The Measuring Tapes of Normal
Why prestige is a prank
Hey there! Quick note. This is part #3 of an essay series that explores the idea of Performance-Based Love, which relates to topics like prestige, labels, and external validation. Read the first two essays here and here!
I’m not normal.
I don’t watch TV. I don’t use TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram. I don’t have email on my phone. I’ve never held a “normal” job for more than three months. I can leg-press 700 pounds with my gigantic quads. I still spend six hours reading and writing on holidays. I rarely say, “good enough.”
To many people—including my family—I’m not normal. But is this bad? In my last essay, I wrote that normal is just a synonym for acceptable. So if I’m not normal, does that mean I’m not acceptable?1
I used to think so. I used to think that people like me didn’t exist. I thought that I wasn’t acceptable because it was objectively true—I never found a deep friendship until I was 19.
I don’t settle, so life was lonely for a while.
When I was contemplating leaving college, I used the mental model, “what would make a better story?” I’ll admit: dropping out of college with a 4.0 sounded like a pretty sweet story. Some part of me was like, hey, look at me, I’m just like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and the Wright Brothers.
Even though I knew how human nature worked, I still felt pulled by prestige. I still wanted to seem impressive to cognitively lazy strangers because I didn’t know anybody who was doing what I was doing. Prestige is like the Earth’s gravity: no matter who you are or where you are, it pulls you in. It’s a universal force. So how do we escape it?
Pranks
To start out, let’s take the pants off of the word itself. “Prestige” comes from the Latin word praestigium, which means delusion or illusion. According to Merriam-Webster, delusion is “the act of tricking or deceiving someone.” And an optical illusion is “a misleading image presented to the vision.”
So in other words, prestige is a prank. It’s a magic trick. It’s an April Fool’s joke.
As it turns out, Ayn Rand was right about this—literally. As she wrote in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead:
“Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own.”
Because most of the population sets the standards for what is “normal,” prestige is not just the opinion of other people but the opinion of most of the planet. That’s how you belong—by playing along with everyone else.
Or so I thought.
Yoga
Besides sacrificing our own happiness to sound impressive to strangers, there’s a deeper delusion of prestige: that there’s one definition of “normal” in the first place.
Nope.
“Normal” is subjective. “Acceptable” is subjective. “Success” is subjective. It’s just like a bad bitch who does yoga: she bends. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden:
“The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?”
In Spain, it’s normal to drink beer at 11am and eat dinner at 11 pm. It’s normal to see a child smoking cigarettes. It’s normal for the city to shut down on Sundays. It’s normal to see pig legs hanging in the deli. But in the US, this would be weird.
This made me realize that it’s ok that I’m not normal. If prestige is a prank, then what is “normal”? What is “acceptable”?
Measuring Tapes of Normal
Because people have different beliefs, they have different ways of measuring what’s normal and what’s acceptable to them. Just like how Canadians use centimeters and Americans use inches, there’s different standards of measurement.
There are multiple measuring tapes with unique units of “normal.”
I never really felt at home in a city until I came to Austin. What a warm welcome—not just because I could walk outside with shorts in January. Austin is the first city in my life that I’ve felt free. I’ve never met so many college dropouts, online creators, and people who just love ideas. It’s an in-person version of Twitter with lifelong learners, sunrise runners, and real readers. The default is deep conversations.
After moving here, I felt like I could finally relax, exhale, and say, “Thank God! Other people like me exist.” But crucially, I didn’t change myself and was still able to feel normal and acceptable. So if there’s any dictionary definition of normal, it’s this: how similar you are to other people around you.2
It’s also worth noting: I’m normal to myself. Therefore, I’m normal to other people who value what I value: growth and the lifelong pursuit of excellence and education.
I feel accepted in Austin because there’s people who actually use grayscale on their phones and meditate outside. I believe that watching TV is a dangerous distraction. Many of my friends feel the same and likewise don’t own one.
Whatever you value, you have to track down the tribe that uses the same measuring tape as you. Remember: 1% of the population is still 80 million people. So if you’re like me and you’re not “normal” in the sense of “what most other people do,” this could be the message you need to hear: people like you exist.3
The Friends Filter
In his 2006 essay, “How to Do What You Love,” Paul Graham wrote that prestige can be one of the dirtiest distractions to finding work you love. So to to help, he said to forget about the opinions of anyone except for your closest friends:
“Prestige is the the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgment you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?”4
This is what I call the friends filter. As I was writing this, I realized that almost all of my friends own their own online businesses. Some are Youtubers. Some are writers. Some are coaches. Some are salesmen. None of them are normal in standard society’s eyes.
But I really respect their judgment and independent thinking. People whose opinions you respect use the same measuring tape of normal as you do. You share standards, so you should only compare yourself to those.5
In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel wrote a letter to his unborn son about prestige. It’s the perfect ending to this essay because it encapsulates both the pull of prestige and the prank of prestige in the context of shiny and superficial objects:
“You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I'm telling you, you don't. What you want is the respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”
Notes
“I’m not normal, so I don’t do that.” One of my friends in Austin shared this amazing affirmation with me. It helps me feel comfortable, especially when someone says I “should” do something. We use labels because they are efficient, and this by far it my favorite cheat code to reminding myself that there are no rules.
Everybody is “normal” in this sense of the word. But nobody is normal in the "just like everyone else" sense because we all have unique DNA. So this is the paradox of life: everybody is normal, but nobody is normal.
Even in the online world, I can confidently say that your physical location is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. It is life-changing to be in a place with like-minded people who aren’t normal and share your standards. I’m happier and healthier because of it.
One of the best things I’ve read on this topic is Paul Graham’s 2008 essay, “Cities and Ambition.” Here’s a great quote:
“No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.”
Another thing he said was to acknowledge and assume that prestige impacts your ideas of what’s admirable. For an antidote, he gave a heuristic: “if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other.”
But beyond friends and mentors, this can also extend to people you don’t know. I haven’t yet met David Perell, but I know that he would approve of what I’m doing (not just because I bought his course).