Are Ants Aliens?

   One of my lifelong fears has always been bugs, not the ones outside but those sneaky intruders that somehow make it in the house.  An encounter with a small ant in my room recently not only spiked my fear of bugs, but also challenged my natural, hard-wired default-setting of my perception of ants.

    When I was about to turn off the light switch on a Friday night, an ant that seemed to appear out of thin air crawled across the light switch.  I must admit, it really got me there with that jump scare.  It took me some time to finally gather my nerves and grab the ant with a tissue paper and put it in the trash bin.  I was so spooked I could not close my eyes for some time.  But I asked this question to myself: Why are you so fixated on the ant? It’s not like it's going to reappear again.  But of course, there is always a plot twist coming.  I glanced at the trash bin, and I saw an ant crawl out of the opening and down the side. I was so paralyzed that all I could do was watch the ant crawl across the carpet. Millions of thoughts were coming into my head, but there was one theory that stood out: Ants are alien-controlled drones spying on humans.

    It was only the next morning that I realized I had probably gone a bit crazy with that outlandish theory about ants. I knew I always had the tendency to get tunnel-visioned into thoughts that have no relation to the situation at hand.  I needed to think of other possibilities-logical possibilities. Just like my instinctual belief that I am the center of the universe and that only my perspective matters, I often dwell on a single possibility when it comes to unsolved mysteries.  The similarities of these concepts honestly explain a lot about how the human mind functions.  One thing I realize I need to improve on is to be more conscious, and to recognize that the way I choose to think about something is probably not what others think about the same situation.

 

The bin the ant crawled out of