On Being Special, Just Like Everybody Else

I’m still deciding how bloggy versus posty I want to be here. If, in fact, I want to post here instead of FB, do I come here every time I have a random thought, or do I wait until I at least have a couple of paragraphs of thoughts to dump? I’m leaning towards the latter in part because I think the desire to share every random thought that come through our heads is not a healthy one, even if those thought are very funny. If I had saved all of those funny thoughts I’ve had over the last 21 years (that’s right - I recently realized I’ve been on Facebook for TWENTY-ONE YEARS) I might finally have that stand up tight ten I keep telling everyone I’m working on. I also thing short takes have hurt my ability to write and that is something, along with my ability to read, that I’m trying to get back.

I’ve also been mulling the entire universe of platforms built around ‘here’s my take’ and the ways in which it has perhaps fed into the dumpster fire we’re in now. I remember when I was growing up, there was a lot of older person crabbiness over kids being told they were special too much and getting too many participation trophies (an item that I’ve literally never actually seen and I suspect like sex-related snap bracelets and litter boxes in classrooms was mostly if not entirely made up). I do remember being told I was special by Grover and Mister Rogers and my parents, but at the time and looking back, it just seems like a nice thing to say to a kid. You’re special. You’re unique. You have worth. You are a whole and complete human being and not a side character in anyone else’s story. Kids often struggled with self esteem - why not say something nice?

Cut to me scrolling through Instagram on any given day, rolling my eyes, muttering to myself, “Everyone thinks they’re so frickin’ special…” Some of this, of course, is my steady decline into grumpy old manhood, which has been happening for a while. But I also think the whole concept of being special and unique has changed into a isolating narcissism that separates us from each other and our shared humanity. A perspective where people start to believe that their particular quirks need to be recognized and accommodated by everyone else. I constantly see post where people introduce some nearly universal experience of life or humanity as evidence of how their brain or life or relationship is different than everyone else’s, usually followed by either an ‘eff the haters’ statement (side note, who is hating on you? why are they so interested? have multiple people actually noted this thing about or have you just decide that it’s what people must be thinking?), sometimes the suggestion that your fairly common bad habit or bad behavior should be accommodated, and sometimes a hard sell for a vaguely related app or supplement. Example: A woman dressed either up or down, as people do, with a caption along the lines of “When your outfit makes all the other moms at school pick up lose their minds! (Ef the haters!).” No one is losing their minds over your sweats/gothic prairie dress. Thousands if not millions of parents all over America are sitting in the pick up line dressed just like you. Or a person wondering around the house, with a caption like, “When your spicy brain means no one understands why you forget what you came into the room for / get overwhelmed by your messy house! (Download my app for somatic yoga dopamine addiction functional mushroom supplements!)” Everyone understands that, my dude! You’re not a victim! You’re just describing being a human an alive.

I get that this may sound petty, but the more prevalent this type of framing has become, the more I’ve seen it seep out into real world interactions, the more concerned I’ve become. Empathy seems to be in shorter and shorter supply, and while fixation on the idea that your experience is so completely different than your neighbors that it almost becomes adversarial may not be the cause, it does feel like a symptom worth paying attention to. I used to love the idea of the democratization of voices that came with the internet. But do we really need everyone’s take on everything? Is the lure of ‘telling your story’ and getting a reaction encouraging people to tell stories that really aren’t worth telling? In a world where we recognized that many of our experiences and challenges are shared by our neighbor, would this kind of content exist?

You, my dear astute reader, may be saying to yourself, “Isn’t this whole deal just Kelsey giving us her take? As if her opinion is special?” Well, yes. But I would argue two things in my defense: 1) In the days of newspapers and books and pamphlets, a certain level of literacy was a barrier to entry and I think that improved the discourse immensely. You’re going to bring in a lot more people with terrible ideas if all they have to do is yap at a phone camera or write a few sentences or just share something someone else yapped into a phone camera. 2) Part of my motivation for weaning myself off of the platforms is to write something down because I feel like it and not in hopes of getting interaction from other people. I’ve always enjoyed it when someone told me they liked what I wrote, but engagement wasn’t necessarily the point. Now engagement is the entire point, with self-worth tied to it. And I hate that. >shakes fist at cloud<