Never Normal

Haven’t you heard? 40 is the new 30! 

That is so old now. What is that, like 10 years old?  Those 40 year olds are now 50, which may be the new 40 (or 37 for a three year duration). 40 being the new 30, I think, started it all. Didn’t it? Can anyone think of an older something-being-the-new-something else? 

Nowadays things-that-are-the-new something-else come and go pretty quickly. You don’t want to get caught using a stale something-is-the-new reference. As the reference has evolved it’s now preferred that the two subjects be as contrasting as possible. So you’ll often hear ridiculisms like “black is the new white”. Of course that makes no sense, but people say it and give wry looks while they say it, and their friends give them wry looks back and order another $16 martini.  

But we are stupid, and we all know it. We don’t’ really care, and we delude ourselves with wry comments. And what is wrong with that, really? The fact is that we sit and spin on a 4.5 billion year old planet that does not care about us. 94 million miles away a ball of plasma heats us, sometimes. Might even be getting warmer; depends on how you vote. That is our situation. But through various random improbabilities (miracles, if you like) we ponder all of this and try to make sense of it. But we can’t. We just can’t. And therefore we are wry and witty because the crushing reality of our irrelevance can be kept at bay through wit (or religion, which is totally another matter). Most of us suck at it, and in the end what does it even mean to be good at it?  If you think black is the new white, well fuck you but ok. I will mock and torment you and try to defeat your wryness with my own and feel superior. In the end it does not matter one iota. Haven’t you heard? Jupiter is the new Saturn. And Pluto was a planet for only 78 years, from 1930 to 2008. Eight is the new nine in our downsized Solar System.

So that was just the introduction, a little background on the something-is-the-new reference. Like any linguistic phenomenon (and yes, I’m calling it a ‘linguistic phenomenon’) it catches on quickly but also changes quickly. And it is changing with the times. Now you don’t even have to actually have two entities in the reference; you can just come out with a something that is New and people generally get what you mean. For instance the most common one going around these days is “the New Normal”. 

First … the lack of a comparative entity. People talking about the New Normal never say such-and-such is the New Normal. They just start talking about the New Normal. If you tried to talk about the New Normal before anyone invented 40 is the new 30, it wouldn’t make any sense. People would wonder why you were saying new normal, like was it a speech impediment, or was it really any different from talking about the new golf club or the hot new waitress? The New Normal. But today we all know exactly what it means, and share a mutual unspoken understanding that it is never required in utterances about the New Normal to reference a comparative entity.

The reason of course is that the comparative entity would be a word like “sucky”.  Sucky is the New Normal. And that’s really what it means, right? Sucky is the New Normal. You’re broke, your friends are broke, you talk about strategic defaults over malt liquor instead of talking about investments over those mojitos with the fresh macerated mint made right in front of you. The New Normal. Welcome home, bitchez! Ramen sales, through the roof. The New Normal is a wry way of saying “we are all pretty much screwed these days. And get used to it.” And of course we are, but it isn’t wry to just say “times suck and we’re all pretty much screwed”.  

If sucky is the New Normal, what was the old normal? Was that when 40 year olds looked 40? When black was still black? And how often does normal change? Is my old normal your old normal, and is the idea in talking about the New Normal that the old normal was better? Well, yes, that is the idea. But it is important to point out that one of the main implications of the New Normal is that really, things are not going to get better. Lower your expectations. Sucky is the New Normal. Wall Street takes a beating day after day, High Schools cut their bands and have to pipe in recorded pomp-and-circumstance at graduation, and those students (or their broke-ass parents) don’t exactly want to spend $150,000 for college so they can job hunt into their 30s after graduating. Sucky . It ain’t about to improve, because it’s normal. But again, how often can normal change? If normal is defined as “the way things generally ought to be” then we’re used to a helluva lot better, or think we are. 

Our New Normal is a favorite of talking heads on 24 hour news channels. At some point they ran out of artful ways to say “today really sucked, details following these pharmaceutical commercials” and said things like “this disturbing downward trend on Wall Street may just be the New Normal”. I miss Pluto.

