The drama of a world gone mad leaves me longing for real peace

The man sounded genuinely surprised. Shocked, even. He hadn’t seen this coming.

He was calling to tell me some terrible news about his son. The kid had done something stupid. Again. This time, it’s going to have life-changing consequences. And I should mention that this irresponsible child isn’t 16. He’s 24.

But my friend has spent a couple of decades enabling this overgrown child to be irresponsible — and the kid has never faced any consequences. But even though everybody else could see the pattern — and could see where things were inevitably leading — my friend seemed shocked.

I kept my mouth shut, but what I was listening to made me feel crazy.

If you smash a hammer into a porcelain teacup, the cup is going to shatter into tiny pieces. It would be crazy to be surprised at the result. Any rational person knew the outcome before the hammer reached the cup. The outcome was inevitable when the choice was made.

But we go through life — both individually and as a culture — acting bewildered when our actions produce their inevitable results.

When I see this playing out — in the lives of my friends and in the life of my culture — it makes me feel as though I must be crazy. And it leaves me desperate to get away from the insane drama that produces this sort of chaotic dysfunction.

People spend months or years or even decades creating insanity in their lives — and then they seem surprised when the inevitable results of their decisions suddenly show up.

The easiest thing — and the most dishonest thing — would be to lecture you about how you ought to be more like me in this regard. I can’t say that with any sense of integrity, because I’ve fallen into the trap of doing this sort of thing, too.

So here’s the thing.

I’m not saying any of this out of anger. Or judgment. Or condescension. I’m saying it out of personal frustration with what it feels like to be inside my head as I observe all of this.

It would be so much easier if I could just note these contradictions and wild errors on the part of others and just ignore them. But I can’t. This is a fault in me. It’s not a fault in the people whose lives I’m observing.

I experience something that psychologists call cognitive dissonance when I see people doing things which are obviously going to cause predictable results. When I clearly see those things and know far ahead of time what’s coming, something in me expects other people to be able to see these things, too.

When I see someone swinging a metaphorical hammer into a teacup — and then expressing surprise that the teacup broke as a result — it makes me feel as though there’s a fundamental contradiction. Unless the person is stupid or mentally incapacitated, shouldn’t that person be able to see the predictable outcome just as easily as I do?

That’s the attitude I want to adopt. I want to blame you. I want to blame my friends and my neighbors and associates. I want to scream at everybody and demand to know why they can’t see what I see.

But when I’m honest with myself, I know that I’m blind, too, at least when it comes to my own decisions. Not always. Not even very often, according to my own evaluation. But often enough to know that I’ve acted like a blind idiot sometimes, too.

It’s not my purpose to tell you how to fix this in your own life. I don’t know how to tell you or anybody else to think more clearly and to accept the reality which is so clear to me. I don’t even know how to rid myself of the problem. Not completely.

So why does this seem like such a painful issue to me today?

Have you ever stopped to think that we might have been better off before we knew what other people were thinking all the time? Think back to the days before social media and before the Internet existed at all.

Did you know what people had on their minds?

Other than a few people who were close to me, I didn’t know the jumbled mess of thoughts and emotions that passed through people’s minds and hearts. I didn’t even know what was going on in the personal lives of most of the people I knew.

I think we were better off back then.

Today, most of us tell the world a lot of what’s going on in our lives and a lot of what’s going on in our minds. Instead of listening to a few friends with some nutty thoughts every now and then, we hear nutty and irrational thoughts from a group of people who are often the loudest and dumbest and most irrational around.

The sort of wildly contradictory behavior that was once private nonsense comes to seem like the public norm. And then those apparently crazy people start arguing among themselves. They insult each other. They scream at each other.

Soon, the entire world seems irrational and crazy. Eventually, some of us end up feeling as though the world has to be blind and stupid and crazy — or else we must be.

I don’t want to allow this to turn into a screed about social media, so I’m just going to say that I feel more peaceful — and I feel saner — when I’m not inundated with the contradictions and irrational thinking of so many people around me.

Are humans dumber today than they were 30 years ago? Are they less rational? Are they less sane?

My instinct is to say yes, but I doubt the facts support that conclusion. People haven’t changed that much, but the information that I take into my brain has dramatically changed in the last 20 years.

I can’t change the nature of what people are blasting into the media environment, but I’m certain that I have to find a way to limit what I consume.

I don’t need to know what everybody is thinking. I don’t need — or want — to know every time someone is doing something that I disagree with. I have absolutely no reason to know about things I can’t change, so please don’t pollute my mind with that information. I’ve already burdened myself enough. I don’t need to go looking for more reasons to be outraged or confused.

I can’t fix the world. I can’t fix how other people think. I do well when I can just improve myself in marginal ways.

But I can cut some of the metaphorical cables bringing nonsense into my life. Doing this won’t change the world, but it can go a long way toward restoring the mental peace and clarity which was once fundamental to how I see the world.