Chaos: An Antidote To Complacency?

If you run into me on my socials, it would be too hard to not catch me lamenting over the pervasive psychological complacency among society’s most eminent and functional members. I find our society to be one that is pathological. I could go on for hours, if not days on end examining and deconstructing society and its institutions – and the lives of those who succeed in them – through the comprehensive and infallible tools of critical theory and psychoanalysis. But we will save that intellectual rigour for another elaborate write-up and instead focus on a certain mental heuristic that I have found to be useful in avoiding the trap of complacency. Often times, I don’t develop these heuristics through some concerted conscious effort as you would expect of philosophical thought but rather as a retrospective analysis of subconscious (and often unacknowledged) cognitive patterns that had found me for good.

When I entitled this post Chaos: An Antidote To Complacency?, I had to be deliberate about not misleading newer readers to the impression that I deal with ideas in the cliché because as readers of mine will know, my write-ups are far from it. For instance, it would be very easy to mistake a discourse on chaos as something about a brute forced attempt at brainstorming. Of course, such an attempt at creation will end up lacking in schematic, often turning out with lots of loose ends and unconnected dots, as well as lacking in nuance because, well, it was devised by blunt effort. To the less cerebral creature, chaos could even mean living dangerously or some other visceral interpretation.

How The Temperaments Justify Their Existence

Just as I had begun penning a rigorous post, I was reminded just how crazy my life has gotten in recent times. Without doubt, it has proven detrimental on my health and general sense of well-being. My usual coping mechanism in times like these would be indulging in my varied hobbies which now seems to include writing on this blog. The purpose of doing this was two-fold. It certainly provided a healthy sort of escapism, and that cannot be dismissed but most importantly, I think it helped rejuvenate my mind and enabled me to bring myself to a place where I could tackle reality all over again. So I’d decided, on this late night where I live, to write on something a lot more casual and paced out to avail the therapeutic benefits of writing.

knowledge is liberation

My exploration into personality theory has proved tremendously rewarding. It launched me on an eye-opening journey into realizing my potential – my in-born strengths, weaknesses and all – teaching myself to capitalize on the same to navigate the hostile world we are born into. This realization was important because right up from childhood, all I have ever heard from my society and family is how much of a disappointment I was. I was humiliated, demeaned and bombarded with nasty insults from all sides. Clearly, this backward society hasn’t figured the emotional scars left over from such an authoritative treatment on children going through their formative years leaves them with debilitating mental conditions which keeps them from becoming healthy, functioning citizens in later life. Furthermore, my emotional adversaries never hesitated to get physical whenever they felt like it. There really wasn’t much to turn to for help. Thankfully, my generation grew up around the same time technology was able to pull off this marvelous stunt called the Internet. I can confidently say that the Internet, in all its essence, liberated me from the shackles of this terribly backward society. Not to mention the aforementioned group of individuals who have had a toxic grip on my life since birth.

Why I (Absolutely Have To) Overthink?

During a heated conversation with a friend, I was told that a good deal of my problems would just vanish into the abyss had I stopped overthinking. Now this seems like a perfectly normal thing to say and even perhaps a platitude we are guilty to offering as advice, and adopt, in lieu of one’s overwhelming thoughts. I went back to my quiet place and reflected. That comment had prompted me to think about my overthinking and this had lead me to a rather unsettling conclusion – that I had to overthink because I was a misfit in society. Without the much needed overthinking, I would no longer be able to function in society, let alone keep myself from becoming the subject of physical harm and emotional exploitation in my social, romantic and personal life.

Here is perhaps one of my biggest reasons for falling back on the good-old Myers-Briggs Type Indicator because it comes startlingly close to mapping out one’s cognitive processes despite its unscientific foundations or the lack of any scientific theory that supports its alleged “preferences” of temperament. If you’re taking the test professionally or on the Internet, like many of us online dwellers do, you will gain a decent glimpse into your own thought patterns. This is why I think MBTI is great for predicting conflict in corporate, romantic and other social environments because people disagree from their point of view, I guess the very nature of a disagreement between people presupposes this. Most people, without realizing, are cognitively solipsistic. When a Ti dominant user like myself is presented with a very intricate and well-defined set of rules, the Ti goes beep beep with “why do you need to follow rule number X when its intended purpose seems to lie in direct contradiction with the most efficient way of having the task accomplished?” Just like that, you get kicked out of class, out of your room and every conceivable social and professional situation that would greatly help you land an job or a girlfriend.

Looking at the calendar, I am going to quote George Eliot from her novel, Middlemarch,

..no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.