Overthinking

I spend a huge amount of time thinking about what's happening to me. We're talking multiple hours a day, daily, dedicated to nothing else but articulating to myself the meaning of my own experience. I write some of it in journals and some of it in blog posts, but for the most part the contents of these hours come and go.

So this morning I began to wonder about the point of this thinking - or overthinking.

I wondered about this not in the bitter self-critical way you might expect given the general damning connotations implied by the word "overthinking", but rather curiously. It's actually kind of fascinating that I do it, given there are few other activities to which I dedicate myself so consistently, besides working and sleep.

If you've spent any amount of time trying to make yourself do thing you don't want to do, you might be able to empathise with my fascination for exactly what drives drive and what makes attention latch onto something and remain attached, in that time-equivalent of gravity-defiance we call flow. This state visits one rarely: while immersed in a truly gripping story, or making difficult but steady progress towards some awesome goal, or spending those first few hours with the person you're about to fall in love with. It's a sort of trance. It's not something you chose to go into so much as something that just happens to you. And when it does, it's like the sound of the world has altered.

These thinking journeys aren't anywhere as elating as gripping stories or successful problem solving or love, but they have something of those things in them. There's definitely a reward mechanism looped into it, somewhere. I may replay a small interaction from the day before and parse its meaning. What does it mean that I become irritable and disengaged when I feel I want something I can't exert control over? First, it's bringing the experience into something like representation. What does that feeling look like in my mind's eye? I see flashing images of running on ice or trying to climb a glass wall, the tactile sensation of mounting heat like holding a hand over a candle, the felt sense of something very large next to something very small, the feeling of infinite space like walking in a desert, etc. Then, it's the story-telling. Am I a child to be loved, a princess to be rescued, a price to be won, am I a hero frustrated by temptations and the wrathful gods, am I a human trapped in the meaningless hell of unattainable desires? And there's the problem-solving. How can I feel differently? Can I turn this feeling's representations into the representations of another feeling? Can I reinterpret the experience and tell another story? Can I understand? All this overthinking, in other words, feels as absorbing as any meaning-making activity.

When people slag off "overthinking" and instruct you to go "just live" or "just be" or some other abstract verb that you can "just" go do, I feel cheated. Overthinking is me "just" living / being / doing. It's as spontaneous and intrinsically sensible as breathing. Meaning-making is what my brain does while being alive.

I think the injunction against "overthinking" is just an expression of the exasperation many people seem to feel with the pursuit of meaning. It's like, you're there splitting hairs in four and looking for something that they're not altogether convinced is real. "Stop overthinking" sounds to me like "stop trying to find meaning where there is none" - and I read frustration and bitterness in this command. It's the same sort of exasperation I often encounter when I persist trying to solve a problem that others have long given up on. "Stop overthinking" has the feeling of saying "There is no answer" or "You can't bring them back". Give up, accept, move on.

But move on to what? If you can't make sense of the past, what sense is there to move towards and want and want and doggedly pursue in the face of obstacles throughout your future? We need closure on our experiences because we need to feel like we understand the world we live in. It's very hard to look forward to things in a random world.