The amount of free, uncluttered horizontal space in someone’s home is an excellent indicator of their mental health.
A significant portion of humans are, regarding any ability, gifted. Say 10% of us are particularly gifted at doing sports - it follows there is another 10% gifted at telling lies. Madden’s Spectrum Observation.
Many people who are annoyed, disappointed, or furious with you will not say a single word to you about it.
Will gladly place an alarmingly large bet on your income in the USA based solely on two factors from your childhood: its zip code, and if your parents subscribed to a newspaper.
Guessing people’s motives or intentions is a losing proposition - there’s this thing called the unconscious mind, so sometimes a person you find difficult doesn’t even know why they said or did this or that.
That being said, should someone tell you something pleasant, but then do something unpleasant, pay attention to the action.
Occam’s Razor is the preferred tool for slicing and dicing the bizarre claims the religious, uninformed, superstitious, junk non-science, and conspiracy minded embrace. While we’re in the neighborhood of world views, remember that, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.”
Not sure what Marcus Aurelius was thinking when he wrote, “Comparisons are odious,” but assure you that your mediocre essay, invention, play, test scores, credit rating, business plan, race time, card trick, bass line, recipe, or group project is not going to win any prizes.
Trauma is common, does not announce itself to the room, and affects its sufferers for their whole lives, unless addressed by a competent clinician. What you think I mean by the word “trauma,” is probably far too narrow.
If you manage to fake rigor, or an orgasm, nobody wins.
The medical/psychological literature will confirm this bold claim: there is no way that exercising, or helping somebody else, will not make you feel better. From a bad day to depression, try to remember this duet of proven cure.
There is no fixing stupid. Addendum: this applies to abilities which clearly elude you. Acceptance is a key to ending your suffering.
If you are not early, you are late.
Many of the quotations you attribute to Mark Twain or Voltaire were never said or written by Mark Twain or Voltaire. Those two are known as “quote magnets” by scholars.
There is an old expression, “Practice makes perfect.” It is mostly correct, but I sure wish I had instead heard the one I first heard when I was about thirty-five and a lot of damage already done: “Practice makes permanent.”
Being quiet does not make somebody deep. It’s just means they are quiet. There are lots of noisy wise people. There are lots of quiet fools.
All things change, including relationships with people with whom at one time you were very close. If you are fortunate enough to have five people with whom you stay in some kind of intimacy, platonic or sexual, you are rich in relationships.
Dead guy told me twenty-five years ago that everybody wants to be on a diet - but nobody wants to be hungry. If you decide you want to live longer and be healthier and drop the weight you are carrying around, live with some hunger (like you had when you were a child and adolescent).
The head neurologist of a fancy healthcare system had no idea how I finished high school, given the severity of my learning disabilities. People like me don’t get a master’s degree. This is not a brag, so much as much as an admission. Learning disabilities are quite common, and many of the struggles you and others face are born of a brain not working entirely optimally. There is no fault. There is no shame. Expecting a person with no arms to catch your ball is insane.
Helping somebody is very different than enabling somebody. A shocking amount of humans will never learn the difference.
Many adults do not know the difference between facts and opinions - a concept that most reasonably bright thirteen year olds have mastered.
Being polite isn’t pointless convention: it’s both social lubricant, and a way of being more aware of others’ needs.
Bit of shorthand in psychology: Jung was speculating, and Sigmund Freud was articulating. If you don’t think that Sigmund Freud changed the world more than almost any other human being, you are full of shit. If that comment makes you feel defensive, it was Sigmund Freud who articulated defenses as a primary mechanism for humans.
Helen Keller learned that things have names, and it shattered her world in a process we can only imagine. The important things that have names - that are entirely unknown to you - are legion. Try to learn some more of them.
With that in mind, the power of Denial is vast, possibly equaling the power that holds atoms together. You are probably reading this on an object society collectively decided to manufacture, but not to dispose of properly, which means that when you dispose of it, its poison will leach into the soil and water on our tiny little planet. Very little of it by mass will be recycled.
