The Normie Cultural Mafia

Yeah I mean I'm not shedding too many tears for normies. Look at who you're describing. Affluent homeowners with good jobs in their late 20s or thereabouts. How many people do I know who would kill to be in a similar position, have that kind of security and stability.

Not that it's impossible for less normal people to get good-paying jobs, own homes, etc. It's just like I said, the farther from normal you are, the harder it is.

I'm not doubting that those people worked hard to earn what they have etc, tbc

It's just like if you want to survive as a cool weird art person and you don't have rich/well-connected parents, it's like good fucking luck (esp if you're non-gender conforming, poc, have mental health issues, etc). Shit why tf else am I trying to become a programmer? Certainly not cos I find tech culture by and large appealing. I just want good health insurance.

I just think about how many, many people I know who get by on camming, sex work, weird hustles, etc and I'm like shit I wish it was easier for them to have a path to jobs with 401ks and paid sick leave.

It also makes me think of the wave of suburban ennui art around the turn of the millennium - American Beauty etc - and how badly it's aged the further we've gotten from the Clinton boom years

linebaugh said:

in actuality no one here is probably a normie that was just a light jab @Leo for being a seemingly happy old man who reads the new york times.

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Ohh... I was hoping for more there.

linebaugh said:

but again I dont think theres anything wrong with being a normie and you could reword what paidrag said to replace 'ignorance' with 'content.' Normies are satisfied with the immediate options presented to them by mainstream culture via media, fashion and lifestyle choices. Theres still plenty of room for intellectual curiosity too if thats what you are thinking is the inherent negative- my buddy in question learns foreign languages for fun to give an example.

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That's a fair point about contentment, it's often seen as the enemy of adventure and even at times as the enemy of creativity. Classic thing where you have a band who are young, hungry and angry and that explodes out of every note of their first album, from the second that the needle hits the first groove to the fade out of the last tune the listener is transfixed by the desperation that imbues every sound with anguished power. The album is so good it turns the band into millionaires who take so much cocaine that the only way they can get themselves off to sleep is by shagging beautiful models that they drop off from exhaustion. And then they gotta make a second album, and they look for the fire in the belly, for that spark of anger that fuels their genius, and they can't find it... and they make the album without that spark, and people can hear that it's missing.. and you could say it was drugs, or sex or whatever that killed it, but really it was contentment. And that's why we (Uffington Primary School Choir) never even got to make a third album.

shakahislop said:

my first thought on reading this thread was 'i've never heard anyone say this except on the internet'

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This is what comes to mind when I hear the term tbh. A pejorative for people who aren't as 'online', i.e. aren't aware of various podcast dramas, conspiracy theories, memes, niche politics etc, used by people who are.

version said:

I can't imagine saying it. It'd be like saying "lol" in an actual conversation.

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Yes I do that regularly

And "TY" more than thank you

A large part of the mythos and metaphorical existence of the normie is IMO tethered to online/alternative tropes like "seeing through the matrix"

Another more social constructivist/cultural relativist way to say this IMO is "the view outside games"

I think some non normies are just highly online people who live and breath contrarian counter-signal type discourse. They are superficially "not normie"/Very Online but in a deeper way, they are normies with a different brand

IMO the true break from normiedom is concurrent with a kind of awareness of the condtructedness/aribtrariness of ones cultural norms, and the freedom that follows from this awareness. It is about de-naturalizing and de-objecticizing social reality. And becoming open to many worlds of possible being and existing and experiencing as a result. And building your own little world and code from pieces salvaged and schlepped.

My friend tells a story about how coworkers think he's weird for snacking on espresso beans for a pick-me-up in a pinch—"you're doing it wrong"—but the right marketing spin would normalize it and suddenly they'd be paying premium for raw snacking beans in the supermarket. They live and breathe and naturalize norms

I also think this is very real, and very important, and framing effects rule everything around us:

suspended said:

A large part of the mythos and metaphorical existence of the normie is IMO tethered to online/alternative tropes like "seeing through the matrix"

Another more social constructivist/cultural relativist way to say this IMO is "the view outside games"

I think some non normies are just highly online people who live and breath contrarian counter-signal type discourse. They are superficially "not normie"/Very Online but in a deeper way, they are normies with a different brand

IMO the true break from normiedom is concurrent with a kind of awareness of the condtructedness/aribtrariness of ones cultural norms, and the freedom that follows from this awareness. It is about de-naturalizing and de-objecticizing social reality. And becoming open to many worlds of possible being and existing and experiencing as a result. And building your own little world and code from pieces salvaged and schlepped.

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People who off-road socially ever have some displayed autonomy of thought from entry level or inherited values. But some people off-road once, some people repeatedly look for increasingly off-road adventures until they die, and some people don't even think to go looking.

As Schutz and IIRC Husserl (and many others in the phenomenological tradition) write, the taken-for-grantedness of the social-coordination-equilibrium's shared, normative perspective is the base illusion on which all other illusions are predicated

Some classic dropout path for smart American teenagers ("the fall from normiedom") are to realize that

(1) drugs are actually super sick and their parents/the government health council can stuff it

(2) most people around them appear to be incompetent or lazy (which is partly but only partly a misrecognition)

(3) their country is deeply flawed and consistently fails to live up to its idealized freedom/democracy self-portrait

(4) the religious ideology they were brought up in is a sham

(5) doing psychedelics

(6) feeling like you've heard every variation of every argument on hot topic issues from free will to abortion, can trace arguments deterministically like a garden of forking paths which you desperately want to escape

(7) going online and stumbling into a host of heterodox subcultures, positions, attitudes, systems of taste judgment, social norms, vibes, and your space of possibles expanding

Some people hop ship once and desperately pledge loyalty to a new adopted home. They learn to paper over incongruences that slowly emerge over time. Others aren't as good at lying to themselves—they end up hopping and hopping and hopping, from New world to new world (sometimes boy to boy, girl to girl, job to job, scene to scene) looking for the perfect fit.

Nb Im of the opinion Obama and Google were my generations great disillusionments—the propaganda either revealed as propaganda, or the bureaucracy corrupting/swallowing everything good in the world. But you could probably add Pitchfork Media on that list.

linebaugh said:

Well gus is clean cut and likes popular music. There's not a mother in america that would not be happy to see him on their doorstep with their daughter come home for Christmas break. But internally we all know him to be freak, possibly deviant and a perv.

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I was going to say, having skim-read this thread so far, that Gus kind of goes out of his way to be clean-cut and normal, but at the same time is one of the biggest weirdos on here.

is a geezer also a normie?

padraig (u.s.) said:

That's no shade @linebaugh or anybody tbc, it's just that normie basically == you're not cool

Just as hipster basically == you're inauthentically cool

I certainty agree that it's weird to interact with relatively normal - as in non-subcultural, I guess - people. I had to actively put effort into learning how do it in my early 20s after several years basically off the grid of mainstream society (living in squats, riding freight trains around, living very minimally off gray market economy stuff, etc). It was a real trip at first.

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tell us about the freight trains!

Not exclusively

shakahislop said:

tell us about the freight trains!

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Weird that trains have come up so often in this thread.

A lot of creative types can't drive