I grew up on matching socks, two freshly washed (thanks to mom), identical pieces of white cloth with a correlating strip along the toe. They were folded from the top so that they would stay together, a trick that I claimed I couldn’t master until I was much older. Mostly to evade the responsibility of having to fold them myself (you’re welcome mom).

Losing one of the pair was comparable to losing one sleeve of a shirt, you would just have to throw the rest away because it would then be rendered useless. I mean it’s not the perfect analogy I guess, considering I have no explanation for how someone might lose a sleeve, but it gives you a notion of how important symmetry and uniformity is, in the simplest form of a sock.

Putting on socks is how most people start their day. While it may seem to be a mundane task that you forget you’ve even done as you walk out the door, it really sets the tone for your day. We subconsciously feel the need to wear matching socks because we take comfort in the conformity. No one’s looking at your socks during the day, you yourself can’t even see them, but you know they’re there, and you know they’re matching.

Why is this something that almost everyone in the world partakes in? Why is it not normal to just have a big drawer full of random socks that you mix and match daily? If your left foot was feeling a white sock with a red stripe down the side and your right foot was feeling a black sock with white stripe on the toe, that would be OK.

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered this alternative method. Some may blame it on college laziness, to that I say, you’re partially right. However, similar to how wearing matching socks provides people comfort through conformity, refusing to wear matching socks provides me satisfaction through unconventionality.

There’s no real practical reason that socks need to match, your feet won’t fall off, your shoes won’t not fit. Making sure you always have two matching socks is an unnecessary part of your life. While matching your socks may not be the most impressive case of blindly following unnecessary traditions, it’s somewhere to start. It allows you to take a step back and question why you are really doing anything.

Is there a good enough reason for doing the things you do other than because you and everyone else have always been doing them? What if no one questioned why we owned slaves, or why women had a lesser value than man? What if we never asked ourselves, ‘why can’t we fly through the air?’ Or ‘why can’t we send messages wirelessly?’ Blind adherence hinders growth. If we don’t spend a couple moments thinking about why we’re doing what we’re doing, we’ll find ourselves moving backwards, stuck in an aimless and trivial life.

I’m not writing this to make you wear mismatched socks everyday, i’m writing to make you at the very least question why you feel the need to wear matching socks everyday. If your answer is because you genuinely love wearing paired socks, and it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside, then by all means continue on. However, if you find yourself lost for an answer, try letting go of the routine and allow yourself to take satisfaction in the unconformity. At the very least, it would cut down on folding time.