This is a story about conformity...

I can tell you a lot about the pressure to fit in or fuck off. I can tell you a lot about conforming. I can tell you a lot about bullying, and other mechanisms of coercion, to get people to fall in line and all march to the same beat.

At school, I wanted to keep a low profile. I wanted less attention from the bullies. This required astute observation and imitation of what was considered 'normal'. You needed to be wearing the right clothes and sneakers, you needed to act a certain way, appear to think certain things and talk in a certain manner. Any deviation from the norm was harshly punished.

I didn't receive a lot of sympathy for the daily misery that I endured, due to having the wrong sort of trousers or shoes, or something so obvious as a reason to bully a kid, such as a bike that didn't conform to gender stereotypes. Kids are excellent at spotting differences, and turning these into the basis for social exclusion, teasing and bullying.

This isn't going to be one of those tear-jerking "oh what a miserable life I had" type rants. Instead, I'm going to tell you what I learned, being pushed to the margins, the fringes.

Most people are blindly unquestioning of the rules of life, the structure of society and the expectations placed upon them. Most people are unaware of their inbuilt tendency to play along with unwritten rules. What is it that stops you talking too loudly? What is it that causes you to walk, when it'd be quicker to run? Why is it that you're stressed and unhappy in an unfulfilling job that barely pays the bills? Why is it that you bottle up all those emotions, when you really want to scream and yell and raise hell?

I'm not very tolerant at the moment. I'm not very good a putting up and shutting up. I made the decision in 2008 to cut away from the mainstream, and actually put some of the talk into action. I had become extremely cynical about what I was doing at the time, and it was clear that simply changing jobs wasn't going to be an extreme enough change. I needed to forge my own path. It was conformity that I was sick of.

We'd all like to be our own boss, right? Well, there are a huge amount of downsides, and you're probably right to stay in your cushy salaried job, but for me there wasn't really a choice: I had reached the limit of my patience, and there was a sickness in my soul from too many years of repressing frustrations.

You do ruin yourself, having had a taste of freedom. It's hard to get the genie back in the bottle. Once you know what you can achieve, when you take away the millstone of the organisations and institutions that sap your energy and discourage innovation, it's very hard to re-enter the corporate or academic world, which is the backbone for modern society.

Society can't handle the free thinker, the nonconformist. The way the systems and the processes are set up, the way our preconceptions and prejudices are programmed... if you don't fit the mould people are going to find you very hard to handle.

Trying to explain gaps in your CV or periods where you ran your own business, will boggle the mind of the drones who need to try and shoehorn you into their neat little boxes. How are you supposed to get a reference when you were your own boss? How do you describe your job title and employment dates, when you're not actually an employee... you cut away from that system and you went in your own direction.

Do you have performance objectives, and reviews with your boss? What would you do if your boss blocked your promotion aspirations? Would you just wait for your turn, to be promoted to the next rung on the ladder?

This is important: it's not a ladder. The ladder is a lie. It's a pyramid, and there is less space on the next step up, than there is on the step below. What do we know about pyramid schemes? Well, it's pretty clear that it's sweet for the person at the top of the pyramid, and we'd all love to be there. But what's less clear is the simple mathematical trick that means that you're never going to reach the top of the pyramid by conventional means: exponential growth.

By the time that 3 or 4 layers of management have been employed, between you and the guy at the top, the number of people vying for even the next step up has exponentially grown to the point where you have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands even (I've worked for companies with a quarter of a million employees) and they're all hoping to get promoted. It's a con.

Society and the companies you work for stand to gain far more from you, than you will gain yourself, by you behaving yourself at school, doing your exams like a good little robot child, and then getting yourself into a job, where you will slave away until the end of your days, never quite reaching the aspirational targets that are just out of reach. Don't you feel a little cheated?

You can look at the big picture, and the greater good, and say that sure, we can't all just do what we want. There have to be rules, and we have to do things we don't like doing. However, have you stopped to think whether you're perpetuating human misery? The best you can hope for with your children is that they won't be very bright or very emotionally attuned, so that they won't be troubled with deeply philosophical questions about "why are we here?". If your kids can avoid questioning authority, and just neatly conform to the world around them, then happy days... they'll probably clone themselves and the whole motherfucking cycle continues.

However, the more you give them the freedom to think and explore their own identities, the more you give them the capability to differentiate themselves, to have independent thoughts and resist indoctrination... well, they might end up having a difficult time. Our society is so highly leveraged, geared up, pressured, that there's no time to stop and consider the alternatives. Nobody has the time or the inclination to say "hey, is there a better way?".

Fit in or fuck off. Fit in or fuck off are the only choices that you have, unless you're going to be an eccentric outcast.

Tags: #career #mentalhealth