How To Keeps Sane

Life confusion, mental breakdown. I found Jordan Peterson's speech about how to keeps us sane that very useful. I think chaos is like a nature thing, and sanity is more like a survival strategy. Maybe this explain why people have the idea of go crazy time to time. We need daily routine to keeps us sane.

People need to know what to do every day, people have to have a routine.

70%~80% of our life consists of those things that people do every single day that they repeat. Those are often the things that people think about as the trivial elements of their life.

People need a structure and predictability, you need more of it than you think just to keep you sane. 

Sanity was a consequence of being properly structured internally. From psychoanalytic point of view you’re sort of an ego, and that ego is inside you, of course it rests on an unconscious structure. But the purpose of psychoanalysis is to sort out that unconscious structure and the ego on top of it to make you a fully functioning and autonomous individual.

The reason that you’re saying as a fully functional and autonomous human being is not just because you’ve organized your psyche. The reason that you’re saying if you have a well-organized unconscious an ego is because other people can tolerate having you around for reasonably extensive periods of time and will cuff you across the back of the head every time you do something so stupid that people will dislike you permanently if you continue. So what people are doing to each other all the time just non-stop is broadcasting sanity signals back and forth. Like you smile at people if they’re not only behaving properly but behaving in a way that you would like to see them continue to behave. You frown at them if they’re not.

You’re blasting signals at other people about how to regulate their behaviour. So partly what you’re doing with your routine is establishing yourself as a credible, reliable trustworthy, potentially interesting human being who isn’t going to do anything too erratic at any moment. Everyone else is around there tapping you into shape making sure that that’s exactly what you are and that’s how you stay sane.

What happens to people too if they don’t have a routine and they get isolated is they start to drift and they drift badly because the world is too complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself. So we outsource the problem of sanity, because sanity is an impossibly complex problem. So the way that we manage the incredibly complex problem is we have a very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time.