I am thirty-eight and I have, in the last few years, been watching a particular kind of adult in their forties and fifties around me start to develop something I had not, until recently, had good language for. The thing they have been developing is a particular kind of internal stability that the wider register has tended to call various imprecise things, including maturity, groundedness, self-knowledge, and equanimity. The labels are real. The labels are also, on close examination, structurally vague about what the underlying practice the stability is actually being produced by.
What I have been noticing, on close examination of the adults who have developed it, is that the underlying practice is considerably more specific than the standard labels allow for. The practice involves, more accurately, the deliberate cessation of a particular set of input streams that most adults are not, in any conscious sense, aware of consulting. The input streams include the opinions of strangers, the opinions of the internet, and the opinions of the person’s own intrusive thoughts. The cessation is small in any single instance. The cessation, accumulated across the small daily decisions that constitute a person’s ongoing interior life, turns out, on the available evidence, to produce most of what the wider register has been calling self-knowledge.
What the consulting of strangers actually consists of
It is worth being precise about what the consulting of strangers consists of, because the wider register has not, on the available evidence, developed particularly good vocabulary for the underlying practice.
The consulting is not, in most cases, the deliberate solicitation of opinion from strangers. The consulting is, more accurately, the small ongoing background activity of allowing the implicit opinions of the surrounding strangers to register in the apparatus as data about who the person is. The data registers in various small ways. The look the person registers when they walk past the mirror in the shop window. The implicit comparison the person registers when they pass another adult of similar age on the street. The various small implicit social calibrations the person performs, throughout the day, in response to the wider environment of strangers they are moving through.
The strangers have, on close examination, no actual information about the person. The strangers cannot, in any meaningful sense, know who the person is. The implicit opinions the strangers are registering, in whatever small ways the apparatus is picking up, are calibrated entirely to the surface presentation the strangers happen to be encountering in the brief moment of contact. The surface presentation is real. The surface presentation is also, in some real way, a tiny fraction of who the person actually is.
What the adult who is developing internal stability has, more specifically, started to do is to stop allowing this data to register as information about themselves. The data continues to be available. The apparatus continues to register that the data is there. The apparatus has, however, started to consistently classify the data as not actually informative about who the person is, and to accordingly stop incorporating it into the ongoing internal self-model the apparatus has been maintaining.
What the internet actually does, on close examination
The consulting of the internet is, on close examination, structurally similar to the consulting of strangers but operating on a much larger scale.
The internet, by virtue of the platforms most adults are spending considerable amounts of their attention inside, presents the person with a continuous stream of implicit opinions about who they are and who they should be. The opinions are calibrated to the platforms’ algorithmic priorities rather than to any honest assessment of the person being shown them. The opinions arrive in the form of the various products being advertised to the person, the various lifestyle configurations being shown as desirable, the various forms of social comparison the platforms have been calibrated to produce, and the various implicit judgments the person registers when they encounter the apparently more successful or more attractive or more accomplished versions of adults the platforms have been calibrated to surface.
The internet has, on close examination, no information about the person. The internet has, more accurately, considerable data about the person’s surface behavior, which the algorithms have been calibrated to convert into the various predictive models that determine what the person is shown next. The predictive models are not, in any meaningful sense, the same thing as the person. The person, in their actual interior, contains considerably more material than the predictive models can capture, and the material the models are operating on is, in most cases, the residue of the person’s surface behavior rather than anything substantive about who they actually are.
The adult who is developing internal stability has, more specifically, started to recognize this structural fact. The recognition does not, in most cases, mean the adult has stopped using the internet. The recognition means, more accurately, that the adult has stopped allowing the implicit opinions the internet is producing about them to register as data about who they actually are. The data continues to arrive. The data is, however, no longer being incorporated into the internal self-model.
What the intrusive thoughts actually are
The third input stream the adult is learning to stop consulting is, on close examination, the most interior of the three and accordingly the hardest to recognize as an input stream at all. The stream is the person’s own intrusive thoughts about themselves.
The intrusive thoughts are, by every available account of how the human apparatus operates, the structural background activity of how the cognitive system processes the wider environment. The thoughts include the various small ongoing critical assessments the person produces about their own appearance, performance, social standing, intelligence, attractiveness, professional competence, and the various other domains the apparatus has been calibrated to monitor. The assessments are not, in most cases, the result of any actual evidence the person has gathered. The assessments are, more accurately, the apparatus’s default background processing, calibrated to the various assumptions about how the person should be that the apparatus has been accumulating across decades of social experience.
