Dear Murtaza:

Yes, I wish you were there, one of the regulars.. as long as you don’t argue with the normies there! lol.

“My day is upside down these days”, you wrote at 8:37 am your time, meaning..?

You wrote that when someone tries to change you, you feel disrespected, which fits with your strong desire and commitment to not change.

You wrote that your suffering is not unique in itself, that what is unique is the philosophy, values and beliefs that you created as your way of handling suffering: “my own philosophy and values and beliefs is what made me unique, not the suffering”.

“I also never asked for help, I seem like a guy with a problem, but I’m not really (by that I mean that the problem has no fix, so its not a problem by definition)”- here is an online definition of the word problem: “a situation, person, or thing that needs attention and needs to be dealt with or solved”- the last word of the definition is “solved”. So what you presented here, on a public forum, is a person (you) being in a situation (the circumstances of your life), and there is an extreme, or unique misfit/ nonconformity between the person and the situation.

“I understand that, and I appreciate people like her, very nice and well intentioned people, actually I love people like that, makes me warm”. You wrote about the same person, “Her post was rude to me.. does she deserve a thank you? No”- you express a complexity here, part of you loves her, part of you feel offended by her.

There is a Wikipedia entry on Social Alienation, it says that the concept of social alienation “can refer both to a personal psychological state (subjectively) and to a type of social relationship (objectively)”- in your case it is both: subjective and objective.

The entry mentions an American sociologist, C. Wright Mills,  who in 1951 “conducted a major study of alienation in modern society”, describing “a society where you have to sell your personality in addition to your work”- very much fitting with what you expressed.

An American social psychologist, Melvin Seeman, published a paper in 1959 “On the Meaning of Alienation”. He “considered a model to recognize the five prominent features of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement”- this too sounds very much like what you expressed, including the word “normlessness” (non-normie=normless).

I am guessing that if Melvin Seeman met you, he would have given you a very  high grade on the social alienation spectrum… all the way at the extreme end of it, for the subjective and the objective types of social alienation.

Seeman was a social psychologist. Social psychology is the scientific study of how a person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by other people: either real people who are in your presence, or imagined people, like when you argue with someone in your head, someone who is not there. Social psychology is about how people are influenced by internalized social norms–  a man has to work/ be employed, is one such internalized norm.

“The first major area of social influence is conformity. Conformity is defined as the tendency to act or think like other members of a group”- you, Murtaza, get a bad grade on conformity, but not a zero because in some situations, you conform, ex,: when shopping, you don’t go out naked and refuse to pay. “A certain amount of conformity is adaptive in some situations, as is nonconformity in other situations”.

“The second major area of social influence research is compliance, which refers to any change in behavior that is due to a request or suggestion from another person”- you get a very low  grade on compliance.

“The third major form of social influence is obedience: this is a change in behavior that is the result of a direct order or command from another person”- you get a very, very bad grade for being obedient, if I may say so.

anita