Americans today seem to almost venerate nonconformity: “Living your truth” is perhaps our society’s one unquestionable imperative.

But what stands out about our approach to nonconformity is how much we talk about it.

Social media, ad campaigns and entertainment all push us to see being “different” or “authentic” as an active and positive pursuit, the controlling factor in what we wear, how we act, where we choose to grow hair — the outward signals of our obsessive preoccupation with identity.

Maybe there’s a better way.

Pee-wee Herman, created and played by the late Paul Reubens, was an atypical character in every respect, from his clothing choices (too-small grey suit and red bowtie) to his childlike persona.

When his hit film “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” debuted 40 years ago this month, we saw Pee-wee’s world as a mid-century-modern fever dream, complete with a Rube Goldbergian breakfast machine, a bar-top dance to “Tequila” in white platform shoes and an epic chase sequence on the Warner Bros. backlot involving Godzilla, Santa Claus and Twisted Sister.

The movie and his later children’s TV show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” are both packed with characters memorable for their outlandishness, from Large Marge the truck driver to Miss Yvonne, with her crinoline skirts and bouffant hair.

But at no point does anyone in the Pee-wee universe explicitly comment on how bizarre everything is.

While much of “Big Adventure” feels like a cartoon, it’s also grounded in real-world places and people; there are no all-knowing winks to the audience to signal its subversion.

This was an intentional choice on Reubens’ part, he explained in the recent documentary “Pee-wee as Himself.”

“I wanted kids to learn about being a nonconformist and what nonconformity was . . . you can do the opposite of things, you can do whatever you want,” he said.

Yet at the same time, “I just felt right from the get-go something that could be very important and very subliminal would be to just make the show very inclusive and not comment on it in any way.”

In a setting so bright, brash and flamboyant, Pee-wee expressed the message that it’s great to be yourself — without any need to draw attention to it.

Talking overtly about what makes us different from one another makes identity the center of society, but Pee-wee’s world has no use for pushing us into boxes that inflexibly define us.

The dark side of building such tight constraints around identity roared into the headlines this week after Wednesday’s horrific mass shooting at a Minneapolis church killed two innocent schoolchildren.

The gunman, 23-year-old Robin Westman, displayed to the world a journal that revealed an agonizing struggle with identity boxes after he adopted a transgender identity, then pondered abandoning it.

“I know I am not a woman but I definitely don’t feel like a man,” Westman wrote. “I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat.”

Westman’s vacillation suggests identity can be more fluid than society’s definitions allow — and his sense of “defeat” shows how strict identity boxes leave some feeling trapped.

It’s becoming increasingly questionable whether putting identity on a pedestal is really the most caring and compassionate way for us to treat one another.

Consider the political backlash against wokeness, and how its proponents’ strictures on language and beliefs ultimately turned off even potential allies.

Maybe loudly proclaiming nonconformity is counterproductive, and emphasizing identity above all else is a not-so-tacit acknowledgment that society doesn’t actually want you to “be yourself,” but rather to fit into one of its predefined boxes.

That was the brilliance of Pee-wee, and of Reubens’ insight: His world is full of distinctive and singular characters, but treating them as the unique individuals they are — never as boxes to check or quotas to fill — makes it impossible to think of them as “weird” or “strange.”

It’s a good lesson, and one our society has been tragically failing at recently.

Shoehorning people into pre-programmed boxes and making those identities the sum of who they are is ultimately more backward and less caring than simply living and letting live.

As cheeky and campy as Pee-wee could be, he taught us that sometimes the most profound things we can say are the things we don’t say at all.

Jennifer Tiedemann is the executive editor of Discourse.