You Inner Dialogue Is Your Greatest Asset

In the contemporary digital information age, we are increasingly confronted with a discrepancy between what we see and who we are. Every day, we are exposed to images of how other people live, what they achieve, what they own, how they look, what they believe, and what they consider meaningful. We scroll through an endless catalogue of possible lives, and somewhere along the way, we can begin to confuse what is visible with what is valuable. This is something I find from an observational perspective, relevant from a historical perspective and how it will evolve into the future. In the sense of what it does to us, the individual, and yourself.

I often think about indigenous communities and the relationship they have historically maintained with their surroundings. Their environment is not simply a place in which they live. It can be an extension of who they are, where they come from, what they believe, and how they understand their place within a community. Their identity is embedded in a particular landscape, a history, with nature in a very deep sense, a social structure and a shared understanding of their cosmological world.

Of course, it would be naïve to romanticize this. It is not the point. Every community develops its own hierarchies, expectations and definitions of success. Human beings have always looked to one another to determine what is desirable. We are social creatures, and belonging has always required some degree of conformity. But something has changed.

For much of human history, the environment from which we constructed our sense of meaning was relatively close to us. It was the family, the village, the landscape, the people we knew and the traditions we inherited. Today, that environment has expanded beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined. The person we compare ourselves with may live on the other side of the world. The career we suddenly desire may belong to someone we have never met. The body we believe we should have, the house we should own, the relationship we should be in, the political beliefs we should hold and the life we should aspire to can all be presented to us through a screen before we have even had time to ask ourselves what we actually want. This has taken the individual away from what is the meaning behind what you wish to make. This is where I believe our inner dialogue becomes one of our greatest assets.

Every person is born with a particular sensitivity to the world. We have our own curiosities, our own forms of wonder, our own obsessions, our own ways of interpreting beauty and truth. Before we learn what we are supposed to become, there is often a quiet sense of what attracts us. A child may spend hours drawing, taking things apart, asking questions, wandering through nature or inventing stories without anyone having told them that these activities are useful. There is something there before the social explanation arrives.

As we grow older, however, that inner dialogue becomes increasingly crowded. Culture teaches us what is prestigious. Institutions teach us what is practical. Families teach us what is respectable. Markets teach us what is valuable. And now the digital world teaches us, continuously and at extraordinary speed, what is popular. None of these things are necessarily wrong. It is not an issue in itself. The problem is that they can become so loud that we stop hearing ourselves. There is a profound difference between choosing a path because something within you is drawn towards it and choosing the same path because you have learned that it represents success in the eyes of others. From the outside, the two lives may look identical. One person may become a lawyer because they are fascinated by justice and argument. Another may become a lawyer because they believe it will provide status, money and approval. Both may succeed. But they are not necessarily living the same life.

The danger is that you can spend decades accumulating things that were never truly yours to desire. A certain career, a certain income, a certain appearance, a certain social status, a certain political identity, or a certain lifestyle. You can become extraordinarily successful at constructing a life that somebody else taught you to want. And then, one day, you may discover that the voice you were following was never your own.

This is why I believe listening to your inner dialogue is not an act of selfishness. It is an act of responsibility. When you understand what genuinely interests you, what gives you energy, what you find beautiful, what questions you cannot stop asking, you become more capable of contributing something meaningful to the people around you. You are no longer simply reproducing what already exists. You are bringing something particular to the world. What that is? That is the question to yourself. Perhaps this is also why contentment and curiosity belong together. Contentment allows you to stop constantly measuring yourself against other people, while curiosity allows you to continue moving. You can accept who you are without believing that you have finished becoming.

The world will always provide you with instructions for how you should live. There will always be another person to admire, another achievement to pursue and another standard against which you can feel inadequate. The digital age has simply made those voices louder and more numerous. We cannot escape society, nor should we want to. We need other people, we need new communities, relationships, ideas and culture. But we can learn to distinguish between the voices that inform us and the voices that replace us.

Your inner dialogue is the conversation that remains when the noise becomes quiet. It tells you what you are curious about, what you care about, what you cannot ignore and perhaps, in its own imperfect way, where you should go next. Perhaps the greater achievement is reaching the end of a life and recognizing that, amid all the voices telling you who you were supposed to become, you never completely lost the ability to hear yourself. Instead of being a by-product of what society, culture, or the coming technology told you.

Take it easy,
Tom