“Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz
This world is going bonkers and not because mother nature has finally given up on us and showing her wrath, it’s because the insanity of humans has turned a perfectly working world into a chaotic mess and there is nothing that can be done about it now. When I started researching about this insane world online, I came across tons and tons of articles that claimed to give you tips and strategies to help survive in this insane world, tips to apparently save you from depression (possibly even suicide) and improve your productivity. After reading almost 50 odd articles (I know the number is insane, I should have stopped at just 2), the only learning I gained was that the Internet is filled with garbage. In reality, we humans love insanity, we revel in the chaos and we enjoy reading about the perils that the world is suffering through as long as it doesn’t affect our daily routine.
Even though I hate human species a lot, I don’t think they are to be blamed for loving the chaos and the suffering surrounding them. From the day we are born, we are given a set of rules to follow by instilling a fear in us that if you don’t follow rules, bad things will happen. Rules are not bad per say, in fact I like rules, rules ensure people follow a pattern which helps improve the survival rate. So, giving a rule book when we are born is not a bad thing, however, the rules keep changing as we grow older.
For e.g. as a kid you were told to sleep early, sometimes as early as 7 PM, parents who were able to put their kids to sleep early would feel proud of their ability to discipline their child. The reasoning is that the more you sleep, the smarter you become as your brain is growing when you are sleeping. It probably is true, who am I to argue with science but what the people teaching you to sleep early forget is that one day you will become an adult, will start sleeping late, sometimes not sleep at all and still be smart. There can be two reasons for it, either we believe that we gain all the smartness as a kid because we sleep early or we are just stupid enough to believe that sleep and smartness have a correlation. Imagine how the kid must be feeling when he/she becomes an adult and is allowed to sleep whenever sleep comes and keeps wondering why the hell was he made to sleep at a particular time even when he was not sleepy.
Another classic example is of chocolates, as kids we are told that chocolates are bad, we are only allowed to eat them in moderate quantities, only to grow up and binge eat a full chocolate cake just because adults can. Fact that we couldn’t be late to school and we needed to reach before the first bell rang only to grow up and reach the office whenever we were able to wake up and get ready.
My point is that what we are taught as kids doesn’t really match up to what is expected from us as adults and it’s confusing. Kid rules feel such a waste of time because for 18 years of your life, you follow rules set by your parents, teachers, friends, siblings and then boom – you are 18 and you get to make your own rules. You sleep whenever you want, you eat whatever you want, you watch whatever you want and you go wherever you want. That’s the beginning of insanity and chaos because whatever you were taught for 18 years just washes away with the onset of adulthood.
We are taught to love peace, to love humans, school prayers are about unity and in the same school you are bullied, you are humiliated and made to feel ashamed of yourself and then we wonder why teenagers suffer depression. At home, we are taught to respect elders, be polite to people, be kind to everyone and in the same house you are molested by the same elders who you respected. As a friend you share secrets, you make pacts, you are expected to be there when your friend needs you and the same friend will forget you for some other hot chick/dude. At church we are taught that god loves us all equally and then you see the neighbour having a bigger house and better car than you and wonder, why did god love them more? Colleges teach you world peace and then the same colleges will expelle you when you stand to protest against war happening in Gaza. Government talks about secularism of religions and races and the same government will persecute you for standing against muslim injustice.
The list goes on and on but the key point is that we are chaos, we are a mess and we enjoy it. Whoever tries to give a lecture of righteousness can save it for some TED speech where a bunch of losers will sit and clap. People will say – don’t look at the negative, try to look for goodness in people, but reality is that there is no goodness, there is no positive. What is good for you might be bad for someone, there are no rules to define what is good or bad so how can you look for something intangible. The problem is that we have all been taught to live in a bubble, a bubble of things we thought were good and we judge everything else outside the bubble. We learn to sugar coat our words, we learn to circumvent topics that are uncomfortable, we learn to be nice to everyone by smiling and keep hoping that our bubble never bursts. We sit in a fancy restaurant and talk about people dying of hunger in Syria and we think we are good people because we empathize with them while putting lobster in our mouth.
I’m not a nice person, I did not learn to sugar coat words, I did not learn to circumvent facts even if they made others uncomfortable. People sometimes find me intimidating because I refuse to sit politely and keep smiling at boredom. I’m living in a chaotic world and while I may not be able to stop the war and global warming, I sure can tell people who they are, whether they like it or not. That is my way to bring some sanity in this insane world by telling people to act their normal self, remove the cloak of fake goodness and be true to yourself. Speaking your true mind in the open would sound rude and condescending and might end up labeling you as insane but insanity is the only way to survive in this insane world.
