Yes, you are definitely WEIRD.
I can say with 99% certainty that if you are reading this blog then you are WEIRD. First, let’s simply acknowledge the fact that you must be pretty WEIRD when compared to most people if you are looking to take more ownership of your life, are curious about ways to do so, and have found this blog in your searches for helpful information on the topic. But I mean WEIRD in an even more fundamental way. WEIRD is the acronym coined by University of British Columbia researchers back in 2010 to describe the vast majority of “subjects” used in most humanities research done over the past 50+ years – college students from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic countries, aka, WEIRD.
It turns out that many Universities and Colleges offer course credits for participating in research studies being run through the various departments on their campuses. These same Universities and Colleges host the research programs, employ the professors who run them, and must pay all the costs for doing so – including paying the subjects who are recruited to participate. What better way to “pay” students than to simply give them some course credits that the they need to graduate? Seems like a win for everybody, right?
Well, maybe not. Perhaps using mostly teenagers from the upper half of the Social Economic Status of the richest countries on the planet as the baseline for “humanity” might be less than ideal. How much truth do you think can be generalized across cultures and through time based on this particular group of research subjects? I know with great certainty that I wouldn’t wish any generalizations to be made onto anybody from me and my life during those early college years!
As a friend of mine recently quipped, most of us in these WEIRD countries are living lives of “generalized captivity” compared to many other places on the planet today, and especially when compared to what we can gather about other cultures and places in the past. We sit most of the day in climate controlled environments, eat heavily processed food, get limited sunshine and outdoor exposure, and have relatively terrible levels of obesity, diabetes, and other diseases of torpidity. How do you think our recent ancestors lived in comparison? Or even our fellow global citizens living today in other places and cultures?
More recent studies since WEIRD became a thing have shown that our WEIRDness manifests in all kinds of interesting ways that differ from other people in the past and present. Compared with recent ancestors our bones are thinner and weaker now than theirs, our jaws our smaller and teeth much more misaligned, and our sedentary lifestyle has created about 1000 other differences. Compared to other people in non-WEIRD cultures today our vision is much more myopic, we focus on figure vs ground, and are better at picking out geometric shapes but fare worse in seeing larger patterns over time.
All this aside, I mention our collective WEIRDness here for a few reasons as relates to my work with clients who are seeking more authentic modes of being, living, working, and otherwise showing up in the world as more fully human. First, our larger culture is WEIRD, so any attempt to self-actualize by conforming to it seems problematic to me right from the start. Pragmatic reasoning suggests conforming to local ideals to be a good idea in many scenarios, such as driving on the right hand side of the highway with everybody else. However, from a perspective seeking greater self-unfoldment and personal development, maybe not.
Second, our WEIRDness is a sudden and steep aberration from our collective history as humans on this planet shaped by eons of evolutionary pressure and collective sensemaking. Therefore, other cultures on the planet, past and present, are perfectly reasonable places to consult for those seeking deeper connections to themselves and society at large. A good start to look for more meaning are the all the places that people have claimed to actually find it for centuries and centuries – family, friends, culture, religion, work, love, self-actualization, etc... You aren’t going to find it on Amazon or in the Metaverse, trust me on this one.
Finally, much of our WEIRDness seems to be great progress in many regards, and should be appreciated and valued as such. I’ve traveled extensively and am quite grateful to be among the WEIRD here in the US. However, that has almost no bearing on making research findings based WEIRD subjects the universal litmus tests for “normal,” “healthy,” or “aspirational” generalizations. Have you been in a room full of college underclassmen recently? Keep this in mind next time you read an article that starts with “New research in Psychology suggests...”
Back to you, you WEIRDo. You might have a sneaking suspicion that life is pretty weird here in the US in 2022, and that maybe the collective is off its collective rocker in many regards. I’d say to trust this intuition and expand your search for deeper truths across time and space and see what you might find there that resonates with you. I’m guessing that college dorms and online marketplaces aren’t the best places to find what you’re looking for.
