The dangers of over-analyzing

 

The dangers of over-analyzing

I like to search for answers.

Finding them is secondary and just means I have to find another interesting question to find an answer for. It’s the search that interests me, Indiana Jones persona trapped within my psyche looking of mysteries to be unearthed.

My addiction to what I call eureka moments (the time when an answer reveals itself) is what drives me forward. It’s why read as much as possible; it’s why I analyze anything I don’t understand (which, to be honest, is most things).

The advantage this gives me is that I know lots of things (most of which are pretty useless in any practical sense but interesting to me none-the-less) the disadvantage is that I often lose myself in whatever I’m thinking about at the time and I cease to see or hear anything around me to any significant degree. Everything becomes a muted, faded background which has people believing that I’m anti-social, or even rude, when I seemingly ignore their greetings.

This brings me to a point of why I started writing this little essay. I was reading an article by S. C. Malik called “INTEGRATION OFENDOGENOUS CULTURAL DIMENSION INTO DEVELOPMENT” and it starts to look at western methodology in its quest for answers since the 17^th century

“Underlying contemporary challenges are certain unquestioned assumptions (e.g. rationality, linear time, subjectivity vs. objectivity, nature vs. man).”

 And he observes that:

these paradigms dominate decision-makers who continue to ignore many of the alternate world-views of indigenous non-Western cultures which are very relevant today. This is the perspective of interconnectedness, simultaneity and multilayeredness of reality; of a seamless whole, a continuum in which we — earth with its creatures and the universe — are all enmeshed within a Unified Force-Field, Energy or Consciousness.

 In laymen’s terms we, in the West, have stopped looking at the big picture.  The example I had in my head earlier was an object I was examining. I was looking closer and closer trying to find out what this object was made of, using bigger and better equipment until, at last, I found that this object was made up of carbon. I could see it on the screen, a carbon atom, absolute proof that this object was made up of carbon.

Whoopee! So what? It doesn’t tell me what the object is does it? It could be a lump of coal, it could be a diamond, it could be just about anything given the amount of carbon based life forms here on Earth. But if I gave it some non-scientist type individual that didn’t give a damn what it was made of I bet they could tell me what it was just by looking at the bigger picture, they might just pick it up and say “That’s a pretty diamond set in a ring“ and all the fancy equipment and experimentation couldn’t give me that answer.

It begs the question what else are we missing. By concentrating in how atoms are made up. Spending billions of dollars building machines so we can smash atoms up into tiny pieces are we missing what’s going on in the Universe as a whole?

Sometimes we can look so hard trying to find the answers that we forget what the question was and why we wanted the answer in the first place.  Imagine all the time you’ve spent looking for answers when you could just be enjoying the bigger picture.