01-04-2018, 08:51 AM
Excerpt #2:
I've finally clarified one of my elusive reasons for eschewing modeling and conformity for so long: A glass of water in a desert matters significantly. A glass of water in the ocean is meaningless. The difference between being an outcast and being indispensable is whether or not you're the perfect anomaly, deviant, and aberration for the occasion. It's not safe, it's not kind, and it's most certainly not what everyone else is doing.
In my mind, celebrity, leading, and growing up share a very specific thing in common: specialization. Becoming someone uniquely useful to division of labor rather than someone ubiquitously replaceable. The average human goal often appears to be to homogenize oneself through mimicry. To move from the indistinguishable baby stage to the indistinguishable adult stage. To be an undifferentiated stem cell that resists (or adapts to avoid) future differentiation, resisting the primary point (as I understand it) of being a stem cell.
The outcast is ridiculed for being different, for being the "error" and the mutation, but, survive long enough and get enough popular recognition for that difference, and others want to copy (follow) you. And, to me, conformity just appears to be an imbalance and a misunderstanding, trying to copy the specific (what someone was once doing differently) instead of copying the method (their ability to fill an unfilled need by being and doing what others aren't). Which creates a surplus where there may once have been (but is no longer) a drought instead of being the first to quench that drought. Instead of being what's needed when it's needed, not after the followers make it superfluous and (economically) reduce its value.
I see mindful deviation as evolution, not as risky mutation.
I've finally clarified one of my elusive reasons for eschewing modeling and conformity for so long: A glass of water in a desert matters significantly. A glass of water in the ocean is meaningless. The difference between being an outcast and being indispensable is whether or not you're the perfect anomaly, deviant, and aberration for the occasion. It's not safe, it's not kind, and it's most certainly not what everyone else is doing.
In my mind, celebrity, leading, and growing up share a very specific thing in common: specialization. Becoming someone uniquely useful to division of labor rather than someone ubiquitously replaceable. The average human goal often appears to be to homogenize oneself through mimicry. To move from the indistinguishable baby stage to the indistinguishable adult stage. To be an undifferentiated stem cell that resists (or adapts to avoid) future differentiation, resisting the primary point (as I understand it) of being a stem cell.
The outcast is ridiculed for being different, for being the "error" and the mutation, but, survive long enough and get enough popular recognition for that difference, and others want to copy (follow) you. And, to me, conformity just appears to be an imbalance and a misunderstanding, trying to copy the specific (what someone was once doing differently) instead of copying the method (their ability to fill an unfilled need by being and doing what others aren't). Which creates a surplus where there may once have been (but is no longer) a drought instead of being the first to quench that drought. Instead of being what's needed when it's needed, not after the followers make it superfluous and (economically) reduce its value.
I see mindful deviation as evolution, not as risky mutation.
