On Overthinking Things
I’ve always thought I had the opposite problem. I thought that packaged with my incessant procrastination was a complementary capacity for not giving anything the amount of thought it deserved. But that, I have now been slowly able to parse out, is rather a lack of attention and focus – a similar issue, sure, but nonetheless a separate practice. The high bar required to grab my attention is very easy to trace to an origin. It is no surprise that, in an age of instant access to information and entertainment, the generation it grew up alongside has developed a less sensitive feeler for what out there is truly worthy of our attention.
That tangent, while interesting to me and nobody else, somewhat proves my thesis statement. Not too long ago, I could have looked at the title and the last paragraph, and concluded that I was reading a fully coherent, on-topic piece. There have been times recently that have made my tendency to overthink very apparent – and in a way, I am very grateful for those. Of course, I am still growing used to being called out in public (see my last entry), but it is proving a reliable way to demonstrate those shortcomings in behaviour after nearly two decades of them being explained away by my subconscious.
Notice again, though, how hard it was for me to stay on topic even in a paragraph in which I called myself out for previously failing to do it? Enough of these flashy demonstratives, though, on to the meat of the piece.
As an argumentative person, one who loves proving others wrong if only for my own enjoyment, I am constantly breaking down a lot of information every time people speak. That, or I’m not paying attention, but we’ve covered that in the early procrastination section. I learned early on to conflate my understanding of how arguments are typically set out logically with how they tend to appear in people’s natural speech. In doing so, I am on a never-ending search for slip-ups in facts I think I know or opinions with which I (likely irrationally) disagree vehemently. Not only do I look for that but for a rudimentary analysis (my brain is only willing to supply so much energy, after all) of the subtext in what people are saying.
This applies not only to my general experience of language but to that of ideas that, on the surface, appear complex. I am more than able to correctly identify when I encounter something of which I have no understanding, but there is within that a grey area in which I falsely classify certain things as beyond my comprehension, when that is not the case. It is here that the procrastination begins to seriously take hold, and can turn a simple quest for information into a drawn-out process in completing which I must pore over each fact for long enough for me to lose all sense of its meaning and bemoan the entire endeavour as impossible. I have been told myself and been told too many times not to believe that I am a chronic overthinker. Short of removing myself entirely from situations in which I could overthink, though, re-evaluating my many moments of head-spinning confusion could prove beneficial to eliminating them in the future.
I think.