One of the things about emerging from the bubble of childhood is that with the loss of the local superstructure of authority, so much more responsibility is now placed on each individual. As adults, we have so much agency to thrive, as well as (frankly) to go the opposite way. For me as a new adult circa half a lifetime ago, that newfound sense of independence was thrilling. Perhaps encouraged by the fact that I was an only child and who grew up largely without the presence of my parents at most hours of the day, I relished being able to finally and officially plan and act by myself. Getting a driver's license, a credit card, a job, a life. It was great. It was naïve of me, however, to assume that the great "unshackling" granted by adulthood was universally positive. (Trigger warning on following content)
As time went on, I noticed certain things about my fellow adults. In school (by which I mean college), people around me started to develop different kinds of neurotic behavior. Mood swings, depression, anxiety, up to and including manic episodes and self-harm. I've certainly experienced some extent of that, especially in those perilous years, and I've often since asked myself why. It's well-known that college years usually see the peak incidence of mental health issues in males. If something's going to go wrong, chances are it'll manifest itself at that age. Are some people naturally predisposed to experience mental health episodes in their late teens or early twenties, or does a high pressure environment like a stringent academic environment force these behaviors? Could it be somewhere in the middle, or elsewhere entirely? Like many, I don't know the exact biological mechanisms at work, or the precise reasons why, but I could see in real time that something was indeed happening. Friends would sometimes withdraw from social life, lose interest in classes, not leave their dorm. These were all people who were for great periods of their earlier lives high achievers. So it was the double-sided torture of simultaneously losing interest in academics, while retaining that part of the brain where they still cared about academic performance (i.e. grades and test scores). At the more extreme end, a complete withdrawal from school was necessary. And if it's not yet clear, this is not one person to whom I'm referring. Multiple people, multiple instances: very similar story arcs.
In the working world, I've been continuously puzzled by how many high-functioning insane people I've come across. Mind you, I don't mean stupid. Stupid has its own category, by which I mean people who mistook the CD-ROM tray in a computer for a coffee mug holder. I mean people who are otherwise intelligent, highly educated with sterling work experience (albeit as they themselves present it), but something critical missing. Usually, that missing bit is something like empathy or responsibility, a sense of caution and risk, or the like. You know, normal human behaviors. One incident that vividly comes to mind: I once had a boss who asked me a non-urgent work question through the door while I was in the bathroom. I couldn't imagine doing that today as a manager, let alone if it were my own company, where the worst thing that happens is not simply being reprimanded or fired, but having my company be sued for harassment.
More recently, in the world of tech startups, I've been even more taken aback by the sheer number of weird workplace encounters. Some examples: people who would be hired, openly espouse or identify with a philosophy/theology/identity that was a protected class, suck at their job either incidentally or purposefully, and then claim protection in order to milk a long offboarding period or a settlement payment. And then there's the constant tussle between the folks who think they're good enough for a promotion, meeting the manager/hirer who is either kind or desperate enough to give them a chance, despite weak practical evidence to support such a decision. Yes, it could turn out well, when you actually find a diamond in the rough, but how often do you find diamonds? Others are seemingly intelligent, frankly interview well, start out great, and for whatever reason that I've never been able to ascertain, make it their entire life's work to cling as hard to their paycheck as possible, using whatever unethical and antisocial behaviors to achieve it. And don't forget during reviews and promotion season, where the sense of entitlement is thick enough to cut with a knife. I realize that greed is one hell of a drug, but I refuse to believe that greed alone can cause an otherwise healthy and balanced individual to throw all sense of ethics and reality out the door (is my naïveté showing again?)
Does any of this sound familiar? As I sift through my memories of my working life, I do often wonder: are things getting worse, or is my tolerance for bullshit getting lower? Both can certainly be true. I assume most of you are familiar enough with the cultural gap between generations. I have seen references to the so-called Gen-Z Stare, and countless other Boomer vs. Zoomer arguments. I've always assumed that the generational gap will always be there, and as such, was likely always there. Or is it simply a variation in performance among the general population, where some a simply high performers in life with equally lofty expectations of those around them, and others aren't? Assuming those high performers are under equally high stress, they simply "break" randomly from time to time. If that were true, then "burnout" would be the requisite word, but none of the scenarios I mentioned would seem to fit the description. It's here that I'd also draw a distinction between mentally unstable and pure laziness. The latter is something I regard as natural, even at times helpful, in the workplace. After all, the desire for laziness is one of the key drivers of technology-led efficiency. Yes, in some cases, laziness can be downright criminal in the workplace (negligence is the first thing that comes to mind). But what causes me to differentiate the two is that when taken to their respective unhealthy extremes, mental instability is fraught with intelligence gone awry, whereas extreme laziness is really rooted in the absence of intelligence. In any case, this is all to say, I have no effing clue why. I'm not particularly trained beyond two decades of higher ed and work experience to have much other way of describing this phenomenon than: "crazy" or "insane".
As I've left working life behind and settled more or less back into "civilian" life, I've noticed the same types of behaviors even in my everyday environment. Folks who just seem off. Unresponsive, super flaky, no sense of commitment; it just goes on and on. I keep on thinking of the parallels I see between these people and those I encountered before. And I wonder: is this the sad reality of life? Are people just fundamentally broken in some strange and random way?
Playing the devil's advocate, many experts prefer to think of mental health is simply an extension of health. That everyone generally has something "going on", we'd all likely benefit from therapy the same way as we're due for at least an annual physical and blood draw, and that manic depression is no different from, say, renal failure in terms of prevalence and the stigma people ought to attach to it. With no undue stigma intended, I'm thinking solely of situations where mental health intersected with work life in a very unfortunate way. And while I've implied from the first paragraph that the leap to adulthood is somehow culpable in making people go crazy, to what extent does that transition from childhood actually matter? In the 21st Century, when we now have so many words and so many ways to sort and categorize ailments and feelings, adults are simply experiencing an amped-up version of what children experience — it's possible that the stakes are simply higher and our reactions are attempting to match. Instead of a report card, it's a perf review. Instead of lunch money, it's mortgage money. Instead of asking a girl out, it's asking a girl out (that part gets easier, right?). And finally, exactly what part of life doesn't have some effect on mental health, anyway? I've heard of being overstimulated from too much interaction with people, and many suffer from too loneliness. Being with a group of people with similar interests is healthy, until it turns into an echo chamber. Being with a diverse group is eye-opening and informative, until the thinly-buried conflicts boil over. Top-down societies meet grassroots movements, and so on so forth. There's no escaping it, and no plan for escape ever intended, but I do often lament where all the sane people have gone.
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