A foreigner friend of mine, flying from Budapest, was staying at my place for a night. “I almost missed the Prague bus”, he complained. “Then I only caught the train because it was late departing. I’m afraid I’ll miss the plane.”
”What time do you have to be at the airport?”, I asked.
”Eleven”, he said.
”All right”, I said. “At the proper time I’ll put you on the airport bus.”
Which I did, then returned home knowing that my buddy will soon be greeted by the sun of the Canary Islands. After a while a message showed up on my screen. “I missed the plane.”
Source: Niels And Marco, Unsplash
I will spare you the details of my friend’s brilliant sequence of operations to achieve this rare feat. It was many hours before he rang again. He shrugged, than explained what he had recently learned: perpetual lateness is an existing neurological syndrome called time blindness. I typed the Hungarian mirror translation into the search engine, and wasn’t disappointed! For once we are not behind developed countries; descriptions tumbled out of the net like clothes from an overstuffed wardrobe. In a single site I found such amazing subtitles as: ‘Cognitive biases behind time blindness’. ‘Hyperbolic devaluation or discounting.’ ‘Optimism distortion’, and so on. Well, isn’t science wonderful! Although I haven’t missed a plane yet, I’m certainly not always on the dot. I used to think all I had to do was to scrape myself together, leave on time, cram less than seventeen tasks into an hour and so on. So good to know it’s not my fault! It’s a simple medical case. I have nothing to do but wait for the chemical industry to invent the proper drugs, ask for special treatment, and fight for my rights.
I admit that up till now I’ve neglected self-diagnosis. I’ve been under the illusion that I’m merely dysformulary (unable to fill in bureaucratic forms) and machinophobic. Fortunately, my time blindness has now come to the light. There actually seems to be an epidemic in my subculture. Could it be that you are also a victim of time blindness, just weren’t aware of it? Join us! I have organized a demonstration in Heroes’ Square next Sunday. Down with timetables! The event will be on all day, probably extending into the first half of next week. In the meantime, while we fight for special rights, I started looking into things and found some interesting results.
Until now, I thought that it was laziness that held me back from achieving certain goals. I had no idea that I was actually suffering from a very serious form of dyslaboria, an inability to work. Healthy folks have no idea at how much of a disadvantage we, dyslaborians, are in society! It’s not only that we can do less than others, we are also subjected to constant critique, ridicule and discrimination, especially in the workplace.
Let’s check what the psychology literature writes about this problem: “Dyslaboria is a work problem that occurs in children who are physically healthy and of normal or high intelligence. Sometimes dyslaboria goes unnoticed for years and symptoms are only recognized in adulthood.” This is reassuring. In my case, it wasn’t recognised, even though I never did my homework, even in primary school. It’s good to know you’re not alone. Let’s read on: “Dyslaboria is not a disease, it’s just a condition, an indication that the brain of a child or adult with dyslaboria is functioning differently. Most people with dyslaboria can succeed in life if they get the help and emotional support they need.”
This page speaks from my heart. The reason I can’t work is because my brain works differently! Once I get the assistance I need: a janitor, a cook, a gardener, a butler, a driver and a secretary, I will be able to live a full life. It’s our dyslaborian human right that society provide these few conveniences to us.
There are other problems as well. Growing up, I was subjected to massive unfair criticism in the subject of cleaning, when it turns out that I am merely a victim of the dysmundia (lack of cleanliness) syndrome. Just because we have more dust in our homes, we, dysmundics, have as much value as anyone else! Certain groups of people, who used to live mostly on the outskirts of settlements, are particularly discriminated against due to their dysmundic problems. It’s evidently not their fault, however. Their population is simply more affected by the dysmundia gene.
Eastern Bloc countries had compulsory Russian at school in the time of communism, with very little result. We now know that the cause of our problems was language deafness. Victims of this syndrome can hear the sounds of their mother tongue perfectly well, but are unable to duplicate the sounds and linguistic structures of other languages. The reason we can’t utter a single word in another language is not the inane way languages are being taught. It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that we don’t dare open our mouths. It’s all because of language deafness. Some populations, such as native English speakers, are particularly strongly affected by this ailment.
Source: Sharon Waldron, Unsplash
Enough of this lunacy. If an extraterrestrial were to arrive to our planet and see what we’re doing to ourselves, they’d be depressed to witness a collapsing civilization. They wouldn’t understand why humans are screaming with joy wallowing in disease instead of getting well. Why we’re gasping from the effort to find exculpatory labels to put on ourselves. Why we claim the right to be unwell instead of looking for ways to pull ourselves together.
“But don’t you understand that some people really can’t perform certain actions?” people say. “It’s unfair, cruel to expect them to do what normal people do.” Of course I understand. I can empathize with what it’s like when you can’t do something that other people can. Like most of us, I don’t do everything well. But that doesn’t mean the gears in our heads are broken. It’s most likely just that we have to learn to do things differently than before. Why should we immediately attribute the difficulty to the hardware? Why make the challenge much harder than it needs to be?
The human nervous system is extremely flexible. Reality does not affect us directly, but through our inner constructs. It’s useless to tell a schizophrenic that he’s not Jesus, or to explain to a jihadist that he will not go to heaven by blowing himself up. His inner reality overrides what we think of as reality.
Shared reality influences our perception the same way. By building a social reality in which behavioral problems are medical in origin, we are placing the solution in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry. All this in an era when the human psyche is in serious turmoil. Everyone’s looking for their place in the current crisis of civilization, searching for a way of life, stable points of reference, an ideology. All that comes with stress and mistakes. We are getting to the point where some professions would call us all ‘neurodivergent’. Shall we all move to the funny farm?
Big Pharma is, of course, more than happy to cure your new ‘ailments’.
“Sick? Lucky you! No other
will heal you but Big Brother.”
But in fact He won’t actually heal you. He’ll just treat you. As we all know, continuing service brings more profit than a single sale.
There was a young woman who once came to a Picking up Languages Naturally workshop. All the way she insisted that she couldn’t do certain things because she was dyslexic. Even though she was the most skilled participant in that particular group, she knew something was wrong with her. It was impossible for me to convince her otherwise. As far as I could tell, she had a single defect tucked in her skull — that conviction that someone installed in her as a child. A couple of decades ago, when masses of people didn’t think they had their brains all trampled over, it was easier to teach people things.
Source: Mark König, Unsplash
The next flight to Tenerife was two days later. The ticket, of course, was quite expensive. My friend had to get up at three in the morning to catch the plane and I wasn’t even there. How come he still made it? Where does time blindness, or ‘a network dysfunction of the brain’s executive function’ go on these occasions?
Reaching goals might be easier by putting our energy not into blindness, but vision. Into believing in ourselves, into knowing we have the necessary skills. Approaching things from the right direction, trying enough new behaviors one has a chance to break through in areas of previous difficulty. I think there is a question we seriously need to ask ourselves at this moment in history. Do we want a normal civilization? If yes, it might be advantageous to start with the premise that we are normal.