Talking to Yourself
September 23, 2026
When I am alone in our garret of an office, high in The Castle more prosaically known as Brookings Hall, the silence grows thick. An hour or so in, it seems as tangible as the dust in the early morning sunlight. A restlessness comes over me, a need to prove I am still alive even with no one bearing witness. I begin to jabber, telling the air what I plan to do next and why.
This feels a little silly in a public building, but I do it at home quite naturally, exclaiming about what I forgot upstairs when I trooped down to the basement or confiding my latest idea to the dog, who does not speak English. Some would find this a worrisome sign, encroaching dementia perhaps. But a nonstop narrative has streamed through my consciousness as long as I can remember, and there are, as yet, no padded walls around me. I just need company, and the company of my own thoughts, aired aloud, does nicely.
Self-talk, the practice is called, and after decades of research, shrinks now admit it can be quite healthy. We learn to speak, after all, by jabbering away in our crib, speaking to no one in particular, catching the rhythm and intonation before we have the vocabulary. Child psychologists call this “jargoning.” And once the words make sense, they are even more useful. Who knows better than you how to calm your anxieties or kick you into action? And practically speaking, you can guide yourself through a task’s many steps at exactly the right pace, no rush or lag. Sometimes I even speak as someone else, a wise old peasant woman mocking my trifling, bourgeois worries.
Danger only comes if you are hallucinating, which will lose you street cred, or criticizing yourself relentlessly, which is corrosive. I am gentle with my ego, considerate of its frailty. All my talking-out-loud does is give voice to the thoughts already batting around my skull—the observations, ideas, reminders, exasperations.
As the late, wonderfully wise Eva Brann wrote in Renovatio, “Self-address is not always silently interior.” Nor is it always aimed at oneself. She once watched as, “bent forward as if in urgent escape, this man strode along, talking. To himself ? I doubt it; he was probably addressing a deaf world or its divinity.”
Like me, Brann kept up a running commentary. She tried addressing herself worldlessly and exclaimed, “I can’t do it: I literally can’t hear myself; I seem to have a virtual inner ear that must be addressed by vocalization.” Speech, she concluded, is thought made physical.
And thought is, by default, dialogue. The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin points out that language is, at its core, social. The back-and-forth of ideas is what makes our sophisticated symbols possible. The selfish impulse to own our own ideas, to lock our thoughts inside our cerebellum, is only ego. In truth, a single, lonely human would not advance far at all. We need collections of minds, and as technology historian David Mattin notes, “mind itself is best understood as a phenomenon that emerges between us, rather than inside any one of us individually.”
We have not always known what to make of our thought-dialogues. Chinese Buddhists called intense internal debates “deluded thought,” notes Ethan Kross in Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. “Early Christian mystics were thoroughly annoyed by the voice in their head always intruding on their silent contemplation. Some even considered these voices demonic.” Most traditions have made room for both: inner voices as demonic and divine, sources of temptation or wisdom.
Mine is just good company. And demons do not scare me. Besides, soon I may not have anyone else to talk to. Human conversation is waning.
We chat with LLMs now, not with cashiers or receptionists or neighbors. But note how carefully tech preserved the “chat” dialogue our brains like best. “It’s as though we’ve created a human hivemind and given it a voice,” Mattin writes, “such that we’re now able to talk to it”—or rather, to our collective self—“at will.”
Thanks to such innovations—and before that, to all our shiny screens—we are losing our ability to talk out loud to one another. The average number of words we speak each day dropped by about 28 percent between 2005 and 2019, and one can only imagine what the past seven years added to that slide. We were already speaking about 338 fewer words per day, more than 120,000 words fewer each year. And those twenty-five or younger are losing words much faster than those of us who grew up with Princess phones on squiggly cords.
The advantage of talking to yourself is instant comprehension and sympathy, not to mention the permission to chatter away, ruminate, or repeat yourself without apology. I thoroughly understand why old people mutter to themselves on park benches, now that the rest of us have stopped listening to them. But solitude does make us solipsistic, and sometimes intolerant. The ancient, the excluded, and the reclusive all become rigid because they have no one to contradict or challenge them, no one who can force a little flexibility, risk, or rethinking.
We really do need somebody else to talk to.
