And no, it’s not to hear a smart person talk.
I am a little embarrassed about it. A conversation takes two people, and so to talk to yourself you must treat yourself as a second person. Where this other person is, or how this shadowy figure might know something you don’t is an illusion that keeps talker-to-himself talking, fated by logic as it is.
But I’ve always done it, and it is in times when I lost the ability to talk to myself that my living was no good. Talking to myself has been when I’ve written my best lines, or when I’ve encountered epiphanies. All these hours spent writing are only records and expansions of those soliloquies, and perhaps writing, and especially my preoccupation with the Montaigne-style personal essay, is just another form of talking to myself. I’ve written paragraphs, refined, edited, expanded them while shingling a roof or mowing the lawn or driving a tractor, and then stopped to type a note into my iPhone.
Does your brain work like this? Whenever I have no cognitive load, say, at work or when I’m running, my thoughts form a kind of monologue or dialogue. I’m not nearly always moving my mouth, but my thoughts try to come out in words and sentences. I’m talking to myself. Give me twenty years and I’ll be sheltered up in a big hollow tree with shaggy hair mumbling about the benefits of the nullifications of and the justification of all the little live things. If you know what I mean.
I stopped writing anything worthwhile about a year and half ago. I still showed up daily at the prearranged spot, but the muse stood me up. Words were typed onto the screen, thousands of them, but there was no idea to quicken them. I blamed it on the fact that we were raising a daughter, that I was building a house, that we were moving across the continent and trying out new jobs and cultures and so forth.
On an unrelated subject, I began to feel enslaved to my phone. I was spending way too much time on Substack, reading notes and other people’s writing. When I had five minutes, instead of picking up the book on the nightstand, I picked up my phone and looked at house plans, or Substack, or any of the million other things one can scrape up on the glowing oracle. At work, I listened to lectures, audiobooks, and podcasts all the time. And I do mean whenever there wasn’t someone interrupting me and sometimes even then. I have learned a lot from all of these activities, but I realized I was listening to other people’s thinking at the expense of my own.
So I stopped. I deleted everything off my phone except the ability to talk and text. No browser, no audiobooks, no music. I could take pictures, so that was nice. I would do this for two months, I said, in the spirit of Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism. And then I would add back the things that I missed and thought I needed.
That’s when I discovered I talked to myself, and rediscovered the joy of it. All my life it had been with me, like some shadow person I never realized could go away, and then I crowded it out the interior dialogue with exterior voices. As my experiment went on and the silence expanded, I realized my brain with was crammed with information that had no place to go; I had no skill and no practice to take those ideas and whittle them to my own uses. I wasn’t talking to myself.
It is painful to delete every app on your phone. You just know you’re going to need it tomorrow. And then? Startling discovery: I didn’t miss ninety percent of the apps. I winced when I deleted my email app—and then never missed it again. I did miss the audiobooks, and I wanted music on stressful days to get out of my head. But that’s pretty much it.
My life expanded to fill the hours and I still had too much to do. My two months are here and gone, and I’m scared to bring back audiobooks or podcasts for fear they will deprive me of the ability wander in the forest of ideas during the day and thus to write at night.
It’s complicated, you know. Because thinking is as much a learned art and skill as it is an opportunity, and I’ve learned so much online, say on the Great Courses on Audible, and many of them have given me the ability to think in the first place. So now I reject all this, but my ability to reject it and find it fun is because I took some of the tools that it gave me.
We need to get rid of the assumption that thinkers don’t work and workers don’t think. We call these laborers who don’t think “meatheads” or “nine-to-fivers” or “blue collar”, and use the non-thinkers like tools. The entire program is wrapped around the propositions that an active physical life and an active mental life are mutually exclusive.
I disagree, and not only do I disagree but propose the opposite. And I stand with good company, Wendell Berry says this. Many poets and philosophers credited walking for their creativity: Thoreau, Wordsworth, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Their minds were the most active when their bodies were in motion but their mind was free to roam. That is what I mean. Not only is physical labor not antithetical to an intelligent mind, but rote physical activity calls forth an awake and active intellect, fully engaged with the world. Hands on wood, feet on the go, productive labor and productive thought. I don’t need a retreat to write and think (although I would enjoy one). I need pile of wood to split.
There are ways to navigate the integration of audiobooks and so forth. For instance, I do all my online reading, news, and so forth on my computer now. It forces me to go to the office, sit down, and do one thing at a time while my daughter plays right outside and asks for my attention, or sits on my lap and plays with the computer mouse, both of which have a way of limiting your screen time. I also listen to audiobooks or lectures now for an hour each morning, because I start my work day an hour earlier than the rest of the crew.
For now, I will work, five days a week for an employer and one day for myself, with hard manual labor that can be mastered. And I will talk to myself and stop feeling bad about it, because it’s more fun (and if I may be so immodest, more valuable) to talk to myself than to listen to some podcaster “delve into” or “take a deep dive” or mispronounce etcetera for the hundredth time. At least these wandering and half-baked thoughts are mine. It is possible for another man to do your thinking for you, but it is not desirable.