Theory of Normality and the Sky

Sometimes you really hear a lot about what’s normal. As of 2006, Wiktionary ranked it 4280 on their list of frequent words: right between “companies” and “shirt”. Unless a lingual apocalypse happened in the last few years, that means that we talk about normality rather a lot. But…sometimes I wonder if we really know what we’re talking about.

Has anyone else noticed how nobody seems exactly “normal”? At first glance, most people do. But over the course of my life, fewer and fewer people have seemed worthy of the great and terrible title Normal Guy. I ask you, would you call yourself that? It didn’t take me long to stop using the adjective to modify people at all.

Then occurred to me the question: what do you mean by “normal”? What do we mean when we use the 4280th most popular word? Well, check the dictionary as often as you like (I’m afraid I can’t be bothered to do it myself 🙂 ) but I doubt you’ll find a satisfying answer. Synonyms about: ordinary, usual, typical, etc. Okay, so what do those mean?

Sometime ago I set off on a great and perilous quest in search of the answer. Id est, I asked around. Unfortunately, none of my daring companions had many ideas beyond the synonyms just relayed.

After some reflection upon my bold and glorious travels, however, I’ve come to this conclusion: our perception of normal is like our perception of the sky. Neither “normal” nor the sky is a tangible, defined thing. Rather, they’re the collective impression we get when lots of small components (individuals and oxygen particles respectively) contribute to create the impression we have.

Also, just like the skies look different depending on where you stand (Isn’t it always sunset somewhere?) so too we have varying standards for normality.

To extend the metaphor perilously far…is anybody normal? Well, some groups of people contribute to our impression of what’s normal more than others. But ultimately, people can’t be normal much more than one bit of air can be the sky.