Nobody wants to be normal online because normal is basically invisible.
That sounds harsher than it is.
Most normal people are fine.
Normal accounts are just incredibly easy to scroll past.
A normal username. A normal headshot. A normal bio. A few vacation photos. A reposted quote. Maybe a coffee picture. Maybe a LinkedIn-style caption about "growth."
Nothing is wrong with any of it.
There is just nothing to grab onto.
The internet is too crowded for neutral.
Everybody is competing with characters now
This is probably the biggest shift.
You are no longer only competing with other people who look vaguely like you.
You are competing with entire characters.
Anonymous crypto whales.
Fashion kids with perfectly broken cameras.
Fitness psychos who seem to live inside a spreadsheet.
Founders who only post screenshots.
Meme accounts with ten years of lore.
People who somehow made one obscure hobby their entire personality and now have 400,000 followers because of it.
Compared to that, "guy with a decent job who likes restaurants and travelling" is difficult to remember.
That does not mean everybody needs to become insane.
It means the bar for being distinct got higher.
The weird parts are usually the useful parts
People spend a lot of time sanding themselves down online.
They remove the weird interests.
They remove the strong opinions.
They remove the stupid jokes.
They try to sound professional.
They try to make the profile acceptable to everybody.
Then they wonder why it feels like nobody is there.
The funny part is that the things people hide are often the only parts worth remembering.
The obsession with weird watches.
The 200-tab research habit.
The specific hatred of startup landing pages.
The collection of terrible old advertisements.
The fact that somebody knows an uncomfortable amount about airport carpets.
That stuff gives the account texture.
"Entrepreneur. Investor. Building the future." does not.
Normal is also harder to trust than it used to be
This sounds backwards, but overly polished normality can feel stranger now.
The perfect headshot.
The safe bio.
The vague inspirational captions.
The feed where every opinion has been run through six layers of reputation management.
It can feel less human than an anonymous account with a stupid avatar arguing about watches at 2:13 AM.
At least the weird account feels owned by somebody.
There is a point where trying to appear normal starts looking like hiding.
Not hiding your identity.
Hiding your personality.
Algorithms exaggerate this
Platforms are not great at rewarding subtle people.
They reward things that produce a reaction.
Funny.
Annoying.
Useful.
Beautiful.
Absurd.
Specific.
Recognizable.
A person who sits exactly in the middle of everything gives the feed very little to work with.
No strong subject.
No obvious audience.
No visual pattern.
No recurring idea.
No reason to stop.
Again, this does not mean the answer is to manufacture outrage or turn yourself into a cartoon.
A lot of accounts do that and become unbearable.
But some level of compression helps.
The internet needs to understand what drawer to put you in before it can decide who else might care.
Being normal is still useful in real life
This is where the internet gets weird.
Offline, being normal is often a massive advantage.
You want your accountant to seem normal.
You probably want your pilot to seem normal.
You generally do not want your dentist to have "lore."
Normal signals stability.
Online, the incentives flip.
Nobody opens an app hoping to discover the world's most average stranger.
They want something.
Information.
Entertainment.
Aesthetic.
Access.
Taste.
A point of view.
A person who sees something they do not.
So people exaggerate the parts of themselves that create one of those things.
That is not necessarily fake.
It is selective.
The accounts people remember usually commit harder
There is a specific kind of fear people have when they start posting.
They do not want to be cringe.
So they keep everything restrained.
Then restrained becomes generic.
Then generic becomes invisible.
The accounts that break through that usually commit to something before they have proof anybody cares.
A style.
A joke.
A worldview.
A subject.
A character.
Sometimes they look stupid for a while.
Sometimes they actually are stupid.
But at least there is something there.
Normal protects you from looking embarrassing.
It also protects you from being memorable.
That trade probably explains a lot of the internet.