A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts, I mean specifically, chatter in the skull. Perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating.
Like everything else, it's useful in moderation. A good servant but a bad master.
And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive because, through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. That's to say, we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, and ideas with the real world.
Info & reflection: "Chatter in the skull" as the exact name for that voice that never stops. It isn't thought, it's noise that takes the place of reality. And the final diagnosis is radical: modern civilization has become self-destructive for exactly this reason. More abstraction, less contact with what's real.
Related in anthology
- Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth. And a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed. And to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event. — Same Watts passage: here the diagnosis of compulsive thinking, there the examples of money, photographs and the newspaper preferred to the real thing