There Is No Normal

The more I learn about life the more I realise that "normal" is just a fairy tale. We say "normal" when what we really mean is "the average of what we observe" or better yet "the story our culture/the media/our environment tells us".

"Normal" only exists on a big scale. When you look at a lot of people you can make out some of the traits they share. You can call that "normal".

When you look at individuals, though, you suddenly start to realise that nobody is living the "normal life" you've seen on TV. In fact, that life doesn't exist.

You also learn that what you consider normal is completely alien to other people.

It can be something small, like food habits, or something really big like drinking and yelling. In this scenario, whatever you are most exposed to ends up being "normal" for you. Once you look beyond your own circumstances, you realise that none of it was "normal" in the strictest sense of the word.

But it goes even further. Things change all the time. Granted, right now, it feels like things are changing much more than usual because we are all living through a similar experience. But even without a global pandemic, things never stayed the same.

Just compare your upbringing with that of your parents, grandparents, and great grandparents and you'll see that what was normal for them is completely different for you now. Things have come such a long way and there is no reason to believe that they will just stop coming along. You are not going to be stuck in the 2010s just like your grandparents were never going to be stuck in the 1950s.

The more I look at it, the more I think that the only thing that is normal is change. And by the looks of it, it seems to be accelerating in pace. At least that's what we assume.

But who knows, maybe life during the end of the middle ages still felt vastly different than at the beginning - at least on the individual level. Perhaps, one day, humans from the future will look at the whole period of time from the invention of the radio to who knows how many years into the future and just go "oh yeah, life didn't change much, that was the age of electronic communication".

Clearly, there truly is no normal in this world.

There never has been.