The route inward

I want to talk about the inward route, because nobody else seems to be talking about it, and I think it is the actual one.

Here is the situation. Most people, in countries like the one I live in, are not being threatened, in any direct sense, by any of the things they are afraid of. They are not, this morning, in physical danger. Their neighbours are not, this morning, plotting against them. The strangers in their town are not, this morning, planning to replace them. The institutions of their country, whatever their faults, are not, this morning, going to fail in a way that ends their lives. None of this is, in any practical sense, happening.

What is happening, this morning, is that they are being fed a steady drip of suggestion that one or more of these things is about to happen, by an industry that profits when they panic and loses money when they do not. The suggestion is not necessarily a lie. It is something subtler. It is the careful selection of the most alarming version of the most alarming thing, served daily, to an audience whose attention is the only product the industry sells. The industry would behave exactly the same way if the world were genuinely fine, because the industry does not know whether the world is fine or not. The industry knows whether you are still scrolling.

You are still scrolling. That is the data the industry has. From the industry’s point of view, you are doing well.

From your point of view, you are losing the texture of your morning.

The texture of the morning is what I am here to defend, because the texture of the morning is what gets paved over first when the fear product comes through the door.

There is a particular flavour of silence that you can have in a kitchen at half past six, before anyone is awake, when the kettle is on and the light outside is starting and there is nothing at all to be afraid of and nothing to be done about anything. That silence is the most valuable acreage in the country. It is rare. It is hard to defend. It is being actively eroded by every device in the house. And it is, in a small but real way, the thing inside which you become yourself, every morning, before the world begins again.

People who do not have access to that silence become brittle. I do not mean this in a precious, mindfulness-app way. I mean it as observation. When you have not been alone with your own head for a few days, you start running other people’s thoughts. You start producing opinions you did not generate. You start performing reactions to events you have not actually experienced. You become the medium’s puppet, in the literal sense: the strings are not yours.

The medium, by design, prefers you puppeted. A person alone with their own head is, from the medium’s point of view, a wasted slot. The medium would rather you were processing its content. The medium has many, many ways of getting you to do this, the simplest of which is the small dopamine reward that comes from any new notification, and the most sophisticated of which is the construction of an entire identity around a position on something you have never thought about directly.

I have done all of this. I am not above any of it. I have spent days at a time running other people’s thoughts. I have produced opinions I did not generate. I have performed reactions to events I had not experienced. I have caught myself, mid-sentence, repeating something I read on a phone screen as if it were something I had concluded.

The thing that pulled me back was not, in the end, an argument. It was a discomfort.

The discomfort is this. The longer I went without the kitchen silence, the less I recognised the person who was using my mouth. The opinions were sharper, the dislikes were stronger, the worries were larger, but none of it felt like mine. It felt like rented furniture in my own head. I would put down the phone and the room would be the same room, but the person sitting in it was a slightly worse-tempered version of me, with a slightly less interesting interior life, and a slightly diminished capacity to be amused by a child eating a banana incorrectly.

I want my interior life back. That is the project. That is, when I strip away the rhetoric of this ‘book’, the entire pitch.

I do not think interior life is a luxury. I think it is, possibly, the only thing of mine that is genuinely mine. My body will fail. My work will be forgotten. My possessions will be given away. The people I love will outlive me or I will outlive them. The one thing I have, that is mine in any final sense, is the quality of attention I bring to the time I am alive. That quality of attention is what gets eaten when I let the fear product into the kitchen. That quality of attention is what the kitchen silence restores.

The kitchen silence is therefore, in my view, a political act. I mean that fairly precisely. The medium needs you to be afraid in order to monetise you, and to be afraid you have to be paying attention to the medium and not to your own head. Each minute you spend in your own head, instead of in the feed, is a small economic loss to the apparatus that profits from your fear. Multiply that by enough people and the apparatus starts to wobble. There is real precedent for this. Many industries that once seemed unstoppable were brought down, eventually, by audiences quietly defecting one at a time. You can be one of those.

So this is the route inward, in concrete terms, as I take it.

I do not look at my phone for the first hour of the day. I have moved it out of the bedroom. The kettle goes on. I read a few pages of a book that has nothing to do with the present moment - usually history, sometimes fiction, sometimes a technical manual. The book is doing two things at once. It is keeping a piece of my mind in a place that is not the present moment, and it is reminding me, at a low pulse, that I have continuous interests that exist outside of whatever the world has decided to be furious about today.

