#Conformity

Why Creativity Often Defies Common Sense

At first glance, Picasso’s claim sounds like a provocation against reason itself. Yet his point is subtler: ‘good sense’ often means the habits, rules, and social expectations that keep people from taking imaginative risks. In that light, creativity suffers not because logic is useless, but because excessive caution can silence ideas before they have a chance to grow. This tension runs through Picasso’s own career. With works such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), he broke sharply from conventional representation, ignoring what many of his contemporaries considered sensible painting. Precisely by refusing accepted standards, he opened a path toward Cubism and changed modern art. [...]

Winning the Rat Race Still Traps You

The “rat race” implies a maze built for endless running—motion without meaning. Even the “winner” remains defined by the same rules: constant comparison, fear of falling behind, and rewards that never quite settle into satisfaction. In that sense, Tomlin is less interested in personal failure than in the structure of the competition. This connects to a long tradition of doubting status-driven striving: Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” in *The Theory of the Leisure Class* (1899) describes how people chase signals of rank that require continual upkeep, ensuring the race never really ends. [...]

The Cost of Conformity: Losing Your Self

Still, the alternative to conformity isn’t constant rebellion or social exile. The more workable path is selective courage: deciding where honesty matters most, where boundaries are necessary, and which values you won’t trade for approval. In this way, self-liking becomes less about never adapting and more about never abandoning your core. Finally, Brown’s insight can be read as an invitation to build relationships that can tolerate difference. When you stop chasing universal approval, you make room for friendships and communities that like you without requiring self-erasure. The reward becomes smaller in quantity but far richer in quality: fewer people liking you, perhaps, but you included among them. [...]

Health Beyond Conformity in a Sick Society

With this in mind, it becomes easier to see what “profoundly sick society” might mean in daily terms. A culture that rewards burnout while calling it ambition can produce people who are impeccably “functional” yet chronically depleted. Likewise, environments that normalize dehumanizing rhetoric may label empathy as weakness and moral hesitation as incompetence. A small anecdote makes the dynamic concrete: someone leaves a workplace where 70-hour weeks are praised, and only afterward realizes their constant headaches and irritability were treated as personal failings rather than predictable outcomes. In Krishnamurti’s framing, their earlier “adjustment” was not health—it was endurance inside a harmful norm. [...]

The Cost of Belonging and Selfhood

Yet Estés pivots to the second, quieter tragedy: compliance can estrange us from ourselves. When we consistently reshape our desires to match others’ wishes, we may remain physically included while becoming internally absent. Over time, this can feel like living as a carefully edited version of oneself—socially acceptable, emotionally dislocated. Psychologically, this resembles what D.W. Winnicott called the “false self” in his writings on adaptation and authenticity (e.g., Winnicott, 1960), where a person presents a compliant persona that protects them from rejection but distances them from spontaneous feeling. The exile Estés describes is therefore not dramatic but cumulative: each small self-silencing adds up until the person no longer knows what they actually want. [...]

Whenever You Find Yourself on the Side of the Majority, It Is Time to Pause and Reflect - Mark Twain

Mark Twain lived through the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period characterized by significant social, political, and technological changes. His works often challenged conventional wisdom and societal norms, reflecting a broader cultural movement towards questioning and reform. [...]

Whenever You Find Yourself on the Side of the Majority, It Is Time to Pause and Reflect - Mark Twain

This quote encourages individuals to engage in critical thinking. Whenever you find yourself agreeing with the majority, it is a cue to step back and examine your beliefs and decisions to ensure they are well-founded and not influenced by groupthink. [...]