A Teen Thinkpiece from 2015 —Normcore: a Wild Mass Guess
An essay from 2015 by a 16 year old.
It’s trendy now to dress like a middle school boy on an early 2000s Disney Channel show. Generic. Like the prototypical American tourist. Or Louis CK. Normcore, to conflate the original definition and real-life practice, is an aesthetic and lifestyle based on embracing the sameness of all humans and avoiding exclusivity and alienation. It’s been called “fashion for those who realize they’re one in seven billion.” One in seven billion meaning that an adherent of normcore can recognize his/her own individuality, but also realize that if each of the seven billion people is an individual, and that recognizing his/her own individuality does not mean he/she is special. The dichotomy between “special” and “normal” is a myth. Normcore is the equal and opposite reaction to the bombardment of the “be special/be different” rhetoric thrust upon Youthz by modern parenting and pop culture.
Normcore embraces an effortless sense of self so it offers a sartorial uniform that is easy to fall back on because it supposedly allows for the person to speak for his/herself. While parents tell their children, “be yourself,” many young people find difficulty in finding their own identity. It forces kids to ask themselves, “What if I don’t know who I am?” The connotation of “be yourself” ironically doesn’t allow for any kind of identity-experimentation, which is becoming increasingly important in a world where more people are starting to identify as genderqueer or sexually fluid. People fear “not being authentic” enough, an issue that may have been prevented had no one ever made them question their own authenticity. A comparison would be Sarah Silverman’s stand-up bit where she says “Don’t tell girls they can be anything they want when they grow up because it would have never occurred to them that they couldn’t.”
The parents of millennials, who happened to grow up with PSAs saying, “the most important person in the world is you!” place a heavy emphasis on self-esteem building. For that reason, in children’s competitions, everyone gets a participation medal, regardless of achievement or effort. But eventually, kids catch on and realize that their participation medals aren’t medals of distinction. Everyone is the "smartest, most beautiful baby in the world" to their parents until they go into the world and realize that they actually might not be and that almost every adjective is subjective. Normcore reflects the disillusionment that occurs when people realize that they aren’t particularly more “something” than everyone else in the world. Contrary to the beliefs of many teen movie protagonists, whose primary goal in life is to “fit in,” many people strive to be exceptional.
Even in the academic world, nobody is trying to “fit in.” Why would someone get rewarded for coming up with a theory that has already been proven? Still, as rare as geniuses are, they exist, meaning that if a “type” of person is able to be categorized, then none of them can be considered unique for that quality alone. The competitive colleges get so many applicants with perfect statistics, that people now need a “hook.” They don’t want a “generic” high performer. They want someone “special.” An applicant must be an underrepresented minority and/or someone who can give a sermon on his/her love of udon noodles. To play the college applications game is to try one’s hardest to differentiate one’s self from “the herd.”
Normcore is actually a meta subversion of the classic teen rebellion: “acting out” by purposefully not acting out. In a world where so many are desperate to be seen as special, Normcore defies the social norm by not fearing seeming “normal” because there really is no definition of “normal.” While pop culture pre-2000s once had young people convinced that conformity is the mainstream and that kids with niche-interests are the minority, with Internet communities, people who once thought, “I thought I was the only person who knew about this!” can now feel popular within their subculture. A gay, anime-loving teen can feel alone in the Bible Belt, but within the endless expanse of the Internet, he will likely find that there are so many more people like him. It’s a comforting yet unsettling prospect to some, who once had to defend their “individuality” and create an “us versus them” mentality regarding the mainstream as a whole.
The caricature of the “hipster” lives to stave off any signs of “conformity,” which would primarily include the “mainstream” media. The hipster, in a desperate attempt to become as special as possible, strives to become the highest possible denominator, finding pride in his ability to realize that he is talking about something no one he knows has heard of before. And it’s so tiring to try so hard to be inaccessible. But now that being a “hipster” is apparently “mainstream,” how do the hipsters cope with capitalist hub Urban Outfitters trying to exploit their once-considered-”alternative” lifestyle? How “alternative” must one be to be considered “alternative?”
Maybe normcore is a sign of society’s realization that the pursuit of uniqueness is futile. Humans are all born unique, but that is what makes them all the same. There is no need to validate one’s individuality because no matter how obscure or mainstream one’s interests are, they are that individual person’s unique interests, enjoyed for unique reasons that only he/she has thought of. “Fitting in” doesn’t mean “selling your soul.” It just means that one’s views align with those of the majority of a certain population. Humans will always naturally congregate towards those like themselves, so there will always be some social stratification. But normcore, as a movement, allows for the greatest freedom of self expression because it doesn’t even necessarily require someone to wear the normcore "uniform." The normcore uniform isn’t even really a uniform, but rather a blank slate that allows one’s self to feel free in his/her own identity no matter how confused or assured he/she is in it in it. Normcore doesn’t even confine anyone within the limits of “be yourself.” Normcore allows a person to just be.