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.
Banger. The Normal discourse has been bothering me specifically because people casually bounce back and forth between defining a normie as somebody who Is Normal and somebody who Does Normal. As someone who embraces the latter without feeling like I get to experience much of the former, your definitions are clean and specific in a way that makes them very useful! Like, I don’t see myself as special but it is, for better or for worse, weird to arrive at normal specifically through first principles and feel like you’re the one who discovered it. But fellow false normies tend to be among my favorite people. Anyway, canonical poast. The forum line truly resonates lol
This made me think about a question I’ve been coming back to again and again.
Across every society, we find people with remarkably different dispositions. Some are explorers, some are builders, some are careful craftsmen, some are natural organizers, some are drawn to risk, while others instinctively preserve stability.
They often end up doing very different kinds of work, yet each seems to fit a different role in the larger system.
The question that fascinates me is not why people choose different paths, but why life keeps producing such different kinds of people in the first place.
Lately I’ve been wondering whether this reflects a broader Strategy Distribution Mechanism—where diversity in human dispositions is itself part of how life responds to uncertainty.
" the internet radically increases Status Elasticity."
BAP and his friends have been saying that the normie is going extinct. If I can give a crude over simplification of a normie based on what you've written here (which I agree with) we could say its a "person who doesn't second guess anything". Because of the internet and other factors (economic factors rapidly corroding the material rewards for conformity is another big one) everybody has SOME niche opinion about SOMETHING along with some pride about being an independent thinker for having this opinion ("first time here, huh?").
The people who want to come to Substack and tell us we all should be normies are contrarians among contrarians, we see right through you
Gotta get equal representation of the normies of every time and place in history and get them arguing with each other - with no way of knowing which ideology holds sway outside of the massive conference room they are gathered in (with very ambiguous construction that doesn’t necessarily look modern).
I was homeschooled, and lived all over the country growing up because my Dad worked for the Government.
I have lived in Illinois, Washington State, Arizona, Virginia, and Michigan.
I’ve been to over 60 Churches in my lifetime.
I’ve been to a far-left state school and a Christian university.
I’ve had every job under the sun, White Collar and Blue Collar, you name it.
I’ve grown up with Soldiers and Cops. I’ve grown up with Homeschool Moms. I’ve grown up with Blue Collar Baby Boomers. I’ve lived amongst Automotive Engineers. I’ve worked with Middle Eastern Refugees.
I know exactly what you mean.
Everything you say is 100% true.
What is Heroism in one group is Cowardice in another, what is Cool in one group is Cringe in the next.
This is as accurate as it gets.
It’s like you’ve been following me around with a hidden camera.
I don't like the way the U.S Government especially it's armed forces cycle people uniquely throughout the world. That's a destroyer of empires btw. And this is inevitable in a planetary empire like this especially how we can easily access multiple geographies with just a car or a bus ride instead of planes or ships. Most other countries have one geography only and to get to another one things change entirely and they are literally the size of small U.S states generally.
Look man, I liked my life. I enjoyed it, and I'd do it again. I'm of Norman Ancestry, and our guys, they like to roam around exotic places and be the outside arbitrator of stuff. That's who I am, and that's what I do!
Oh yes I know that. It works depending on some circumstances but ideally once you have children you shouldn't move around until at least they move out of the house. I like outside arbitration of stuff too.
Love this essay, especially the definition of normiedom.
I have a wife and two kids, a W-2, fantasy football league, crossover SUV. I am doing no better or worse on most metrics of normie success than my normiest US classmates. But of course, since I'm a fucking weirdo, I had to get there by immigrating twice, breaking down the OkCupid algorithm with math, finding jobs through twitter, getting out of 2-3 situations where I was the clown bottom of the status pole to restart social life from scratch, etc.
I feel neither envious nor superior to the normies. I can't judge them, I know nothing of what it's like to be them. My parents were also weirdos, so are my siblings and all my close friends. Did I have to "work harder"? Kinda, but it's not really work — that's just what life is. A normie would balk at the amount of hyperverbal overthinking I apply to everything, but hyperverbal overthinking is my main hobby, not a chore. I'm about as happy with my life as most normies, as far as I can tell.
