Why mental diversity is more important than ever.
Following the midair collision in DC last week Donald Trump made a preemptive attack on everything from Barack Obama to DEI. Slap bang in the center of his tirade sat mental health, as the new president blamed employment mandates prioritizing the mentally ‘unfit’ as responsible for the catastrophe. The outrage from the media was immediate – every (left-leaning) outlet tripping over themselves to stress the lack of evidence for such a claim. They simultaneously raced to broadcast said claim, thereby enabling Trump to ‘flood the airwaves’ with his narrative before questions of federal defunding could be surfaced.
The speed with which The Donald lumped a tragedy and concern for mental health into the same bucket mirrors that with which we are dividing up all topics right now, and I’d like to cleanse mental health of its political sullying. Because our mental health and fluency is everybody’s problem. As the bloody purge of DEI starts to feel like the slaughter of French Catholics in the reformation, let’s be careful not to allow ourselves to throw out mental health with the bloody bathwater. We are all still messy humans, and this next phase will demand a connection with, and interest in, our mental abnormalities more than ever.
We can see examples on full display in Trump’s refusal to just let go – even after his monumental win. Beyond the ritualistic firings and stripping of security details from former aides, why is he still bleating about Obama? Because, while singling out mental deficiencies as the next evil to purge, he’s also displaying his very own. Anger management? Daddy issues? Jealousy? Whatever the diagnosis, we are going to be traveling with a new Psychotic-in-Chief for the next four years. But mental health must not be relegated to the era of wokeism, the purview of the feeble minded, who throw around terms like ‘toxic’ at the mere sight of a raised eyebrow. If we lump it in with the ‘snowflakes’ we’ll be failing in our duty, which is to enthusiastically study the mind so that we may master and joyfully harness it.
Our mental foibles are everything.
Because the human mind isn’t only about to be taxed by an administration, but by a technological revolution too. AI risks removing our agency as it zealously hoovers up the less complex tasks. This will provide those more equipped with fully working cognitive systems the chance to employ them again – to great benefit in many cases. Gone will be the days when your admin tasks strip you of your energy that you can’t complete your more creative tasks. But what about those who haven’t used their emotional plumbing for so long that they struggle, or those who’ve suffered from mental health issues? The growth of AI is going to necessitate a growing demand for brains that remember how to be human, instinctive, creative and yes weird.
Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book at Christmas spoke of Gen Z as the ‘anxious generation', but I would argue that this clickbait title is pathologizing Gen Z’s superpower. In every conversation we have with this cohort we are met by candid confessions about mental health and the free discussion of the drugs and treatments they use to manage their lives. These are not ‘snowflakes;’ they are the advanced guard in a new era of emotional flourishing. And they will be essential in the rebuilding of a system that skills us in the naming and handling of our rampant and mischievous emotions. Gen Z are the first generation where education brought a normalization of the ‘abnormal.’ Yes – we perhaps spent a few years turning these into identities that somehow needed to find enemies to give them added meaning, but I believe that the emotion-recognizing muscle that was built beneath the more public discourse on identity has and will be a force for good. When the dust settles on the so-called culture wars, we won’t see dead bodies on the ground, we’ll see mentally stronger individuals. Not because they’ve chiseled off the odd shapes but because they’ve named and embraced the ‘odd’. This generation of the emotionally literate will be essential in a workforce that will be co-piloting with AI. Embracing mental diversity will be hugely sought after. Those who espouse unorthodox approaches to problems, or who bring the poetic, the tortured, the fantastical and the purely instinctive will provide great value. These people who have learned to see their emotions and leverage them – rather than bottle them up and convert them into spite and anger, they are who the world needs in an age of oligarchs and robots.
So how should we tilt the field in favor of the human in the age of the efficient robot?
Design permissive environments for play and debate.
Let’s start by dispensing with the fear and formality that have plagued the workplace in the era of corporate and automation. I love Apple’s show Severance for its ability to build a cringingly accurate depiction of the hushed sterility of the modern workplace. Where colleagues speak in coded small talk but rarely say anything of any worth. What makes this show so addictive is how spookily accurate it is. In mocking it so gratuitously we feel a moment of liberation. Have you noticed how liberating it is to debate with a bot? When you know there’s no human judging you for the boundaries you may overstep, you can let loose and explore ideas that you may have curtailed in another place. The safe space to play that this tech provides is the first ingredient for a world that must relearn to feel, debate, intuit and express its humanity. Now you can explore the depths and the limits of an idea without fear of overstepping and causing offense.
Keep things in perpetual motion.
One of the beautiful things about working with AI today is that you never quite know if
it’s telling the truth or cosplaying the know-it-all. This is incredibly stressful for the left-brained worker who must have objectivity and consistency but rather good training for the critical thinker. A dynamic environment keeps us on our toes and trains us to keep ideas in play too. This in turn gives more air to new possibilities as we are instinctively forced to rotate, distort and challenge ideas. When the field is designed to keep things in play it’s much easier to continue to play with them yourself. This is what great conversation, comedy or expert rhetoric is all about. There are no dead ends or petering out conversations as everything is perpetually energized. This works in the interview and analysis context too.
Make things weird.
As every good artist or writer knows, if you look at something from its most conventional angle you will paint it in the most conventional way. If this is something you see everyday a conventional depiction will render it almost invisible. But if you distort, upend or rotate an everyday experience, you can paint it with renewed wonder. So the ‘divergent’ for us is one of the most important mechanics for seeing. Through projection, performance and distortion we enable the mundane to reanimate into the truly wonderful, and truths that we hide just under the surface shine through in glorious freaky technicolor. None of us are just one thing. If we embrace our mental foibles and divergence from each other, rather than numbing it, boxing it or politicizing it, we will be in possession of a true superpower.