There's something in life that has always puzzled me and that is the balance we strike between give and take. I know that some people are inherently generous and others are inherently greedy. There are those that will give freely without any thought of what they get in return. The generosity of these people knows no bounds. On the other hand the people who are greedy, take all that they can and want even to take more. They have no thought for the person who gives and in the end consume all that they can when they can equally with a depth that knows no bounds.
This binary view isn't one that fits with the world well, to be more accurate there needs to be 2 more personalities added to the mix. That is if you can consider greed and generosity as personality traits. These two more personalities that we add are the frivolous giver and the glutton. These two differ from their extreme counterparts in that their respective traits do have bounds. For the frivolous giver he will give without any thought for the future but he has a limit he will eventually reach, a point where he stops and recounts his finances as it were, and upon realisation of his overspend enters into an emotional recession, retracting his generosity, almost to the point of becoming a miser. The glutton equally has a tipping point - the point they reach when they have consumed more than they ought, to use the eating analogy his stomach swells to the point of bursting, at which point he snaps back and pukes up everything he ate losing everything that he lapped up so greedily. In that aftermath the glutton will pass through a period of fasting, where consuming anything at all turns his stomach.
In many respects gluttony and frivolity come together as yin and yang, swapping places occasionally, you see the good in the bad, and the bad in the good, but only for a time, before both return to their overwhelming nature.
I would consider myself generous, but I would also consider my generosity to reach a limit - quite a high limit I will admit but it does exist. In this respect I can only conclude that I am the frivolous giver. The problems that arise then are the moments when you realise that your emotions are spent. In that moment the prevailing personality is inverted. The question is, when this happens and you find yourself derailed, how do you get back on track?
Feeling Emotional
I'm not having a good day. In fact I'm feeling quite down at the moment. Like always though when I feel like this I seek an outlet to vent my emotions. That outlet changes sometimes I write, sometimes I draw, sometimes I cook but in all these cases the outlet is a vent for emotions that are rooted in my actions. Today though it is not my actions that have brought me down but the actions of others. When this is the case I try to escape with somewhat more passive outlets, watching movies, playing games or listening to music.
At the moment I am listening to music - 'Memory Of A Dream' by Tenishia featuring Chris Jones. The song is quite sad really but in moments like this it's sad music that I listen to, I don't quite like bottling things up, I prefer to stop and let myself feel what I need to feel so I can move on. I know to some this can be seen as a form of wallowing self-pity and paint a negative view of someone but the truth is, as negative the view is, we are creatures of emotion and our lives are defined by the ups as well as the downs, so I take no shame in this at all.
If show me your life, and it is one filled with smiles and never a single moment of upset, sadness, or general moodiness then I'll show you the door. I do not trust people who only show their positive emotions and deny the negative ones exist. I am not wishing ill fate on you it is just a fact of life that shit happens. People who smile all the time are hiding something. Whether its something their afraid of the rest of the world knowing, or something they are afraid to admit to themselves, in either case your silence hurts, you more than anyone else. If you never open your heart you will never truly experience love or compassion.
So the next time you feel sad or down or upset, screw the idea that you have to smile for the world, you're allowed to feel emotion, be sad, be down, be upset - you'd be surprised who actually cares. I know some people exploit this, I know some people seek attention from anyone or anything they can, I know that not everyone who expresses emotion is sincere, but this, all of this can be applied to happiness too, there are people who portray false positive emotion in the name of seeking attention too - that fact doesn't stop you being happy when you truly feel it now does it? So why should that stop you expressing the opposite when you truly feel it?
Some of the most influential people throughout history, artists, musicians, philosophers, humanitarians, and ordinary people who had just had enough, were empowered by their emotions. We have great musicians who wrote great music borne of happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, love, and all that lie in between. We have artists who created great works that have inspired countless generations their motivations are equally as varied and represent both sides of the spectrum, positive and negative, arguably the negative can sometime be so much more powerful, a song of love is moving, but there is something deeply moving and intimate about a song of heartbreak.
Never be afraid to feel your emotions.
At the moment I am listening to music - 'Memory Of A Dream' by Tenishia featuring Chris Jones. The song is quite sad really but in moments like this it's sad music that I listen to, I don't quite like bottling things up, I prefer to stop and let myself feel what I need to feel so I can move on. I know to some this can be seen as a form of wallowing self-pity and paint a negative view of someone but the truth is, as negative the view is, we are creatures of emotion and our lives are defined by the ups as well as the downs, so I take no shame in this at all.
