Crazy is a numbers game.
This crisp amalgamation of words has been coined together by one of my favorite pseudonymous writers, Jed McKenna. A quote that packs entire libraries into an eloquently loaded shutgun to destroy boundaries with.
The understanding behind the words tells you more about the world around you than you’re maybe giving credit to right now.
What is crazy?
What do you consider to be crazy?
Maybe jumping out of a plane.
Maybe sleeping under a bridge.
Maybe working 14 hour days on a project you’re obsessed with.
Maybe quitting a great paying job to become a cashier on the beach.
But really, what actually is crazy?
What metrics does an activity need to abide by in order to be placed under the umbrella of the word crazy?
If one person jumps off a cliff they’re crazy. If a hundred people jump off a cliff they’re a cult. If millions jump off a cliff that’s culture.
A clear way to visualize the meaning is this:
The word crazy is the denial of permission by society.
Anything that is not under societally agreed upon terms is being denied permission through being placed in the loony person category.
You may have a burning obsession for things the normal folk has no understanding of.
The lack of understanding about where the desire arises from leads a person falling under the umbrella of the societal collective conscious to categorize anyone that strays away from the mean as crazy.
This categorization may lead one to be turned back away from pursuing something that has been burning inside themselves for years only to have the collective societal conscious extinguish such desires.
I will tell you this.
You always know what you want to do, you’re just searching for permission to do so.
Being classified as crazy is a way to be denied permission by society.
The antonym of crazy is not sane, but normal. Sanity has at its roots the requirement of being in the proximity of truth, and a crazy person may as well be more sane than a normal person. In the societal sense though, the state of sanity is given birth to as a consequence of defining normality. Sanity is a consequence of the norm, anything that is not normal, sane, is automatically rendered as insane.
My interest in health and human performance has lead me down the rabbit hole of longevity research and people like Bryan Johnson, the self proclaimed “most measured human in history”.
Brian takes 100 pills a day, Brian eats a strict vegan diet. Brian has extreme anti-aging protocols that the average human cannot even comprehend.
Brian has a lot of backlash form lots of people, from the normal Joe, and even the health community. He is seen as a crazy delusional elf.
Social media loves to criticize such extreme health freaks by telling them “life is short, you should live more, you should enjoy it” without realizing that going to such extremes is exactly the way they enjoy life to the fullest. What looks like play to the “crazy” is not what looks like play to the normal.
On a call with my old high-school friend I haven’t talked with in a long time one thing stood out to me, after a lengthy conversation of my usual excited golden retriever style of wasting people’s time over the phone, I hear this:
It’s fine, I’m not doing much anyway, I’ll just go get drunk later
That line brought shivers down my spine. This is the normal. This is what people consider to be an enjoyable activity. Getting buzzed, destroying your liver, your sleep, to then waste an entire day recovering from the hangover, and potentially 2 weeks to be fully back into full gear. This is what the norm has taught us enjoying life is.
And if you’ve decided to stay away from alcohol you’re an alien between the humans.
You may have certain ways to move through the world that place you in the loonie bag. Every person you meet that abides by the collective societal conscious will unknowingly try to persuade you into adapting what is considered socially agreed upon.
Society can only put one that doesn’t wait for its permission down.
There are individuals in the world choosing to pursue spiritual enlightenment to then frequently be ending up in mental asylums. Are they crazy? Or did they just see something so clearly that nobody can ever unsee, and few others can ever understand?
I myself have very specific and peculiar health habits. Crazy diets, crazy supplements, red light therapy, attaching a grounding wire to my feet. Not getting a driver’s license to be more active. Weirdo.
And people notice too, coworkers like to poke fun at such habits only to be met with silence.
You are crazy, you’re uncompromising, you keep yourself to a standard not commonly held. There’s nothing to be talked about. No idea to persuade someone of. It’s you, your life, your highly specialized terms you have signed in a contract with your own self. No explanations are needed. There only is silence to be met with for one not initiated into such ways of moving through the world.
This is not better in any way. Just different. A meticulously chosen alternative way of living were every person that abides by the mind of the norm will become an agent in the pursuit of trying to persuade you into abiding by the same rules of the same norm.
And all of it is unconscious too.
All evils are due to lack of knowledge.
~ David Deutsch
Ultimately we’re all trying to achieve the same goal.
What people would call happiness.
And what I would call the absence of pain.
The goal is the same, the path is entirely different.
One may try to achieve the absence of pain through sedation which later on leads to pain.
And another will trying to achieve the absence of pain by treating the cause, or becoming the person that is not bothered by its presence.
Same goal, different paradigm.
A person crazy in their ways to achieve such goals may be met with the remark:
You should enjoy life more
To which my answer is this:
I am.
And I’m thriving.