The Danger of Normalizing Extremes

One day during college, my engineering friends, Brad, Carter and I, joked about how difficult it is to be average. The conversation sounded like this.

“That guy is incredibly average.”

“Yeah, what are the odds of being the exact average person?

“Astronomically low really. What an amazing feat.”

“Truly an extraordinary accomplishment! His parents should be so proud.”

“I wish I could be that average…”

“Maybe you should try harder.”

For some reason, this conversation stayed with me all these years and prompted me to consider a related example.

Landing the Most Average Grade

Suppose your professor presented your class of 40 students with the following challenge,

“The student who scores nearest to the average grade on the next exam will receive a 100% for the final grade for the class.”

Realistically, the random chance you win “The Most Average Grade Contest” is 2.5%. Not great odds. Nevertheless, some of the students will be inclined to think,

A 100% final grade would be excellent. And, since I’m the smartest person in the room, I can definitely be the most average.

I’m not exactly sure how this plays out in practice, but it might look like a large swath of otherwise ambitious students all trying to land a failing grade. But not just any failing grade… a very specific low grade that no one really knows what it is, or should be, until everyone has tried their best to hit it precisely, by outsmarting everyone else. Yet, participants must also consider that others are simultaneously trying to hit the average by aiming lower than normal. Consequently, they must account for this and aim even lower than the “normal average”. But wait, the others will also consider this factor. And they know that you know, that they know… Aim lower. This logic gets circular quickly.

It’s not quite so easy to be average now, is it?

This whole convoluted topic about being average seeded my thinking about the statistical spectrum of life events and what it means to be normal or what constitutes extremes and why it matters.

Hang with me here, this is going somewhere.¹

The Averageness of Most of Life

Consider the whole series of events that transpire during the course of your normal day. For this thought exercise, we’ll make the generous assumption that you are also a normal person (much like the rest of us, excluding the large contingent of people who are not).²

You wake up. You check your phone. You get dressed. You eat. You commute (well, you used to). You go to class or to work, or both. You waste some time on social media (you waste a lot of time on social media). You have a few normal conversations. You eat again. You go to bed. You forgot to shower and brush your teeth. You nasty. You get up and do that too… and stub your toe. You utter a discouraging word. You go back to bed. You waste even more time on social media. You decide to officially turn in when your phone falls from your hand, lands on your chest, and wakes you. You fall asleep. Your dreams are infused and informed by what you most recently digested, physically and mentally.

So yeah, that’s a pretty normal day there.

Probably the wildest part is the last bit, because you had some crazy, nonsensical dream about a half-naked, pumpkin-head scarecrow chasing you with a chainsaw and a hockey mask. That’s not normal. You should see someone.

Dreams aside…

Imagine plotting the events of an ordinary day like this along a spectrum. On the far left, we have the “catastrophically bad” moments, and on the far right, the “amazingly great” ones. Most events, for most people, on most days, cluster around the mean (the average). That is to say, almost ALL events in the course of a typical day differ very little in excitement compared to the sentiment invoked by the phrase, “Please pass the salt,” which you actually said on both Tuesday and Thursday last week, because the chicken was a little bland. Sadly, this phrase is categorized only slightly right-of-the-mean for Tuesday because the salt enhanced the flavor of your dinner, and only slightly left-of-the-mean for Thursday, because you gave it one shake too many. It’s difficult to remove salt once added to food. That may be the real lesson here.

So, most life-event-stuff lands near the mean. By definition, the mean means mundane, banal, and prosaic. The mean is more about unloading the dishwasher and brushing your teeth than winning the lottery. For me, the mean sometimes includes staring at the monitor and thinking about the next sentence to write (which is what I just did), and how to edit it later, which I did by adding this last phrase here at the end. This is also getting circular.