If show me your life, and it is one filled with smiles and never a single moment of upset, sadness, or general moodiness then I'll show you the door. I do not trust people who only show their positive emotions and deny the negative ones exist. I am not wishing ill fate on you it is just a fact of life that shit happens. People who smile all the time are hiding something. Whether its something their afraid of the rest of the world knowing, or something they are afraid to admit to themselves, in either case your silence hurts, you more than anyone else. If you never open your heart you will never truly experience love or compassion.
So the next time you feel sad or down or upset, screw the idea that you have to smile for the world, you're allowed to feel emotion, be sad, be down, be upset - you'd be surprised who actually cares. I know some people exploit this, I know some people seek attention from anyone or anything they can, I know that not everyone who expresses emotion is sincere, but this, all of this can be applied to happiness too, there are people who portray false positive emotion in the name of seeking attention too - that fact doesn't stop you being happy when you truly feel it now does it? So why should that stop you expressing the opposite when you truly feel it?
Some of the most influential people throughout history, artists, musicians, philosophers, humanitarians, and ordinary people who had just had enough, were empowered by their emotions. We have great musicians who wrote great music borne of happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, love, and all that lie in between. We have artists who created great works that have inspired countless generations their motivations are equally as varied and represent both sides of the spectrum, positive and negative, arguably the negative can sometime be so much more powerful, a song of love is moving, but there is something deeply moving and intimate about a song of heartbreak.
Never be afraid to feel your emotions.
Leagues
I've never liked the idea of leagues. "He's out of your league", "She's out of his league", or "He'd never be interested in me, he's out of my league" - I don't like this saying because it promotes the idea that you or someone else isn't good enough or not worthy enough to fall in love with - which to me is complete bullshit.
I have always believed that you can fall in love with anyone. That is in no way a judgement of your morality or promiscuity, love and lust are not the same thing and where the former is concerned the truth is that Love really is blind. If you base your potential relationships purely on what someone looks like or the lust you feel when you first meet them, that relationship is doomed to failure in my eyes. Lust is like hunger, once satisfied the sensation dies. Love is never satisfied, Love always leaves you wanting more. To be entirely crude, lust is the want for sex, once fulfilled the object of lust is no longer needed - Love is the desire that remains, you have sex and you hold one another and want to stay in that moment forever more. Of course in practice you can't do that, but Love is not defined by sex, you can love anyone or anything, you can love people you would never have sex with, and love things it's not even possible to have sex with . . . hmm don't dwell on the semantics of that one too long . . .
The point I was trying to make is that today a guy told me they liked a guy he had met and I said that he should show him rather than telling me, his response was that he didn't want to, because this guy was out of his league, that they'd probably end up being just friends. Love is blind, sometimes it has to bump into something for it to realise. If you stand still and refuse to explore the world around you, the chances of Love finding you are going to be very slim. You need to give Love a chance. Of the people I know in relationships the longest have been those that knew each other first, and fell in love. There is a string of failed relationships that I have seen that all began with people who met for the sole purpose of sex.
I'm not singling out the gay community here, if you have any preconceptions about gay people being more promiscuous than straights I'd ask you to drop them now, the only reason this lie is perpetuated is that gay promiscuity is more visible, probably in part due to what seems to be the world's preoccupation with what gay people do with one another. I've always thought that was displacement really, people being preoccupied with gay sex and making it an issue because their own sex lives are so disturbed they feel guilt they need to project onto others - just look at the Catholic Church.
Straight people are equally as promiscuous and I have seen many guys and girls too who sleep around, having countless one night stands and flings. This post has become somewhat of a condescending rant, which wasn't the intention, but I can't help but feel that people need to stop judging themselves so harshly. We judge ourselves with such temerity convincing ourselves that others judge us cruelly when in reality, most people couldn't give a shit. We are incredibly self absorbed, that we refuse to admit that even to ourselves. We project judgement, not at others, but at ourselves because we feel that's the way others will treat us. No-one is "out of your league"
- And I do realise it may seem as though I am getting ahead of myself, jumping straight to 'Love' when discussing dating or even just meeting someone. Really though, 'Like' and 'Love' are two points on the same scale, they may be a fair bit apart but Love is one extreme of the scale, the end goal, equally hate and dislike are the opposites but also part of the same scale.
