Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the... — Michael Leunig

Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality - which indeed may be a rare achievement.

Author: Michael Leunig

Insight: We're so used to thinking of sanity as simply doing what most people do. If everyone's anxious, everyone's distracted, everyone's scrolling at dinner—that becomes the baseline for "normal." But Leunig is pointing at something deeper: there's actually a kind of health that exists beyond the bell curve of how people currently behave. Sanity isn't a majority vote. This shifts everything about how we judge ourselves. You might feel strange for wanting silence in a noisy world, or for questioning habits everyone else accepts. That strangeness doesn't mean you're broken. It might mean you're sensing something real about what actually sustains a person—presence, boundaries, purpose, genuine connection. The pressure to fit the statistical norm (which keeps shifting anyway) can actually be what keeps us from discovering genuine health. The tricky part is telling the difference between healthy nonconformity and plain dysfunction. But Leunig's point holds: real sanity is rarer than normality, and worth seeking out. It means sometimes standing apart from the crowd not out of rebellion, but out of clarity about what makes a life actually work.