What is the right amount of time to spend with yourself? I wondered about it while reading Arie Storm’s novel The Harp (2022). The characters in The Harp ‘are in their heads’, as it is disapprovingly called nowadays. They think about everything and are, as it were, in conversation with themselves. It looks like this: “A window was opened. Or what happened with cars these days? The window buzzed open.”
The Arie Storm-like older protagonist describes how as an adolescent he “adored” the sounds of the city. These drove away his thoughts, “the awareness of myself and that concentration on myself that I hated”: “I was stuck with my consciousness forever and ever. I wanted to escape it, to sneak away from that ‘I’, to leave it somewhere. And only the street, with its sounds and its frequent distractions coming in through the open window on a summer day, scattered and drove away my otherwise ever-present self.”
How recognizable! I too often fail to shake off my ‘self’. My big dream is to be thoughtless for once, to be ‘in the moment’ or, if necessary, ‘in my body’, but my self feels like a stalker, who can track me down anywhere and everywhere.
The ‘I’ can be a miserable conversation partner. On bad days there are angry thoughts, anxious thoughts, self-defeating thoughts, or simply too many thoughts, like dogs jumping up on your legs or swarms of flies on a summer day. They have to go, you think. A proven method, at least in the short term, is booze. Several people told me they drink to quiet their thoughts. Another way seems to be mindfulness, where you notice your thoughts like boats on a river, which you simply let sail by. I have never succeeded in doing this, which is why mindfulness mainly results in internal insults and new frustrations. Films, books and television work better, ideal means to escape from yourself.
In recent years, another way has been added, and I’m sorry to say something so predictable, but it involves the smartphone. On the train, on the ferry, in the waiting room: everywhere people used to stare into space, they are now watching or listening to something on their phone. According to historian Ileen Montijn, people listen to podcasts out of ‘horror vacui’, fear of emptiness: “Time needs to be filled, even in between, when you are on the road or cleaning or waiting. Being dependent on your own thoughts, just looking around? Huuu!”, she recently said on X.
Horror vacui, the fear of emptiness, sounds like a logical reason to look for distraction. But is there really emptiness if you put your phone away for a while? No: there is a confrontation with the ‘I’, and that is not necessarily pleasant. A friend told me that she listens to podcasts to avoid being confronted with her often grim thoughts. For her, podcasts are a form of the “frequent distractions” that Arie Storm’s young protagonist needed to drive away his ‘self’.
But where street noises like that come from The Harp still leave room for your own thoughts, podcasts and social media are more intrusive. This is an immense change. All the ‘lost’ time that people used to spend on processing and thinking about information, they now spend additional absorb information. What impact does it have if you slip away from yourself so often? Yes, you avoid unpleasant thoughts, but you may also miss signals: that you are actually tired, or unhappy, or stressed, or angry. You also miss the opportunity to think about the world together with yourself, and thus develop a stronger own voice. That’s useful, because then you don’t have to repeat others.
Of course, there is no ‘right’ amount of time to spend with yourself: it varies from person to person. I do it too much myself. My head often feels like a room in which everything has been turned upside down, after which I have to put things back in the appropriate drawers. I am convinced that this is useful, but I also know that I am going too far. There comes a time when you’re going around in circles in that room, moving things from one drawer to another and back again, making new labels for the drawers, and maybe even throwing everything back on the floor.
So I have to ‘get out of my head’ more often, although I still don’t know how. But others, I am convinced, should visit themselves more often.