Moments that people are in
When something becomes a theme, that suggests I ought to write about it. Not every writer gets to have a theme. Writing is hard at its most paradoxical, though. I’m trying to figure out the solution to a problem whose root is the search for solutions.
I’m tightly wound — cogs are always churning along, grinding every moment into sour theory. Put the average person in a hypersurveilled house à la Big Brother and they wouldn’t be half as self-conscious as me. I’m obsessing over the idea of moments that people are in, which is a roundabout way of describing, you know, be in the moment — moments in which a person’s consciousness is in the moment, rather than about it. This is a rather paradoxical obsession, as the idea I’m obsessing over is a hundred and eighty degrees removed from the kind of reflective, self-aware obsession that I’m pouring onto it.
Excessive analyzing, overthinking, self-reflection and intellectualizing isn’t good for the soul. Happy people, people experiencing genuine joy, don’t sit around thinking “yes, this is feeling pretty joyous, but how does it compare to that night four weeks ago?”, “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m Happy, I’m HAPPY, c’mon now”, “I really ought to be feeling euphoric right now”, “what am I supposed to do right now, I don’t know, is happiness expected of me?”, “serotonin and dopamine are rushing across my synapses at unimaginable speeds this very second, through an arcane process not yet understood by science somehow causing my self-aware consciousness to experience ecstacy”, “oh god I think I’m finally losing my self-awareness in the moment, I can feel it slipping right now!”, “these pants are itchy”, “oh, my experiences are insignificant and ungenuine”, “can this happiness be said to be real?”, “at what point does the mask that is my public imagine end and the me that’s really me begin?”
Real happiness is uninhibited. Sitting around thinking about things is either a symptom or a cause of depression, and I don’t care which. This is really a dual problem: on the one hand, for us types who sit around thinking too much and doing too little, and whose brains haven’t understood that they’re supposed to concentrate on the doing and not the thinking when we are doing, the problem is how much thinking we can get away with and still be happy. For those who don’t think too much — generally more successful in every area of life except academia — the problem is how little thought they can get away with and still not run their life off a cliff due to bad, unconsidered decisions. The latter problem hasn’t been much of an issue to me — let’s put it that way — which is not to say that I’m smarter than you or always do the right thing; actually, my point is how dysfunctional overthinking really is. Social life, especially, is set up so that excessive thinking is brutally penalized.
My first impulse whenever I hear Socrates’s oft-quoted quip about the unexamined life not being worth living is to ask: at what point does examining the mechanics of life inhibit actually living it? Of course, sitting around thinking isn’t literally not living. You’re breathing, your neurons are still buzzing (in fact they may well be buzzing more intensely than during any other activity), but you’re hardly living life to the fullest. I’m not a believer in ultimate purposes, divine or otherwise, so I can’t say that there is a pre-determined metric of what it means for you to live up to your full potential as a human being. When I say that sitting around thinking isn’t living life to its fullest, I can easily imagine that there are some people, maybe folks like Socrates, for whom there’s just nothing better in life than just quietly contemplating states of affairs. But this person is a theoretical construction that’s just so very typical of overthinking. Where, exactly, are these people who are living happy, fulfilled lives, and yet do nothing but analyze? Maybe some Buddhist monk on a mountain somewhere, but he does so only by relinquishing any stakes in this world. Only by not attaching any special significance to anything do you not incur any losses. Detached analysis leads you into a flat, largely unemotional rhythm, in which the strongest emotion is an all-pervading feeling of melancholia.
And aren’t the ups and downs the whole point? If your emotional landscape is flatter than Denmark (I’ve been there; it’s really flat), what could it be but a desert? It just isn’t possible to maintain a steady state of bliss, and so, in order to be completely stable you need to be consistently low. Ever see a mountain that’s just five thousand meters straight up, and then there’s a flat, consistent, distinctly unbumpy plateau on top that goes on forever? I haven’t. Like mountains, emotional lives never reach the tallest heights unless they’re kind of rumbling, tumbling, up and down, zigzagging, inconstant, varying over time, jagged and uneven. That’s not to say you’ve got to be a bipolar teenager in order to be happy — not at all. But a detached, quasi-objective and analytic life isn’t going to be a happy life.
