It may seem trivial that I am questioning the amount of time that we spend thinking each day since we do it essentially nonstop, but what I mean is that we do not do enough thorough deliberation. Critical thinking, although often abandoned as a reminder of the horrors of education, is what improves, humbles, and amazes us—it is what makes us distinctly human. We are so relentlessly fed information from the news and social media about what to think that we tend to forget to do any thinking for ourselves.
The result is a society of people whose mindsets remain unchanged. Our lack of adaptability inhibits self fulfilment and societal progression as a whole. It is alarming how much of our judgement is a reflection of what we are told to believe and not what we have justified by our own careful introspection.
The majority of people are reluctant to accept that people can change, however, I can hardly blame them because we so rarely do. When we are stuck inside a single perspective, it becomes frightfully easy to assume that we are the only enlightened person left and all others have fallen from grace.
Luckily, there is a cure: thought. If we took even a quarter of the time we spend on social media to ponder the world from an outside perspective, we would realize just how much we let autopilot take control of our lives.
Throughout my childhood, life was simple: I was catholic, God existed, good grades were good, drugs were bad, if I am nice I’ll go to heaven, if I have premarital sex I’ll burn in the flames of hell for eternity.
Not until I reached early teenhood did I realize that none of that made sense to me. Sure, some of the church’s teachings are loosely based off of common decency, but this is just an example of how we often times blindly follow arbitrary precedents that, although cliché, are just social constructs.
I never would have come to this conclusion had I never spent some undistracted time thinking about the whole situation. Entering high school and being exposed to new experiences had made me realize that I still held on to ideals and prejudices that I received as a child that I had never questioned. Consequently, I removed the mindset that I was just part of the group and began developing an independent and critical view of the world. Forming my own opinions was a new and beautiful idea to me.
The idea that most of the qualities that were essential to my identity were not my own was still a hard pill to swallow. But because of how much my perspective has broadened and developed through thought, I am a vastly different and improved person now than I was a year ago. If there is one thing I’ve realized over the past year, it’s how little I really knew and how much I still have yet to learn.
Just as the frontier of knowledge has exponentially expanded in the sciences over the past century, my understanding of the world has also broadened significantly as a result of my new found appreciation for public education and critical thinking. But in science, as each new discovery is made and the frontier is pushed a little farther, we are met in tenfold with new unexplained phenomena. Similarly, as I have learned more and more about myself and the world, I have been met with the mountains of knowledge that I still have yet to learn. Thought is a positive feedback loop: it inspires us to think more.
As a result, thought is also the great humbler, the builder of humility and understanding. We are not the enlightened idols that we sometimes makes ourselves out to be. In a world so plagued by bigotry and polarization, we need thought more than ever to understand each other and to realize that we truly don’t have everything figured out.
But how does one start thinking? It is about changing the way we look at thought. Instead of viewing our brains as absorbers of knowledge, we should see them as interpreters of the world. As soon as we realize that our brain is capable of constructing its own framework, we will begin seeing things from an original perspective.
Maybe in a perfect world we would stop being so complacent and start asking why, but what do I know? If you take anything from this, it should be that you should take everything I just wrote and create your own perspective about it. Even as I have written this my perspective has changed about the importance of deliberate consideration. It may seem scary admitting our ignorance about so much, but I think the promise of constantly evolving wisdom is beautiful. If the static mind is dead, thought is the best way to revive it.