There are few things more ironic than a conscious effort to be different. And it’s not just the people who dress all in black or tattoo their entire bodies that I’m talking about. Every time somebody does something just for the sake of setting themselves apart from everyone else, I cringe.

It’s obvious to me that the people who so consciously try to be different are reacting in an extraordinarily predictable way. It’s the Tom Sawyer effect in action — a parent, or more likely society-at-large, implicity or explicitly, forbids something, like destroying one’s appearance. The response is to do exactly what is forbidden. The choice to be different is irrational precisely for that reason. In this case, the person is not rebelling against society’s ideology but against its expectations.

Similarly, I know of one case in which the sibling of a friend consciously made a decision to be different. She came from a family that loved red meat and would eat steak or something similar most nights. The person decided to become a vegan. A more rational decision would have been to just cut back on red meat, but she had decided to be different at all costs.

Of course, the irony of such a decision lies in its hypocrisy. Entire groups form whose sole mission is to be different from everyone else. In the end, trying to be different just pushes people from one organized group into another. In that sense, they fail to achieve their goal every time, but they succeed in alienating a whole bunch of people.

So why do I care? People should be finding ways to do things that work for them, not do things specifically because they don’t work for other people. If people deviate from the social norm for a legitimate reason, then I accept that, but people who do things just to be different are living a life of hackery. The problem is that people in the second category believe themselves to be in the first category.

I look forward to your comments!