Weird doesn't exist. You are not weird. You are not normal.
This may be different to your situation, but when i was younger I wanted people to like me, and if they didn't I'd blame myself for being weird. Now I'm older, I don't give a shit if people like me or not, and I've stopped thinking of myself as weird.
Weird definitely exists. If you can’t form social connections well with pretty much everyone you run into, you’re weird. You can pontificate about the proper terminology but that’s the one society understands.
I am very weird and quite capable of making friends with people. I am not super extrovert, I need concentrated down time. And will ignore people when I am doing the introvert phase. But overal people find me sociable. Weird just means not normal. It's basically a codified statistical concept.
There's whether or not you can make friends at all, and how choosy you are about who to make friends with, which aren't really the same thing.
As a moderate introvert (handle social situations OK but need the down time to balance), I just find some people aren't worth the effort, and like to save my energy for those that are.
But the weird/normal axis, I'm a little less comfortable with (similarly "neurotypical"/"neurodivergent"). Fundamentally I dislike the idea of letting the most boring people claim normal, in a similar way to how LGBTQ and nonwhite folks don't like it when cishet or white people claim normal. Most of the people I most enjoy spending time with are ADD, ADHD or ASD, and all the better for it. It's not like these are even disabilities, they're just different ways of being.
I'm OK with the labels themselves as a broad, shorthand way of understanding personality types / ways of seeing the world, but I don't buy that no-label people are more normal.
I agree to some extent, and I am getting better at just being comfortable in my own skin, but I think social conventions matter too. Eg I shouldn’t act overly surprised when someone says they’re a morning person, but I should/can do that when they say they’re pregnant. If you get too many conventions wrong, people are uncomfortable lol
Edit: I realized I didn’t respond as directly as I’d like to. I think I do want people to like me, and that’s ok. I think it’s also ok to not care
Thank you for the considered and insightful response. This is obviously a deeply person topic and each individual will have their own take on how they feel.
I think the key point in all of this, which you and others highlighted, is weird vs not weird is very much a consequence of social conventions. It's also important, generally speaking, to fit into these conventions to facilitate social cohesion. There are obviously extremes, which are outside of my considerations here.
I should have put more effort into my original comment but I was in a rush at the time. This bit might not apply to you, I don't know you, these are just my own poor articulations. Feeling like you are weird, or don't fit in, or make people uncomfortable, basically comes down to peoples reflections of their judgement on you. This is inescapable and to judge is human nature. But being on the wrong side of it, for long enough, can lead to a very negative mental state. Having the ability to realise you are not responsible for other peoples feelings is important. And also realising these feelings are largely dictated by the society you find yourself in is also important. These things can be changed, social circles need not be permanent, and should probably be changed if leading to a negative mental state, brought about because you feel you don't fit in.
I stand by my original point that there is no such thing as weird or normal, anymore so than some cultures or societies can appear weird or normal, which is highly relative. Otherwise intelligent and conscientious people should not believe themselves to be less than they are because they are at odds with their current time and place. As Yuval Noah Harari would say, society is a fiction.
Don’t worry at all, I think your original post was fine too, and I agree with what you say! I think some of this comes down to personal preference, how you want to relate to the world, and who you want to surround yourself with. “Different strokes for different folks” :)
If most people aren’t like you, you are not normal by definition.
Good for you that you learned to cope with that. After the ‘don’t give a shit’ stage there usually is ‘sit back and observe’ stage to understand what exactly you don’t give a shit about.
Define "most people"? Clearly an absurd question in the context of this discussion. It's like saying "Most people on earth are not like you". How do you define that?
I actually laughed out loud at how different this is to the usual "be yourself and to hell with what people think" advice. Can you elaborate on why it's so important to care if people like you?
Not OP, but we humans are social animals. As much as we may want to pretend we live alone just fine, it's not the common case. Sure, some people enjoy solitude and don't have to care about what others think, but most of us enjoy company, and this comes with caring about others and what they think of you.
You surely care about what your partner thinks about you. Your parents perhaps? Your friends? It's part of the emotional connection.
You can be laid back and easy going, but you're still going to care if your loved ones strongly go against your core beliefs and ways of living, right?
Also, whether we like it or not we depend on other people. If you want to get hired, reproduce, sell stuff, or just not be a hermit, it matters what people think of you.
Sometimes that means changing who you are. Sometimes it means finding people who are more like you (I know that I hate living in most rural areas based on the people I've met in them, for instance). Maybe a combination.
Yeah, most of the advice is really bad, because they want to avoid the harsh truth: that things aren't necessarily going to work out. You can't sell a self-help book that teaches "you need people to love you but you might be left alone forever". People want a guaranteed solution but that simply doesn't exist.
However, a lot of people, like the person I originally replied to, choose to remain alone, and that's often because they are scared of rejection or of being left alone. It's kind of ironic, like a contradiction. Longing for connection, but being so scared of rejection that you force the rejection to happen yourself, so that it doesn't happen to you involuntarily, but by forcing that rejection through self-isolation you basically guarantee your doom rather than opening the possibility for flourishing.
At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.
It turns out that this necessity never truly goes away. Aside from merely surviving (e.g. you need your doctor to at least tolerate you) interacting with other human is what makes life more than just surviving. At least it’s like that for most people.
Even hermits and sociopaths need to be liked by at least one person, which is their own selves. Since the number must be at least one, it might as well be 2 or 3.
> At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.
Yep, and even a slight degradation of that trust that your parents that are necessary for your survival will protect you can have devastating, life-long psychological effects. And indeed everything can be traced back to that.
Perhaps controversial but I think this is the origin of most religion: baby is protected by infinitely powerful parents, child has shocking and painful revelation that their parents are not infinitely powerful and have all kinds of insecurities and weakness, therefore a forever infallible representative (e.g. God) is constructed to fill in that gap.
But I think that's just one way to fill the gap, and people engage in all kinds of strange, obsessive behaviours to try and reclaim that illusion of eternal protection and safety.
This may be different to your situation, but when i was younger I wanted people to like me, and if they didn't I'd blame myself for being weird. Now I'm older, I don't give a shit if people like me or not, and I've stopped thinking of myself as weird.