THE REDUNDANCY OF THINKING WITHOUT TINKERING

October 31st, 2019

How many times have you had the same thought?

Naturally, this is an impossible question.  Countless thoughts have been repetitively run in the sound booth of our minds.

It’s quite similar to asking:  how many times have you made the exact same dumb mistake again?

We are all victim to this repetitive malfunction.

Left to its own devices, the brain is a repetition machine.

The study of habits only exemplifies this.  The fact that the brain is a repetition machine is what makes good habits so valuable and easy once installed, and bad habits so insidious and entrenched.

Much of the self-improvement world revolves around the notion of installing good habits and then simply waiting for the results to compound into large, noticeable benefits. 

It holds that we are all broken records, and that it’s just a matter of making sure we are singing the right song. 

There’s a lot of truth to this.

We may even go so far as to say that all thinking is mere repetition if we are not actively tinkering with the way it works.  And if that’s the case, is it even thinking without the tinkering?

One perspective can see that the name tinkered thinking, is a bit redundant: i.e. can we really call it thinking if it’s not actively seeking to evolve some new thoughts?

But take habits -both good and bad- into account and thinking might simply be defined as brain activity. 

Tinkering with that activity is how we improve it, switching up habitual patterns and most importantly, making a habit of seeking a better way to think.

This is a process that can be never ending, making life always fresh and full of possibility.

It is the realm of the autodidact, the person who doesn’t simply figure it out, but teaches themselves how to figure it out.

We think of a tinkerer as someone fiddling with some mechanical gadget, like a pocket watch, or an automaton,

but the supreme object of someone who tinkers is their own self.