Are Cultural Norms Important?

I’m sitting in a café, drinking a cup of coffee while my body adjusts in confusions to the mix of cold outside air, sweat from a long bike ride, and warmth from the mug in my hand. I took off my sweatshirt and wonder, if by doing so, I’m breaking any cultural norms.

Everyone else here is sitting in their sweaters and long sleeved shirts as I write in my tank top and beanie. Is it better to fit into arbitrary cultural standards or should I just make myself as comfortable as possible?

I guess that’s the key question one has to grapple with when traveling to a new place. How much should cultural norms be respected and to what extent should they be discarded? They are, after all, only constructions of the human mind.

We create arbitrary rules and laws to be followed and it’s considered “strange” to forego the norm for a different avenue of thought, but the concept of strange itself is also only a social construct.

Apparently, in Denmark, it’s considered “strange” to smile at strangers on the street. I was told my first week that if we did that, people would either think we were drunk or American (the horror!).

But if you go to, say, Costa Rica, it’s not too out of the ordinary to have conversations with random people on the street. The culture is incredibly friendly and open to strangers. In fact, I was once invited by my taxi driver to stay at his house and meet his family!

I’ve tried to tone down my smiling while here, but it’s difficult when I’m a naturally smiley person. I attempt to adjust to each new culture I’m in, adopting the norms to the best of my ability, trying them on like an accessory, trying to see which one fits best and looks most stylish.

And then, when I leave, I take the “cultural hat” off to leave room for the next one. But maybe the accessories are a bit more permanet than I’m even aware of. Maybe they’re like tattoos that won’t ever go away fully. Or maybe they’re scars that fade away after enough time has passed.

Maybe, to some degree, I let each new culture shape my personality so that I can blend in as seemlessly as possible.

From here, I wonder how much of our personalities are inherently “us” and how much are just us unconsciously adapting to the environment around us. This environment can be as large as our nation all the way down to our town, neighborhood, or individual household.

Every group that we belong to follows some sort of social code, and if we never experience ideas outside of these narrow points of view, we start to believe that this social code is an underlying objective reality, when it’s actually only a figment of our collective imagination.

In a couple hundred years, our current social norms will likely seem “strange” to future humans (or whatever beings take our place), so how much can we really claim that our current way of viewing the world and interacting with one another has any legitimacy to it at all? How much should we accept norms that, in essence, have no underlying truth to them? And if they don’t have any basis in reality, then why do we choose to follow them?