riskless business

overthinking it all

As we let the words into the air, the verdant grass danced in the wind, dogs continuously ran by. We sipped our drinks and watched the world around us. Even as we covered all sorts of topics, our conversation seemed to all come back to the same idea. During this coffee with a friend recently, everything led to the idea of risk — how the variable nature of one’s risk tolerance affects their approach to life. 

A risk exposes one to some sort of danger, harm, or loss, which could range from temporary embarrassment to irrecoverable financial loss. Despite this, there is still a desire to engage with risk, which doesn’t come from nowhere. There must be a want, a desire. A risk is only worthwhile if it’s associated with a reward, a reward is only valuable if it offers a material improvement in some way. In poker, going all-in on a big pot makes sense because you could end up with a lot more money than you started. In life, making a career change or moving across the country is only worth considering if it’s clear that there’s something missing — why else would you risk the loss of what’s familiar?

And when I started thinking about this more, I wondered if this was part of the reason that I’m risk-averse and have struggled to take any major risks: I don’t really ever know what I want. I don’t remember ever having a childhood dream that I thought would complete my life — no big ideas of becoming a writer or astronaut, seeing the world, or ruling a kingdom. I never thought that much about the future in general. It was only once I grew older that I started to develop desires that felt important enough to take risks on, but only some desires seemed to be relevant enough. 

When I do have a desire, I tend to dig into it deeper, likely more than necessary. Consider this: what is a real desire, and what is a misinterpreted and overthought interpretation of a feeling? When one feels weird and empty for a few days, does that stem from a vitamin deficiency or the weather or something else that’s harder to grasp? Should one spend the next few weeks analyzing their life to try and identify a possible answer? When they decide the feeling comes from the fact that they live in the wrong city, or don’t get to experience enough culture, or that their career might not be right for them, can we really know if that’s the truth? Do they actually desire the change, or have they just convinced themselves of it?

Is this all overthinking? The defensive part of me imagines I’m following in the tradition of Socrates’s famous words, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but following these types of thought patterns blindly is like someone deciding that the examining was the living. Even so, this overthinking is important to me. Reining these thoughts in leads to coherence, but the initial instinct is what inspires my writing in the first place — taking what most people barely think about and re-litigating it with myself repeatedly. These acts of overthinking only get worse when I try and communicate the feeling in words, as nothing seems like the right way to describe a feeling, something that seems to both gain and lose meaning with additional thought.

I keep returning to this passage from Either/Or by Elif Batuman, in which a character struggles with a similar experience:

She talked about a poem she had written, in which she dropped her laptop in the rain and swallowed the universe. She was worried that “swallowing the universe” sounded pretentious, because the sensation she was trying to describe was really similar to the sensation of swallowing an entire hard-boiled egg. Should she just say she had swallowed a whole egg, and leave the universe out of it? But the egg felt like the whole universe. “It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,” she said. “I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you’ve swallowed the universe? Not say so?”

What’s left out of this passage is how the character arrived at the image of “feeling like you’ve swallowed the universe.” In the moment her laptop fell, perhaps the physical sensation of digestion appeared to her, but only on reflection could she really encapsulate what it felt like she was swallowing in that moment. To someone less prone to overthinking and over-describing, it may just be a lump in the throat, but that’s not enough for her — that’s not the feeling! And those aren’t the only thoughts! At the same time, as she finds the perfect words, do they sound pretentious? Does it even make any sense to anyone else? 

How could I worry about things like risk-taking when I’m so occupied with these sorts of thoughts? I don’t know if it’s true, but I imagine many artists, or maybe just writers, are plagued by this type of overthinking that both fuels their work and deflates other thoughts. This aligns with how Austin Kleon thinks about risk: 

What I’m trying to do is this: take less risks (or more calculated risks) in my life so that I can take more risks in my work. 

That’s where I’ll land for now — content with my low-risk existence for now, in search of opportunities to let my work become more risky. 

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - september 24 - farewell September, I hardly knew ya

• POEM - “Missed Time” by Ha Jin - Nothing is better than to live / a storyless life