I have always believed that you can fall in love with anyone. That is in no way a judgement of your morality or promiscuity, love and lust are not the same thing and where the former is concerned the truth is that Love really is blind. If you base your potential relationships purely on what someone looks like or the lust you feel when you first meet them, that relationship is doomed to failure in my eyes. Lust is like hunger, once satisfied the sensation dies. Love is never satisfied, Love always leaves you wanting more. To be entirely crude, lust is the want for sex, once fulfilled the object of lust is no longer needed - Love is the desire that remains, you have sex and you hold one another and want to stay in that moment forever more. Of course in practice you can't do that, but Love is not defined by sex, you can love anyone or anything, you can love people you would never have sex with, and love things it's not even possible to have sex with . . . hmm don't dwell on the semantics of that one too long . . .
The point I was trying to make is that today a guy told me they liked a guy he had met and I said that he should show him rather than telling me, his response was that he didn't want to, because this guy was out of his league, that they'd probably end up being just friends. Love is blind, sometimes it has to bump into something for it to realise. If you stand still and refuse to explore the world around you, the chances of Love finding you are going to be very slim. You need to give Love a chance. Of the people I know in relationships the longest have been those that knew each other first, and fell in love. There is a string of failed relationships that I have seen that all began with people who met for the sole purpose of sex.
I'm not singling out the gay community here, if you have any preconceptions about gay people being more promiscuous than straights I'd ask you to drop them now, the only reason this lie is perpetuated is that gay promiscuity is more visible, probably in part due to what seems to be the world's preoccupation with what gay people do with one another. I've always thought that was displacement really, people being preoccupied with gay sex and making it an issue because their own sex lives are so disturbed they feel guilt they need to project onto others - just look at the Catholic Church.
Straight people are equally as promiscuous and I have seen many guys and girls too who sleep around, having countless one night stands and flings. This post has become somewhat of a condescending rant, which wasn't the intention, but I can't help but feel that people need to stop judging themselves so harshly. We judge ourselves with such temerity convincing ourselves that others judge us cruelly when in reality, most people couldn't give a shit. We are incredibly self absorbed, that we refuse to admit that even to ourselves. We project judgement, not at others, but at ourselves because we feel that's the way others will treat us. No-one is "out of your league"
- And I do realise it may seem as though I am getting ahead of myself, jumping straight to 'Love' when discussing dating or even just meeting someone. Really though, 'Like' and 'Love' are two points on the same scale, they may be a fair bit apart but Love is one extreme of the scale, the end goal, equally hate and dislike are the opposites but also part of the same scale.
My Year Of The Dragon
So Chinese New Year came a few days ago and with it the Year Of The Dragon came to an end. As a Dragon baby I had been looking forward to 2012 as a chance to make changes and hope for new things - well in many respects I got what I hoped for but things didn't pan out the way I expected. This post is in a way my year in review.
Last February I was in a different place emotionally than I am now, back then I felt quite alone, despite having people around me it didn't make much difference to me. I felt trapped and while I still do to an extent it's not as imposing as it was back then. I've made a few changes in the last year to my life one of which was to scrap all social networks. I left twitter - twice actually, yea that was complicated - and I left facebook, and I left a few online forums I was a member of and I even scrapped this blog. For a while it was taken down completely. I had a change of heart where the blog was concerned and restored it, and on twitter, I gave it another chance - although a recent post highlighted the fact I still wasn't completely comfortable keeping it. It's staying for now, but I'm still in two minds.
Scrapping social networks proved effective for me as it cut out a lot of people who were "in" my life but weren't part of it; by that I mean they would be involved in it, inevitably ask questions or judge me for what I had or had not done and that was annoying for me. I value my privacy and I value having the freedom to make my own decisions without having to explain myself every step of the way. Social networks, facebook in particular in this respect I found quite invasive. Since scrapping them however I have spoken to people a lot more, people who I wanted to keep in my life. If anything scrapping "social" networks made me less anti-social.
I volunteered working for a charity. I worked there for a few months, the work was fulfilling, it was a pretty easy job and I was happy doing it. If anything had it been paid I would have done it as a real job. The charity work eventually ended when I was offered a job in a different company that in hindsight I shouldn't have taken. That job didn't work out well in the end and was nothing it promised to be, nevertheless it taught me a lesson that I needed to learn - as difficult as it was at the time to accept.