One note though: the world is getting weirder faster, and it's not just the internet. The normie is hyper efficient at the cost of adaptability, like the dodo. There is no guarantee that the future will contain a big enough "normal" ecology to sustain a normie from birth till death, nor that it will be a smooth continuation of the current one. Qing China and Mao's China both had normies, but it weren't the same ones. I wonder if the normies are aware of this, if they experience it as a sense of creeping unease they can't quite put into words.
I have a different mental model of normie-thought, and would push back against "efficient at the cost of adaptability".
Picture this: You're a tiny baby who has no idea what's going on. You initially learn a lot by imitation. And this continues to work throughout most of your life, or at least a good portion of your childhood. You grow up in an environment without weirdos, or where the weirdos are a small minority that most people look askance at. Most of the people you interact with are kind of same-ish in many ways. You internalize on a subconscious, unquestioned level that doing what other people are doing is good because it works, and doing stuff other people aren't doing is risky, dangerous, often stupid, generally bad. By the time you're a teenager, you've taken "be normal" in as an internalized value, it is not a strategy you adopt. It feels to you close to and potentially the same as "be good" feels to you, Jacob. "Normal" and "good" are not fully distinct concepts in your mind, they're strongly intermingled, such that hearing "being normal is bad" would be deeply confusing, and might make you think the person you're talking to misunderstands how reality works.
What effect does this have on your psychology? See: mimesis. The person who has internalized normal==good as a terminal value they never needed to question, spends a lot of time looking at what other people are doing to determine what they themselves should do because it's normal, not as a "let's understand and pick from their strategies" approach, but as a "most people are doing this so it's normal so it's good and I should do it too" approach. Not fully articulated, but this explains the fascination "normies" have with celebrities, fashion, social trends in general. Some people I've met spend a lot of time and mental energy thinking about what everyone else is doing and how they can "fit in" to the middle of the distribution, or at least kind of near the good end but not too far out in front. I literally had one of the people who raised me for a while who encouraged us to do well at school, but not _too_ well, you wouldn't want to be top of your class because that would be weird, you'd stand out.
With that approach to life, as social trends change, you are acutely aware of those changes, carefully watching which way the social winds are blowing. When it's cool to make fun of homosexuals, you do so. When it later becomes uncool, you stop. You're first in line to be an ally, once you realize that's what everyone else is going to be doing (yes, I'm aware of the contradiction, and that's not how a normie would articulate it, they'd find some way where the contradiction was less glaringly obvious) - and you're trying hard to be the first, or near the first, to realize that's what everyone else is going to be doing, but not so far ahead of everyone else in your actual actions that you seem weird.
I predict hardcore normies, when faced with a social change that occurred between birth and death, would not freeze and be confused, they'd see the change coming and adjust their thoughts and behaviours to be well within the typical range of whatever group they're a part of. With things changing as quickly as they are on so many dimensions, I expect there is a creeping sense of unease, but it's partly rooted in not knowing what will be "normal" in the near future, which feels to them kind of like it would feel to you if you were uncertain how to be a good person in the near future.
Normies can adapt to changing mores in the same reference group of mimetic influences, like daytime TV celebrities updating what the Current Thing is every couple of years. They can’t adapt very quickly to the mainstream culture fracturing (choosing which shard of culture to follow requires seeing each as contingent) or to revolutions that replace the reference group with a new norm-setting elite overnight.
Easy example: Good Morning America will keep hosting some humanities professor telling you that AI is a stupid stochastic parrot right up till the day you lose your job to some combination of AIs and people who learned how to use them.
For me, the takeaway from DW seemed to be "a 9-5 is actually good."
I actually like normal people enough that I genuinely care about getting along with them, within limits, and I think trying to do that develops some very healthy habits.
This clarified and articulated some concepts that match my experience. Which is: some people just seem to see certain things as "normal" and treat that as "so obviously that's what you should do", without differentiating between "normal" and "good", and recognizing that sometimes what is currently percieved as "normal" is not "good". And so they go drinking when you're supposed to go drinking, eat meat when you're supposed to eat meat, watch the sports everyone else is watching and avoid watching the sports others are not watching, avidly absorb the opinions of others about such matters to figure out what you should do (not by parsing arguments and determining validity/finding errors or side-cases or underlying principles, but by figuring out what "normal" means in this social context.)
