Danny ChaiI just saw one of my neighbors walk by our window. I’ve never met him; I don’t even know where he lives, but I’ve seen him from time to time, and I remember him because he looks like he’s weird. In fact, when I stop and think about it, a lot of people are weird to me. I’m frequently saying to someone or other how someone else I know or don’t know is weird. Which is probably largely ironic to those many people who find me a total oddball.
What I’ve concluded is that everyone in the world is weird. There is no such thing as an objective normal. There’s not even such thing as a personality average, a sort of global normal; you can’t take the personality of everyone in the world, map them, and take a cluster of people that are in the “middle”. There’s no such thing. The map is a circle, there is no middle; everyone is weird.
The people we find the most normal are the people closest to the way we think. Not necessarily the way we act, but the way we think. As La Rochefoucauld says, “There are few sensible people, we find, except those who share our opinions.”* When I think about who I find least weird, it’s the people whose thought process makes sense to me. I may not agree with them, but their thinking is understandable. That’s basically the criteria for whether they’re weird or not. I personally thought there were lots of normal Stanford people, largely because people’s thought processes made sense to me. But I remember Cal people at KCPC saying how everyone (without exception) from Stanford was so weird. I think it had nothing to do with any objective criteria, but just how similar the thinking processes were.
In any case. Everyone is weird. There’s not a single person you think of as normal that another person doesn’t think is weird.
*That maxim doesn’t actually capture what I’m trying to say, I just thought it would be cool to quote someone famous. I don’t have a trove of La Rochefoucauld quotations at the ready, by the way. I just came across it in this random book I got while we were in SoCal, published by Barnes and Noble, called “Philosophical Classics: The Thinking Person’s Guide To Great Philosophical Books”. One of the greatest purchases I’ve ever made, and only $7.