Tag Archives: new normal

Why Can’t You Just Be Normal?

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I admit I have never been what most people would consider normal.  I have been much bigger and physically stronger than most people I know most of my life.  I have usually been one of the smartest people in every group I’ve been part of.  Smarts and strength do not ‘normally’ go together, at least not according to popular stereotype.  I have also always been one of those rare kids who never stopped asking ‘why’ to everything.  I just turned thirty six years old and I still ask ‘why’ to everything just like I did when I was eight years old.

I’m sure most of you who are parents and have dealt with grade school children get asked ‘why’ to everything.  Why is the sky blue?  Why is the grass green?  Why did my dog die?  Why do people fight wars? Why do people dump toxic sludge into the ocean?  And on it goes.  Tragically most people quit asking why entirely about the time they hit puberty and become interested in sex, sports, and popular culture.  I never developed a strong appetite for any of these three aspects of life.  My friends and I were discussing economics, science, and foreign policy when we were thirteen years old, right about the time most of our peers and elders outcasted us.  I think we were outcasted because we didn’t care about the latest episode of ‘Friends’ or ‘The Simpsons’ or how bad the football team lost on Friday night.

My close friends and I were never popular or considered normal, especially in high school.  While most of my rural school was listening to Garth Brooks, Faith Hill, and Alan Jackson, my friends and I were listening to Metallica, AC/DC, Green Day, Marilyn Manson, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and other hard rock groups that were big in the late 1990s.  People thought it was odd that my best friend was a girl.  Most people figured we were having sex (which we never did) just to wrap their minds around the foreign concept that platonic friendships can exist between teenage boys and teenage girls.

I am not what most people would consider normal, mental illness or not. I never have been normal and I certainly don’t care to start being normal now.  I never want to engage in normal behavior, especially with what I have seen out of normal people just from my previous jobs and some of my normal friends’ Facebook postings.  I care about the plight of the poor.  I also do not envy the wealthy.  I believe climate change is real and we  are contributing to it.  But I also believe we will adapt to climate change, manage it, and even solve it.  Our species has survived small pox epidemics, bubonic plagues, malaria, famines, hundreds of wars, the Dark Ages, and several ice ages with only a pittance of the science and knowledge we have even today.  And our knowledge is only continuing to grow with each passing day.  Science and knowledge are not static, don’t fool yourself.  We have knocked problems down for thousands of years.  We are knocking down problems even as you read these passages.  We will continue to knock problems down.  It is what our species does.  Birds can fly, lions can hunt, fish can breathe underwater, we humans see problems and solve them.  One of the most encouraging things I tell myself everyday is “many people much smarter than me are thinking things up.”

I support renewable energy. I don’t buy the whole “drill baby drill” nonsense, climate change or not. I believe we are and will keep advancing and find far better ways of powering civilization and doing things.  If Henry Ford just listened to public opinion, he’d just sold faster and stronger horses.  If Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla would have just listened to public opinion, we would not have gotten electricity when we did. I also believe we would have never gotten to where we could use renewable energy without using fossil fuels first.  But like the use of whale oil and wax candles, we will move beyond oil to even better energy sources.  I believe we will leave the oil age long before we run out of oil, just like we left the bronze age three thousand years ago and yet we still use copper and tin.

I am not afraid of foreigners and immigrants.  Ninety five percent of planet Earth does not come from America already.  I guarantee you my ancestors from Germany weren’t fluent in English (nor were they doctors or engineers) when they first set foot on Ellis Island.  If anthropologists are correct, we’re all immigrants one way or another.  I don’t watch regular news casts because I am convinced the regular news reports only bad news and only a fraction of what could be reported.  But bad news is reported on so much only because that is what we humans are predisposed to notice.  It’s in our genes.  Our minds can only take in so much information and survival is priority number one of all species.

