Sanity and the real world

Years back, a good friend, in a varied career, worked managing the men’s’ overflow shelter down at Central Arizona Shelter Services (our downtown Phoenix homeless shelter complex).  Bill was the only staffer on at night, in the midst of a hundred plus often rough-hewn individuals. Early on, he recruited on of the regulars, a seemingly sensible but capable fellow, to stick close and cover his “6”. Several months into the arrangement, they were sitting in Bill’s tiny office.  Out of the blue his protector mentioned “by the way, I’m schizophrenic”.

Bill responded with “like, you occasionally think you hear something?”

“No; at the moment, for instance, there’s a bunch of hobgoblins dancing around atop the file cabinet behind you.  And they are just as real as you and me sitting here.” Bill’s eyes widened a bit; he couldn’t resist a glance over his shoulder.  There weren’t no hobgoblins.

I draw from that an informal rule of thumb – much of insanity can be recognized by one’s disconnect from reality.

Matthew Crawford, in his recent “Why We Drive”, features a discussion of self-driving cars.  Driving is a complex skill that requires connection to the world.  Learning, and practicing, that skill encourages us in connectivity. With Uber, and now self-driving cars, kids no longer have to learn to drive.  This follows, by a few years, kids no longer working on their own cars, which follows adults no longer working on their homes, or repairing their appliances.  I can’t imagine my old man, faced with a broken washing machine, not trying to repair it himself, and calling on neighbor or friend if stymied.  He’d call a repairman only as a last resort.

Kids mostly no longer work for their own spending money – newspaper and lawn care jobs are no longer available; kids no longer need organize their own baseball game – Little League provides and adult to do the organizing and adjudicating; they no longer even organize their own play – parents organize “play dates”.  Less and less can they do on their own.

Besides encouraging disconnection from the physical world, and making us less capable as a people, one’s inability to “do stuff” creates a sense of one’s own incompetence and inability, and thus creates anxiety.  Note the sharp rise in medicating for anxiety disorder.