Underthinking

I started this column by typing this exact sentence, as you are reading it, without any idea of what the topic would be this month. In fact, every word you read this month will be as I first typed it, with no redos.

Here’s why.

You may have noticed I can be inconsistent in my column schedule (and if you have not noticed that, please don’t tell me); what is theoretically a monthly column comes on a schedule that can better be described as, “mercurial.”

Yes, my name is Josh and I am an overthinker. (“Hello, Josh.”) Not in everything; I will be the first to cast my fate to the universe for anything it is the boss of anyway. But for my own output, frequently. The fancy term for this is “task initiation paralysis.”

I believe this can sometimes be for good reasons. For example, it can be the result of living an engaged life—the Socratic assertion that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Personally, I am suspicious of habit and, as an artist/creator, tend to like the chance to question my own impulses. The brilliant songwriter and guitarist St. Vincent used to detune her guitar at random before writing, so that all her ideas would be based on sound alone, and not familiar patterns or shapes. The familiar is expedient, but also arbitrary. So, artists spend an embarrassing amount of time knocking over metaphorical mailboxes and seeing what tumbles out—from little things like tackling the supermarket in reverse order, to bigger things like changing how we create, to see what the change might result in.

The downside is that sometimes “habit” is the result of decades of daily personal experiments and refinement, so while a bit of healthy skepticism is productive, a lot of it is not always so. Some impulses can be questioned out of existence. Some of those might be the right ones!

Another reason for “overthinking,” at least in my case, is because I love games and puzzles. I truly enjoy the “Well, now, hold on. Let’s think about this for a second” run-up to what could have been a routine interaction or transaction. I have a minor obsession with efficiency. (I have a whole different column in the barrel on this topic, for the future.) And I don’t even mind if the “sunk cost” of the thinking takes longer than the task might have. In the future, that time is more than made up for in smug, “Ha, beat you again, Waze!” moments of quiet and obnoxious victory.

Of course, you can spend so much time trying to save time, that it wastes time. And there’s no way to know if you’ve done this, until you’ve done. Fun, right?

But most crucially, I suspect I overthink for subconscious fear of getting something wrong that I identify as someone who gets right.

That tension point between what is and what we think or hoped was, is the root of all art. So, I don’t always mind it there—which may be the problem! But it’s hell on a computer browser when it comes time to pull the trigger on a toaster or life-advice column.

I am back from a brief Google AI lesson on overthinking. Apparently, there are many reasons for it, from mental health conditions to low self-esteem to trauma. That’s right, Google overthinks overthinking.

Personally, I think it’s more directly related to the Douchbag Inside Your Head, which pops in sometimes just to be sure we heard it last time when it explained to us that we are dweebs. I think the act of, for example, writing this column, which I love and feel moderately sufficient at, sends the DBIYH off on a quest to ask the existential question, “What if you actually suck at this and this is the week you finally find out?” So rather than invite Beetlejuice into the conversation, I may keep the column in the just-short-of-release state basically forever, or at least for a month.

The obvious question is, “So what if you did suck? Who cares? Not everyone’s good at everything,” I think the answer is that if I think I’m good at this, and it turns out I’m not, then nothing else I think about myself can be trusted, either. Then the only voice of record is DBIYH. And therein lies the existential heart of the overthinking soul.

What is at the heart of yours?

Whatever it might be, I suppose I am offering this week, by way of demonstration/example, the encouragement to get all Nike’d up in there and “just do it.” Forget what it was supposed to be. That is existential bird poop on the windshield of your mind. Just do the task as someone who doesn’t care if it sucks, might do it. It doesn’t mean it will suck. It just means paralysis won’t stop you, not on a Tuesday, and that is nearly as satisfying a victory as forcing Waze to reconsider its smug, avatar-mottled confidence.

So here it is, the anti-Taylor Swift column: this is me not trying. I am “underthinking” in the interest of science. These words are being typed as you read them. The topic revealed itself to me in the same order it revealed itself to you. This column will now be sent as written to the unfortunate and saintly Liz Abbott for its close-up when I reach the end of what will probably be this very paragraph, maybe this very sentence, maybe even right now.