Be eccentric

Through many hours of detailed scientific research, I have come up with a new theory, that I believe I have sufficiently proven with smoke, mirrors, and hopefully more writing then you will read.

Hypothesis:

As any form of content (call it X) approaches the limit of popularity (P), X become increasingly bland and exponentially less interesting. Thus, the interesting-ness of X, call it Y, can be expressed as an exponential decay function and plotted on a graph. This revolutionary formula which I am naming “Your Moms law” can be written as follows:

Y = (1/2)^p

Y = interesting-ness

P = popularity

I define interesting-ness in this case a bit more broadly. Interesting could mean entertaining, enjoyable, creative, fun, etc.

Here is a visual of a graph showing the exponential decay of X as it increases linearly in popularity.

As a control test. I plotted the interesting-ness of major Marvel movies and showed how they validate Your Moms law. The numbers on the right axis are the popularity index, and the left axis is the interesting-ness scale. The exponential decay is not smooth because the popularity of Marvel movies did not increase at a linear rate. You see a spike in popularity at Avengers, further growth at Guardians of the Galaxy, an explosion of popularity by Endgame, and continued popularity increases through Eternals. By the time we hit Eternals, the value of interesting-ness in my spreadsheet was so low that the sheet could only produce the value 0, as it would take several minutes of adding decimals to finally get to the infinitesimally small interesting-ness value.

Don’t misinterpret this graph either. This graph does not say that the first Iron Man movie was perfectly interesting, the scale is just indexed for the list of movies provided. Iron Man was mildly interesting at best.

Now this doesn’t sound like a particularly controversial or new thought in any way. But I’d argue that even if we say that we believe this theory, our behaviours tend to disagree.

Have you ever given something a chance just because it was popular, but you knew deep down that you would not enjoy it? Maybe you said something like “I must be missing something”, or “maybe this time it will be different”. I somehow talked myself into going to see the first Wonder Woman movie when it came out (the Gal Gadot one). I didn’t like superhero movies at the time, but everyone said this one was different. So I went. And guess what? It was just as objectively terrible as its counterparts in Marvel and I wasted my time and money.

YouTube used to be interesting. I’d spend hours watching random low production value videos of people teaching things, doing dumb stuff, and falling over. Now YouTube is almost entirely comprised of bland personalities desperately trying to one up each other to stay relevant. Every single video is just a grabby title, with someones face plastered on the front with their mouth hanging open. I kid you not, the images below were all featured on YouTube’s home page when I opened it in a private browser.

As Marvel and YouTube have grown in popularity, they have become more bland, annoying, formulaic, and conformist to the status quo. Everything tends to become alike, only the subject changes.

In his book, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill discusses how societies tend toward conformity. He encourages individuals to instead lean into their eccentricity, because by doing so, they become more valuable to themselves and to others. Mill says that societies need to encourage this and make sure they are providing enough freedom to do so.

Genius can only breathe free in an atmosphere of freedom

John Stuart Mill

In conformity, people are not able to develop as meaningfully, and don’t have the opportunity to learn other potentially desirable ways of approaching life. In conformity, we miss out on genius, creativity, new ideas, entertainment, learning, inventions, and more.

In conformity, our YouTube thumbnails become faces with open mouths, and our movies become trash.

Be eccentric!