Every interaction you have with a thought, a feeling, or the external world creates or extends a process. These processes—called open loops —expend emotional energy, whether you pay attention to them or not, and only cease to do so when they are resolved. An illustrative example of an open loop is a new table for a waitress. The people become her problem whether she is attending to them or not until they pay their bill and leave. Just like a waitress, we have to juggle our limited resources around all open loops.
In modern times, most people deal with most open loops in ways that do not actually resolve them, either mistakenly thinking they are closing them or by intentionally ignoring them. Technology has facilitated this by lowering the price of opening loops while providing several imitations of loop-closing that fail to provide the benefit of actual loop closing. You open many loops every time you open and scroll through social media, creating thoughts that will continue to occupy your emotional energy—at least subconsciously—for some time after you put down your phone. Emails and texts proliferate open loops that fail to close when unanswered or ignored. Online arguments create many open loops, and they don’t close through anything other than a valid counterargument or acknowledgment of agreement. Snarky responses, blocking, ghosting, or knowingly insufficient counterarguments—including lies—leave loops open, whether you like it or not.
You can choose to ignore open loops, but open loops will not ignore you. Open loops consume resources, even if we do not consciously realize they exist. What you refuse to address consciously will engage you subconsciously. As such, you should be extremely careful not to pretend that ignoring open loops is the same as truly closing them. For example, it is important to note that emotive evasions of rational discourse are not counterarguments, but deceitful attempts to dismiss what is presented without having to disprove it. Here are some common emotive evasions:
- Describing your emotion (“you disgust me,” “I am disappointed that you would say that,” etc.)
- Expressing your offense (“how dare you,” “who do you think you are,” etc.)
- Denigrating the other person (“who hurt you,” “where is your degree,” etc.)
- Ghosting.
You’ll notice that nearly everyone who engages in these tactics suffers from anxiety and depression. Every instance of this kind of evasion creates an open loop that will subconsciously eat away at your peace of mind until it finally fades away or unless you address it by coming back to the argument you dismissed and either making a real and sufficient counterargument or changing your belief to accept what you previously rejected.