In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.
As you may have heard, a couple of weeks ago, the billionaire investor went on a podcast and said that he aims to have “zero” introspection in his life, or at least “as little as possible.” He added that “I’ve found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem.”
This whole introspection thing, Andreessen asserted, is a folly invented in the 20th century by people like Sigmund Freud: “If you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”
After the podcast aired, he doubled down on X: “It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.”
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The very powerful men who think introspection is dumb]
As you can imagine, the internet erupted. Andreessen had unwittingly stumbled into one of the great cultural rivalries of modern times. On the one side are the business-world paragons who consider themselves decisive manly men of action who don’t waste time on girly things like feelings, self-doubt, and personal reflection. On the other are the humanists who look at Andreessen as just the sort of monster capitalism can create: emotionally impoverished, spiritually inert, arrogant, utilitarian, blind to all knowledge but empirical data, and voraciously materialistic.
Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is a whole novel about this rivalry. The main character, Thomas Gradgrind, is a Victorian Andreessen, a utilitarian materialist. Talking to students and a schoolmaster, Gradgrind barks out his theory of education: “Now what I want, is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”
Over the course of the novel, the humanist Dickens puts Gradgrind and his offspring through hell in ways that expose the shortcomings of his heartless and soulless philosophy—until he finally cracks. This narrative arc was enacted in real life by the philosopher John Stuart Mill. His father, a friend of the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham, tried to raise Mill to be a perfectly rational thinking machine. This all seemed to be going well until Mill had an emotional breakdown and experienced a complete loss of joy and meaning. Mill recovered only when he started reading William Wordsworth’s romantic poetry, a redemption that is often treated as a vindicating win for Team Humanism.
The problem for the humanists is that Andreessen is not entirely wrong. Introspection consists of at least two mental acts: First, trying to pin down and understand the ceaseless flow of beliefs, emotions, and desires that surges through your mind minute by minute. Second, trying to look behind the wellsprings of actions and get a sense for the unconscious processes that ultimately drive perception and behavior. Both of these acts are unbelievably hard to do. When you ask people why they made a certain choice or hold a particular attitude, they tend to confabulate. Instead of excavating their actual mental processes, they generally seize upon the first plausible story that pops into their head and makes them feel attractive to themselves.
The past 30 years of cognitive sciences have underlined the extent to which we are often strangers to ourselves. When we try to understand our own personalities, our own decisions, our own motives we are highly unreliable. As Will Storr put it in his book The Science of Storytelling, “We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us.”
Because of this, many therapists no longer ask why questions. Asking a patient “Why did you do that?” serves little purpose when the answer will largely be a piece of fiction.
Bad introspection can in fact make you feel worse. When I was a callow young man in college, I used to be happy that I was so shallow. All of those deep people around me who were peering into their soul and writing bad poetry seemed self-absorbed and miserable. I wasn’t entirely wrong. Introspection, when done poorly, can backfire. A study of some 10,000 college students found that introspection correlated with a drop in overall well-being. A study of men who had engaged in introspection soon after their partner had died from AIDS found that they felt a bit better then, but they were more depressed one year later.
After a traumatic event, such as a school shooting, grief counselors used to rush in immediately to help people process their shock and pain. But research has found it did no apparent good, and might even have retraumatized the students and made them more depressed. For some people, immediate reflection might have frozen the pain and locked it in place.
The researcher Anthony Grant found that there’s a big difference between introspection and insight—you can do a lot of the former without producing any of the latter. The organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich made a study of this and was astonished. “The people who scored high on self-reflection were more stressed, depressed and anxious, less satisfied with their jobs and relationships, more self-absorbed, and they felt less in control of their lives,” she found. “What’s more, these negative consequences seemed to increase the more they reflected.”
Leo Tolstoy is one of my favorite novelists, yet he is the poster child for bad introspection. He kept a journal for much of his life and devoted a lot of it to measuring his own moral failures. Here’s an excerpt from 1851: “Arose somewhat late and read, but did not have time to write. Poiret came, I fenced, and did not send him away (sloth and cowardice). Ivanov came, I spoke with him for too long (cowardice). Koloshin (Sergei) came to drink vodka, I did not escort him out (cowardice).”
The problem with Tolstoy’s introspection is that he was entirely bent in on himself. He treated other people as props for his own moral self-obsession. He produced magnificent works and inspiring ideas. Although he spent his life trying to be a holy man, all of that self-examination never produced much self-improvement. He was a narcissistic schmuck to his wife the day before they married, and he was a narcissistic schmuck to her decades later when he abandoned her and died in a train station.