I do not check the news until after the kids are at nursery. When I do check it, I check it on purpose, in one sitting, from sources I have chosen with some thought, and I close it again afterwards. I do not let it run in the background. The background is mine.

I do not read threads about countries I do not vote in. I have made an exception for one or two stories I am following deliberately, for reasons I could state out loud if asked. Everything else, I have unsubscribed from. The unsubscribing was difficult at first because each one felt like an act of disengagement from the world. After a few weeks I realised I had not become less engaged. I had become more engaged with the things I had actually chosen, and disengaged from the things the algorithm had chosen for me. This is the opposite of disengagement. This is regaining the steering wheel.

I have a walk. The walk is in the village or out of it, depending on the weather and the available hour. The walk is not exercise. The walk’s purpose is to give my body something to do that is not screens, and to give my head a thirty-minute window in which it is required to think about nothing in particular. About a third of the walks produce thoughts I did not know I had. About a third produce no thoughts at all, which is restful. About a third are spent thinking about whatever was already in my head, more slowly. All three modes are valuable. None of them are available with a phone in my hand.

I have a kitchen practice. I cook a proper dinner most nights. The cooking is not impressive. The point of the cooking is to require my hands to do something that requires the rest of me to be present. Onions are forgiving but not infinitely forgiving. You have to watch them. Watching the onions is a small daily exercise in being where you are. The onions do not care about your opinions about anything. The onions care about heat and time. I find them clarifying.

I have people. I see them in person. The people I see are mostly the same people every week. I have stopped trying to maintain wide social networks of acquaintances I see twice a year, because it turns out wide and shallow does not nourish me, and narrow and deep does. The narrow and deep version requires fewer people, more consistently, more honestly. It is harder work in some weeks and easier in others. It is, in every week, more useful to me than any number of LinkedIn connections.

I write. Not for anyone, mostly. A diary, of sorts. The writing is private. The writing is a way of producing my own thoughts rather than borrowing other people’s. The writing also turns out, over time, into something like an archive of who I was at any given week, which is a comfort I did not know I would want. My mother kept letters from her own mother and I am glad of them now. I expect my children, if they want, to be glad of the diary later. The pages exist. The pages are mine.

None of this is a programme. I am not asking you to do any of it. I am describing what I have found works for me, and what I have found, in the months I have done it, is that I am better company. To R. . To the kids. To myself. To the friends I see. To the work I do. My opinions are fewer and slightly better defended. My attention is steadier. The fear is not gone, because the world is not safe and I am not a fool, but the fear has gone back to its proper size, which is the size of an emotion you have occasionally, rather than the size of a climate you live inside.

The route inward is not, I should add, an exit from the world. It is, in fact, the precondition for being in the world properly. You cannot help your neighbour if you cannot stand to be alone with yourself. You cannot raise children whose interior lives are intact if your own is in tatters. You cannot do useful work if your concentration has been broken into shards by an infinite stream of micro-emergencies. The route inward is what makes the route outward survivable.

The reason nobody is selling you this is that nobody can package it. There is no app. There is no subscription. The medium I have been describing all this time cannot monetise the kitchen silence, because the kitchen silence is what is left when the medium leaves the room. Quietness is, by definition, what the noise economy does not contain.

So you will not see this advertised. You have to find it yourself, and you have to defend it yourself, against an environment that has no commercial reason to leave you alone.

You can defend it. The defending is not difficult work, only unfashionable work, and the surrounding culture will not applaud you for it.

The Scotland route was always a metaphor for this. The actual subject, all along, was the having of an interior place to which you could retreat when the country got too loud. Scotland is the kettle and the kitchen and the half-hour silence and the walk in the village. Scotland is wherever you are when the medium is in the next room and the door is closed.

I planned the route north as a joke and discovered, somewhere along the way, that I had been planning the route inward all along. I have not noticed when the switch happened. I have noticed that I no longer need the map.

The map is still in the drawer in the kitchen. I will keep it there. The kids may need it one day. Maybe they will not. Either way, it is good to know it is in the drawer.

The route is inward. The kettle is on. There is nowhere to be that is more important than here.