And so, jobs. We’re all supposed to be able to get jobs, or think that we are supposed to be able to, but the New Normal keeps screwing us. We’re supposed to get jobs because humans banded together (Aristotle did say the State is naturally forming) and created Nations, and economies, and expectations of these entities. One of these expectations is jobs. We are indignant that we can’t just drill for jobs (although we try) or buy them from somewhere. We can’t believe that the Government is practically broke and doesn’t have jobs for us. Well, my friends, welcome to the New Normal. Maybe the New Normal says you aren’t getting a job anytime soon. Sorry. If you do get one the pay will suck and you’ll be treated like crap.  But that is also the New Normal. Everything: worse than before. 

But what version of before does the New Normal imply? I guess it implies Recent Normal, like the boom times of the late 90s. That would maybe be kind of a sweet normal, but it was so abnormal that of course it couldn’t be normal, and so it ended very fucking abruptly leaving us with a serious need to come up with a wry explanation for the fact that we’re all basically screwed these days. What happened to cheap gas with everyone driving their own SUV? That was awesome right? And buying a house without putting any cash down, having a pool put in, knocking up your wife a few times, and then selling the place at a profit for something bigger? That was sweet right? We got strawberries from South America shipped in so we could eat them in January, and they started shooting up Thanksgiving Turkeys with all kinds of bonus steroids so that breast on Thanksgiving day was frickin’ PIMP. Steroids in the milk, while we’re at it, and let’s see just how young of girls can grow nice tits.  

Sucky is the new normal. You went from an SUV to a used minivan that you sometimes now have to sleep in. And where the hell is a job for this person? Isn’t the Government supposed to ‘create jobs’? And I put that in ironic half-quotes because the answer is NO, stupid, the economy creates jobs. The Government can hire in people to build roads and whatever all else, but p.s. businesses that are still operating have no customers anymore because this is the New Normal. The government doesn’t have the revenue it wants so instead of trying to massively spark the economy they spend what little money they have blowing on the embers , but only enough to go even broker and warm our hands for a second. There has to be demand for things for job creation to happen. You can’t create jobs from nothing. Even if the Government were flush what should they do, create useless unnecessary jobs just to create them? Sounds great, I guess, but isn’t the chief complaint about Government that it is a bunch of ineffective people sucking at performing unnecessary tasks? The New Normal says you better not go pulling stuff out of thin air. That’s how we got here in the first place. And yet the major talking point for out-of-touch Politicians with chemically whitened teeth is ‘job creation’. I’m all for it. Jobs are the new Interest Only Loans. Maybe we can just ride that shit straight to a Better Normal. 

The suckiness of the New Normal is pretty draining, that’s for sure. What about earlier versions of normal? Were they any good? Like what about 1492 normal, or 1942 normal.  At the end of the American Century (that was the 20^th, ya’ll) we bloated the crap out of ourselves and wanted to live like Kings. We had a great time doing it. But it wasn’t normal. It was a frickin’ party and a half but a lot of people barfed on the floor, and we can’t really clean it up, it’s just the New Normal. 

The New Normal, or said a different way: it is what it is, another tricky phrase that has burst onto the casual conversation scene in recent years.  Lost the house, credit score down to 238. It is what it is. Now let me get on a Vampire movie. Can’t afford the theatre, gonna hit Redbox. It is what it is. The New Normal.

A not-so-long-time-ago, people knew how to do more stuff. Were more self-reliant. Not in a country hick make-your-own-beef-jerky kind of way, but just in general. And I have nothing against beef jerky. But back before the Abnormal Normal strawberries tasted grand because you only had them certain times of year. Your Turkey was a bit thinner (and so was your daughter) but it looked like it might have actually flown at some point or another, and after dinner you saved the bones to make stock. In the Abnormal Normal you threw everything out and drove to a restaurant next time you wanted soup (and paid with a credit card).


There is no such thing as the New Normal. It just means people miss the past. And besides, normal isn’t how things ought to be but rather how things are. And brother, you better work it out because if you look around at the grocery store, beans are the new bacon, tap water is the new Gatorade, and 40 year olds look like shit again.