Late Bloomers by Rich Karlgaard

Author:Rich Karlgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

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What does all this have to do with late blooming?

The problem for late bloomers is that many of the standards and expectations pushed through mass and social media can work against us. Even if we ourselves are immune to media influences—we don’t own a TV, say—we live in a society where norms that affect us directly have been altered by media. Thus media affect how we define success, what types of careers or relationships are desirable or even acceptable, and when life milestones should be met. So the dominant social culture can create self-doubt, or even self-loathing, among those who do not conform. We feel we don’t fit in. The twenty-year-old virgin is made to feel like he or she has something to hide from friends and peers. The twenty-five-year-old late bloomer working odd jobs while figuring out his or her career path is made to feel like a loser. Our value as a person can be thrown into question when we follow a slower or unconventional path. Today’s media wildly overcelebrate youthful success. It is hard to overstate the influence this exerts on our children, our peers, and ourselves. Commenting on this darker side of society, the French psychologist Adolphe Quetelet famously said, “Society prepares the crime, and the guilty are only the instrument by which it is executed.”

Mass media ask us to compare our body shape, sex life, marriage, house, car, family, and community to unattainable television versions of perfection. Social media ask us to compare our own commonplace or even boring reality against the curated accounts of how absolutely wonderful someone else’s life is—people we know! Recovering addicts have a useful saying: Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. It’s good advice. But social media make it almost impossible to follow.

Why should it be so hard? We have free will, don’t we? To understand why pressure to conform makes keeping our own counsel so difficult, let’s look at what sociologists call social norms.

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