After that job didn't work out I got quite depressed and found myself thrown back to the same place I was last February. It took a while for that to ease off. During that time though I had a number of arguments with people that resulted in me leaving yet more people behind and out of my life. The only pick-me-up from last year was the Christmas season. Normally I am quite active, and contribute a lot, as I love to cook, and there's nothing I love more than Christmas. As I have said before Christmas to me and my family has pretty much lost all Religious significance, it's more a tradition now, and one that I will continue for years to come. To me it's about togetherness, being surrounded by the people you love and people who love you.
2012 had a lot of ups and downs, the highest point for me ironically was the point I got the job that didn't work out, I had left my CV in that morning, and as I was on my way to the charity job, not even to the end of the street I got a phone-call asking me to come for an interview that day. I went for the interview, and it was a few days later I was offered the job. I guess that they had asked for an interview so quickly, and that they had replied so quickly after the interview should have made me think "Why?" - in hindsight things always look obvious.
The low point of 2012 probably wasn't the depression but actually when I got Tonsillitis, I don't like tablets in the slightest, I avoid Doctors usually and if I am ever sick I usually want to "ride it out" but that wasn't really an option. I wrote a post shortly after professing my love for the NHS'
So I guess 2012 was filled with ups and downs, quite possibly more down than up. As for my Year Of The Dragon, that was bumpy right to the bitter end, with January smacking me in the face with a bill for the better part of a grand - not so happy days. So here we are now, Year Of The Snake. Will it be any better?
Oh and if you find the idea of the Chinese zodiac somewhat laughable or the idea of astrology in general laughable I have only one question for you really: Have you ever made a New Year's resolution, if so how is it any different, what's so special about Dec 31st/Jan 1st that makes you question life set goals or reassess the year that just passed?
After all that if you would like a pick-me-up post then try last year's single on Valentine's Day post.
Last February I was in a different place emotionally than I am now, back then I felt quite alone, despite having people around me it didn't make much difference to me. I felt trapped and while I still do to an extent it's not as imposing as it was back then. I've made a few changes in the last year to my life one of which was to scrap all social networks. I left twitter - twice actually, yea that was complicated - and I left facebook, and I left a few online forums I was a member of and I even scrapped this blog. For a while it was taken down completely. I had a change of heart where the blog was concerned and restored it, and on twitter, I gave it another chance - although a recent post highlighted the fact I still wasn't completely comfortable keeping it. It's staying for now, but I'm still in two minds.
Scrapping social networks proved effective for me as it cut out a lot of people who were "in" my life but weren't part of it; by that I mean they would be involved in it, inevitably ask questions or judge me for what I had or had not done and that was annoying for me. I value my privacy and I value having the freedom to make my own decisions without having to explain myself every step of the way. Social networks, facebook in particular in this respect I found quite invasive. Since scrapping them however I have spoken to people a lot more, people who I wanted to keep in my life. If anything scrapping "social" networks made me less anti-social.
I volunteered working for a charity. I worked there for a few months, the work was fulfilling, it was a pretty easy job and I was happy doing it. If anything had it been paid I would have done it as a real job. The charity work eventually ended when I was offered a job in a different company that in hindsight I shouldn't have taken. That job didn't work out well in the end and was nothing it promised to be, nevertheless it taught me a lesson that I needed to learn - as difficult as it was at the time to accept.
After that job didn't work out I got quite depressed and found myself thrown back to the same place I was last February. It took a while for that to ease off. During that time though I had a number of arguments with people that resulted in me leaving yet more people behind and out of my life. The only pick-me-up from last year was the Christmas season. Normally I am quite active, and contribute a lot, as I love to cook, and there's nothing I love more than Christmas. As I have said before Christmas to me and my family has pretty much lost all Religious significance, it's more a tradition now, and one that I will continue for years to come. To me it's about togetherness, being surrounded by the people you love and people who love you.
2012 had a lot of ups and downs, the highest point for me ironically was the point I got the job that didn't work out, I had left my CV in that morning, and as I was on my way to the charity job, not even to the end of the street I got a phone-call asking me to come for an interview that day. I went for the interview, and it was a few days later I was offered the job. I guess that they had asked for an interview so quickly, and that they had replied so quickly after the interview should have made me think "Why?" - in hindsight things always look obvious.
The low point of 2012 probably wasn't the depression but actually when I got Tonsillitis, I don't like tablets in the slightest, I avoid Doctors usually and if I am ever sick I usually want to "ride it out" but that wasn't really an option. I wrote a post shortly after professing my love for the NHS'
So I guess 2012 was filled with ups and downs, quite possibly more down than up. As for my Year Of The Dragon, that was bumpy right to the bitter end, with January smacking me in the face with a bill for the better part of a grand - not so happy days. So here we are now, Year Of The Snake. Will it be any better?
