How to Stay Sane
Modern life can feel a little crazy-making
For every truth, there is an infinite number of falsehoods and lies. This makes staying sane difficult.
Truth has an advantage though: it cannot be killed. It can be ignored, wounded, or buried. But never truly defeated.
While lies are created by the second, they can be extinguished just as quickly, once the light of truth is shone upon them. For what can be destroyed by the truth will be.
Normalised insanity
Beliefs that are not concordant with reality are insane. And insanity is being normalised.
You feel this to be true. You might not have articulated it verbally, but you’ve seen it happen to your friends and family, and in the media. You probably even feel it within yourself. A mind splinter.
Everywhere you turn, someone is saying something that is just ridiculous. As if truth does not matter. Which isn’t exactly new — the problem is that now half the world seems to clap when they do.
- Politicians will make complete fabrications of history
- Public figures will say being overweight is healthy
- Tech “leaders” will assure you everything is alright when that’s not what your eyes and ears tell you
- And even everyday men and women will say things about the opposite sex that are just completely unfounded and only based on what the hive-mind algorithm has pumped into their brain
A lot of this can be seen as insanity. Especially when you recognise that talking to a smart 14-year-old results in more sane answers than talking to a smart 28-year-old about these things.
The 28-year-old should be more intelligent, using their years of experience and more mature brain. Yet, those intervening years have mostly just brainwashed them.
Which brings me to the best predictor of insanity that I know: existing for too long in a singular ecosystem. That’s where brainwashing occurs.
Why this is the problem
No system of knowledge is completely accurate. We are still without a Unified Theory of Reality. Even for the most mundane topics you eventually run into the limits of what is known and err.
Take architecture for example. If you dive deep enough into the topic of architecture, you will start to accumulate half-truths and untruths. Facts about the world that just aren’t so. Mini-doses of insanity. This can happen because the knowledge contradicts some other field (such as engineering or the psychology of aesthetics), extrapolates incorrectly over a knowledge gap without realising it, or misinterprets evidence and draws a false conclusion.
A multitude of ways exist that can lead some sliver of knowledge to be erroneous. There is only one right and many, many wrong. This sliver of knowledge can be anything from a how-to-guide, to a book, a formal philosophy, or an academic field.
Furthermore, it is not self-evident from within the field of knowledge where the errors are. Or that they even exist, unless you grant that premise prima facie.
This leads me to the conclusion that it is rarely the content of any one field that is problematic. It is its all-consuming nature.
Whether it be Red Pill, Wokeism, or IIFYM, the problem is less to do with what those domains are about, and more to do with the belief they are all you should believe. Obsession, intolerance, and dogma quickly follow.
The best of the bad ideas
Science, capitalism, and democracy are terrible ideas. They are utterly flawed. They lead to nerds who know everything about nothing, profit-seeking companies with wicked externalities, and elected idiots.
But they are the best bad ideas we have. And they are better, by many orders of magnitude, than their competitors. Assuming personal sovereignty and quality of life are among the things you care about.
What makes these imperfect ideas so useful? They have self-correction mechanisms built into them. They can be slow and imprecise, but self-correcting systems are qualitatively better than self-reinforcing ones when it comes to the diverse nature of human affairs.
Reclaiming your sanity
The simplest method I know for fighting back against algorithms and tribes that only want to reinforce your beliefs is to exist in multiple ecosystems.
Here, an ecosystem can be a friendship group, an interest or hobby, or even just an online platform.
You’ll find that there is insanity on both Instagram and X — but they’ll be different kinds of insanity. If you only existed in one of those ecosystems, you might be tempted to conclude that’s just how things are; the way of the world. It’s only through the contrast that you catch a glimpse of the territory underneath the map. You have a chance to ground your thoughts and beliefs.
Why does this work?
Consilience. Knowledge converges.
While lies don’t point to anything, truth points to truth. It becomes a reliable system of signs you can follow. It is only the constraint placed upon truth — that it must point at other true things — that allows it to become something that will not outgrow, but outlast, all the falsehoods.
So take interest in a variety of things. Run into the walls of each ecosystem; notice its limitations and partake in others.
Finally, if you notice someone who has fallen too deeply into an unproductive ecosystem (read: you don’t approve of their beliefs), try to help them. Don’t chastise them — how dare you hold these beliefs! — that is only going to reinforce things. My experience tells me that the best thing you can do is to show them other things and try to capture their interest.
Curiosity can remedy a multitude of intellectual sins.