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The Personal and Collective Promise of Eccentricity
Both our culture and our technology increasingly incentivize conformity. Eccentrics remind us to resist.
If you Google the definition of eccentric, the first definition offered is of “(of a person or their behavior) unconventional and slightly strange.” An eccentric is not someone thinking so far outside our respective familial and societal boxes that we can’t understand or relate to them at all. Nor are they mentally ill or so distant from the mainstream that they can’t function.
That said, they do see the world differently. While they may understand how most of us see and relate with the world, they do not share our perspective — not completely at any rate. As a result, they can often see connections that most of us fail to see and can come up with innovations and solutions that we never could have imagined.
While what distinguishes eccentrics is their deviation from the norm, they hardly all deviate in the same way or to the same degree. Eccentrics are as different from each other as they are from the ‘normies’ that make up the bulk of society. They are like social time bombs that might go off at any moment and disrupt our expectations, generating reactions from mild amusement to extreme annoyance, and everything in between.
