Weirdo. How misunderstood human beings become misfits.

Weird doesn’t actually mean much more than usual, however often with the negative connotation of “creepy”. Weirdos don’t necessarily have anything creepy about them. It might be the way they dress, that is usual and that makes other people think of the person as a weirdo. More often it is the way they behave. Behaving outside the norm is perceived as threating by the majority of people. People who conform are predictable, people who don’t aren’t and are therefore potentially seen as threats.

Laura James describes in her book Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World, how she was made to feel like a weirdo her whole life long until she received her diagnosis of autism. From the outside autistic people might seem like weirdos, from the inside much less so. When they live in an understanding family environment, autistic people don’t seem that weird. Nor do they when they are among a group of other autistic people. Their anxiety disappears and they enjoy themselves. Reading Laura James’ book I didn’t feel there was much weird about here apart from her elevate levels of anxiety. She often sees the world like I do, thinking there is too much violence, too little tolerance and acceptance. I often share the same opinions despite not being autistic. I do understand her quite well.

Becoming a weirdo is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is this introverted guy who likes to walk around all by himself, doing circles in the garden. It’s weird, somebody who walks in circles and enjoys thinking out loud (talking to himself). The person who is perceived as weird is often socially hypersensitive, i.e. being perceived as weird makes him/her even more insecure and they start to avoid people more and more frequently. The worst part of this process are the teenage years when other teenagers become highly sensitive towards “being different”, which can make the difference between being “in” or “out” (both literally and metaphorically). It is not a coincidence that the majority of mental disorders, from social anxiety to schizophrenia have their onset in the teens.

Weirdos don’t have to have ASD. What they often have in common is something that might surprise most people: out-group sociality. I will argue here that most often weirdos have hunter-gatherer minds, who do not form in-groups, i.e. their social organisation is fluid between their bands, hunter-gatherers join bands and leave them again to join another one, people are not excluded because they are “strangers”. Hunter-gatherer types have a different social cognition and awareness: they might not like making eye contact, they have little undemanding of social formalities and traditions (those were often inventions of early farmers, who were more in-group social) and are most likely to hate small-talk.

What’s more, hunter-gatherer types are likely to be hypersensitive, including physical sensitivities, emotional and social (heightened fear of being criticized and ostracized) This baseline sensitivity may be responsible for high stress-reactivity, neuroticism, anxiety, and consequently also mood and personality disorders. These alone would already contribute to the person’s weirdness, but when the fear begins to spiral the oddness increases. Consequences can be:

• OCD
• Bipolar
• Phobias
• Avoidant personality disorder and other personality disorders
• Substance use as a coping strategy

All of these conditions contribute to a person’s weirdness. On the flip side, weirdos are in good company. There are hardly any famous historical personalities who didn’t have their own weirdness, the more genius they had, the weirder they were often perceived. Somebody who is conformist to a 100% is hardly anybody to come up with something innovative or to change history.  What weirdos often have in common with those famous people: they are high in personality trait “openness”, and being “hunter-gatherer” personalities they disklike authority and hierarchy (hunter-gatherers are egalitarian) and are therefore less traditional and conventional.

Read more in my book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086R31TRN