While on my current trip to India, I had one of many conversations with my brother (technically my cousin, but you know, culture) about life and existence. During our conversation, he said something that stuck with me: “Bhai, people think I’m weird. Everybody does.”
I obviously asked him why he felt that way. He then explained that it was mostly due to the fact that he takes his health and longevity very seriously. When he says seriously, he means to the point where he “sees food and instantly starts thinking about its nutritional value.”
He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and spends the majority of his free time reading books about science and the human body. His main source of pleasure is working out, which he considers his drug.
As someone who knows him very well, I can fully see why he is the way he is: he was in the Indian special forces for over a decade and in a military school from around the age of 10.
Having been in a job where survival and longevity are everything, it makes perfect sense that you would see the world in such a way. How do you unlearn a lifetime of training? And, furthermore, why would you want to?
We All Have Our Idiosyncrasies
As someone who walks around wearing a bunch of mala beads, bangles, and anklets on a daily basis, and enjoys the occasional bit of nail polish/makeover, I can’t really say much about being what mainstream society would call “weird.”
In all honesty, however, I’d personally argue that there are no “normal” people out there. Think about it. We are literally a bunch of hairless apes that walk around in a state of continuous awkwardness. What’s even weirder is the source of this continuous awkwardness… our bodies.
Some will say they don’t feel awkward about their bodies, which would beg the question of why we all feel the need to cover them with clothes to prevent the world from seeing them.
Even if you truly don’t feel embarrassed by showing it off—I’ve been known to frequent the occasional nudist beach (they’re a lot less crowded than non-nudist beaches)—I’d guarantee that you, like me, sit around watching fictional stories on a little digital screen. I’d also bet that you (again, like me) most likely participate in activities that are detrimental to your long-term survival under the guise of “entertainment.” These two examples are barely scratching the surface of just how weird we all are.
We Are All Animals That Can’t Survive Unaided
I guess the most poignant example of just how strange our species has become is the fact that there is a shockingly small percentage of human beings alive who would be able to survive without something like a supermarket to provide them with sustenance.
Ask yourself this question: If the world went to shit tomorrow and Lidl no longer had food/water to sell and the taps at home ran dry, how long would you survive? I’d bet my life savings that, in such a scenario, at least 70% of the world’s human population would cease to exist within a couple of months.
With that being said, how do any of us have the right to single out another human and call them “weird”? We are so strange that we have actively diminished our inherited generational knowledge to the point of being unable to survive in our natural environment. We vehemently make biased decisions about topics we literally know fuck-all about. How many of us read a headline and form an opinion without any further research?
We have strong opinions about things that literally have nothing to do with us or the quality of our existence, while shooting down anything that looks or sounds different from what we want to hear.
We. Are. Weird.
