Beyond Letting Go, There Is Now | Part 2: Who Decided What’s Standard?
Advertising Builds the World’s “Normal”
His years at an advertising agency left a lasting mark on how Atau thinks. The “family” that appears in ads and car commercials — a heterosexual couple, one son and one daughter — gets repeated so often in the media that it settles into the culture as the default before you know it. “I’ve been aware, since my agency days, of how much influence advertising actually has,” he says. “That awareness has carried into how I work now. It can cut either way, depending on how you use it.”
That same awareness turns inward, toward his own presence on social media. If showing only the polished parts of his life leads followers to believe that’s the standard, and to feel bad about their own lives as a result, the whole thing defeats its purpose. He’s also not comfortable feeding an economy built on excess consumption. He carries that tension. People sometimes assume he lives an elegantly curated life, but he laughs it off: more often than not, he’s in his pajamas, still wearing clothes with holes in them.
Against the standards society constructs, he places himself in a particular category: someone who wanted to belong to the standard but couldn’t. “I think that’s where my complex comes from,” he says. “And maybe that’s exactly why I want to break the standard down.”
There’s No Such Thing as Perfect
When friends back in Japan come to him for advice, Atau notices how often they struggle to answer the simple questions: is this really what you want? And why do you want it? Growing up in an environment that’s often monocultural, he suspects, makes it harder to even arrive at those questions in the first place.
A similar structure exists in France, he says, and it could probably be found anywhere in the world. In France, the attributes still treated as the default are white, male, and heterosexual. “The closer you are to the standard, the deeper the crisis can go once something knocks you off it,” he explains. There’s pride in having smoothly followed the track laid out for you, precisely because you were close to the standard, which is exactly why the smallest deviation from it can trigger such a deep struggle with the question of what you actually want.
“There’s no such thing as perfect,” he says. “Everyone, at some point, ends up with a gap between reality and how things ‘should’ be. That’s when you start wondering, is this really okay?” From his own experience, he insists: “Even people who think they want to be the ‘standard’ — I don’t think they want that deep down.”
Atau himself says he’s always asking these two questions — is this really what I want, and why do I want it. Back in Japan, the pain of wanting to be close to the standard and never quite getting there is what first gave him an opportunity to ask them. “Because I was outside the standard, questions like ‘why am I different’ or ‘why am I doing something different’ were always there somewhere inside me,” he says. “I think that turned into a habit.”
The Standard Was Never Just One
Atau also pushes back against meritocracy — the belief, so central to what modern society treats as standard, that effort is always rewarded. The idea that success comes down to individual effort alone erases everything a person can’t control: family background, economic circumstances, luck. “It’s just the people who already have the foundation to put in that effort who get to say things like that,” he points out.
The more fortunate someone’s circumstances, the harder it is for them to notice how fortunate they’ve been. Which is exactly why, he believes, it matters to recognize the foundation you’re standing on — and not impose it on anyone else.
That perspective extends to questioning the systems of school and society themselves. “The whole structure of schools, and of the economy in general, is a textbook case of meritocracy, measuring people by test scores, by productivity,” Atau says. Kids who can’t sit still and focus during class end up with diagnoses, but maybe the problem isn’t the child, he points out. Maybe it’s that they simply don’t fit a system built around economic output.
“Even the definitions of disability start to feel questionable when you think about it this way,” Atau continues. “By what standard is something a disability? Schizophrenia, mental illness — is it labeled that way because the person can’t earn money, can’t contribute economically? When you think about it like that, it feels like there’s only one standard being applied to everything.”
A society that measures people against a single yardstick — can they work, can they earn. What needs to change, he believes, is the standard itself, made plural instead of singular. His Instagram is, among other things, a tool for chipping away at that monolith, not through some grand declaration, but little by little, post by post.
“Normal” was never something that occurred naturally. Someone built it, piece by piece.
