Original Article by George Mack
George Mack writes essays the way a good bartender pours: rarely, and with intent. This one starts in 1570s France with Montaigne cataloguing the absurd customs entire societies once called normal, and ends with a challenge about what people will say next to your casket. In between sits a question most of us spend a lifetime avoiding: how much of yourself have you sanded down to match a standard nobody will remember enforcing? Mack’s answer is uncomfortable, which is usually the sign it’s true.
Preamble:
This article should be required reading for kids, teens, adults, hell even the elderly. Especially in this new society where everything is becoming homogenized. The era of chalant behavior and wet towel personalities.
I’ve moved to five different cities and started over six times. Net new friend group, careers, living situation, fully shaken the Etch A Sketch. What you realize after doing that so many times is that people and situations are largely the same.
I’ve met the same personality in different bodies over and over again. It makes making friends incredibly easy and predictable. I just need to find Brandon in San Diego or Kyle in Austin… It’s a little bleak and a little funny. Most people are, echoes, copies, shadows.. it’s a copy and paste formula regardless of boundary.
That said, there have always been a few people I have never met twice. Those rare personalities that transcend states, time, and ego. One of those is my wife-to-be and five others are my groomsmen.
Being yourself, innately unique and weird and goofy, is the main draw to being remembered, cherished, and valued.
It of course will be controversial and polarizing, but that is so much better than living your life as an empty chair that anyone could sit in.
My Notes:
Normal Is Just What You Happened to Be Born Into
“Everything society told him was normal… is just what he happened to be born into.”
Montaigne kept lists of normalcy across history. Societies that shaved half the body and grew hair on the other half. Cultures where blackened teeth were beautiful and white teeth were ugly. Places where killing your aging father was an act of love. He collected these not as trivia but as a solvent, something to dissolve his own certainty that the customs of 16th century France were the natural order of things rather than an accident of geography and timing.
This is the move that matters. Not “other cultures are strange” but “mine is too, and I can’t see it.” The rules you follow about how to grieve, how to dress, how to structure a career, how to measure a good life, none of them were handed down from physics. They were handed down from whoever happened to be standing nearby when you arrived. Montaigne’s lists were a daily reminder that the water he swam in was still water.
Once you see normal as an inheritance rather than a truth, the obligation to obey it gets a lot thinner. You didn’t choose it. You just haven’t audited it yet.
The Modern Defaults Are Not Neutral
“Normal spends 90,000 hours of their life at work disengaged.”
Mack imagines resurrecting Montaigne and handing him our list. Normal today carries six figures of debt, eats seventeen teaspoons of sugar a day, stays indoors for over 22 hours, hasn’t finished a book in a year, and will spend two decades of a single human life watching television or scrolling. Read that list slowly and notice what it actually is: not a description of choices, but a description of defaults. Nobody sits down and selects “disengaged for 90,000 hours” from a menu.
That’s the trap of normal. It doesn’t announce itself as a decision, so it never gets the scrutiny decisions get. You’d never sign a contract with those terms. But you’ll drift into them, because drifting is what defaults are for. The average isn’t a benchmark of health. It’s just the sum of everyone else’s unexamined momentum.
The point isn’t superiority over the statistics. It’s that “normal” and “good” quietly swapped seats somewhere, and most people never noticed the switch. Following the median is only safe when the median is going somewhere you’d want to end up.
The Worst Sin Is Betraying Yourself for Nothing
“The worst sin is that you destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
Mack borrows this line from Dostoevsky and it’s the hinge of the whole essay. Not betraying yourself for something, which is at least a trade. For nothing. You suppress the way you’d actually dress, speak, work, and live in exchange for the approval of a tribe, and then the tribe forgets. The transaction has a price on one side and a void on the other.
This is what makes conformity a bad deal rather than merely a boring one. If hiding your strangeness bought you lasting affection, permanent belonging, a name carved somewhere, you could at least run the math. But it buys you temporary, low-resolution acceptance from people who are themselves too busy hiding to notice your performance. Everyone’s on stage. Nobody’s watching.
The sin isn’t the self-destruction. It’s the exchange rate.
Nobody Tells Stories About the Expected
“They only tell stories of when you did the unexpected.”
