Reclaiming Interiority

On taking back the inner mental life that makes us human

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

One of the defining features of contemporary life is the loss of a rich inner life due to the constant barrage of voices and technologies demanding our attention and colonizing our thoughts. Interiority is one of the attributes of being human. It involves acts like metacognition (our ability to think about thinking), self reflection, contemplation, recalling of memories, imagination, daydreaming, silent prayer, and so on. It is our primary perspective of being human. But consumer entertainment culture takes up inordinate space in our minds, crowding out our agency to think creatively and freely about things of substance and value and beauty. Children offload part of their imaginations onto video games. Adults allow political news to live rent free in their minds until they can’t think about the needs of their neighbor. Even most contemporary sexual fantasies are merely remixes of pornography, nothing truly imaginative or beautiful about them. The daydreaming we do have tends to be only of one kind: negative. Anxiety, worry, fear. Worst-case scenarios. We daydream about political crises. We daydream about our families getting into accidents. We daydream about losing our jobs. We daydream about inflation. We daydream about guilt or shame or inadequacy or trauma. And this negative inner-life of course feeds into having no inner life at all. Because our response is to shut it all down. When living inside your head is painful, to protect yourself, you’ll choose not to live inside your head. You’ll distract yourself or numb yourself. But that takes us away from who we were created to be. Humans were created for interiority. So how do we reclaim interiority from both the world and our own minds?