Friendly Advice: Tip 3

You are not original. All the post-modernism classes you’ve had have probably taught you that. Well, okay, how’s this? All those people you scorn for being sheep—for shopping at the mall, for eating a chain resturaunts, for watching hit shows, buying Top 40 music, and reading bestsellers. How do you honestly believe they are any different than you? I mean, you didn’t invent the idea of shopping at the co-op instead of the supermarket. You aren’t the only person who wears that particular variety of black framed eyeglasses . And to be honest, if you can put yourself in the rubber soled shoes of the masses for a moment and see yourself—you’d think you looked the same as all your friends too. An old friend of mine once subverted the Emerson quotation about conformity to read something rather like: “To be a non-conformist is to conform to being a non-conformist.” That’s the bitch about reactive behavior. Living a life based on obsessively avoiding what you dislike inevitable gets in the way of doing what you like And if nothing else, you are spending your life trying to be one thing in order to NOT be something else, you’re probably not having any fun.