Do We Only Think About Ourselves
I find it constantly surprising how much people talk about themselves or refer to themselves in conversations. It seems like a kind of consciousness where the self sits highest, next to God alone, almost on a sacred altar where only their own image is allowed. They seem to think only of themselves, their stories, their feelings, and then only about others in terms of duties or usefulness—how another person fits into their pre-written script or serves a purpose in their personal universe.
I wonder how much I think of myself, how often my own thoughts circle back to my own experiences, or whether I actively try to stop it, try not to give in to that pull. I remember talking about myself while networking at events, making a conscious effort to share myself because, well, one needs to talk about themselves otherwise people will not know who they are talking to; it’s a necessary dance of introduction. But it’s like most people want this kind of attention, this constant confirmation of their own story, in a way that just makes them feel cringe to me—an overblown performance of self. I really don’t know what else to say about this because I just don’t know that much, and perhaps that’s the heart of it—the less we know, the smaller our world, the larger the self appears within it.
It is a matter of consciousness, and when it hasn’t grown, when it hasn’t stretched beyond its first boundaries, the person sees only themselves, and even the world they see, so rich and multifaceted, is secondary, a mere backdrop to their own starring role.
It’s a strange human tendency, isn’t it? This constant circling around ourselves, as if each of us is a sun with our own planets of thoughts and memories. We’re all the heroes of our own stories, however ordinary they might look from outside. Psychology even has a name for a related mental quirk: the “self-reference effect.” It’s a well-studied fact that we tend to remember information much more clearly if we can somehow link it back to ourselves. If a story about a distant land mentions a type of tree that grew in our childhood garden, that detail will light up the entire story for us. If a historical fact connects with a personal struggle, it’s carved into our memory.
So, in a way, our brains are wired to focus on the “me-show,” to filter experience through the lens of what matters to us personally. This isn’t necessarily bad; it’s likely a tool from evolution, a mental shortcut that helped our ancestors navigate and make sense of a complex and often dangerous world by connecting it to their most immediate reference point: themselves. But it does make you wonder where the line is, when this natural tendency, this spotlight becomes a closed loop, a conversation with ourselves even when others are trying to join in.
This intense focus on self has deep roots, starting when we’re very young. The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget noticed that small children genuinely can’t understand that others see the world differently. It’s a thinking stage where a child genuinely struggles to understand that others have thoughts, feelings, and viewpoints different from their own. If a child sees a toy they like, they might assume everyone else sees it, wants it, and experiences it in exactly the same way. If they are hiding and cover their own eyes, they might believe that because they cannot see, no one can see them. It’s a world filtered almost completely through their own lens, a universe where their perceptions are the absolute truth.
As we grow, we’re supposed to develop what’s called a “theory of mind” - the crucial understanding that others have their own independent mental states, their own beliefs, desires, intentions, and knowledge, which may be completely different from our own. This is the foundation of social interaction, the base upon which empathy and complex relationships are built.
Yet, echoes of this egocentrism can remain, sometimes quite loudly, into teenage years and even adulthood, making me wonder if what I see in others is an old pattern that never quite faded. David Elkind expanded on this with his idea of “adolescent egocentrism,” which brings two rather uncomfortable ideas forward: the “imaginary audience” and the “personal fable.”
The imaginary audience is that constant feeling that everyone is watching you, examining your every move, your clothes, your words, every small stumble and brief success. It’s like living under a constant spotlight, where every social interaction is a performance for a critical, unseen crowd. This can be exhausting and, frankly, a bit self-important, creating a kind of anxious self-awareness. This might be where some of that ‘cringe’ factor comes in—that uncomfortable internal squirm we feel when someone seems to be performing for invisible judges, their every story polished for maximum personal shine, their laughter a little too loud, their gestures a little too big, demanding a kind of attention that feels… off, because it seems disconnected from a genuine shared experience.
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Then there’s the personal fable. The deeply held belief that one’s own experiences, feelings, and thoughts are completely unique, so deep, so intense, that no one else could possibly understand. “You just don’t get it!”, or “no one understands me” become repeated lines, a shield against perceived misunderstanding, but also a barrier to true connection. While a part of creating an identity, this sense of being special, if not balanced with a broader understanding of shared human experience, can lead to a deep sense of being alone, or worse, a dismissal of others’ experiences as somehow less valid or less important.
The journey of consciousness, as I first framed it, seems to involve a gradual, and often difficult, moving away from this built-in egocentric viewpoint. It’s recognising that while our own experience feels bright, immediate, and undeniably real to us, it’s just one light among billions of others, equally bright. Like realising your torch only lights a tiny patch of an endless landscape. When this shift doesn’t fully happen, or when life circumstances—perhaps trauma, long-term stress, or even too much praise without grounding—push a person back into a more self-protective, self-focused mode, we might see this pattern. Their interactions with others might then become mostly transactional, framed by “duties or usefulness” what can this person do for me, how do they reflect on me, or what do I owe them in a way that serves my story, rather than a genuine curiosity about who they are, what they feel, and what the world looks like through their eyes.
There’s a spectrum here, of course, a vast range between unhealthy self-obsession and a complete lack of self-awareness. A healthy amount of self-awareness, self-care, and self-compassion is vital—we need it to care for ourselves, to be kind to ourselves when we stumble. This is the kind of self-focus that empowers, that allows us to build strength, to learn from our mistakes, and to engage with the world from a place of authenticity. But when this crosses into an unhealthy fixation, when the self becomes not a home base but a fortress, it can become problematic. Constant negative self-talk, an overwhelming focus on one’s perceived flaws that stops action, or, on the flip side, an inflated sense of self-importance that demands constant validation and accepts no criticism (does this remind you of someone?). These are the darker sides of self-focus. Some research even links excessive, particularly negative, self-focused attention to conditions like depression and anxiety, where people get stuck in a repeating loop of their own thoughts and feelings, unable to easily shift their attention outward. It’s as if the “me-show” becomes a horror film playing on repeat, with the self as both the suffering victim and the relentless tormentor, and there is no way out.
