There’s Nothing Wrong with You

The people involved in Incubator are the people I love most, which is why it pains me to see some of them move through the world with the belief that something wrong with them. 

Psychological “disorders” like ADHD and bipolar disorder are unintentionally used by the ruling class to get us to think there’s something wrong with our brains when, in fact, there’s something wrong with the society our brains live in. The society our ruling class forces us to live in is not suited for natural human brain chemistry. 

Our rulers heavily discourage divergency so that they can maintain order. They want us to be good workers who make them more money. 

So tragically, they’ve convinced many people that what makes them different is a problem.

Society is failing and people are looking for someone to blame

Our rulers have realized that people are going to point the finger, and they’ve decided it’s better we point it at ourselves. 

They’ve made up legitimate-seeming psychological “disorders” and even put them in textbooks so we don’t address how disordered society is.

They’ve raised us to sit in a chair doing Sisyphean tasks 40 hours a week and convinced us there’s something wrong with our brains when we desperately don’t want to do that. 

And when as a result, we have mood swings or can’t sleep well or can’t maintain healthy eating habits, they’re okay with that because all our problems are just opportunities for them to sell us solutions.

The danger of suppressing our shadow

Our rulers will allow any problem to persist as long as it’s profitable for them.

Perhaps the biggest problem is shadow suppression.

We all have a shadow (the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected). Carl Jung, who coined the term, says we should try to integrate it into our conscious world, not suppress it.

He says if we don’t integrate our shadow, it will come out in unseen and increasingly nefarious ways (AKA neuroses).

We’re taught to reject our shadow and keep it in the darkness because integrating it would entail facing the deep societal flaws that we’re forced to endure.

And when we have trouble keeping our shadow in the dark, we’re prescribed synthetic chemicals to take care of that for us.

Our shadow contains the parts of us that are key to unlocking are creativity and true spirit. Integrating it is essential to the lifelong process of becoming whole. 

Our rulers don’t care about that. They want us to keep working, so they treat these natural parts of ourselves like diseases.

This has lead to widespread self-hatred that’s so ubiquitous it’s like background noise now. This self-hatred is about the unhealthiest thing we can do for our psyches.

The most popular psychological diagnoses

To people with bipolar disorder: some people naturally have a wider range of emotions. You live in a society that overemphasizes emotional stability (because that’s what makes better workers). 

To people with ADHD: you’re overstimulated because the world is overstimulating. You haven’t learned to cope because you haven’t had a chance to. Our brains crave a slower way of life and you haven’t had access to that.

To people with autism: you’ve been convinced something’s wrong with you because divergent people are harder to control. You’re unpredictable, which makes it more difficult for the ruling class to subjugate you.

To people with with borderline personality disorder: this is the most absurd of the most popular diagnoses. Where’s the border? What were the values of the privileged white men in the latter half of the 20th century who drew the borders? What did those men consider a good personality when they wrote the handbooks on how to diagnose people? 

I’m sorry but we barely understand the human mind

If we understood our minds, we wouldn’t design a world so ill suited for it. 

We’ll never be able to see our own eyes, bite our own teeth or see the Milky Way from the outside. In the same way, our minds will probably never completely understand itself.

To cope with this, we’ve developed mechanisms

The sickest part of our society is how we’ve been convinced us we’re the sick ones.

To cope, some people have gone down the rabbit hole of made-up diagnoses. They often end up confused whether they have borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder or ADHD or all of the above.

That’s because it’s not real.

Shifting blame onto the individual

Just like corporations who destroy the environment have systematically shifted the responsibility of saving the environment onto the individual, they’ve shifted the responsibility of being happy completely onto the individual.

It’s the job of a society to take care of its citizens. Instead, we’ve been exploited. We’ve been forced to work Kafkaesque jobs until our bodies and minds are used up all under the threat of losing access to food, shelter and health care.

And when we’re unhappy as a result, they say our brains aren’t right.

Sadly, most of us have internalized this thinking to some degree and subconsciously berate ourselves on a daily basis for not fitting in as a cog in an evil empire. 

There’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t pathologize parts of yourself just because they don’t fit neatly into capitalism. Try to listen to those parts and learn to love them instead.

We won’t build a better world until we start accepting ourselves for who we are

We live in a country where problems are manufactured so that we can buy and sell solutions to each other. Where food is systematically destroyed “for economic purposes” while people starve. And where everyone hates our leaders but we seemingly can’t do anything about it. 

A few years ago, shortly after I turned 30, I gave up on American society at large. It’s been a process of mourning that I’m still going through, but now I’m convinced the best solution is to simply get away from the noise.

The best thing we can do is stop trying to fix a broken system that doesn’t allow for change.

The best thing we can do is disconnect from it as it spins out of control.

The best thing we can do is generate our own resources and try to live life the way we want to…autonomously. 

Then we can start to build a world where people can simply be people.