Maybe Being the Punk Is Just Another Way to Belong

Growing up, I thought acceptance was one of the highest things you could earn.

Nobody said it quite like that. Nobody handed me a pamphlet called HOW TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE WONDERING WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU.

You just learned.

You learned by paying attention to the room.

Your job gave you a room. Your neighborhood gave you one. School. Church. Family. Whatever patch of ground you happened to be born on came preloaded with people, and your first social responsibility was figuring out how much of yourself you could sand off before you fit comfortably among them.

Listen to the music.

Laugh at the jokes.

Learn what people find embarrassing.

Learn what you’re not supposed to say.

Figure out which opinions get a nod and which ones make everyone suddenly interested in their drink.

You could bring something of yourself to the table, sure. Everybody loves individuality right up until the individuality becomes inconvenient.

The trick was to be different in ways everybody approved of.

That’s how you became accepted.

And being accepted meant you were okay.

Maybe more than okay.

It meant you were valuable.

That’s a hell of a thing to teach somebody without ever actually saying it.

For a long time, your people were mostly the people around you.

Geography did the work.

You lived here, so these were your people. You went to this school, worked at this job, attended this church, drank at this bar. The social map was drawn before you arrived.

And if everybody around you looked alike, thought alike, worshipped alike, voted alike, raised their children alike, then eventually you could make a pretty understandable mistake.

You could think that’s just what people are like.

Not some people.

People.

Then the internet showed up.

And suddenly your people didn’t have to live anywhere near you.

That changed everything.

You could be a kid in a small town and find somebody on the other side of the world who liked the same strange music you did. You could spend your entire life feeling like there was something wrong with you because nobody around you understood what you were talking about, then discover thousands of people who had been talking about the same thing all along.

Your interests could become your geography.

Your weirdness could find an address.

That was one of the best things the internet gave us.

It also gave us the ability to build the same goddamn small town over and over again.

Just without the inconvenience of everybody living in it.

Because when you grow up surrounded by one kind of experience, diversity can feel like an interruption.

Not because people suddenly became different.

They were always different.

You just didn’t have to look at them before.

Then suddenly you’re hearing stories that don’t match yours.

Stories about being Black.

Gay.

Trans.

Immigrant.

Disabled.

Female.

Poor.

Rich.

Religious.

Not religious.

Whatever.

And if you’ve spent your whole life mistaking your experience for the default experience, other people’s existence can start to feel like an accusation.

You see someone telling a story about their life and think, Why are they shoving this down my throat?

Which is a fascinating thing to say.

Because what you often mean is: Why can’t I go back to not having to think about this?

That’s different.

And that’s the part that interests me.

Because I don’t think everybody who resists diversity necessarily woke up one morning and decided to hate someone.

Sometimes they just never encountered difference in a way that made it ordinary.

Then difference arrived all at once.

Not literally.

On a screen.

Which, depending on how you use the screen, is either a window into the world or a mirror with Wi-Fi.

And then we all did something predictable.

We found our people.

Again.

Only this time we got to pick them.

And then the algorithm took over the job geography used to do.

Your neighborhood used to give you a sample of humanity and, depending on where you lived, it could be a pretty shitty sample.

Your job did the same thing. Your church. Your school. Your family.

These were the people you saw.

Therefore, these were the people.

If everybody around you believed the same thing, eventually you could make the understandable mistake of thinking this is how people are.

Not the people I happen to know.

People.

The internet was supposed to blow that open. And for a while, it did.

Suddenly you could encounter people you never would have met. Different races. Different religions. Different sexualities. Different politics. Different experiences. Somebody halfway across the world could tell you something about their life that contradicted everything you thought you knew about how the world worked.

Then social media figured out that showing you things you agreed with kept you around longer.

So the algorithm did something interesting.

It rebuilt the neighborhood.

Only this time, the houses were invisible.

You don’t see the people who live there because they live next door. You see them because the machine has decided you’re likely to agree with them.

You watch one video and get another.

You like one post and get twenty more.

You stop to read an argument you agree with and suddenly your entire feed starts looking like evidence.

See?

Everybody thinks this.

Everybody knows this.

Everybody is angry about this.

And we’re right back where we started.

This is how people are.

Except now your neighborhood has no geographical boundaries.

It’s made of preferences.

Your job used to give you coworkers. The algorithm gives you a worldview.

Your neighborhood used to show you the same people every day until you mistook familiarity for consensus. Now the algorithm shows you the same ideas over and over until repetition starts to feel like truth.

And the really insidious part is that it can make you feel like you’ve escaped conformity.

You found your people yourself.

Nobody assigned them to you.

You chose them.

Except you didn’t entirely choose them.

The machine watched you choose once.

Then it kept making the choice for you.

It learned what makes you nod.

What makes you angry.

What makes you feel smarter than somebody else.

What makes you feel seen.

And eventually it built you a little town full of people who think like you do.

Then it sold you the revolutionary idea that you were finally seeing the real world.

You’re not.

Neither am I.

We’re seeing a version of the world selected to keep us looking at it.

Which might be the most dangerous form of acceptance yet.

At least your old neighborhood could surprise you.

That’s where things get weird.

Because the internet lets you find people who understand you when nobody around you does. That’s good. I mean that. There are people alive right now who would have spent their entire lives believing they were alone if they hadn’t found other people online.

But it also lets you find an audience for every dumb thing you’ve ever believed.

You feel like an outsider in your town.

You go online.

You find people who agree.

They tell you you’re not crazy.

Sometimes you’re not.

Sometimes you absolutely are.

But now you have a thousand people agreeing with you, which can make insanity feel like research.

And suddenly we’re right back where we started.

Same need.

Different neighborhood.

I see this in politics all the time.

In my county, there’s a school administrator with a worldview so closed that disagreement itself becomes proof that you’re the problem.

He wants books removed from school libraries because he believes they “normalize” deviant behavior.

Fine. That’s his position. People are allowed to have positions. Hell, I’m suspicious of anyone who says they don’t.

But disagree with him and suddenly you aren’t someone with a different opinion about books, education, censorship, childhood, or what public schools are supposed to do.

No.

You’re for child sex trafficking.

That’s the trick now.

You don’t have to defend your argument if you can make the other person morally radioactive.

I want to remove these books to protect children.

You want to keep them because you’re for trafficking.

I am defending normalcy.

You are promoting deviance.

I am keeping politics out of education.

You are bringing politics into it by disagreeing with me.

It’s a beautiful system if you never want to have a difficult conversation.

Everything you believe is common sense.

Everything I believe is political.

That’s how it works.

And it makes me wonder how much of this comes from the old lesson.

If people accept me, I must be right.

Because your people are real to you in a way everyone else isn’t.

They’re the people who email you.

Call you.

Vote for you.

Come to the meeting.

Stop you at the grocery store.

If they all agree, that’s reality.

The people who don’t agree are somewhere else.

They’re an abstraction.

Or worse, they’re trying to ruin everything.

And here’s the part that gets me.

I understand the desire to be accepted.

I understand it too well.

I wanted to belong for most of my life.

I wanted to walk into a room and know what version of myself was going to work.

I wanted the nod.

The laugh.

The approval.

The feeling that everyone had quietly decided I was okay.

But somewhere along the way, acceptance started making my stomach hurt.

Now I distrust it.

Not because I’m some lone wolf bullshit artist who doesn’t need anybody. I like being liked. You probably do too. We can dispense with the mythology.

But when everybody agrees with me, I start wondering what I missed.

There’s too much nuance in any group of people for me to comfortably become one of them completely.

Call yourself something and people immediately start filling in the blanks.

Oh, you’re a Democrat.

So you believe this.

Oh, you’re a Republican.

So you believe that.

You’re progressive.

You’re conservative.

You’re religious.

You’re atheist.

You’re this.

You’re that.

From the outside, a label is a package deal.

And maybe it is from the inside too.

That’s what bothers me.

There are things I agree with inside groups I otherwise disagree with. There are things I disagree with inside groups I mostly agree with. There are positions I’ve held that I no longer hold. There are things I’m not sure about.

I know. Cowardly stuff. Apparently you’re supposed to pick a team and pretend certainty is a personality.

But I don’t trust the jersey.

The minute you put one on, somebody assumes you agree with the entire playbook.

And maybe the real price of acceptance is that eventually you start agreeing with things you haven’t even examined because examining them would risk your membership.

That’s when I swung too far in the other direction.

Now I like being contrary.

Everybody says left, I start looking right.

Everybody likes something, I wonder what the catch is.

Everybody agrees, I assume someone is lying.

A group welcomes me too quickly and I start looking for the hidden camera.

Contrarianism feels clean.

At least when you’re disagreeing, you can’t be accused of selling yourself out.

Except that’s bullshit too.

Because contrarianism has its own crowd.

Everybody thinks they’re the punk now.

That’s the funny part.

The conservative is fighting the establishment.

The liberal is fighting the establishment.

The billionaire is fighting the establishment.

The corporation changed its logo for a month and is apparently fighting the establishment.

Every guy with a podcast, a leather jacket, and a microphone thinks he’s Hunter S. Thompson because he said something offensive about the government before reading an ad for a mattress.

Everybody is a rebel.

Nobody is the machine.

And I keep wondering:

If everyone thinks they’re the punk, is contrarianism just another way of being accepted?

Maybe you don’t belong to the people who agree with everything.

Maybe you belong to the people who agree that those people are idiots.

You learn a new language.

New jokes.

New villains.

New sacred cows you’re allowed to slaughter.

You get the same laugh when you say the right thing.

The same nod.

The same approval.

The group still exists.

You just moved to the back table.

And now everybody there is congratulating themselves for not sitting with the popular kids.

Congratulations.

You’ve conformed to nonconformity.

I don’t know what the answer is.

I don’t think it’s belonging to nothing. That’s just another identity. Another costume. The guy outside the party smoking a cigarette because he’s too authentic to come in is still defining himself by the party.

I don’t think acceptance is evil either.

Acceptance can save people.

Finding your people can save people.

Being understood can save people.

But maybe needing acceptance to prove that you’re worth something is where it starts getting dangerous.

Maybe being rejected isn’t proof you’re right.

Maybe being accepted isn’t proof you’re right.

Maybe being contrarian isn’t proof you’re brave.

And maybe agreeing with everyone isn’t proof you’re weak.

Maybe the harder thing is to stop needing your position to tell you what kind of person you are.

To agree when you agree.

Disagree when you disagree.

Change your mind when the evidence changes.

Admit when you don’t know.

And accept that occasionally the consequence of having an honest opinion will be standing somewhere without anybody immediately standing next to you.

I’ve spent most of my life wanting to be accepted.

Then I started distrusting acceptance.

Now I’m beginning to suspect I’ve made the same mistake twice.

First, I thought belonging was the goal.

Then I thought not belonging was the goal.

Maybe neither one is.

Maybe the goal is to survive being alone with your own opinion long enough to find out whether it’s actually yours.