The seventh sense

I see needy people. All the time. They’re everywhere.

Hands up anyone who knows someone stuck in the needy+ cycle? This business of neediness seems to afflict an enormous number of people in modern society. Whatever the song may have led us to believe, “people who need people” are not, in fact, the luckiest people in the world. “Misery loves company” would be a bit more accurate, although I don’t think anybody’s made it into a Broadway song. At least, not yet.

I put it down to shoddy programming. Humans have a nasty tendency to get stuck in these destructive behaviour loops++ that prove surprisingly difficult to break – even when we are fully aware of them. People can spend years in therapy trying to come to terms with their own (apparent) weirdness and still be no closer to an answer at the end.

Although there is a certain elegance to this all-pervasive fucked-upness that permeates pretty much everyone’s lives, it does kind of beg the question whether such a thing as “normal” exists at all. Hands up anyone who knows someone normal? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

+ i.e. someone who is insecure, so they continually need others to validate their self worth. This can be seriously annoying and consequently, others will tend to avoid them. This, in turn, makes them insecure, so they continually need others to… (Repeat ad infinitum)

++ or the psychological equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death, if you will