In the spirit of not overthinking things like my good friend Nicole McInnes from My Idea Life seems to think with her post Is There a Brain Behind That Smile or am I Overthinking It? I give you some of my purged thoughts, largely unedited. (I had the edit for grammatical reasons okay).
Adults complicate things. We do. Or is the situation already complicated and we don’t fully appreciate the intricate web of circumstances until we are adults?
My older kids (8 and 10) are at that ‘why can’t we just do this…’ stage.
My daughter asks, “Why can’t people just get on? Who cares what everyone else is doing?”
My 8 year old son asked about Kurt Cobain the other day. “How did he die?”
“He killed himself.”
“Why?”
“He was having a hard time coping with being a famous singer and he wasn’t enjoying it anymore. He was probably really sad so he killed himself.”
My son looks at me all confused. “Well, that was a dumb decision. Why didn’t he just quit the band?”
I looked at him and thought, ‘yeah he could have done that but I don’t know if that would have made him happy. Maybe he was already sad before his fame, so fame wasn’t really the catalyst for him taking his life’.
But what I said out loud was “I don’t know”.
Kurt Cobain dying, the Middle East, asylum seekers these are all complex issues. No doubt about it. But I wonder if we all followed the kids approach and just let go of everything and took the “back away…nothing to see here” approach, what would happen?
Do we overcomplicate things unnecessarily? Do we overthink things? I’m not going to overthink this post (for once).
My 10 year old couldn’t give a stuff about someone’s religion, ethnic background, job.
And how many of us were exactly like that when we were 10? I’ll take a punt and say all of us.
Where do our prejudices come from?
Where does our bias come from?
Thank you for the mention lovely – very appropriate too me being the queen of overthinking! Mine comes from my Mum who always needed approval from the outside world because her own mum rejected her. So she passed on that anxiety that makes me look at every angle before deciding! Not fun, wish I had a simpler approach. Nxx
Better to overthink than underthink…. I think….
Love & stuff
Mrs M
So this is where the ‘over-thinkers’ hang out huh? Nice 🙂
Thinking is crucial for trying to make some sense of the collective human experience. However, so often the conclusions we come to as adults are flawed to start with as the way we see the world is already influenced by the color of our individual lens/personal experience.
I think the way kids see the world is simplistic but it is also beautifully simple..I know that my little girls have the power to bring me back to the core of what truly matters by sharing their view of the world and in that regard, I aim to never over think again!
Kirri, I agree with you. Kids provide that guidance that adults need to steer back towards a simpler approach to things. And they don’t even realise the impact they have on us.
Love & stuff
Mrs M
I think overthinking is a side effect of the way adults process information. Children aren’t able to follow the complex chains of cause and effect that make up our lives and society, and whilst I do think modern lives are a bit Overcomplicated, even a simpler life involves those chains of reasoning – right from farming and food gathering across the board to programming a computer.
I also think it’s quite amusing how children go from simple to overthinking as teenaged drama queens/kings, with mountains out of molehills, and that mixture of priorities that adults find so hard to relate to.
I do think children and their simple views help us down from our adult pedestals, where overthinking is clearly the best way to think 😛
Warren, love your comment. And to add to it, I think adult are guilty of adding things to the complex chain of cause and effect that simply do not belong because we have more information and we are able to formulate some sort of ‘logical’ argument as to why all the events are linked. And then when we’ve overwhelmed and confused we throw our hands up in the air and claim the universe or (insert deity here) is against us.
Love & stuff
Mrs M
Yep, we DEFINITELY over-complicate things.
I would love to chat to your kids some time…
Wait until your little man grows up. Kids challenge your thinking, they really do. My 8yo asked today why do we pronounce the letter ‘w’ as ‘double u’. When it should be ‘double v’ because it is two ‘v’ letters put together, not two ‘u’ letters. I have no answer for that.
Love & stuff
Mrs M
Overcomplication comes from being tainted by all sorts of crappy experiences. That’s what makes this world so cruel to young, innocent kids…
It’s a terrible shame and no matter how we try to teach them to be strong and stand up against horrible issues like bullying, prejudice or whatever…we can’t completely guard them from it. Awful, but that’s the harsh reality.
Grace, no we can’t guard our kids from the harsh realities of the world we live in.
I dont’ know about you but i remember being frustrated as a little kid because I had no control over anything really; not like adults did, or so I thought.
Now as an adult, I miss that idealism and ignorance really. Maybe ignorance really is bliss.
Love & stuff
Mrs M
Omg so true, so simple. Oh god, I dread the day they become complicated too. I love this stage of innocence.
And hahaha on why didn’t he just quit the band hahaha
Kris, we were listening to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and 8yo asked what the song was about. I told him the singer didn’t feel very good about himself. 8yo says” that’s not good, everyone should feel good about themselves’. I think I need to get him to listen to The Muppets or something. My music is very depressing.
Love & stuff
Mrs M