Indeed, there is far, far more evidence that we humans are destroying the very habitat that we live in, like an insane colony of mice refusing to crap outside of their sleeping quarters, than there is for angels or ghosts. But those two non-things get a lot of press, whereas Denial gets zip.
This amazing power of Denial extends to many quarters you wouldn’t at first suspect. Whereas children outgrow the myth of Santa Claus — which like all myths does have a use – most of them will never outgrow the idea of an invisible being interested in our affairs. If such a being existed, they have long owed us a plausible explanation for everything from childhood leukemia to the entities’ believers suffering excruciating deaths for no good reason.
Perhaps the luckiest trait that a human might have is curiosity (presuming good health). Many people hold that they are interested in the truth, but in fact most of them are just interested in certainty. Curiosity will drive you to the truth, but its various perversions will keep you certain of many things, many of which are not true.
Debts/loans are jointly manufactured by those who don’t need more money for those who have little to no money. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, but many of us go into debt to survive, and some of us get out only because of a death in the family. The stats are grim, and because of Denial, almost never discussed openly.
The amount of grown-ass adults who cannot distinguish between a need and a want is baffling. Some of the debt described above is simply from people purchasing goods and services they don’t need (living beyond their means), from a new car rather than a perfectly good used one, to a manicure (instead of a friend doing their nails), to feeding a growing and nasty gambling habit.
Arguably the two most important Latin phrases to know are a priori and a postiori. They concern what you can know, and how you can know it. Most humans live in a world of beliefs they were told — they live in an a priori world. Grown-ups and mature people live in the world of a postiori evidence — things they were told, but they then investigated, and found to be far more plausible than comforting myths.
Chosen silence leads to many good things. Whether it is meditation, a Yoga pose, or a sunrise stroll, find one that works for you. Not talking about pondering here. Talking about giving that monkey-mind a break.
Many things which are not for good for you, nor for others, nor for the planet - are insanely popular. From the concussion–causing sport of American football, to eating dead animals, to drinking yeast shit regularly, to sitting on your ass and watching unchallenging material scroll before your eyes, please try to remember this life you have is not a dress rehearsal, so you might want to diligently search for unpopular truths, and thereby discover what is good for you and others.
Mental illness is about as rare as broken limbs and the common cold, and because of Denial, most college graduates can tell you what your liver does, but not the difference between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Fixing that knowledge base is up to you. Mental illness is the last taboo.
If you can read this, congrats – you are at least somewhat literate in English. If you can comprehend it after seeing it, you are in a tiny minority, as many college graduates are not proficient readers at this time in human history, and most people don’t look up words they don’t know. The dictionary-averse think of their behavior as some sort of character flaw, rather than simply not knowing a word’s meaning. Your ignorance (look up where that word comes from) as to a word’s meaning is a fixable problem.
Patterns are a thing. In politics, in chess, in your sex life. Riding the mustang of Denial, many go to their deaths having never been willing to see what they are up to is in nobody’s best interest, including their own.
Names and definitions matter. Imagine if type II diabetes was called instead, “The Shitty Eating Disorder,” or if the word theology in the dictionary had an asterisk, “*In western countries, often referring to the three, dominant a priori religions. Their faith is based on their three books, each of which has been corrupted and altered through several civilizations and languages over two millennia prior to the myth fan’s printed version. If you disagree with their interpretation, you are automatically wrong, and indeed damned for your misunderstanding.”
Nobody will read this in two, much less 200 years. I wrote it because I’ve been thinking about it for a decade or two, and decided this weekend was the time to jot it all down. Educated, smart people will still read Shakespeare, and listen to Bach in 200 years, but not because of elitism or The Patriarchy. Excellence is a thing.
