Last week the fleet-footed Georgi Boorman put out an intriguing disquisition called Admit it: You Just Want to be Normal that suggested extremely online autismos who rail against normies all day are ackshully just motivated by lifestyle jealousy.
This immediately brought to mind a piece that Drunk Wisconsin had written in May called Why Can’t You Just Be Normal?, in which he’d made largely the same point except by way of a male-coded shame grammar overtly foregrounding putative violations of some established propositional life-script centering material acquisition, as opposed to Georgi’s own rather more photonegative maneuver of epistemic foreclosure via plausibly deniable affective status contamination / relational innuendo.
While each of these pieces was superbly put together from a rhetorical perspective, I also found both a bit silly, as it seems to me that while the normie frame might prove useful circumstantially for economic or lifestyle status jockeying, neither Georgi nor Drunk Wisconsin are particularly “normal” in any way I myself would define it—which is to say in terms of operative essence.
What do I mean by operative essence?
Merely the sum of essential qualities that persist across all operative use cases, which in this case is to say the set of individual traits no culturally plugged-in actor could ever deny is the province of normiedom.
What are those traits?
It doesn’t seem to be professional success or sexual access or even stable family formation given these spaces are teeming with people who plainly aren’t normies despite ticking two or three of those boxes.
It’s definitely not social acumen given any major subcultural presence will have plenty of that alongside vanishingly little normie-cred.
It’s also not embodied presence or physical competence, because someone in the vein of Mark Rippetoe for instance most definitely isn’t a normie.
At this point some of you will no doubt get frustrated and say it’s just a graduated scale one approaches continuously along several axes in concert, including the above; to them I’d point to Russell Walter, who I don’t think anyone could experience as a normie despite cutting the mustard on literally all of those items.
Which are all, it turns out, just kind of red herrings—the true essence of normiedom having virtually nothing to do with how much money you make or hoes you possess or rizz you command except as proximate cause or by contingency—because normiedom qua normiedom is ultimately all a matter of epistemics and discursive game theory.
So what is a normie?
Essentially someone whose phenotype is sufficiently well-priced across the mainstream cultural ecologies he inhabits that he rarely acquires an especially pressing incentive to understand those ecologies as contingent in the first place.
His world simply works. The same basic suite of instincts that gets him friends in high school gets him laid in college, hired after graduation, invited to weddings at thirty, and eventually promoted at work. He does not need a private theory of status, because the publicly available one keeps producing approximately the right answer.
And this doesn’t mean he’s stupid—quite the opposite: plenty of hugely intelligent people are normies. It means only his intelligence has never been forced into that particular recursive direction associated with repeatedly discovering that the same person, trait, or behavior is priced radically differently depending on the room.
Per the hermeneutics of Waltine Realism we call this property Status Elasticity: the degree to which one’s perceived rank changes across ecologies and over time. A status-elastic actor might be seen as a freak at school, a minor deity on some obscure forum, weirdly hot to one ethnic group and viscerally wretched to another, impressive career-wise yet socially bizarre, or functionally invisible until at last transited to some environment wherein his oddities can shine.
Only thing is after enough throws of the bagatelle it all starts to become a little impossible for such an actor to sincerely experience things like “high status,” “attractive,” “creepy,” “normal,” “successful,” or “embarrassing” as fixed traits people ackshully possess in some concrete and objective way, as by that point they’ve seen all of the associated exchange rates move in real time.
The normalfag, being the characteristic product of mainstream status inelasticity and low ecological metacognition, has not—or if he has, the shift almost certainly wasn’t salient enough to him personally for it to ever register as something other than noise.
Thus the normie epistemology du jour is not propositional adherence to some explicit bourgeois rulebook in the vein of Mr. Wisconsin’s splendid tract (which perhaps unsurprisingly from a Russian is in practice far more mechanistic and overt about mainstream life scripts than any Western normalfag would ever find convivial) so much as the implicit essentialization of his own ecology’s locally stable prices.
Thus a normie will never think: in my social ecology this behavior carries a severe reputational penalty because it codes as low-status to actors possessing disproportionate interpretive jurisdiction. Merely: “That’s weird.”
He doesn’t think: this guy’s phenotype performs badly under the particular mating-market sorting mechanisms available here. Just: “He’s creepy.”
He doesn’t think: this relationship structure violates the prestige grammar of my peer group. He thinks: “That’s unhealthy.”
He doesn’t think: my own social phenotype is unusually well-adapted to this institution. Simply: “I’m good with people.”