Go to a funeral and listen. Nobody eulogizes reasonable behavior. No one stands up to say he always merged politely and kept his lawn regulation length. The stories are the deviations: the strange traditions, the out-of-character gambles, the time they did the thing nobody else would do. Memory is a filter that keeps only the outliers and throws the median away.
Mack names this the normal paradox, and it’s a genuine paradox. We perform normalcy to be liked by the tribe, and the tribe’s memory discards normalcy on contact. You are optimizing for an audience that structurally cannot retain what you’re showing them. It’s like whispering into a shredder.
For anyone who’s spent years being appropriately impressive in appropriately expected ways, this lands hard. All that careful calibration, invisible by design.
Weirdness Is a Cost You Pay Now for a Story That Compounds Later
“Unconventional weird behaviour costs a price in the short term, but the actions live on as stories in the future.”
Mack’s examples are small and devastating. Send a handwritten letter instead of an email and the immediate reaction is mild embarrassment on both sides. Twelve months later it’s the only message they remember receiving that year. Fly across the country for a friend’s parent’s funeral and they’ll tell you it wasn’t necessary. Then they’ll tell the story, in tears, at your wedding.
Notice the shape of the trade. Normal behavior is free upfront and worthless downstream. Weird behavior costs something immediately, a little awkwardness, a little exposure, a plane ticket, and then pays out for decades. It’s the same asymmetry as any good investment: the price is concentrated, the return is compounding, and most people can’t stomach the entry cost.
Which reframes the discomfort of doing the unexpected thing. That flinch you feel isn’t a warning. It’s the purchase price.
People Can Smell Performative Weirdness
“When it’s performative weirdness, people will see through it.”
The essay’s proof case is Zack Pinsent, a British fourteen-year-old who burned his jeans and has dressed as an 1820s gentleman every day since. He now has 750K followers and a bespoke tailoring business. But Mack is careful about why this worked, and the reason isn’t the top hat. Zack wasn’t doing it for anyone. He was releasing a version of himself he’d been suppressing to appear normal.
That distinction is everything, because weirdness has become a marketing strategy, and manufactured quirk reads as exactly what it is. The difference between Zack and a personal-brand eccentric is directional: one is letting something out, the other is putting something on. Audiences can’t always articulate the difference but they can always feel it.
So the instruction isn’t “be weirder.” It’s “stop editing.” The weirdness worth showing already exists. It’s the stuff you currently redact.
“I Don’t Like This” Usually Means “I Didn’t Predict This”
“That sensation labelled as ‘I don’t like this’ was actually their brain filing a prediction error report.”
The two worst-rated shows in BBC test screening history: women’s lawn bowling, and The Office. One of these deserved it. The other became one of the most influential comedies ever made. The test audiences weren’t detecting bad television. Their brains had forecast catchphrases and laughter tracks, got awkward silences instead, and misfiled the surprise as dislike.
This is quietly one of the most useful ideas in the essay, because it works in both directions. When people react badly to your unedited self, you’re probably not witnessing a verdict. You’re witnessing a prediction error, the mild wrongness of a brain whose model of you just failed. Give it time and the model updates. The Office got the graveyard slot before it got the canon.
And it works on you too. The next time something new produces that reflexive “I don’t like this,” it’s worth asking whether you dislike it or whether you simply didn’t see it coming. Those are different sensations wearing the same label, and confusing them is how people end up with the taste of a test audience.
Your Weirdness Is a Permission Slip for Everyone Watching
“Normalcy is a fiction. Your job is to discover their weird genius.”
Here’s the second-order effect Mack lands on: when Zack shows up to a party in Regency dress, some people laugh and someone drunk makes a comment. But everyone in that room walks out with a wider prediction model of what’s acceptable. The next time they go shopping, they can push a little further, because Zack moved the fence.
Weirdness is contagious in the best sense. Most people aren’t actually normal; they’re weird people doing normal cosplay because everyone around them appears to be doing the same. It’s a coordination failure. The whole room is waiting for someone else to go first. Kevin Kelly’s line cuts to it: if you think someone is normal, you don’t know them very well.
Which means letting your own strangeness out isn’t just self-expression. It’s a public service. Every genuinely weird act you commit lowers the cost of the next person’s honesty. You’re not just living your own story. You’re loosening everyone else’s script.
cullaways 
Leave a comment