Weird, weirdo, strange, unusual, abnormal, not normal, odd, freaky, eccentric, all words I’ve been called over the years. But why? Why have we (society) corrupted the words weird and inserted negative meanings into them? I don’t know about anyone else but I wasn’t party to the memo telling me the ‘Normal Police’ had been legislated and were arresting anyone who showed even a hint of stepping over the accepted line. I know humans are conformists, but really?

Conformity as described by simply psychology is:

‘Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group. This change is in response to real (involving the physical presence of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms / expectations) group pressure.’

I’ve tried conformity, didn’t like it. Tasted funny, a mix of bitter sourness, self depreciation and depression. Conformity is dangerous. Humans are wired to want to fit. To belong, and that means we absent mindedly accept the presumed authority of those that present themselves as authoritative. Ever heard of the Stanely Milgram experiment? He made himself look authoritative by wearing a scientific lab coat, and used particular commanding phrases like:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

Which forced experimentees to continue to give electric shocks to people who got answers to questions wrong – even when the shock levels read XXX. In the first set of experiments 65% continued to shock all the way to 450 volts (the XXX button). Milligram himself summarised his experiment as ‘The Perils of Obedience’.

Just think about that – because we would rather submit ourselves to the judgement of a presumed authority we would give someone electric shocks to the point of death. If we would do that then it’s not even remotely surprising we have conditioned society to view ‘weird’ as bad. There are other psychological experiments showing similar results – Asch’s line experiment where a group of participants were primed to give wrong answers about the length of lines, and the one participant who was blind to their reasons for giving wrong answers would give the same wrong answer as the rest of them – instead of giving the answer they knew to be right. We have conformity wired into our genes. Any kind of social upheaval is seen as negative. But why?

Groups make us stupid. They make us think one thing.They make those who could speak up, those who think differently shy away from voicing their opinions because they will be in the minority. Groups sap all our creativity, morph us into sheep, a group consciousness all thinking the same ‘wrong’ boring shit.

Personally I think weird is the new black. But going again something hard wired in our genes is extraordinarily difficult. It’s like wading through sludge. People (kids, teens and adults alike) get bullied for being different, being the one with their hand up in class ready to ask another question, for thinking outside the box or standing up and saying ‘I will’. But without those people, we wouldn’t have progression. Society wouldn’t grow. It makes me wonder though, if – when we are constrained to such an extent that only the exceptional few like Galileo, Da Vinci, and Einstein are able to break away from the norm, except their inner weird and use it to change the way we all think, then what would happen if we could all accept our inner weird?

What would happen if one day we all woke up and lived in a world where there was no weird, because we were all different?

Oh. Wait. We are all different. So why are we not allowed to embrace it?

I’ve heard people say that life gets better once you get to your thirties, I’ve heard people say every decade gets better. I’m starting to wonder if some of that ‘betterness’ isn’t actually about acceptance? I’ve had more existential life crisis than my 28 young years should have allowed. But it is what it is. Most of them have been about my inability to accept who I am. I have been trained to think I am weird or wrong because I think differently, speak differently even look different.

Teenage years are the worst, because you become cognisant of the fact that there is an acceptable norm, and then you spend that decade trying to work out what your position is in it. When you realise you don’t fit, you spend much of those years racing through fads, crazes and styles trying to establish which one fits so you know your place in society. In your twenties the fads slow to just one or two interests with life getting in the way of most of it. The life crises cease because you find a groove and a set of friends that accept you. Sometimes friends drift, and you have a period of readjustment trying to find another square hole for your square self to fit in.

But I hear that as you get older you stop giving a shit. Square pegs, round holes, fads, groups, fashions… none of it matter anymore. Why? because you know you can go get a saw and a piece of sandpaper and carve the sodding hole yourself.

The thing is, we are all a bit weird. There’s a bit of strange inside all of us, and the quicker we accept it, the faster we become comfortable with ourselves. Like when I discovered someone at work who I thought was completely straight laced, was actually in a rock band… A ROCK BAND?!

I’ve had a bit of a journey trying to accept myself. I have more weirdness than your average person and trying to squeeze all the odd aspects of myself into one group is impossible – a fact I have only recently been able to accept. So I’ve stopped trying. Now I’m carving my own hole, standing up and saying ‘I will’ and knowing that every piece of me I can accept makes me a better writer, more creative, more able to understand the plight of others.

I’ve accepted the weird in me… have you?

The post Accepting The Weird In You – A Writers Must #1000speak appeared first on Sacha Black.

