Intro

• "How can people who are different embrace whatever it is that makes them unusual and... use it to power them?"
• Being only one of your kind is doable but difficult— in academia, the workplace
• Lacking connection → steep health consequences (on par with smoking, obesity)
• More and more people are feeling isolated and "weird," just as it's getting more important to work together
• Here, interview around 40 people unique in their environment for some reason → some common themes/trajectories, despite varying degrees of discrimination/difference
  • Recognize their outsider status, "reckon" with their difference, eventually find peace and success
  • Sometimes seek similar people
• Hope to reclaim "weird" as your potential— ultimate roots in words for the fantastical, supernatural

Part 1: Being Weird

1. The Realization

• Norms = powerful forces on human behavior
  • Some genetic basis
  • Inherently conservative
  • Too weak → lawlessness, too much divergence; but too strong → oppressive discipline. Either → higher suicide rates in society
  • We are likely to uphold norms, even if we don't personally support a POV
• Many female-dominant industries projected for most growth (nursing, home health aides...), but barriers to men entering
• Late 1980s, American Jews pushed for Russian Jews to be allowed to immigrate to US; eventually happened, cultures surprisingly different! Russian → Athiest, rarely act Jewish
• The more self-assured you are, the more tolerant you are to difference
• Tight cultures → strict norms, vs loose cultures → not as much, more behaviors permitted
  • Russia, Singapore, the military, the Amish = tight cultures
    • Less crime, less fat, more autocratic, more religious
  • Tech startups, the Netherlands, Sweden = loose cultures
    • More crime, more tolerant of change, of people with facial scars
  • Trade off between orderliness and creativity
  • Tight culture ads emphasize conformity, while loose culture ads emphasize uniqueness
  • Neither is better or worse- simply produce diff kinds of comforts and anxieties in their people

2. The Exclusion

• Norms trap us in the status quo, even when irrational
• Violations bother us more when they affect us personally
• Prejudice = more about group dynamics than an inborn trait
  • In-group bias = evolutionary advantage; supported by neurobio data— amygdala activation, less empathy-like activity when viewing faces of those outside your group (regardless of how THATS defined)
  • Still, prejudice vs outsiders became more significant only after farming took hold (agriculture→ civilization→ warfare)
• Recent fear of immigrants increasing bc larger influx → threatens to change the norm
  • People more worried about cultural differences than immigrants taking American jobs
• Exclusion of a "deviant" from the group makes the rest of the group feel more normal, and pushes the deviant further away
  • With immigrants, less likely to adopt American culture
• Fear over biological threats like infectious disease → more conformity → less creativity (less Nobel Prizes)
  • Biases based on identity tap into basal responses re: disgust, cleanliness
  • Akin to a behavioral immune system— some controversy over whether this is a psychological or cultural force, or whether it's real at all
  • People more concerned about disease, sensitive to cleanliness → more likely to have "tight culture" traits

3. The Sting

• Social isolation = very distressing, physiologically and psychologically
• Loneliness = gap between amount of social interaction you would like to have and the amount you experience
  • Want to be around others, but afraid of tejection
  • In study of monkeys, lonely monkeys → more norepinephrine (fight or flight), more monocytes (inflammatory state), AND more cortisol (anti-inflammatory!)
  • Loneliness → constant heightened immune response → all the consequences of long-term inflammation, up to worse cancer outcomes
• Exclusion often at the root of terrorisn, radicalization
  • Economist Thomas Piketty, after 2015 Paris attacks: economic equality is key to extinguishing global terrorist threat
  • In fact, more tied to cultural marginalization (2nd or 3rd gen immigrants, kids that were bullied)
  • Exclusion can trigger "significance quest"

Part 2: The Weird Advantage

5. Creativity

• Optimal distinctiveness theory → people most prefer to be in a group that's not too inclusive or exclusive
• Cognitive reappraisal → reframing your circumstances (ex. your"weird factor") can help you cope with challenges
• Uniqueness enhances integrative complexity: ability to recognize and tie together competing POVs
  • People who lived abroad → better at solving brain puzzles
  • Speaking multiple languages, being multicultural → more creative, better at perspective taking
  • People at the periphery → more able to innovate, change social norms
  • People who've experienced adversity → higher levels of creative achievement
• Important that level of "weirdness" experience isn't too much— enough to teach you that the world doesn't have to work by your rules, so you can break the rules
• Being different doesn't just boost your own creativity, but also creativity of your group
  • Having one dissenter reduces tendency to sunken cost fallacy, breaks group conformity
  • Minority often values diverse opinions and dissent more, opens door for more "weirdos"

6. Truth

• Doing something different can help you find your true calling, true love

Part 3: How to Be Different

7. Getting Support

• Having strong support system → easier to make and follow through with "pathbreaking" choices
• "Intense" financial or emotional support from parents → better adjusted, satisfied grown children
• Different people → different thresholds for how many people they need to see breaking a norm before they do (some don't need any, more cautious need a lot)

8. Comfort with Discomfort

• Idiosyncrasy credits → nonconformist survival mechanism, easier to be accepted by first paying homage to established values and goals, then starting to deviate in small ways (conform, then innovate)
• Or.. just don't care what other people think

9. Better Than the Rest

• If you can't join 'em, beat 'em
• Unfortunate reality esp for racial minorities— have to work twice as hard, be twice as good to achieve same outcomes
  • What is required until true progress makes this survival strategy less necessary
• However: working to prove yourself can also indicate imposter syndrome— always feeling like you don't belong
  • Nonstop work offers a sad to explain good results without taking credit— "I'm not really qualified, I just pulled an all-nighter"
  • Challenge this by deliberately pulling back on some non crucial tasks, see what happens

10. The Big Picture

• View your situation from an outside perspective
  • We are better at giving advice to someone else than ourselves → helpful to distance yourself from your problem, refer to yourself in third person
  • Intellectualize your experience: learn about psychology and history of biases
• Helping others, acts of kindness→ mitigates social anxiety by relating to a larger purpose
  • Ex. connecting with others in your position via social media
• Hardiness = major trait that helps overcome hardship— commitment to seeing life as meaningful and interesting, sense of self-efficacy, viewing negative events as opportunity to grow (growth mindset!)
  • About half genetic, half dependent on personality and environment, esp social support
  • Able to tell better stories about yourself
    • Helpful even if you have to lie a little— ex. "They just teased me bc they were jealous"

11. Change Yourself

• Obviously not the answer for everyone, but personalities are fairly flexible if you are motivated to change
  • Can shift your Big Five traits— embody and act the way you want, and your mind will follow
  • Act as if → self-fulfilling prophecy
  • Neuroticism, extraversion = most changeable traits, and most relevant to social anxiety

Part 4: To Stay Different, or to Find Your Own Kind?

12. Staying

• Do you go along with the crowd or teach people difference is okay?
• Can find success in remaining among people unlike you

13. Leaving

• Going to find your own tribe

14. In Between

• Accept that you're going to have to answer questions, "explain yourself," if you remain different
• Keep those parts of your identity, and still live with everyone else?