Beware the buzzkill...

Several years ago I started reading Noam Chomsky and became a total buzzkiller. Allow me to explain. 

A good friend had been raving about Chomsky for years, about his intellect and perspectives, and my friend suggested I give Chomsky's stuff a look. I did. I was so taken with Noam that I bought everything I could find at the time and just immersed myself in it all. After ingesting about four or five books over a two-week period I found myself in a funk, a dark place in which I'd never before found myself. 

I couldn't seem to shake it. I couldn't view anything around me without this state of thinking and feeling coloring what I was seeing, what I was doing, what I was perceiving. I was finding cause to rant about just about everything, driving my friends nuts. "Hey, lighten up," they'd tell me. I couldn't hold a normal, civil conversation with anyone without interjecting some aspect(s) of what I'd read in a Chomsky piece. This started to happen during seemingly innocuous conversations, about music, or about sports, or about pretty much anything. I was driving my friends nuts, which was driving me nuts. 

During a conversation about this with my wife, she suggested I try backing off reading so much Noam, and maybe interspersing it with something a bit lighter, a bit less weighty, like fiction. 

It worked.

I'd always enjoyed reading, and this was coupled with a strong feeling that I was out of touch with current and historical events. Reading Chomsky seemed to be the perfect solution: read about what I felt I was lacking. 

My overload was not Noam's fault. Noam was just being Noam. He still is and you have to love him for it. I still read him, as well as Chris Hedges and many, many others, but I do so in much smaller pieces and always intersperse it with escapist fiction to maintain balance. I've not fallen into the funk overload since then and I'm far happier, and so are my friends, I'm sure. I know my wife sure is. 

Long, long ago I came to realize that what I thought at the time were original, unique ideas and views I was developing were actually nothing of the sort. I was merely thinking along lines shared by others, maybe millions of others. The important part, though, was what I did with those ideas and thoughts: did they offer balance or buzzkill? I wonder, therefore, if something similar happens to anyone who might be immersing his or herself in the writings of folks who are sure they have the truth, who are sure they're right, and these could be folks on the right or on the left. Maybe people who watch too much Fox News are doing the same thing to themselves as I did with too much Noam Chomsky, who is as far from what Fox News espouses as one can get. But maybe there is a parallel. 

Finding balance is the key, I think, and leaning one way too much, right or left, makes it impossible to balance yourself, figuratively as well as literally. Balance or buzzkill? Which will it be?