Processing Power

Human minds have limited processing power. One of the effects of living in a city is that processing power becomes overloaded fairly easily, and people go into shutdown mode in order to deal with it. That is, to avoid going positively nuts. Everyone does it to a greater or lesser extent.

Now, my consideration is with why it is that some people think for themselves and others don't. I'm going to assume that processing power norms exist, and most people are similarly smart. I'm also assuming that people are able to think, and most aren't necessarily running their brains in suspend mode all the time. With these assumptions in place, the logical question is what exactly the processing power is spent on.

Some of the supposedly "mindless" folk most probably do run their processors. They just seem to have their processors set on dealing with seemingly unproductive activities, such as fashion perhaps. However, it does seem to me that the constraints they set upon themselves (or have internalized from wider society) is the set of prescribed topics to think about. The reason "mindless" folk are as they are is that they are simply processing within the prescribed paradigm, and it never really does occur to them to consider anything beyond those confines. Not so mindless after all. Just...misguided.