The Extreme Relativity of 'Good'

everything is uniform

Society is a blizzard of individual snowflakes. We are a world of individuals, a universe of differences; sometimes deceivingly similar but other times drastically different. Yet we grade ourselves on a standardized scale. We walk around compared to by the norm, always shown up by the guidelines, and in constant competition with benchmark we set for us all.


There are thousands of quotes that tell us to break the mold and to be ourselves. We plaster them on our walls and read them and feel inspired. We are told that we don't have to follow everyone else's footsteps, we don't have to be like everyone else. Those words... they're wrong. We love to hold that up as an ideal, and in my mind it is, but in reality society hates the people that go off in the opposite direction. We gawk at them, we shun them, and we belittle them.



In our schools, we value intelligence by its every definition. The artistic eye, the math whizz, the poetry slammer, the chess champion, the goal-scorer. They are all valued. The person who earns a 4.0, though, is the person who can look at a rubric and start checking things off the list. It is the person who can evaluate the criteria and full-fill it. That's great, but when you have a society full of people who know nothing but the rubric, you have a society of robots. And when we're all in line wondering what to do, who's going to write the set of instructions? We all love the unique...until we find it.


Write your name in the top right corner of your college ruled notebook paper. Capitalize the first letter of the first word of every sentence. Type with your fingers on home row of the qwerty keyboard. Walk down the right side of the hallway. Follow the rules. There is only one right way to do everything you will ever do. We are conformity.


So what if you didn't. Maybe it would be impractical to cApitalize tHe sEcond lEtter oF eVery wOrd, just because you can. Probably. But there are bigger things that really matter. Bigger things that need people to start thinking outside the box. Because those people are the game-changers, they are the ground breakers and the future. The person who steps out of line, is the person who wins in the end.


It all boils down to the word good. These standards are built to put ourselves on a scale of best to worst. This person has straight A's, they are better than you. This person lost every race last year, they're worse than you. Honestly though, good is relative, it's useless and it's confining. Your great may have another person in tears of shame. Your terrible might make someone jump with joy. It's completely relative.

leave your own footsteps

Who cares where you fit on the standardized scale? Are you getting better? Are you improving? Are you finding a different way? Then fine, take it as it is. When you make a difference as you are off on your own path, we'll be the ones thanking you.


Nordic skiing, for me, does a good job of striking that balance. You have teammates and competition there, pushing you, making you stronger. But it is your time-trial time, your canadian test score, your race that goes down in your training log. Sure, you line up at the start line against a hundred other skiers, but when you kick off, the race that really begins is the one against yourself.


So go for it. Watch the standard, let that competition build you up and make you better. If it starts to build walls around you and to define you....blow that wall apart. Because nothing deserves that power. Fill out the rubric later, damn it, and get on with your life.

Ciao,
Victoria