Note: Written in response to Adam Mastroianni, “The Decline of Deviance.” experimental-history.com. October 28, 2025.
There’s a strange thing happening: people are getting more similar.
Teenagers drink less, fight less, have less sex. Crime rates have dropped by half in thirty years. People move less often. Movies are all sequels. Buildings all look the same. Even rebellion has a template now.
A psychologist named Adam Mastroianni calls this “the decline of deviance.” His argument is simple: we’re safer and richer than ever before, so we have more to lose. When you might live to 95 instead of 65, when you have a good job and a nice apartment, why risk it? Better to play it safe.
But there’s another explanation. Maybe weirdness didn’t disappear. Maybe it just went underground.
The Two Kinds of Control
Think about how society used to handle people who didn’t fit in. If you broke the rules, you got punished—arrested, fired, kicked out. The control was obvious and external.
Now it works differently. If you’re too energetic as a kid, you don’t get punished. You get diagnosed. You get medication. The problem gets managed, not punished.
Instead of “you’re breaking the rules,” you hear “you might have a condition.” Instead of consequences, you get treatment. The control moved from outside (police, punishment) to inside (therapy, medication, self-management).
This is harder to resist because it sounds like help.
The Frictionless Slope
Modern life is designed to be smooth. Apps remove friction. Algorithms show you what you already like. HR departments solve problems before they become conflicts. Everything is optimized.
This sounds good. Who wants friction?
But here’s the problem: if everything is frictionless, you slide toward average. The path of least resistance leads straight to normal. To stay different, you need something to grab onto. You need an anchor.
The Brand of Sacrifice
Some fitness influencers are getting tattoos from a manga called Berserk. It’s called the Brand of Sacrifice. In the story, it marks you as someone who struggles against overwhelming odds.
Why would someone permanently mark their body with this symbol?
It’s a commitment device. Once you have that tattoo, quitting your training regimen means betraying your own identity. The tattoo makes giving up psychologically expensive. It creates friction where the environment removed it.
This is different from just liking Berserk. Wearing a t-shirt is aesthetic. Getting a permanent tattoo is structural. One is consumption. The other is a binding commitment.
What Changed
In the past, if you wanted to be different, there were paths:
- Join a monastery
- Become an artist
- Go into academia
- Join the military
These were recognized ways to commit to non-standard lives. They had structures, institutions, and social recognition. They were visible.
Now those paths are either gone or captured. Monasteries are rare. Artist careers are precarious. Academia is adjunct labor. And the weird professor who used to be tolerated? Now they’re HR problems.
So if you want to maintain a different trajectory, you have to build your own infrastructure—in ways institutions can’t see or measure.
The Dark Forest
Mastroianni’s data comes from visible sources: crime statistics, box office numbers, survey responses. But what if deviance just became invisible?
Consider:
- Discord servers with thousands of members discussing ideas that don’t fit any mainstream category
- People maintaining their own encrypted servers instead of using Google
- Communities organized around specific practices invisible to algorithmic measurement
- Subcultures with their own norms, practices, and commitment devices
These don’t show up in Mastroianni’s data. They’re designed not to. When being visible means being measured, optimized, and normalized, invisibility becomes survival.
The question isn’t “are people less weird?” It’s “where did the weirdness go?”
Two Worlds
We’re splitting into two populations:
The Visible: People whose lives are legible to institutions. They have LinkedIn profiles, measurable metrics, recognizable career paths. They move along approved channels. The environment is optimized for them, and they’re optimized by the environment.
The Invisible: People who maintain their own infrastructure. They use privacy tools, build their own systems, participate in communities institutions don’t recognize. They create their own friction because the default is too smooth.
The middle ground—the eccentric uncle, the weird local artist, the odd professor—is disappearing. You’re either normal enough to be comfortable, or different enough to need camouflage.
What To Do About It
If you want to maintain a distinct trajectory, you need commitment devices—things that make it costly to drift back to normal.
Physical commitments:
- Tattoos (like the Brand of Sacrifice)
- Infrastructure you maintain yourself (encrypted servers, self-hosted tools)
- Skills that require daily practice
- Geographic choices that create distance from default options
Cognitive commitments:
- Keep your own records instead of trusting memory or AI
- Verify important claims rather than accepting confident statements
- Maintain practices that create friction (journaling, analog tools, slow processes)
- Build redundancy (multiple sources, cross-checking, external validation)
Social commitments:
- Find people who hold you accountable to your stated values
- Make public commitments that would be embarrassing to abandon
- Participate in communities with their own norms and standards
- Create regular practices with others (weekly meetings, shared projects)
The key is making abandonment more expensive than maintenance. The environment pulls toward average. Your commitments need to pull harder.
The Real Problem
The decline of deviance isn’t about teen pregnancy or crime rates. Those going down is good.
The problem is losing the ability to maintain any position that differs from the optimized default. When algorithms determine what you see, when therapeutic frameworks pathologize discomfort, when institutional measurement captures all visible activity, staying different requires active resistance.
Most people won’t bother. The cost is too high. The path is too unclear. The pressure to conform is constant and invisible.
But some variance needs to be preserved. Not because being weird is inherently good, but because when the environment changes—and it will—non-standard strategies need to still exist.
A Final Thought
You probably won’t build your own encrypted server. You probably won’t get a commitment tattoo. You probably won’t structure your life around resistance to optimization pressure.
That’s fine. Most people don’t need to.
But notice what’s happening. Notice when friction gets removed and you start sliding. Notice when your doubts get reframed as conditions needing management. Notice when your goals become more measurable and less meaningful.
And if you decide you want to stay strange, you’ll need to build your own anchors. The environment won’t provide them anymore.
The garden is gone. The default path is smooth and well-lit and leads exactly where everyone else is going.
If you want to go somewhere else, you’ll need to make your own path. And you’ll need something to keep you on it when the pull toward normal gets strong.
That’s what commitment devices are for. That’s what the weird tattoos mean. That’s what the encrypted servers do.
They’re anchors in a frictionless world.
And you might need one.
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