Maaaybe they (some of them) just perceive "this is what everyone (except weirdos) does" or "this is just the objectively correct thing to do in this situation according to reality, anyone who doesn't see that is neurodeficient, although I wouldn't use a word like that because it's weird, unless my friends think it's cool". But I notice a lot of paying attention to celebrities and trends in thought, behaviour, fashion, etc. among normies. So it's probably not all fully unconscious processing.
I find a lot of the people who come across as "normie" are trying pretty hard to fit in and make significant efforts to not be weird. It's just they've internalized "being normal" as a terminal value/non-instrumental goal, haven't thought about it very much and realized there are different "normals" among different groups, and mostly do what they do by figuring out who to copy.
This mindset is captured in a story I was told in a Marketing class back in university. One of the major tomato sauce brands decades ago wanted to figure out more about their consumer base, specifically whether it would be better to make their sauce more chunky or more smooth, more herbed or more plain, etc. So they sent out a survey asking various questions trying to determine what kind of tomato sauce people liked the best. They were shocked and confused that there was no one answer, and had to restructure and re-run different surveys to finally come to the conclusion that different people like different things, and they should make multiple sauces to serve different market segments. They were basically naively asking "which sauce is normal?", which is a question that happened not to have an answer across the market they were trying to serve.
2. Using 'freak' as a convenient antonym, it's important to divide freaks into two categories. Those choosing to engage in non-normie behavior, and those constitutionally incapable of engaging naturally in normie behavior -- who can still engage but only with sustained effort. IMO, normie discourse is directed to the former category. These folks are not trying to tell neurodivergent people to just cut it out and start being neurotypical. It's about the people making a choice.
Being a normie isn't a constant state: normies who engaged is this that or the other freakery in their youth are common as dirt.
3. Mr. Justice Stewart famously applied the one true normie principle in his concurring opinion in *Jacobellis v. Ohio:* "I know it when I see it."
The complexity you’re talking about here that autists can’t get away from is real, but I think it has kind of a skeleton key in adopting a low-threat valence you can portray by adapting to Christian moral expectations of openness and humility. Sure, it’s not really a universal, but it is so broadly disarming that, among non-predator types, it will allow you to mesh with a huge variety of people. You can make others comfortable, and be comfortable yourself, just with what normies call basic consideration.
They call it basic despite it being mostly imposed by upbringing. And the degree normal people probably have to work into their own acceptance seems to be understated here. I tend to think that most people are weird, especially about the things they care about - rich inner lives and so forth - and while most of us can get comfortable, there is a true autist that literally cannot while many of the others are just poorly socialized lost boys who were never taught that it mattered to reduce friction and understand boundaries.
Sometimes that’s a superpower. Sometimes it obviously isn’t. The non-weird, non-creepy, good-with-people types will try and standardize their behavior, but it’s not that simple or legible, because this is not even close to an exact science. It’s an ever-changing, subjective mess, and the good faith is only maintained by commitment, both to your in-group and to the bit, and seeing other people’s intentions as we want to see them.
It’s hard to keep it going. It’s also worth it, because high-trust social efficiency. I’m not trying to blast the semi-autists here, but any given society needs a sense of normal, and even if you can’t contribute to it just so, you can at least try and show you aren’t out to fuck it up. Meet your obligations, try to be easy to get along with, and others will make up for you in ways they don’t even perceive.
That’s what Wisconsin was really talking about. Boorman’s thing is a far more insulting slag against weird that shows resentment and social fragility more than anything.
This is 100% but the cultural difference is important, Americans are truly bad at being overt about social norms and say Brits are slightly better, Germans more etc. saying "wow, just wow" is truly the worst, a German would at least tell you you were being sexist or something
I think I agree with all of this
DW, we aren’t normies. How will we cope? 🫠
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.
