Originally posted on substack: https://kindredspirits.substack.com/p/mva

A little while ago, I burnt myself out on introspection.

What started out as a reasonable quest for self-awareness curdled into a cycle of over-analysis and hyper-focus on the endless stream of thoughts and emotions. Like a modern-day Narcissus, I was entranced by the reflective pool of my own interiority and unable to detach myself from it. Now I see the irony: I was trying to become my best self through introspection but got stuck in a labyrinth of ifs and buts, a maze with no discernible exit, only endless corridors leading back into themselves. But back then, I just kept digging deeper.

Obviously, making any sort of decision in this state is exhausting. I found myself beset with doubts and wishing I could just turn my brain off. Uncertainty is a way of life and you don’t get anywhere by agonising over every decision and rooting around for meaning. But I did — and I got stuck in a vortex of decision paralysis when I had to make leaps in relationships and work. It was a necessary revelation that introspection isn’t to find the objective right answer. It’s to find out what you want.

Why was that distinction important? For a long time, I would ruminate over decisions, turning every one of them over in my head until the pros and cons were much too muddled. It was an agonisingly slow process and, even then, I didn’t always get it right. That usually had nothing to do with how deep I dug but everything to do with how inflexibly I would expect a certain outcome. Of course, that isn’t the way the world works, and sometimes you have to make raw decisions with very little data to go off of. But when you’re expecting the answer to reveal itself to you right at the start, you’re leaving no room to recalibrate if things go awry, as things are wont to do. The doors swing open to analysis paralysis and introspective burnout.

The only way to break out of this paralysis is really to act. To move a step at a time towards what I’m drawn to until a clear reason emerges to stop. This single step, the minimum viable action, is powerful, because the minute you take it, you set off reactions that arm you with more information. The fog clears a little, and then some more. The abstract concepts and hypothetical outcomes that once dominated your thought process are replaced by real-world feedback. This shift from s...

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