When Exceptions Look Like the Norm

‘I’ve been doing something so irrational and self-destructive that it reminds me of you,’ PDB11 said.  I couldn’t argue with that – after all, my own irrationally pessimistic thoughts are a recurring theme in this blog.

Yesterday, we had been out to Trio Paradis concert.  It had been splendid, but PDB11 had found that, instead of simply enjoying the music, he couldn’t stop noticing how much better these three musicians were than he was, and feeling depressed about not being that good.

The same thing had happened a few days before.  Already feeling despondent and wanting to do something together that we might enjoy, PDB11 had suggested we listen to a Vaughan Williams CD.  But by the end of the first track, he switched it off.  Again, he couldn’t stop feeling regretful that, even though music had always been his great joy and being a musician had been a key part of his identity, he hadn’t taken composition lessons as a teenager and hadn’t followed a career as a musician, and that by now, when he had more time to play music and had even started a band, he had stopped composing original music at all.

I suspect that part of the problem for many creative people today is that we live in a society which is both competitive and globalised.  Forty thousand years ago, if you could play a bone flute, you played it, and the rest of your tribe would sing along or dance to the music.  If there was someone else in your tribe who played rock music (banging two pebbles together), the two of you could play a duet.  You didn’t need to worry about whether you were the greatest composer ever.

Today, though, if you’re a musician, you aren’t simply the church organist and a member of the village band.  You have access to the radio, recordings, and (as often as you can afford to go to them) live concerts, at which some of the finest musicians alive today (or alive after recording technology was invented) play some of the finest music that has been written in the past thousand years over several continents.  You know that, unless you are exceptionally good compared with the best composers and performers, you are unlikely to be able to play music as more than a hobby, and that few people will ever know your name.

Under the circumstances, it is hard not to have unrealistic expectations, and to feel disappointed at not having met them.  ‘It’s an example of the paradox…’ PDB11 began…

‘That the exceptional gets the most publicity and so it seems like the norm?’ I suggested.

‘I mean the paradox that greater connection makes us more isolated,’ PDB11 explained.

I think both of these are true – and not just in the field of creative arts, but in many aspects of life.  For example, I encounter men on the internet complaining that they have no chance of getting a girlfriend because, in their opinion, women (or at least white western women) are only interested in tall, hot, chiselled, male model body-builders, or only want millionaires.

If men who posted comments like this got off the internet, walked down the High Street and looked at all the couples they could see, it would be obvious to them that not only tall, hunky guys find partners.  And while the couple in patched, much-mended clothes browsing around charity shops before treating themselves to an all-day breakfast in a greasy spoon café could be an eccentric millionaire and his gold-digger wife amusing themselves by slumming it, it isn’t particularly likely.  After all, any woman who married for money would presumably want to enjoy the lifestyle that the money could buy.

But for a lonely, socially inept person (of either sex) trying and failing to find love, perhaps it can feel less painful to compare yourself with film stars and tell yourself, ‘I can’t find a partner because I’m a normal person who doesn’t have unrealistically way-above-average looks and salary,’ rather than to look at your friends and neighbours and say, ‘I can’t find a partner because I have below-average social skills.’ 

We more often hear about the effect of the exceptional being so publicised that it can come to seem like the norm in the context of news, usually bad news.  Although newspapers can report ordinary events – someone getting married, having a baby, or dying – because the person getting married or having a baby or dying happens to be famous, generally they report news – in other words, unusual and exceptional events.  As the cliché says, ‘Dog bites man’ is not news (unless it involves someone famous or makes for a pun, e.g. ‘Corgi bites King Charles,’) but ‘man bites dog’ is news.

However, if the papers carried many reports of people biting their pets, it would look as if it was the norm.  Perhaps, if a famous veterinarian wrote an article saying, ‘Biting your dog is the most natural way to discipline it, because this is what the leader of a pack of wolves would do,’ there might actually be a fad for doing this.  For a while, ‘man bites dog’ wouldn’t be news any more, but ‘why are so many people biting their dogs, and does it work?’ would be material for an opinion column.  And then, if most dog owners (rather than just an increasing minority) did this, it would cease to be news.