I made a point recently about the lack of ‘actual’ writing I do. You know, with my hand and a real life pen. The post discussed Distributed Cognition, a concept that debates where the boundaries of thought are and one example is the use of a pen. Does the physicality of using a pen change your thought process through the action of writing? Where do your thoughts end, and the pen and ink begin, and what is the reciprocal effect of the thought, hand and pen interacting.

Why am I talking about this again? Well, in my author interviews, I ask a provocative question making a point that the publishing industry is in decline (I don’t actually think it is, but it tends to provoke an interesting answer). That question got me thinking, is penmanship in decline?

When I was a kid I used to have a pen pal, in fact, I had two. Didn’t everyone?

My mum still has her from childhood, a fact I love. When I went to school, I had a friend who liked reading and writing as much as I did. We used to hand write each other letters. I still have them. Dozens of them. I would painstakingly scribe words, colour and decorate pieces of paper in order to swap post with her, and more often than not we would stick a stamp on them (because back then you didn’t need a mortgage to buy a stamp) and pop them in a post box. I love nothing better than receiving post. I can’t remember the last time I received a letter.

I used to write a journal, I’ve said before I have a box of them in the loft, thousands hundreds of thousands of words scribed by hand, poured out in a labour of love for the written word. Then I started writing journals electronically. I don’t even know where they are now. Probably on a floppy disk somewhere *cringe* yes, I know what a floppy disk is. My wife’s students don’t. That’s depressing. We are only a decade older than them. But for them, the concept of ‘dial up’ is alien. They just don’t ‘get it’ and blank stares and sniggers follow her when she talks about floppy disks. I used an encyclopaedia – they use wikipedia.

That’s just ten years of development. TEN.

Is this evolution? Are we really developing? Or is this actually regression in disguise?

We apes evolved hands for a reason, to craft tools, feed ourselves, rear babies. I’m not interested in the argument that typing counts because you type with fingers. It doesn’t count. Not in my mind anyway. Theres no physicality. It’s mindless tapping learnt through rote memory.

The physicality of writing comes from having to push the pen around, forcing ink to curve to make shapes and markings. The mental process of deciding feeling where the next dot and cross has to go. I find it satisfying marking the page, leaving an imprint, knowing I created that design, story or letter. It’s gratifying.

Evolution is about progression, right? the ‘gradual development of something.’

Well penmanship is a skill and evolutionarily speaking, skills are things we had to learn too. If typing was just the next evolution, then why does its loss feel like such a sacrilege?

Is the loss of a skill not regression?

We are living in a technological black hole. Anthropologically speaking, in five hundred years how many people are going to be able to understand our culture? My guess is not many. The number of physical records is dropping, we are publishing books electronically rather than physically. Egyptians use to carve writings and explanations into granite, forever left as a guide to their culture. The internet records our culture. But, one day, the oil is going to run out and the electricity switch off. Then it’s all gone. Every record, every piece of information will disappear in a poof of smoke from the last drop burnt oil.

I’m troubled, I don’t know whether it’s my obsession with apocalyptic/dystopian fiction, or a worry founded in philosophical thought, but I am deeply concerned. Look at my wife’s students. Ten years is all it took for them to not understand a concept that to me (and I’m really not old),  is completely normal. I mean what about the words going into the dictionary that originate from text messages for goodness sake. In 2011 the Oxford English Dictionary added OMG, LOL and FYI into the dictionary. What does that mean?

I can’t shift this nagging thought that one day, kids won’t even be taught how to write any more. How long is it going to be? Thirty years? Fifty? Two hundred? It’s going to happen. The pen, and hand written scripture is becoming redundant, typing is faster and more efficient. You can erase your mistakes and no one will ever know. But aren’t mistakes part of what makes us fallible humans? Are we heading for a dystopian future where no one knows how to write?

Penmanship will become a lost art. 

There’s one more point I want to leave you with. My wife is dyslexic. She spells better on a computer. For her, the rote patterns of movement from tapping words is more kinesthetic and memorable than the closed hand structure of holding a pen. Her brain remembers how to spell patterns on a keyboard, but can’t remember the physicality of holding a pen to spell. Something I find truly fascinating. For her, although she believes the lost art of penmanship is regression, there is no doubting that for her, computers and typing are evolution. For me, a lover of pen and ink it’s regression.

What do you think?

The post The Lost Art of Penmanship – Evolution or Regression? appeared first on Sacha Black.