Let Me Tell You About My “Problem”
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. — Jiddhu Krishnamurti
I’ve always been a relaxed kind of guy. As a kid, I liked to enjoy myself without stressing much. I could spend many happy hours alone listening to music or playing with an erector set or Lego blocks. I also liked to play with my friends, including games, cycling, touch football, and other pastimes, but I was never hellbent on accomplishing anything, competing, or living up to any grand purpose. I was happy just to be alive and do fun things.
I lived in this delusive state of contentment until I discovered at the ripe age of 19 that my easy-going temperament was actually a psychological disorder. Yes! Unbeknownst to me, I had a mental illness. My best friend broke the news to me one day: “Your problem,” he said, “is that you don’t have any interests.” The horror! He revealed this diagnosis after taking note of the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed doing as little as possible during the warm summer months between college semesters in Austin, TX.
Apparently, if you live in a way that suits you and makes you happy, you have something wrong with you that needs to be fixed! How was I to know?
This seemed problematic to me. After all, I wasn’t just vegetating. I was biking and swimming and smoking marijuana and skinny dipping and listening to music and masturbating and doing whatever else I fancied, yet somehow these didn’t qualify as valid interests. And not having interests, apparently, meant that I had a problem, my friend told me, his voice cracking with concern. That’s what friends are for.
I was truly saddened to discover this congenital defect after so many years of happy living. Apparently, if you live in a way that suits you and makes you thankful for your existence, you have something wrong with you that needs to be fixed! How was I to know that others are entitled to judge me and tell me that I have a problem because I don’t conform to their arbitrary standards of personal conduct?
Luckily, there is a simple fix for this pathological desire to live on your own terms: to get with the societal game plan and live the way you are supposed to. The fix is painful, of course, as it does not comport with one’s natural instincts and inclinations. It requires you to adopt values, behaviors, and ways of being that don’t appeal to you, but that’s the price you pay to become a normal and healthy adult in our normal and healthy society.
But you don’t want a corporate job, you say? You don’t want to devote yourself to the meaningless task of making and spending money? That’s a problem, buddy.
Never mind that the cure serves the interests of those who benefit from you adopting those values, behaviors, and ways of being, to wit, the world of jobs, careers, kids, spouses, mortgages, divorces, IRAs, health insurance, and burial plans. Since it’s highly unlikely that you came into this world with a natural affinity for these things, you must be taught to want them and to get along in a world that needs them.
But you don’t want a corporate job, you say? You don’t want to devote yourself to the meaningless task of making and spending money? You don’t want 2.3 kids and a house in the suburbs? Or to pay for a mortgage or your kids’ education or your wife’s alimony or your retirement and burial? That’s a problem, buddy.
I find it ironic that some adults who adopt the correct societally imposed values and sacrifice their own happiness and well-being to serve a system that sucks them dry, eventually get to a point when, out of their own misery and discontent, they take up a spiritual practice, or meditation, or yoga, or some other discipline to learn how to simply exist contentedly in the present moment without needing to do anything or go anywhere or exert themselves in any way.
How ironic it is that the answer to all their stress and unhappiness turns out to be the very thing they were told was a problem in the first place — enjoying life here and now in whatever manner naturally suits them.
