I was reading “The Psychopath Test” and after a couple of chapters of the book, I began feeling the same thing that the author, Jon Ronson concluded with… that at some level, at some time we are all insane… and that, probably what all is termed as insanity, are actually moods of our mind that most of us in some form or the other go through… things termed as insanities by the outside world, to us at that stage seem so real and true, that we follow it with all our heart… and mind…  so true that we either don’t care about the outside world or that world seemed to be insane to us in not getting it…

At the same time, by some coincidence, I was going through some of my previous writings on a social group which I used to be a part of in my late teens to mid-20’s… I realized that I was so belligerent and zealous in my pursuits that I simply acted as if I co-owned that group… that I had the moral right to speak and share whatever I felt, however, I felt like… today when I read it, I feel I was so naïve and almost unsocial and callous in my approach… while my writing was incisive and true to my heart, in a hindsight it feels that I would have been better off presenting it diplomatically… without such raw and excessive display of emotions…

But that musing also instantaneously made me remember the blinding pleasures that I felt in those days… blinding for sure… for I was very rational… I used to slice and dice an argument and use raw emotional arguments to blast through fallacies… and yet the pleasures of my pursuits were so blinding that it glossed the fact over my mind that I am actually acting a little insane in that journey…

Today I believe I am much more restrained… thoughtful and more socially correct in stating my thoughts… but then I miss those days where I used to throw caution to the winds… speak my heart with passion… caring less about what effect it had on anyone… just basking in the thrills of the raw power my intellectual outputs gave me (with no other being its judge)… what that pleasures of insanity were… those extremes…

I guess it must be a combination of age-related hormones and the experiences one gathers growing up which subdues the tendency of a human being to go to the extremes… makes one more balanced than risk-free… more realist than idealist… more diplomatic than outspoken…  you get the drift… essentially more sane than insane…

Is there then I wonder… a connection between why people are happier in their youth than when they are in their mid-life? Are those pleasures of insanity’s that now no longer exist that cause a mid-life crisis?

If the answer is yes, then should we actually aim for sanity or should we continue with our insanity’s? After all, life is a pursuit of pleasures, isn’t it?

Even if the argument is that pleasures of insanities are only temporal and cannot be sustained… where have the comforts that sanity brought been permanent? Things, situations, people, time, everything changes… and so could our insanity’s… can’t they?

And pleasures could be from anything… for some maybe intellectual studies, for some it maybe spiritual goals, for some – a social change, for others – sports excellence, monetary wealth… anything…

The underlying fact still will be that most of us experience utmost pleasure when we pursue it madly… and in that craziness, we derive the utmost satisfaction… not in moderated, controlled and a balanced approach…

There are times I keep thinking about those 10 hours of non-stop chess at a friend’s home… those 50 sit ups and 4 rounds of suryanamaskars at one go… that continuous 4 hours of bowling practice at the back of my old building… that debates of whole night… writing of poems in 10 minutes… voracious reading of philosophy and quantum physics… and I did all those things at the same late teens to mid-20’s age… when my parents thought I was probably going crazy after unimportant things…

I guess every person who is possessed by some goal must come across as a madman (woman) to the world who does not share that vision… every person who seems as crazy must be in his or her world deriving amazing satisfaction… guess this is why getting on a ‘high’ with drugs is such a cool thing amongst today’s youth… it is that pleasure in insanity… that carefree delights that one cannot experience with a controlled mind…

Believe this thrills and bliss of insanity is a state of mind experience… probably derived by concentrating one’s energies in something in kind of a focused meditative state but in a conscious mode… where one does not care about the world but is lost in the thing… without getting physically tired or worried about social stigmas…

Idols & ideals and the crazy & mad people of this world both share the same mind state… just that one’s vision we understand, while the others are restricted only to themselves… at the end of the day, though… both experience the same kind of pleasures… the ones coming from insanity…

Anyway… while I have been thinking and writing all this… my wife rightly feels that I am not spending enough time with her and Aarav… and am just going overboard with all this… so I better stop… after all, I am a happily married man… and I would like to stay so 🙂 …

– Written on 27 May 2012