Thoughts swirl in my mind like a colony of blind army ants, trapped in a ceaseless, spiraling march—each one lost, yet compelled to follow the others. When I’m caught in a wave of negative thinking, this feels painfully true. But when I’m clear of it, the analogy seems a bit overblown.
Ant mills, with their hypnotic, disorienting patterns, are oddly beautiful to watch—yet the ants, locked into the loop of following each other, march themselves to their deaths. Only an outside force—a shift in the environment or a few exhausted ants breaking away—can interrupt the cycle and stop the march. For those who manage to escape, I imagine it’s hard to understand how they got pulled in so deeply to begin with.