Which Voice Is Actually Yours?

It's a common saying to follow your inner voice, but with so many different voices in my head, how is it possible to figure out which one is my voice? Lately, for personal and for company steps, I've been struggling with this dilemma happening in the chaotic universe of my brain.

Modern society

It is so hard to ever truly be alone in today's population-dense world. There are just so many of us humans that finding a place where no one is watching, it just seems like an impossible task at times. It always seems as if we are within eyesight of someone else and this perpetual pressure can become overbearing at times. To make the best decision possible for myself, I want to create a wall to block others' sweeping lenses. But I just find it impossible. Even in my apartment when I think I am finally alone, I can hear the neighbor's cough at times and that feeling soon fleets as well.

Is it ever possible to be alone at this rate? As much as loneliness is the modern epidemic, perhaps it is just as insidious to be constantly in the zone between neither having proper connections nor being fully alone either. The modern monkey is perpetually caught between both extremes without ever getting to taste either destination. I am not sure about you, but for me, I'd rather be in one zone or the other rather than having both mixed in.

What I find even more greatly frustrating is the sheer number of inputs constantly entering our minds. To those who scroll on their socials continuously (for which I built Doxo AI), how many different people's voices do you let in daily? For me, just a few minutes of scrolling made my mind astir with voices... other people's voices. How is it possible to act from my pure essence when there are so many other elements diffused in?

Digging deeper into isolation

Oftentimes when I would whine about how lonely I was, I realized I would keep forgetting the connection I had to my own self. To my own body and to the trillions of other living cells that I share it with. I felt such a disgusting shame after having whined that I could not love the amalgamation of beings that lets me do so much in the world. Yet, the reason for me having this entered this state has been cuttingly obvious as well. If I am so focused on other people's voices, how could I hold on to my own? How can I listen to what my body is telling me if my mind is stuck on to the twenty different heartbreak songs I listened to an hour earlier?

In ancient times, we would only interact with the same faces every single day. A new face, a new voice, would in fact necessitate a gathering village wide for this event seemed to happen once in a rare blue moon. It would become the talk of the town and a topic to be deeply discussed, regurgitated and then further analyzed. However, today, we have seemed to lose this novelty effect. Sure, a new kid moving down the block or the new coworker still creates that buzz of curiosity. Yet even though novelty has retained its charm, I wonder at its diminishment as time goes on. If one scroll through the internet presents me with hundreds of different faces, will I still continue to appreciate the beauty of a new member of my community when this flood of inputs keeps on growing?

While technology is advancing at exponential rates (at least, recently), I am not sure if our brains are keeping up. Perhaps, we need to help ourselves adapt (and that's why I want to make Beemo as an augmentation to humanity so you can bee-more) and thus require augmentations to process all the changes that have happened in the world since our parents' time. And further, if we are to keep up with the consequences of social media, we certainly need ways to retrain our brains to ignore all of these inputs. Until such tools can come out, the only choice we are left with is to siphon these inputs ourselves from our lives. Blocking apps, journaling rather than scrolling, meditating, abstaining from meaningless relationships, these are all ways we can do so. This isolation of our internal world from the external world has become much needed in today's world if we are to guard who we truly are on the inside rather than letting it crumble from the continuous outside attacks.

Yin and Yang of isolation

I promote isolationism with a warning. While I have reaped tremendous benefits from having gone weeks without having any non-transactional conversations (as defined as conversations that happen outside of the exchanges for work, with the cashier, etc.), I have also noticed certain dangers of it. For one, if there is something broken inside of you, are you truly able to fix it on your own? Just as a diabetic needs outside medication to regulate his glucose, sometimes we need the inspiration from others to diagnose and mend our internal affairs. While this may sound gloomy for those who never seem to find any connection with others, I would like to add that this is not a necessity to live one's life. Such a connection may be a random person you stumble upon while sitting at the lake one day (which has in fact happened to me) or a friend checking in after years of silence. Whatever it may be, we should not take these outside blessings in the forms of other people for granted as well lest you shall sink into the depressive hells of those heartbroken singers who think of love as a deserved part of life (it isn't, true love is for the lucky).

With this disclaimer aside, the most significant benefit of self isolating for me has always been the title of this post. Through literally reducing the voices in my head, it becomes easy to pick which one is mine. When there are only a few choices, even if I guessed randomly, I would have a high chance of becoming authentic. With the paradox of choice gone, it not only becomes easy to evaluate each choice, but I also have more time to invest in the process of feeling each of the voices out thoroughly to determine how I resonate with it. Compare this to one who has hundreds of TikTok songs playing in his head, and I think you must be getting the value present here.

Of course, as Carl Jung would say, all such advice like this should be taken with a grain of salt. What may apply to me may be completely irrelevant to you. I simply hope this has just provided some condiment to your thoughts. You may be in a completely different place from me and may feel completely isolated not out of a courageous choice, but out of dire loneliness. Or, you may be experiencing the most loving relationships in your life. Ones filled with people staring at you but never piercing your soul. Ah, how interesting this all is, and how we can find ourselves in all these different positions. It truly is a wonder I feel our human race, no matter what other undiscovered life forms may exist in the galaxy.