Your engine is overheating

I took this photo in 2016 because the scene seemed worth capturing: a street-facing door packed floor to ceiling with books and stuff. I had just arrived in Santiago and everything felt fascinating. I didn’t know what I’d use it for, but I kept it anyway. Looking at it today, besides reminding me of Monica Geller’s closet door in Friends, it makes me notice something else: even if I wanted to, I couldn’t get in. It’s full.

Too much information, and none of it worth anything.

Books, books, and more books stacked to the ceiling. No order, no air, no room to squeeze through.

Sometimes my head feels like that, and every now and then I try to figure out why. One thing I’ve learned: when you overexpose yourself to too many creative stimuli at once, your thoughts jam up and your body reacts. Sometimes with mental blocks, sometimes with overwhelm, sometimes with the urge to throw everything out.

But your creativity hasn’t switched off. Your engine is overheating.

Pinterest, Instagram, references, trends, tutorials, screenshots, accounts you follow for no real reason, content you consume without knowing why. It all gets in, until your brain says enough and what felt like inspiration turns into noise. You want to make everything you see, and you end up making nothing. The block didn’t come from inside. It came from outside, disguised as inspiration. The nerve.

In Las Olas, a book by the Argentine science collective El Gato y la Caja, I read that anxiety lives in the gap between what you want to do and what you feel you can do. That’s exactly what happens here. It’s not that you don’t have ideas. You have too many, all at once, and you want to act on all of them right now.

The problem isn’t taking things in. It’s forgetting why you’re taking them in. At some point you stop looking for what you need and start grabbing whatever the algorithm throws at you. And in that exact moment, you lose touch with what’s yours.

Have you ever walked out of a supermarket with your brain fried from staring at too many nearly identical products, when buying the same thing online, with no distractions, takes five minutes and zero stress? You go straight for what you want, and that’s it. I think it’s the same thing. Barry Schwartz wrote about exactly this in The Paradox of Choice: when we have too many options, the brain doesn’t open up, it freezes. Abundance doesn’t free us. It stresses us out. We do better with fewer things to choose from and more room to go deep.

Dropping that load lowers the saturation and the anxiety, and it can ease the stress your body carries when it’s stuck on high alert. Marie Kondo-ing the content you consume (cleaning up your sources, unsubscribing, muting, letting go) clears your mind in a way that feels almost physical.

Moving forward on a few concrete ideas weighs less than carrying every idea in the world, all competing for space in your head. You don’t need all of them. Let go of the ones that don’t belong as soon as you can.