Our teachers have taught us not only to learn, but to question. Starting in middle school, we learned techniques for different ways we can flesh out the “why” are drilled into our brains. We are forced to write papers on the significance of the red curtains on the wall in the novel and why the author used the work “rock” instead of “stone.” Everything has some sort of deeper meaning; nothing is what it appears to be. In English class, this does ring true. But The Great Gatsby and The Awakening are not the real world, and questioning everything is not always the best thing to do.

A while back I was doing some research for a philosophy paper. It was on Sigmund Freud, and I got into looking into some of his quotes. I came across a particular one that really stood out to me.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

I’m not necessarily sure what Freud meant by it, but it resonated with me. Every day I see people overthinking things, whether it be that picture their boyfriend liked on Instagram or the weird smile the girl across the hall gave them in the bathroom. Things always seem to mean more to us in our heads than they do in actuality, but sometimes, most of the time, a cigar is just a cigar.

So much time is wasted these days obsessing over finding the “deeper meaning” behind things that usually don’t have any meaning at all. This need to find some sort of reason or meaning behind everything causes unnecessary discontent in our lives. People would benefit so much if they saved the questioning for class and started taking real life at its face value, just as Freud suggests. Complexity in life and in literature is present, yes, but that doesn’t always mean you should go searching for it. More often than not this results in people forcing complexity into the simplest of things, which only causes the mind to start on a downward spiral, connecting things that have no connection at all. This prohibits you from actively living because you’re too stuck rereading your life like you would a novel. Your life is not a novel and you don’t have years to analyze it. As Ferris Bueller says “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it.”

So bottom line -- remember how annoyed you got in high school when your teacher tried to tell you that yellow wallpaper somehow signified fertility and new life and that meant the protagonist was pregnant, and you wanted nothing more than to yell at her and say “maybe the author just liked the color yellow"? Well, that is what I am saying to you. Maybe your boyfriend really, truly just tapped on his phone screen. Stop trying to tell me that somehow it means he’s cheating on you.