This is almost never overt hypocrisy as such—rather the normie experiences local grammar so innocently that translating it into mechanism itself feels vaguely obscene.
By this point the reader can hopefully start to glean why overt status talk is so chronically autismo-coded.
Obviously the autist says the quiet part out loud—more crucially, though, he fails to recognize that to the normalfag there was never a quiet part in the first place. There was never some secret spreadsheet hidden behind all the vibes. The vibe was the cognition: a thousand low-resolution social signals precognitively compressed into a judgment that arrived in consciousness already clad in the uniform of indubitable reality.
This, of course, is what makes normiedom so maddeningly difficult to imitate.
Because you can always go memorize manners, or make more money, or get a wife, and get shredded, and purchase a house, and stop posting, and learn to maintain eye contact, and maybe also join a church, and even start saying “we should grab drinks” to other fellers you haven’t the slightest intention of actually grabbing drinks with, and none of that will turn you into a normie—indeed, consciously undertaking some elaborate program to become more normal is just about the least normal thing a human being can possibly do.
The normalfag’s advantage is that he doesn’t have to model the game to play it, as his precognitive instincts alone tend to yield a sufficiently accurate compression of the surrounding ecology that where the sperg sees a bewildering forest of arbitrary norms requiring explicit causal explanation the normie sees merely a road.
And this is where I think Georgi’s account of normalfag-envy in particular gets something astonishingly right while slightly misidentifying the object.
What the chronically online autismo envies is not the normie’s salary, house, friends, lawn, housewife, housewife’s feet, cannily monetized FIRE heuristics, or even public coding as socially ratified / coo without having to explain himself every five seconds;
He envies his absence of recursive friction—which is to say the normie’s ability to simply inhabit a room without immediately having to construct a model of it; he envies his ability to want something without simultaneously observing himself wanting it, or make a friend without wondering what latent coalition function the friendship serves.
He envies hearing “everyone thinks X” without reflexively asking the cosmos who the fuck “everyone” is—and also what particular status incentives make X declaratively legible, and which subjects tend to disappear from the sample, and what happens to the speaker if X turns out not to be true.
He envies, in short, the ability to experience a social equilibrium without constantly auditing its source code—which you can take it from Wally B is a considerably more substantive form of envy than meager lifestyle jealousy.
Of course, it goes without saying autists will LARP about the condition equating somehow to superiority—normies are NPCs; I alone perceive the Matrix; etc.—which if we’re fair genuinely does let us perceive lots of things a normie misses. But a private operating system is also ruinously expensive to run, because every new interaction now risks turning into its own inference problem, while each established norm now clads itself in scare quotes, until with time every essence you once believed in gets fractured ignominiously into boundless ecological contingencies.
Meanwhile the normie gets to spend all of that cognitive bandwidth the autist wastes reverse-engineering the menu on actually eating dinner.
Note also that high intelligence doesn’t rescue you here, as if anything a pronounced verbal tilt especially makes the problem dramatically worse; once you possess enough semiotic horsepower to explain every last status reversal, romantic loss, professional setback, and social misfire in six competing interpretive registers, even the modality of interpretation itself soon starts to look like a copacetic substitute for adaptation.
The normalfag gets rejected, feels like shit a couple days, starts dating someone else, and then goes bowling with his bros; the hyperverbal sperg writes The Phenomenology of Not Getting Invited to Ashley’s Birthday Party and then derives four new genuinely insightful principles from it.
There is therefore a deeply adaptive side to normie epistemics, as status inelasticity permits a kind of autopiloted compression; if ninety-five percent of the rooms you enter reward approximately the same behaviors, treating their prestige grammar as objective reality is not especially irrational, and may actually be cognitively efficient.
The mistake, however, comes when the normalfag insists on universalizing his local success beyond the rooms where it applies—because note someone whose phenotype has remained consistently legible across the institutions that matter to him has very little experiential reason to distinguish “this works here” from “this is what works.”
And this produces one of the perennial collisions between normies and their critics:
The status elastic actor says: “Your supposedly universal social rule is just an ecology.”
The normie hears: “I am a bitter coping malcontent pathetically attempting to intellectualize my inability to satisfy obvious human standards.”
And in many cases the normie manages to win the resulting argument without ever needing to adjudicate it, because his interpretation by default is the higher-status one.
And this, my friends, is where normiedom stops being merely a neurotype and turns into an incredibly significant mode of discursive power.
The normie’s great rhetorical privilege is that he’s seldom ever obliged to actually prosecute his case from first principles—rather, he speaks in declaratives:
“People don’t like that.”
“That makes women uncomfortable.”
