An Exercise in Overthinking
I was having a conversation with someone about my thoughts. They had gone through my website and read the things I wrote. For a while, I felt so seen, so vulnerable and I wasn’t entirely sure why. The thoughts I had published were thoughts I had chosen to put out, willingly.
I go back and forth on writing and putting stuff online. At times, I feel a certain sense of fear, or perhaps it’s more so a sense of reluctance, to put a thought out there before it’s fully formed. Perhaps what it simply boils down to is the fact that marinating too long on a thought makes me second guess myself, to the point where all that remains is a seedling of doubt.
But the more I thought about my thoughts, it occurred to me that: thoughts don’t necessarily have to be fully formed, but simply act as bridges to connect you to new ideas and continue to evolve as your mind navigates the human experience. My thoughts are simply what comes to mind, it relates to whatever is going on in my life at the time, or whatever I’m exposed with.
When I originally made this part of my website, I never wanted to call it anything else but ‘thoughts’. Looking back, perhaps it’s because I’ve been influenced by the works of Antonio Damasio. Damasio talks about the difference between emotions, feelings, and thoughts and the order in which these occur. He argues that thoughts are not entirely abstract and that the process of thinking is deeply embedded in our emotional and physical experiences.
So, why is it that I feel this overwhelming sense of vulnerability when people read what I’ve written? Perhaps, it’s because we live in a world where sharing our free and unadulterated thoughts exposes it to waves of scrutiny and criticism, mostly from people you don’t even know. It’s as if everything we put out and say must be perfected and curated to fit in some sort of box, leaving very little room for us to maneuver. There exists this notion that everything we put out there becomes concrete, cemented by ones and zeros to an infinity we refer to as the internet. Paradoxically, this infinity somehow makes me feel claustrophobic. Maybe, I’m not alone.
These days, most of us live our lives online. We communicate and interact with family, friends, and strangers online. Although the internet is largely an abstract concept for most of us, there is a looming sense of permanence that has been birthed around the same time data farms and the cloud came into existence. The idea that anything you put on the internet will forever be archived in cyberspace is a scary one. But perhaps, an even scarier idea, for me at least, is that by putting something out there, I’m going to be held to it until the end of time. That putting something out there causes me to lose the right to change my mind. I lose the ability to change my opinions, to grow, to form, to evolve as a person, as my thoughts are encoded to a data centre somewhere in Texas.
I realise deep down that permanence is simply a concept constructed by our minds to offer us a safety blanket as we navigate through life. Life itself is impermanent, and everything is in a constant state of change. How can you go through life with the expectation to grow and evolve if you don’t allow your mind the same freedom?
I guess, what I’m experiencing is a form of cognitive dissonance. Why is it that I fear permanence when I know that life itself is impermanent? Perhaps, it’s not permanence that I fear, but society and what it has become. Increasingly, I’ve notice people are attaching themselves too strongly to their ideas. And although there are merits to sticking to your guns, it’s another thing to point that gun at someone else for disagreeing with the way you view the world. People have become so convinced that they are right to the point where they lack the vulnerability to self-reflect and hear why they might be wrong about something. To entertain the perspective of another.
In a way, I think I’ve connected the dots and understood why I felt so vulnerable when someone told me they had read what I had written. I felt scared that I would be pinned to the things I write and that somehow my existence would be summed up by what I decide to publish. That the thoughts I put out would somehow act as chains that kept me tethered to something although impermanent, is seemingly infinite; trapping me inside a box that I’ve willingly put myself in. More importantly, I felt scared of being wrong.
That’s not to say that I don’t stand by everything I’ve put out thus far. On the contrary, I still stand by all of the things I’ve put out. However, where the vulnerability lies is my fear of being wrong. My fear that what I believe in and have convinced myself of, is a lie. That my reality is a lie and that my life is somehow not what it seems. But it’s most likely the case that I’m not alone in that feeling and perhaps embracing, instead of acting out of fear and vulnerability, is where the beauty lies. And, in finding peace with that fear and vulnerability one finds less discomfort in stepping into the reality of another. With that, realising that reality is what you’ve created for yourself. And to leave you with the wise words of Simone de Beauvoir, “freedom realises itself only by engaging itself in the world”.
Food for thoughts:
Looking for Spinoza - Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio
Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious by Antonio Damasio
Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir
Anicca, the doctrine of impermanence
