Sanity

It’s really hard to understand yourself. All the little things about your past, your parents, your experiences. It’s funny how simple but complicated humans are. Perhaps it’s possible to be both.

Who are you? What makes a person, an identity, or a personality. At any given moment, is it how you feel? Is it your memories? From which angle? How you remember it or how it actually happened? What actually happened? How can you know?

It’s hard for us to understand these things, and we often run from them. We tell ourselves stories about what happened because we need to. You can’t know who you are. We can’t “know” anything. But the story we tell ourselves matters. Because the stories impact the actions we take now, the way in which we perceive the world, which impacts our actions further, and how we remember them.

The wrong story will lead you the wrong way. But your stories are always convincing to yourself. The only hope we have to keep our sanity is to be honest about our stories with others that can be honest with you. So this is my story, in all honesty, so perhaps you can understand your own.

What is Sanity?

Sanity without indoctrination is really hard to develop and rare to come across. Sanity is kept by sharing a worldview with at least one other person, ideally more than that. Throughout human history we’ve done that through indoctrination, strict cultural expectations, and homogeneous beliefs. It was easy to have stability in your beliefs when everyone around you shared them.

However, without indoctrination one must build a worldview from their own volition and find others that are willing to adopt those same beliefs. The truth about human nature is that we would rather be wrong with others than right by ourselves.

Developing your own worldview forces accountability. But you know you are a flawed human being, so how are you to trust yourself? It’s far easier to decide that someone else knows better and to follow them.

In many cases, people lose themselves in pursuit of sanity by joining a group of people that share a belief. While it may seem to be just a different form of insanity, that’s not how it feels. To be alone in your beliefs, as a social mammal, is horribly painful.

Many of the innovators and philosophers throughout history were labeled as insane, and that’s because many of them were. To build your own paradigm without others is an insane thing to do, and many of them feel insane. Building your own perception is a dangerous thing. Without others to call you out on your false or inconsistent beliefs, you can lead yourself to dark places. However, sometimes insanity is what’s necessary for progress.

Building Sanity

To adopt sanity is easy. To build sanity is hard. To build sanity based on truth is almost impossible. Well, our family attempted the impossible.

From the moment my sister and I could understand language our father would explain to us that he didn’t know how to parent, because he had never done it before. He encouraged us to challenge him and ask questions. Our shared beliefs were: Freedom, Kindness, and Service -- all in the pursuit of truth.

When I was 12 years old my family went on a hike with a family friend and his son. Our family always discussed deep and meaningful topics, finding little interest in small talk. This family friend enjoyed my parents' inclination towards these kinds of topics.

Wherever we went our family always gave the impression of being on the same page. We would finish each other’s points and help each other communicate. From the time I was seven years old my dad would encourage me to communicate certain points to others that we had already discussed at home. When I was younger, adults were often surprised and confused as to why my father had invited his child into an adult conversation. As I got older, people were increasingly confused. While many coming of age children started to rebel against their parents and rarely spoke to them in any meaningful way, our family continued to operate effectively as a unified force, while also being individuals.

Our family friend became increasingly uncomfortable as my father included me, his 12 year old daughter, in these complex conversations to contribute my own thoughts. Eventually our friend mentioned his concerns with my father about this strange behavior, wondering if I had been indoctrinated or sheltered to only believe what my father told me.

My father suggested he talk to me about it. Obviously very uncomfortable, the friend asked me, “Do you ever disagree with your father?” I laughed and responded, “Of course!”

When our family had conversations, we had many disagreements. But the way we treated disagreements was that the other person had a perception that we were not aware of. We never “agreed to disagree”, because every perspective is valuable and a piece of the puzzle that is reality. We would continue to discuss a disagreement until we came to a better conclusion, often including both our perspectives, or occasionally persuading the other by articulating our viewpoint.

When we would have conversations with others they would see our family always on the same page and be rather confused. But what they didn’t see is all the work, disagreements, and growth that got us there.

How do you build sanity? It’s difficult but there are a few steps:

TBC ...