A Thought About Thinking

I once had a friend named Jameson Pirkel. We are not friends anymore. However, when we were friends, I noticed, he was kind in his speech, competent in his skills and loud in his head. We developed a friendship because we both possessed loud octaves of inner monologues in our head, that barely, ever made it outside. In stark contrast to our loud heads, we were both, calm and composed in our outwardly presence.

We did, however, differ in the value we assigned to thinking about things.

We both ran prediction models in our heads, we both had a tendency to examine a statement with surgical precision to discern the fallacies upon which the statement was made. Some call this tendency critical thinking, others call it intelligence. I (different from James), call this compulsion, absolute madness. This essay is to tell you why I think, 'thinking on loop' is not a sign of intelligence, rather I argue, it is a sign of one's inability to be present with life. If I am to be harsh, I would claim that thinking beyond necessary is an incompetence sold under the false guise of intelligence.

Here is my argument.

We are homo Sapiens. We are told it is our distinct evolutionary capability to engage in different forms of reasoning (e.g., concrete, abstract, meta) that puts at the top of the animal kingdom. A human brain can conjure up worlds that don't exist and these thoughts can manifest into cities, tools, mechanisms that upgrade human existence. To demonstrate, cue your brain to run images of before and after of the city of Dubai (UAE). The before images will have sand, camels, palm trees and bedouins. The after images will be one of skyscapers, shopping malls! Think of humans walking on the moon, an image that was a figment of someone's imagination. Ofcourse, being able to think about things that do not yet exist, is a sign of intelligence.

Or is it a cop-out?

The story of humans building cities and walking on the moon conveniently leaves something out. It celebrates thinking as the force that moved us forward, but ignores the context in which that thinking developed—fear. We learned to think because we had to survive. Thinking helped us anticipate danger, build fire, avoid predators. It had a clear purpose. But the world we live in now is not the world our minds were built for. We are no longer being hunted. We are not solving for survival in the same way. And yet, the machinery of thought continues to run—unchanged. So what happens when a system designed for survival has no real threat to respond to? It turns inward. Thinking no longer builds fire.
It builds doubt.

We think before we speak.
We think after we speak.
We replay conversations.
We question how we sounded, how we looked, whether we fit in.

That is not intelligence. That is a survival mechanism with nowhere to go. And so it creates its own problems to solve. Look around you, how many fires is the world putting out, that were ignited simply because, some can only see threat in differences. A threat manufactured by a brain that tells you, your fear knows better.

Id recommend cutting thinking in half. We don't need to be running prediction models 24/7. Rather, we need to learn to trust that in the moment being present, truly present is all we need. To believe in the goodness of others. To seek company, not in thought, but in being. With ourselves, and with those around us, is the skill we need to practice and for that we need to get out of our loud heads. 

Touch. Laugh. Breathe. Giggle. Play.
That’s what we need.

To trust that there is no danger our mind can predict that we cannot meet when it arrives. To remain still in the face of uncertainty. To abandon the thoughts that tell us we are less than, or that another is less worthy.

That is not a skill easily achieved.
However, I would argue—it is the highest form of intelligence: to trust the world we live in, over the octaves of our mind, that tell us otherwise.

Noora Noushad