All happy smiles are alike

Late 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy has been often acclaimed as one of the pinnacles of realism for his insightful depictions of the imperial Russian society. One of his most famous lines is the beginning of his 1878 world renowned novel Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The background for this statement is that, for the most part, the preconditions for happiness are multi-factorial but common to all people. The families who manage to meet all the conditions turn out to be all happy and very similar to one another. However not meeting one of the conditions is reason enough to be unhappy, so each unhappy family is so in its own way.

Photo: מאיר אבירם

The paraphrase in the title comes for a discussion I had with Karen one of these days while we were taking a walk in the forest in the late afternoon. Watching NHK World, the international channel of the national Japanese television, it is very apparent that Japanese children and youngsters tend to have very crooked teeth, particularly compared with some parts of the US and Europe where dental braces are almost default. It is hard to say if our teeth would also be as crooked if they were not aligned, but the contrast is definitely shocking. However, the results is that, as I mention in the title, all happy smiles end up been alike, since they follow similar design patterns. Probably in the cases where the "ideal" is not achievable, the orthodontist has to find a trade-off and settle for second best, but they are aware that the results is not "as it should be".

While this regularity is already mildly troubling, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the current social trends towards idealization and normalization. While a hundred or two hundred years ago people had to learn to play with the cards they had been dealt, social advances and modern technologies are allowing much more ready access to the means to change who we are. Dyeing your hair use to be cumbersome and physically dangerous for you skin, but nowadays both professional and at-home methods are safe and cheap. Changing the color our your eyes has been impossible for the whole history of humanity, but these days you can walk into a pharmacy and buy a pair of colored contact lenses for a few bucks. Even plastic surgery has become cheaper and more reliable. And although all these options are often publicized as widening the landscape of choices, there is an intrinsic underlying message to choose the right option, the one that moves you towards "the" ideal. 

Our society still worships the white, educated, heterosexual, ambitious and extroverted man ahead of any other combination, and that is very problematic because, on the one hand, undermines the self-confidence of the big majority of the population which, not fitting in this definition, spends its timing how to accommodate, and on the other hand, with everybody trying to look and act like the ideal the results is incredibly monotonous: many useful contributions get discarded before being emitted for fear of being considered out of line. As American author Susan Cain writes in her 2012 book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking":

Introversion - along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness - is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.

The result is that, in the end, all happy smiles are alike, all good workers are alike, perfect but absolutely pointless, and all the others are nothing but zombie chasers of an unattainable ideal. One striking example of how futile this hunt is is the comparison between wild and domesticated animals: wolfs were, for millions of years, at the top of the pyramids in the respective habitats, with nothing to contend with other than climate, fate and their own tendency to spread. From those magnificent predators we have "distilled" pitiful beings like the pugs, who can barely breathe, the dachshund, who would certainly be unable to catch a rabbit, or the komondor, who is unable to see anything among its long hairs. We have been working for decades against the work of evolution to create tailored dog breeds, and in the process have shown much more mercy with the variety in our pets than in ourselves.

Hopefully, the current push of the millennial generation for the society to accept their individualized views and goals and to respect their choice to be different will eventually bloom in wider tolerance and richer texture in our lives. In the meantime, I will continue to focus on making the best out of my gifts and forget about shoehorning myself into a pattern that I will never match. Have a nice evening.