There aren’t any happy cynics, and analysis can turn anyone into a cynic. Sure, there are people who voice cynical opinions from time to time. There are happy people who feign cynicism. I’m not calling them liars, but they’re certainly not true cynics. A true cynic is someone who spends every day dissecting life rather than living it. For a true cynic, life is an autopsy that they are performing, and the smell of death pervades everything. Everything is fake, false, inauthentic. If a true emotion shows up, the cynic’s first reaction — and the overthinker often becomes a cynic — is to dissect its reasons for being, until he can prove to himself that the feeling is unwarranted and thus inauthentic, and so cannot be enjoyed. And even if the feeling is pure and its motivations withstand every attack, analyzing it destroys it. When you’re constantly thinking about what you’re feeling, what you’re feeling gives way to the omnipresent melancholia of analysis. You can’t be truly happy in the same instance as you’re analyzing every event and emotion that led up to your present happiness, as well as society’s reactions and norms regarding the aforementioned.
Meta is a symptom of excessive reflection. Meta is sometimes fun, sometimes genuinely insightful, but mostly, it’s just a sign that you can’t enjoy a thing for what it is. No, you have to apply it to itself, twist it onto its own tail, so that you can follow it around itself like the path of a Möbius strip. You’re not getting anywhere, just endlessly looping, but you aren’t able to settle down and enjoy whereever you are, either. That’s not progress, and it’s not honest enjoyment of something either. I think I can say that, because I’m obsessed with meta myself. First reaction whenever I encounter a new concept: can it be applied to itself? Douglas Hofstadter calls these things Strange Loops, and thinks they’re key to understanding consciousness, but I think that’s exactly what an overthinker as obsessed with meta as I am would say, and I’m not at all convinced that “this snake can bite its own tail!” is an important discovery that everyone ought to think about. I think it’s mostly dysfunctional wankery of the sort I’m trying to avoid.
Trying to attack this problem with the intellect is the last thing you want to do. Intellectualization isn’t going to solve over-intellectualization. Thinking about overthinking isn’t going anywhere, just like two wrongs don’t make a right.
A prime example of neurotic overthinking, from David Foster Wallace:
I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I’m not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?
The answer to my worries is probably, “you got to chillax, duuuude.” However, noticing the problem isn’t going to solve it. The whole problem is this business of noticing. We should just abolish noticing. Noticing is the root of the problem. I don’t want to be dumb and unaware and totally naïve, of course, but all this analysis is driving me up the wall. It’s painfully obvious that thinking isn’t going to settle anything. The way to just chillax, dude, isn’t going to materialize by me thinking about it. Thinking about it is inhibiting my chillaxing, dude, and being aware of that isn’t helping. It’s actually aggravating the situation, as it gives every thought a new meta-layer: for every thought I’m thinking too much, I’m now also worrying that I’m thinking too much, bringing the sum total of overthinking to stratospheric heights.
When I linked to the broken koan, a few weeks ago, I wrote:
I think I, and a lot of other people, are stuck thinking too much. Overanalyzing. Never being fully present in a moment, because our minds are also busy analyzing the moment as it’s happening. And how the fuck do we get out of that quagmire? Resistance is futile. Whatever we decide to do is going to be a method, and the whole point is not to look at the world through methods or analysis, but to simply live it.
The koan suggests that we should just not think:
… since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.
However, you can’t just not think. It’s not something you can just turn off. If you tried to consciously turn it off, that would just lead to another cloud of meta-thinking about thinking hanging over your every thought: am I thinking about this too much? I got to not think too much about this. I got to just chillax, dude.
It’s not going to work. Direct engagement with the enemy will end up with all the fatalities on your side. If there’s a method to get out of this bog, it’s got to be indirect. But how do you find that method unless you engage in the very activity that you’re trying to prevent?
