Conformity

I don’t believe the above. Not for a second. Okay, maybe a second. But definitely not for a third. People are not zebras. Even though zebras cannot distiguish one human from another (and who says they can’t?) we as humans would probably be stumped if justice depended on our reaction to the usual suspect zebras brought in at a police lineup. We would rely too much on appearance, on stripes. For the criminal zebra to be properly identified, he or she would bear obviously different stripes. Who has time to take mental note of all those patterns? It’s just not what we do.

Imitating another is to flatter that individual. We observe a singular aspect of someone’s personality because something about that person just, well, we like. We like that person or the thing about him or her. And so we try to be more like that thing it is about that person that we like. Before you know it, everybody is the same way and bored again, looking for something new to like, something really different.

The marketing cycle reveals itself again: innovation, imitation, saturation, decline.

So tempted am I to jump on the despair bandwagon that I will allow that temptation to serve as the warning not to do so. Usually such urges are something everybody else is doing or thinking about doing at the same time, even if that something everyone is thinking about is allowing a temptation to serve as a warning against doing so. The layers of reasoning here are beyond conundrum, beyond symmetry.

Despair.com shows us marketing genius akin to the fruits born out in the 1970′s British TV comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Look it up. Success comes from despair, hopelessness, pain, self-pity, loathing but more especially (and this is the magic) the mockery thereof.

Might I suggest that before we mock the misery of others, we do so that of ourselves. No kidding. It really works. And it’s the nearest thing to Douglas Adams’ instructions on how to fly, the ones he gives us in his most famous trilogy (look it up) in its book version: “Throw yourself at the ground and miss.” Try it. Everybody else is. Everybody but…