Beards, anyone?

I have recently tried to grow a beard. My god, the hysteria. As I work in an office, numerous people have been chastising me for looking unprofessional or messy. Even though I have blonde hair and it takes me slightly longer to go from the stubble stage to the beard stage than it would for most people, I still found it difficult to comprehend why my work colleagues had such an issue with it. Since when was facial hair a social sign of negativity. Apparently, with the air of vagrancy that I was demonstrating, I may as well have taken off my tie and wrapped it around my forehead! To the people in the world who care so much about public appearance rather than the individual personality underneath, I simply say, "Pay more attention to your own lives and stop concerning yourself with mine, I truly have better things to be thinking about."

The Social Construction Of Ties

Social Constructionism is the premise where the norms of society are passed from generation to generation to the point where they become taken-for-granted assumptions that people automatically believe to be true without any sense of rational thought. These assumptions become followed on a daily basis, never being considered or analysed as people cannot bring themselves to believe that generations of social well-doers in the past could possibly have all been weak-minded sheep or just plain wrong. And so things that vary from social constraints ('hard work is good for the soul'!) to the downright ridiculous (a roast beef meal should only be eaten at Sunday lunchtimes) permeate society to the extent that only the free-thinking few can think outside the box and will continually be ostracised for it.
A good example of social construction which fits somewhere in between the two extremes is the tie. If you work in professional white-collar employment (as I unfortunately do), every morning (after having been woken up by the socially constructed alarm clock) you will then proceed to take a long piece of strangely-shaped material and tie it in a methodical knot around your neck. Let's think about this for a second: you take what is in effect a noose, put it as tightly around your jugular as is humanly possible without causing permanent damage, and then ensure that it will not be dislodged from that zone of discomfort by doing up your top shirt button and folding over the collar! And why do we perform this masochistic practice every day? Because somebody - god knows who, but somebody - in their eternal wisdom of stupidity, decided many moons ago that this was a really smart thing to do. So now, the sheep in the world automatically presume this to be true as so many have done it before them. But, my friends, if you think about it rationally, there is no logical basis as to why we wear these restrictive contraptions of clothing; it is pure social constructionism. Of course, nobody will ever pay attention to this argument, because the overriding principle of being a sheep is that you don't want to think for yourself. Nevertheless, I will always hate ties!