Not surprisingly, when it comes to accidents or one-off crimes, such as murders, this can make the world look like a bleaker, violent place than is realistic, and progress can actually make things look worse.  For example, as aircraft were developed to make them safer, aeroplane accidents became rarer, therefore they get more news coverage when they happen, which makes flying look more dangerous.

On the other hand, when it comes to ongoing problems, most mainstream newspapers (as opposed to specialist magazines devoted to, for example, science or conservation) don’t report them much.  Why bother repeatedly printing headlines like ‘Pollinating insects still declining’ or ‘Average global temperature still rising’?

When climate change does get reported, it is usually in the context of a specific weather event that the papers can print photographs of – such as a storm or a forest fire – with the statement that climate scientists have said that climate change makes events like this more likely to happen. 

The trouble is that focusing reporting on specific events – rather than on overall long-term trends – can make it look as if either the climate scientists or the journalists are cherry-picking events to fit their thesis.  After all, haven’t there always been extreme weather events?  And don’t they often have other causes?  For example, while floods and droughts in tropical regions may indeed be caused by climate change, increased flooding in Britain often has more to do with covering flood-plains in concrete and tarmac so that rain has nowhere to drain away.

So what is the way out of this problem?  One answer might be: ‘Learn from your own experience and what you see around you.  It may be very incomplete as a picture of the world, but at least your life experience comes to you in its entirety, rather than in selected snapshots shown to you by the media.’

This isn’t a complete solution, of course.  For one thing, our memories can be faulty or selective.  It isn’t that I delude myself that, for example, summer days were always warm and sunny when I was a child, or that there was always snow at Christmas.  I have vivid memories of a particularly wet summer in 1992, when I was eleven, when we barely got away for a camping holiday, eventually decided to go camping anyway in the last week of the summer, and spent three days huddled in a leaking tent in a wet field, reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  But I probably remember this summer vividly precisely because most summer holidays did include some sunny days of long walks, weaving bracken into nests.

Most of us have a selection bias of some sort.  For example, being pessimistic and insecure, ever since childhood I have been mentally filtering out compliments and affirmation, but uncritically accepting all criticism that came my way.  In our own lives, too, we can be prone to take the exception as the norm, and in my case, because I knew that my parents loved me, I just assumed that whenever they praised me for anything, it was meaningless, but that if anyone said anything which I could interpret as meaning that it would be better if I did not exist, that was an irrefutable fact.

When it comes to religious teaching, I’m not good at taking in the overall narrative of religious books or compilations of religious texts – for example, of the four Gospels.  If the gospels tell lots of stories of Jesus healing people, encouraging people, giving food to people, and raising people from the dead, but have one or two phrases which I can interpret as him telling his disciples that they are evil, I latch onto this and say, ‘There you are – this shows that Jesus secretly hated everybody, and all his apparent kindness was just a front.’  If the central message of Christianity is that Jesus is the Saviour, and I decide I can interpret the Parable of the Tenants as meaning that because humans crucified Jesus, God has finally lost patience with humanity and will take revenge by destroying all humans and giving the Earth to a more deserving species instead – then I assume I understand Jesus’s real message better than his disciples did. 

Of course, I know rationally that this is ridiculous.  After all, Jesus’s disciples knew him and I don’t.  But to me, precisely because a radical interpretation of one passage in the gospels says something so different to the rest of the thrust of all the gospels, it can look as if this was the truth hidden in plain sight for two thousand years, waiting until there was someone open-minded enough to notice it.

So forming a balanced sense of the world – whether from popular media, ancient religious texts, or our first-hand experience – isn’t something all of us do automatically.  Rather, it is something we need to make a conscious effort to do.  When we catch ourselves thinking thoughts like, ‘I’m useless, I’ve never achieved anything good,’ or, ‘If I can’t be as good as the best, there’s no point in trying,’ we need to learn to pause, step back, and ask ourselves, ‘Is that thought actually true?’

One of the best pieces of advice I have seen is, as Joseph Nguyen puts it, ‘Don’t believe everything you think.’   I haven’t actually read Nguyen’s book, but I just love the way the title expresses it.  However, I have read – and would recommend – this article by Rebecca Gladding on the same theme.