Why We (I) Think the Way We (I) Think

thoughts on dark distractions

Why do we let ourselves fall deep into the hole of self-destruction, that ever-present chasm in which we plunge into and then lie in, day-dreaming about horrific scenarios we concoct in our heads? You ask: in that case, shouldn’t we call it day-nightmaring? No, we shouldn’t. Because it is dreaming. It’s a fantasy. It’s a comfortable fantasy about controlling the bad things that might - that will, by our happy expectations - happen to us. By dreaming of them, playing them out in our heads, we are choosing for them to happen. They aren’t some event outside our control, unlike the events that have happened in our pasts that have made us fearful and pessimistic about good things in our present and future.

            How do some of us resolve that pesky cognitive dissonance, that lingering sense of uncertainty about seemingly unavoidable negative experiences? We pretend we want it. We say yes when we want to say no, because saying no will not prevent the event from happening. So we welcome the event, we scream, “Yes, please!” in an effort to convince ourselves that yes, indeed, we chose this scenario, and therefore it hurts a little less. Or so we believe. We throw out uncertainty altogether, and think we are stripping it of its power over us, by expecting and even welcoming negative events, and being pleasantly surprised by positive events we would have never guessed would happen. Because we all know that to expect the worst and experience the best is much less damaging to our souls than to expect the best and be sorely disappointed.