The wider register has tended to treat these intrusive thoughts as the person’s own honest assessment of themselves, on the implicit assumption that thoughts that arise inside the person’s own mind must, by structural definition, be the person’s own. The assumption is, on close examination, almost entirely wrong. The intrusive thoughts are, more accurately, the residue of the various external opinions the person has been absorbing across decades, now installed in the apparatus as the apparatus’s default self-commentary. The thoughts feel like the person’s own thoughts. The thoughts are, structurally, the externally derived assessments the person has been training the apparatus to produce on the externally derived inputs’ behalf.
The adult who is developing internal stability has, more specifically, started to recognize this as well. The recognition is uncomfortable. The recognition involves the acknowledgment that the apparatus’s default self-commentary is not, in any meaningful sense, the person’s own honest assessment, and that the honest assessment is, in most cases, considerably quieter than the default self-commentary the apparatus has been producing. The honest assessment, when one listens for it, is also considerably more measured and considerably less alarmed than the intrusive thoughts have been training the person to be.
What the actual practice of cessation looks like, in daily life
I want to be honest about what the actual practice of cessation looks like, because the wider register has tended to romanticize it in ways that make it sound considerably more dramatic than the underlying activity actually is.
The practice is, on close examination, almost entirely small. The practice involves, in selected moments throughout the day, the small implicit decision to not incorporate a particular piece of input data into the ongoing internal self-model. The person walks past the shop window and notices the implicit assessment the apparatus is producing about their reflection. The person, in some small ongoing way, declines to incorporate the assessment. The person continues walking. The walking is small. The not-incorporating is what produces the cumulative effect.
The person opens the internet and encounters the various implicit comparisons the platforms are calibrated to produce. The person, in some small ongoing way, declines to incorporate the comparisons. The person continues with whatever they were going to do on the internet. The continuing is small. The not-incorporating is, again, what produces the cumulative effect.
The person produces, in their own apparatus, the various intrusive self-assessments the apparatus has been trained to produce. The person, in some small ongoing way, declines to incorporate the assessments. The person continues with whatever they were doing in their own interior. The continuing is small. The not-incorporating, by structural design, is what the practice consists of.
None of this is, on close examination, the dramatic interior transformation the wider self-help register has been calibrated to sell. The practice is, more modestly, the slow accumulated reduction of input noise across thousands of small moments per day. The accumulation, across years, produces the structural effect the adults around me have been developing.
What the cumulative effect actually produces
What the cumulative effect actually produces, on close examination, is the structural condition that the wider register has been calling self-knowledge, but that is, more accurately, the structural absence of the various forms of self-noise the apparatus had been previously running on.
The self-knowledge is not, in any meaningful sense, knowledge in the standard cognitive sense. The self-knowledge is, more accurately, the structural condition in which the person’s actual interior has been allowed to surface, because the various external opinions the person had been previously incorporating as data about themselves have stopped being incorporated. The actual interior was, on close examination, there all along. The actual interior was, until the cessation began, structurally drowned out by the various forms of input noise the person had been treating as data about who they were.
This is, in some real way, what most of what the wider register has been calling self-knowledge actually consists of. The self-knowledge is the audibility of the underlying interior that the input noise had been previously preventing the person from hearing. The audibility is the structural product of the cessation. The cessation is the practice. The practice is small. The practice, accumulated across the years of midlife in which most of the adults who develop it are doing the work, produces the structural stability the wider register has been admiring without quite knowing how to articulate what it was actually a product of.
What I want to acknowledge, finally
I am thirty-eight and I have not, in any sustained way, completed the practice myself. The practice is, on close examination, considerably harder than the description above makes it sound. The input streams are, by structural design, calibrated to be difficult to stop consulting. The strangers are everywhere I go. The internet is on every device I own. The intrusive thoughts are, by structural design, located inside my own head, where the not-consulting requires the additional discrimination of the underlying interior from the apparatus that has been impersonating it for decades.
What I have been able to do, in some small ongoing way, is to start to register the practice as a practice. The registering is not the practice. The registering is, more modestly, the structural precondition for the practice. The person who has not registered the input streams as input streams cannot, by structural design, decline to incorporate them, because the apparatus has not yet recognized them as separable from the underlying interior the person has been mistaking them for.
The registering is what I have been doing. The declining-to-incorporate is what I am, in some small ongoing way, starting to practice. The cumulative effect, if the adults around me are any guide, will take considerably more than a few months to develop. The waiting is what most of the rest of my adult life, lived honestly, is going to be quietly organized around. The wider register would prefer a faster solution. The faster solution does not, on the available evidence of the adults who have actually developed the underlying stability, exist. The slow path is what is available. The taking of it, modestly, is what I am, in some small ongoing way, currently in the process of beginning.
