on overthinking
author's notes:
- This is a working history of my understanding of overthinking and how I've been navigating around it. I think you will particularly find good use out of this if:
- You are a control freak
- You want to break out of your own shell
- You think logically, therefore irrationally wanting rational solutions to irrational feelings.
- You are not religious and seek a human-centric approach to faith
- As this is more documentation than a guide, I've left stories in that I would've omitted otherwise. Feel free to skip around to whatever you find useful
- I view overthinking and anxiety as different, the former being a more extreme, spiral-y version of the latter. But also I think there is enough overlap for somewhat interchangeable use
situational overthinking → blind optimism
Since turning 20 I've set a goal for myself to travel more. As I hopped from roofs to sand dune coasts I discovered new sides of old friends and befriended people I've never seen. These different humans shared a common similarity: optimism. This made me acutely aware of my own overthinking and anxieties, which became heightened whenever I brought up a worry with them ("It's fine! You're overthinking" was the common response). It wasn't so much that I envied to be like them, but more so a fascination with how anyone could be so kumbaya with life. My travelling companions sometimes felt like they came from an alien planet.
In the spirit of my 20岁 wishes I kept travelling, eventually climbing a particularly giant rock in Quebec with friends in summer 2024. I had been obsessively checking the weather since it started forecasting thunderstorms a week earlier. Blue skies at the entrance made me optimistic to continue, but any hope quickly soured once the sky darkened. Our first glimpse of the summit was accompanied by a black wall of clouds right behind it.
This has been the closest near-death experience I've ever had. Wind blew rain so hard it fell up and sideways. I couldn't see anything more than 3 feet in front of me. A meter of rock separated me as I sprinted down a 800m cliff face, lightning and thunder roaring behind threatening us otherwise. By the time we regrouped at the tree line I felt like laughing, crying, and yelling all at once. I had tracked this storm in fear for a week– and in some twisted beautiful way, it still nearly killed me. It could've cared less about how much anxiety I had.
Since then I've done a lot more reflecting on what place overthinking and anxiety have in my life. Choosing optimism will always feel like a leap of faith to me. But two years of traveling have made me think that I should leap anyways. Everything in my life has turned out okay so far. Everything in the future will probably also sort itself out. If not immediately, then in a few years, or a few decades. At this point in my life, I feel like whatever human I become will not be markedly worse than any other version.
I'm not sure what to call this feeling. Just "optimism" doesn't feel quite right – this is more artificial. Optimistic nihilism also feels close but is ultimately addressing larger existential topics. The best thing I can come up with is "blind optimism," which references to my attempts to manufacture it without being able to see its existence for myself.
So far blind optimism has been a pretty effective tool in quelling any overthinking I've had. At the same time, it feels blunt and somewhat less agentic than the kind of optimism mentioned in Steph Ango's piece. I also wonder if quelling all anxiety is necessarily a good thing, as it is quite a good lighthouse for preventing future shipwrecks.
social overthinking → occam's razor
I occasionally want to hit myself for reading Ray Dalio's Principles in my wee years of elementary school. I haven't got the faintest memory of his squabbling business logic and corporate management, but one thing did stick. Stick would be an understatement – it fused deep with my psyche.
That idea was blatant honesty: the idea that most problems could just be solved if you were completely transparent with the other party. If they are stupid, you call them stupid. If you hate them, let them know before it blows up. Eliminate social inferencing and the margins of error attached. This made complete sense to me.
Alas, most people are not devout Ray Dalio followers. The result is that I find myself in situations where I have no idea what the other person is thinking. Maybe they're angry towards me, being more dry than usual, or suddenly not showing interest romantically. Suddenly I'm lying fetal position in my bed wondering if fatally misinterpreted a question you asked 3 months ago.
Here I find blind optimism harder to tap into. Whatever reaction the person has is entirely dependent on them, no matter what I've done beforehand. Beyond that, I find social interactions to have nuance that lacks in situational anxiety. Small hitches can spiral out of control if we only slap on a bandaid of faith. It demands a more delicate tool – something razor sharp.
A friend of mine once was cold to me over text, eventually leading me to think that a "LOL" I sent 3 years earlier caused some sort of permanent trauma in our dynamic. When we met weeks later they told me they were just busy with school. When I showed them the message (I dug it up), they laughed and said the reply was fine. Most of my hitches have now ended in this uneventful yet relieving resolution, leading me to believe in Occam's razor. Simple machines fail less than large machines. In the same way, simple outcomes consistently play out over complex ones. It helps me stamp out irrational thoughts by helping me focus on the most likely ones.
The astute among you might say I'm stupid (appreciate the honesty!) Occam's razor isn't a hard rule to understand. Boltzmann brains don't just rain down from the sky. What is deceptively complicated is recognizing Occam's simplicity. "He hates me" sounds simple, but only because it's three words long (I've found that getting someone to hate you is actually quite hard). "She didn't sleep well" or "they were busy with school" are much simpler outcomes, but took me countless shower contemplations to realize. Focus first on the ability to discern simplicity, and Occam will naturally guide you the rest of the way.
a spooky edge case
I flop back and forth on whether 𝖌𝖍𝖔𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 is a situational or a social overthinking thing. My somewhat final answer is that it can be both, hence a lovely potion of optimistic nihilism seems to do the trick. I would love to tag one down and talk to a ghoster about what goes on in their minds (if you have "nothing to say," do you realize that in itself is something to say?) but for some reason they're quite hard to reach.