“Nobody cares.”
“Normal people want families.”
“That’s just not how relationships work.”
“Successful people don’t act like this.”
These statements possess tremendous power because they package a contingent status judgment as a neutral description of reality. The normalfag does not merely state: I demand you behave differently, because that would expose him as merely one interested actor among others. Instead he says: this is how things are.
And because his own phenotype is by definition tightly correlated with whatever particular traits the prevailing ecology already rewards, the distinction between description and prescription becomes functionally invisible to him.
This is why being a normie is substantially different from merely being conventional; a highly conventional person can be painfully aware he is following a script, and say, “Yes, I know this is arbitrary, but it works, so I’m doing it.” That, if anything, is the polar opposite of normiedom, because it demands overtly stepping outside of convention long enough to perceive it as convention. The normie’s normie, meanwhile, merely inhabits the script from the inside.
Note this also explains why some extremely successful or socially adroit people can remain unmistakably non-normie. A bloke like Russell Walter, for instance, might accumulate every outward token of successful adulthood without also acquiring true normie essence, because the deeper question is whether he experiences the social world as one continuous field of inscrutable reality or as some compartmentalized array of highly contingent games whose rules are available for explicit inspection and manipulation.
Perhaps now the reader can glean why Georgi and Drunk Wisconsin strike me as altogether unconvincing champions of normiedom—their essays simply don’t read like artifacts produced by some non-metacognitive and highly status-inelastic actor.
Rather, they read like artifacts produced by highly recursive subcultural actors who have identified normie legibility as a useful weapon.
Drunk Wisconsin does it through the masculine propositional grammar: there exists a legible adulthood script involving money, work, family, responsibility, and embodied competence; you have failed to execute it; stop coping.
Georgi’s version is softer and more sophisticated; rather than announcing a failed life script directly, she invokes the affective texture surrounding people who supposedly managed to inhabit it: ease, friendship, romance, ordinary enjoyment, freedom from rancorous online abstraction. The target is invited to infer his own deficiency.
Both maneuvers work because “normal” possesses tremendous borrowed jurisdiction: nobody has to define it, and that itself is the whole trick. Meanwhile, the instant you attempt to define normality propositionally its authority begins to corrode, as now we’re able to ask which ecology, whose peer group, what life stage, what status stratum, what city, what sex, what neurotype, and what historical moment.
The normie ordinarily escapes those questions because normiedom is most powerful before it becomes explicit—which of course is how online subcultures become so fixated on normies in the first place: the internet radically increases Status Elasticity.
A man who possesses little standing in his hometown can become hugely influential in some niche artistic scene. A physically unimpressive coder can accumulate millions of followers on Twitter. An attractive woman can discover the same traits making her desirable to men also make her loathed by other women. A fellow widely ostracized as politically radioactive in the office can become a subcultural kingmaker online. And a mediocre local celebrity can enter a larger arena and discover he’s a nobody.
The internet, therefore, produces millions of Liminal Balconies: vantage points from which people can watch their own status coding mutate as they walk between rooms.
Once you’ve been through the ringer enough times and to sufficient extremes, earnest normalfag epistemics soon become nearly impossible to recover.
Which clearly one can still want the house—and also children, community, money, lawn, physical health, Sunday dinner, clean kitchen, housewife’s feet, and friend circle that doesn’t register a dopaminergic return from frivolously calling shit “ontological.” But wanting such things does not make somebody a normie any more than wanting sushi makes him Japanese.
And I suspect that’s why so many extremely online people who at some point manage to carve out plausibly conventional lives remain noticeably strange forever; they can leave the forum all they want, but the forum (at least to some extent) never fully leaves them; once you’ve learned that every room has an exchange rate, it’s pretty damn hard to go back to pretending prices are essences.
It’s that—more than income or hoes or homeownership or whether one spends his nights drafting philippics about asseating or even whether he’s Russian / pregnant—that ultimately separates the normalfag from all the rest of us.
That’s why we can’t be normal, Drunk Wisconsin
It’s why the things we want have no real bearing on it, Georgi.
Because all behavior is performative—and also, for the most part, sincere.
Just as all cognition is cope, and there’s precisely nothing wrong with that.
I think I agree with all of this
I have all the basic female markers of Normie Success except children so I get to skinwalk it. What I've been a little offended about regarding the "JUST BE NORMAL" literature is that the subtext of it seems to assume there is some intentionality behind an outsider's behavior. And also, this presumtion that by the time you are an adult you're still pining for Normie instead of what most weirdo's do: You spend you time at a different party and have a good time.