I'm subscribed to you now because of your username 🫡
Banger. The Normal discourse has been bothering me specifically because people casually bounce back and forth between defining a normie as somebody who Is Normal and somebody who Does Normal. As someone who embraces the latter without feeling like I get to experience much of the former, your definitions are clean and specific in a way that makes them very useful! Like, I don’t see myself as special but it is, for better or for worse, weird to arrive at normal specifically through first principles and feel like you’re the one who discovered it. But fellow false normies tend to be among my favorite people. Anyway, canonical poast. The forum line truly resonates lol
This made me think about a question I’ve been coming back to again and again.
Across every society, we find people with remarkably different dispositions. Some are explorers, some are builders, some are careful craftsmen, some are natural organizers, some are drawn to risk, while others instinctively preserve stability.
They often end up doing very different kinds of work, yet each seems to fit a different role in the larger system.
The question that fascinates me is not why people choose different paths, but why life keeps producing such different kinds of people in the first place.
Lately I’ve been wondering whether this reflects a broader Strategy Distribution Mechanism—where diversity in human dispositions is itself part of how life responds to uncertainty.
" the internet radically increases Status Elasticity."
BAP and his friends have been saying that the normie is going extinct. If I can give a crude over simplification of a normie based on what you've written here (which I agree with) we could say its a "person who doesn't second guess anything". Because of the internet and other factors (economic factors rapidly corroding the material rewards for conformity is another big one) everybody has SOME niche opinion about SOMETHING along with some pride about being an independent thinker for having this opinion ("first time here, huh?").
The people who want to come to Substack and tell us we all should be normies are contrarians among contrarians, we see right through you
Gotta get equal representation of the normies of every time and place in history and get them arguing with each other - with no way of knowing which ideology holds sway outside of the massive conference room they are gathered in (with very ambiguous construction that doesn’t necessarily look modern).
Walter, you get it.
I was homeschooled, and lived all over the country growing up because my Dad worked for the Government.
I have lived in Illinois, Washington State, Arizona, Virginia, and Michigan.
I’ve been to over 60 Churches in my lifetime.
I’ve been to a far-left state school and a Christian university.
I’ve had every job under the sun, White Collar and Blue Collar, you name it.
I’ve grown up with Soldiers and Cops. I’ve grown up with Homeschool Moms. I’ve grown up with Blue Collar Baby Boomers. I’ve lived amongst Automotive Engineers. I’ve worked with Middle Eastern Refugees.
I know exactly what you mean.
Everything you say is 100% true.
What is Heroism in one group is Cowardice in another, what is Cool in one group is Cringe in the next.
This is as accurate as it gets.
It’s like you’ve been following me around with a hidden camera.
I don't like the way the U.S Government especially it's armed forces cycle people uniquely throughout the world. That's a destroyer of empires btw. And this is inevitable in a planetary empire like this especially how we can easily access multiple geographies with just a car or a bus ride instead of planes or ships. Most other countries have one geography only and to get to another one things change entirely and they are literally the size of small U.S states generally.
Look man, I liked my life. I enjoyed it, and I'd do it again. I'm of Norman Ancestry, and our guys, they like to roam around exotic places and be the outside arbitrator of stuff. That's who I am, and that's what I do!
Oh yes I know that. It works depending on some circumstances but ideally once you have children you shouldn't move around until at least they move out of the house. I like outside arbitration of stuff too.
Love this essay, especially the definition of normiedom.
I have a wife and two kids, a W-2, fantasy football league, crossover SUV. I am doing no better or worse on most metrics of normie success than my normiest US classmates. But of course, since I'm a fucking weirdo, I had to get there by immigrating twice, breaking down the OkCupid algorithm with math, finding jobs through twitter, getting out of 2-3 situations where I was the clown bottom of the status pole to restart social life from scratch, etc.
I feel neither envious nor superior to the normies. I can't judge them, I know nothing of what it's like to be them. My parents were also weirdos, so are my siblings and all my close friends. Did I have to "work harder"? Kinda, but it's not really work — that's just what life is. A normie would balk at the amount of hyperverbal overthinking I apply to everything, but hyperverbal overthinking is my main hobby, not a chore. I'm about as happy with my life as most normies, as far as I can tell.
