How to Be Alone With Your Thoughts

After February 14, I’m going to take a long week off from Trying!, and I could use your advice on what to do with this project when I come back to it. So take my quick little survey!

At the end of one of Philip Roth’s later novels—The Dying Animal, I’m pretty sure—his narrator, David Kepesh, is walking around Manhattan in, let’s say, a mood. All around him he sees people wearing headphones, tuned into their personal soundtracks instead of listening to the incredible, magical soundtrack of the city itself: the cars, the clanks, the rumble of the subway. How, he wonders in disgust and disappointment, can they go around so oblivious? Why can’t they be more like him?

The novel was written around the turn of the millennium, so iPods and mp3 players were just coming into vogue, while smartphones had not yet been invented. Were Kepesh transported to 2025, he would have been fully consumed by hatred as he spied AirPods shining from the ears of, by my rough estimate, a full 7 percent of New York’s population.

When I first read the book, I found Kepesh’s judgment particularly uncharitable, and the fact that it was Kepesh making it—Kepesh being one of two frequent Roth alter egos—meant it might very well be Roth’s judgment as well. That discomfort has now stuck with me for more than 20 years. Who was either of them to say how people should amble around the city? Sometimes you want to listen to the radio, the news, some old music, a podcast. Sometimes you’ve had a bad day and just want the escape into an alternate reality that headphones provide. Sometimes you get tired of the city’s own soundtracks and crave something else. Sometimes you need your own music to make sense of the city: I remember one afternoon in 2016 or 2017 I spent wandering the East Village with the newly released Hamilton soundtrack on repeat—it was glorious, and attuned me to my surroundings in a way I’d never been before.

But obviously there are pitfalls to this, or I wouldn’t have named this essay “How to Be Alone With Your Thoughts.” Because, well, it’s a refrain I hear and see all the time: People—maybe especially young people—need a constant soundtrack, crave the unceasing stimulation of TikTok and doomscrolling, because they can’t bear to just be. Which is a problem because sometimes you have to just be. The battery is dead or the Wifi is out or, heaven forfend, you have forgotten not only your headphones but your dog-eared copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and have to ride the subway with nothing to occupy your brain but Spanish-language ads for diabetes medication and the smell of vomit from somewhere uncomfortably close by. And sometimes you want to just be: You don’t want to have to depend on a panoply of devices to keep your ears and eyes and brain distracted from the ongoing fact of your very existence. Whether it’s a true addiction or not, it feels like one, and no one wants to be an addict.

I, however, spend a lot of time alone with my own thoughts. I know, I know: Shocking! But it’s true. In fact, I probably spend at least 50 percent of my waking hours inside my own brain, with no aural stimulation beyond the click of the keyboard and whatever traffic and construction noises emanate in from the street outside. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no ascetic. I’m not raw-dogging long-haul flights to Asia. I’ll put on a playlist now and then while I’m working, but often, if I have to take a call and pause the music, I’ll forget to restart it afterwards. And I’ve certainly spent hours bingeing short-form videos—pointlessly, as I can recall little of what I’ve seen there. A high-school teacher making jokes about her students? Québecois slang lessons? It’s a stitch-incoming blur.

The difference is that, most of the time, I’ve been able to pause, step outside of myself, realize how much time and brainpower I’m wasting, and put down the phone. And so maybe that is the first step to learning how to be alone with your thoughts: summoning the willpower to disconnect. It’s not easy. Spotify, Netflix, TikTok—the whole menagerie of distractions comes at you so effortlessly that it takes an effort to shut it down. But then there is this: Have you ever actually flung your phone across the room—or at least across the bed or couch? There is a visceral satisfaction in this act, of violently tossing away the device that is bringing you so much frustrating joy. I’d suggest you give it a try right now, but maybe finish reading this essay first?

Once you’ve done it once, do it again. And again. Do it at random moments when you don’t even feel locked in to your soundtrack or your close friends’ Stories. Hit pause, click close, just stop. Wait a minute or two. Think of things. Breathe. Pick up a book. Get up and stretch. Then, sure, go back to your phone or your music or whatever. It’s okay to enjoy those things. But you want to feel like you’re choosing them—like you have a choice. Which you do. You just need to make it.

