The Hidden Reason You Can't Stop Overthinking - Alain de Botton
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Why do we intellectualize emotions instead of feeling them?
I'm interested in the temptation to intellectualize emotions. You know, you were talking before, ask the sort of why beneath the why and getting below the neck as it's known in embodiment. Okay, fantastic. We have this very developed. Who was that philosopher that talked about being a philosopher is like being a mouse with a huge oversized ear on its back. You know, you have this one particular thing that you've grown to monstrous size. And anybody that is smart can do the work. But doing the work is just turning feelings into theories. And I wonder, I'm interested in this temptation of how to overcome intellectualizing emotions as opposed to actually sitting and feeling them.
Yeah. What's wrong with intellectualizing? Intellectualizing gets a bad name because at some point it ceases to have an accurate relationship to reality. So in other words, your theory has left behind the facts. Your map is no longer mapping the territory accurately. That's what's wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with having a map, but there's something very wrong with having a misguided map. And I think when we say intellectualizing is bad, it's when it gives us a rather rigid description of the territory, which no longer sees the actual full complexity of the terrain it's aiming, it's purporting to represent. And so what do we need to do? We need to constantly... check our maps against the territory.
In other words, we need to think, okay, I've got this nice, neat theory. Maybe I need to blow it up because it's liable to have grown a bit stale. I need to head out back into the world and assume I know nothing, blow up my theory in order to build a better one. So it's not about... I think humans are naturally theory makers. There's nothing wrong with that. There's something wrong with clinging to outdated theory.
If you hold it too tightly, that's an issue. I've got this visual in my mind, the difference between a way marker, which is being planted to give you an idea of the terrain, and a tether to which you are attached. Oh, I can't move from this thing anymore. This made sense five years ago when I first left university, and that explained where I was at. And it gave the chaos in the world a sense of order. I understood where I was going and what was happening. Oh, if that no longer has accurate explanatory depth, I need to come up with a new theory. And that's scary. I have to start all over again. You're telling me I have to start all over again?
I think we regularly have to start all over again. And I think, you know, that old adage, Socrates was asked why he was so wise and he was said that he was so wise because he knew that he wasn't wise. In other words, ignorance, a capacity to acknowledge one's ignorance is at the root cause of sophisticated thinking. that you should be returning to a kind of basic ignorance. Remember the story of Picasso, who went to an art school in old age, and he looks at some children scribbling and doing drawings. And he said, you know, when I was their age, I could paint like Raphael. And now I'm learning again how to paint like them. And
When does intellectualizing emotions stop matching reality?
That's really a story about giving up the old map and allowing oneself to be ignorant again. And I think that's a true gift we give to ourselves when we allow ourselves to say, you know what, I don't know very much at all. I mean, people often say to me, they must say this to you, you know, people say to me, oh, you must know so much about, you know, love or death or this or that, you know, spend all the time thinking. And I rush to tell them, I literally don't know anything. And I'm not, this is not false modesty. It's a genuine sense that, you know, with every passing day, I know less. And, you know, it's not even wisdom. It's just comedic, really.
With every passing day, I know less. I love that. Yeah, the other thing to consider there is that almost everyone's body of work is a thinly veiled autobiography. You are looking to the person who has put the most time into this. Why do you think I put the most time into this? Because I see me as most efficient in precisely all of the different areas that I am focusing on.
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