Oh and if you find the idea of the Chinese zodiac somewhat laughable or the idea of astrology in general laughable I have only one question for you really: Have you ever made a New Year's resolution, if so how is it any different, what's so special about Dec 31st/Jan 1st that makes you question life set goals or reassess the year that just passed?
After all that if you would like a pick-me-up post then try last year's single on Valentine's Day post.
The Sands of Time
If you could go back and change your past, or prevent yourself from doing something that you regret, would you do it? More important than that, is the question: would you want to remember what you changed?
Consider for a moment that you had the power to travel back and forward along your own timeline, turning or returning to any given point in your life, retaining all memories that you have. Now if you jumped back to say 10 years ago and you remembered everything that you had experienced and could change whatever you want, let's assume that you change something. Would you want to remember what you change, and everything from that point onward in your life that you "already" experienced, or would you want it to sever the connection to your old timeline, leaving you back in that moment, with the event changed but only with the memories to that moment.
Here's an example, let's say you were hurt by someone you met 9 years ago and you regretted meeting them and all that you came to experience. You have the chance to go back to the point in your life 10 years ago. You can make a change in your life that ultimately means that you will never meet them. So you make that change. Would you want to remember everything you had experienced, or would you want your life to be "reset" to that moment, effectively writing off the 10 years you had experienced and all recollection.
Would you choose to remember or would you choose to forget?
I'm not really interested if you would choose to forget, what I am interested in is those who say they would choose to remember, because to me, if you choose to remember it, then it still happened. If you choose to forget, then no-one will remember it, and you have the possibility that history could repeat itself. Choosing to forget is in effect rewriting history, it is as if it never happened. Whereas if you choose to remember, you are only really making a change in your life - albeit one in the past that has far reaching consequences but it's still on the face of it only a change in your life, as if it was a change you made in the present not undoing anything just taking a new outlook on life.
I guess the question is, for those who would long to go back and change something in their past, if you would choose to remember it, what's the difference between going back in time, or just accepting your past in the present and moving on? Is it the want to recover lost years of your life? Or maybe it's not the fact that you forget or remember it, rather it's that you want the other person forget?
Time fascinates me, and the possibility of time travel is something that throws up many questions I like to contemplate. Some of these questions though often bring about a realisation of the present more than the possibilities for the future or the memories of the past.
Consider for a moment that you had the power to travel back and forward along your own timeline, turning or returning to any given point in your life, retaining all memories that you have. Now if you jumped back to say 10 years ago and you remembered everything that you had experienced and could change whatever you want, let's assume that you change something. Would you want to remember what you change, and everything from that point onward in your life that you "already" experienced, or would you want it to sever the connection to your old timeline, leaving you back in that moment, with the event changed but only with the memories to that moment.
Here's an example, let's say you were hurt by someone you met 9 years ago and you regretted meeting them and all that you came to experience. You have the chance to go back to the point in your life 10 years ago. You can make a change in your life that ultimately means that you will never meet them. So you make that change. Would you want to remember everything you had experienced, or would you want your life to be "reset" to that moment, effectively writing off the 10 years you had experienced and all recollection.
Would you choose to remember or would you choose to forget?
I'm not really interested if you would choose to forget, what I am interested in is those who say they would choose to remember, because to me, if you choose to remember it, then it still happened. If you choose to forget, then no-one will remember it, and you have the possibility that history could repeat itself. Choosing to forget is in effect rewriting history, it is as if it never happened. Whereas if you choose to remember, you are only really making a change in your life - albeit one in the past that has far reaching consequences but it's still on the face of it only a change in your life, as if it was a change you made in the present not undoing anything just taking a new outlook on life.
I guess the question is, for those who would long to go back and change something in their past, if you would choose to remember it, what's the difference between going back in time, or just accepting your past in the present and moving on? Is it the want to recover lost years of your life? Or maybe it's not the fact that you forget or remember it, rather it's that you want the other person forget?
Time fascinates me, and the possibility of time travel is something that throws up many questions I like to contemplate. Some of these questions though often bring about a realisation of the present more than the possibilities for the future or the memories of the past.
I'll bet you think this post is about you!
It probably is.
