The fool crisis (an essay on mental health)
Dear M,
America doesn’t have a mental health crisis. We have a fool crisis; and if people would stop acting like fools they would stop complaining about their mental health.
Saying this out loud gets me in lots of trouble, though; the top reason being that a fool almost never thinks he's a fool — it’s his last guess at why he’s in pain, and before he gets there he has a chain of reasons as long as his arm. High up on this list of excuses, probably first, for most actual fools today, is that they’re “unwell.” The problem? Their brains. So in fact I agree with them — I just happen to view their problem from another angle.
But before explaining why Americans are clowns, I want to explain what foolish isn't.
Foolish isn’t when your kid dies and your life turns black. Foolish isn't being born into an abusive household and trying to recover from trauma. It also isn’t waking up one morning and realizing your whole life is going nowhere and that you're going to die and maybe nobody’s going to remember you in a few years. These are all great reasons to be sad, and, I would argue, a sign that you're healthy. It could even be argued that if you aren't sad when bad things happen, you're sick. So we can cross these off the “mental health list,” and anybody who says they're suffering mental unhealth because of them is a fool. Wrong words signify the wrong ideas, and wrong ideas are the only reason anybody can be foolish.
So then what exactly is a fool? A fool isn't someone who screws up. A fool is someone who never asks himself if what he's doing is stupid. He never asks himself if what he's doing is morally wrong. He prefers instead to play the victim. He never asks himself what kind of an organism he is and whether or not his lifestyle is healthy. He frames everything in the worst light possible and then expects himself to feel okay about it.
This last one is especially stupid. It’s also especially common, so to put it in the clearest light possible, it’s being upset about your car problems without thinking you’re one of the only people in history who gets to drive a car. Or having someone do you a favor and not saying how lucky you are to have them. It's going through life, having 99% of everything you want go your way (think about this, I dare you), and then pretending the 1% not going your way is your whole life. It’s not being thankful to your parents when they care for you, not listening to them when they're just trying to help you, not telling them you love them when the time you’ve got left with them is short, now, and getting shorter every day*. It’s thinking your kids are killing you without admitting they keep you alive.
Every second of every day there’s something or someone beautiful right in front of you. God has put them there, and you never stopped to thank Him. I was told the other day that happy people aren’t grateful; grateful people are happy. The reverse is also 100% true, and if you aren’t grateful in some way, then you deserve it.
(Another thing people blame mental illness on is social media, but this is unfair too. Social media hasn’t affected anybody’s health, but it has affected their happiness. First issue is, we see what people are thinking, and we’re terrified and disgusted — a normal reaction, I think, to anyone who really discovers humanity. But more importantly than this, we’ve put ourselves on trial before the public opinion, the closest thing we have to God in our godless society, and we found we’re neither loved nor hated, but worse — that nobody cares).
But being a fool is also living a life divorced from everything healthy and then expecting to feel okay. Here are a few prime examples of how modern people wreck themselves.
Having sex with the wrong people. A healthy brain gets pumped with oxytocin every time you have sex. You keep doing this with strangers, or people who aren’t worth it, or both, and your brain attaches itself to these people and then rips that attachment right off — the fast lane to feeling completely empty, and abandoned. Jerking off to gross women on the internet isn’t an alternative, as it makes you lazy, dirty, weak, and stupid.
People are biologically wired for being close to large families, and having little privacy. Moving far away from your family, not having any kids, and living for a boss who will throw you away is a good way to kill yourself on the inside. Having a dog and pretending it's your kid is a band-aid on a lost arm, and it has the added effect of making you look silly.
Eating Ding-Dongs instead of veggies. Not exercising and letting yourself get fat and telling yourself you love being fat and publicly making yourself a big fat liar. Staying up late doomscrolling instead of sleeping. Drinking too much too often, or using drugs.
Violating your conscience. Making promises you don’t keep. Pretending Nature made promises to you and won’t keep them (i.e., having wild and unusual expectations).
Whining about survival. Making excuses for your bad performance. Being lazy at your job and then complaining you didn't get the promotion even though you have seniority. Thinking “doing your job well” is the most important thing and that doing it cheerfully isn't (we still hate you). Thinking that work life and church life and even politics is “too much politics” instead of making an effort to be likable. Never taking obstacles in your path as a personal challenge — as the only way you can become a better person.
Not asking for forgiveness when you're wrong. Not forgiving people when they say they’re sorry. Holding long-term grudges against people you never see anymore. Thinking kids are immature when they’re just kids and it’s your job to make them better.
Reading the news all day and believing the news is the world without just looking at the world in front of you.
Waking up and filling your brain with distractions instead of reading something wholesome. Not going to church regularly, or to any other meaningful organization outside of work. Watching trash movies and trash TV and listening to trash music. Not understanding that every song has a vibe, and that every time you listen to music you're changing the frequency of your soul. Garbage in, garbage out.
