You’re Not Crazy - People Aren’t Ok. Here's Why

There has been a fundamental shift in the last several years, and you can probably feel it. You might not be able to necessarily point to what it is, but you can sense it in almost every single interaction that you have, both online and in person. People aren't okay. The average person has become so difficult to have a real and meaningful interaction with, a meaningful or structured conversation with. People are starting to act like they're being puppeted by some external force, or they're so worried about having just normal interactions. I went to my sister's wedding recently and had a number of interactions with people where I could tell that they wanted to say something, but they were either too afraid to say it, or they were worried that somehow, you know, they'd be judged or criticized or create some blowup. And this, this is how interactions have become with so many people. You talk to people in the grocery store, at a coffee shop, you talk to friends, you meet up with buddies that you haven't seen in a while, you have interactions with, you know, colleagues at work. And people really seem to not only be self-censoring in a way that is objectively worrisome, but people seem to be more and more disconnected from any type of reality. And I did a video recently that got a ton of traction called Surviving the Collapse of the Modern Psyche. And I put that video out and people really responded to it, but I put that video out because when I look at the statistical data and the research around the rise of mental health issues, I get very curious about what's contributing to these things. But I also try and look at it from a perspective of not only where are we at, but where are we going to go? What's the trajectory that we're heading towards. And in that video, I made a prediction. It's a very simple prediction. And unfortunately, I think more and more that it's going to come true. And that prediction was twofold. Number one, we are going to continue to see the rise of mental health issues spike. They're just gonna get worse before they get better. And number two, we are specifically going to see a collapse of the modern psyche, meaning more and more people are going to experience symptoms of psychosis. And that was the main point of the video. The main point of that video, which I encourage you to go check out, is that people are going to be more and more disconnected from reality. That actually is what psychosis is. Psychosis is a series of symptoms. It's not necessarily a diagnosable thing like severe depression or bipolar or multiple personality disorder. It's not something that's clinically diagnosable in the DSM-5. It is a subset of symptoms that people experience. And we can talk about what's contributed to that, right? Obviously, there's things like social media that has contributed to the disconnection of people. I do think that more and more, as we see the rise in lacking meaning, more people are lacking meaning. And when you see this, the sort of structures of our culture, of our society that have always given people given meaning to people. Those things are collapsing more and more, and they're being consolidated into political ideologies. And when your sense of identity, your sense of self, your sense of meaning, your mental health and wellbeing are contingent on political ideologies, it's a very difficult thing for you to experience, but it also makes you very, malleable and pliable. You're much more easy to control, to coerce, to manipulate simply because the— and this is true for a lot of the people that I think are going to struggle more and more in the next 3 to 5 years, the next 10 years. Individuals whose identity has become swallowed by political ideology on whatever side they might be on are really going to struggle because they are disconnected from the things that have largely been in giving us meaning. But underneath all of this, I think that there's something a little bit more subtle, something a little bit more simple. And that's that people have stopped caring. There's a quality of nihilism that seems to have become so pervasive within our culture. And I saw this article the other day, and it showed the— It showed mainstream media's you know, this sort of like classic CBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News. And it was all this series of articles, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, putting out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles with the end of, the end of climate, the end of the species, the end of this, the end of that. We've entered into this kind of apocalyptic mentality and this apocalyptic form of belief system within our civilization, within our society, within our culture, that is very alluring for a lot of people. And the reality is that nothing grabs your attention quite like death and sex. Nothing grabs your attention like death and sex. And so, If you can leverage people's deep subconscious fear of the end of something, the death of something, the collapse of something, there is nothing more engaging for that person than the worrying and the fretting about what that entails. And if you pay attention, if you're really paying attention, what can start to happen is that you can feel quite isolated because people have moved into very extreme forms of not only ideology, but they've moved into very extreme forms of identity. And you can start to feel like you're the crazy one. I hear a lot of people, not a lot of people, I hear some people who are maybe more politically moderate or, you know, and even in some circles, if you tell somebody that you're politically moderate, they immediately call you a fascist, you know, or it's just code that you're a racist. or a MAGA or something like that. But people that are more center, people that are more in the middle of things, whether