The explosion of weirdness.
Until very recently there were some really constraining bottlenecks when it came to finding out who you were and what you liked as you were growing up.
Up until your mid-teens, getting information about anything mostly meant asking your parents or teachers; censorship, both in terms of what made it to the printing press and what ended up on your shelves at home, was quite high. Meeting similarly inclined eccentrics was mostly the result of luck.
That was a large part of what made universities appealing. All of a sudden, here was a place where information was much freer, its sources more diverse. People were not only encouraged to pursue new intellectual fields, they were given the time and resources to do so.
For those who are genuinely intellectually curious, all of that changed almost overnight with the Internet, and the “discovery” appeal of universities all but vanished.
Anyone under the age of 22 or 23 today embodies that perfectly.They have always been able to learn whatever they wanted online, needing no one's permission. They can meet others with similar interests much more easily than any previous generation. They can even monetise whatever “weird” things they’ve learned.
Weird is good. Weird is often a frontier, and people arrive at those frontiers much earlier than before. Which means people will discover new frontiers much younger than they used to. This is great news for progress.
At The Family, just in our latest batch, we had a self-taught bio-engineer who built a lab in his bedroom to farm spider cells in the hope of industrialising silk production; two 20-year-olds who decided to learn everything about aeronautics and are building hydrogen-powered zeppelins; an 18-year-old self-taught programmer & engineer who is building a fully integrated VR universe from scratch because he couldn't afford an Oculus.
They didn’t ask for anyone’s permission before doing any of this.
They liked it, so they dug into it, and they built it. They met many of the people they now work with online. Since all of them come from smallish towns, just like a startup in a small market needs to look for customers elsewhere, they had to hunt for people who shared their interests. They were young and passionate enough to ignore the financial prospects of whatever it was they were initially pursuing. More importantly, they didn't really care what others around them thought about what they were building.
It's when you start playing the status game that you can start giving up on eccentricity and regress to the mean. And once you're caught in it, the status game is hard to give up.
That's where the schism is.
Being social and part of a community now doesn’t have to come at the expense of conforming. We're seeing the first generations that have the option of playing this new game, the game that requires no one's permission. They don’t even understand the concept of having to kiss asses for a while to "earn your stripes".
And that's incredibly exciting, because it means the number of weird people embracing their weirdness will only increase. And since they tend to build the things we all end up enjoying, there are few things worth celebrating more than this explosion of weirdness. Weirdness is progress. Weirdness is culture.
If you enjoy this revenge of the eccentrics, then buckle up because the world is about to get a whole lot weirder... and more exciting!
If you’re building something a lot of people find weird, that’s probably a good sign. And it likely means we at The Family want to speak to you, so just tell us!