The notion that you have to “do what you love” to pay the bills is unhelpful in a world full of people seeking the same. Do what you love please, but don’t feel entitled to get paid for it. Hint: the higher the skill level required for the work, the less talent & luck are required. Hint two: people providing needed rather than merely wanted goods or services do better financially.
Most of the critical decisions you will make - who to love, where to live, what kind of work to do, to have or not have children - cannot be broached with logic. They are entirely driven by feelings.
Speaking of feelings, feelings trump thoughts and reasoning
*every single time.*
Whether it is the reaction to a despot abusing power, or grief leading to the bereaved contacting charlatans who feign communication with the dead, or your thought/self-judgement that you really should practice the piano or paint more when you don’t really want to, or date someone because they check all the boxes, abandon all hope. Hope by the way is a kind of feeling. You can’t think yourself into action that you just don’t want to do, and you can’t argue with people whose feelings are built on a foundation of those a priori thingies.
None of the above has anything to do with being disciplined, which is invaluable for being effective. While we’re here, look up the etymology for “discipline,” and blow your mind that you didn’t know that all these years.
Some is not a number, soon is not a time.
If you want to play music, good idea to learn how to read music. If you want to be a human being, good idea to learn how to read at a deeper level. You probably don’t know that the brains of people who learn to read become physiologically different than those who are illiterate. This is one of many very unpopular facts I happen to know.
Hail Romans (native English speakers)! Speaking another language at a conversational level is not a neat party trick: it is your entree into worlds, that as was the case for Helen Keller before her breakthrough, are beyond metaphor. Friendships are born of this pleasant endeavor, art is found, strangers are instantly more pleasant when greeted in their mother tongue. Real magic. English being as dominant as Latin was is an advantage to its speakers, but can’t even describe the boats you are missing.
Get your own set of unpopular facts, but make sure they are not racist or sexist bullshit that somebody told you, but you wanted your horrifying biases confirmed, so you accepted the new non-fact as revealed truth/certainty.
Comorbidity is a medical term that will open a world to you, and unless you already know it, does not mean what you think it means.
Much of the academic field of philosophy is again speculation. Very smart people, who did not have the technology to experiment to confirm a provable hypothesis, wrote a lot of very dense crap that is not remotely worth the several hundred hours trying to understand it, though some of you will be compelled to do so, which is fine. Everybody needs a hobby.
Sociopaths, like criminals, are not a societal construct. They are again a manifestation of that gifts/propensity/qualities spectrum noted a while back. Some people are very good at running fast, without really trying that hard to get good at it. Some people lack remorse, and they are not particularly rare – about 5% of the population. If you accept that there are delightful people all over the world, please accept there are terrible people all over the world, and societies needs to grow up and decide how to handle this painful truth.
Many people who are deemed terrible by others are simply struggling, but societies of all kinds refuse to grow up, drop their collective Denial, and help them. Many people make a handsome living pretending to help people, as a kind of dark pantomime, but refuse to measure their clients’ success, much less their efficacy, or as the professional, to gain a mature understanding of the problem in front of them.
Addiction, like trauma, is common, and keeps its sufferers (they’ve had their brain hijacked) both in a state of frozen, adolescent immaturity, and lacking insight (personal or societal).
Kindness is vastly underrated.
Dunning-Kruger are two guys who articulated the precise mechanism that generates most human suffering, and broadly what will probably bring civilization to an unhappy end, unless you help us reverse course. Not your neighbor. You. Step up.
Be part of the solution; many are unknowingly (cough cough Freud) and fervently part of the problem.
Very likely, I will learn much more before I die. I learn something astonishing almost every week, and/or that is quite useful for problem-solving and/or a richer life than I would have otherwise had. How? I seek it.
People are not different versions of you. Accepting the radical differences in gifts and deficits, that different value systems are common and extensive, and that others experience and understand the world fundamentally differently than you will reduce your struggles with yourself and others.
Things tend to go as they begin.
Kevin A. Madden
April 16th, 17th, and 18th, 2022
* The title references All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, published in 1986 by Robert Fulghum
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