Thinking is not Basking in Vibes

Author: Indigo Curnick

Date: 2026-05-25

#philosophy   #psychology   #critical-thinking  


tl;dr you should write things down because nobody is capable of thinking only in their head. Serious if I can convince you to do one thing it is to write things down.

Have you ever believed that you thought a lot about something, but then later realised there was no substance at all? Maybe you felt like you thought a lot about something you wanted to write but when you sat down found you had nothing to say? These are likely symptoms of basking in vibes.

Basking in vibes is the process of tricking yourself into feeling like you're thinking by a process of going over the same thing in your mind over and over again, usually in a very surface level way. The definition is a bit vague, so some concrete expressions are worthy.

This article won't be a full description of how to think, but instead I want to look at the symptoms of basking in vibes and how to cure each symptom. Again, tl;dr write things down.

Symptoms of Basking In Vibes

Adult Daydreaming

Some ways you see basking in vibes is the "wouldn't it be nice if..." style of thought. This can be identified by the entire thought process being something like "wow I would love this". This could be likened to the now popular practice of "manifestation". The idea that by visualising the result for a long time, it aids in achievement. While I won't go into the actual efficacy of this, it is certainly not thinking in any meaningful sense. Usually when someone says they "thought a lot" about something, but have nothing at all written down, this is usually what happened.

I call this "adult daydreaming". The adult part makes it way worse than regular old daydreaming. At least when you regular daydream you might come up with some interesting fantasy worlds or some cool imagery in your mind. With adult daydreaming you get nothing but the outcome of about 4 seconds of actual thought spread out over hours (days?).

For example, a classic "thought" many people would have is something along the lines of

"politicians should care about the little man!"

which feels politically salient but is essentially vapid. There's no definition, no model of incentives, no mechanisms to achieve this, and no conception of trade offs. Just as a few examples of instant questions which should come to mind (and these are only a few):

It's okay to have an initial desire, but we need to quickly get into analysis mode.

Outcomes Over Processes

Another way is an over focus on outcomes over processes. We see this a lot in the business world. There can be a lot of "thought"; a several hour meeting to arrive at the conclusion the business should try and sell more. Revolutionary.

Having a goal is important, but be real - in most cases the goal should take a few minutes to figure out and write down. Once you have the ultimate goal, you need to ask if that goal is actionable. If it isn't you need to come up with an actionable goal which is congruent with the real goal.

If we take "sell more" as a goal, you can't actually do this. You have to instead do something which can lead to selling more. Let's say you decide this something is getting your produce in a showcase event. Now we have an actionable goal. From there you can start to write down specific things you need to do to get to the actionable goal. You might need to prepare a stall, reach out to the organisers of the event, get a permit, and so on and so forth.

In other words, once an outcome is settled, it should be settled. It doesn't need to be reflected on over and over. Now the process of attainment begins by setting incremental and concrete goals. Work to them.

Unable to Move On

An inability to move on is another common symptom. In this symptom, what we see is that the subject is incapable of solidifying something as a concrete assumption or premise of the line of thought. This causes them to get stuck at the phase of making premises.

If not moving on is the problem, writing things down is usually the cure. The direct cause of not moving on is a fear about having an incorrect premise. The best way to reframe this is once again through WRITING DOWN the premise. The solution here is to say "here, I took the premise of X, Y, Z and worked through to the end assuming they were true, here's the conclusion". Maybe later you find X, Y, Z are all true, then your conclusion is good. Maybe you find the conclusion is so absolutely ridiculous that you can scrap X, Y, Z. Some people might be worried about spending too much time on this but it's quicker than basking in vibes.

Let's say you're thinking about quitting your job. Since this is an emotional decision, it's prone to "overthinking":

This is the kind of problem you can easily get stuck thinking about over and over in loops.

How could we go about turning this into actual thought? Here we would start to create premise sets and explore outcomes.

Set A might be

Set B might be

Set C might be

In this case, since the problem is partially emotional, doing each of these also helps you discover yourself: the limits of staying and leaving. We can see in these sets that whether a promotion happens or not is a big factor in staying or leaving. You could then start to ask "well what could I do to improve chances of promotion?".

The inability to move on is overthinking but in the rational domain rather than the emotional domain. A lot of overthinking advice is focused on mindfulness and quieting the mind. That doesn't work here as the domain here does involve important problems that require solutions. This is about what I call epistemic termination conditions. We need to pull out premises, reach temporary placeholder conclusions, and then figure out how to gather more evidence on the uncertain premises to reach stronger conclusions.

The Jitters

In this one, no decision or final conclusion about any aspect is ever made, and the mind jumps from aspect to aspect over and over again.

First things first. This symptom is characterised by never completing any line of thought and actually coming to (and WRITING DOWN) a conclusion. My ADHD baddies are going to struggle with this the worst, but really many people struggle with this. The way to deal with this is again to break the problem down into a number of "problem areas" (just to keep it vague) which you WRITE DOWN. Once you've written them down, you can forget them all. Then, you can pick one at a time and work on it independently. Then, once all "problem areas" have been addressed, you can start to pull it back into a complete whole.

