What consequences are there for people who don't conform in society?

All actions have consequences, and while it is easy to condemn “anti-social behavior” and to ascribe dire, even punitive, consequences to all “anti-social” behavior (prison, rejection by normative society, etc.), the truth is that not all nonconformist behavior is “anti” social. Artists almost by definition thrive on “non-conformity,” (Agnes Martin, Lady Gaga, James Joyce) as do creative people in general – athletes, thinkers, inventors, etc. History is riddled with “non-conformist” social geniuses: Napolean, Einstein, Walt Whitman, etc. etc. On the most mundane level, one might say that people who choose to deviate from normally accepted social behavior leave themselves at the mercy of those social conformists who dictate and regulate social conformity, not only local “divas” but advertisers, the media themselves, even the “new social media” such as Twitter and Facebook. The consequences, then, are that one is not absorbed into the common, the regular, the usual; what “society” doles out to those persons is of no consequence to the devoted non-conformist.