A Short Overview of Mental Health Through the Nincompoop Lens.
For most of history, mental health has been treated like a collection of strange, disconnected afflictions that happen to “other people.” The Nincompoop lens rejects this completely. There is no fundamental difference between the so-called “sick” mind and the “healthy” one. There’s only the Human Cognitive Shortcuts Engine — the same clumsy survival mechanism we all use every day, whether we’re aware of it or not.
The brain’s primary goal is to avoid pain, stay safe, and conserve energy. It does this not by seeing reality clearly, but by employing a patchwork of mental shortcuts: projection, bias, mimicry, lazy thinking, tribal loyalty, and dozens more. These shortcuts make us feel certain, stable, and functional — or at least they keep us feeling that way long enough to get through the day.
Mental health conditions, then, are not exotic errors. They are simply what happens when one or more of these cognitive shortcuts break loose from the pack and begin running the whole show. Instead of a balanced (if still deeply flawed) mixture of coping mechanisms, a person with a mental health condition experiences a kind of psychological monopoly — one dial turned too high, others struggling to compensate. The machinery is the same. The settings are different.
Anxiety is what happens when the brain’s threat detection system can’t shut off. Depression is the mind’s exhausted retreat when nothing seems worth the effort. OCD is habitual thinking locked in a loop. ADHD is impulsive heuristics without brakes. Narcissism is projection protecting fragile self-worth. Autism is often a refusal (or inability) to play the social mimicry game the rest of us bluff our way through. The list goes on. But none of it is foreign. It’s all familiar. It’s simply the everyday Nincompoop machinery running off-balance.
The uncomfortable truth is that all of us live somewhere on the same spectrum of dysfunction. The mind doesn’t operate in tidy categories. It drifts. It wobbles. It compensates. On a bad week, most people will find themselves sliding dangerously close to the very conditions they believe are reserved for “the unwell.”
The Nincompoop philosophy offers no cure for this. There isn’t one. Instead, it offers clarity. By seeing mental health not as a wall between “us” and “them,” but as a shared consequence of being human, we replace fear with understanding, and judgment with something resembling humility. None of us are immune. We’re all running on the same faulty software.