Thinking About Thinking

Bring Your Own Infinity!

Thinking About Thinking by Balaji Prasad

“Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Life can seem difficult. You need to deal with a lot out there: a veritable infinity of things. That alone would be difficult, but there are quite a few things inside you that have somehow taken root and have become exceedingly important. These things inside compete and entangle with one another.

They also interact with the infinity outside in ways that produce uncertainty, anxiety and a sense that you can never succeed in quite the way that you would like to.

It is difficult because you are resource constrained. There is only one of you. You can hold only so many things at the same time in your head, let alone in your heart: a space that is smaller still. You only have so many hours in a day. And you know only so much.

So, you look for ways to match your small set of finite resources with the infinite tangle that the universe throws at you. This is essentially a supply-and-demand problem. There are only two ways to do this: either shrink your universe or expand your resources.

Fortunately, both approaches are possible.

It’s a small world after all

The epiphany you need is that you don’t have to shrink the universe; you only need to shrink yours! It is critical to understand that these two are very different things.

The easiest way to do this is, of course, to examine the things you inject into your universe, to see if there is a way to whittle some of it down. Maybe if you did not accentuate certain things as much as you do, those things would cease to be such a strong gravitational force on everything else, causing them to have to spin around these? Maybe you could reduce the number of things that seemingly drive your engine, but which you don’t really need?

If you dig even lightly on the surface, it may yield: you may be surprised to find things that don’t matter much at all, in the overall scheme of things. Do those Facebook (or whatever social media is used) posts really need to get acclaim in the form of “likes” or other positive responses? Do you really need to get into that flaming battle online with someone who is not going to make a significant difference to your life? These are just examples, of course; there are many others that may be relevant for each individual as we sift through the rubble that is part of the life that we sometimes construct.