One note though: the world is getting weirder faster, and it's not just the internet. The normie is hyper efficient at the cost of adaptability, like the dodo. There is no guarantee that the future will contain a big enough "normal" ecology to sustain a normie from birth till death, nor that it will be a smooth continuation of the current one. Qing China and Mao's China both had normies, but it weren't the same ones. I wonder if the normies are aware of this, if they experience it as a sense of creeping unease they can't quite put into words.
I have a different mental model of normie-thought, and would push back against "efficient at the cost of adaptability".
Picture this: You're a tiny baby who has no idea what's going on. You initially learn a lot by imitation. And this continues to work throughout most of your life, or at least a good portion of your childhood. You grow up in an environment without weirdos, or where the weirdos are a small minority that most people look askance at. Most of the people you interact with are kind of same-ish in many ways. You internalize on a subconscious, unquestioned level that doing what other people are doing is good because it works, and doing stuff other people aren't doing is risky, dangerous, often stupid, generally bad. By the time you're a teenager, you've taken "be normal" in as an internalized value, it is not a strategy you adopt. It feels to you close to and potentially the same as "be good" feels to you, Jacob. "Normal" and "good" are not fully distinct concepts in your mind, they're strongly intermingled, such that hearing "being normal is bad" would be deeply confusing, and might make you think the person you're talking to misunderstands how reality works.
What effect does this have on your psychology? See: mimesis. The person who has internalized normal==good as a terminal value they never needed to question, spends a lot of time looking at what other people are doing to determine what they themselves should do because it's normal, not as a "let's understand and pick from their strategies" approach, but as a "most people are doing this so it's normal so it's good and I should do it too" approach. Not fully articulated, but this explains the fascination "normies" have with celebrities, fashion, social trends in general. Some people I've met spend a lot of time and mental energy thinking about what everyone else is doing and how they can "fit in" to the middle of the distribution, or at least kind of near the good end but not too far out in front. I literally had one of the people who raised me for a while who encouraged us to do well at school, but not _too_ well, you wouldn't want to be top of your class because that would be weird, you'd stand out.
With that approach to life, as social trends change, you are acutely aware of those changes, carefully watching which way the social winds are blowing. When it's cool to make fun of homosexuals, you do so. When it later becomes uncool, you stop. You're first in line to be an ally, once you realize that's what everyone else is going to be doing (yes, I'm aware of the contradiction, and that's not how a normie would articulate it, they'd find some way where the contradiction was less glaringly obvious) - and you're trying hard to be the first, or near the first, to realize that's what everyone else is going to be doing, but not so far ahead of everyone else in your actual actions that you seem weird.
I predict hardcore normies, when faced with a social change that occurred between birth and death, would not freeze and be confused, they'd see the change coming and adjust their thoughts and behaviours to be well within the typical range of whatever group they're a part of. With things changing as quickly as they are on so many dimensions, I expect there is a creeping sense of unease, but it's partly rooted in not knowing what will be "normal" in the near future, which feels to them kind of like it would feel to you if you were uncertain how to be a good person in the near future.
Normies can adapt to changing mores in the same reference group of mimetic influences, like daytime TV celebrities updating what the Current Thing is every couple of years. They can’t adapt very quickly to the mainstream culture fracturing (choosing which shard of culture to follow requires seeing each as contingent) or to revolutions that replace the reference group with a new norm-setting elite overnight.
Easy example: Good Morning America will keep hosting some humanities professor telling you that AI is a stupid stochastic parrot right up till the day you lose your job to some combination of AIs and people who learned how to use them.
For me, the takeaway from DW seemed to be "a 9-5 is actually good."
I actually like normal people enough that I genuinely care about getting along with them, within limits, and I think trying to do that develops some very healthy habits.
Damn the read-til-you-see-the-word-epistemic challenge is getting easy
This clarified and articulated some concepts that match my experience. Which is: some people just seem to see certain things as "normal" and treat that as "so obviously that's what you should do", without differentiating between "normal" and "good", and recognizing that sometimes what is currently percieved as "normal" is not "good". And so they go drinking when you're supposed to go drinking, eat meat when you're supposed to eat meat, watch the sports everyone else is watching and avoid watching the sports others are not watching, avidly absorb the opinions of others about such matters to figure out what you should do (not by parsing arguments and determining validity/finding errors or side-cases or underlying principles, but by figuring out what "normal" means in this social context.)
