A Culture of Introspective Captivity

We all live in little self-reflection boxes with inadequate access to stimuli.

A few months ago, I ended therapy. I had been seeing a psychologist for six years. And he is, for sure, a large part of the reason I am still alive. But then, within a few months, after many years of usefulness, therapy began to feel not only not-useful, but potentially harmful to me. 

I don’t know exactly when I realized this—perhaps it was the umpteenth time we’d talked about my fear of accomplishing my desires, my fear that that would somehow make people angry at me. Repetition is a necessary component of analysis. You return again and again, reframing and finding new angles each time. But this repetition felt different; less like we were uncovering, and more like we were digging a hole. Instead of solving the issue at hand, I was concerned we were actually exacerbating it—finding more and more reasons I was scared of accomplishment, and thus almost justifying them, instead of me, well, just doing the things I want to accomplish.

It was as if through professionally-assisted introspection, I’d found a way to live an internally-focused life rather than an externally-focused one. I’d found a way to excuse my inertia as endlessly-analyzable neurosis. 

And so I said goodbye. 

Things have not been necessarily great since then, but they have not been worse either. I find myself experiencing slightly more symptomatology typical of my various conditions, but I also find myself wanting now not to analyze these conditions, but to simply do things in spite of them. To live my life. 

Therapy is not bad. It is often good. But, I think, it is easy to find tools in this world to force our focus inward. It is encouraged that we constantly check ourselves and check in with ourselves and self-care ourselves. To live externally is to live more dangerously; it is to live a life that takes up public space, a life that is messy and confusing and thus a life that is often frowned upon, especially in an era in which everyone is accustomed to control and curation over social space and affect (e.g. via our phones). 

For some—straight, cis, white men, for example—perhaps this has never been a problem. They are used to living lives of externalization. But for others, I think introspection can become somewhat of a trap—a system by which you control yourself so that you do not disturb the peace of the world outside of you.

Since leaving therapy, I have begun to see an excess of introspection not as a sign of high personal responsibility or desire to better oneself, but as a potential symptom of captivity (self-imposed or otherwise). If you are placed in a room with four white walls, your thoughts will turn inward because they have nowhere else to go. Solitary confinement is torture precisely because of this lack of stimuli (social, physical, intellectual). Without claiming that many of us are living lives equivalent to those in solitary confinement (which is deeply evil and should be immediately abolished), I would like to argue that, under capitalism, we all do live on a spectrum of captivity, with access to social and physical and intellectual stimuli unequally distributed. And thus we live on a spectrum of forced introspection, in which we ruminate on our own lives excessively because we do not have adequate access to external stimuli. 

And, I believe, this captivity is increasing, not through any directly punitive force, but through learned behavioral changes encouraged by our current culture.

We live in an age of therapy speak, in an age of seemingly every song and TikTok and book using the language of introspection and healing and self-care, because we live in an age of increased isolation, of detachment from the messiness and joy and danger of the real, physical world. A culture of excessive introspection is not a sign of collective or personal growth, but a sign of disconnection from the outside world and each other. And even more depressingly, we have accepted that this is good and moral and correct; we are lauded for living alone within four white walls, and lauded for the imagery and thoughts we produce under these conditions. 

Take, for example, the spate of albums released in the last few years by many of pop’s main girls: Lorde’s Solar Power, Miley Cyrus’s Endless Summer Vacation, Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism, Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine. All of these albums portray isolation and introspection as keys to happiness. “I can buy myself flowers,” Miley sings. “Talk to myself for hours.” We’re better off alone, as long as we can talk to ourselves, like a mental patient trapped in a padded cell.

Social media is filled with similar encouragements—who needs friends or lovers or the outside world when we can create self-care cells in our homes and journal and go to therapy. Cut everyone off who is “bad” for you. Prioritize your mental healing over everything else, even if it means being alone. As Rayne Fisher-Quann points out, this leaves us not only alone, but in a mental state in which we are more prone to buy stimuli and social interaction from corporations (via social media).

And this creates a cycle—the more we encourage ourselves and each other to live lives of reflective isolation, the more scared we become of stimuli that cannot be controlled. No wonder everyone is addicted to their phones. No wonder everyone is depressed. No wonder people are having so much less sex these days. No wonder so many insane people on TikTok are convinced they will be kidnapped from a Target parking lot. 

Of course, therapy and its vernacular are not solely to blame for our era of isolation. Rather, therapy and other tools of introspection have become ways to justify our lack of access to external stimulation. Instead of using therapy to untangle our desires and fears so that we may effectively act on them, therapy becomes the goal in itself—to create mental stimulation through constant rumination. 

My favorite parts of Freud’s works are when he gets real trippy with it, talking about energetic flows, what he called cathexis. If we blocked our psychosexual energies, Freud believed, then those energies would have nowhere to go except inward, and thus potentially create neuroses and melancholia.

So, it makes sense in a society that is under-stimulated—that is having not enough sex, that is not going outside enough, that is not interacting with humans enough, that is, in short, not discharging its psychosexual and emotional energies—that we would all become neurotic and depressed. Therapy should be, and often is, a way to realize this—to realize that you must enact your desires before they turn inward and wreak havoc on your psyche. But these days, I believe, we have forgotten what comes after therapy—that we must then act on these desires, not just understand them, for our energies to be released, and thus for us to feel healthy and happy.

Since I left therapy, I’ve been doing a lot more stuff. Traveling. Going out to the club. Body work of various kinds. And what’s happened is that I’ve found myself thinking a lot less. Introspecting a lot less. Perhaps a year or two ago I was depressed, ruminating too much on my life and my fears and my desires, and thus could not bring myself to do these things. Or perhaps it was the opposite: I was ruminating on all these things because I would not simply get out of those house, and live a life full of external stimuli.