Author Archives: Spencer J Smith

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A Blog Post In Which I Over-think My Tendency To Over-think

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I think far too much. Ask anyone who even knows the first thing about me, and they will all say the same thing. Thinking too much isn’t always a bad thing. I think it might be connected to my need to listen to jazz music while I study and my love for reading and my general ability to sometimes make good decisions. And all of those things are good.

But sometimes, it is a very bad thing. There are several reasons for this.

1) Thinking too much paralyzes. It keeps you from actually doing anything. Sometimes I get so caught up in the theoretical components of an activity, that I never actually do the activity. I am guilty of this in responsibilities as small as reading e-mails. I think about how great it would be if I set a little time apart each day to answer all my e-mails. And while I am thinking about this, my inbox piles up and my time disappears. But if I answered e-mails as they came in, I would have plenty of time for them.

2) Thinking too much leads to bad thoughts. When you think too much, it is impossible to think good thoughts all the time. Invariably, then, less than good thoughts creep their way into your mind. Often, I find myself thinking about how I am going to fail at something. And even more often than that, I find myself thinking about how I compare to other people. Spending time comparing myself to others is probably the biggest time-suck I engage in. It makes no sense. As I am thinking about how I measure up to other people, they are getting even farther ahead. Some people might argue that I shouldn’t think about it like that, but I do. And it is helpful to think that if I just did the work, I would stand a much better chance of measuring up. You can’t do anything standing still.

3) Thinking too much causes a decrease in self-confidence. If I listened to my head all the time, I would really hate myself. My apartment is rarely clean, my inbox rarely empty, my work rarely done, my dreams rarely achieved, and my relationships rarely deep. But what my head doesn’t tell me is that all of those things are within my ability to change. I just need to stop thinking and get up and do them.

What are you thinking about? How much you hate these questions? Leave a comment anyway. I would love to hear from you!

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The Rhetoric of Evil

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Evil is around. A lot of people say that. Enough people say it that I think there’s probably some truth to it. But I often feel like I’m not actually understanding what’s evil. If you are liberal, you learn that conservatives are evil. If you are conservative, you learn that liberals are evil. And if you are in a class about rhetoric, you learn that institutions are evil.

I can speak to that last one because I am in a rhetoric course this quarter. And every week we learn how evil the American government and Hollywood are for misleading the public. Now, I’ve never been in the American government or Hollywood so I don’t know if I’m allowed to say what I’m about to say, but I’m gonna go for it anyway. I don’t think they mean to full us. I don’t think all of the producers in Hollywood get together at biweekly meetings and decide that this week they are going to use war-time propaganda to encourage war. And I don’t think the American government wastes meetings on how to best use domestication as a form of nukespeak.

I think sometimes we criticize others too harshly. How many times do we sit down and say, “I’m going to use rhetoric today to get my way?” I know I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t use it. It just means that the study of rhetoric is a useful tool for studying human behavior after the fact. It’s not predictive.

Evil exists, but it doesn’t exist in the places we most think we can identify it. It lives in all of those places where we convince ourselves that we are different than other people. It thrives on us believing that being conscious of rhetoric means that we should be put in charge of the world.

I was talking with a friend the other day, and I asked, “Why are people so confusing?” Instead of answering me (she never answers me), she said, “Isn’t it interesting that we always say that people are confusing. But it’s not like we are simple not-confusing people. I wonder what it would be like to not be confusing.”

Of course, she was correct. When a government uses seemingly rhetorical devices on its constituency, it’s doing so because it thinks it is somehow helpful. That doesn’t make it right. But it’s human. It’s something I can relate with.

Jesus said it really well back in his day and luckily somebody had the foreknowledge to get that stuff down on papyrus. “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye ” (Matthew 7:5). Why do we ever think that we have removed the log? That’s not the point of this verse. Evil laughs when we think we have removed the log.

What do you think of rhetoric?

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The Interesting Business of College

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Being a college student is interesting business. On the one hand, we are told repeatedly that this is the time when we get to start living – we have the freedom and the ability to really do what we want. On the other hand, there is an understood rule that we will be responsible, get our degrees, go on to occupy “meaningful” jobs and be productive members of society.

The great absurdity of life, as my friend once said, is that we don’t spend every second of every day doing something we love. Because, he argued, who, if not ourselves, are we trying to make happy? And if there is anytime at all to be happy, isn’t it during our life?

These are important questions to think about. The problem is that happiness is such a hard concept to pin down. Is someone who plays video games all day because that’s what she wants to do really happier than someone who goes to class because she has a responsibility to do so? I don’t think so.

Yes, we should be chasing things we are passionate about all day erryday, but we also shouldn’t let immediate gratification blind us to the fact that some of the things we want we are going to have to wait for.

What do you wish you were doing?