october 2025
.
.
.
thinking is supposed to be good.
if you read enough articles, you start to believe the main problem people have is that they don’t think enough. so you try to fix that. you try to think more deliberately, more deeply, and more productively.
but there’s a point where thinking stops being helpful and starts becoming expensive.
this is what i call "the thinking tax."
we all pay it. the only difference is how much.
our brain is always running. even when we don’t notice it, it’s making decisions—what to eat, where to go, whether to check your phone again. these are small thoughts, cheap ones. they don’t cost much.
the expensive thoughts are the ones that feel important.
what should i do with my life?
is this the right idea?
what if this doesn’t work?
am i making a mistake?
these feel productive, because they’re serious. but they tend to expand. one thought leads to another, then another, until you’re no longer deciding—you’re wandering.
the strange thing about thinking is that it doesn’t have a natural stopping point.
you can always think a little more, refine the plan, consider another angle, simulate another outcome. there’s always one more scenario worth examining, especially when the stakes feel high.
so you keep going, and this is where the tax shows up.
every hour you spend thinking about doing something is an hour you’re not doing it. this sounds obvious, but it doesn’t feel obvious when you’re in it, because thinking feels like progress.
it isn’t, or more precisely, it’s only a very specific kind of progress, and it has diminishing returns. the first few minutes of thinking are often valuable. you get clarity. you avoid obvious mistakes.
after that, the returns drop quickly.
what replaces them is a kind of mental noise that looks like work but behaves more like avoidance. instead of reducing uncertainty, you start feeding it. you discover new risks, new edge cases, new reasons to hesitate.
this is how overthinking happens—not because people are irrational, but because they’re too willing to continue a process that has already stopped paying off.
the people who get the most done don’t necessarily think less. they just pay less tax. they seem to have an implicit rule: think just enough to start, then let reality do the rest of the thinking for you.
because reality is faster.
when you act, you get feedback immediately. something works or it doesn’t, the problem becomes concrete. instead of imagining ten possible outcomes, you’re dealing with one actual outcome, which is much easier to improve.
thinking tries to predict the future. action interacts with it, and interaction is more efficient.
this is why plans often feel so convincing in your head but fall apart when you try to execute them. the plan was built in a frictionless environment. reality adds friction instantly.
but that friction is useful. it forces you to adjust in ways you couldn’t have predicted.
so the goal isn’t to eliminate thinking. that’s impossible. the goal is to recognize when thinking has crossed the line from useful to expensive.
a simple test is this: are you learning something new from continuing to think, or are you just rearranging the same ideas?
if it’s the second, you’re probably paying the tax.
and like most taxes, a small amount is unavoidable, even necessary. but if you let it grow unchecked, it starts to consume the thing it was supposed to support.
you end up with beautifully constructed plans and very little to show for them.
the irony is that the only reliable way to reduce the thinking tax is to do the thing you’ve been thinking about.
action interrupts the loop. it replaces speculation with evidence.
once you start, the questions change. they become smaller, sharper, and easier to answer. you stop asking “what should i do?” and start asking “what’s the next step?”
that’s a much cheaper question, and it turns out, most useful work is just a series of those.
img source: shotkit