The last few weeks I’ve been reading the book Outsiders by Howard Becker. He explains about the norms every society has, and that if you don’t obey to those rules you probably will become an outsider. But outsiders are mostly “normal” people, only their interests or lifestyles are different from the norm. All those people who are seen as deviant by society form different subcultures. For example, there is the emo subculture and the hiphop scene, but there are also fitgirls, vegans and hipsters. These people form a subculture because of the deviance they have in common.

When you’re part of a very deviant and/or negative (like criminal) subculture, it can affect your chance of getting a successful career. Because when you are a drug-addict or a thief, your future employers will find out about that, and I don’t think any boss would want a criminal as an employee. The same goes for when you have a lot of showing tattoos, purple hair or a lot of piercings, you look different than the norm and most people experience that as a negative thing and won’t hire you as an employee.

I think I’m part of the vegan subculture, although I’m not completely vegan yet. Not eating meat and dairy is different from the norm, thus deviant. But it’s not that people can see it when they look at me and they only know when I tell them myself. But I’ve never experienced any difficulties because of this. For example, some of my co-workers think it’s weird and they ask a lot of questions about it, others are just surprised but don’t really care. But it doesn’t affect how they treat me or how much they “like” me. I don’t think being a vegan does affect your career, unless maybe you want to work at a butchers’ shop or as a chef in a meat restaurant of course. I’m still a novice in the vegan subculture, because it’s been less than a year since I’m trying to be vegan as possible. I think you can be a master when you really don’t use any animal products at all, but that’s very difficult to accomplish and takes a lot of effort.

A lot has changed since Howard Beckers’ Outsiders was published. They aren’t really hippies anymore and using marihuana is not so deviant anymore and is even legal. But most importantly is that there isn’t any dominant subculture anymore. There is a mix of a lot of different subcultures nowadays and it’s not so weird anymore to be part of one.