I have a theory entirely of my own making. It goes like this:
The older you get, the weirder you get. (I want to pause here to note that by "weirder", I mean, generally, non-mainstream. "Weird" is not a pejorative in this essay, it's a simple descriptive term which means "not like everyone else.")
This is because the older you are, the more you have read, the more you have read, the more you know about all kinds of issues facing the world. Environmental issues, economic issues, labor injustices, gay rights, women's rights, men's rights, human rights, animal rights, food safety and nutrition, ocean pollution and overfishing, factory farms, there are so many things to be weird about! And when we read about all of these problems, naturally, we change our minds and attitudes toward the world we live in, giving up this kind of food or that kind of lifestyle, trying desperately to avoid being "part of the problem."
But, here's the key: everyone reads different things. Nobody has time to read it all! And much of it is contradictory anyway. So everyone gets weird in different ways.
For instance, my mom has really bought heavily into the Germ Theory of Disease. So much so, that when she eats french fries, she eats everything except the last bit that touched her hands. She refuses to eat the fry ends! Whereas I am the exact opposite. I think we need to eat lots harmless bacteria to stay healthy. As you can imagine, there are some slight incompatibilities in our approach toward food.
We're both weird about food in completely different, incompatible ways!
But like I said above, because there are so many causes and issues and scientific studies out there, there's far too much bad news to even glance at it all as it comes in, let alone internalize it and let change us. We all pick our battles in the war for Attention. And yet, it's very hard to remember that. Because there are so many things to be weird, non-mainstream, or even neurotic about, I think sometimes that the important thing is to remember that other people are weird and believe different things than you do, and that's okay.
For instance, we were at the state fair a few weeks ago, and my mom got a medium sized cup of french fries. It wasn't until she was almost done with the cup that I looked down and saw all of the fry ends -- piled up on my son's stroller tray, where he was happily chowing down! That, to me, was a real gesture of empathy and respect. "I believe this fry end is harmful, so harmful I will not even put it in my own body and yet, I will feed it to your two year old, because I know that you believe differently."
So now, when I am tempted to say something to someone else, like "Ocean overfishing is such an enormous problem facing the world today, how can you possibly eat that piece of cod?!", I try to remember to pause, stop, and ask the other person what kinds of issues they care about.
Maybe the key to solving some of these big problems isn't to convert everyone over to our own particular kind of weirdness. Maybe the key is finding other people whose weirdness is compatible with our own.