Montaigne begins this deep chapter about interpretations with his own misinterpretation. He opens with a standard Greek philosophical maxim:

Men, says an old Greek maxim, are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves

This is material for an essay, but Montaigne immediately takes it in a very strange direction. He suggests:

There would be a great point gained for the relief of our wretched human lot if someone could prove this statement true in every case. For if evils have no entry into us but by our judgment, it seems to be in our power to disdain them or turn them to good use. If things give themselves up to our mercy, why shall we not dispose of them and arrange them to our advantage? If what we call evil and torment is neither evil nor torment in itself, if it is merely our fancy that gives it this quality, it is in us to change it.

I have no problem with Montaigne making this the point of his inquiry, but all of it is irrelevant to what the maxim is actually getting at. I don’t believe the maxim is claiming that all evil is a matter of opinion, but if Montaigne wants to transform the realities of life — including death — into states of mind, that’s his prerogative. Instead of taking a look at what interested Montaigne, I’m going to observe the same source material from a different vantage point.

I believe the maxim is referring to a specific form of mental state known as rumination. What are the things that stick in our heads, that live in us rent-free? They don’t tend to be the declarative facts of the world. We don’t, for example, ruminate on our available cash and budgeting habits, we fret about how we are going to pay for something we’ve committed to in the future — or self attack over an impulsive purchase we should have avoided.

Another example — a large number of people suffer from something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, where some kind of rejection or setback is overblown in importance by the individual. The real or perceived slight touches off a cycle of rumination that puts the person into a deep state of despair, often beyond the reach of standard anti-depression treatments.

What’s interesting about RSD is that the nature of the slight is irrelevant and often an incorrect perception is even more damaging than an accurate one. In other words, while the syndrome distorts reality in all cases, it can be set off by factors with no basis in reality, just the opinions that Montaigne concerns himself with in this essay.

In a way, this is a highly logical outcome, because impressions without basis in fact have even more potential ground for examination and rumination than factual ones. If someone actually didn’t intend words to be taken a certain way, it makes complete sense to ruminate on why someone close to you, such as a friend or family member, would think or say something so terrible. Often it’s the right question to ask, because they wouldn’t. But that won’t stop you from thinking about the incongruity and trying to extrapolate it into even more reality distortions unless you step in and tell your brain to stop.

If the source of rumination is a person instead of an event, complicated people are the ones who most often end up taking up too much headspace. People who reveal little or purposefully communicate in a confusing manner put us into a permanent state of interpretation. The human brain is surprisingly open and susceptible to such puzzle-solving. Our brains produce their own riddles without prompting whenever we fall asleep. There may be something inherently comforting to the brain in trying to figure people and things out, which is demonstrated often for people who can’t stop thinking about someone they don’t fully understand.

There is likely a matter of safety involved in this rumination as well. Primitive humans had to make friend-or-foe calculations about people outside their clan. It’s likely that our brain developed a warning system for those who appeared to be concealing details about themselves. And the value of our brain’s source-code level problem solving abilities is well documented, which is why it’s good advice to sleep on a difficult problem or take a nap to let your last guitar practice sink in.

We are tormented by opinions because we are problem-solving beings. But just because our brains are wired to do this well doesn’t mean we should let them free-range think about anything. We need to stop and remind our brains sometimes that they are worrying about nothing, chewing over details based on misunderstandings, and extrapolating outcomes based on no facts at all.

The point isn’t to scold our brains for going back to unpleasant places, but to give them a break, to gently remind them that we don’t need to keep churning on this problem — it’s okay to let it go.