Everybody Is Diseased (And You're Not Special)
A medical diagnosis can either be one of the best things that ever happened for you, or it can be the worst thing that ever happened to you. Few people understand the difference.
I’m quite sure I don’t have to tell you that we live in the age of the pill. But we also live in the age of the trendy, hip emotional problem. The age of the cute social-media post with self-deprecating humor about “my anxiety” and “my terrible coping skills” and how “adulting is hard.”
But the thing is, this humor is actually self-pity disguised as playful self-deprecation. People wear their incompetence and self-defeat like some sort of cub scout badge. “Look,” they say, “I’m a true [Millennial or Gen Zer], because I’m existentially miserable and I have no idea how I’m supposed to live a good life.”
This is similar to the way a lot of men use weaponized incompetence to make their own wives do all of the chores in the home. “Well I don’t know how to do that, and you’re better at it, and look how bad I [intentionally] messed it up last time, you better just do it yourself.”
Men like this are pathetic.
People want it to seem like they’re just being silly and having a little fun, but they actually believe this stuff. I mean, look around you. The majority of these people really do believe that their lives are harder than they actually are. And they actually do want pity for it.
People play with their mental health problems like toys. They stand in the town square and show them off like Beanie Babies. “Oh I got the latest version of seasonal depression, did you see? Oh and I also got the limited edition of crippling social anxiety, I’ll bet you don’t have that one. My collection is deeper and better than yours.”
People think their suffering is unique and interesting. And their tragedies. People think they are medically unique and interesting. And the truth, in almost all cases, is that they're not. Almost none of us is actually unique or interesting. Myself included.
There are some people who get diagnosed with some medical issue, and they feel relieved. "Okay, well at least now I know what the problem is. Now I can begin to address it."
But there are some people who get diagnosed with some medical issue, and they feel empowered. "Okay," they think, "now I can use this as a weapon."
The first group, to me, looks like a skimpy minority. Most people don’t actually have serious problems; they just want excuses for their anti-social or self-destructive behavior. What it often boils down to is that people get a medical excuse for their bad results in life, and then they pass Go, collect 200 dollars, and continue getting bad results. They change nothing. Now they just have medically-sponsored words to justify their own self-defeat.
I've known people who, after receiving an excuse from a medical specialist, go on behaving in the same horrible ways (or even worse ways) and continue to just brush off the social consequences. "That's just the way I am," they say. Or "oh, that's just my horrible depression acting up again."
"Oh, I'm just an introvert. I didn't text anyone back for 6 days because I'm an introvert.”
And then they wonder why they don’t have any friends and no one trusts them.
There's a fundamental reality of human life that needs to be grasped. Everyone has their quirks, their excesses, their weaknesses, their blind spots. You’re not special. Introverts have a comfort zone and need to work to expand it. Extroverts are social by nature and need to learn to appreciate isolation more.
Everyone is just as messed up as you are. And they always have been, since we were apes.
Some “experts” are now calling obesity a disease; they are claiming that the vast majority of overweight people have a genetically inherited brain disease. And yes, I’m using the word expert here with the blackest sarcasm. I'm not a neurologist, I'm not a biologist, and I'm not a geneticist. So I can't rightfully claim that this is Untrue. That obesity is not a “disease.”
But I can pose some questions. Some questions like:
Well then what else might we consider a disease? Alcoholism? Lack of ability to stop spending money? Poor eyesight? Is that a disease? What about lack of motivation? Is that a disease? What about someone who wants to work out but just can't seem to do it? Is that a disease?
If we are now calling everything a disease, then... does that mean everyone who isn't a perfectly functioning human being has a disease? Or many diseases?
What does perfectly functioning mean? What criteria are being used to assess that?
Who gets to decide what those criteria are? Who gets to decide what perfectly functioning means? Do we need a committee? Is it going to be tied in with political agendas?
Are we ignoring willpower and self-control entirely? To what extent are people responsible for their own decisions? Are people responsible for their own decisions at all?
This is the danger of medical diagnoses. They help you understand yourself better (well, maybe), but they also give you an easy way out. They give you an excuse for your behavior or your issues... but they also give you an excuse for your behavior or your issues. Two sides of the same double-edged sword.
It’s the same reason a lot of people despise social welfare programs and a large portion of politics: because they not only allow incompetence to flourish, they subsidize it. Social welfare programs literally make it profitable to be bad at life. This is something Thomas Sowell talks about: if you pay people (including politicians) cash to be incompetent, you guarantee that they will remain incompetent. How could it possibly be any other way? Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.