I believe that decades from now, future generations will be amazed that people used to work in manufacturing, farming, and customer service instead of letting machines and computer programs do most of this repetitive work.  It’s an election year in my country and all sides are talking about bringing back jobs to America.  Most low to mid level manufacturing jobs are never coming back to America.  Many manufacturers in China and other countries where we outsourced our manufacturing are replacing their human workers with machines even as we speak.   And this is before 3D printing becomes mainstream, which it will within ten years. The days of people going straight from high school to a manufacturing job for the next forty five years with a pension, union protection, and insurance are just as dead as the days of the blacksmith and wagon maker.  So also are gone the days of a family with eight kids being able to make a living on 40 acres of farmland.  We simply no longer need ninety percent of our population working in farming or manufacturing like we did during the Industrial Revolution.  And these people had really low standard of living by modern standards anyway.  Hans Rosling gives some pretty good TED talks about how standards of living are rising all over the world, not just in North America and Western Europe.

Change is the only real constant.  Trying to hold onto the old tried and true may be normal but it merely delays the inevitable. The US banned stem cell research several years ago only to see that research go to countries like South Korea and China.  Now that stem cell research can be done without aborted fetuses, the US welcomed it back but will be playing catch up in this field for years to come.  Normal people talk about building walls, closing off the national borders, and isolating.  Yeah, that worked miracles during the Cold War and ancient China.  If normal people would have had all the say, we’d have never gotten rid of slavery, we’d be systematically discriminating against women, religious, and racial minorities far more than we are now, children working in mines and mills would be considered ‘character building’,  we’d still have the divine right of kings and emperors, and we would have never entered the Industrial Revolution, let alone our current Information Revolution.  These same people who fear change and machines taking their jobs don’t seem to be rushing to join Amish communities or throw away their smart phones.  But it’s normal to be selective, have cognitive biases, and to overestimate how great the past was while underestimating the possibility for the future.  Normal is common.  Normal does not change the world, especially not for the better.  Normal is boring.  And dare I say normal sucks.

 

To The Stars With Difficulty

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The road to the life of our dreams is seldom a straight and smooth one.  I admit I don’t remind myself of that enough.  But life is mainly about how many times you get up after being knocked down.  I have been knocked down quite a bit in the last several months as my previous posts have shown.  But I have to keep getting up and moving forward.  Yes I lost a grandmother who was one of my closest confidants.  Yes my back got messed up in a car accident.  Yes I got lazy about losing weight and gained much of the weight I lost.  Yes I had difficulties and relapses with my schizophrenia.  Yes I became lazy in my social life.  Yes I developed a negative attitude about many things.  Yes I became depressed and lazy in my personal habits.  It’s all true.

But that does not define me any longer.  I won’t allow it to define me.  I do have problems I’ve been dealing with.  But I will solve them and keep moving forward.  I have solved problems in the past and I will solve my problems again.  No I may not make my goal of being at my high school weight within the time frame I set for myself two years ago.  But I won’t give up on pursuing that goal.  No I haven’t been able to exercise for two weeks because of my bad back.  Yes I made excuses not to exercise because the weather was lousy this spring.  Yes I lost a lot of my social safety net when I became paranoid and thought I could do all things on my own.  But that is changing starting here and now.  I am not going to go out without a fight.  I am not giving up on improving my health.  I lost seventy pounds in a little over a year only to gain at least forty pounds back in a year.  But I am stopping the bleeding.  I lost weight before and I will do it again.  I had good mental health before and I can gain it back even with a mental illness.  I have had good friends and lots of acquaintances before and I will have them again.  It starts here and now.  It starts today.  I am no longer going to be my past failures.  I have been through difficulties, some beyond my control and some even self inflicted.  I am going to be better all around.  And the road to the stars for me restarts here and now.

New Normal verses Old Normal

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When I was growing up as a precocious child in the rural corn belt of Nebraska, I was frequently asked “Why can’t you be normal”.  My classmates, the adults in my life, and even my own family asked me this frequently. I didn’t have the foresight or the courage then to ask “What defines normal” or even “Who defines normal”.

