No, I do not agree with you. There is no "they" somewhere, defining what normalcy is. Pathology is another thing, and the combined efforts of the AMA, The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Academy of Certified Social Workers, as well as independents (I applied to submit data,but was not selected), have now come up with a very unpopular Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-5. It differs in significant ways from the DSM III, DSM III-R, DSM IV, DSM-TR that have come before. I began my schooling with the 3rd version.
People who are conformists are usually pretty boring as people go, I quite agree with you. They are not necessarily what I call normal either. After 20 years of getting together on weekends with a married couple who are typically preppy, boring, family people. I called it quits. The guy was kind to me when I met him 20 years ago, when I was going through divorce. He was an art teacher for a couple of years in the middle school we worked in, and invited me home for dinner on Friday nights. His wife was pregnant when we met. Then I got a girlfriend and we'd all go out, but we had Nothing in common. After their second child, as they became more engrossed in parenting, they became hovering, overly-enmeshed emotionally in their children's lives because they had no interests of their own. The guy always lauded me for my work ethics and dedication, which was a very weak reason to think we had true friendship. When I lost my position of 27 years, and I refused to become a classroom teacher, which would have been a horrible come-down for me, shit-loads more work, no freedom to come and go, utter despair and frustration, and never something I EVER wanted to do, this acquaintance who always recognized my ethics as a reason for him to be friends with me, began to urge me to "just do a shitty job, just show up for the paycheck for a couple of more years," instead of being sympathetic and supportive of my difficult decision to resign/retire early.
This behavior does not qualify by itself as mental illness, but it is not what I want to be around. It is hypocritical and obnoxious. Over the past year, I assiduously avoided going out with this couple or to a party they threw. I had to ask myself how normal it was for us to visit with their friends at a party when it included a judge, a couple of rich arrogant lawyers, and a police captain! I had to keep my long-haired, Shroomery shirt-wearing mouth shut. I am not preppy, but I am probably Bohemian, weird, or 'questionable' to his crowd. They might even find me marginally criminal, and definitely suspect for not being a family guy. My writing here might be controversial, but I cannot say that I am considered to be boring at these forums, or with my selected FB 'friends,' but among these people, I am the abnormal one. I am not robotic, cookie-cutter, conformist, or criminal in any real sense of the word - certainly not to people at The Shroomery.
This couple has been seeing us for 20 years, but apparently only out of severe boredom. They have NEVER drawn any conversation out of us of the sort I engage in here. They have NEVER wanted to look at our library or discuss a book about something because he, at least, NEVER reads according to his wife. We became just another house they could eat their junk food in on a Saturday night, and chit-chat until, like clockwork, the woman fell asleep at about 10:00 PM, almost every time she came over. She must have been bored to sleep every time! Again, I don't think my wife or I am boring people. We'll offer wine, food, music, conversation, other people, but it is US who are obviously so boring to these people that he has nothing to say, and she shoots her load (mostly trivia about their kids), and falls asleep. He wants to lie on the floor and turn on our TV like he's 6 years old!
Do you grok the relativity of normalcy here? None of us is mentally ill, but what appears to be normal to the preppies is totally freaky for me. Dockers and khakis, Izod-Lacoste as an Astro-Van, 11:00 PM bedtime and parents who are unnaturally enmeshed in their high school and college aged children, freak me out negatively. Reading or discussing philosophy, transpersonal psychology, Hell, reading anything at all, tripping, catching a buzz (wine, beer, pot [even if I don't use pot]), conversation, listening to music, meditating (or talking about meditation, which they also have Never done) - these things make us look eccentric at the very least, if not somewhat odd or crazy to them.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
|