What the hell is normal anymore?

In My Humble Opinion
21

This is true. There are different sets of mental illnesses depending upon which society you live in. For example, there’s no such illness as “Social Phobia” in Japan, where shyness is seen as a positive personality trait, and most public social interaction follows a set of rigid, formal rules that every person learns at a young age. In a place like the US, where being able to comfortably make small talk with all sorts of random strangers is considered normal (and even critical to success), those who are naturally quiet are considered mentally ill and must be cured.

Go to a therapist in Japan and complain of social anxiety, an inability to make eye contact with strangers, and a strong aversion to small talk, and you will be told that you are perfectly normal and healthy.

22

I was on the recieving end of an armed robbery, and suffered a brain injury.

While nursing me back to health, my mother convinced herself that I was showing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and she insisted that I see a shrink.

The psychologist ran me through a few tests. He found a couple of minor problems related to the skull fracture, and gave me advise on how to deal with that. He gave me a list of symptoms to watch out for, and then turned me loose.

So there is at least one honest shrink in the world.

23

“Normal is just a setting on the washing machine!”

24

“Normal?
That’s a word with no meaning!
Every human being that ever lived,
from Jojo the caveman,
down to the culmination of civilization,
namely, me,
was as eccentric as a pet coon,
once you caught him with his mask off!”
–Robert Heinlein, in The Rolling Stones

[I’m quoting from memory. Apologies to my fellow Heinlein junkies if I botched it.]

25

The thing is people are too obsesed with finding excuses why they failed. When in reality everyone fails.

I’ll give you an example, I have Meniere’s Disease, which basically means I have trouble balancing. I got this very young. Most people don’t get it till they are over 35. So I’ve had it since I was around 21. I fell down alot. I remember my doctor saying “Well Mark, next time you fall over, pick youself up.” That was his treatment.

And he was right. I had to learn to cope with it. Am I sick, yes I guess technically I am, but I don’t really fall over anymore and haven’t for years. I learned to cope with it. Yeah I could blame millions of things on it, but what good does it do? Yet people are much more comfortable placing blame than accepting responsiblity.

We’ve changed in a society that celebrates recovery instead of celebrating those who never succumb in the first place. I say it’s great for a person who has an alcohol or drug problem to go get help and get over that issue. But what about the person that never fell into that trap and resisted temptation. In my opinion those people are better than those who failed and recovered.

I am not saying being an ex-alcoholic is something to be ashamed of, but it’s nothing to be proud of. Alcoholism isn’t something to be celebrated it’s something to recover from.

And this is the problem we have gotten into. People who do right to begin with don’t get any credit while the message is, do drugs, do booze, do whatever you want, then say you’re sorry.

I hear people say “I grew up poor in the ghetto and it was impossible for me not to be a gang banger and do drugs, but now I’m better.” They get applauded. Well I’m not saying their story is a lie, what I am saying is I personally know people that grew up in the projects that didn’t do drugs, that didn’t join gangs, that were threatened everyday, and I think they have much more character and are much more worthy of applause than those who did it and now are sorry for it.

But they won’t get a “parade,” so to speak.

So this “celebration of self-abuse” has become popular in today’s society

26

Hikikomori.

27

That’s a very interesting point.

My take is that struggles with problems, and the conquests thereof, are what make these things dramatic and interesting. If there’s no struggle (or if there struggle is all internalized within a “strong” individual), to the outsider it looks like nothing is happening.

It’s not that we celebrate failure per se, I don’t think, it’s that it’s difficult to distinguish between those who successfully resisted and those who were never tempted to begin with (who, by your scale, would be even better).

These individuals, though strong, would be hard for the “regular” mistake-prone human to identify with, whereas somebody who has “fallen” and eventually climbed back up will have a detailed story that people can follow and relate to.

To be fair, there are certainly stories of people successfully resisting great temptations, and properly told, those too become relatable and interesting.

Basically, picture-perfect lives make for lousy drama and flawless gods make for poor heroes – if we can’t see some sort of vulnerability, we dismiss them as boring or false. I think coming-of-age stories (which recoveries are kinda similar to) are popular precisely because they mirror the less-than-perfect lives that most people have.

28

Sounds a lot like what we’d consider agoraphobia in the US.