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Several years ago, a British man named Harry picked his nose. A hidden camera recorded him in this private moment, then someone uploaded the video to the internet, and soon Harry’s pratfall exploded into a worldwide meme. Millions of people—most of them in the United States—became obsessed with the video. Everywhere Harry went, strangers shot significant looks at him and touched their nostrils, as if to say, “Hey, you’re that nose-picking guy!”
Harry loved the attention—he described his fame as a “safety blanket” and said he felt as if everyone on the street had become his friend. But there was a problem with Harry’s internet stardom: No one else could perceive it.
In a parallel reality where most of us live, Harry had been diagnosed with psychotic delusions, many of them seemingly borrowed from the YouTube videos he obsessively watched.
His family convinced him to visit a mental health clinic affiliated with the University of Birmingham. There, he enthused to his clinician—Rosa Ritunnano—that he was “the happiest man in the world.” Harry told Ritunnano that he could read and control other people’s thoughts; he deployed his telepathy to battle the lizard-humans and the Illuminati at the center of a web of power. These enemies, for their part, surveilled him through hidden cameras and telepathic spies.
As nightmarish as that all might sound, Harry relished the attention from the imaginary conspirators who monitored him. “If I found out that they [were] not watching me and reading my mind, I would feel alone and crazy,” he explained to Ritunnano.
Though he was engaged in an apocalyptic psi war, Harry was also a remarkably pleasant fellow who seemed to pose no threat to anyone. He did refuse his prescribed antipsychotic medications, but when Ritunnano and her colleagues asked him whether he would submit to a battery of pencil-and-paper tests, he cheerfully agreed. And so the doctors administered some whimsically named tools that are used to measure self-worth, including the Purpose in Life Test, the Life Regard Index and the Existential Meaning Scale. Harry aced them all.
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- By Pagan Kennedy, October 31, 2023
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Click the link below for the article:
https://nautil.us
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