Dispatch #3: Everything Has Meaning (And That's The Problem)

May 6, 2025

A lot of people love a good mystery.

Book, movie, TV show… it doesn’t matter. There’s pleasure in having a plot unravel in front of you, in looking back and smacking your forehead at the clues that were there all along.

Then there’s me.

In college, my roommate saw The Sixth Sense and couldn’t stop raving about it. The next weekend, we went together. About 30 seconds after Bruce Willis first appeared on screen, I leaned over and whispered,

“So… he’s dead, right?”

He stared at me like I’d just dropped the mother-of-all-swear-words in a convent and then shushed me quickly.

After the movie, he looked at me half annoyed, half impressed and asked, “How the hell did you figure that out?”

Simple: patterns.

My brain is always looking for them.

Scanning. Comparing. Matching what’s in front of me to everything I’ve seen, felt, or filed away.

Movies, sure. Ask my wife who makes me swear to keep my mouth shut about the ending whenever we see a movie or watch a show. But it carries into conversations, body language, and social cues. It lurks in silence and timing. It’s flowing through tone.

Everything is a pattern.

“That sounds like a superpower!” you might say.

Sometimes it is.

But it’s also a fast track to anxiety, overthinking, and emotional burnout.

Because when everything has meaning, it’s hard to tell what actually matters. What’s real signal… and what’s just background noise.

You don’t want to be the person who overreacts to nothing. But you really don’t want to be the one who misses something that was right there all along.

And when your brain has been right before… when it spotted a pattern you ignored… it doesn’t let that go.

It reminds you. Over and over. Like an obnoxious friend: “I don’t want to say I told you so, but…” Yeah. I remember. Thanks.

So your brain stays switched on and hypervigilant.

All. The. Time.

Cataloging tone shifts. Logging word choices. Replaying conversations and filing them away for future analysis.

And yeah, it can make you insightful. Intuitive, even. But it also means you can’t just be in a moment. You’re too busy dissecting it.

For example, if I am listening to an audio track to relax... something like "Rain on a Tropical Beach" or "Mountain Stream in the Mountains" my brain will be hunting for the loop. The repeat. The pattern.

And if it finds it? My brain will latch onto it like a raccoon discovering a half-eaten Pop-Tart. It won’t let go. It can’t unhear it. It WON’T unhear it. It becomes the only thing in the whole universe. Unremitting laser focus. Until it drives me nuts.

It’s like living with a built-in pattern slot machine. Pull the lever, find the loop, win a dopamine jackpot.

Reality is that patterns really ARE everywhere. They're in body position, eye contact, interruptions, timing, pacing. Hell, even the order in which people comment in a group chat.

It’s exhausting… but it’s also addicting (thanks, dopamine).

Because when your brain thrives on structure, it’ll find patterns whether they’re there or not. Often it's right. Often enough that it's hard to discount. But sometimes… it’s wrong. Spectacularly, beautifully, stupidly wrong.

Thing is for me, it’s a curse and a blessing.

I’m a data scientist. I get paid to do this.

My job and my training is to hunt for patterns. To separate signal from noise. To dig through chaos and find the quiet thread running through it all. I literally built a career on the thing my brain won’t stop doing.

Might as well work with the grain instead of against it, right?

There’s a joy in finding hidden structure. Seeing the numbers align. Watching the model make sense. That little aha moment? It’s like popping the cork on brain champagne.

It’s fun. It’s meaningful. And hey, the pay isn't half bad either.

But here’s the part I don’t talk about much:

It’s one thing to chase patterns in data.
It’s another thing entirely when your brain won’t stop doing it with people.
When it turns everything into a dataset.
When it tries to optimize human interaction like it’s a regression model.

That’s when it starts to eat you a little from the inside out. You have to be careful with that leakage.

But I’ve come to accept that this is just… how I’m built.
It’s in my source code.
Pattern recognition isn’t just a feature; it’s a core part of the operating system.
And trying to remove it would be like ripping out a vital organ.
Sure, life might get quieter. But it wouldn’t be me anymore.

I won't lie... there are days I wish with all my might I could turn it off.
When a late reply spirals me into worst-case scenarios.
When a weird email ending becomes a psychological autopsy.
When a dropped chat becomes a full-blown rejection narrative.

But maybe the goal isn’t to turn it off.
Maybe it’s to learn how to question it.
To remind myself that not every pattern is a prophecy set in stone.
That sometimes, a silence is just a silence.
And a missed message is just… life.

Still, I can’t help but wonder… maybe there’s a pattern here, too.