Epically Normal

                                                            Epically Normal


                           

A client recently told me I was “epically normal,” I take this as a very high compliment. To be normal on an epic scale is what I'm going for both personally and in my professional helping of people to be fully human. As bizarre as this sounds, it is becoming somewhat foreign to be a normal human being, our world is so dramatically hyperbolized that everything is bigger than life, to such an extent that real life is becoming more and more abstract. Simple human encounters such as going for a walk, eating a meal, having coffee with someone, driving, etc. are becoming productions that include texting, being distracted, instigraming, Facebooking what you're eating, and being enraged at the idiot driver in front of you!

The recent Argentine-Spanish black comedy film “Wild Tales,” written and directed by Damián Szifron takes simple modern day experiences like road rage, getting a parking ticket, getting married, being a waitress, carrying a grudge with your ex, etc to the level of Greek tragedy. The film is certainly a commentary on modern life and the feelings that are just below the surface of contemporary “normal” everyday life.

We are living in a cultural crisis that is strongly challenging our humanity at every turn. We live in an attentional economy, an economy built upon getting people's attention, a system presenting the world to us through representations and images. Life is becoming an imitation of the theories that govern a market economy, and driven by technologic devices that garner attention, because attention these days equals revenue. Very different than an information age, we are living in an attentional age, our human experience is highly engineered and manipulated much like a good movie, and one in which we are having a virtual, vicarious experience of our own life.

Being normal has taken on negative connotations these days, because everything is about intensity, extreme, upgraded, cutting edge, etc., being just regular, average, normal guy/girl doesn't cut it. We certainly see this with kids who are the targets of much advertising and manipulated attention that results in their not feeling good enough or on par with the images being broadcast to them 24/7.

The remedy for all this is of course the most obvious, the least popular, and the most radical, which is to be the “square” that is relearning how to just be a normal human being doing normal human things like walking the dog, having coffee with a friend, and eating a meal without staging it to broadcast on Facebook. Try not to try being more than human or less than human, and to find people that you would say “That's a real nice normal person!” and hang out with them. Depending on the degree and time that your attention has been hijacked and co-opted you will have to go through some de-tox/withdrawl of how jacked up your nervous system has been, this is not unlike recovery from addiction, in fact it is recovery from addiction.