We're all normies now

Reflections on identity or lack thereof

What is so repulsive about the normie, the poor soul who appears to have built their identity around mainstream, lowest-common-denominator culture? You know them: they quote The Office; their pillows remind them to live, laugh, and love; they are fluent in sarcasm; you should not talk to them before they have had their coffee. They are cringe, they are cheugy, they are basic, they are NPCs. To be a normie feels a fate worse than death. It is an inability to develop the self beyond the basest, blandest gruel that popular culture heaps onto your plate.

It’s tempting, upon encountering a normie, to create a certain distance between them and yourself. You can remind yourself of your superior taste, your refined interests, your critical capacity. You can elevate yourself above the normie by doing irony, whatever that means, mocking the normie pose through a detached, mocking lens. You can go buy yourself that shirt, the one that says “I Don’t Need Google, My Wife Knows Everything.” You have earned that cache, everybody will know you’re joking. You have put in the legwork to do a bit or two. Hell, you can even become a normie, so long as you first announce that you have become “normie-pilled” or something along those lines, just to let everybody know that you’re doing this as a sort of calculated political and aesthetic move. So long as you show your work, you’re good to go.

What is it, though, that makes the normie leprous? Why, when faced with the normie, do we feel the need to distinguish ourselves? What’s so wrong with being cringe?

The normie, as far as I can tell, is the prototypical citizen of our new century. As our lives have become mediated beyond all recognition, as capital has found a way to commercialize the deepest expanses of the human mind, and as our daily lives are stripped of any purpose outside of production and consumption, we all face an identity crisis. There has never been less latitude with which we might spiritually develop ourselves - our jobs are meaningless, our time stretched, our connections frayed. At the same time, there has never been more pressure to craft totalizing, presentable identities to the world around us. Our loneliness births desperation, our economies and social networks (online and off, to the extent one can get “off”) demand we render ourselves marketable. We are asked to brand ourselves in order to manufacture any semblance of a desirable self, despite the fact that we lack the time, support, or conditions to actually develop authentic identities.

Luckily, pre-made identities exist for us. Just as those in the 90s learned to buy and wear their identities, we are able to stream and post ours. In the US, where the physical, productive economic capacity has been completely outsourced and strip-mined, the buying and selling of identity has become the essential engine of the techno-capitalist market we’ve been taught to call a country. Streaming conglomerates tell us we are sad girls and handily provide us starter packs. Social media corporations process and deal our most personal information to advertisers tasked with telling us what we want to consume. We buy ourselves so that we can sell ourselves anew.

The normie is loathsome, then, because seeing a normie means looking into a terribly unflattering mirror. The fundamental problem with normies is not that they’ve bought an identity from popular culture; it’s that they seem to have spent very little on one. They seem to have failed, in an unforgivable way, at the task of self-branding. The normie reminds us that we are all a pastiche of cultural references, shallow tastes worn on our sleeves, insecurities masked under coats of irony or layered beneath a veneer of taste. Encountering a normie in the wild reminds you of your insignificance and inauthenticity. You can take solace only in the distant hope that the identity you have bought is a cooler one.

You may argue that what distinguishes you from the normie is the work you have put into yourself, the depths of introspection you have plumbed, the transformations art has performed upon your soul. Maybe so, but it’s not altogether clear whether that makes a difference. Ask yourself if you cannot be distilled to a starter pack, a mood board, a meme. A signifier is a signifier, a shortcut a shortcut, whether it is The Office or The Sopranos.

The difference between you and the normie is one of consumer preference, not species. We are all NPCs in the world of capital’s main character, distinguished only by whether we prefer Coke to Pepsi. Realizing this is not cause for despair; if anything, it is an inflection point, a revelation. As the 2022 midterms taught us, we live in the age of the normie - the Democrats teaching us that it is your commitment to being basic and normal, not your politics, policies, or stance upon the “issues,” that controls in the political realm. You can’t opt out of the marketplace of identity, but in this day and age you might be rewarded for choosing to spend less on it.

Becoming normies will save many of us a great deal of headaches: the Marvel wars, “poptimism,” the thing where Taylor Swift becomes indie every album. It means no longer having to carve out an identity on the cutting edge, dodging the mainstream at all costs. You do not need to “schizo-post,” you do not need to convert to Catholicism, you do not need to become a Republican. You are a normie, you are cringe, there’s no escape, and it’s not your fault. If you really want to be so different, log off.