- Utilities and bills
- Shopping, groceries, and meals
- Housemate is not doing his / her fair share of housework
- I cannot find my favourite t-shirt
- I need a haircut
- My computer Desktop is a complete mess
- I have too many unread books
- How much money am I saving each month
Reviewing this list, it seems clear that there is something in common between these trivial thoughts: they tend to either have something to do with the domestic, or are related to the desire to be tidy and organised. This list may somewhat reflect on my personality as being somewhat obsessive with tidiness, but it is entirely possible that one may have an entirely different list of unproductive thoughts e.g. unhappy or envious thoughts triggered by social media, or something like "my annoying neighbour has a much better car than I do". In any case, what I had been experiencing at the time was a genuine frustration that these useless, unproductive thoughts were like mindless termites chomping away at my precious time.
I believed that there is a genuine finding about life behind all this frustration, and I suppose there is no harm putting this in a neat premise-conclusion format:
P1: My mind can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. Whilst there may be unconscious thought processes (such as the reading of facial expressions) which can run in parallel with your conscious thoughts, it is a reasonable assumption that generally the conscious mental facility is not fit for multi-tasking, say for instance that it feels impossible to multiply 15 x 16 and 17 * 24 in your mind at the same time; you have to do them one after another.
P2: The amount of conscious time is finite over one's lifetime. This is a relatively simple and uncontroversial premise as long as we are not trying to interpret time as a fourth dimension or in the context of Relativity. Given roughly 17 waking hours every day, 365 days a year, and an average lifespan of 70 - the maximum amount of conscious thinking time is roughly 434,350 hour. This doesn't even discount times of the day when the mind is less capable than usual in reasoning or conscious thought (say when a human is aged between 0 and 3, drunk, or on drugs)
C1: The amount of conscious thought is therefore finite over one's lifetime. This is P1 + P2. I refer to the mental capacity for processing this quantifiable amount of conscious thought personally and in my own writings as 'mental space', but I have also discovered that the equivalent term in popular psychology is 'mental bandwidth'.
P3: Some conscious thoughts are better than others, where 'better' can be taken to mean that is more capable of delivering greater utility to one's life. A more direct way of saying this is perhaps that some conscious thoughts are better than others at making you happy or making your life more meaningful. Regardless of which conscious thoughts you consider as being better, we can agree that not all conscious thoughts are the same. For instance, thoughts about relationships with people who are important to you are (I hope) superior to thoughts about spam emails which are clogging up your inbox.
C2: C1 + P3 - In order to maximise utility or happiness, we should, as a proportion of our overall conscious mental capacity, maximise the number of 'good' conscious thoughts and minimise the number of unproductive conscious thoughts.
Having said that, it can be dangerous to go right down the rabbit hole of singling out 'unproductive' thoughts to stop thinking; the idea that one simply alter the proportion of one's thoughts should ring alarm bells. I think the solution to the problem comes in two parts.
The first part of the solution to remedying my frustration is that I could accept these thoughts and worries as a necessary part of life and view them as one of the necessary things that you have to experience in life, rather than something that I should desperately get rid of or spend too much thinking about. For one, it is virtually impossible to not think about money at all as one goes through life. For a period of time I did actually find this to have quite a soothing impact on my mind, and it made me feel better about how my mental space was being used.
The second part of the solution, which is also what I believe to be a promising and practical part of the solution, is inspired by the book goodbye, things - on minimalist living by the Fumio Sasaki. One of the central theses of Sasaki's book is that by reducing the number of possessions that one owns to only the possessions which are most important, a significant amount of mental effort will be saved on these trivial worries, particularly ones related to tidying. If you do not own a lot of travel souvenirs, you would not have spend time tidying them and organising them; if you do not own electronic devices with duplicated functionality (e.g. cameras, smartphone, and a calculator), you would not need to worry about the additional cables and chargers which little by little take up your mental space. This is a really good and easy read which I managed to finish over a weekend, and I thoroughly recommend this if you have similar feelings that your life is littered full of trivialities and inherently meaningless things. I think there is something truly valuable behind the book's recommendations and how one might live a good life whilst being surrounded by the culture of mindless consumerism. Going back to my solution, I think that one promising route to get out of the avalanche of 'thought clutter' is to reduce the physical objects which induce these thoughts, i.e. disposing or giving away things which do not matter. With regards to this part of the solution it is still a work-in-progress on my part: I have started throwing away all the obviously useless things and bulk deleting emails/files, but already it feels great now that I have made the first step. It won't be a short journey, but I believe finally I have found a promising and practical solution to the problem of the scarcity of mental space.
*Even now this occasionally happens, which is one of the reasons that prompted me to write this post.
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