i thunk, therefore i um

posted dec 2025

thunk

In CS, a thunk is a piece of code that defers a computation.

one_plus_one = 1 + 1

def one_plus_one_thunk(): return 1 + 1

When a computer sees one_plus_one, it immediately (“eagerly”) evaluates it to the value 2.

When it sees one_plus_one_thunk, it doesn’t immediately do the work to evaluate it’s result. If you want, you can in fact evaluate the computation later, by calling the function: one_plus_one_thunk().

You can also never evaluate it, in which case you’ll never incur the cost of calculating 1 + 1.

um

funnily, writing this post is exactly antithetical to the post’s core idea. so i stopped and nuked everything after a few paragraphs because i was having an otherwise lovely weekend.

but i also don’t want to waste my “i think, therefore i am” pun hehe. so i’m giving myself 15 minutes to write some bulletpoints¹:

• talking (or writing, lol) about negative thoughts (anger / sadness / fear) forces me to “eagerly evaluate” these negative thoughts

• it seems like most people think that talking about thoughts is a good way to process them, and stuff like counselling / therapy exists to offer this as a service, and obviously it’s a net good for most people because the industry continues to exist²

• evaluating negative thoughts comes at the cost of feeling negative feelings³ for hopefully an appropriate amount of time, but occasionally an excessive amount of time because i’ll ruminate / spiral

• there is a further cost in that these “talking” functions aren’t pure stateless functions. they have side effects: people can react to the things you say! and idk take actions based on what you say! and it’s impossible to try to enumerate all these side effects. this cost feels far more unbounded and nebulous than the cost of just feeling negative feelings for longer-than-expected

• i claim that some negative thoughts aren’t that important after a while. often, if i wait some time, some negative thoughts are in fact inconsequential and go away⁴

• thus, by deferring the evaluation of negative thoughts (thunking instead of thinking, hehe), i can often avoid the cost of a bunch of these negative thoughts because i do in fact later forget about them

• and the way i can thunk is by defaulting to not talking about negative thoughts (“umming”, hehe)

• for what it’s worth, i don’t know if i do this more than the average person. i feel like i try to be pretty emotive and open and vulnerable. i was just thinking about this as a thing i do recently⁵

• this approach comes at a cost though:

• my 15 mins are basically up but clearly talking about your negative thoughts is an important to building trust and togetherness. i believe this too, i absolutely use “talking about these things” as a way to “formally” admit to myself that i trust a person.

• i think it’s also important to get other genuine perspectives on your thoughts, and you don’t get access to that if you don’t discuss them

• some people want to help you, and for such people for whom talking about negative feelings is the obviously correct thing to do, “thunking” in this way will feel (to them) like a rejection of their help. which sucks for you because having people who want to help you is so good for you

• shrugs