Just try to act normal

I'm reading an autobiography of someone who has chosen to live an "alternative lifestyle". It strikes me that the world is full of people who struggle with "being normal". This person had the shattering experience of losing a parent at a young age, and it is pretty evident that his life is a long quest trying to "fill the hole where Daddy should go."

I can understand that "acting normal" would be hard in that case. But, isn't it perhaps all the more critical that if you know you are broken inside, if you know that you can't really pass down to the next generation what you don't have, perhaps you should just "go through the motions?"

I've pretty much discovered from personal experience that being happily married means going through the motions of being happily married even when you don't feel like it - or maybe especially when you don't feel like it.

Isn't there a 12-step program slogan, saying, "Fake it till you make it"?

That works. I think our society is falling apart partly because we want to "do what we feel" instead of "acting civilized". Manners, customs and traditions are all necessary for us to dwell together without killing each other. There can be a lot of room for individual identity, but ultimately a people needs an identity that says, "This is normal", and gives pressure, to some degree, to make people conform to it.

Otherwise, there is no framework for the next generation to build their lives on. Remember when young people started dressing preppy as their "rebellion" against their sloppy, anything-goes parents? We need a normal, even if we hate it.

The idea that we have to broaden the definition of "normal" to allow for every aberration of human behavior isn't only destructive, it is just plain silly. Most of us, most of the time, have to exert ourselves to be civilized, or civilization would break down altogether. There has to be a meeting place. There has to be a "normal".

So... Just try to act normal!