it's political, whether it's you're a centrist when it comes to religion, you're not fundamental necessarily, that seems to be a large part of people that are like, wait, am I the crazy one? While they look out at all of these individuals who have been propelled to opposing ends of the spectrum, occupying very frenzied, very polarizing, very extremist modalities. And you start to wonder, why do people care what they care about? Why don't they care about the things that seem to actually matter, but they're obsessed with things that don't seem to have any relevancy with their specific life. But those things that don't seem to have any relevancy over their life, and I'm going to use this as an example, the Lindsay Clancy case that has garnered so much attention, becomes yet another wedge point for extremism to take place. And, you know, we can't even have a trial for an individual who is accused of murdering her 3 children without it being turned into some type of political ideology weaponization. And I think this really speaks to one core thing, which is that there is in some ways an erosion of objective reality. And there's a push into what I have called subjective supremacy, So this push into how you feel, what you think, how you want to identify, that is the supreme be-all and end-all. Nothing is more important than that. And that's very appealing to the ego. It's very appealing to the identity. It's very appealing because there's something fundamentally narcissistic about it, right? Like if you want to identify as a dog, you should have the right to do that. And you should wholeheartedly be treated like a dog and called a dog and all that other type of stuff. And that's appealing to the ego because the ego then gets to control one very important thing. It gets to control how other people interact with you. And so it's a great way for the ego and the identity to take a stronghold and become quite robust. So on the one side, we have people getting pushed towards subjective supremacy, this notion that how you feel and what's going on inside and how you want to identify and et cetera. Yeah. is really the be-all end-all. And then we have people being pushed towards intersubjective reality. And so there's sort of this attempt to hollow out what is objectively true, what we can objectively view, see, measure, quantify, calculate, observe, touch, interact with. There's an attempt to erode this part of our experience as human beings. And in a book years ago that came out, this is, I don't even know when it came out, but Yuval Harari wrote this great book called Homo Deus, which means human gods. And in the book, he talked about that the wars of the future were not going to be hot wars necessarily. They weren't going to be the traditional World War II style, go to battle, rally the troops, you know, go in and shoot guns and drop bombs. That's still going to happen. But the real wars are going to be the wars of intersubjective reality. And intersubjective reality is the reality of narrative and story. And you can see this. You can see the battleground happening online, on social media platforms, in the news, to try and control and coerce through the narrative, through the story. It's almost as if what actually happened is irrelevant. What actually is true doesn't matter anymore. It's just the story about what happened. It's how you should think, how you should feel about what happened. And this is, I mean, the Lindsay Clancy case is a great example of this. There are so many narratives telling you how you should think and how you should feel and what you should be worried about. You know, how it relates to your voting bloc and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there isn't really discernment of like, well, here's what actually happened. Here's the objective truth of what happened that we can all agree on. And this is important because for a healthy psyche, for a healthy identity to take place, for you to be mentally well, Yeah. Mental health requires a few things. If you want to be mentally strong, mentally robust, you need a few things. The first thing that you need is mental flexibility. Mental flexibility and agility might be one of the most fundamental factors that contributes to mental health and well-being. If you have mental rigidity, things need to be a certain way, things need to happen a certain way. That's called control. That's called obsessive-compulsive disorder, not to label or pathologize, but if you absolutely need things to be a certain way in order for your internal state to be all right, then that is a type of compulsion. That is not mental wellness or mental health. And so the first marker of mental health and wellness is being able to have mental flexibility, that you can view things from multiple vantage points, that you can meet a set of circumstances and hope for an outcome, but be okay if that outcome doesn't happen, that you can adjust, you can adapt. Mental adaptability is mental health and wellness. If you are not mentally adaptable, then you are decaying, you are rigid, you are in a state that is going to be very, very, very challenging For you to feel all right. So that's one of the pieces. The next piece is that you need to have some tether to objective truth and reality in order to be mentally well. Okay? Remember, the definition of psychosis is that in some ways you are disconnected from objective reality. You start to believe things that aren't true. You start to see things that aren't actually there. You start to disconnect from the fabric of reality as it is. And part of the challenge that is happening within our modern culture and society is that people are being incentivized to fundamentally erode and disconnect from any type of objective truth or objective reality. They're being told that it's okay to disconnect from that. And I know I'm about to give a very