I think there must be three basic types of people inhabit this world. Some people simply go on with life without much thought for their actions or their surroundings; this type predominates. Other people, more rare, posses a high intelligence, an awareness for the consequences of their actions, and a general understanding of the nature of the world. But beyond those two is the rarest, the most perplexing; the last, the dread, the doomed type, the type to which I belong - the overthinkers.

I coined the term "overthinker" from a book my girlfriend acquired some years ago, the name of which neither she nor I remember. The book argued thusly: all people have an analytical mindset and a "rest" mindset. For most situations, the rest mindset suffices; the analytical mode is for planning and preparing. The analytical mindset answers questions about a dinner party. "How many chairs will I need?" it ponders. "How many people should I expect as opposed to how many I invited?" Having solved all these problems, the analytical mindset should dissipate, and the brain should return to rest. But often it does not, instead turning to questions it should not touch.. "What if no one comes? What if the turkey burns or is unusable? What if I do something boneheaded and dumb?" The analytical mode churns away at impossible questions, bringing every cold possibility to light. Every negative option surfaces in the brain - I drop the turkey! I burn the gravy! I hit the Duchess of York in the face with the cranberry sauce! Unlikely futures and negative hypotheticals send the mind spiraling downwards, confronted with innumerable possibilities it cannot handle.

Imagine a brain permanently stuck in analytic mode.

Jamming one's brain in a permanent analytic mode is not an easy task. I believe my case stems from my peculiar mental power; I possess a keen mind, a quick imagination, and no ability to control either. I look at others I know, as smart or smarter than me, who harness their minds firmly, constrain their intellects to the task at hand, chain their imagination. I cannot do this. I have tried; usually the faculty I attempt to pin down squirts out of my grasp, shouting, "So long, sucker!" I cannot name a single other person in my experience who I would apply the term "overthinker" to. Some days, I believe there are no others.

But truly believing that would be presumptuous, I think. I can't be the only one - it's a big planet, with six billion inhabitants - surely at least one other must have a mind as uncontrolled as mine! I must classify overthinkers as a group. I can't claim to be unique. Thinking I am is a scary prospect. Could I really be the only one to experience life through a permanent analytical mindset? No - I can't let myself think that.

Perhaps I'm being foolish when I ask for understanding. I've already said that my mental composition is rare, that I'm smart and imaginative and no one can understand what it's like to be an overthinker if they aren't one, and so on and so on. But I think it behooves us, as human beings, to try to understand, even if we can do so only partly. Not being female, for example, means that I can never understand what it's like to have breasts, or carry a child for nine months. But I try to understand anyway, because I do not want to belittle or dismiss, even inadvertently, women and their particular troubles and feelings. Understanding has brought us universal suffrage, civil rights, peace and trade agreements - I think trying to understand is an admirable goal.

The first step to understanding is empathy; he or she who would understand the overthinker must first know what the overthinker feels, what the overthinker experiences. So what must what I, poor overthinking me, go through on a daily basis? An example: On the way to the dentist one day, I saw several students exiting from what appeared to be a classroom underneath a grassy field. Any other person who saw that would simply think, "Ah, an underground section of the building, cool." I wished for that simplicity of thought even as my mind began dissection the other possibilities. Some of them were absolutely ludicrous, to my shame: the underground tunnel built for evacuation purposes; the converted bomb-shelter classroom; the former tomb refurbished for modern use.

Exhausted by the possibilities? I only wish my mind would tire. But thinking is like lifting weights - the dumbbell that a novice can barely lift becomes a good warm-up weight, in sets of a hundred, for the trained professional. I am such a professional - not in clarity or quality of thought, but in sheer volume. I examined the feasibility of the structure. I pondered the motives that could have pushed the nameless architect who built the mysterious underground classroom into that particular design. I even wondered what the people who walked above the tunnels, on the unassuming grass, thought.

Ten minutes later I noticed my environment again. I'd walked five extra blocks past the dentist's office, and I scrambled to get back in time for my appointment..

Every person, place, or thing I see, I analyze. Sometimes my analysis is brief, until another thought captures my mind, but some particularly captivating ideas lodge in my brain for hours, if not days, at a time. Even writing about overthinking went through the same process. My brain churns at it awhile, kicking it around from thought to idea to stupid idea to good thought, a Ping-Pong ball on speed. Sometimes it settles down, when other duties demand full attention - but, duty done, the topic leaps into my brain again, often in the middle of class, to seize attention away from a critique of a screenplay or a discussion on the politics of the Reformation.

Professors often hate the overthinker for this reason. I frequently lapse into completely irrelevant thoughts during a lecture, even when I find the topic fascinating. As a consequence, when I'm called upon I find myself roughly jerked back to reality, blustering and fumbling for answers to a question I've only half-heard. I have many bluffing or stalling tactics. I claim I can't find what I'm looking for in a packet or page, and quote something from memory. I agree with everything that has been said before by other people. I hem and haw and make a great show of collecting my thoughts to say something profound. Survival tactics, in other words, but I give my professors enough credit that I assume they know what I'm about. I would like to tell my professors that I'm not daydreaming, as it surely must appear I am, and that I do indeed find their class interesting and the discussion helpful and relevant. In fact I do find the class interesting and the discussion helpful, and I only wish I were daydreaming - I have never been permitted a airy flight of fancy. No, my thoughts are banal grinding on the nature of language (is it innate or developed?), or the book I just read (What's with Anne Fadiman?!), never something I would wish to think about. The daydreamer chooses to drift off from class; I'm forcibly ejected from it by a brain on mental steroids.

I have lain awake at night at least twice thinking about this essay. I concocted this very part of it at a time when I should have been sleeping, when I wished desperately I could sleep.

