In Julie Beck’s article, there were many points she touched on that caught my eye and grabbed my attention. One of those moments was when she stated, “Stories are life, life is stories.” This quote made me really think about how people talk about their live. People explain their lives by telling stories so, in a way, life is a never-ending story that contains many short stories within in. If you think about all the times in your life you have to explain an event you always a use a story to explain who you are and how you got to this point.
Another moment in Beck’s article that I connected with when she mentioned how humans have a tendency to try and predict the future even when they have no reason to. My mom and I tend to watch a lot of crime shows and we always try to predict how the show will proceed (who killed the person and why they did it). When I thought about how I try to predict the ending of a show, it made me realize that we, as humans, have a need to know every detail about life. We want to know what will happen next because it makes us feel more comfortable because we are prepared for the outcome. However, that is not how life works. Life is full of surprises and twists, just like TV shows, and those twists are what makes life exciting and different. By guessing what will happen in the future, the excitement disappears and we may become let down by the actual outcome.
Lastly, I also connected with Beck’s quote about overthinking, “If you’re prone to overthinking, and playing out every possibly scenario in your head in advance, you can see foreshadowing in everything.” Sometimes when I am unsure about a decision I made, I overthink the possibly repercussions of my choice and I dive into those thoughts until I start to believe it is actually happening and I have to revert myself back to the reality of the situation. Most of the time, my worst thoughts never actually happen, but in the moments following my decision I feel like it is the only possible outcome. These thoughts are like a train that never stops because more thoughts build and build upon them until I arrive at a very unlikely outcome.
It is interesting how easily it seems you can apply what you’ve read to your own life. I think you make some interesting points. Do you think stories are the best way to tell someone about life events? Do you think guessing the future is a part of the excitement of the unknown? Just a few question I thought of while reading this.
I liked the analogies you made on Beck’s stories and I could definitely relate them to ideas I’ve thought of before. We as humans do have those tendencies to explain our live as a story rather than simply a list of points. I also think we do look ahead far too often rather than remaining in the present. I actually found a weird statistic one time that said that over 90% of the time we live in, our brain is either in the past or the future. Now whether or not this is true, it reiterates the point that we are always looking ahead to what’s next to help us prepare for our next chapter.
This ties nicely into your last point about overthinking because the more we wrap our minds around time periods that may be ahead of us or behind us, the more we overthink what’s actually in front of our eyes (the present). Because of this, we tend to stress about the future and dwell on the past wishing we may have done something differently. Unfortunately, we must stop thinking this way and should simply stay in the present.
Dang! That’s a startling statistic, Anthony! Thanks for sharing!
Nicole,
I once heard a statistic that said that only 8 percent of our worries are worth taking into consideration–everything else is sort of wasted energy. (I’m a worrier, so I tend to turn to this stat whenever I need an excuse to step away from a what-if-this-happens kind of thought.) You picked up on some interesting moments and advanced the conversation in an interesting direction. Keep up the great work!