Before I begin, I would like to draw attention to the graphic displayed above. Entitled “Individualism” it was created by me in 2005 as a sort of social commentary. Until now, I’ve never explained how the title and graphic relate.

The graphic depicts a man who is being ordered to leap to a painful death before a cheering crowd. The commentary here is that society, in all its factors, has turned individualism from what should have been a quietly understood given into a conceptualization that is completely blown out of proportion.

The fact that this man is about to leap to his death is not, surprisingly, the focus of the argument. The focus is in the words of society. “Do it.” The way things are today, we are hedged and forced into a thought pattern of “I must actively strive at being different than everyone else.”

What’s wrong with that? Only the fact that in society’s forcing that process upon us at a young age (you hear it from your parents, from friends, from your teachers at school, etc.), we effectually become the very thing we are told to avoid. We become just like everybody else. Another person who must be their own person.

The man in the graphic will die if he does what he’s told to do. Our own individualism dies when we strive for it because that’s what we’re told to do. For what other outcome can there be? Individualism has become a new trend, and trends by definition are the very opposite of individuality.

Am I saying that you shouldn’t be an individual? No! Never that. I myself understand myself to be an individual, as well as many other people that I know. However, we dare not let ourselves maintain mistaken priorities.

I believe we can agree that if you wear a certain style of jacket because so many others are wearing it, you are not being individual in that aspect. You are following a trend. How different is it to NOT wear a certain jacket for the sole reason that so many others are? Are you not being affected by the trend just as much as if you had decided to wear the jacket?

Perhaps the reason I have unconsciously resisted writing this document is because by writing it, I am going against my own views, after a fashion. I am allowing myself to be affected by the current notion that individualism must be placed upon a pedestal, much as the person who does not wear the jacket to make a point is being affected by the trend.

It is difficult to keep quiet however, when I see so many people actively tricking themselves into thinking they are different from everyone else, when, at the base level of motives, they are exactly the same. They are all trying to be so... different.

Bottom line what I want to get across is this: Don’t try to be different than others. Just live your life. Individualism will work itself out.

- Lou Cypher