What is sanity?

where someone can make a sound, rational decision. where’s the fun in that tho? will you ever learn anything?

I would describe sanity as exercising accepted norms of behaviour & thought…. which is why anyone who is foreign to a culture has a much higher risk of being labelled as having mental health issues.

A satisfied mind.

free from distress

Sharing the reality of those around you.

the ability to fit in and not stand out from the crowd by any means great or otherwise ;)

Make rational decisions.

By token of Einstien’s Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, Sanity would be: Doing the things that work best for those involved in the situation?

Sanity is when you know the difference between insane and sane behavior.
Insane people don’t see their behavior as being insane, they think everyone elses concept of reality is wrong.

Sanity is what I say it is.

and yes, i know that’s insane

but knowing that i know it’s insane makes it sane

“What is sanity?”

It is being on the side of the majority. In most cases.

Sanity is a norm accepted by others and exhibited by others – it is a social construct.

I agree with @Simone_De_Beauvoir, so I don’t need to say that again. Let me talk about some of the implications of the social construct. Since it is culturally determined, the consensus about sanity changes from subculture to subculture, from community to community and from nation to nation. Unacceptable behavior in one place may be considered completely sane in another.

Sanity also becomes a synonym for normal. We are normal. We are sane. Those others are insane. They are so different, they can not be responding appropriately to situations. Thus do Muslims become insane (they are all suicide bombers, right?) Or Northern Californians or any other culture that seems to participate in strange or barbaric rituals.

Of course, sanity is different from normality. Someone could be at one extreme end of normal and be perfectly sane. At the other extreme end, they would not be sane. What I mean is that one can be abnormal and sane. But one cannot be normal and insane.

Society is willing to accept abnormalities of some kinds (genius for example) and include those people among the sane because they behave normally in other areas. Other abnormalities are indications of insanity—the ones that seem to harm the individual or society. By extension, sanity is where a person does not harm themselves or others.

“Sanity” is very hollow. when you boil it down it amounts to ‘your grasp on this reality’. However, since nobody really seems to know the mysteries of the universe like ‘What happens to you when you die?’ and ‘how did the universe come to exist?’, no one can really have that solid of an understanding of the universe itself. Those who claim to know (religious people) are viewed as crazy for believing something silly like the creation myth or Noah’s ark, but to me it’s crazier to say you know that to be not true. how do you know? how do you know what is or isn’t possible in this vast universe? you don’t even know where it came from or if there’s a point to it. i just wouldn’t rule anything out is all i’m saying.
cheers.

@MichaelRichard Oh sure but we can safely rule Noah’s ark out – in that it couldn’t physically contain all that it claimed to contain.

ugh. with all the great mysteries of the universe, all that is unknown to us, to put a bunch of animals in a boat is impossible? the point was more that the universe is in the eye of the beholder and to be able to separate your own thoughts and reasons from the general consensus and to truly be able to think for yourself…. well, that’s sanity.

I think sanity is simply being reasonable, I also think it’s some what subjective.

Sanity is how YOU live you life.