An overthinker can never get to sleep. When I hear of a person who falls asleep almost immediately upon lying down, I become bitter. An overthinker's brain is at its most powerful in the dark of night. When all is silent and still, when motion and outside concerns are nothing, when you are curled up alone in an empty room, the ultimate sensation of privacy - then the overthinker's mind has free reign. My own ranges far afield; from elaborate reconstructions of television to thoughts about standard issues such as love and war to bizarre musings on cows. Anything and everything is free game, and not only is falling asleep through the mental cacophony impossible, it is oftentimes undesirable. I personally have a script of sorts stored in my head, one that takes hours to mentally act out and would take up page after page if it were ever written down. I run through it, as far as I can get each night, forever modifying, extracting, adding as I see fit. The exercise is one in futility - the script will never see daylight, and I'm embarrassed to even admit it exists. But my mind turns to that script at night whether I want it to or not; all I can do is accept the inevitable.

Empathy is another curse of the overthinker. A consequence of analyzing people and situations is that one comes to comprehend where the other person is coming from. This is not such a curse, but the result of it is: a frequent inability to take action.

The other night my roommate played loud music while I was trying to sleep. The bass was keeping me awake; not only did its pounding rhythm interfere with my little script, but I have been conditioned to hate bass being pumped through my walls, and exhibit an aggressive physiological response to it: increased heart rate, adrenaline in the bloodstream, and so forth. What I ought to have done, what I should have done, what most anyone else would have done, would have been to yell at him to turn it off.

But I didn't. Because I understood that he was certainly unaware of what he was doing, and almost certainly enjoying the music, I was unable to move. When it finally became intolerable, I went over and asked him politely to shut it off. One might think that such an action was the right thing to do - but I was forced to internalize and suppress a great deal of anger and unhappiness doing it, and had already analyzed at that point exactly what damage the chained rage would soon do to me. Sure enough, the next morning I awoke with a terrible pain in my stomach, as all that caged anger clawed its way out of me, all because I could not express my unhappiness the way I would have liked to.

Manipulation is worse than self-destruction, however, and thanks to overthinking I am a truly manipulative bastard. Even as I prepare to speak, I analyze what effect my words will have and what I can expect from the person I'm facing as a response. When I tell someone, "Oh, I'm walking home," I know full well that I'm truly saying, "Hey, I don't have a ride, give me one!"

I hate this manipulative streak. I do not want to be a deceitful and manipulative person. But I cannot help it, since everything I do is subject to the same brutal analysis which can't help but present me with expected results. And even in the prior sentence, I have chosen what phrasing I could concoct to draw the reader's sympathy to me, to encourage him or her not to hate me! And I do it again, in an endless cycle.

Cynicism and overthinking are almost interchangeable. The cynic looks at a person and expects them to do something stupid and destructive; the overthinker analyzes a person and concludes that they're almost certainly going to do something stupid and destructive. Not all cynics are overthinkers. More appropriately, we could say that cynicism becomes a heuristic of the overthinker.

Think of it in terms of probabilities. A cynic automatically assumes that negative actions - say, violence against completely innocent people of Arabic descent in the wake of terrorist attacks - are 100% guaranteed to happen. A cynic assumes that all other people will follow the most simple course of logic -- "Arabic people attacked our country; this person looks Arabic; this person attacked our country" - without considering its flaws, or other possibilities. I, on the other hand, look at the characteristics of people who are scared and shocked. They are insecure; they wonder what they can do; they seek for an avenue of control over their lives, which they feel deprived of. Logically, they'll seek an exterior target which they perceive as responsible for their loss of control, and seek to dominate it to reassert control. Violence against people who are associated with the terrorists by even the most tenuous connections becomes, in this chain of events, ninety percent certain.

My prediction rate is good; I can accurately predict what students will do to their new dorm furniture (destroy it), what the government will do when a social problem raises its ugly head (seek the quick fix which looks good to constituents), and what the college administration will do to address student concerns (very little). Is it any wonder I appear cynical to the outside observer?

One of the most intelligent and highest-quality shows on contemporary television was MTV's Daria. Ironically, it's a spinoff of Beavis and Butthead; also ironically, MTV killed it for more attention to their reality show Road Rules. I based a large amount of this theory on the title character. "I don't smile unless I have a reason," she says - and that is a hallmark of overthinkers, who typically generate a great deal of analysis which isn't conducive to general happiness. How does a person manage to be happy when they know that life is cruel and arbitrary? The analytical mindset, misapplied, dredges up negative thoughts and dark possibilities - how can I get up every day and face the world, knowing what it might have in store for me? More importantly, how can I ever interact with people who don't?

One of my favorite quotes from Daria explains it better than I can. After the death of a football player, all the "normal" people seek Daria's advice - she's the "misery chick," in their parlance. One of Daria's friends explains it: "When they say 'You're always unhappy,' what they mean is 'You think, Daria. I can tell because you don't smile. Now this guy died, and it's making me think, and that hurts my little head and makes me stop smiling. So, tell me how you cope with thinking all the time, Daria, until I can get back to my normal vegetative state'."

And in the end, when I think about my friends and acquaintances, I realize I am trapped. I am cursed to overthink - and overthinking is a curse, make no mistake about it. But were I given the choice, I wouldn't stop. I don't believe I could. Like Adam and Eve's fall from grace, the path I've walked is one-way only. In eating the apple, in coming to know good and evil, mankind's progenitors knew shame as well, and lust - and even had they regained their state of grace, their memories would strike them from it once more. Innocence, once lost, can never be reclaimed. So too the overthinker can never return to a state of grace - I would remember fondly the time I spent as an overthinker, and in remembering, relapse. I'm stuck an overthinker - and despite everything, I begin to think that I like it.