Your thoughts aren't special.
I guarantee if you understand this, your mind will become less of a trap and more of a tool for productivity.
But first, a confession.
I nearly lost my mind trying to watch it.
It was day three of a five-day silent retreat. No talking. No texting. No distractions. Just me, a cushion, and the circus inside my skull.
At first, it felt peaceful.
Then it got weird.
Then it got terrifying.
Because in trying to understand my thoughts, I made a dangerous mistake.
I started dressing them up.
I turned them into a spectacle. A system. A self-contained theory of consciousness.
And it nearly drove me insane.
Here's the story:
After 72 hours of silence, I noticed something strange.
My thoughts had locations.
One memory would show up in the bottom left of my mental screen. Another in the top right. Some were pictures. Some were voices. Some were both.
It was like my mind was running a 3D operating system.
I started testing it.
Could I drag thoughts around? Could I stack five at once? Could I zoom in and out like windows on a desktop?
Turns out, yes.
So I mapped them. Sketched them. Obsessed over them.
And the more I tried to understand, the more disoriented I became.
It wasn't clarity. It was cognitive cosplay.
A hall of mirrors.
And the harder I looked, the more I lost.
The breakthrough came not from more thinking, but from a simple phrase from the retreat teacher.
After I explained my whole elaborate theory of thought-location-mechanics, she smiled and said:
“That sounds like a lot of cats and boots.”
What?
She explained: sometimes we take a basic thought (a cat) and start dressing it up.
First, boots. Then a scarf. Then a monocle. Then a backstory. Suddenly it's not a thought—it's a character. A concept. A construct.
It's not real anymore.
It's just decoration.
And that's what I was doing.
I wasn't understanding my thoughts.
I was accessorizing them.
Here's the big idea:
Your thoughts don't need analysis.
They need observation.
Simple, clean, quiet observation.
Most thinking is just dressing up a cat.
We think we're being wise when we're just being wordy.
We confuse complexity with insight.
We confuse description with truth.
We mistake the map for the territory.
When you stop dressing up your thoughts, something wild happens.
They become boring.
They lose their grip.
And when thoughts lose their power, presence appears.
Not as an idea. Not as a goal.
As a felt sense of “this is what's real.”
That's the liberation.
That's how to change your life.
It doesn't come from conceptual breakthroughs.
It comes from subtraction.
From silence.
So here's what to do:
Next time you catch yourself spiraling into analysis—stop.
Ask:
Am I experiencing, or am I accessorizing?
Then drop the boots.
Return to the breath.
And keep it simple.
And if you're nodding along, try monkwit:
Download monkwit—the anti-productivity app that keeps you grounded.
Because thinking is cute.
But doing is clear.
Midwits build concepts.
Monkwits make moves.
Master how to be more productive by doing less, not more.