The trick is to not move on from a specific "problem area" until that has been completed.

Let's say you need to come to some conclusion about the best database to use for your application. Let's say you've narrowed it down to Postgres and ElasticSearch. The jitters here would be to flick from the Postgres to ElasticSearch documentation, flick to different blogs but not engage with any of them. The correct thing to do here instead is to pick one to begin with at random - either Postgres or ElasticSearch as it does not matter, let's say Postgres - and find some kind of "strengths of Postgres" page on the documentation. Then read, review and take notes on it in full. Then, once that is complete, do the same for ElasticSearch. You will at this point have some notes on the relative strengths of each database. Do you have enough information to make a conclusion yet? No? What's missing from each side? More cons? More limitations? Now you have a basic scaffold in place for each database, you can go find additional information as necessary. Always proceeding one thing at a time and completing it before moving on. Notice how writing things down was the effective solution here.

A common place this comes up is in meetings. Someone will ask a question, and in the process of having it answered will have an idea. "Oh, could we do...." they interject, before the original question is fully answered. While I appreciate the enthusiasm, this isn't an efficient way to proceed! A great solution to this problem is to always go into meetings with either a pen and paper or a computer/laptop you can take notes on. Make brief notes on your questions and what the speaker says, and when on the fly questions and ideas come up for you, write them down and allow the current train of thought to come to an end. You can then return to those ideas later. While every meeting should have one person designated to do meeting minutes, everyone should also be taking their own notes. Pro tip, if you share your notes with the person designated to do meeting minutes you will curry immense favour with them (only if your notes are actually good).

The jitters comes from a place of anxiety. People worry about doing things in the "right" or "optimal" order. They worry about not doing "pointless" work. If you are thinking, it means you do not know the answer yet. Therefore, you can not make a decision about what is "optimal" or "pointless". Thinking is a process of discovery. You don't know the path or the end destination yet. No work done when thinking is pointless because you always learn something: at minimum you find out about a dead end. Usually though you learn a bit more than that: find some new interesting sources, stubs for later work that might be interesting. If you take effective notes, no work is wasted because it can always be repurposed at a later date!

Compare this to a place where there is no discovery. A good example is flying aircraft. There is no room for discovery in the cockpit. They do this with a series of checklists and set procedures. However, when thinking about something unknown you can't know yet what the checklists are! Be prepared to do "wasted" work, have unknowns, dead ends, unoptimal orders. Ultimately, enjoy the process of thinking.

Organising Thoughts with Witnesses

One other place this happens all the time is in meetings. I use a big disclaimer at work: meetings are not your place to organise your thoughts with witnesses. All too often meetings are not used as places to present and discuss ideas and decide on concrete action steps. Instead, some participants are essentially either organising their thoughts and coming up with those ideas in real time; or worse, getting everyone else to actually do the thinking for them.

True thinking is always a solo act. It requires contemplation and reflection. It is a slow and deliberate action. This very rarely can be done collaboratively.

There is a lot of value to working with others. Of course, some larger projects require the work of several people to ever be completed. But within every project, if the project has intellectual aspects which require thought, those are going to have to be worked out alone.

Not Writing Things Down

You might have noticed a common theme with all of these so far. The idea of writing things down! So much so is this the focus of the article, here's a section dedicated to this and this alone.

Write things down!

Generally people describe my memory as excellent, and yet I am fully aware of how much my memory can fail me. I am constantly writing everything down: what I did in a day, any new terminal commands or software I used, any new yoga sequences I did. Maybe I remember all the times I forget? Anyway, unless you are writing something down, there's a good chance you're just basking in vibes.

Why is writing things down so important? It's because humans are unable to hold an infinite number of things in their minds at once. If you don't write things down, you will inevitable fall into one of the above traps, and then, to top it all off, you'll forget everything and repeat it the next day.

If you do write things down, you can immediately remove those things from your mind because you can trust they are on paper/in the computer. That frees up your mental space so much. It will allow you to only need to hold onto a tiny part of the problem in your mind at once, which you can then reasonably solve. Then you write that conclusion down. When you need to go back and remember something from before, it's all there for you!

Fixing It

Not all tasks require the full suit of thinking tools. For example, research is an important part of thinking though sometimes small problems don't require research.

Again, this isn't intended to be a blog which teaches thinking in detail; just a diagnostic tool for if you struggle to think. However, let's get a very brief structure for what it actually looks like to think.

Let's say you have some problem you want to solve at work, it doesn't matter what it is. Here's more or less the kind of thing you'll need to do in order to solve it:

I already mentioned this in passing, but if you are in business make sure you're final goal or solution isn't something passé like "make more money" or "sell more things". This is super unhelpful!

If someone sent you this blog, you're probably basking in vibes rather than thinking. That's okay! It's not a personal attack; most people simply can not think. However, you should probably do something about it. This is not something small you can just change instantly - it will require lots of work over a long period of time to correct. This blog isn't big enough to contain a full guide on how to think, but it should help you diagnose the problem. You can use the outline above to try and structure your thinking a bit better too.

In conclusion, please don't just bask in vibes and call it thinking. The number one way to ensure this is to write things down!