I've always been the one to overlook past the surface tensions and undercurrents that ripple beneath everyday interactions.
Perhaps, many people do that also. Why is it so borders around 1) lack of incentive to move further into murky emotional territory where clarity demands effort, and 2) preservation mode of the mind to not destabilize our carefully constructed sense of normalcy and control.
Somehow, both 1 and 2 are protective mechanisms that serve us in the short term. The first keeps us efficient, the second keeps us sane.
Categorically, it can also be a good thing in presence of too much noise in one's environment.
In the long run, efficiency and sanity can erode. Efficiency becomes a liability when it bypasses crucial, non-immediate information in favor of speed leading to predictable future crises.
In interpersonal relationships, overlooking subtle power dynamics and unspoken resentments is often deemed a social grace, even a virtue.
I remember being reminded that "letting things slide" somehow demonstrates maturity and emotional intelligence.
The hard part for me at the time was reconciling the short-term peace this approach offered with the nagging feeling that I was sacrificing my own informed reality for the sake of social comfort.
Say someone deflects serious conversations with humor or agrees enthusiastically to plans they later sabotage through inaction.
The socially acceptable response is normally to absorb these patterns quietly and overlook their cumulative impact in service of maintaining harmony.
I'm personally not fully onboard with this seemingly diplomatic approach.
There's a huge difference between maintaining diplomatic silence in minor moments and systematically ignoring information signals that reveal cracks in one’s own reality.
The protective mechanisms of overlook and the demanding process to oversee can best be understood as a spectrum of attentional engagement.
Our interaction with reality, be it interpersonal or purely situational, exists on a continuum defined by how actively we engage with underlying, uncomfortable, or non-obvious information.
Life situations can be overlooked and systematically ignored when they don't fit our preferred narrative about how things should be working.
A simple and common example is one can overlook the gradual depletion of a savings account because acknowledging the truth would demand an immediate, uncomfortable lifestyle change.
I realized I sometimes unconsciously build my peace on selective ignorance as it felt easier to believe that the small cracks I was noticing would magically heal themselves than to face the disruptive truth that I needed to actively intervene.
The spectrum runs from complete overlook, where we've trained ourselves not to register certain categories of information at all, to complete oversight, where we're actively scanning for patterns and anomalies.
Many of us live somewhere in the middle, subconsciously selectively attending to what feels manageable and unconsciously filtering out what feels too complex, threatening, or demanding of our attention.
As of late, I'm leaning more towards complete oversight. Figured there's way too much information sitting on the table that I'm not registering because of this overlook tendency.
Also, it's getting too expensive to fix the compound damage later! Time to be more hands on as my grandma would say small problems ignored become big problems guaranteed or something along those lines.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
