manage it. It's not surprising that the people who are really good at it are the serious extroverts - being around people recharges them, and they can put that energy right back into socializing. Most people - even more extroverted people - need down time.

What you're saying about the internet is something Freud talks about in Civilization and Its Discontents.

I believe there are both positives and negatives to the internet - but there are a lot more positives. I spent a lot of my life without internet access and I can tell you that as terrible as it would have been to be a desperate teenager crushing on someone abroad who'd treated me kindly, or as terrible as it would be to know that I'd never meet anyone in the same chat room, it'd be worthwhile if I could have known that there'd be women who considered me worth talking to, football fans who were also interested in D&D, other bisexuals, just learning from people that no, I wasn't defective shit.

I think keeping perspective on internet friendships is nuanced, and we humans aren't so great with nuance. I know that I want people I like to like me, and to be my best friends ever. It does sting to know that I won't ever hang out with a lot of my friends in person, if I do it'll be a few scant hours at a con or on vacation - that it won't be casually hanging out just because hey it's Saturday, or playing a Friday night game or whatever. But they're still my friends.

And, in the larger discussion of "being social is hard," knowing I'm someone who can have friends online - and having friends I can go back to online, a much less energy intensive form of socializing, might just give me the ability to get out and meet new people IRL.

And ultimately there's a lot of loneliness out there. I don't have anything even vaguely like a way of being at peace with that - I mean, I spend how much time hanging out online in the evening feeling really cut off because I don't have a car? - and the closest I can come up with is to accept that loneliness will happen.

If that stuff makes any sense?

That makes sense.
Still isn't fair or right.
Feels like the social structure we live in relegates us to the trash.

Wish I knew what to say.

Social structures can be hugely, hugely artificial, and they're not always fair - compare the income of the average grade school teacher to the average investment banker. Going along with "we're all pretty similar really," remember that the people who got things to be this unfair and completely absurd in places are just like us. They want to be liked, want to be comfortable, wonder how the hell they got to be this old, worry when they fail to be minor deities in bed, feel like after all the hard work they've done they deserve a little extra damnit, they get irritable when inconvenienced, you name it. This giant combination of human wants and needs with what's necessary, feasible or accidentally forgotten, comes together to make things this screwy. Unfortunately sometimes that screwy winds up being incredibly hurtful and painful. Fortunately, that's not all there is going on out there in the world.