Transcription
Something has been happening to people, and no one wants to say it out loud. You feel it. I feel it. Every creative I've spoken to feels it. It's like the world has been sanded down. All the sharp edges have fouled off. All the weird corners patched over. And we're supposed to believe this, this is progress.
But if you stop and watch closely, like something just feels off now. And people aren't as weird as they used to be, in a weird way to say it. You know, they aren't as unruly. They aren't as brave. They aren't as willing to, you know, do the unthinkable, make mistakes. You know, it, it's just weird. Something feels off. It's like we keep talking about how chaotic this world is, yet people have never been more cautious, more careful, more predictable, more allergic to risk. So, it's kind of like society gently wrapped us in this bubble wrap and was like, you know, don't embarrass yourself. Really, don't do anything you can't take back. Don't get hurt. And we listened.
The part that really gets to me is that the decline of deviance didn't really start with the internet. I think that's just an excuse everyone really uses. This shift has been happening for decades, slowly, quietly, almost politely, like a culture training itself to avoid trouble. You look at teens now and they're not really messy. You know, they're safe, safer than ever. You know, drinking less, smoking less, fighting less. Even rebellion got optimized into this hydration flask and a mental health worksheet.
So, I think because after talking to so many people, I've realized something: that when life gets safer, people stop knowing how to live. And I'm not saying like not survive, but live. Because when nothing threatens your existence, you start protecting the wrong things, in a way, right? Your image, your reputation, your future LinkedIn endorsements. And when you're protecting those things, you kind of stop being weird. And when you stop being weird, you stop being creative. And when you stop being creative, something inside you kind of dies a little.
So think about how strange you have to be to uproot your life, leave your hometown, chase a dream no one really believes in. I think that kind of movement takes a spark in the brain, a very deviant spark. It takes mischief. It takes delusional. It takes the ability to say, you know what, I'm, I'm going to leave. But movement, literal movement is dying. I think people aren't moving states anymore. People aren't running away, in a good way, right? People aren't trying new cities or breaking old cycles. Everybody's staying put. And it's not because they're content, but because the unknown feels fatal now. It's safer to raw when you're standing. And maybe like you feel that too. I don't know. Like the world kind of just says, you know, stay small, stay near what you know. Stay where nothing really surprises you.
And I think the part that brings kind of like a lump in my throat type of feeling is that every creative I talk to says the same thing. I feel stuck. I feel numb. I feel like I'm not allowed to be who I want to be. I feel like I'm waiting for permission to go, to go somewhere. And I'm starting to believe it's all connected, right? The decline of deviance isn't just misbehavior. I want to say that it's about the decline of courage. So when I say deviance, I mean courage.
You see it everywhere, right? Art is very stagnant. Culture is repeating itself like a glitch. Every movie is a sequel. Every song sounds like a cousin of another. Every novel cover looks like it was generated by an algorithm that only knows how to draw either like woman silhouettes or foliage. And even the internet, the place that was supposed to be the most chaotic playground of human weirdness, has become one long grid of sataness. You know, I've, I'm, I'm sure a lot of people know MySpace. You know, it looked like someone sneezed HTML onto the screen. And now everything looks like this rental apartment with white walls and beige furniture and a sad little house plant begging for sunlight.
I think the internet flattened us completely, and we let it happen because to be weird online now is to risk exile. To be unconventional is to risk misunderstanding. And misunderstanding feels like lifethreatening in an era where reputation is the new oxygen for us. And I think that's why everyone copies each other. And it's not because they lack ideas, but because they fear being wrong in public. So I want to say like I've learned from speaking with hundreds of creatives that no one feels safe enough to be original. And I think that's incredibly devastating. Originality requires danger. Requires risk. Requires messing up and trying again. Requires living in a way that doesn't fit the blueprint. But we don't live in a world built to support that. We live in a world built to monitor, optimize, analyze, track, and predict. We are being shepherd into the most average version of ourselves.
