A One Way Ticket to Crazy

I recently read Jim Holt’s history of one of philosophy's great questions, Why Does the World Exist, and when I got to the end, I realized that something earlier in the book had me more curious than the book’s meta question of why there is something as opposed to nothing.    

In one of the early chapters, Holt relays an anecdote about a lecture that Bertrand Russell once gave to the public on astronomy. In his lecture, Russell apparently described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room supposedly got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." Russell then allegedly donned a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

And while the thought exercise of why the world exists is certainly engaging, I found myself repeatedly cycling back to a different kind of question spawned by this story. Why do we all go crazy as we move through our own individual stints of existence – put more simply, why are so many old people crazier than a bag full of bobcats? And the logical egocentric follow-up, how much longer before I’m one of the cats? As I thought through this, it struck me that what we are really dealing with is a natural evolution of our own personalities throughout the course of our lives. From there, I started to wonder, if that’s the case, then what can we say is our “True Personality”. Is it the us at age seventeen or the us at age fifty-seven?  

Now, admittedly I’m a bit of a nerd. So I decided to see if I could come up with a mathematical formula that defines our “Effective Personalities” at any point in time and see if I could square that with my own experiences and relationships. Here’s what I came up with:

This formula supposes that our Effective Personalities are really a combination of our True Personalities and the sums of all of the external influences on us. In effect, what the world sees as “us” is not really “us” at all, but rather the reflected image of the sum of our influencing factors, tweaked marginally at the edges by the underlying individual. If we all had exactly the same social circle, watched exactly the same TV shows, read exactly the same books, blogs, and twitter feeds, the theory holds that there would be little differentiating us at all.  

How does this square with experienced reality?  Compare the dialect, vocabulary, actions and jokes inside a college fraternity house versus amongst those same individuals 20 years later after their social circles and influencing media channels have diverged. It is generally assumed that we change because of age and maturity, but perhaps we are just reflecting different mirror images from our divergent lives – the True Personality of each individual hasn’t changed at all but the Effective Personalities have morphed significantly. Imagine watching the changing reflection in a mirror as it is carried across Central Park and then straight down Fifth Avenue. 

For me at least, when I think of people in this frame, things begin to make a lot of sense. We all have friends who used to be completely “normal” and then years later we are amazed by how seemingly strange they have become. The reality is that their social circles have shrunk enormously under the pressure of careers first, then relationships, then marriage, and finally kids. These steps progressively remove more and more of the great normalizing factors from the overlapping Effective Personalities of Relationships (P e,r).  As that input collapses to zero, it pushes them towards their True Personality.  And here’s the kicker – we’re all a little crazy in our root self. The perfect example is the lone man in the woods with no social interactions and no media exposure. Does anyone remember Ted Kaczynski?

I know what you’re thinking, “Ok, so if I don’t want to fast forward to bathrobe-in-the-daytime-wearing, nothing-but-Mr-Bean-re-run-watching crazy, what steps can I take today to postpone the inevitable?”

It seems the answer, like with so many other things in life, is balance – a balanced diet of social interactions and external influences. Don’t just read the Huffington Post. Mix it up with the Drudge Report, the Economist and other unrelated publications. Don’t just hang out with your kids and pretend to be connected to your friends because you follow their feeds on Facebook. Actually stay connected. Go out to dinner. Invite someone over that is different from you and has different views on the world. Follow people on Twitter that you do not agree with, and then actually try to understand their point of view. 

If you really make an effort, you can probably move towards the dotted line on the right. But make no mistake about it – if you are lucky enough to live a long life, at some point you are going to retreat. The news is going to begin to annoy you so you will turn it off. The print will be too small to read, even on your adjustable Kindle. And only then will the true you begin to shine, in all of your crazy glory. 

The good news, though, is that by that point all of your friends will be way too crazy to notice.

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