This will be a short post.
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I've been thinking a lot about originality and individualism in the last few weeks.
It's not the first time I've spent a while thinking about it. An episode Lex Fridman's podcast from back in 2020 with Yaron Brook may be the cause of this time's resurgence. Brook is an Ayn Rand scholar and seems to say that individualism, through reason, is the gift that made Rand unique; and is what's behind the philosophy of Objectivism. That challenged my assumptions and surface level thoughts around individualism.
Most likely though, this Spike Jonze-directed music video with the rapper Fatlip is the heavy of the source. I'm drawn to it for the reason I can't really put my finger on it: Fatlip let's the camera in and shows himself, fully.
Seeing others be deeply themselves is beautiful.
It's why I love the Grateful Dead.
It's why I want to hold on to my own sense of fashion and get lazy.
It's why I'm getting more comfortable not pinning myself down on politics, decision matrices, and so forth.
It's why I took a risk and quit my job to freelance for a year and spend as much time in proximity to my wife and kids as I could.
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Maybe conformity is natural, understandable. Until recently, we've needed to conform in order to eat and not be burned at the stake. Neither of those are much of an issue any more.
In fact, the opposite seems to be happening: complete subscription to individualism through "identity"
Individualism is special, though. We have infrastructure and nice things because someone understood something about the way the world works, and what they want, shared that with others who wanted more of the same.
It's been dangerous to be that person -- the individual a thing starts with -- for a while because that means change, and we don't always do well with change. That may be because we're not great judges of what we need.
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I think being "yourself" is something we're told a lot as a kid, and when you're a kid a lot of things sound kind of easier; or, they at least don't seem hard. Kids haven't really grown into the "proper" and conformed world. They dance in public still. They ask questions they have no clue about. They don't care if they have peanut butter on the corner of their mouths.
99% of us care about all those things and exhaust ourselves checking boxes to save face in public.
For this reason, my admiration for the Derrick Stewarts of the world, being an individual and finding creative ways to share that, has no end.