And maybe, maybe that's why you feel like you're shrinking. Maybe that's why you feel like you are, your voice is muffled. Maybe that's why creatively feels harder than it used to be. And because the world isn't rewarding deviance anymore. It's sedating it, almost. I feel like life is worth more now. And I think that's the problem. It's not spiritually. It's not existentially. It's not economically. A statistical human life is more valuable than ever. The richer we get, the more afraid we become of losing what we have. So when you know you might live until 95, you protect that life like this fragile museum artifact. You don't take risk. You don't leap. You don't fall. You don't run. You don't disappear into another city or town. You don't make a fool of yourself. You don't ruin the version of you everyone else thinks is real. You play on slow mode. You choose safety. And then you wonder why your soul is so restless.
And I think that's why we have longer lives, better comforts, higher baselines, and yet somehow we're more scared than ever. Your grandparents did wild stuff, I'm sure, because they knew the world didn't owe them time. The world didn't pamper them. The world didn't protect them. The world didn't say, "Oh, track your steps. Meditate for 15 minutes. Avoid gluten." You know, they didn't have the luxury of fear, but you do, and it's killing your imagination.
So, look, I'm not saying danger is good. I'm not saying you should self-destruct for the sake of art. I'm But I am saying that a life without deviance becomes a life without surprise. And a life without surprise becomes a life without creation. So, if the world is going to keep getting safer, then we have to get weirder on purpose. We need spaces where risk is allowed. Studios where no one asks for your five-year plan before you make something strange. Friend groups that don't really panic when someone decides to reinvent themselves because the truth is ugly and beautiful at the same time.
Weirdness used to be, you know, this survival thing. Now, it has to be this choice, but it's the hardest choice you'll ever make. To live against the grain, to live to create against the algorithm, to move when everything tells you to stay, to make work that scares you, to become someone unrecognizable to the person you were trained to be. But if you don't, if you keep choosing the cushion over the cliff, your life will never belong to you. It's going to belong to the version of you that tried not to die instead of the version of you that tried to live.
And I think that's the tragedy of this moment in history is that we're not losing our weird people. We're convincing them to behave. We're watching them fold their wings, in a way. But you, you're here because some part of you is starting to miss it. Miss the deviance, miss the pulse of aliveness that only comes from stepping outside the script. So, let me end this chapter with something simple. If you don't reclaim your weirdness, someone else will claim your life.
So, let's keep going because if chapter 1 was about how we slowly became scared of living, chapter 2 is about what that fear is doing to our culture and what it's doing to you. And again, like I need you to really hear me out because not in a dramatic heavy way, not over emotional way, but culturally heavy, you know, so heavy, you know, that kind of heavy you feel when you kind of wake up one morning and you realize that the world isn't broken in obvious ways, it's broken in more quieter ways. And I think those are the hardest ones to fix.
I want to say that I've mentioned that I've talked to a lot of different people going down a lot of different paths and, you know, people who don't even know what they are yet, but everyone feels like culture is decaying, but no one really wants to admit that they're contributing to that decay. We blame streaming. We blame TikTok. We blame algorithms. We blame capitalism. We blame the internet for flattening taste. But maybe the scarier truth is that we stopped wanting to be pioneers because pioneers always got laughed at. They got disliked, misunderstood. You know, they get the lowest engagement. They get told that won't work. They build things that don't have audiences. And most people, especially now, would rather succeed safely than fail creatively. Like we aren't drowning in sameness because the world ran out of ideas. We're drowning in sameness because the world ran out of that grit.
So if you think about art, think about movies, you know, music, architecture, the internet. If you think about what everything looks like now, it's completely polished, minimal, optimized, unformed. You know, before the 2000s, only a quarter of the highest grossing films were sequels or spin-offs. Now it's three-quarters. So if we let that sink in, we've built an entire entertainment industry on recycling safety. Popular music is more repetitive than ever. Novel covers look like clones. Buildings look more air purified than windows. Fashion moves in micro trends designed for people who are too afraid to commit to a style. Even your phone, you know, this object you touch 200 times a day has shaped your taste into a smooth, frictionless, algorithm approved rectangle. No texture, no risk, no wrongness. The world got optimized. And when the world gets optimized, it stops being alive.
