“I miss you like the deserts miss the rain.” — Aw, how romantic. Romantic? — Think again!

Yes, let’s ponder on this a bit.

My hypothesis is that many of us have hummed Everything but the Girl’s song “Missing” back in the 90s. So most of you will remember the chorus: “And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain”. Aw, it’s about missing your love interest so badly, just like the desert misses the rain, ’cause it gets so little of it. Oh, wait. Critical thinking cap on. Deserts don’t quite miss the rain, do they? More rain would mean… ahm… less or no desert. 😀 Let’s go with no desert. If it rains, the desert would disappear; some other type of land would be there instead…you know, the kind of land that needs, likes, and sometimes even misses the rain. So the desert doesn’t miss the rain; it’s quite happy with the little rainfall it gets. It’s, in fact, everything it needs. The sands are happy, sedimentary rocks continue to form happily, and plants that live in the desert are…grateful they’re not drowning and get to exist. So… “I miss you like the deserts miss the rain” can be reformulated as “I don’t quite miss you …you know, like the deserts don’t quite miss the rain. I’m just fine without you.” Just don’t put this in a card. Oh, you’ve done that already? Sorry.

Anyway, it seems those lyrics are abundant in logical fallacies.

Let’s see a few more…

“I step off the train
I’m walking down your street again
And past your door
But you don’t live there anymore“

Not his door anymore — he has some other door, someplace else.

“It’s years since you’ve been there“

So you knew.

“Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead
Of everyone
We’d walk behind while you would run“

Is that a wish? — Not two steps ahead anymore if he’s dead. You won! (Cynical ka-ching!)

“Back on the train
I ask why did I come again
Can I confess
I’ve been hanging around your old address?“

Romantic? Maybe. — Useful? No. — Perfect example of how a person can set the path for one’s own disappointment.

“And the years have proved
To offer nothing since you moved“

Told you.

“I step off the train
I’m walking down your street again
And past your door
I guess you don’t live there anymore“

If the author had placed the “I guess” at the beginning of the song, critical thinkers everywhere could have used the time for something else instead of analyzing the nonsense in the first verse. They could’ve watched a funny cat video on YouTube and muttered “It’s so obvious the cat doesn’t say “I love you” Why has this gone viral?”.

And here we go again…

“And I miss you –
Like the deserts miss the rain“

And this, as we’ve shown previously, is just an apparently nice message that actually means the opposite of what we think it means in the beginning: “I don’t miss you at all.”

So, to conclude… This is a nice song about a person doing useless things in regard to an impossible relationship with a person they don’t miss or need. But the person singing it is quite bummed… Lesson on how to make our life miserable when life is actually good enough for us: We add useless meaning to things and then whine about it. It’s all in our minds. Next time, spare yourself the misery and be rational.

Oh, and enjoy the song. Here it is!

…that’s if you haven’t googled it yet after reading the title of the blog post. Our psyche sometimes works like that.

Beautiful song, by the way. Too bad the words don’t mean much.

P.S. Just found out the song was written by the two band members, who now make a happily (we hope) married couple. Um, Okay.

P.S. 2. The Critical Thinking Cap “said” we should skip the whole “But how could deserts miss anything, they don’t have awareness” topic. However, critical thinkers out there who have had enough of the funny cat videos, can ponder on this subject too.

Lyrics retrieved from here*.

* Links no longer active.