Our World Needs Your Weird

Why AI-sameness makes individual weirdness necessary

Front gardens overrun by gnomes, huddled groups of train spotters, TV news interviews with people who keep their Christmas decorations up all year. Blokes tinkering with their inventions in the shed. Grannies cooking utterly outlandish multi-tiered cakes.

When I was a girl, mild eccentricity was simply accepted in any average British village. Every community had a handful of people who were slightly… specialised. The pigeon fancier. The amateur historian who could explain the Napoleonic Wars if you accidentally made eye contact. The woman who knitted elaborate jumpers for her dogs.

Nobody asked them to moderate their enthusiasm. Quite the opposite. Their oddness was part of the local ecology. Remove the eccentrics from a village and you’d be left with nothing but polite conversations about property prices.

Which is what our online world is in danger of becoming.

On LinkedIn, in articles, social posts and even here on substack weirdness is being tidied away. Replaced by a thousand AI-written posts about ‘increasing your reach’, ‘raising your value’ or various repeats of ‘Under 100 followers? Post your link below and let’s all follow each other!’

I miss the self-obsessed passion of weirdo’s who don’t care if anyone is watching.

They might even be key to changing the world.

The modern online world encourages a very specific personality type: tidy, agreeable, moderately interesting but not too interesting. People have hobbies, of course, but preferably the sort that appear reasonable in small talk. If your hobby is pretty, that helps.

You can like birds, and even post pretty pictures of them.
You must not become a person who talks about birds at length.

I miss the eccentrics, because the people who care too much about things are exactly the people who change things.

Spend ten minutes with anyone who is properly obsessed with something, and you will notice that they tell you stories.

The train enthusiast doesn’t just explain locomotives. They recount the tragic career of a particular engine that once ran the Glasgow route before an unfortunate signalling incident in 1956. The amateur astronomer will describe the first night they saw Saturn’s rings through a telescope as if recalling a childhood miracle. Gardeners talk about soil the way chefs talk about truffles.

Or me talking about Star Trek ;-)

Unleash your weird! Be brave enough to geek out, without curating your passions for others' consumption.

Be un-embarrassed about loving something. Because somewhere in all that glorious, unfiltered obsession is the thing we keep saying we need more of in sustainability - CARE

The kind of care that makes someone wake up at dawn to spot a bird. The kind that makes someone painstakingly rebuild a broken thing instead of throwing it away. The kind that notices, that pays attention, that falls a little bit in love with the world as it is, and how it could be.

People don’t care because they’ve been told to. They feel things because someone showed them why it mattered. Because someone, somewhere, couldn’t stop talking about a tree, or a river, or a species, or a machine, or a place. Because someone was a bit… much about it.

That’s how care spreads. Through slightly OTT enthusiasm.

We talk a lot in sustainability about behaviour change, systems change and culture change. But culture doesn’t shift because everyone becomes slightly more sensible. It shifts because enough people become passionately unreasonable about something they love.

It might just be to care about something, loudly and specifically, in public.

So let your weird out where others can see it.

Who are the wonderful weirdos who should read this?