The Gayest Science - the Joy of Sloppy Thinking

Listen - don’t fret too much over whether you are a sloppy thinker. You don’t need to prevent sloppy thinking from happening, you just need to be brutally honest with yourself after the fact. You can’t really control how you think from moment to moment. You can only articulate, and then analyze your own articulation. Just allow yourself to be a pontificating charlatan, but then go back and look at what you wrote, and see that it is bullshit. Or maybe it is not totally bullshit, maybe there is some insight there, but it is a tangled mess of various ideas which do not seem to totally cohere. Can they be disentangled into neat categories so the reader doesn’t have to wade through such a confused mess to get to the nugget of insight, or are all the ideas tangled together out of necessity, because they are really interdependent? Or, is it simply material for the waste bin?

To the best of your ability, don’t make the reader go through the same struggle that you went through to get to the interesting ideas. Unless you are Nietzsche, then the whole point is to bring the reader along with you as you wrestle with yourself in your head. Nietzsche is really the inspiration for this little essay - one of his books, “The Gay Science,” is the inspiration for its title. Though it is not really the content of that work but his style which is my inspiration.

There is something to learn from Nietzsche. Retaining the complete mental process which led you to the conclusion can be more valuable than the conclusion itself. Sometimes the thinker is not the best judge of which section of their stream of consciousness is the part that contains insight. Nietzsche’s works often come of as personal dialectic ramblings. But that is part of what makes him interesting - it feels like he is showing you a part of himself that other philosophers don’t show you. He doesn’t hide that he is a sloppy emotional thinker. He’s trying to form a legitimate cultural critique, but at the same time he is playful and sarcastic, and loves poetry.

I know I just contradicted myself. Maybe the answer is both - that you should clean it up and organize it, and keep your drafts and notes and also put them both out there. It’s a personal call. But regardless, two things are clear - when thinking, you need to be both totally shameless, and ruthlessly critical. But its not really possible to be both at the same time. So don’t be shy - express yourself, but then try to be an honest critic of your own expression. And seek out the critique of others, and listen. You want to be an effective communicator.

Writing stream of consciousness is like dream logic - everything makes sense in the moment, but then when you go back, you might find yourself scratching your head thinking, “why did I think these two ideas were related? Why did I write this whole giant section that seems totally irrelevant to my initial stated topic?” That is fine. Don’t feel embarrassed, that is just how brains work. We form all sorts of connections that we aren’t aware of, which might initially seem like universals but are really very specific to us and our perspective.

Going through this process actually helps you sharpen and clarify these vague areas of your mind. It’s a bit embarrassing to see that psychobabble has dribbled out of your mouth like a mental infant. But fuck the people who only ever try to appear as flawless authorities, who hide their own mental process from the public - thinking is a messy business, you have to get your hands dirty.

Just imagine the long arc of human history. All the mysticism, the superstition, the speculation, and somehow from that starting point, the art of clear thinking was gradually refined. Don’t deny yourself madness. Don’t feel embarrassed. Rational thought is only human madness refined. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is the synthesis of madness and another mental faculty which involves organization and separation. But it doesn’t have its own independent existence, separate from madness. It all emerges from that mysterious intuitive place, as it speaks and then critiques itself, speaks and then critiques itself, again and again and again.

We are storytellers, fantasizers by nature. But we don’t only tell stories for pleasure - we tell stories to try and explain how the world works, especially how it pertains to keeping ourselves safe and getting what we need and want. If we want to speculate in terms of evolutionary psychology, perhaps that’s why thinking is pleasurable - because it aids us in creating a useful map of our world as it relates to our self interest (I generally hate evolutionary psychology, because it is usually pure speculation, and here I am, red handed).

So thinking is inherently emotional, self interested. And this is a complex aspect of thinking which we must be self aware of and try to manage. On the one hand, you want to be critical of this emotional element, because it is the primary source of bias. But on the other hand, if you don’t find thinking pleasurable, you struggle to think at all. So you have to allow yourself to enjoy it, perhaps permit yourself little narcissistic fantasies, but then afterward when you go to critique yourself, reign these elements back in.

This is why I feel strongly that some amount of cultivated sadomasochism is necessary for thought. Being critical of yourself is the harder part. It is easy to get excited and pontificate. But then you need to learn to take pleasure in eviscerating your own ideas. This is the pleasure of destroying something beloved, something that you may feel proud of. No, I was not a genius here - I was an idiot! I think that people who learn to think critically often learn it in a way that comes with a self destructive cost. They learn to be ashamed of making mistakes and develop a form of rigor which is derived from a quiet self-loathing. Of course, there is a narcissistic element to this as well, the pride of appearing flawless.

The approach that I find the best, and the least emotionally corrosive, is to play this cruel game but in a self aware manner. To me, this is the “gay science” - it makes the hard part of thinking a more pleasurable activity. I know there can be virtue in remaining level- headed and meticulous, but I think it is important to find ways to playfully break up monotonous activities. For example, I had a grumpy coworker who would pound his keyboard and bitch and moan while editing and writing tests for our code (I worked as a software engineer). Some people might call this “toxic,” and I think it can be if you take it to heart, but when you do it in a self aware fashion it just makes the whole thing a better time. Editing and writing code can be a bitch. Once you learn to write code it becomes a relatively fun and fluid activity, but learning to read someone else’s, especially when you need to understand a whole elaborate system, is an entirely different mountain to climb. I haven’t experienced any mental activity where the chasm between input and output, reading and writing, was as wide as it was in computer programming.

First a thought appears as a glittering insight - but afterward it should be treated as a festering pile of garbage you should feel ashamed of, which deserved to be disinfected and burned. After this you can again indulge the pleasure of being authentically proud of your creation. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And finally, listen. This is just my subjective perspective. I don’t mean to universalize it to everyone. There seem to be many meticulous, disciplined, level headed individuals which outwardly do not seem to have the same wild emotional experiences I have while thinking. Good for them. But I am not one of them. But if you are, good for you. Perhaps none of what I’ve said applies to you. It’s just a bit of advice, from me to you. Take it or leave it. But obviously, for the sake of my smugness and pride, I would like you to take it. Doesn’t it sound fun? Take it!