Like minded people: WTF?

Read any list of advice about how to improve your life and ‘finding like-minded people’ will appear. It’s a guaranteed sign of a half-assed list produced by someone with little knowledge of the human condition.

My birth year cohort was about 450,000 men.

I’m a lifetime bachelor. According to an ONS dataset I can’t find again, that’s one in ten of my birth year cohort. 1 of 45,000

I have an undergraduate degree from the mid-1970’s. Counting in the polytechnics, one in five of my cohort got one of those. 1 of 9,000.

I have a postgraduate degree. One in ten undergraduates did that in the mid-1970’s. 1 of 900.

I’m still working. Half my age cohort are doing that. 1 of 450.

I’m long-term sober. I can’t remember the last census count from AA, but it was less than 100,000. (Really. And even then, that’s a gross over-estimate of the number of ex-drunks with long-term sobriety). Out of an 18+ population of around 50 million. Which is 1 in 500.

So that’s me. Unique in my birth year.

We’re all equal, right? Well, if you want, but we’re all different. Some of those differences matter, and many don’t. Being a lifetime bachelor matters (as does being MGM’d as a baby, but that’s another story). That my degrees were in Philosophy of one kind or another, mixed with chunks of mathematics and logic, matters. Philosophers are not as other people. As for being long-term sober having worked the programme and done the Steps, you can’t even imagine the difference that opens up.

This is not a play for tragic status or for sympathy. I don’t want either. There are a bunch of other people whose experiences, on the way to wealth, artistic recognition or athletic success, separate them from everyone else except the other fifty people who went through the same wringers. I have nothing in common with them either.

My question is: who the frack are my ‘like-minded people’?

I have some friends. We can communicate. I think they might be insulted by the suggestion that they and I were ‘like-minded’.

So I have another question: why are ‘like-minded people’ important? Or is it a code? For, you know, being gay. Or fascist. Or an Aston Villa supporter. Or a Conservative in Rotherham. Or a train-spotter. Something that give my identity a distinctive flavour.

My identity, such as the poor worn-out thing is, has no particular flavour. So maybe there are no ‘like-minded people’ for me.