Being a consumer instead of a producer. Not being great at anything you can feel proud about. Listening to the radio and never singing with anybody else in unison.
Not valuing your time, which goes away every second, and wasting it on things that don’t matter. Not valuing people who’ve spent more time on this earth than you, and neglecting to ask them questions.
Chasing Yin and ignoring Yang. Not seeing the good in bad situations, and not considering the bad in good situations. Thinking you can have your cake and eat it too.
Thinking it’s possible to hang on to any moment, or mood, and getting upset when all of life isn’t the peaks.
These are only a few instances**, but they sum up the stupid things people think and do and then wonder why they aren’t feeling okay. The modern man shoots himself in the foot and then won't acknowledge the gun in his hand. We commit soul suicide and then expect the body to go on living well without it. But the body is staging a protest, and when it does, we blame the body. This is when we get meds, and call in a “mental health day.” We ought to be locked up in the looney bin.
I'd also argue that a lot of suffering in life is normal, and we need to just get used to it. Where we draw the line between normal and extraordinary suffering is a matter worth fighting over, and will probably be fought about by every generation***. But once you get the foolishness and weakness out of the way you’re free to deal with the mentally unwell — the psychopaths, sociopaths, paranoids, perverts, and fanatics: people who need meds and a nice padded room or a jail cell. But of course we don't want to deal with them either: we give them cheap drugs and let them run wild on the streets of Seattle, or we give them expensive drugs, and let them run Stanford, CNN, Nike, and Disney.
Yours,
-J
P.S. I don't consider myself a fool, but I screw up every day; and the comfort I take in this essay is I at least know what I’m doing when I do something stupid. I know when I’m being stupid because I’ve spent a decade reading serious books about people.
As such I’m not the perfect opposite of the twelve things I listed above. Sometimes I’m just weak. Other times I’m forgetful. But I think about these things often, and work on them, and I get hurt badly when I don’t. I get sad too, like everybody else, and being sad is normal, and I’m learning to be thankful for sadness and sickness and the hurts God throws my way.
These are the soil that real joy grows out of, either escaping them or rising above them; and when I’m down I remind myself that I’m dynamic — that more than others I’m electric — and I wallow in these emotions, and soak in them, and even enjoy sadness, because sadness is a good feeling in its own way, and it sobers us up*****. And when I’m down, I know that I can grow from there, and that I can’t stay anywhere for too long, for better or for worse. For me personally, to get too high is a terrifying experience: I know I’m about to fall, and I would rather be on the ground looking up.
P.P.S. (?) One important way to stay level in a decaying society is by knowing where success comes from. We see decay more easily because only the big things can get our attention, and the biggest things and institutions fall hardest. But big things come from little things, and if every day there’s a giant falling, there’s a David rising. And nobody will know David is there until he gets there. Nobody will even suspect David exists until he gets there. The rise of all great things is a surprise. The end of all great things is obvious. Thus I advise us all to expect surprises — and for many of them to be good. Let Disney and Miss America and CNN collapse — and let somebody else discover magic, and beauty, and become important telling us all about it.
*Regarding money trouble, I heard a man the other day, whose name I can’t find, pose a few questions to a crowd. He said
Money isn’t even in your Top 3. If you were offered a million dollars a day, but you had to die tomorrow, would you take the money? No — so that means time is more important than money. If you were offered a million dollars a day, but you’ve gotta be sick the rest of your life, would you take the money? No again — so health is better than money. What if I offer millions of dollars but your mama’s going to die tomorrow: do you want it? No again — so relationships are worth more than money too.
—something to remember when your heart is full but your bank account dries up.
**When life gets really absurd or bad things pile up it's comical; and if I could have listed "no sense of humor" as the 11th Sign of Foolishness I would have. But being humorless is something God slaps on you at birth — a disability harder on a man than being ugly, or stupid. And if laughter really is the best medicine, how else could I categorize a bore than with the mentally unwell? He’s not a fool: he's biologically, spiritually, and mentally disabled. It’s no small comfort to me he's usually my chief antagonist. I’m abounding in life — and the dying see me, and they hate me.
***I think man's tendency is to draw the line for pain tolerance higher; and woman's tendency, due to her (sincerely, ladies, thank you) drive to nurture children, is lower. We need both drives to survive, but in the modern age, where women mix with men in almost everything and get special protections, women tend to get their way on it. And it’s killing the men. First because the bar gets lowered until we’re too weak to deal with life. And second because we feel we’re too weak to deal with it. I believe the second, which kills your spirit, is just as deadly as the first.
****Those who disagree with me, and think I'm ignorant, and want me to “trust the science” can take it up with a professional psychologist. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple writes, in Our Culture, What's Left of It,
There is something to be said here about the word ‘depression,’ which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient’s notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.
Truth doesn't need a professional to prove it — but if a moron only listens to a lab coat, you can always find one out there. You can always find one to say the opposite, too.
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