A year or two before I started my YouTube channel, I went for a meal in Edinburgh with two relatives and their spouses. I have remembered this meal ever since because of two appalling things that were said during it. It might have been 2011, but was probably 2012.
As detailed elsewhere, I had always been the black sheep of the family. They had come to expect unorthodox opinions from me, sometimes controversial and sometimes (to them) a bit baffling. But by 2012 I had very much outgrown those tendencies and was earnestly trying to see things truthfully.
Unfortunately, if one does not tailor one’s opinions to suit other people, there can be discord. Thus, to my fellow diners in 2012 it might well have seemed that I was still that dream-headed youth “just trying to be different”. We live in a time of such involved delusion that the truth is often surprising - not what you’ve heard on TV or in the staff-room at work - and people will look for some way to dismiss it.
And that is the word. The reaction from my fellow diners was slight shock, and some of the bafflement that had greeted my opinions many years earlier, but mainly it was casual dismissiveness.
That needs explaining too. I was certainly the most intelligent, educated and thoughtful person at that table, so why did I have no credibility? Because I was a failure in life. Now at the end of my twenties, I had been unemployed for seven years. I had no money, no love life, no prospects, no contacts, almost no friends, no commitments or responsibilities, and no direction.
I was trying to escape six years of severe depression. I had been trying since hitting “rock bottom” in 2008. That was now four years in the past, but I lacked the courage to face the world. Over years of isolation and failure, my confidence had been completely destroyed.
My relatives had tried valiantly to help me, but nothing they had done or said had worked. Most of it had only made me more weak and frightened. By 2012 they had basically given up on me, and really I had given up on myself.
I was, now in a much grimmer way than when I was a child, the black sheep of the family: the failure, the loser, the screw-up, the loner, the wreck, the welfare-scrounging layabout. It was a kindness that they even invited me along to that meal.
When the two disagreements came up, they had no reason to take me or my opinions seriously. After all, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? That would be the dumbass materialistic remark. These people were not nasty enough to say that, but their view of me, which I knew though they rarely said it, was similar: if you’re so smart, why aren’t you successful, at anything?
It is a valid question. Of course, one can talk about how depression is linked to intelligence, but let’s not get into that here.
I give the above history so as to explain - and perhaps excuse - what happened at that meal in 2012.
As I said, there were two disagreements. Both concerned hierarchy.
