What is normal?
In the fall out from the US presidential election something in the coverage gave me pause. As The News Agents answered listener questions about the result, Lewis Goodall said for Gen Z, Trump is normal.
He said: “A lot of young people growing up in this country are looking at Trump and thinking this is what a normal president is and that’s how they behave.”
Wow.
But that makes sense. Trump has been part of the political landscape for more than 8 years now so for an 18-year-old first time voter, he is who you would see on your TV screen all the time.
What is ‘normal’ is changing. And it’s changing in different ways for different people.
They way we work, where we work, the rules of work, are no longer uniform in the way they were a short time ago.
Our leisure time is spent very differently. There are more options, we’re all doing our own thing, rather than doing things collectively.
And technology is creating different experiences.
I have conversations about AI every week but I also know people who haven’t explored some of the platforms being talked about and are worried about being left behind.
What is ‘normal’ for me isn’t necessarily ‘normal’ for you.
I’ve never really liked the phrase ‘normal’, mainly because I never fit it as a label. It’s a way of othering people. You don’t fit the mould so you can be excluded guilt free. It’s never felt fair.
I have two thoughts now:
That ‘normal’ is changing rapidly and at different rates for different people, who can find what they previously relied upon to be true, to no longer works that way. And this can affect us in different ways. On some levels, I like the shift, and on other levels, I am discombobulated. Donald Trump is not the image of a President of the United States to me and a lot of the rhetoric is anathema. But clearly, to millions of other people, he is. I have to accept that while supporting people who will be marginalised and face difficulties as a result of his policies. The next few years are going to involve rapid change and that is going to impact what is ‘normal’ for all of us in different ways. There’s no denying that for some people, what lies ahead will be catastrophic. And that’s awful. I am terrified about what this election means geopolitically and for the climate crisis.
That ‘normal’ is a standard artificially created by the status quo and that what we have now is a society in which more of us are able to express ourselves and follow our own path. Which is great! It means we need to understand more about each other, find out about other people’s experiences, and see what we have in common, and how we can work together. It’s not ‘them’ and ‘us’. There are lots of groups of ‘people like us’, some of them overlap and some of them don’t.
There are a lot of things happening at the same time right now which make us feel uncertain and fearful. But it’s worth remembering that lots of things we see as ‘normal’, like the 9-5, weekends, car travel, and who we are governed by, have not been set in stone since time immemorial, they are relatively new inventions.
We are living in interesting times, whether we want to or not, and that is currently our normal.
