Boredom

For some reason, I feel a constant need to be doing something. I can never sit still; I am always twitching and shaking. I also can't deal with silence. Freud would probably just blame sex, but who listens to amphetamine addicts anyway? Biopsychology would claim that there is something wrong with my dopamine levels. Jung would just turn around and blame the collective unconscious, the run off into the mountains screaming about his archetypes. Existential psychology would claim I have deep and unresolved personal issues revolving around me not liking myself very much. Social psychology, my specialty, simply wouldn't give a fuck because who the hell cares about an individual anyway?

And on and on it goes. Psychology is funny like that; it is never wrong because it gives you a hundred different answers, and half of them are so vague that they could apply to anyone. Psychology is kind of like cold reading, fortune telling and all those other shams, in it is right only because it offers so many explanations that one is bound to fit. The wondeful thing about the human psyche is how quickly we are willing to attach belief to anything that sounds remotely possible.

Here is a quick example. Pop psychology likes to claim that the best way to relieve stress is to rip up pieces of paper or punch a pillow, you know, catharsis. However, various studies have shown that catharsis actually increases violent tendencies and makes things worse, not better. Oh, and 'Doctor' John Gray (the guy who wrote the oft-quoted book Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus) got his PhD from an unaccredited school and his book didn't so much as give any real insight as tell people what they wanted to hear.

People love easy answers. But, not any old easy answers. No, no, no! People want easy answers that sound good. It sounds really good that my constant twitching and aversion to silence is a result of fucked up dopamine levels or deeply rooted intrapsych issues, just like it sounds really good that men and women are so biologically and psychologically different that they may as well be from two different planets. The real reason we like these 'easy' answers is it would absolve us for any blame. I can't be blamed for screwy brain chemistry or psychological problems, just like if a man and a woman have a miscommunication, they can't be blamed for it.

This is bullshit. I have a big problem with any answer that absolves an individual from any blame. The reason I can't stop shaking is because I have no patience and I constantly want to be doing something, even if it is completely pointless and unproductive (I'll start a hundred straight games of solitaire without actually finishing any of them), and I hate silence because I am simply unaccustomed to it, seeing as how I grew up in a city. The reason men and women have communication problems is because our society has divided us and given us two seperate set of rules to live by, or, more likely, people just don't like to listen.