AN OVERTHINKER'S GUIDE TO OVERTHINKING

HOW TO BE AS ANXIOUS AS ME

Everyone wants to stop overthinking, but I don’t have any expertise to share with you on the subject. I can, however, say that I am extremely good at overthinking and will walk you through some of the key ways to be as anxious as me. If you’re looking for an improved experience of life, well, you can still gain value from reading this post. Just do the opposite of this guide! YOU’RE VERY WELCOME.

NEVER PRIORITIZE

Yesterday, you spent three hours messaging

Jeffrey Yun

about logistics for an event that you both wanted to attend. You don’t want to drive there yourself (you are really terrified that the stop lights will be down, as Austin has had many power outages in the past few days), and he is an unfamiliar driver himself, so you have to spend many hours coming to conclusions about very important questions such as the following:

1. If you want Jeffrey to pick you up, should you meet him at the dinner place, at the hotel, or at your apartment? How can you optimize the route so that he only spends 40 minutes driving instead of 45 minutes? This portion of the conversation takes maybe two hours of back and forth.

2. Should you drive some of the distance myself, or should he drive it all? Maybe if you are willing to drive a portion of the ride, you guys can use your car instead of his car, as it is a bit larger and a bit newer. In the case you get into accidents, however, then you’re liable for the damages, so maybe you don’t want to do that. You spend another twenty minutes trying to calculate this.

3. You want to order him food. Jeffrey can’t eat lobster, crab, or shrimp, but clam, mussels, and krill are okay. He also prefers food that is “as healthy as humanly possible,” ideally high protein and low-carb. By the way, can you also make sure that you two eat somewhere with refrigerator access (not your apartment because you don’t have power), so you have somewhere to store his leftovers?

At any point during the THREE HOURS you spend discussing a TWO HOUR LONG EVENT should you bother to ask yourself, is spending three hours worrying about this really worth your time? Of course not! Every detail, no matter how small, is of utmost importance. Create plans with six layers of dependencies, and worry about all of them, and don’t bother to ask yourself questions like, what if you just spent $20 for a round trip and just Ubered there, instead of valuing your time at $6.66 an hour?

USE YOUR BIG ASS BRAIN AND IGNORE YOUR SMALL ASS GUT

Your brain is very large and very powerful, so you have to rely on it for everything. At no point should you listen to the small voice inside of you (hereby known as your intuition), that goes maybe there’s a better approach and you don’t actually want to keep messaging Jeffrey about this, or has a deep sense of what the right decision is at key turning points in your life. Your intuition is bogus and irrational. You can’t listen to it.

And sure, maybe you get stuck in circles sometimes trying to optimize everything and can’t see the bigger picture, but hey, at least your brain is something that you can control. You’ve used it in the past, and it’s led you here, to a life that is overall materially okay, if not always okay internally. So you know your big ass brain can get every job done, even if painfully. Do NOT take risks by experimenting with your intuition. That shit is for crazy people, and you can’t let people think you’re crazy!

FEEL TERRIFIED ALL THE TIME

The world is a terrifying place, and unlikely negative outcomes are extremely likely, despite what all your optimistic friends seem to think. You have to live your life on edge all the time. You know this is a fact of the universe. After all, you’ve done the research.

If you mess up at work, people think that you’re a loser, despite substantial evidence to the contrary that people still seem to like you when you make mistakes. If you forget to pay your rent, you get charged a late fee and have to drive ten minutes to the store to get a cashier’s check. That’s unacceptable. Competent adults don’t do that. And if you make relationship mistakes, then the people in your life are going to leave you. Tommy, Greg, and Juliette? They’re gonna hang out with each other instead if you are unskillful and cross their boundaries.

So if you can’t figure out the optimal route for your dinner plans, then Jeffrey Yun will get really upset with you for taking advantage of him by making him drive extra just so you don’t have to drive to the event. But if you are willing to spend all your time optimizing with him to shave off ten minutes from his drive, then maybe he won’t think of you poorly and decide to cut you off forever.

Your whole life must be a carefully constructed series of texts, actions, and insights in an effort to keep the whole world from finding out the truth about you, that deep down inside, you’re an incompetent fraud. You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re making shit up as you go, and many nights, you lay in bed worrying about the future. But you can’t tell people that. Everyone else has their shit all figured out and can think clearly about themselves, so you better get your act together.

So yeah. If you don’t figure out every single detail, then the world will literally explode.

Thank you to

Jeffrey Yun

for driving us yesterday and not crashing the car, despite my shoddy instructions.

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