“You are the observer of your own thoughts.”
Sounds profound. Also sounds completely useless.
Then it clicked — and it clicked because of work, of all places.
I noticed about 60% of incoming requests were the same questions, recycled. My team eventually trained AI to handle them automatically because humans kept solving the same problems like they’d never seen them before.
The waste wasn’t the volume. It was the attention.
My brain, I realized, was doing the exact same thing.
Every thought came in like an urgent DM.
Why didn’t they text back? Did I say something wrong in that meeting? What if I tanked that interview? Why did they say it that way?
Each one got full attention. Investigated from scratch. Like I’d never filed this ticket before.
I had. Many times.
The shift wasn’t learning to stop thinking.
It was realizing I didn’t have to treat every thought like an emergency.
Some thoughts are repeat tickets. I’ve opened this one before. Spent hours on it. I already know how it ends.
A delayed response isn’t automatically someone being upset with me. A weird facial expression isn’t automatically judgment. An unanswered question doesn’t always need an answer right now.
The ticket isn’t new. My brain just forgot it filed it already.
And the bigger thing — not every ticket needs to be resolved. Some need investigation. Some need a response. Some are waiting on information I don’t have yet. Some are just low priority and can sit. And some have so much ambiguity, I’ll never have a resolution and need to file it away.
For years I thought observing my thoughts meant stopping them or controlling them. Becoming somehow immune.
Now I think it just means: a thought shows up, I acknowledge it, and then I decide if it deserves my time.
“You are not your thoughts” used to sound like a fortune cookie. Now I think it means that a ticket entering the queue doesn’t automatically become the work.
I still get all the tickets.
I just stopped treating every single one like a Sev 1.
I started managing my thoughts like a ticketing queue.
That’s so Ops.
.