It’s this intense personal experience, this fundamental difficulty in truly knowing what it’s like outside our own heads—a point that almost makes discussing it feel like grasping at smoke, trying to describe the taste of water to someone who has never drunk—that philosophers have taken to its most extreme conclusion with the concept of ‘solipsism.’ It’s the radical idea that one can only be certain of the existence of one’s own mind; everything else could theoretically be a creation of one’s imagination, an elaborate projection. While few people truly live as solipsists (it would be an incredibly lonely existence), it’s a thought experiment that starkly shows the built-in privacy of our own consciousness.
We can never directly experience another person’s thoughts or feelings. We guess, we empathise, we communicate through the imperfect tools of language and gesture, but that direct, unfiltered access to another’s inner world is impossible. This fundamental separateness can be a source of deep existential worry, a feeling of ultimate aloneness, or it can be a starting point for a deeper appreciation of the effort, the courage, and the sheer miracle it takes to truly connect with another being across that invisible gap.
So, if we’re all somewhat wired for self-reference, and if egocentrism is a developmental hurdle we all face, how does one develop a consciousness that genuinely sees and values others beyond their usefulness to the self, beyond their role as supporting characters in our personal drama?
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This is where concepts like “decentering” and “empathy” become so crucial, acting as counterweights to our built-in self-focus. Decentering, in a psychological sense, is the ability to step back from our own thoughts and emotions, to observe them with some distance, without necessarily identifying with them or being swept away by them. It’s a skill of thinking about thinking—thinking about our thinking, feeling about our feelings. Mindfulness practices, for example, often aim to develop this ability by encouraging us to notice thoughts as they come and go, like clouds in the sky, rather than as unchangeable truths or urgent commands. By creating a little space between ourselves and our internal monologue, we can react less, gain a broader view, and choose our responses more consciously. We might realise that a thought is just a thought, a passing mental event, not an absolute truth, and that a feeling, however intense, will eventually pass or change.
Empathy, then, is the bridge we build from our own decentered awareness to the experience of another. It’s more than just sympathy (feeling sorry for someone, which can still keep a sense of separation or even superiority); it’s the attempt to understand and even share the feelings of another person from their perspective, to imaginatively live in their world for a moment. There’s cognitive empathy: the intellectual exercise of understanding what someone else might be thinking or feeling, like figuring out a map of their internal landscape. And there’s emotional empathy: actually feeling an echo with their emotional state, a faint reflection of their joy or sorrow in our own being.
Building empathy isn’t always easy; it’s an active, ongoing practice. It requires active listening and not just waiting for our turn to speak. It’s truly hearing what is being said and what is left unsaid. It means paying attention not just to words but to body language, tone of voice, and the subtle signs that reveal inner states. It means challenging our own biases and assumptions, those pre-formed ideas that can colour our view of others. And it demands genuine curiosity about others, asking questions not to gather information for our own story, or to confirm our own theories, but to truly learn about theirs, to understand their unique story.
Perhaps the most important shift in consciousness, the true marker of its growth, is the move from a default setting of “What does this mean for me?” to “What might this mean for them?” or even, more broadly, “What does this mean for us?” It’s an expansion of the circle of concern, from the self, to the family, to the community, to the wider world. It doesn’t mean erasing the self or becoming a selfless martyr; a healthy sense of self, a well-tended inner garden, is the foundation upon which genuine connection and contribution can be built. But it does mean recognising that the self, however important, is not the whole landscape, not the only flower in the garden.
The philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote beautifully about this, calling it “unselfing” those moments when attention to something outside ourselves (beauty, art, another person’s reality) jolts us out of our self-absorption. Instead of losing ourselves we find ourselves as part of something larger, something that includes but transcends our individual concerns.
The ‘cringe’ I feel when witnessing certain kinds of self-display, then, might be an intuitive recognition of this imbalance. This performance that seems to demand an oversized portion of the world’s attention is perhaps a sign, as I first wondered, of a consciousness that hasn’t quite ‘grown’ beyond that primary self-orbit, showing an underlying insecurity or an unmet need for validation that hasn’t found a healthier, more integrated outlet. It’s as if the person is stuck in that “imaginary audience” phase, still believing the spotlight is intensely on them, and acting accordingly, unaware that the rest of the world is not, in fact, holding its breath for their next announcement.
Ultimately, navigating this tension between self and other, between our inner world and the shared world, is a delicate, lifelong process. There will be times when looking inward and self-focus are necessary and healing, moments when we must retreat inside to recharge or heal. There will be other times when the greatest growth, the deepest joy, comes from turning our attention outward, from engaging with the world and its people with genuine curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to be changed by the encounter.
It’s a living balance and while it’s easy to observe the seemingly endless self-reference in others, the more challenging, and perhaps more rewarding, question remains the one I first asked myself: “I wonder how much I think of myself or whether I try and stop it, try and not engage in it.” That very question, that moment of self-reflection armed with a little more understanding, is perhaps the first, and maybe most crucial, step towards a more expansive consciousness—a journey that, by its very nature, likely never truly ends but continues to unfold with each attempt to see beyond our own reflection, to listen more deeply, and to connect more authentically. It’s an acknowledgment that the self, while central to our experience, doesn’t have to be the sole occupant, or the loudest voice, in the vast concert hall of our awareness.
