Are You on the Wild Ride of Individuality?

The Wild Ride of Individuality

Source: Sharon McCutcheon/Unsplash

While many people lead conventional lives, some people prize their individuality. You may have been stubbornly prizing your individuality since birth. That can’t have been easy. From the first moments, you were coerced by society to fit in and to look like somebody’s idea of normal. If you were different, they said, “Be the same!”

Individuality is the theme of existential philosophy, psychology, and coaching. A core principle of existential thinking is that we must take personal responsibility for our life, whether or not our parents, our community, our society, or anyone else agrees with our decisions and our positions. We are told not to drift through life, as the main character in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger does, to his ruin, and we are told not to accept life’s absurdities without blinking, as the main character in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial does, also to his ruin. We are supposed to stand up for our values and our principles, no matter what. Those are the high-bar standards posited by existential thought.

Even if you train yourself to hold your tongue, you may already know as a young child that you can’t conform and that you weren't built to conform. But the pressure applied to you is enormous. Looking around you, mistrusting the rule-makers, feeling alienated and like a “stranger in a strange land,” you find yourself burdened right from the beginning by this pulsating energy that invites retaliation: the energy of individuality.

This fierce need produces lifelong consequences. You find yourself presented with some odd-sounding rule—say, that God will be offended if you don’t wear a hat. You find yourself obliged to ask, “Why?” And they will certainly tell you why! The whole world will tell you why. But their answers will not make sense to you. So, you’ll get your ears boxed or worse. You’ll fall silent or cry, “No, I can’t believe this nonsense!” You may unwillingly acquiesce, or grow oppositional.

If you take the oppositional route, you’ll adamantly reject humbug and try to make personal sense of the world. What will this feel like? Like sorrow, anger, anxiety, alienation, rootlessness, and fierceness, all balled up together. This oppositional attitude, maybe suppressed in childhood, begins to announce itself and assert itself in adolescence and to grow as your interactions with the conventional world increase. A battle begins with all sorts of skirmishes.

This oppositional energy grows as your ability to “do your thing” is directly or indirectly restricted by the machinery of society. You find yourself in an odd kind of fight, not necessarily with any particular person or group, but with just about everyone. You're in a battle with everything meant to constrain you and reduce you to a cipher. You see a falsehood there—skirmish! You see a restriction there— skirmish! You see a nonsensical rule there—skirmish! You are marginalized there— skirmish!

We repeatedly see this dynamic in the lives of our heroes. Where the dominant ideology challenges reason, they feel obliged to speak out, to do what they believe is right, and to pursue their own goals, even though they may be punished. Popping out of the womb individual, needing to experiment and to risk as part of individuality, and feeling thwarted and frustrated by the oh-so- conventional universe into which they have been plopped at birth, they wriggle like fish bait.

This may be you, rushing headlong, like a ski jumper down a steep ramp, toward reckless ways of dealing with your feelings of alienation and frustration. Driven to be individual, you may be racing through life, not wisely, but fiercely and obsessively. What a wild ride is individuality! Great books have been written about the challenges of individuality. I recommend The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Resistance, Rebellion and Death by Albert Camus, Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the other classics in the existential literature and existential philosophy traditions.

[This “Individuality and Absurd Rebellion” series of posts introduces you to ideas you’ll find in my most recent book, Redesign Your Mind.]