The point is…

The Mean is Boring

There’s nothing in the average part of your average day that would be remotely interesting to watch someone else do. It’s not the content predestined for TikTok and YouTube shorts. Mean events sometimes go viral, but events around the mean do not. Yet, events around the mean constitute most of our beautiful lives.³

So, most of your day is boring – maybe not to you, but to everyone else. Why? Because your routines mirror theirs, and mine. And to everyone else, their boring day is infinitely more interesting than your boring day or my boring day.

Events on Social Media Deviate Substantially from the Mean

Because of this boring-day-problem, social media platforms amass non-boring experiences from the collective hive to offer us an endless stream of unusual life events from a vast array of lives in exchange for the opportunity to commercialize our attention.

Statistically speaking, someone, somewhere is having a wild day, either good or bad… or both simultaneously. Somehow, those people managed to capture a video of an experience five or six deviations from the mean on the left (negative events) and on the right (positive events). Those days, for those people, are certainly more interesting than my typical day and your typical day. So, we opt in and watch it.⁴

As a result, your infinite scroll feed is dominated by rare, “long tail” events. Otherwise, you would not watch them. Nor would anyone else. The algorithm simply does not circulate events around the mean of everyday life.

The normalcy of life does not propagate. Only extreme events go viral.

Doing a triple backflip off a 100-foot cliff into a raging river while your friend films is a six-sigma event (either to the left or the right, depending on how it ends).

Almost by definition, if an activity or ideology comes through your social media feed, it’s an unusual event.

Why It Matters

Here’s the issue: social media offers us the opportunity and the temptation to voluntarily immerse ourselves in an unending torrent of extreme events and radical ideas.

A steady diet of the extraordinary, the unusual, and the statistically improbable distorts malleable young minds into thinking extreme acts and ideas constitute normal behavior. They do not.

Normalizing extremes is not healthy, especially for young, impressionable minds lacking sufficient real-life experience to the contrary.

I do not want my son to jump off a 100-foot cliff because he thinks that’s just what guys do. In general, we prefer our kids NOT replicate most of the things that constitute a viral social media post.

Similarly, we generally do not want our kids to believe the six-sigma ideas propagated through social media, just because they have heard 137 people espouse a certain ideological, philosophical, or political view. This volume of voices does not make it true, or even accurate. It does not even mean it is a widely held view or belief. What it usually indicates is that the algorithm understands the viewer has a certain proclivity to already align with the idea, or abhors it, or it is simply an unusually abnormal stance. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, nor viral.

This is another major issue our youth face today – a bombardment of long tail events in all categories, (physical acts, relationships, materialism, wealth, physical fitness or lack thereof, political views, social issues, psychological issues, etc.) that warps their perception of reality.

Conclusion: We Should…

We should recognize that nearly all the content flowing in from our social media feeds represents non-normal behaviors, unusual ideas or hidden biases.

We should understand that,

Social media warps our perception of the average and the extreme and skews reality for young people.

We should teach our kids to better understand this concept, or to at least have awareness about it. Without this guidance or guidelines to limit exposure to social media, our kids will come to believe and act out what they are most exposed to.⁵

If we allow our kids to use social media, at a minimum, we should have these conversations with them, and periodically with ourselves.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. I didn’t say somewhere good or somewhere interesting. I just said somewhere, which is exactly where everything that goes, goes.
2. Incidentally, for most people, “normal” means “other people like me”.
3. With age, I find more and more beauty in the most normal of things. A few years ago, I paused while washing my hands to marvel at how amazing water is… that we just have this very special substance of life in such abundance. The way it feels wet and weighty, and flows with such effortless fluidity between our fingers is truly amazing. Yet, it goes underappreciated, like most things in abundance.
4. Sometimes the non-normal event is not an experience, it’s an ideology. We do not want our children to adopt six-sigma ideas, views and beliefs (in almost all cases). [NOTE: “sigma” denotes one standard deviation from normal.]
5. By the way, I’m not sure it’s possible to sufficiently limit exposure and still allow youth to use social media apps. The allure is simply too compelling.