thinking about thinking

how our thoughts shape who we are and how we see ourselves in the world

How many thoughts do you think you have in a day?

Take a guess before I tell you. A thousand? Five thousand?

Try somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000—roughly one every 1.2 seconds during your waking hours. It's an absurd number when you really sit with it, like trying to imagine the national debt in dollar bills. Most of these thoughts won’t be anywhere near memorable. A few might offer genuine insight. Others will be harsh, critical, unkind. But the majority will just be familiar.

The familiar ones are what fascinate me. They're like that piece of mental furniture you've been meaning to move for years but never do—you just keep bumping into it in the dark, cursing under your breath, wondering why you haven't rearranged things yet. That same anxious thought about money that visits every Sunday evening. The way I replay conversations, editing them hours too late. The mental inventory of everything I should be doing better. These aren't really thoughts at all—they're fixtures in the landscape of my mind, as predictable as the creak in the third step or the way 10:00am light hits that corner of the kitchen.

But here's what troubles me about this whole arrangement: we know belief isn't built on truth. It's built on repetition. The thoughts we return to, consciously or not, become something much more powerful than fleeting mental events. They become the raw material from which we construct our mental models—those invisible lenses through which we perceive everything, predict how others will behave, decide what's possible and what's not.

I've been thinking about mental models lately the way Charlie Munger used to—as tools in a toolkit, except I've come to see them more like prescription glasses. They help us see clearly, but they also determine what we can see at all. The person who thinks the world is fundamentally hostile develops different mental models than someone who believes it's fundamentally kind. Same reality, completely different experience of being alive.

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If you’re interested in mental models, I wrote more about them here—

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Here's what I find really wild: we're not consciously choosing these models most of the time. They emerge from the thoughts we allow to repeat, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the patterns we reinforce through sheer mental habit. Daniel Kahneman spent his career mapping the difference between what he called System 1 thinking—fast, automatic, intuitive—and System 2 thinking—slow, deliberate, effortful. Most of our mental models are built in System 1 territory, formed before we even realize we're forming them, like sediment settling in still water.

This is where the whole enterprise of intentional thinking starts to feel revolutionary rather than just self-helpy. When we start choosing the thoughts we return to, we're not just trying to feel better or reduce anxiety—we're literally rewiring the fundamental operating system through which we experience reality. Every repeated thought is a vote for the kind of mental model we want to inhabit. Every familiar worry is reinforcing a particular way of perceiving threat. Every moment of gratitude is strengthening a mental model that looks for what's working rather than what's broken.

But the thing I find even more wild whenever I really think about it: you are the one who notices the thought. That moment of recognition—"Oh, there I go again, spiraling about money"—that's not the thought itself. That's awareness. That's you, standing apart from the mental furniture, observing it rather than being trapped inside it. The thought says "I'm terrible at this." But something else, something deeper, notices that the thought is happening. And that something—that's where your actual power lives.

I've been experimenting with this, treating my mind like a house that needs renovation. When I catch myself thinking "This always happens to me" or "I'm terrible at this," I try to pause and ask: Is this thought building a mental model I want to live with? Am I constructing a lens that will help me see clearly, or am I just reinforcing an old prescription that no longer serves me?

There's something almost architectural about it—the way our repeated thoughts become the blueprints for our perception. The person who habitually thinks "People are fundamentally good" will walk through the world with different eyes than someone whose mental models are built on thoughts of distrust and disappointment. They'll notice different things, respond differently to ambiguous situations, create different relationships. Same objective reality, completely different lived experience.

One of my personal favorite things to explore when it comes to thinking and consciousness are those glimpses of what's possible when we step outside our mental models entirely. I'm thinking about those moments when I'm writing and suddenly realize I've been typing for an hour without any sense of time passing, or when I'm having a conversation so absorbing that I forget to perform the usual mental commentary about how I'm coming across. Psychologists call this flow state, but the name doesn't quite capture what's really happening—this temporary dissolution of all our accumulated ways of seeing and predicting and analyzing.

In flow, the surfer isn't thinking about the wave through the lens of past waves or future consequences; she's responding to this wave, right now, with a kind of intelligence that bypasses the filter of mental models entirely. The musician isn't playing from theory or memory but from some deeper wellspring that emerges when our constructed sense of self steps aside.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who spent decades studying this phenomenon, found that people in flow states often report feeling more themselves than in ordinary consciousness—which is puzzling when you consider that flow involves a kind of temporary self-erasure. Maybe what we call "self" most of the time is really just the accumulated weight of our mental models, our familiar thoughts, our predictable patterns of perception. And maybe what emerges in flow is something more essential—not the self we've constructed through repetition, but the self that exists prior to all that construction.

This connects to something the Japanese call "mushin"—no-mind. Not thoughtlessness, but a way of being so present that our mental models become transparent, like perfectly clean glass. It's what happens when we stop performing our interiority and start trusting something deeper than our accumulated thoughts and predictions.

Mushin, meaning "no-mind" or "mind without mind," is a Japanese Zen concept describing a state of mind where thoughts, emotions, and ego are absent during action, leading to heightened awareness and effortless performance.

These moments show us something profound: we are not our mental models. We are the awareness that can step back from them, examine them, even temporarily set them aside. And if we can do that in flow states, we can learn to do it in ordinary consciousness too—choosing which models serve us and which ones need updating.

Here’s the thing: you're going to have those 60,000 thoughts today whether you pay attention to them or not. The question is whether you're going to let them construct your mental models by default, or whether you're going to become an intentional architect of your own perception.

Start small. Notice the familiar thoughts—the ones that show up like clockwork, predictable as that morning coffee ritual. Ask yourself: Is this thought building a mental model I want to live with? Is it helping me see clearly, or just reinforcing an old prescription that no longer serves me?

Because what I’ve learned is—and maybe this is too embarrassingly obvious to even admit—you don't have to believe every thought you think. You don't have to let repetition masquerade as truth. You can choose which thoughts get your attention, which ones you return to, which ones you allow to shape the lens through which you see everything else.

Your mental models aren't permanent fixtures—they're renovations in progress. And you're holding the blueprint.

So, how will you choose to see the world today? I hope you see something beautiful.

xo

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catch up on this week’s posts ICYMI —