The Social Media Navel Gaze
On the double-edged sword of self-awareness
This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Sarah Jane Souther
THE TERM “NAVEL GAZER” comes from the Greek word omphaloskepsis, and it didn’t enter the English vernacular until the 20th century. But omphalopsychoi (people having their souls in their navels) was initially a pejorative name given to the Hesychasts, a monastic faction of Eastern Christianity in the 14th century.
Central to Hesychasm was a practice of contemplative prayer where the attention was fixed on the middle of the body. The idea was to connect one’s own breath by literally gazing at one’s navel. Rather than just self-reflection, this practice was a way to find the quietness necessary to commune with God.
In the centuries since the Hesychasts were gazing at their belly buttons, belief in the transcendent has eroded. Navel-gazing as we know it is no longer a way to commune with the divine but to seek deeper communion with ourselves. And you, as it turns out, make both a fascinating and a disturbing subject of study.
Documenting this phenomenon, I recently did a social experiment on my Instagram account. The self-obsessed “hot girls” on the platform were driving me mental—the ones defined less by their physical attractiveness and more by their incessant, vapid posting about themselves. I decided to try posting like one. My goal was to get to the root of my own annoyance.
For two weeks, I posted only self-aggrandizing photos of myself—fit check videos, self-timer photos and selfies in bed. I kept a record of how it was making me feel and how other people responded to my posts. And then I wrote a whole essay about it.
In essence, I was doing some navel-gazing.
G.K. CHESTERTON, in his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition,” writes: “Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.” We are complicated, living beings, ignorant of even ourselves most of the time. Some amount of self-observation is necessary if we want to pursue wisdom and even love. But self-reflection is a kind of Goldilocks game. Just enough of it is immensely helpful. Too little or too much can warp us in unintended ways of being.
And then social media enters the chat. An addictive platform defined by the currency of attention. It’s become a kind of marketplace where we are rewarded for navel-gazing and then encouraged to do even more of it. Find your perfect color palette, discover your metabolic rate, unearth your trauma through this new therapy technique, figure out your attachment style. All of these are invitations to look at ourselves and attempt to heal the wounds within us. A frantic scramble to look better, to be better and to do it in front of each other online.
But this content is packaged with the underlying assumption that you can fix yourself if only you put in enough effort. But just because you know something doesn’t mean you actually have the capacity to change it or yourself. The Apostle Paul at his most relatable: “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”
DURING MY OWN social media experiment, I learned a lot of things, both about the way that others reacted to my posts and what it did to me as I engaged in it. Put simply, the posts that were directly and unabashedly about me got more attention. That feedback loop was addictive. Yet it also tormented me. Why didn’t more people respond, why did that person respond, why didn’t that person respond?!
I also started to notice how the act of taking photos of myself and posting them was making my lens of the world even more self-focused. On one particular walk in the woods with my mom, I caught myself thinking, That patch of sunlight would be the perfect place for a photo of me.
Thankfully, I capped my experiment at two weeks. The attention-grabbing made me feel gross inside, and I wanted to go walking in the woods again, unencumbered by the narrative of my own psychodrama.
In an ironic way, I think navel-gazing about my own navel-gazing helped me to disengage from it. Yet I was still left with the palpable feeling that those things at the root of my irritation with the hot girls, as well as my own tendency to get caught up in other people’s attention, were things buried so deeply in my heart I really couldn’t reach them all by myself.
Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor and social scientist, had something interesting to say about this “self-reflection paradox” in one of his recent columns for The Atlantic:
“The rate of depression in the United States has risen to its highest level on record. Behavioral science offers a compelling thesis that may explain what we’re seeing, as a result of what has been termed the ‘self-reflection paradox.’ An intense focus on self is an evolved trait, scientists suggest, because it confers competitive advantages in mating and survival. But research has also shown that to be so focused on self can be a primary source of unhappiness and maladjustment. So what appears to be happening is that we have developed culture and technology that together supercharge this primal drive of self-reflection—to such an unhealthy and unnatural extent that it has the paradoxical effect of ruining our lives.”
