I think I’ve made an important breakthrough in the field of theoretical hikikimori research, otherwise known as loserology.
It’s not a cure for failure to launch but I think its an important step towards one.
As seen in today’s vid.
Saying us failure to launch (heretofore called “FTL”) types have failed to grow up is hardly revolutionary in and of itself.
I mean duh.
But the connection I’ve made to childhood fear of abandonment is, as far as I know, brand new and original to yours truly.
Excuse me while I bask in my own genius.
Gee that feels nice.
Seriously though, I’ve wrestled with where this pervasive feeling of not being able to make it in the real world comes one for quite a while and so making the connection with the very important instinct of children to stick close to their parents was a huge relief.
But it begs the question of what the hell went wrong? How does a normal, successfully launched person acquire the confidence to leave the nest and how did that process fail to happen for us?
I have a brutally cynical theory and it has to do with how we are a very intelligent population of social misfires.
Basically, the difference with us is we’re smart enough to think about things the healthier masses simply do without question by following their herd instinct.
Our herd instinct either does not work or we ignore it in favour of concentrating on our abstract reasoning skills and the world inside our heads.
Don’t get me wrong : the ability to tune out the outside world and hone in on your inner voice is vital to high intelligence.
But like all good things, it can go way too far and become a serious problem.
So the idea is that regular, normal, healthy folk just do what everyone else is doing and it never even occurs to them to wonder why, let alone contemplate not doing it.
In doing so, they maintain life momentum and have the support and safety that comes from having the rest of the herd around them.
Yes, even in our hyper individualistic society, people still take a great deal of comfort from knowing they are “normal” and therefore “safe”.
Normal people are also far better at listening to their instincts than us FTL folk. Again, we listen to our intellects, and that means we tend to view any kind of mental input that is not logically connected to anything as noise and tune it out.
You know, pesky little things like emotions and instincts and empathy and people.
So while the rest of the kiddies were blithely developing normally into healthy, functioning adults, we were on the sidelines questioning everything and unwittingly robbing ourselves of forward momentum.
But lots of intelligent nerdy people go on to have perfectly normal, healthy, respectable lives, so that can’t be the only answer.
Something more must have happened to us to destroy our ability to advance to that level of emotional maturity and I can’t think of what it might be.
Probably not one single thing, but a number of different things that all can disrupt the same vital psychological subsystem for which we do not yet have a name.
This phenomenon may include more than us extreme cases that are unemployed and always online and so on.
I know a lot of highly intelligent people who got a university degree in something brilliant but impractical and then took one look at the prospect of competing with all the other people with the same degree for the incredibly small number of jobs in that field, and decided it was not worth even trying, and gave up, and ended up working the same sort of jobs people without degrees get.
Only with debt.
In a way, they failed to launch too.
This warrants further investigation.
More after the break.
Did we make it?
There definitely seems to be a certain subset of the population that assume that if there’s competition, we lose.
Like there is zero chance we can win over others on any level.
Now where does THAT come from? How did we end up assigning ourselves to the omega camp, the permanent losers club?
Social dominance games have to play a role in there somewhere. You grow up being the last picked on teams and being treated like the lowest of the low by your classmates and getting bullied on the schoolyard and it sure seems like that’s the role society has in store for you.
And childhood, especially early childhood, is where we get our fundamental social programming. These are our basic lessons in how to exist around others.
And I didn’t even go to kindergarten. Le sigh.
So I guess the answer to how we assigned ourselves to the loser group is that we didn’t, we just found ourselves there and adapted.
It’s probably not quite that black and white, but close enough.
And maybe we didn’t develop our social skills more because we were too busy listening to that intuitively intelligent voice inside. Maybe that’s why there is this seeming incompatibility between high IQ and social skills.
Maybe when that goes too far, you get Asperger’s. Or full on autism.
Anyhow. To attempt to drag us back to the point by our ankles.
The feeling that we come last in everything leads a lot of us to seek cooperative environments, or at least our own specialized nerdy environments where we at least stand some chance of not being at the very bottom.
Like I said, not all of us end up in the full on FTL group like me. My circumstances , with my parents taking me out of university and back into my childhood bedroom, were especially cruel and regressive.
But enough of us end up here that you really have to wonder why.
And if there is something we can do to get the fuck out of here.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.