We have decided some brain quirks are disorders (and get accommodations, as is compassionate), whilst others are flaws (and get slurs). But no one picks their hardware. You cannot earn a better prefrontal cortex or deserve a calmer amygdala. Nor does one get to pick the environment they are born in, which will inform their choices later in life. Even the capacity to “learn better” is a roll of the dice, some brains start the race with sprinting shoes, others with lead weights.
So when we call someone stupid, lazy or insane we are not describing a choice, but simply announcing which kinds of unlucky we’ve decided are worthy of scorn.
Since you mention lonely, depressing nights, I’ll drop the act.
I actively worked to understand the things I wrote because that finally let me forgive myself for not being perfect. I’m the perfectly natural consequence of everything that ever happened, so I had no reason to beat myself up anymore. But of course, the requirement for that realization was to allow others the same grace.
You are exactly right that it made me appreciate the complexity much more. It was much easier to think there was some objective “good” (that I always failed to be), and it definitely was easier to think people I didn’t like were “evil”, instead of coming to the very sad understanding that I could be them if not for luck. But having that understanding doesn’t lead me to depression, it leads me to write bizarre pompous manifestos on Lemmy for fun. And working in health and wellness industry, because I realized also that I’ll never know what could happen, before it has happened (as there’s a difference between determinism and fatalism).
I hope you don’t have too many lonely and depressing nights. Probably my sentiment won’t land but I mean it.
I haven’t had them in a while to be fair, and it was mostly a sideffect of stress elsewhere, like high school. I did however remember middle school, where after a near-death experience I coped for a while by bothering classmates with similiarly overly dramatic sentences like “You don’t know death as I do”, even if they weren’t nearly as well thought out. It may have ended up well, especially if all the philosophizing taught me to cope after that (we’ll see), but clearly meeting a psychiatrist would’ve been safer.
Glad to hear you’re doing better. And near death experience as a teen sounds like a lot, especially if you didn’t get appropriate support after. But philosophizing isn’t the worst thing you could’ve done, in fact please keep doing that. Crash Course to Philosophy is a nice and engaging starting point if you’re interested.
If it is within your means, no reason to not go see a psychiatrist now if you feel there’s something unresolved there. I realize that’s a slightly privileged invitation these days though.