It seems that a small dose of self-reflection is some kind of evolutionary elixir, but too much and it becomes a poison to our well-being.
THE HESYCHASTS were criticized for their literal navel-gazing, but there may be something in their practice we could learn from—both their search for quietness and their hunger to commune with Someone other than themselves. I think of the psalmist’s words. “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” We could keep on gazing at ourselves, with our critical, fallacy-prone human eyes. Or we could invite the perfect gaze of God.
I quoted G.K. Chesterton above. But I withheld the last part of that quote because I wanted to save the best for last. Chesterton finishes with this (emphasis mine): “Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance; and a divine ignorance may be called the definition of romance.”
Could it be that our inability to truly know ourselves or fix ourselves is a kind of beckoning portal to divine communion? A prompt to invite the Divine gaze that always looks with unflinching honesty and kindness. The gaze that knows the way out of the quagmire of your brokenness. The only gaze with the power to truly heal you.
And maybe this secure affection could allow you to participate in the adventure, the romance that is your life? To let yourself be revealed over a lifetime and not scrutinized, dissected, over-analyzed like a thing. You are a person, a story within a story. And you cannot only be studied; you must be known, treasured, loved into becoming who you are.
A YOUNG MAN STRUGGLING with excessive self-awareness once wrote C.S. Lewis asking for advice. Lewis responded with this beautiful letter. At the end of it, he writes, “I sometimes pray, ‘Lord, give me no more and no less self-knowledge than I can at this moment make a good use of.’ Remember, He is the artist, and you are only the picture. You can’t see it.”
As an Enneagram Four, hopeless romantic, highly sensitive, and navel-gazing prone woman, that prayer from C.S. Lewis brings me relief. While I may have stopped posting vapid selfies, I still scroll Instagram too much. Sometimes I see reels of therapist interviews and am tempted to diagnose myself with the latest trending mental health problem—I’m like a hypochondriac reading too many WebMD articles and convincing myself I have cancer.
But I come back to that prayer often, whispering the words to myself, asking God for my daily bread of self-awareness and nothing more.
Sarah Jane is a graphic designer and the founder of Unfortunately, i Love You, a poetry collective centered around the theme of unrequited love. Her writing has been published online at Fathom and Woman Alive. She currently resides in Manhattan and writes about culture, literature and faith on her Substack, the Other Darlings.
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As another enneagram 4, reading this piece felt like reading my own mind. After years of trying to figure myself out, pursuing happiness through self reflection, I am realizing more and more that sweeping my porch in the morning and watching the squirrels chase each other around the cottonwood tree is infinitely more satisfying.
Evocative read full of bright and instructive moments---thank you Sarah and Inkwell!
Still, I can't help but wonder--having lived long in the age of incessant self-broadcasting AND finger-wagging reactions against it--if we're missing the point when we chastise specific groups "the self-obsessed hot girls" (even in the abstract)
I've become increasingly curious about proactive antidotes to our social-media maladies--- what might it mean, for example, to cultivate and encourage deep engagement with the world/others---the outward gaze---instead of defaulting to more lamentation about the proliferation of new-age digital egoism and its (already well-documented) harms?
Awareness that constant self-indulgence is problematic and reaffirmations that only God can rightly identify/heal our wounds hasn't done much to reverse the cultural trends.
How might this conversation be changed by questions like 'how do we tempt (shift, coax, delight??) the gaze out (from the navel) into the world we are called to love, or up to the God we are called to worship?
I lovedddd the invitation to think of our brokenness as a portal to divine communion and the nod to Arthur C. Brooks, one of our finest--and Catholic, if you didn't know!
Not to be an out-and-out contrarian, but when my friends post a 12/10 selfie, I'm 'yasss kweeen-ing' with the best of them. Lol.