THIS IS HOW TO BE TRULY UNIQUE

on being cool, weird, and, oh, george michael

you know those preaching youtube channels that claim to know the (next) best way to live?

THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD CRAWL TO WORK EVERY DAY.

I QUIT BRUSHING MY TEETH. THIS HAPPENED.

WHY I NO LONGER BELIEVE THE EARTH IS ROUND.

I SAVED EVERY CENT AND LIVED IN A DUMPSTER AND NOW I AM RETIRED AT 19.

MY DOG AND I ARE GETTING MARRIED. (232 REASONS WHY.)

i am guilty as the next person of catching the bait and clicking on these titles – after all, they are called clickbait, they seem full of promise and potential – but the truth is, i almost never finish watching them. somewhere after a few minutes of nodding along to the person sitting in front of an overpriced camera with a gorgeous backdrop of a scandinavian-style furnished apartment they must have bought on all those online courses they sell, i start to feel queasy, like someone is trying to sell me on something they haven’t fully sold to themselves yet.

i am especially fond of videos called why i quit social media. on youtube. a social media platform.

oh well…

it’s not news that we’re all narcissists. if you put a 21st century millennial in a 19th century world, they’d be sent to a mental asylum. (a typical gen z would probably be burned on a stick in the central town square.)

it’s also spotify wrapped season – which i absolutely adore – and if you look closely, you’ll notice that it’s all one big ego jerk.

you’re the top-1% of this artist! your color is blue! no wait, it’s black! you are a shapeshifting zebra! an underwater cactus! and your sound city is karaganda, kazakhstan!

we all crave to be defined. but more than being defined, we want that definition to be unique to us. there’s no point in being defined if we’re just like everyone else. spotify marketing people know this and they use this so that people post on their instagram stories, look, i am so unique! i am so special! yay me! aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhH!

but it’s one thing to be unlike everyone else and a whole another bag of burritos to feel like you are. i would argue that most young people in today’s world don’t actually want to be unique, which is scary as fuck. instead, they want to feel unique, which is quite pleasant.

you are sort of contrarian but not really. you go off social media and then post (on social media) about going off social media. and other people (on social media) comment and say, wow, you’re so unique, i want to be just like you. and they do what they’re told, they go off social media, and then post (on social media) and someone else sees them and the cycle repeats itself, indefinitely.

what i am trying to say is that being a non-conformist among many other non-conformists is simply another type of conformism. if you want to be truly unique, you’ll have to take yourself by the balls – either literal or metaphorical – and embrace uncertainty, stigma, being ridiculed. you’ll have to embrace the suck. because being truly unlike everyone else sucks. it doesn’t feel pleasant. in fact, it feels like you’re a complete weirdo, a wacko, and everyone will be pointing fingers at you, saying, what’s wrong with that dude?

nobody will applaud and comment how great you are and try to imitate you. not now and – if you’ve just thought about not being appreciated in your time – maybe not ever.

so if you’re trying to be unique for the sake of applause, forget it. just doesn’t work.

in fact, you can use it as a compass. if people like what you’re doing, if they agree with you, it’s a sign you’re not being contrarian enough. true contrarianism means being alone. it means being misunderstood, underappreciated. it means being told to fuck off and shut up and be ostracized from society.

none of these things appeal to gen z or millennials. which means, it’s not uniqueness that we’re after. instead, we want to be appreciated, seen, congratulated for our mere existence. we want to be famous and in the spotlight without doing anything extraordinary or working too hard. and we want to feel unique but not really be unique.

saying truly contrarian things is a) very uncomfortable (you might get thrown rotten tomatoes at); b) it might not work; and c) it won’t get you many likes on youtube. it’s much safer to do what everyone else is doing and pretend (read: bullshit to yourself) that you’re doing something new.

fun fact about me: i can’t grow a mustache. but when i try, it looks like this.

all of the above falls in the category of ‘bad news’.

now the good news. how to actually be unique, cool, yourself, yada, yada.

my answer is: be like emily clark.

no, not like the actress herself. but like her character in that romantic comedy i’ve been rewatching every december: Last Christmas.

in the movie, clark’s character is a fucked up 26-year-old, who drinks and wastes her life, while listening to (a lot!) of george michael.

now, the movie plot is great and all, quite tragic too, but what struck me was something else entirely.

the george michael part.

wham! and george michael wasn’t – still isn’t, in many circles – something to brag about. if you say you’re a fan of wham!, people will look at your ears for signs of an earring. chandler bing would ask, you know wham! broke up right?

loving that kind of music is pretty cheesy. or so it was, before the movie.

anyone who had watched the movie will tell you: after 1 hour and 32 minutes of it, you walk out, and suddenly feel the mindset shift.

it’s weird. but suddenly you want to listen to some wham! songs. and you actually (gasp!) think that george michael is pretty cool.

how did that happen? simple: what’s cool and what’s not is a matter of perspective and context. it’s also quite ephemeral.

which is to say: be cool by being yourself and loving what you love. simple as that.

though not easy, i know.

for as long as i remember i had weird tastes. i have a weird sense of humour. i love listening to songs everyone else finds abhorrent. i won’t be a minority here if i say that i pretended to like something i didn’t like to get people’s approval. for a long time, it was my father’s approval. then it was my girlfriends’. then my wife’s. but now my wife has left me and i am sick of trying to pretend to be someone i am not. i want to like what i like even if it’s not something cool to like.

so – instead of searching for what’s cool, i dare you to like something that you genuinely like. you know, as if nobody is watching.

unapologetically. unconditionally. other words that start with un–

as if you’re alone in your apartment and the neighbors have left and you can walk naked and listen to adele on high volume.

i think that’s the only true way to happiness and fulfillment and that sense of self everyone is chasing: just giving yourself permission to be weird. truly weird. you-weird. not like-everyone-else-weird.

the important thing is that whatever you do, you do it for yourself. not for the audience. not because you think something is cool. but because you genuinely enjoy it.

(sorry if this insight is not as deep as you hoped for. but i truly believe it.)

and when you find that something, whether it’s a job, a song, a book, a way of living, a partner, or lack of one, you’ll know it. you won’t need to explain the reasons behind it to anyone, including yourself.

because let’s face it. if you need to record a video that says THIS IS WHY I LIKE GEORGE MICHAEL, you’ve got a problem.

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if you enjoyed this, you can buy me a coffee (or a pint of beer or a pizza or a book or whatever you want) here.

you can also use that platform to ask questions and i’ll answer them in future posts. don’t be shy.

cheers.