34a1910d41c36deb73735b5e8455dace @NormalTweetGuy is just that: tweets from a normal guy. The account is based on the idea that there are some people on social media who just aren’t at all interesting. Like your sort of friend from high school who is so ridiculously boring that it’s disgusting. Though simple, its a pretty funny concept and I find myself amused at nearly everything he says. It’s so normal! Though Normal Guy would never admit it or have the wherewithal to understand, there’s something inherently interesting about being uninteresting. The account as an entity, characterizing the most vanilla, boring, cliche guy you know, is getting across a hard-to-articulate idea about what we use social media for.

There’s an episode of 30 Rock where Jenna and Paul (Will Forte’s character) discover that being incredibly normal is even kinkier than any of their other crazy sexual fetishes. “Normaling” as they call it, can feel so foreign, so against the grain. Normal guy is normaling in our faces every time he tweets “TGIF!,” thus exposing the triviality of our own stupid tweets that we spent so long crafting.

It’s the same underlying idea that makes normcore both A) interesting and B) fashionable. Being different – whether it be in fashion, online or in your politics is exhausting. What’s the point of being a cynic, a contrarian, a freethinker? I mean that rhetorically. We’re flecks of space dust, after all, just enjoy yourself because life is meaningless. Normcore takes the idea that fashion needs to be difficult and flips it on its head, because trying hard is stupid. It ponders whether the truest sense of fashion is perhaps not caring about fashion at all. Similarly, Normal Guy lives his life the way we all wish we could, without giving a damn.

For normcore, however, the joke is part performance art and part fashion statement. Ultimately, the owners of normcore are the ones in on the joke. Normal Guy isn’t self-aware in it’s performance. It’s sincerity only plays as a joke in the context of Twitter, while normcore is more interested in letting people know how much it knows.

Twitter, to its credit, encourages us to be funny, original, and overall useful for our followers. In being the opposite of that, Normal Guy is able to mock our inherent interest in being interesting. It’s post-post-modern. Banal commentary on a 9-5 job stands in stark contrast to the rest of the internet’s obsession with making their lives and personality seem different and at odds with everyone else’s. Normal Guy tweets is the prototype of what people who aren’t on Twitter think Twitter is. And in using the platform “wrong” he exposes the unimportance of Twitter, social media, and perhaps even  life itself. It’s brilliant. It’s horrible. It’s FRIDAY!