I over-think things and over-analyse things a lot, and I always believed that was a bad thing to do - or at least that's what everyone told me. I was thinking about this however and after chatting with my good friend Ryan who would openly admit that he over-thinks things too, I had a thought; we both perceived this as something bad or wrong or something that you should try not to do, but is that really the case?
When I stopped to think about it, I don't actually know anyone that doesn't over-think things. How often they do it or admit to doing it however is another matter - but I don't actually know anyone who has never over-thought something or had a moment when someone said something or did something that they then thought about in excess, often ending with them having an in depth conversation about what happened and what things actually meant.
The Psychologists among us, or more specifically the Behavioural Psychologists will side with me on one point - that what we do is rarely if ever random. Everything we do is motivated by our thoughts, intuitions, desires, motivations, and aspirations etc. Whether we are conscious of the reason we do something or not, there is almost always a rationale behind the behaviour. We eat because we are hungry or because we are low on energy - we rarely eat for the sake of eating. Even people who eat all the time will have a motivation for doing so, whether that be something physical or emotional - we don't always eat consciously, sometimes we eat for the sake of routine and pay little attention to what we are doing or if we were actually hungry in the first place.
In following with all of this, our actions and our words are often chosen for a reason, whether we give it conscious forethought or if our actions are motivated by our subconscious what we say is inexorably linked to what we want, or how we feel. So every little thing you say in conversation, no matter how insignificant you think it is, it has a motivation behind it. So if we accept that we are all guilty of over thinking things, consciously or not, then you have to ask yourself is it actually wrong to over analyse what someone else does? If someone else has said something to you that may seem insignificant at first, even if they never meant it to be anything more than a passing remark, surely you should feel no guilt about contemplating why they said it, or even what might have lead them to think about it in the first place.
So going back to the title of this post, when someone makes a passing remark and you dismiss it thinking "oh they don't mean me" or "hmm do they mean me?" the answer is more than likely yes, they do. Carly Simon once wrote a song called 'You're so Vain' with the infamous line "I'll bet you think this song is about you" - nowhere is this over-analysis psyche more apt than in the critique of the lyrics, despite the chorus in jest that someone might be so self-absorbed to believe they'd write about them, if you actually read the rest of the lyrics the song is indeed about them.
I over-think things and over-analyse things a lot, and I always believed that was a bad thing to do - or at least that's what everyone told me. I was thinking about this however and after chatting with my good friend Ryan who would openly admit that he over-thinks things too, I had a thought; we both perceived this as something bad or wrong or something that you should try not to do, but is that really the case?
When I stopped to think about it, I don't actually know anyone that doesn't over-think things. How often they do it or admit to doing it however is another matter - but I don't actually know anyone who has never over-thought something or had a moment when someone said something or did something that they then thought about in excess, often ending with them having an in depth conversation about what happened and what things actually meant.
The Psychologists among us, or more specifically the Behavioural Psychologists will side with me on one point - that what we do is rarely if ever random. Everything we do is motivated by our thoughts, intuitions, desires, motivations, and aspirations etc. Whether we are conscious of the reason we do something or not, there is almost always a rationale behind the behaviour. We eat because we are hungry or because we are low on energy - we rarely eat for the sake of eating. Even people who eat all the time will have a motivation for doing so, whether that be something physical or emotional - we don't always eat consciously, sometimes we eat for the sake of routine and pay little attention to what we are doing or if we were actually hungry in the first place.
In following with all of this, our actions and our words are often chosen for a reason, whether we give it conscious forethought or if our actions are motivated by our subconscious what we say is inexorably linked to what we want, or how we feel. So every little thing you say in conversation, no matter how insignificant you think it is, it has a motivation behind it. So if we accept that we are all guilty of over thinking things, consciously or not, then you have to ask yourself is it actually wrong to over analyse what someone else does? If someone else has said something to you that may seem insignificant at first, even if they never meant it to be anything more than a passing remark, surely you should feel no guilt about contemplating why they said it, or even what might have lead them to think about it in the first place.
So going back to the title of this post, when someone makes a passing remark and you dismiss it thinking "oh they don't mean me" or "hmm do they mean me?" the answer is more than likely yes, they do. Carly Simon once wrote a song called 'You're so Vain' with the infamous line "I'll bet you think this song is about you" - nowhere is this over-analysis psyche more apt than in the critique of the lyrics, despite the chorus in jest that someone might be so self-absorbed to believe they'd write about them, if you actually read the rest of the lyrics the song is indeed about them.
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