Closest Thing To Crazy

I met a guy once with a pretty sad story. He'd been a successful professional with a cool and adventurous life: he'd traveled the world and had all kinds of stories about, say, visiting some random country and deciding on a whim to build a vineyard there, before whimsically moving somewhere else instead. Later in life, he had a serious incident and was diagnosed with severe mental illness, which he was now medicated for.

There were obviously many negative consequences of this for him, but the one that was most poignant to me was the way he talked about all these previous stories. His self-identity had been as this cool adventurous guy who did "crazy" things. Now he wasn't sure what to make of himself: whether his fun adventures were unrelated to the mental illness, or correlated but not the same as the mental illness, or if all these things he liked about himself were mental illness all along.

As I get older, one of the hardest things for me to react to is when friends do things that 1) are non-normative in our society as it exists, 2) seem to make them happy and fulfilled. Occasionally they'll even ask me: is this thing I'm doing crazy?

And I don't know what to say. I think many great things in our world start out from bucking social norms, from people who had the courage to be a little bit crazy: they all laughed at Wilbur for saying man could fly and at Whitney for his cotton gin, I'm told, and those things worked out great. On the personal level, many it'll-never-work-out couples have worked out great and been the joy of many lives.

At the same time, social norms exist for a reason, and many bad things also start with someone doing something a little bit crazy. I really do believe that there's a thin line between greatness (whether personal / moral / societal / whathaveyou) and madness, and I'm not sure from the outside how you can tell which side of the ridge someone is sliding down.

I'm sure this will turn out wrong as well, but the closest thing I have to a heuristic for distinguishing between the two is a kind of emotional affect I see in some people (but not others) when they're doing something crazy-seeming.

I once met a guy who had just met a woman while both of them were travelling in a foreign land. They had matched on a dating app and met in person to discover they had no actual shared languages. They had spent a whirlwind weekend together communicating entirely through translation apps, and then both gone home, and now he was going to fly halfway round the world to her homeland to see her, still barely able to speak each other's languages.

I think this is a crazy thing to do, in general, but hearing him tell the story gave me a good amount of hope that this romance might work out. He didn't seem manic or delusional at all, just kind of calm and peacefully inevitable. He knew it sounded crazy, and he knew it might not work, but it felt right to both of them (he said) and they wanted to give it a shot. I left the encounter thinking: you know, I don't think this is crazy.

But honestly, I doubt that "seems calm and thoughtful rather than high-energy about the crazy-sounding thing" is a consistent and reasonable heuristic, and possibly it's just a reflection of my own personal tastes in energy-level. If you have a better way of telling the difference, let me know.