ICD-10–CM F99 - Idealism

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

“What is mediocre in the typical man? That he does not understand the necessity for the reverse side of things: that he combats evils as if one could dispense with them; that he will not take the one with the other—that he wants to erase and extinguish the typical character of a thing, a condition, an age, a person, approving of only one part of their qualities and wishing to abolish the others” - Nietzsche

In the present age, a disease replicates and infects us silently and insidiously. Those who reap the benefits of the high standard of living are all affected. I myself have only recently paid proper attention to this disease. At its core is the plethora of external options that are available, the immense babel of endless products, the siren songs of Amazon deliveries and Netflix shows, the unceasing chaos of text messages, two factor verification codes, phone calls, instruction manuals, youtube shorts, medical intake forms, and the whole headless chicken madness of bureaucratic stupidity.

The ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen discovered something disturbing in the 20th century. He found that animals will abandon their real eggs if they are presented with larger and more colorful ones. “Supernormal Stimuli” hijacked their reward systems and they preferred the illusion to reality, much in the same way as we often prefer television to reality. As much as I despise the irony of making a movie about David Foster Wallace, The End of the Tour had one particular scene which stuck with me.

DAVID

“Look: as the Internet grows in the next ten, fifteen years, and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we're gonna have to develop some machinery, inside our guts, to help us turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Otherwise, I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna have to leave the planet.

LIPSKY

Why?

DAVID

Because the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is fine. In low doses. But if that's the basic main staple of your diet? You're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.

Do you not have a TV?

DAVID

I do not have a TV.

LIPSKY

How come?

DAVID

‘Cause if I had a TV, I’d watch it all the time. I don’t even know if I would watch it; it would be on all the time - my version of a fireplace. A source of warmth and light in the corner that I would occasionally get sucked into.”

...

DAVID

“I think probably the not very sophisticated diagnosis is that I was depressed.

Or, then, for two weeks I wouldn't drink, and I'd run ten miles every morning, in a desperate, like very American, “I will fix this somehow, by taking radical action” sort of thing. …

It wasn't a chemical imbalance, and it wasn't drugs and alcohol. It was much more that I had lived an incredibly American life. That, “If I could just achieve X and Y and Z, everything would be OK.”

I have gathered through observation that people are quite aware of this problem but not sure how to solve it. Minimalism has had a surge in popularity in recent years but it seems to me to be a weak solution. It hadn’t occurred to me why it is a weak solution until recently. Minimalism still focuses on the external and the problem is internal. We need to develop this “machinery in our guts”. Few things are more difficult. However, I think the Japanese can offer some advice in this area.

The principle of Wabi-Sabi involves embracing impermanence and imperfection. It reflects the idea through symbols and aesthetics, that things are more valuable when they are worn and tattered. As Nietzsche said, “Examine the lives of the best and more fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourselves whether a tree, if it is to grow proudly into the sky, can do without bad weather and storms: whether unkindness and opposition from without, whether some sort of hatred, envy, obstinacy, mistrust, severity, greed and violence do not belong to the favouring circumstances without which a great increase even in virtue is hardly possible.”

Shoma Morita was a Japanese psychologist who devised a therapeutic system based on Zen Buddhism. Central to his system is that actions can be controlled but feelings cannot be. As Alan Watts said “there are no wrong feelings”. Morita was opposed to the Western notion of some kind of permanent happiness, the achieving of x, y, and z. He thought instead that we must learn to coexist with pleasant and unpleasant feelings and learn to act in spite of them. Of course, this is easier said than done.

But I would like to underscore what I feel is a more significant and overarching aspect of this idea. Much of what we do is a distraction from this problem, such as minimalism. There are so many distractions that there is never really a powerful impetus to actually address the internal state. The first stage of Morita Therapy, lasting one week, is to literally do nothing. Patients are put in a room with just a futon and there is no reading, no talking, nothing. This may sound ridiculous, but it represents an absolute focus on the internal. The patient then progresses towards reintegration through actions.

The reason why I consider minimalism to be insignificant is because it ultimately does not force one to address the internal realm. Ultimately, one can only deal with the external issues of idealism with the internal willingness to let go of certain things that one thinks will be essential for happiness. The attainment of goals, promotions, awards, etc, is so highly coveted in our society that we lose sight of what is truly significant. We may become entirely blind to it. The tragic irony is that it is precisely the hyper fixation on the future and on expectations of the meaning it will bring that prevents one from experiencing life meaningfully. Life will always be chaotic and present problems, catastrophes, curveballs of all shapes and sizes. It is a fool’s errand to live believing “once I do X I can finally relax”. This time will never come. “All idealism is falseness in the face of necessity” - Nietzsche