When Processing Life Becomes More Work Than Living

Computing has a useful word for a system that spends too much of its capacity managing work instead of doing the work: thrashing.

The analogy travels.

We can spend extraordinary amounts of energy preparing to begin, monitoring how we are doing, reorganizing the system, revisiting the decision, explaining the delay, and processing our feelings about the process.

Eventually the work around the work becomes larger than the work itself.

The same thing can happen with living.

Reflection is valuable.

Planning is valuable.

Emotional processing can be necessary.

The problem is not that any of these exist.

The problem appears when the processing no longer serves the activity and becomes the activity.

One sign is repetition without new information.

Another is increasing effort with decreasing movement.

A third is the feeling that we must completely understand or optimize the experience before we can participate in it.

The correction is not always to work harder.

Sometimes it is to reduce the work required to process the work.

Simplify the system.

Return to the task.

Let some experience remain experience rather than another problem to administer.

Living needs some processing.

It should not disappear inside the processing.