I've always struggled with decisions. I used to think I had bad judgment. Actually, I did have bad judgment, but, by some luck, it was not the worst judgment. I've always tended to think things through, or at least try hard to.
When you are depressed enough, your deciding gets tangled up and impaired. I remember going to a shoe store and my best friend treating me as if I were handicapped with indecision. The atmosphere made me feel as if I needed a decision about footwear made for me. The clerk kept looking at me strangely. That woke me up, a bit.
Much later, another friend told me about a similar conversation with a therapist who'd replied "I love making decisions!" She'd fizzed on passionately about decisions. They make her feel energetic and free, a complete human being. She looks forward to them. This inspired me. If someone I've never met can feel joyous making decisions, well so can I, I imagined. It used to be difficult for her. Now she loves it.
That's sort of how I see it.
Overthinking is a danger, but it's also overrated as a danger and an error. When you think something through obsessively, you get better at thinking about it.
When I was just about my most depressed, I remember I'd get out of class or off of work and I'd have some time to find food. Many times I'd drive around, abrading internally while trying to decide what wouldn't mess up my head. Lots of foods would give me migraines at the time, or at least clutter my thinking somehow. I remember sitting in a parking lot for an hour after more than an hour of driving, convinced I needed to make a decision and get out of the car, but feeling unable to choose, broken. It was a routine experience, but that time was especially bad. I wasn't calm on the inside, either. I was spewing sparks. I was catching fire on oil slicks. I couldn't get myself to do even simple things.
So I used to believe I was irreparably impaired, because I thought so hard about things and couldn't make up my mind, and when I did, it didn't work out well.
What I learned, though, is that this is especially deep practice.
After enough experiences like this, you become wise.
First you start making good decisions. Initially they're just as difficult, but suddenly, on one fine cherry blossom morning, they're not disappointments, and then the process gets easier. Your judgment is no longer bad.
Second, you start making better decisions than other people. Your judgment is somehow unexpectedly good.
Third, you find that you can relay what you've picked up to other people. You can talk about what's complicated and what's simple. You can feel the decision landscape someone's walking on, and they'll appreciate your descriptions of what they haven't said. Your judgment is shared.
Having the guts to admit you don't understand something simple, or to admit that your judgment is poor, allows you to see deeper patterns.
What I've learned, then, is that overthinking is a cost up front that pays off later.
That's what I tell my students, too, if it comes up. Many of them want to dismiss their mistakes as "overthinking." But I understand this better. When you don't know a domain or problem type or situation well, your brain goes into overdrive picking up on what's there, on leads, on angles, on potentials, on regularities and irregularities. After a while, you can navigate all this almost unconsciously, maybe even literally asleep, anyway on autopilot. Autopilot takes much less mental activity because the brain has reorganized itself. But if you try to short-circuit that process, if you say as a beginner "I'm just overthinking it," then I really don't think you're doing yourself a service. Your goal should not be to limit how much time and energy your brain spends reorganizing itself.
For better and worse, I've always wanted to be a game designer. Games are about decisions. There's a kind of poetry in the struggle just deciding. I get to see it all in slow motion. It becomes a talent rather than a defect.
Anyway, that's one way of looking at it.
I've told people I'm almost all about this one idea, about choice. Games are the art made of choice, choice distilled, rather than an art distilled from many choices. That essence mixes with the above and is why I keep saying it. I want to understand what choice is at the deepest possible level, and I want to unfold the best of those growing roots.
