Over the years, I have come to embrace being weird. However, I don’t mean weird for weird’s sake. My weird has a purpose. Despite how I sometimes appear, I am not heeding the advice of Robin Williams, who said:
“You got to be crazy. It’s too late to be sane. Too late. You got to go full tilt bozo. Cause you’re only given a little spark of madness, and if you lose that, you’re nothing.”
(It’s worth listening to his delivery.)
While I love this quote, this is not the reason I embrace being weird. I embrace being weird so that I can be comfortable making unconventional choices, so that I can shamelessly live an unconventional life. I believe that to be truly happy, healthy, and successful in the modern world, you cannot simply follow the herd; you mustn’t try to be “normal.”
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” –Krishnamurti
Consider, for a moment, what’s “normal” in the modern world: being sedentary most of the day, eating processed food, allowing your phone to be a constant distraction, avoiding discomfort as much as possible, escaping your boring life by drinking or watching shows, longing for a vacation because you hate your job, living vicariously through other people’s creativity or athleticism.
Just because most people live that way, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Here is a sampling of the ways I buck these trends and live what most people would consider a “weird” lifestyle:
- I don’t own a television, and I don’t follow professional sports.
- Instead of a couch, I have physical therapy equipment.
- I don’t have any junk food in my home.
- For dinner most nights, I eat a giant salad.
- I start every morning in shorts and a t-shirt doing body movement on my porch. This is followed by exercise, meditation, and a cold shower.
- I spend most of every day in airplane mode.
- I take advantage of OTM’s and do little bits of meditation and exercise throughout the day.
- I don’t have Twitter or Instagram, and I’ve unfollowed nearly everyone on Facebook so I can’t waste time scrolling through my newsfeed. (I’ve kept Facebook for business and social reasons.)
- If I’m on my computer late at night, I wear silly orange glasses that block sleep-harming blue light.
- I no longer drink or use other drugs, and I never will again.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you should live the way I live or that you should reject everything that “normal” people do. Rather, I’m suggesting that you take a critical look at everything you do and exercise the power of choice. If you decide that what you’re currently doing is already aligned with your goals and values, great. If not, give yourself permission to be weird.
Oh, and if creativity is important to you, you’ll almost certainly have to embrace being weird. Here’s Eric Barker on that:
“We spend too much time trying to be ‘good’ when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you. … In the right environment, bad can be good and odd can be beautiful.”1
And if you intend to pursue mastery in any arena, you’ll definitely have to become comfortable being unconventional. Mastery requires long hours of “deep work” done over many years.2 We live in a culture of multitasking, distraction, and instant gratification that constantly tries to pull you off of the mastery path.
“If you’re planning to embark on a master’s journey, you might find yourself bucking current trends in American life. Our hyped-up consumerist society is engaged, in fact, in an all-out war on mastery.” –George Leonard3
And lastly, if you would strive to live a moral life, marked by mindfulness and generosity, you “must swim upstream, against the current of habit, familiarity, and ease,”4 while most people around you allow themselves to be swept away.
Being weird is hard. In “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that: “For nonconformity, society will whip you with its displeasure.”5 If you choose to live a lifestyle that others consider weird, you may be chastised, sneered at, or discriminated against. And it can be lonely. You might feel out of place, like a fire hydrant in the woods. But who knows? One day, you might find someone out there just like you.
1 Barker, Eric. Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong. HarperOne, 2017.
2 Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.
3 Leonard, George. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. Plume, 1992.
4 Easwaran, Eknath. Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life (Essential Easwaran Library). Nilgiri Press, 2008.
5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” The Domino Project, 2011.