1992 Everyone Is Special.

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Once everyone is special no one will be.
Most people will come to a point in their lives when they realize they aren’t exceptional. Sure, maybe in that feels before reals kind of way that self help books tell you about, but not in a way more meaningful than some sort of cultural abstraction. Most humans are doomed, statistically, to averageness. The problem then becomes the internal struggle to accept that. I was very much ready to be nothing forever when I started working in retail. Honestly I was only alive because people forced me to be at that point. Eventually I settled in to misery until I could function without suffocating in it. The way you build up a tolerance to a poison. The small daily dose wasn’t noticeable anymore.

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I don’t [always] feel this way, I do like it, when people try to get Cs, + Bs, + As, in school, but- I do like it, when people or a person finds out that they/he/she is pretty much like 75% of the population. There is, for some, a very liberating thing to know…that you don’t have to force yourself to be better or worse, than anyone one else in your group of friends. Being usual + happy, can be a good, emotional thing for some. Peace + love.

A variation on that theme: part of the song, Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone:
Sometimes I’m right and I can be wrong
My own beliefs are in my song
The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then
Makes no difference what group I’m in

I am everyday people, yeah yeah

There is a blue one who can’t accept the green one

…And different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo

Oh sha sha we got to live together

I am no better and neither are you
We are the same whatever we do
You love me you hate me you know me and then
You can’t figure out the bag I’m in

I am everyday people, yeah yeah. I am everyday people!

[A footnote- your “bag” means your main hobby, or the thing that you like to do].

Thomas does offer an interesting idea- why do some people strive to be “special”? Does special imply being better than other people?
It is probably better to find friends you like, + they like you, and to also find things that you think are cool to do.

Interesting combination of Syndrome and Dread Pirate Roberts. I am intrigued. May I subscribe to your newsletter?

“Most humans are doomed, statistically, to averageness.”

There are many, many dimensions someone can be excellent in. To avoid averageness, you only have to be excellent in one dimension (that you care about) (and you also have to know you’re excellent).

(At least one person reading this is far above average as a webcomic artist and author.)

Challenge yourself to be better in some small way, known only to yourself, than the you that you were yesterday and look back on each day fulfilled.

“You should stay away from your potential. I mean, that is something you should leave absolutely alone! You’ll mess it up! It’s potential, leave it! And anyway, it’s like your bank balance, you know – you always have much less than you think. Leave it as the locked door within yourself and then at least, in your mind, the interior will always be palatial. Wonderful gleaming marble floors, brocaded drapes. Mullioned windows, covered in mullions, whatever they are. Flamingos serving drinks.

Pianos shooting out canapés into the mouths of elegant men and women who are exchanging witticisms… “Oh yes, this reminds me of the time I was in BudaPESHT with Binky… We were trying to steal a goose from the casino, muahahaha…” But it won’t be like that. You don’t want to find out that the most you could possibly achieve, if you gave it your all, if you harvested every screed of energy within you, and devoted yourself to improving yourself, that all you would get to would be maybe eating less cheesy snacks.”

-Dylan Moran

It doesn’t matter what you wanted to be back then. It doesn’t matter what you want to be years from now. It’s what you do now that determines where you go next.

Most people settle in for an average life, partly because it’s easier, but mostly because they become good at it. I admit, it’s a weird feeling being asked how to do things by people who are, by employment period, position and age, your superiors, but that only happened because I got fed up with the lazy and incompetent idiots who wouldn’t do their shit properly, and got it right for the most part (99% success rate out of 1 million (figure may be inflated for illustration purposes), still leaves 10,000 fuck-ups).

I was expecting Carol to say “you’re MINE, and that’s special enough for me” or something sappy like that. :P

It’s true, really, and frankly, the state of public high schools 20 years ago didn’t help. I don’t know how many of you heard the great maxim that was “Work hard, study hard, get good grades, and a good job will follow.” I’m still waiting for mine and scrabbling together what living I can in the meantime.

Lot of people out there burn up their youths on the altar of preparedness, only to discover that they don’t have the resources or the connections or what have you to make their potential mean something.

I was on vacation so excuse my tardy response to this but –

You can still have a great job, it’s just that everyone adds the caveat “that I’d like/tolerate doing.” Yeah, we’d all like that, and we’d all hope that we could find a tolerable job or at least one we’d like.

However, the reality is we all do jobs for the fact we need money, not satisfaction. What should be happening is that you do your job, you get paid, you continue on. And if the place you work at actually has decent management, they’ll start providing you with the sense of self-accomplishment and value. That’s not always a given, so you need to keep looking around while doing the job until something comes up.

I’m 45 and a Director, but that didn’t happen until I was 39. I was mostly in middle management starting at 34 when I finally bit the bullet and just worked at a mediocre job that I hated. The thing I had to do was sacrifice a little dream and time while I worked hard enough to prove I was worth taking a risk on (to make manager). Once I hit that, three years later, I was in middle management at a new company that was more tolerable and IT related.

My point being – don’t give up, and don’t stop working hard just because you seem to be stuck. Keep working hard and eventually someone will notice.

There was a Rose is Rose [R] comic, whose plot one day, looked like this:
Rose stands in her backyard, with a huge smile on her face. She smiles at- her husband inside…watching TV, her young son playing with toy cars…outside, her good looking house and yard, a great…wizened looking tree in her yard, and a robin happily building a nest in that tree.

Rose then smiles, and says- “Mediocrity, is underrated!”

“Most people will come to a point in their lives when they realize they aren’t exceptional. Sure, maybe in that feels before reals kind of way that self help books tell you about, but not in a way more meaningful than some sort of cultural abstraction. Most humans are doomed, statistically, to averageness. The problem then becomes the internal struggle to accept that.”

I’ve dubbed this the Haruhi problem, mostly because I’m a huge nerd. Also because some of my friends when that show was airing didn’t get what she was upset about.

(For the uninitiated, the title character is a freshman in high school that realized she isn’t special and that nothing she does is ever going to matter except at the most superficially local scale. She then proceeds to take acting out to unheard-of levels.)

I thought it was more like she was annoyed that the world wasn’t interesting becauseshe was exceptional at everything she tried. Oh shit. She’s a proto version of one punch man…

I wouldn’t mind seeing Haruhi VS Saitama.
Bring the whole team, even. Yuki takes on Genos, Koizumi trades blows with Blizzard, and Kyon goes against King. Mikuru… stayed home, if we’re lucky. This actually sounds more amazing the more I think about it.

But they did explicitly call out the source of her upset near the end of the first arc. I’d definitely agree that a lack of challenge exacerbated it, but it wasn’t the root.
(I got pretty deep into the Haruhi fandom for a while back then. I seem to have a personal wiki in my head occupying otherwise-useful brain cells.)

Thomas as a character often strikes me as a Youtuber waiting to happen. A news guy like Defranco, or some kind of nostalgia reviewer. With the girls getting involved in a possible streaming scheme, I could see him getting curious about it all.

I’m 26 too, I feel him…

On the other hand, Julius Caesar wept at the statue of Alexander the Great at over 30 (32?) years old. At this same age, Alexander was already dead, having done all his conquests already. Caesar hadn’t really begun his own conquests then, and felt he had been wasting his life all those years.

He then proceeded to change the course of History and became arguably even more famous than Alexander. Lesson: comparing age is garbage.

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