We Are All Weird

The mass market—which made average products for average people—was invented by organizations that needed to keep their factories and systems running efficiently.

The typical institution (an insurance company, a record label, a bed factory) just couldn’t afford mass customization, couldn’t afford to make a different product for every user

Why offer respectful choice when you can make more money from forced compliance and social pressure

Most people who make that choice are paradoxically looking to be accepted. Not by everyone, of course, but by their tribe, by people they admire and hope to

The weird aren’t loners. They’re not alone, either. The weird are weird because they’ve foregone the comfort and efficiency of mass and instead they’re forming smaller groups, groups where their weirdness is actually expected.

Only wealthy organisms are able to culturally diversify, and as human beings get richer and richer, our instinct is to get ever more weird. As productivity has skyrocketed, so has our ability to do what we’d like instead of merely focusing on survival.

Standing out takes time, money, and confidence. More of us have all three now

That makes it far easier to be obsessed, because marketers are willing to go along with your desires, instead of forcing you to do only what they want

The thing that made us rich was our ability to process in mass, produce in mass, ship in mass, and market in mass.

This wealth, though, is fueling a movement that undermines the foundation that earned us the wealth. We needed a mass audience to leverage the assembly line, and the assembly line was supported by TV ads, but as the marketers and factory owners got wealthy, that wealth made the market wealthy enough to no longer sit still and obediently do what we’re told to do, undermining the very system that created the wealth in the first place.