extreme example, but But I think it's an important example, right? So there are individuals who identify as dogs and identify as birds. They're called— I think they call themselves therians, therians, something along those lines. And for some of those people, they're cosplaying, right? It's a fetish. It's a— it's an experience. They want to be treated a certain way. It's a power dynamic. It's a whole bunch of those things. And then there are legitimately people who believe that they are a dog and they want to be treated as such, and people that fundamentally believe that they are therians. Yeah. That they are birds by nature, that their inner soul, that their inner experience identifies as a bird. And this is where mental health and wellbeing begins to leave the scene. When you believe a structure of reality where you can identify as anything, and that that holds to be true simply because that's how you feel inside. And I know this gets complicated with gender identities and trans folks and all those other things. But when you believe that you can fundamentally disconnect from biology, from nature, from objective, measurable truth and reality, and that is seen as the enemy, you have moved away from mental health and wellness. And there have been times throughout human history where we have used Objective, measurable, calculable differences, objective, measurable truths and facts. We have used those for not so good outcomes. And so I understand the push sometimes against objective truth, against facts and logic. I get it. But the fact still stands nonetheless, that if you want to be mentally healthy and mentally robust, You'd not only need to be adaptable and agile, you need to have some level of coherence between your subjective sense of self, how you experience yourself, and objective truth and reality, what is actually true in the world, right? If I came to you and I said, hey, I identify as somebody that doesn't need to breathe air, you would— You would laugh. worry that there's something fundamentally that's gone on with me. You would worry that I'm not doing okay, that I'm not well, and you should be worried. You should have cause for concern because my inner state, my inner sense of perception has become one that is so jarringly disconnected from reality that I might end up harming myself or people around me, right? So hold that for a moment. If I believe That I don't need to breathe air in order to survive. I identify as something that breathes water. I'm going to walk into water and drown myself, and I might pull other people along for that ride. But this is the place that we find ourselves in collectively. And I think it's something that we all have to hold. We have to hold a center place of truth that we can agree on. That some tether to reality, objective reality, what we can see, what we can measure, nature, biology, that some of these things require connection to in order for mental health and wellbeing to be present. And there does seem to be a correlation between the degree to which somebody is disconnected from observable truth and reality, from observable reality and their inner sense of chaos, right? And I see this in clients. I've worked with individuals who have struggled with a ton of different issues, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and part of what they're struggling with is that their view of reality has become skewed and they can't quite tell what's true and what's not true. And a lot of the times, a great therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, what their role is, part of their role is to support that individual in finding coherence between their subjective experience and the objective reality that exists outside of them. And one of the challenges that I think that we face is that people are being pushed so heavily so intensely towards subjective experience and towards intersubjective reality, the story about things, right? News hasn't really just— most news, I'm sure that there's some outlets out there that still stay with here's what happened, but most news has moved to intersubjective reality. They're not talking about objective truth and facts. Here's what happened. Here's when it happened. Here's who was involved. It's, here's what you should think about what happened, and here's how you should feel about who's involved, and here's what you need to believe about the circumstances that have unfolded. And when that intensifies to a certain degree, when you are immersed constantly in social media content, in media content, in conversations where there's no real interest in being connected to observable reality, then things begin to break down. The psyche begins to break down. The individual's ability to feel healthy and well begins to break down, right? Another example, if you walked out into the wilderness right now, you walked out into the forest or near the lake surrounding your house, And you believed that what you started to see was trees growing out of the water, or you started to believe that you could walk on water like Jesus, and you went for a stroll across the lake and ended up drowning yourself, you would have a hard time. That would not be good. And I know that those are extreme examples, but I have to give some extreme examples so that we can just come back to the sort of median, the core of the issue, which is that plain and simply, when you are disconnected from observable reality in a more intense degree, you are going to suffer. That is one of the definitions of suffering, that you are at odds with how things actually are. that you are against the grain of what is true. Now, this becomes very challenging when you have a war that is taking place in intersubjective reality. And when I say a war, I don't mean China and Russia, or the Democrat— China and the United States, or the Democrats and the Republicans. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. I'm simply saying that there are power struggles that are happening. Many, many power struggles that are happening, and they're happening in the realm of intersubjective reality, in the realm of narrative. And one of the things that I really would encourage people to do is to begin to look to see what is objectively true. When you feel overwhelmed by UFO files being released and Lindsay Clancy cases and, you know, the war in Iran and all these types of things, and you don't know what to think or who to believe, You don't know what you can control. You don't know what you can influence. We need to return to some type of tether with, well, what is objectively real? What can I see and view and quantify and touch and hold and smell and experience that is objectively true? And the more that you can do that, the more that you can ground yourself In the present moment. And one of the tragedies, I think, of power battles happening in the realm of story and narrative, in intersubjective reality, is that so many people not only get disoriented and confused, they not only eject from objective reality, but they begin to— struggle to understand what they can influence. And there is a kind of nihilism and hopelessness and really severe self-pity and victimhood that seems to have been propagated through social media channels, through the media channels, almost as if— and this is not a tin hat conspiracy, but almost as if there is a push to move the average individual down a path of believing that they can't actually influence or affect anything, or conversely, that they should try and influence and change and alter the course of something that is so wildly and vastly out of their control. Right? If you're the average individual sitting at home and you're watching the war happening in Iran, There's not a lot that you can directly do about that. You could go and volunteer. You can go and vote differently. You know, there are some things that you can objectively do, but it's very unlikely. The chances are not good that you're going to be able to, through your social media tweeting or Instagram posts, be able to, you know, stop whatever's happening in Palestine or Gaza or Iran. And yet this is what the majority of people have been tricked into believing, that their greatest good, their highest value, comes in the form of trying to influence things so vastly beyond what they can actually affect. And it has robbed individuals of the meaning and the function and the purpose of being able to see what in their objective reality they can influence. You see, when you're so lost in subjective experiencing and subjective supremacy, how I feel, what I think, how I identify is the ultimate most important thing, you collapse into narcissism. And when the most important thing is the narrative and the story about some political ideology or how you should think or how you should feel that's being fed to you, you are constantly trying to control or influence things that are so wildly out of your control and outside of your purview and circle of influence that you collapse into deep despair and deep meaninglessness. And both of these areas psychologically are the most fertile ground for manipulation and control. They are also the most fertile ground to make it very, very challenging to have any type of interaction or meaningful relationship with you, because Every individual has to agree fully, without any deviation, with either the story that you believe or the subjective experience that you hold to be supreme. And when this happens, people become mentally unstable, mentally unwell. And so it's not to say that subjective experience isn't relevant and important. It absolutely is. And it's not to say that intersubjective reality, the realm of myth and narrative and story and the collective beliefs that we hold about certain things aren't important. Those things are very important. They are both important. But when we disconnect from objective truth and reality, what ends up happening is that we must, we must collapse into some type of either narcissism or helplessness, victimhood, Nihilism, despair. There's no other choice, because for mental health and well-being to take place, we must have some tether to all 3 planes of existence, both subjective experience— we must have some tether and connection to that— objective reality, and intersubjective reality. This is the other marker. Of mental health and wellness, of mental robustness that philosophers for ages have been talking about. And when we eject from those things, we become susceptible to immoral behaviors, immoral beliefs. We justify all types of behaviors because it aligns with our internal subjective experience or our perceived identity, or we justify things simply because that's the narrative that we happen to be swimming in. And we can't see that there's some, you know, objective reality that's right there in front of us. So here's the other thing. I don't have to be right about any of this. This is just what I have seen. The individuals that I have worked with over the last decade, the ones that end up becoming the most, the most resilient, the most happy, the most meaningful in their life, meaning-filled in their lives, are the ones that have a deep understanding of their subjective experience, a very deep and robust relationship with objective reality, and an understanding of the importance and the relevance of intersubjective reality. And so this isn't me telling you what to do. This is more me saying, this is what I notice. This is what I see happening. And I don't know if you've noticed this, if you've seen this, But this is kind of where I'm at. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Share your comments below. Make sure you man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you think will enjoy it, and I'll see you next week.