Looking back on it years later I know I never would have gotten any kind of direct answer simply because what qualifies as normal keeps changing.  In 1750 it was normal for two out of three children born in London, England to die before their fifth birthday.  Now in the developed world (and increasingly so in the developing nations) infant mortality is rare.  It is so rare now that if most of us were to look back five or six generations in our family tree, we would find that our most of our ancestors had more dead children than most of us have children or siblings.  That’s what breakthroughs in medical science can do.  As recently as my parent’s generation, most people were married in their early to mid twenties and had children within a few years.  Now it is quite common for people of my generation to not marry until their thirties or even not marry at all.  Back when my parents were in their twenties, if you weren’t married before thirty you were thought insane or gay.  Now the stigmas on both homosexuality and lifelong bachelorhood are in retreat.  Instances like these create new normals out of old normals that no longer worked.

There are things that go on now most people take for granted that may be looked out in horror by future generations.  Even though wars haven’t really been fought between developed nations since World War II, I can imagine a future where people will look back at their ancestors and wonder how we justified ourselves in fighting wars and proxy wars that went on for years.  Perhaps committing any kind of violence against other people will someday be viewed with the same horror we in 2016 view slavery, inquisitions, and wars of territory expansion.  I can hope, can’t I?  Perhaps in future years it will seem absurd for people to hate others based on their political views.  I can only hope so, otherwise I am forever condemned having to listen to people bicker back on forth about political beliefs on Facebook and Youtube when all I really want to do is chat with a few friends and watch a few videos.  I hope our obsession and splitting hairs over political beliefs will someday seem as absurd as Catholics and Protestants fighting during the Renaissance is to our 21st century sensibilities.  Besides it’s not like politicians ever invented any labor saving devices, cured any deadly diseases, did any serious scientific research, or thought up better and less cruel ways of living.  At most, they provided some funding and got out of the scientists and engineers ways.  Many of the most influential and beneficial people who made a difference in history never held a public office, won a battle, or sat on a throne.  Remember that the next time you take your political beliefs seriously.

Less dogmatic and hateful attitudes about political beliefs would be nice.  What would be even nicer is less stigma and discrimination against those with mental health issues.  Seems to me that having mental illness is one of those few things many people don’t feel bad at all about stigmatizing.  It is essentially stigma’s final frontier.  Every week it seems there are crime drama shows where the accused perpetrator is mentally ill or an introverted loner who doesn’t fit in.  It also seems too common someone with a mental illness committing a violent crime gets far more attention than homeless mentally ill people being beaten by cops or gangs of ‘concerned citizens.’  Funding for mental hospitals has been dramatically cut over the years, often leaving the most afflicted to either the street, prison, or dead.  It seems that prisons have become de facto mental health hospitals for a sizable portion of the mentally ill population.  I know that the stats are a few years old in the link.  But I have little reason to believe that the situation for mentally ill individuals in prisons has gotten much better in recent years.  The treatment of seriously mentally ill individuals, at least in my country, is barbaric and insane.  What did you think was going to happen when funding for mental hospitals was cut?  Did you think the problems of the mentally ill would magically vanish once the hospitals were no longer well funded?  Or did you think mentally ill people like myself are making our illnesses up and don’t need help?  There should be no wonder why I was so quick to self commit myself on two separate occasions.  There should be no wonder why I want to change my medications even after a few mini breakdowns.  I don’t want to wind up in prison or dead for the crime of having a psychotic breakdown in front of the wrong person.  You won’t prosecute the handfuls of crooked bankers who triggered the Great Recession but you will throw thousands of mentally ill people in jail because you don’t know what else to do with them?  Way to stay classy. This is certainly one old normal that is in dire need of a quick death and being replaced by a new normal of more understanding, compassion, and better treatments.  And yes, we can find the funding to do this transition if we care enough to do so.

Speaking of practices some currently on the fringes of normal society abhor, maybe even the age old practice of killing animals for food will seem barbaric to future generations.  If lab grown meat gains traction in future years it could.  Don’t be so quick to scoff.  In 1900, who would have thought Henry Ford and his insane motorized carriage would put the draft horse out of business within several years?  Or who would have thought in 1850 that John Rockefeller would find great and numerous uses for a scummy and sludgy nuisance called petroleum?  These two by themselves got rid of old normals and created a new normal.  The internet is a key example of a new normal.  If I was born even fifteen years earlier I would have never been doing this blog.  Who knows what new normals are on their way?  Stay tuned my friends.  Things are going to be getting more interesting than they already are.