I’ve written a lot on the Internet, and one of the side effects of having a vociferous web presence is that people speculate about one’s mental health. It’s really none of anyone’s business but… in fact, I’m fine. I’ve dealt with some shit in the past, but I’m treated and I’m past 30, so my worst years are definitely behind me. One problem that no treatment seems to fully erase, however, is moral mysophobia.

What is mysophobia? The Greek phobos is an overloaded word. It’s used for both fear and hatred. Mysophobia is a fear or hatred of germs, filth, or contamination. Physical mysophobia is sometimes called “germophobia”. I don’t have that issue. Physical germs are no more repulsive to me than to anyone else. For some reason, though, moral filth has always inspired in me a disproportionate hatred.

To make it clear, this isn’t something that I’m bragging about. It’s not a good thing, and it doesn’t make me a good person. Concretely, I explain it like this: if someone sees a cockroach in his bathtub, he’ll kill it. No one finds that to be disordered. I’m the sort of person who would, after that, want to kill cockroaches in every bathtub. (Of course, when it comes to literal cockroaches and actual bathtubs, I wouldn’t, but I think that the metaphor works.) Most people find moral filth unpleasant, whereas I hate it and sometimes the disgust and anger get the better of me. Occasionally, I catch myself seeking moral filth out so I can destroy it. And that has gotten me into a shit-ton of trouble that I should have been able to avoid. Moral mysophobia leads to conflict and too much conflict, for too long, makes a person either bitter or insane. I haven’t reached either of those states yet, but I ought to back away while I can.

Consider some of the high-profile feuds that I’ve had with some of the worst people in the tech industry: truly nauseating specimens like Paul Buchheit and Marc Bodnick. Why did I enter conflict with such people? To a degree, I bought into the larger tech-industry narrative: meritocracy. I believed in it enough to think that I, obviously a person of higher merit than those who are actively making the place worse, have a just territorial claim. There are plenty of people who make millions of dollars for no other reason than that (a) they believe themselves to be what I actually am, and (b) they’ve managed to convince other people that they are what I actually am. The charlatans make me sick. If this industry were a meritocracy, then it would be my territory far more rightfully than theirs, so why should I not fight them? Is it not my calling to drive them out?

Looking back, I recognize this as somewhat absurd; meritocracy is just a marketing slogan in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t mean anything, and I feel like a chump for having bought it. If anything, the closest things to meritocracies are the old-style organizations (e.g. government agencies and large corporate research divisions) that still invest in people and that have real purposes for existing.

When I was younger, I’d defend my moral mysophobia because I believed that it made me “more moral” than people who didn’t seem to be fighting as hard. I really considered myself to be a defender of civilization. Maybe I was, but that’s not something that one can do alone. I no longer feel that moral mysophobia makes me a better person. Is a person who washes his hands for an hour more clean than someone who washes for 20 seconds? I doubt it. Is putting one’s own health and career at risk, just to purge moral rot from the fucking VC-funded tech industry justifiable? I don’t think so. Silicon Valley just isn’t that goddamn important. The narcissists and scumbags have been allowed to take it over because society has deemed it to be not worth defending. Is second-guessing society, on this matter, a sign of unique moral insight? It’s astronomically more likely that it’s just quixotry.

Being moral is a good thing, and I’d like to think that I generally succeed on this front. As for moral mysophobia, I’d like to learn to live without it. What good does it do? I’ve expended hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of effort to save an industry that neither wanted nor deserved to be saved. All for what?