What is it about thinking?

There are a lot of strands in ol’ duders head… man. Recently, I was sitting there having a beer with a friend of mine—one that was coming towards the end of a string of beers—and he said to me something that I wasn’t sure I agreed with, but something that I have come to understand in a different way.
All he said was:
--People like you and me, we just can’t help it.
Is there such a thing as simply being unable to help it? What part of what we are is pure instinct? What part of us is so practiced that to break the habit of that practice would require something almost cataclysmic?
I have often maintained that there is nothing whatsoever to stop the consciousness from choosing an entirely new way of being, and I’m pretty sure that’s true; however, in order for the decisions that the consciousness makes to become lasting and (perhaps) permanent, there needs to be a thoroughgoing personal discipline to back it up.
So, I started to think about the things that I couldn’t help. I have a drink before I go to bed. It’s almost compulsory these days. I’m not getting belligerent. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m not drinking excessively, but I do have that drink every day. I can’t help wandering. There are some days that I leave my apartment having absolutely no idea where I’m going or why I’m going there, but it is precisely to there that I am going, and I take comfort in that. I can’t help playing guitar. If I went a week without playing some guitar, I might crack because it’s an hour or two a day where I get to practice my instincts, feelings, and auditory senses. I can’t help writing. I recently went four months without writing… much. I did it intentionally because there hasn’t been a period in my life over the course of the last nine years where I didn’t write anything that lasted any more than three months. By the end of the fourth month, I had the shakes and words pouring out of me that made no sense, but simply had to come. I can’t help reading. I am a compulsive reader, constantly involved with, usually, three or four books at once. I always have a toilet book (there is nothing better for an excuse to read for ten or fifteen or twenty… or thirty minutes). I always have something else—generally a work of historical significance because I am a literature nerd who can’t pull himself out of the old school. Generally I have some work of a spiritual bend for daily meditations—I’ve gone through things from Buddhism to Taoism to Stoicism to Christianity, and I plan to make it through whatever –isms and –itys that I can. Finally, I will have a work of philosophy that I’m plodding through slowly.
The question that has popped into my head lately is: what is it about my activities that connects them—apart from the fact, of course, that I am the one doing them?
I can’t help thinking, and by thinking I mean reasoning, investigating, pondering, wondering, criticizing, being skeptical, accepting, and generally wandering through the musical liquor of words, impressions, and ideas.
When I read something that means, I smile. Today I read this from David Hume’s “Treatise of Human Nature,” 1.4.7, paragraph 12:

I cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of these several passions and inclinations which actuate and govern me. I am uneasy to think I approve of one object and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful and another deform’d; decide concerning of truth and falshood, reason and folly, without knowing up what principles I proceed. I am concern’d for the condition of the learned world, which lies under such a deplorable ignorance in all these particulars. I feel an ambition to arise in me of contributing to the instruction of mankind, and of acquiring a name by my inventions and discoveries. These sentiments spring up naturally in my present disposition; and shou’d I endeavour to banish them, by attaching myself to any other business or diversion, I feel I shou’d be a loser in point of pleasure; and this is the origin of my philosophy.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why I started reading philosophy, but I know now and knew (somehow) even when I started that it was not to find answers. There are no answers in philosophy. As a matter of fact, Hume tells us: “Philosophy…if just, can present us only with mild and moderate sentiments.”
What the fuck do we study it for?
Precisely for those moderate sentiments.
What does it matter when Derrida says that everything is metaphor?
What does it matter if Camus tells us everything is pointless and the greatest decision we can make every day is the one to NOT commit suicide?
What does Heidegger’s four-fold matter?
What does Ethics matter?
I know (kind of) what I feel, my impressions—at least that I have impressions, and ideas (or at least that they sometimes burst with a severe force through my mind). I know that these things are the result of my investigation into things. I don’t read things to find something. I don’t read in order to know something. I read in order to mull things over. I am consistently skeptical because it keeps my brain limber. I think I actually hate knowing the answers to things. It annoys me. Any time you CAN’T know, that’s where I want to go.
What is time? What are the structures of the human consciousness? What is justice? What is injustice? What is pleasure? What is pain? What does “the” mean? What is an idea? What is good? What is bad? What is beauty? What is art? What does it mean that music is such an important part of the human experience? What is a soul? How do we reason? How do we answer questions that can only be supported by theory, observation and experience—the matter of truth—but no facts?
Theory, observation and experience are the necessary components of truth, but it’s that last one that, if I might be allowed a platitude: throws the wrench in the gears. You cannot experience what I experience. Sorry. I’m not sorry. Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I hereby make no claims on my ability to function—sometimes I maintain that I’m barely human. There is only personal truth. Sorry to you universal truth adherents. The other bummer about truth is: you can’t put it into words. Truth in words defeats the point of it.
That’s something to think about.