To Aleksandra Jelesijević: How to Overcome the Dangers of Overthinking

Recently, one of my top students reached out to me and asked me whether or not ‘overthinking’ is a valid concept. After all, man, she pointed out, should think about each and every issue which is important to him rather than make any decision based on faith, feeling, or whims. Consequently, my student wondered whether or not there is a point at which one has effectively thought enough about a given issue and consequent thinking about the subject in question would have to be evaluated as overthinking. In this short, I would like to venture forth to argue that this is indeed the case. Overthinking, I hold, can, at least in extreme cases, hamper us and thereby impair our ability to flourish.

As my student correctly pointed out, understanding the world, ourselves, and other men demands that we constantly use our minds. After all, our senses automatically provide us with data about our surroundings. It is, of course, true that I can choose not to temporarily get information about my surroundings by, for instance, closing my eyes or my ears. As soon as I open my eyes and my ears, though, I receive data about my surroundings. The materials with which our senses provide us can be perceived neither rightly nor falsely, neither correctly nor incorrectly. Rather, as American philosopher Leonard Peikoff puts it, our senses are necessarily valid, explaining, “All sense perceptions are necessarily valid. … [T]he senses sum up automatically what is.”¹

The question, then, is how we mentally deal with the material we perceive through our senses. And at this point, man must make a fundamental choice. He can either use his mind to logically integrate the material with which his senses provide him or let his emotions take over and misintegrate this data.² Only the former, rational approach, though, enables us to stay in existence, to understand our surroundings, and to live a flourishing life. After all, as philosopher Ayn Rand frequently and famously points out, “emotions are not tools of cognition.”³ The belief that consuming heroin is a healthy and safe practice does not mean that this substance actually furthers your life. Nor does the fear of an alien abduction mean that such a kidnapping constitutes an actual danger to your life. By using reason, though, one can easily conclude that taking heroin severely damages one’s health and that there is no evidence that a single man has ever been abducted by an extraterrestrial species.

Consequently, whenever one is faced with new data or needs to make a decision, it is paramount that one use one’s reason if one wishes neither to disintegrate one’s mind nor to make detrimental decisions. However, it is metaphysically impossible to ponder each and every issue in the universe. After all, as Rand points out, “[t]he universe is really the sum of everything that exists.”⁴ Since even thousands of lifetimes would not provide us with sufficient time to form a vague idea of everything that exists, man needs to consciously and rationally choose which subjects he would like to study and learn about. 

In The Romantic Manifesto, Rand points out that an artist cannot represent each and every aspect of reality. Consequently, he has to choose which aspects of reality he wants to stylize. In her words, “An artist … selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence.”⁵ Similarly, if he aims to flourish, man has to first ponder which subjects he is interested in and to then explore these topics rather than the ones he does not care about. If he, for instance, listens to a handful of jazz songs and doesn’t like them, it would not be a rational decision either to listen to this genre or to study jazz musicians. After all, every minute a man dedicates to a topic he has no interest in is one minute he could invest in pondering an issue that actually matters to him. Consequently, remaining rationally ignorant, i.e. refraining from studying an irrelevant subject because spending time on thinking about the issue would constitute overthinking, is the rational choice to make in such instances.⁶

What is more, though, is that one can also overthink a topic which one is actually interested in.⁷ Imagine, for instance, that you have extensively studied political systems for several years and you are now an expert on this topic. Both your observations and your studies have led you to the conclusion that capitalism results in a prosperous and flourishing society whereas collectivism (in any of its forms) leads to disintegration and decay. Given that you have by now reached a conclusive verdict about the topic in question and given that you likely have other interests, reading all the myriad books published on this subject each year to continuously check one’s conclusion would, indeed, constitute overthinking. 

Hence, it might be a reasonable decision to remain rationally ignorant about many of these new publications since most of them will neither refute one’s conclusion nor provide new evidence for it. Rather than pondering over the same material over and over again, a rational person will likely invest his time in learning about other subjects that interest him and only rethink his previous conclusion if there is new evidence which threatens to refute his hypothesis. If a communist country overthrows its tyrannical government, becomes capitalist and free, and propers, for instance, there is no need to rethink one’s previous hypothesis. Quite the opposite, the new example affirms one’s conclusion and integrates with one’s previous observations. If, however, a free nation becomes communist, regulates its economy, and nevertheless prospers for a period of a decade, a rational person would want to understand the reasons why and attempt to integrate this new data without any contradiction. 

Therefore, a rational person should not indiscriminately think about each and every claim and subject (regardless of how stupid and/or irrelevant they might be). Rather, prior to taking action, he should decide which subjects to study, whether or not to obtain more information about a topic, etc. In short, he should have an active rather than an open mind. As Rand explains the difference in an article:

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an ‘open mind,’ but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them.⁸

Activating one’s mind to the fullest degree and critically examining one’s context might, it seems to me, be the keys to overcoming the dangers of overthinking.

1. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, [1991] 1993), 41 [emphasis in the original].

2. Cf. Peikoff, Objectivism, 159-163.

3. Ayn Rand, “For The New Intellectual,” For The New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Signet, [1961] 1963), 55. Cf., too, Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, [1964] 2014), 32, Ayn Rand, “Art and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, 2nd ed (New York: Signet, [1969] 1975), 32, and Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, [1982] 1984), 8. 

4. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed, edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: Meridian, [1979] 1990), 273.

5. Rand, “Art and Sense of Life,” 26 [emphasis in the original].

6. American economist Anthony Downs coined the term ‘rational ignorance’ in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy.

7. Perhaps, the more interested the topic, the higher the odds of overthinking it.

8. Ayn Rand, “Philosophical Detection,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 29 [emphasis in the original].