John's Blog: On Thinking

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On Thinking

Monday, May 26, 2003

I've been told by many people over the years, mostly women, that I think too much. Even my wife says so, although, fortunately for me, she doesn't seem to mind, most of the time. (Sometimes she even participates. She's been known to take more than a healthy interest in prime numbers, for example.)

I've been going through old papers at my mother's house for the last few days, and came across some printouts of email correspondence from college. (Yes, I did at one time archive hardcopy of my email -- it was new then, and it seemed more special [and there was no spam]. Besides, it was on the college's server, and they purged it at the end of the semester. This was the mid-1980s, before we all had email on our PC's, for you younger generation out there.) Among the messages was a reply by me to the woman-of-the-month saying that it was interesting she should say that I think too much, as that is the same thing the woman I had dated the previous summer told me. "Is this a trend?" (My wife chuckled when she read this.)

But you know what? I don't think that I think too much. I think that I think just the right amount for me. If other people think that I think too much, maybe I just think too much for them. Or, to give them more credit, maybe they mean that I think more than is generally required to get by in the world, and maybe too much to get by comfortably. Which is probably true. Nonetheless, I'm right there with Socrates about the unexamined life.

For her birthday, I bought my wife a humor book called The Idiot-Girls Action Adventure Club, by an Arizona-based columnist. One of the stories features a friend of the author's who divides the world into "the Dumb Ones" and "the Smart Ones", noting that he and she are both in the "dumb" group. (Although when pressed, he claims to include her only because she is too cool to be in the "smart" group.) He does like to hang around with Smart Ones though, because then he can pick up interesting tidbits of information from them (like who the vice-president of the United States is) and repeat it to other Dumb Ones, who then think of him as Smart. So he gets the benefit of being thought Smart without all the accompanying angst.

As my sometimes tortured personal journal from late high school and college (most of which is now in the recycling) has lately reminded me, I had a lot of worries then. Although many of them were legitimate, I have thankfully become better over the years at prioritizing concerns (which back then also did not include providing for dependents) and not holding myself to impossible standards of "having it all together". I have also learned that a life continuously examined under an emotional microscope can tend towards paralysis. Which is maybe what my friends meant in the first place. But now I know it's true, because I've thought it through for myself!

4 comments

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