It was a clinical trial, and what they wanted from me was unusual: a conversation about my own perception, and nothing else. Not what I could recall. Not what I had read. Only what I noticed, in my own words.
I can’t tell you how rare that is until you are asked to start speaking. Almost always, the world wants the borrowed thing — what we know, what we’ve heard, what someone more certain than us has already said. To be asked instead only for what was mine, and to watch a researcher write it down as though it mattered, is uncommon. Something in me went quiet before we had even begun.
There was a pause before the first question, and the silence stretched. Not the uncomfortable kind. The contemplative one. In it, I asked the researcher the thing I actually wanted to know:
What are you reading right now?
She thought about it. Then said plainly, “Nothing. By choice. The moment I can stop taking more in, I do. I spend all day listening. And I’m afraid that one day, if I don’t guard what I let in, I’ll forget what my own voice sounds like.”
She looked at me and smiled, “And I think you know what I mean. Shall we begin?”
I’ve thought about her ever since. It is the most honest description of this moment of consumption I have heard from anyone.
Consuming Versus Digesting Information
Here’s what she opened in me. I hope it opens something in you too.
Almost nothing that moves through us in a day is really ours anymore. We take in other people’s moods, arguments and certainties, and none of it arrives labeled as someone else’s. In the moment, you honestly can’t tell the difference between this is true for me and this simply arrived in me. The two feel identical as they enter our system. We swallow them whole.
Digestion is the slower work, and it is where the sorting finally happens. Give a borrowed thought a little time and quiet, and it does one of two things: it dissolves into you and becomes truly yours, or it shows itself as foreign and you let it go.
That sorting only happens in the pause. Skip the pause, and nothing gets metabolized. It just sits there in its entirety, still speaking in the voice it came in with.
Then something happens so slowly that almost no one notices: you begin to mistake the crowd of borrowed voices for your own thinking. You speak, and it is your news feed speaking. You decide, and it is the room deciding. You are still in there. You have simply been outvoted.
The Case for Solitude
There is one thing that reliably clears the crowd. It is solitude. It is the one condition quiet enough where you can finally hear which line of thought was yours all along.
Here is where I want to be precise. It is tempting to file solitude under the Emergenetics Behavioral Attribute of Expressiveness — to say it belongs to those of us who prefer to process quietly and inwardly rather than out loud. If that is your preference, solitude may come more easily to you.
However, your Expressiveness preference [1] only tells you where you tend to start and what you enjoy most naturally. It does not tell you what you can reach. A preference is a gift and your center of gravity, not a limit. The research bears it out. Across ordinary days, most of us move through nearly the full range of a trait, and our preference is only where we tend to land most often (Fleeson, 2001).
So, solitude is not the private property of first-third Expressiveness. If you do your best thinking out loud, choosing to sit alone with an idea is a genuine stretch and doing it anyway is not a betrayal of who you are. It is a flex. And, after you’ve flexed, you can recharge by sharing your insights with someone else.
Additionally, even if you prefer first-third Expressiveness, that does not mean you are truly taking the time to pause and digest. That requires deliberate attention.
The choice to be alone with your own perception belongs to everyone in the room. It simply costs some of us more energy to reach for. I am inviting all of us to extend that reach.
How to Practice Solitude
The practice that helps you flex into solitude is almost embarrassingly simple. Take in a little; sit with it a lot. For every hour I spend taking something in, I try to give two hours to its consideration — letting it settle, hearing what it stirred in me — before I reach for the next thing to consume.
Don’t hold me to the exact ratio. I have no study that says two-to-one rather than three-to-two, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I will defend is the direction because for most of us it is inverted. We have built lives where digestion is the scrap left over after consumption has taken the whole day.
And here is the move I want to put in your hands. Any time you feel that push — you have to keep up, everyone’s already read it — stop and ask yourself, “Who is setting the pace?” That turn is not stubbornness or rigidity. It is Flexibility [2], used on purpose to decide how much any single voice gets to move you before you have digested it.
You can love saying yes, absorbing, keeping up and still choose, in the moment, not to bend to everything at once. It doesn’t change your preference. It gives you agency in a situation to discern for yourself. Held up to that one question, most of the pressure to keep up loses its grip.
I know the fear underneath all this, because I have felt it too: if I slow down, I’ll fall behind.
The urge to consume more, faster, is a matter of pace, and pace is Assertiveness [3]. I am not describing an innately methodical person being virtuous. It’s entirely possible to tread gently and still only consume information.
I am describing the deliberate regulation of pace: choosing, on purpose, to move more slowly through what you take in. That is discipline and a flex of Assertiveness under pressure. Your preferred pace may still be quicker or more measured than another. What’s important is that you take the pause you need to digest.
And here is what I believe. I will call it a belief, not a finding, because I cannot prove it the way a study proves a thing. Those who slow down on purpose will be the ones thinking most clearly and behaving most coherently.
Picture a glass of water with a little mud stirred through it. Keep shaking it, and it stays cloudy; you can’t see a thing. Set it down, and the mud drifts to the bottom until the water runs clear. The fast consumer keeps shaking the glass. The deliberate one sets it down. And when the moment finally asks you to see — to judge, to choose, to lead — only one of you is looking through clear water.
To embrace solitude, here are three choices. Challenge yourself to turn inward so you can hear your own voice: that is Expressiveness. Set your own pace instead of honoring the feed’s: that is Assertiveness. Decide how far each voice moves you: that is Flexibility.
The researcher was right to be afraid. A voice does not vanish because it is gone; it vanishes because it is drowned out — outvoted by everything we swallowed and never took the time to digest. Solitude is simply turning the world’s volume down far enough to hear, underneath all of it, the one line that was always ours.
It asks for something that counters consumption: for an hour, for an afternoon, to take in nothing — nothing, by choice — and find out what is still there when we do.
I want to hear my own voice while I still can. I suspect you do too.
I go further on my Substack — into what forms in that solitude, and why choosing it is nothing like being left alone: https://annielbrowning.substack.com/. [4]
A note on method: this begins as me talking out loud, from hours of contemplation. I use AI to transcribe and tighten what I dictate. The thinking, and the final word, are mine.
Reference
Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(6), 1011–1027. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.6.1011 [5]