Photo by Helena Lopes
We’re All Crazy: Get Used to It by Jerold Skolnik drives us to realize that the world is crazy and that accepting chaos is the best way to navigate it.
The World Is Crazy
Long before anyone was born, long even before humans first came down from the trees and learned that cooperating with one another was a good idea, and they developed civilization–long before any of all that, the world was already crazy. The world is incredibly and profoundly insane, simple as that, and it wasn’t because of anything any human has invented.
Accepting chaos is the best way to navigate the world, and We’re All Crazy: Get Used to It by Jerold Skolnik drives us to realize the importance of this truth both in how we can move forward with society and how we can understand ourselves better and more fully.
Left now with this truth, there are really only two paths that any of us has to take in trying to understand and survive this wild, wild world we all collectively call home. It’s either we let the craziness eat us up, and we fizzle out because of the madness, or we start accepting chaos and acknowledge that if the world is crazy, that also makes us crazy too.
And We Are Too
We like to think that what sets us apart from all the creatures of creation is that we humans are naturally orderly and stable, finding comfortable patterns and predictable routines that help us maintain sanity while living from day to day.
Don’t deny it, but we all have a cricket inside our heads, our very own Jiminy Cricket that keeps on nagging at us about how everything should make sense, how this way is vastly superior to other ways, and how we should interact with the world according to a very convoluted but otherwise “logical” set of standards and rules that we’ve arbitrarily set for ourselves or are forced to follow because of the conditions and cultures of the people and community around us.
If you think about it: That is crazy. For all we like to think of ourselves as children of reason and logic, when we dig deeper, we find that there is nothing objective to plenty of our stances and presuppositions of the world. We are all crazy, in a way.
Yet, people are often very hesitant to embrace this truth; they struggle to accept chaos and proclaim, “The world is crazy, not me.” This is despite all evidence to the contrary, all the chaos, the unpredictability, and the overall madness that seems to always exude from the world and the people that live in it.
We always conveniently forget that we are part of the people living in it.
Accepting Chaos
The world is complex. The world is crazy too. These are not mutually exclusive.
As we may have already guessed, the reality of things is much more complex, multifaceted, and infinitely variable. Almost an endless amount of factors has the potential to affect the myriad events that have happened, are happening, and will happen all across the grand scope of existence.
If you think about it, we are all just ants in a very elaborate and massive ant farm. It’s more deliriously maddening when you learn that one of those countless factors can be an individual action coming from you.
How astoundingly insane is that, yeah? And simply attempting to make any sense of it all, let alone trying to take the horns (like a lot of us want to do), is an impossible and foolish task, which will only lead to eternal frustration and anxiety, perhaps even a bout of despair.
This is why accepting chaos is important.
When we understand that there are simply things that are beyond our control and notice, the things and opportunities that pass us by and the people that we cannot truly connect with become easier to ignore and put down, no longer are we burdened by missed moments and inexplicable rivalries; thus, we are freed, and this freedom allows us to make better use of our time in ways that are fulfilling for us and fully accounts for our needs and desires.
Trina’s Travel 