David McElroy

You are an irrational person. Yes, you.

That’s not an insult. If you can read this, you’re a human being — and that makes you irrational. In fact, I believe — in all seriousness — that every human being is just a little bit insane. Some form of insanity is a universal “birth defect” among us.

One of the biggest mistakes we make in life is assuming we’re rational. What’s worse, we notice that other people seem irrational and stupid, but almost all of us believe we’re the exception. My way of looking at the world is right and rational. Your way is wrong and irrational. (You probably have evil motives, too.)

You are the hero of your own story. In your own mind, you believe you’re making rational and smart and sane decisions. You believe you have good motives, at least within the context of however you’ve justified your own actions.

I do exactly the same thing. And our mutual blindness about this whole charade leaves us with warped perceptions of the world around us — and of each other.

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For the last week or so, something has been telling me to check on my neighbor Ruth. Every night when I got home, I’d think about walking over to her house and knocking on the door. But I kept putting it off. It can always wait another day.

Ruth has lived near me several years. She’s in her mid 50s and lives alone. I originally got to know her because she has two young granddaughters who like to ask Lucy to stop and see them when they’re at Ruth’s house.

About six months ago, a man moved in with Ruth and I soon met him. He seemed nice enough. He was her ex-husband — and they were trying to see whether they could get back together again. As I talked to both of them over the coming weeks — sometimes individually and sometimes together — I knew it wasn’t going to work.

Ruth kicked him out about six weeks ago. She briefly told me that when I saw her on the street one day, but I didn’t have time to stop to chat about it then. But I’d been having a strange feeling lately that I needed to check on her.

I finally got home tonight about 8:30, but I didn’t even go inside. I left my things in the car and walked straight to Ruth’s house and knocked on the door.

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I’ve been away from Facebook for more than a year, but I recently waded into the waters of insanity there briefly. It was an eye-opening experience.

Facebook owns Instagram and is pushing users to integrate their accounts on the two services. Somehow, my Instagram settings were changed — without my knowledge — in a way that published all of my Instagram posts to Facebook. This meant I had to spend some time figuring out how to untangle the two accounts again. Out of curiosity, I browsed my old Facebook news feed while I was there.

The experience reminded me why I left. More than anything, though, it left me questioning the mental stability and judgment of some friends who I’ve always believed are good people. The raging political hatred they were expressing left me alarmed.

It wasn’t that I disagreed with the specifics of their political or social positions, in many cases. But the rage and hatred they were spewing made it seem that they had lost all perspective about life. It seemed as though the medium of social media had turned them into raging monsters.

They were angry about things they couldn’t control in the real world, so their rage drove them to scream with hatred of their enemies on Facebook. This does absolutely nothing to change the world around them in the ways they want — and that internal rage appears to be destroying them.

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