It's OK son, we're all mentally ill

Son, don’t worry that you think your mind is like a flock of flamingos; all settled and calm and doing productive things one minute, startled and flying off in all directions the next, and kind of gangly and pink and weird in either case. We’re all like that. We’re all twisted and delusional, it’s the only way to survive. A sane, rational person would be driven instantly insane by the world around them. We all have little neuroses and self-delusions that get us through the day. Take these for instance:

Red hair fixes your personality problems. There is a pod of thought amongst some overweight women with no fashion sense, no humour and an F-cup chip on their shoulder that dying their hair fire-engine red will make them into Jenny Gross. The character, played by Melissa Bergland in Winners and Losers, is large and sexy. But that’s because she’s fun. She smiles, she has conversation and makes the body she has look beautiful. It’s a package deal. The budget option that comes out of a box from the beauty section at the supermarket isn’t working. But the pod thinks it is.

Sunglasses hide our perving. Men of all ages think this is true and no woman yet has fallen for it. Sitting at the coffee shop or posing against the handrail at the beach and admiring the geometry of the ladies is something we do but we’re not supposed to. What we think is that, if we put on the sunnies and turn our heads to be ostensibly gazing off to the far, blue horizon, then the owner of the geometry won’t know that our eyes aren’t aligned with our heads. This is crap. Women have an inbuilt perv-detecting radar that is not fooled by sunglasses. Damn!

That the world revolves around us. We are the centre of the universe and our desires and plans are the most important things. It follows, therefore, that all occurrences are evaluated against those desires and plans. If the lights are green and a parking spot is available then it’s God / Gaia / The Universal Spirit affirming our plans and telling us we’re going to win. If the driver in front is slow, if the rain falls on our garden wedding, if the key decision-maker pulls out of our big meeting then it’s aimed at us; it’s done just to thwart us and to make us into losers. “Why me?” we scream at the sky, knowing that the rain fell because we planned a wedding. It didn’t. Almost nothing is about us and our desires. But we think it is.

The checkout chick is impressed with our veggies. Look at the amount of fresh food I’m putting on the conveyor compared to the chubby parents with the chubby kids in front. Look at all the processed food in their trolley! Admire my three kilos of apples and 9 litres of milk. Envy my children their wholegrain bread and go green that I can get my kids to eat that spinach. See? I’m a great parent. They bleep the barcodes. They couldn’t care less.

We could survive in the wilderness. If civilization ended tomorrow, every man knows that he could survive out there. But for our family responsibilities, we’re all Bear Grylls – conquering nature with nothing but a pointed stick and a four man film crew. Like fun! How could I start a fire in the wilderness if I couldn’t watch an instructional YouTube video? Getting all wet and cold and doing all that trekking is fine provided there’s a warm shower and a cold beer somewhere. Most of us would be eaten by the first lizard, but we need to believe we could be Hiroo Onoda to keep our self-image of rugged masculinity alive.

That I’m right. That the world would be a better place if everyone was more like me. When people say that they want to “change the world”, they rarely specify what they want to change it into. I suspect that they want to change it into a world that’s perfect for them; not because they want to make it miserable for everyone else, they just genuinely believe that people would be happier if they were more like them. 

Patrick O’Brian put it well (from The Surgeon’s Mate)

“Every man is a hero of his own tale. Surely, Dr Maturin, every man must look on himself as wiser and more intelligent and more virtuous than the rest, so how could he see himself as the villain, or even as a minor character?”

It’s OK son, we’re all mentally ill, it’s just the degree that varies.

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Notes

Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese soldier that refused to believe that the war had finished and hid in the jungle in the Philippines, still fighting World War 2, until 1974.