Hi Moses, thanks for the comment. Totally agree with you here. There’s a certain amount of thinking that is useful to consider things and make good decisions but the mind has a tendency to carry on thinking for a long time after that threshold of usefulness has been reached. After that, it can easily turn into over-analysing, doubt, worry and all sorts of other productivity-sapping stuff.
I think it’s more than a matter of the quantity of thinking; I think there’s a qualitative difference in whether the underlying motive for even starting the train of thought is “I intend to do X, so I have to plan the steps that constitute X”, or whether it’s “X scares the fuck out of me and I have to avoid doing X in a way that the System 2 can rationalize to itself, so it’s either (1) go stare in the fridge, (2) masturbate, (3) deep-clean the bathroom, or (4) start a google doc brainstorming all the concerns I should take into account when prioritizing the various sub-tasks of X. Hmm, 4 sounds like something System 2 would eat up, the absolute dumbass.”
Hi Moses, thanks for the comment. Totally agree with you here. There’s a certain amount of thinking that is useful to consider things and make good decisions but the mind has a tendency to carry on thinking for a long time after that threshold of usefulness has been reached. After that, it can easily turn into over-analysing, doubt, worry and all sorts of other productivity-sapping stuff.
I think it’s more than a matter of the quantity of thinking; I think there’s a qualitative difference in whether the underlying motive for even starting the train of thought is “I intend to do X, so I have to plan the steps that constitute X”, or whether it’s “X scares the fuck out of me and I have to avoid doing X in a way that the System 2 can rationalize to itself, so it’s either (1) go stare in the fridge, (2) masturbate, (3) deep-clean the bathroom, or (4) start a google doc brainstorming all the concerns I should take into account when prioritizing the various sub-tasks of X. Hmm, 4 sounds like something System 2 would eat up, the absolute dumbass.”