Kelly's World | Why do we overthink everything?

“To think too much is a disease.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

I saw a post on Instagram a couple of weeks ago with a man sporting shortish dreadlocks and nuff beard sitting in a barber chair.

The text went something like this,

Barber: “What style you want?”

Dreadlocked dude: “I’m looking for a wife.”

Barber: “I got you, fam!”

The next photo shows same dude, post-haircut, with locks now trimmed into a fade, and beard now shaped up.

If memory serves me correctly, the Instagram account was that of a barbershop or some other ‘beauty industry’ establishment.

At the very least, the point of it was to show the barber’s skill level, puncuated by the caption ‘this barber, tho’.

And guess what, in terms of highlighting the barber’s craft, the post worked. Heck, I wanted to visit the barbershop to get a line-up and trim and I’m very happy with the barbershop I use.

But wouldn’t you guess, some people started talking about the post and why the dude in the chair felt like he needed to trim to find a wife.

Some people were saying he looked good just the way he was, others were saying hair doesn’t make the man, and so on and so forth.

If memory serves me correctly, I’m pretty certain there were some comments about race thrown in there too.

Not that Serious

 

While I appreciate that people are thinking about wider issues, do you really have to make a doctoral thesis of everything?

 

Let’s be clear, I know that we’ll all overthink at some point. Heck, I’m the king of overthinking actually. I would have had a crown by now if I could decide what material it should be made of (leaning towards platinum). But even I think that sometimes you just need to see something just for what it is.

 

Not everything is an abstract painting that you need to delve into with the inquisitive mind of a precocious pre-teen.

 

You know the old comparison of people who will see the glass as half full, while others will see it as half empty.

 

Well, I figure some of the people commenting on that post might start making a correlation between the glass’ contents and the current water shortage around sections of the Corporate Area.

 

If the water looks brown, they might start a conversation on malfunctioning NWC treatment plants.

 

The thing is, with everybody having an opinion, it kinda forces you to be brave and have a thick skin.

 

I’m left with a few questions. First off, if the person who originally put out the post envisioned that some people would turn it into a cultural debate, would they have bothered to put it out?

 

I might not have gone through with it, but den me easy fi get dark.

 

What I also wonder about the people who were reading all kind of stuff into the post was whether they analyse their own lives so much.

 

Somehow I doubt it. But I won’t think about it too much. Later.

- Link me at daviot.kelly@gleanerjm.com.