The Right Side of Thought - More To That

At this point, some of you may be asking, “Being on the right side of thought is great and all, but is it really that important to spend your time thinking? After all, reflection doesn’t put food on the table, it doesn’t get the world’s businesses moving, and it sure as hell won’t drive my ass to work. So what’s the point?”

A great response to that question comes in Simon Blackburn’s book, Think, which has a whole section devoted to answering it. In it, he offers this reply:

What you’ll find is that almost everything you experience is a product of thought.

If there’s ever a universal lesson about thought, it’s that it can help us immensely, but can just as easily destroy us. Toxic ideologies such as racism, sexism, and classism are all the byproduct of misdirected thought. Things that human beings have grown to cherish – like art, philosophy, and science – can become sources of absolute hell and mise... See more

To properly navigate these waves, we require reflection, or what I like to refer to as being on the right side of thought.

The very smartphone or laptop you may be using to read this is the result of thousands of minds, all thinking together about what it takes to extract raw materials from the Earth, assemble everything into the singular shape you see now, imbue it with the properties of computational power, and cleverly market the resulting device so your hard-earned... See more

Ideas are the software that run on the hardware of our minds, and reflection is the only tool we have to reliably maintain and update it.

So if thought is the great thing responsible for the evolutionary backbone of our species, why has its reputation been so shitty this whole time?

Thoughts are so powerful because each one offers a deeply compelling interpretation of our reality. It has the unique ability to assign meaning to a given event, as the event itself doesn’t intrinsically come with an associated emotion. For example, if we get laid off from a job, the layoff itself is simply an objective event with no innate, emotio... See more