Yet whatever truths it contains, Andreessen’s worldview still comes with a few problems. In the first place, he is an ignoramus of epic proportions. The idea that it would not have occurred to people to introspect before the 20th century would have been news to, say, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Montaigne, Jane Austen, or George Eliot. Each of them produced stunning insights into the heart of human nature. Their lives demonstrate that although it’s possible to do introspection badly, it’s also possible to do it magnificently.
Andreessen’s second problem is that he is scientifically illiterate. The cognitive revolution of the past 30 years has shown that “feelings” are not passing fancies that get in the way of forming an objective view of reality. Emotions are vital to all rational thought. Our feelings help us assign value to things, and if you can’t do that, your decision-making landscape will be hopelessly flat. In his book Emotional, Leonard Mlodinow quotes the neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs: “An emotion is a functional state of the mind that puts your brain in a particular mode of operation that adjusts your goals, directs your attention, and modifies the weights you assign to various factors as you do mental calculations.” People who have brain lesions that make it impossible for them to process emotions are not a super-smart Mr. Spock; their life falls apart because they make terrible choices.
Despite Andreessen’s prejudices, the ability to understand, recognize, and label your own emotions is a necessary part of living a fulfilling life. The mere act of naming an emotion dampens its psychological power, which is a tremendously useful trick. One key to a good life is the ability to make your emotions your advisers rather than your masters.
Some non-introspective people have what the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls “low emotional granularity.” They can distinguish between only basic emotions: I like; I don’t like. Other effectively introspective people have high emotional granularity. They can distinguish between adjacent emotions such as anxiety, angst, frustration, irritation, anger, pressure, and stress. People with this introspective skill are capable of superior emotional regulation. They react with less aggression, and they are less likely to binge drink and more likely to have better mental health.
So what’s the difference between bad and good introspection?
One distinction is akin to the difference between archeology and journalism. Bad introspection consists of trying to dig down deeper in search of your “true self”—excavating one stratum after another in search of the answers that lie buried within. Good introspection, by contrast, requires achieving some distance from yourself. It’s done by observing your behavior (not just your thoughts) from the outside, as if you were a reporter watching another person. Talk to yourself in the second or third person, Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan suggests. Establish some temporal distance from yourself by asking, say, “What would I feel about this experience if I looked at it 10 years from now?” If you’ve experienced something traumatic, don’t write about it right away. Give yourself some distance.
People who are good at introspection tend not to ask themselves why questions. Instead, they ask themselves what, where, and when questions: What’s going on? What am I feeling? When was the last time somebody made me feel these feelings of inferiority?
Good introspectors are skilled at noticing their own behavior patterns without succumbing to excessive self-absorption. They don’t ruminate or let their own thoughts spiral around and around in dark, depressing doom loops. They get in, get on with it, and get out.
The psychologist James Pennebaker has conducted some of the most compelling research on how to do introspection well. Decades ago, he found that people who write about significant experiences—but who do so for as little as 15 minutes a day over four evenings—experienced fewer health problems. Other researchers expanded on his work, finding such people experienced better immune function, better mental health, and better academic and professional success.
[Julie Beck: You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do]
This method works in part because the act of writing forces people to describe events in linear sequence, and to pin their emotions down with words. It’s hard not to slip into spiralling ruminations when you’re lying on your pillow at 3 a.m. and staring at the ceiling. When you’re writing something down, though, you’re not just trying to discover what’s going on inside of you—you are actively constructing a narrative that will allow you to shape how you experience your experience. As novelists have long understood, we tell ourselves stories about our life and then we inhabit the stories we tell. People who are bad at introspection tell themselves distorted stories that are either too self-flattering or too self-denigrating. In the former, they tell stories in which they are always the flawless hero; in the latter, they tell stories in which they are the perpetual victim, whose life has been ruined by, say, an overbearing parent or a personal flaw. A lot of good introspection (such as psychotherapy) is really story editing. It’s easier to live a growing and fulfilling life if your life story is closer to what really happened. Good introspectors tell stories that account for flaws and setbacks, and that still point to higher possibilities. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” the Danish writer Isak Dinesen observed.
Finally, good introspection is done with a specific goal in mind: making introspection unnecessary. During introspection, the self is divided; there is the acting self, and there is the self that is observing the acting self. But life goes best when you are unified and wholehearted, and so enthusiastic about what you are doing that you’re not thinking about yourself at all.
The best life is lived after you’ve done enough introspection to achieve some self-knowledge so that you can turn your attention on others. The worst life is lived by those who have done no introspection and achieved no self-understanding, but who are nonetheless utterly self-centered. The guy in the White House is like that. So, perhaps, is a certain billionaire investor who is able to talk with great confidence even while lacking basic awareness of the fact that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
The post How to Know Yourself appeared first on The Atlantic.