But I think the part that hurts creatives the most is that the internet used to be a playground. But it's just a shopping mall now. You know, everyone used to build weird little websites for no reason. Everyone used to have an online persona that made no sense. Every page looked like someone dumped a bucket of glitter-coated chaos. Now, every profile looks like it's ready for this job interview. Every artist portfolio looks like a corporate pitch deck. Every creator is scared of being cringey. Cringe is the new crime. A crime against branding. A crime against relatability. A crime against the image you've been told to polish until it reflects back something I don't know, acceptable. It's just funny. You know, we talk about authenticity non-stop, but nobody wants to risk looking stupid. Nobody wants to risk being early. No one wants to risk being wrong. So, but all original art looks wrong right at first. And that's the rule. That's, you know, it's not the expectation.
So, I feel like, you know, every cafe now looks like the same beige boho soft textured IKEA mood board. You could travel 3,000 miles and still end up drinking the same latte. So, under the same dried pampas grass next to the same overpriced white oak table. Buildings used to scream personality, now they whisper minimalism. Clothes used to define tribes, now they define anxiety levels. Art used to break things, now it fits into social feeds. Like, doesn't this bother you? It bothers me. It bothers every creative I've talked to who feels suffocated by the quiet pressure to blend in or be punished. Like, we keep talking. We keep calling it taste. But really, it's, it's like this fear wearing a fashionable outfit. Culture is stagnating because people are too scared to be interesting. It's not corporations. It's not the institutions. It's not the markets, it's us, it's you. We stopped experimenting. We stopped breaking rules. We stopped building things that weren't guaranteed to work. We traded mischief for metrics. We traded deviance for safety. We traded identity for identity management. And the saddest part is that we don't even notice anymore. We think safety is normal. We think sameness is natural. We think creativity is supposed to feel like this brand deck. This is the real crisis. It's not, it's not AI. It's not money. It's not attention spans. The crisis is courage.
So, what do we do? What do you do? Because I know you're feeling this tension inside yourself. The part of you that wants to stay safe, the part of you that wants to crack open the world with something wild. But my honest take is that if the world keeps getting safer, you have to get more dangerous. And I'm not saying reckless or self-destructive or not chaotic for the sake of chaos, but dangerous in the way artists used to be. Dangerous in thought, dangerous in imagination, dangerous in the ability to create something that you know does not exist yet. You need to become someone who refuses to be flattened, someone who refuses to be optimized, someone who refuses to be digestible because digestible things get swallowed. Origination gets worshipped.
So here's the manifesto part that I think you should probably tell yourself is that there is no creativity without deviance. There is no originality without risk. There is no culture without people who are willing to disturb it. So if you want to be an artist, whatever an artist is, if you want to be someone who changes something, you cannot be normal. You cannot be polite. You cannot be universally liked. You must be willing to lose the comfort that is killing you because comfort sterilizes. Comfort neutralizes. Comfort is the enemy of the very thing you're trying to become.
And I'm telling you this, you know, nicely, but I'm telling you this as a warning that your life will not get interesting by mistake. Your work will not get original by accident. Your future will not get weird on its own. You have to choose it. You have to build it. You have to risk the wrongness of being early, unpopular, or misunderstood. Weirdness used to be a consequence. Now it's a responsibility. If you want a more interesting world, you have to live in a way that threatens the boring one. You have to make something no one asked for. If you want culture to come alive again, you have to resurrect your own aliveness first.
You know, our ancestors didn't choose weirdness. They were thrown into it. You have to do the opposite. You have to reach for it, even if it scares you. Because nothing new grows in safety. Nothing revolutionary grows in comfort. Nothing groundbreaking grows in sness. We're running out of excuses now. The world is safer than ever, which means the danger has to come from you. So let me leave you with this that if you don't disturb the world, the world will quietly erase you.