Really, this was my second choice of an article. The first choice was to write an original piece on unoriginality, which, I must say, couldn’t really be done, because a lot of people comment on the recycling of ideas within our culture anyways and secondly, something I considered an original turned out to be from 1975, the REAL original, which I always supposed was younger was from 1962. Since the core of the argument resided on this piece of ‘evidence’, it has all fallen apart and I am here writing my second choice, but as always a brilliant piece (note to self: who do I think I’m fooling?). And thirdly, I myself am a little bit unoriginal, taking parts of songs, lines from books, whatever, into the stuff I write (but I suppose that’s a clever way to reference pop culture).
Anyways, I have been thinking that people make judgments too quickly. You know, the whole ‘first impression’ thing. I, being one of the people, also suffer from this, even if I’m aware of it. How many of us have actually stopped to think about emos when we were laughing at the whole fringe&cut up one’s arms thing. I think none of us. Or how many of us see the true person behind that nerd’s glasses? That there’s so much more to fairy tales than the cliche of good winning over evil (and the amount of blood that Hollywood horror directors would die for)? Why do we tend to pass off so many things without giving them a second chance. I suppose one thing that has to do with it is peer-pressure, the other thing is fear linked to peer pressure.
The peer-pressure itself is a well-known phenomenon. The fear linked to it is the sort of thing ‘if I talk to that nerd my friends will think I’m uncool’. There is, however, another sort of fear. The fear of you actually liking that object, idea, person that you treated with indifference or maybe even contempt. Because to tell you the truth, everything is interesting if you dive into it properly. An author that you’d never read, after being forced to write an essay on him, you might find his stuff dead interesting. Of course not all of us are equally interesting; we do not show off our genitalia while stepping out of a car or shaving our heads bald. However this is on the tabloid-level interesting. I think that on an intellectual level, all the people who read this (about 2, myself included), are way more interesting than any of the ladies I was referring to (I do not really know, but I’m a pretty good guesser).
So next time you pass off something as bad, boring, uncool or stupid, stop to think about it for just a second. There might be a million people in the world who think that that which you just labelled as ‘lame’ is the coolest thing in the world. I’m not saying you should not make that choice to label something (if you actually really investigated everything, a million lifetimes would not suffice), just be aware that you’re SOO wrong (just as I am wrong about 50 Cent, Bob Geldof, etc).
Peter S
