08 Feb Worried you’re not normal? Don’t be – there’s no such thing
For many of us, happiness is at least in part related to fitting in, to feeling like we’re like others.
And that’s OK; because we are social animals and so our happiness will always, at least in part, depend on feelings of connection and belonging.
But as with anything, there’s a dark side to this and that can, for some, be social comparison – comparing ourselves to others in ways that aren’t always healthy …
via Psyche by Sarah Chaney
Have you ever wondered whether or not you are normal? Think about the last time you asked yourself that question. What did you mean? Maybe you were considering if an attribute was healthy or not. Perhaps you were concerned that the way you look or behave didn’t quite meet a perceived ideal. Or maybe you simply wondered whether you fitted in: do you think and act and live ‘like everyone else’?
Few of us are immune from the mysterious power of the so-called normal. I spent my socially awkward teens and 20s obsessed with this mysterious state. I was positive that my life would be better and happier if I could only be a bit more like other people. But then, one day, I asked myself a different question. Who are all these so-called normal people out there? Do they even exist?
Before the early 19th century, the word ‘normal’ was not applied to human beings at all. It was a mathematical term, meaning a right angle. People compared themselves with each other, of course, but largely on an individual level: the normal as a generic state of being or behaving simply did not exist. Our modern notions of normal emerged in Belgium in 1835, when Adolphe Quetelet, a 39-year-old astronomer and statistician, began the trend of comparing human characteristics against an average. Quetelet discovered that if you plot a large set of data on a graph – the individual heights of thousands of people, for example – it often makes a bell-shaped curve. The heights of the largest number of people will fall around the peak at the centre, with a rapidly decreasing tail on either side where fewer people are much shorter or taller than the average.
This spread of heights is simply what happens to exist. There is nothing intrinsically desirable about being a particular height. But the ‘normal distribution’ (as it became known) was also the astronomer’s error curve, popularised by the mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss and Pierre-Simon Laplace soon after 1800. Astronomers’ measurements were invariably subject to error. They knew that small mistakes were made more frequently than large ones. By taking multiple measurements of the same thing, they could better determine the correct distance or trajectory of a planet or a star. For the astronomer, the centre of the bell curve was not only the average – the mean, median and mode all align in a symmetrical normal distribution – but also the correct measurement.
Quetelet assumed that the same thing applied to people: those who happened to be closer to the average were also nearer to a correct or ideal way of being. As he wrote in the preface to the 1842 English translation of A Treatise on Man, the book outlining his method of ‘social physics’: ‘[E]very quality, taken within suitable limits, is essentially good; it is only in its extreme deviations from the mean that it becomes bad.’ The ‘average man’, as Quetelet called him, was also the ideal human being, in body, mind and behaviour. This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everything is designed for someone of average height, from the length of a bed to the height of a table, then this average man inevitably becomes the ideal human within that society…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE