I say this in all seriousness, life is the strangest experience I have ever had.
Life consists primarily of people making things up as they go along. To me, most remarkable thing that has ever been conceived is the notion that one person’s way of making things up can be wrong, while another person’s equally arbitrary way of making things up is correct. The language I’m using to write this was made up by someone, and yet I’m wrong if I don’t follow those rules.
This has never been more prevalent to me than when I became a parent. I’m making stuff up all the time. Take bedtime, for example. Why does my three year old have to go to bed at all? She doesn’t have work in the morning. But I decided I wanted time to write in the evenings, so I made up a bedtime.
There are self evident reasons why some things are made up; like hygiene and seat-belts. It took some time for me to comprehend why anyone would make up mathematics, other than a torture device for young students.
But manners make no sense to me. Etiquette is the quintessential arbitrary tenet. Everyone I’ve met has their own little white book of rules to follow, none of which are exactly the same. You don’t give someone the thumbs up in the Middle East. There are certain forks one is supposed to use with certain foods. Elbows are not supposed to be placed on the table when eating. I don’t understand why.
Pants were made up, too, by the way.
That brings me to fashion. I saw a new term the other day while perusing a clothing website. Nerd Chic. The man was dressed in white, v-neck sweater, jeans rolled up at the cuffs and thick-rimmed glasses. What once was a socially abhorrent way to dress you can now pay a good portion of your engineering salary for. Simply because someone decided to make it so, and someone else said "OK."
I look at people around me and wonder which things I’m doing wrong. I doubt they know of all the things they're doing incorrectly; because it’s all made up. And that means not a single person is getting it right.
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