In Defense of the Individual

I recently got a pair of Adirondack chairs for my front porch. Tan, sitting right next to each other, with the remnants of what used to be a rose bush, but has since become a patch of newly-growing grass. And every day since, I’ve taken to reading in them, looking up at the bright sky shining directly into my face. Some days it’s been dappled with clouds, puffy, friendly and white, hopefully dimming the sun for a minute, while other days clouds hung low, morose, gray, coming with the promise of rain. Even when the sky appears familiar to me, it never remains quite the same. The clouds have drifted elsewhere. The wind has shifted. The light bends differently with the season. Yet, I never find myself thinking, The sky should have looked the same as yesterday. It is naturally assumed that the sky constantly shifts, and we instinctively meet it where it’s at, even when we don’t particularly like what the sky may have in store for us. 

With this, I wonder why we don’t extend ourselves the same grace. We expect ourselves to wake up with the same energy every day, and criticize ourselves when our creativity wanes, our motivation dips. We compare today’s version of ourselves with yesterday’s, or worse, to someone else’s highlight reel that was posted last week. We assume consistency is maturity and variation is failure. I reject the belief that change is evidence that we’ve somehow “lost ourselves”, but firmly embrace it as an act of life. It is evidence that we are alive.

 For centuries, philosophers have searched for ideals. Plato imagined perfect Forms existing beyond our imperfect world. Every beautiful thing participates in Beauty itself. Every chair is only an approximation of the perfect Chair. The ideal exists outside of us, forever beyond reach. Centuries later,  the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet offered a different, but no less appealing, ideal, called “the average man”. By collecting measurements from thousands of individuals, he proposed a model that represented the typical human being. What began as a statistical description slowly became something more. Schools, workplaces, medicine, and governments increasingly treated the average not simply as a mathematical convenience but as a standard. And the average, then, became yet another ideal. The comparison isn't merely that Quetelet's average exists beyond individuals. It's that society mistakenly grants it the same authority that Plato granted the Forms.

However, nobody is perfectly average, nor are they capable of doing so. This is not because we failed, but because the average itself remains an abstraction. It is created from countless people, and yet it belongs to none of them. It exists outside the individual just as surely as Plato's perfect Chair exists outside every chair ever built. Today, we find ourselves inventing newer averages. Social media labels them as aesthetics like “Cottagecore”, “The Book Lover”, “The Fitness Guru”. Though the names change, the pattern remains. Millions of people share fragments of their lives. Algorithms recognize these recurring patterns. These patterns then become identities. Soon, people begin arranging their lives to resemble the very abstractions that emerged from everyone else's. The abstraction begins to govern those who created it. 

That is not to say that there is anything wrong with finding joy in an aesthetic or a community. Rather, the danger comes when we believe we must somehow embody this abstraction ourselves. We stop asking, Who am I today? and begin asking, How do I become that person? The problem is, there is no that person. In fact, that person never existed to begin with. Just as there is no perfectly average person, and just as there has never been yesterday’s sky, we are reminded of something that we often forget. Identity is not the absence of change. It is the continuity that persists through change. Perhaps maturity is not becoming more consistent, but lies in becoming more attentive. Attentive enough to meet ourselves where we are instead of where an abstraction tells us we should be. Attentive enough to offer others the same grace. To recognize that every person we encounter is like the sky. Familiar, yet never exactly the same as yesterday. I refuse to see this as a flaw to be corrected. Maybe it is one of the most beautiful things about being human. Tomorrow, I'll probably sit in those same Adirondack chairs again. The sky will be different, and so will I.