Asserting Individuality by being more like everyone else than anyone else....

Tweet

I haven't been a youth counselor at my church for a few years, but one thing I used to teach the kids was "Don't assert your individuality by being more like everyone else than anyone else." It's not just teenagers that do it though, and I've never understood why so many adults think that the only way to be an individual is to do what everyone else is doing. I see it in our celebrities. Actresses seem to think that the more clothes they shed in a film is somehow "brave" or "groundbreaking"... give me a break, that ground is so broken you could drop a small planet into the chasm. On the subject of clothing, it seems that when celebrities aren't taking them off, they are making sure they get seen in the "right ones", with the "right labels" or from the "right designers"... bah! Does anyone remember the first person to wear a Christian Dior design? NO! But now that countless others have paraded around in them, it seems to matter to countless other people. So where is the individuality? Where is the originality? We seem so quick to throw away everything that really matters in this world, in favor of things that aren't going to matter two minutes after we do them. It's been decades since I was in high school, and I only remember a few teachers any more. The ones I remember were those who didn't just feed me with information, then grade me on my ability to regurgitate it. They actually taught me things that mattered. That is a common thread about all the people in my life who don't end up in the trash heap of the forgetfullness of time. Those who affected my life in a real way get remembered, those who were just filling space in the general area of the space I was filling don't. What separates the two? The space fillers were more like everyone else than anyone else... those who stay with me in my heart and mind cared more about what they did than how many other people were doing it. "Don't assert your individuality by being more like everyone else than anyone else" ~ParaTed2k's (Not So) Famous Sayings.