How We Think About Thinking
Beneath all the slogans, the old question still waits: what is thinking, really?
It seems timely, in the era of booming AI, to pause and ask: what is thinking? I could ask instead: what is intelligence? But the second question feels too many steps down the road from the first to offer a clean answer. If you’ve encountered my writing before, you know I lean toward first principles. I want ideas that are elegant, precise, and resilient — ideas that can survive attack because they grew from a seed that was already strong.
It always starts with the sense that something doesn’t cohere — some tension between experience, memory, feeling, and decision. Some misfit between the way we are told thinking works and the way it actually moves among these parts. When I stop to track it — to follow the movement through memory, sensation, doubt, conviction — the first crack appears not in what we think, but in how we think about thinking. If that is structurally unsound, then we cannot fully rely on the things we build atop it.
We live in an era saturated with language about thinking — or at least something we still call by that name. Critical thinking, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, lifelong learning: these are everywhere, stitched into mission statements and leadership decks. Each expansion has opened useful new facets of thought — the recognition that emotion matters, that problem-solving is part of real-world intelligence. But naming more dimensions has not clarified the structure underneath. It is as if we now have blue widgets, green widgets, fuzzy widgets — more kinds of something we still do not fully understand. In trying to widen the lens, we have blurred the image.
Schools and the conversations around them are thick with promises of lifelong learning and critical thinking. But in practice, to call someone an uncritical thinker usually just means we think they weren’t thinking at all. Without a clear account of what thinking is, the label collapses into insult. The same inflation happens in the world of work, where job descriptions now orbit a constellation of soft skills: communication, teamwork, problem-solving, adaptability, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity. Taken one by one, they sound promising. Taken together, they betray their true function: compliance, output, navigable friction toward deliverables.
In this light, problem-solving and teamwork are not about solving problems between people. They are about solving output problems efficiently enough that people can get along. Creativity and critical thinking are not invited to remake the work itself; they are supposed to optimize the work already assigned. Emotional intelligence isn’t about deepening understanding. It’s about modulating reactions so the machinery of collaboration doesn’t seize up. These skills, however valuable in practice, are selected not to sustain thinking — but to maintain systems.
I am not an enemy of outcomes, nor an opponent of people doing their jobs and getting things done without adolescent bickering and self-centeredness. I think my employer can expect those things from me. I try to be a person others can work with, not a bottleneck or a burden. I wish we wanted more from each other sometimes — more depth, more reality, more thoughtfulness in the structures we serve — but I also understand why we don’t always ask for it. I think most people know the difference, and live in that tension, even if we rarely say it aloud.
Schools, leadership programs, self-help books, and corporate retreats have turned "thinking" into a liturgy of phrases — critical thinking, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, lifelong learning. The words are not empty, but they are no longer clear. They have become ciphers: stand-ins for a kind of cognition we rarely bother to define. They allow us to speak as if we have deepened the discourse when in truth we have moved sideways, multiplying signs without clarifying the structure underneath. We keep teaching thinking without ever agreeing on what thinking actually is.
We see the same distortion with newer entries like resilience and grit. Each captures something real: the human capacity to recover, to reorient, to pursue meaning through difficulty. But framed as static traits, they lose their dynamic heart. Resilience becomes personal toughness. Grit becomes endurance without context. Their articulation shifts: you either have it or you don’t, and absence looks like deficiency — rather than a recognition that resilience and grit are themselves living processes of development, not possessions to be hoarded or displayed.
It would be false to say these models achieved nothing. Frameworks like Bloom’s Taxonomy, the "7 Habits" empire, and the leadership training boom offered real tools that helped people set clearer goals, structure their efforts, reclaim some sense of agency. They worked — but only at the surface. They optimized the visible outputs of mind without strengthening the deeper movement that gives thought its life. They polished the artifacts of thinking but left untouched the process that turns thought from something we have into something we do — something that can bend, adapt, endure.
Because of this, much of what we have called cognitive development has focused on surface upgrades without touching the real architecture of mind — an architecture that is becoming more visible in research, but still remains beyond our ability to teach or operationalize in any coherent way. Frameworks built to optimize business performance were smuggled into education — from pre-K classrooms to MBA seminars — and once inside, they taught tactics without cultivating cognitive depth. Emotional intelligence, soft skills, grit, growth mindset: each new banner widened the roster of expectations but left the underlying structure unexamined. We multiplied the outputs without deepening the roots. And now, as the conditions of the world shift faster than these frameworks can absorb, we are left standing on ground we never really fortified. We have not yet taught people how to think in motion — not because it is impossible, but because we never dared to ask the more dangerous question: what is thinking itself? We stopped at logos and episteme, mistaking the naming of things for the life of the mind they were meant to serve.
Postscript:
There is a name I use for the movement that thinking depends on, but that our frameworks have rarely bothered to name. A name for the living integration of reflection, sensation, emotion, and action — not as traits or tools, but as one continuous choreography. I call it Holothysis. In the pieces that follow, I will try to surface what it is, why we missed it, and what might still be possible if we learn to see it clearly.
- Dox