But all of that is simply getting to the point of being alone with your thoughts. What the fuck do you do next? As I understand it, people are often afraid of their own thoughts because those thoughts invariably turn negative. People think of their failures, of their inadequacies, of all the ways their lives could go and have gone wrong, of the fundamental, inescapable loneliness of being inside their own heads.

This is horrible, and this is normal. This is also me. I spend an inordinate amount of time rehashing errors, wishing I had said or done something differently, going all the way back to high school, even junior high, in a kind of internal doomscrolling of humiliating mistakes. As awful as some of those recollections can make me feel, I’ve also learned simply to accept them. There is nothing I can do about the past, and maybe, even though the past should be a guide, only a little I can do about the present and the future. Life teaches us lessons all the time. But we don’t always learn them.

How do you get to be okay with that? You tell yourself you are. Maybe it’s a lie at first. Maybe, probably, you’re not okay with the litany of failure that is life. But say it to yourself anyway: You’re okay with that. You accept the past. You’ll try to do better next time. It sounds like so much self-help bullshit, but it works: We can make ourselves believe our own lies, and sometimes the lies can become the truth. You are okay with things. You can accept the past. You can scroll through your own personal search history with the analytical coolness of a distracted outsider. You don’t have to care so much because you’ve told yourself a million times you don’t have to care so much.

I guess this is called self-discipline? All I know is the more you do it, the easier it gets. About 14 years ago, I stopped running with headphones. Mostly, this was a practical choice. I sweat a lot, and I kept burning out headphones, even those specially designed for sweaty runners like me. But also, I wanted to run without encumbrance, to need nothing more than my shoes, legs, heart, and lungs—and, okay, my running watch—to get out the door. But also also, I was about to go off to Kenya to report a story about running there, and I didn’t want to be the slow guy there glued to his headphones, surrounded by insanely fast men and women running on nothing. (Also also also, in an unfamiliar area I wanted to be aware of my surroundings.) So I ditched the dying headphones, went to Kenya, and never replaced them when I got back. At times I miss the music, and creating playlists to get me up tough hills, but at the same time I don’t. I don’t need it anymore, because I’ve gone without for so long. And I still sweat like a monster.

I don’t know if any of this helps anyone. A lot of it just boils down to: Stop trying. Get over yourself. Just do it. To be alone with your thoughts you have to be alone with your thoughts. This is where I should probably ask you to give me money, right?

And the truth is, it doesn’t always work for me. There are times when the fear of death overwhelms me: the finality, the inescapability, the futility. My heart races uncontrollably, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever escape this bleak cycle of negativity, scrolling myself toward the ultimate doom. A lot of the anxiety over being alone with your thoughts is about possibility—you fret about what might happen, you use your potent imagination to predict all the ways life could go wrong. But death is a certainty. You may not know when or how it will come for you, but it will come for you. And so, I tell myself when it gets bad, there is no use in worrying about it. I breathe. I tell myself to fret elsewhere. I tell myself there are other thoughts worth thinking, even stupid, minor thoughts. I breathe some more. I try to recall some kid’s name from elementary school—that kid who was a wiz with a yo-yo? Jesse Holstein, maybe?—and I try to think about what we’re making for dinner tonight, and I try to distract myself with something, anything, other than the fear. Sometimes, I’ll even pick up my phone and do the crossword.

Or I’ll read. When I’m alone with my thoughts but no longer willing or able to be alone with my thoughts, there’s nothing like being alone with someone else’s thoughts—ideally, in a novel. (Not Roth so much anymore, though I do want to re-read Sabbath’s Theater.) And perhaps that’s also why I write these essays, because to put these thoughts down on paper allows me to feel as if I’m both alone in my head and not alone, with someone who is me and who is not me. And I hope it doesn’t sound too mushy or sentimental to say that I hope, for any of you who have trouble being alone with your thoughts, that reading Trying! helps alleviate that for a few minutes every day.

And now it’s time to put down your phone. 🪨🪨🪨

But If You Didn’t Put Down Your Phone…

Why not fill out that survey about what I should do next with this project?

Read Yesterday’s Attempt