All my life, I’ve felt the force of a lot of different arguments that go in separate ways, but I never knew how to describe them. “You should be yourself!” “You should be kind and selfless!”

It was only after I took Kant that I put a word to this feeling: antinomies. For Kant, antinomies are equally good contradictory arguments that reason produces. Well, in my case, I’ll use them to describe contradictory arguments that both seem intuitively right. They both feel right. But they point in opposite directions.

One of these that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the claims “You shouldn’t overthink” and “You should just go with the flow.”

These claims seem very simple on the surface. But they become much more complicated the more you think about them. Whenever I encounter something difficult, my friends and family always tell me: “Don’t think too much about it,” and “Just follow nature.” This was also the advice of Marcus Aurelius (I used to love this guy).

But here’s the contradiction: what if, by nature, I want to overthink?

In this sense, there seems to be a contradiction within myself. I naturally drift toward thinking things through, but every time I do so, I tell myself that I shouldn’t, and that I should “go with the flow.” But what is “the flow?” If the flow is that I naturally want to think things through, then these two claims, “you shouldn’t overthink” and “you should go with the flow,” become contradictory.

You kind of get stuck in a cycle if you take this advice seriously. When you encounter a difficult circumstance, you:
Feel a lot of emotions and gravitate toward thinking about them
Tell yourself you shouldn’t overthink
But you are overthinking while telling yourself not to overthink
Go back to overthinking

So how do we get out of this cycle? What is the false assumption here?

Maybe it’s not to fight with yourself. I think a large portion of anxiety comes from reason conflicting with emotion. You feel something, and then your reason tells you that you shouldn’t feel this way. So now there are two parts of yourself pulling against each other.

This seems intuitive, but people do it all the time. When you fail a test, you tell yourself: “I shouldn’t feel sad about this test. It’s such a small portion of life when you zoom out.” Well, maybe that makes you feel better in the short term, but it also creates a little civil war in your mind. Your emotions do not agree with your reason.

But here’s the complicated part: how am I arriving at these judgments I am making now, that “we shouldn’t have reason conflict with emotion?” Isn’t this also generated through reason? There seems to be an inherent conflict between using reason and truly following nature. Once we use reason, we generate claims and judgments that can conflict with our natural emotions. How do we know this is not just the same thing happening again?

Well, to answer this question, we might have to examine why reason does this in the first place. What is reason’s true purpose anyway? What is its right use?

Immanuel Kant says that reason is for morality. But I think a more general claim is that reason should help us flourish. It should help us live well. So if reason is constantly generating conflicts that trap us in cycles of guilt, anxiety, and self-hatred, then maybe reason is not actually functioning properly.

So with this, how do we solve the overthinking problem?
I don’t think the solution is to stop thinking. That’s impossible. And honestly, telling someone to “just stop overthinking” is itself another thought, another judgment, another command produced by reason. It just adds another layer onto the cycle.

Maybe the real issue is that reason keeps trying to occupy a role it was never supposed to occupy.

Reason seems to assume that every emotion must be explained, every conflict resolved, every uncertainty eliminated. It wants the mind to become internally consistent. But human beings are probably not internally consistent creatures to begin with.

Maybe this is the false assumption.

Maybe reason creates antinomies within everyday life because it tries to turn life into a system. It tries to force every impulse, emotion, and desire into coherence. But life is not coherent in that way. We can want contradictory things at the same time. We can love someone and resent them. We can want freedom and stability. We can want to let go while also wanting control.

And maybe overthinking begins precisely when reason refuses to tolerate these contradictions.

So maybe the goal is not to eliminate conflict within ourselves. Maybe that is impossible. Maybe the goal is simply to stop expecting ourselves to become perfectly unified beings.

Because the moment reason says:
“You should not feel this” or “You should not think this”

it has already divided the mind into two sides.

And maybe peace does not come from reason finally winning that war.

Maybe peace comes from realizing the war itself never had an endpoint.

Thinking about this hurts my brain, I’m going to play some basketball now.