I'm not saying real, undeserved anxiety doesn't exist. Nor depression, nor diseases. Nor useful welfare programs. What I'm saying is, we have watered down the term "disease" to the point where it doesn't even mean anything anymore. Just like we do with every other word. Because we are completely ungrateful for what words actually mean.
We have allowed “those in need” to become a category so bloated and crowded that it includes, like, 50% of the population. It’s no longer an economically meaningful category. It’s just a burden.
Sometimes some people have to starve to death. Because the alternative is that everyone gets to survive everything — regardless of the cost to everyone else, and regardless of their own input.
When I think of the average person, I think of someone who has an imperfect brain and imperfect muscles and an imperfect life. I think of someone who has his or her own individual challenges to deal with. Some of which are circumstantial… and some of which are genetic. Because it's not possible to be alive and not have any individual circumstantial and genetic challenges. That's what's on the menu. That's what being alive is. Having challenges you don't want and didn't sign up for.
What’s on the menu is unfairness.
That doesn't mean you have a disease. And it doesn’t mean the rest of your nation owes you something. Be it money or pity. It means you have to take responsibility for the cards you're holding, and play them with some dignity and intestinal fortitude.
And any doctor who gives children a close sister of methamphetamine because they have a little trouble sitting still in class ought to have both his license and his hands revoked.
I had a little trouble sitting still in class. You know what I needed? I needed someone to lovingly grab my shoulders and say “look man, you’re gonna be okay. Just get through these next few years and graduate… because you literally never have to be in an environment like this again. The problem is not you, the problem is that this environment is not suitable for 80% of human beings.”
But nobody did. What people told me instead was that if I couldn’t learn how to be successful in school, I was a failure and I was wasting my potential. Because we are trained to think that American lower education is a good place to assess the quality of human beings. Which it’s not.
What we need is simple, honest discourse with our children, friends, families, and communities about what reasonable expectations are. Expectations for the self, and expectations for others.
We should be attacking and deflating the feeling of being special. Because there is nothing good that comes from feeling special. There aren’t any useful things that come out of that. How good and useful a person someone becomes is inversely proportional to how special they feel — how entitled they feel. Said differently, I know zero wise people who think they’re special. None.
But we should also be attacking and deflating the institutions that make us feel that way. Children need to be told, if they’re struggling in school, that it’s just not that big a deal. It really isn’t. School is not a predictor, at all, of how or what you’re going to do in real life. Nor are doctors. Nor politicians.
The predictors of how and what you’re going to do in real life are the qualities that you make the decision to possess and work on. How successful you’re going to be is determined by how well you accept your current situation and make something of it. How well you accept that life is unfair, and figure it out anyway.
Everyone is born with their own little garden of personal qualities and inherited circumstances. A wise man figures out what kind of seeds and saplings he has, and cares for those ones properly. And then he creates connections with other people, and brings new seeds and flowers into his own garden and gives them some of his own. And he ends up with a beautiful garden and a beautiful life.
Being an introvert or an extrovert does not make you special or interesting. If your emotional condition is one of the 20 most interesting things about you, you seriously need to do more with your life. You were given a starting place on various spectrums of human behavior, and you need to learn how to adjust and move along those spectrums. Just like everyone else does. It doesn't mean anything more than that.
When people act like they are special for being quirky or isolated or weird, there's an implication baked into that. What they're saying to the world is "everyone else has this default mode of being well-adapted and healthy and reasonable, and I'm just not like that. I’m just unlucky.”
The default state for human beings is not being well-adapted and healthy and reasonable. Not by a long shot. The average person, left to his own devices, will become the average person. And the average person here is neither happy nor wise.
You don’t get to take credit for the strengths you were born with, and you also don’t have to take blame for the deficits you were born with. You don’t have to take blame, but you do have to take responsibility. And for god’s sakes, stop posting words like “adulting” on social media. Just have some self-respect and be an adult.
Doctors want you to stay on pills so they can bill your insurance company.
Politicians don’t care about you, they’re trading you comfort for a vote.
And other people don’t care about how bad you think your life is, because they are convinced theirs is worse.
Don't feel bad about yourself because your default state is unhappiness and low self-discipline. That's everyone's default state. Now do something about it.
Drink some water and read a damn book.
JDR
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” - Mel Brooks