Maaaybe they (some of them) just perceive "this is what everyone (except weirdos) does" or "this is just the objectively correct thing to do in this situation according to reality, anyone who doesn't see that is neurodeficient, although I wouldn't use a word like that because it's weird, unless my friends think it's cool". But I notice a lot of paying attention to celebrities and trends in thought, behaviour, fashion, etc. among normies. So it's probably not all fully unconscious processing.
I find a lot of the people who come across as "normie" are trying pretty hard to fit in and make significant efforts to not be weird. It's just they've internalized "being normal" as a terminal value/non-instrumental goal, haven't thought about it very much and realized there are different "normals" among different groups, and mostly do what they do by figuring out who to copy.
This mindset is captured in a story I was told in a Marketing class back in university. One of the major tomato sauce brands decades ago wanted to figure out more about their consumer base, specifically whether it would be better to make their sauce more chunky or more smooth, more herbed or more plain, etc. So they sent out a survey asking various questions trying to determine what kind of tomato sauce people liked the best. They were shocked and confused that there was no one answer, and had to restructure and re-run different surveys to finally come to the conclusion that different people like different things, and they should make multiple sauces to serve different market segments. They were basically naively asking "which sauce is normal?", which is a question that happened not to have an answer across the market they were trying to serve.
The strongest of your essays I’ve read yet 🫡
1. Normies don't "possess" "hoes."
2. Using 'freak' as a convenient antonym, it's important to divide freaks into two categories. Those choosing to engage in non-normie behavior, and those constitutionally incapable of engaging naturally in normie behavior -- who can still engage but only with sustained effort. IMO, normie discourse is directed to the former category. These folks are not trying to tell neurodivergent people to just cut it out and start being neurotypical. It's about the people making a choice.
Being a normie isn't a constant state: normies who engaged is this that or the other freakery in their youth are common as dirt.
3. Mr. Justice Stewart famously applied the one true normie principle in his concurring opinion in *Jacobellis v. Ohio:* "I know it when I see it."
The complexity you’re talking about here that autists can’t get away from is real, but I think it has kind of a skeleton key in adopting a low-threat valence you can portray by adapting to Christian moral expectations of openness and humility. Sure, it’s not really a universal, but it is so broadly disarming that, among non-predator types, it will allow you to mesh with a huge variety of people. You can make others comfortable, and be comfortable yourself, just with what normies call basic consideration.
They call it basic despite it being mostly imposed by upbringing. And the degree normal people probably have to work into their own acceptance seems to be understated here. I tend to think that most people are weird, especially about the things they care about - rich inner lives and so forth - and while most of us can get comfortable, there is a true autist that literally cannot while many of the others are just poorly socialized lost boys who were never taught that it mattered to reduce friction and understand boundaries.
Sometimes that’s a superpower. Sometimes it obviously isn’t. The non-weird, non-creepy, good-with-people types will try and standardize their behavior, but it’s not that simple or legible, because this is not even close to an exact science. It’s an ever-changing, subjective mess, and the good faith is only maintained by commitment, both to your in-group and to the bit, and seeing other people’s intentions as we want to see them.
It’s hard to keep it going. It’s also worth it, because high-trust social efficiency. I’m not trying to blast the semi-autists here, but any given society needs a sense of normal, and even if you can’t contribute to it just so, you can at least try and show you aren’t out to fuck it up. Meet your obligations, try to be easy to get along with, and others will make up for you in ways they don’t even perceive.
That’s what Wisconsin was really talking about. Boorman’s thing is a far more insulting slag against weird that shows resentment and social fragility more than anything.
Hint: Agnes Called, universal context
Callard
This is 100% but the cultural difference is important, Americans are truly bad at being overt about social norms and say Brits are slightly better, Germans more etc. saying "wow, just wow" is truly the worst, a German would at least tell you you were being sexist or something