Introspectiongate:“Feelings vs. Action” Debate Gets Needlessly Emotive
One of the more tiresome debates that cyclically arises is the “feelings/therapy versus no introspection necessary” battle. I don’t have anything against Marc Andreessen - I quite like him. I hope his team wins - but the recent blowup (now dubbed “Introspectiongate”) is worthy of a brief audit.
Introspectiongate certainly does relate to the themes we explore here, which is why a targeted breakdown feels useful (ha!). Even though, as you know, I usually avoid “current thing” commentary, finding it a largely detestable exercise. For me at least, most current things are neither current nor things.
The argument in short (paraphrasing): Introspection is not only a complete waste of time, but also destructive to progress. We’re goldfish. Great men and founders were never introspective, since that would mean they wouldn’t have got anything done. Introspection means a focus on feelings, and these nouns cannot be separated. Feelings/Introspection Introspection/Feelings. The ubiquitous modern focus on feelings and introspection is hampering positive technological developments.
From the outset, there’s always a bit of head-slapping irony that goes on with these takes. Over the years, I’ve always found the loudest “anti-feelings” guys, whether they are digital ultra-maculinists, who are the usual offenders, or in this case, tech people, often get highly emotional and even catty defending their positions. Of course, we cannot be without feelings, which is what’s so funny about all of this.
They will typically go on, as Marc did, to target and browbeat the roughly 120 people a year who attend ayahuasca ceremonies. Those brave souls who pay, sometimes good money, to vomit and shit their pants for a few days. All while a Shipibo sings songs they can’t understand. Because of this, they also end up threatening the downfall of Western civilisation. This is the line of reasoning.
In their apparent rush to die on this hill, half-truths are peddled, along with dramatic oversimplifications and lazy, incorrect lumping together of terms. “Feelings” is equated with “all therapeutic modalities” and “introspection”, which, in turn, becomes synonymous with “navel-gazing” and “the West has fallen”.
Of course, naughty man Freud is routinely thrown in this mix. Blamed for everything under the sun - as is tradition. The result is a needlessly emotive word salad in which no one defines anything and no truth emerges. Though, hilariously, I think everyone is also roughly in agreement. Still, you can’t build a sweeping, globalised, civilisational critique on that level of vagueness without looking a bit of a clown and getting pantsed by the crowd.
The same sloppiness applies to his claim that what ails the West is too much introspection. Having spent time around ordinary people, as I’m sure you have too - failures, successes, and everyone in between - I can pretty confidently report that introspection is not exactly a major issue. I’m not even sure 99% of humans are capable of it, much less engage in it to the detriment of society at large.
In a way, though, I agree with him. Kevin and I have been consistent critics of therapy culture and feelings-based ascetic practices in particular. We’ve called out the worst excesses here repeatedly. But the current online pile-on…well, the lads are doing it all wrong. They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Confuddling the issues.
Yes - some therapeutic modalities obsess over talking, emoting, and “narrative-as-healing”. But as I always point out, that’s actually what most people are already doing all the time anyway - just badly. And sometimes they want someone to listen, so they pay an accredited expert to tolerate their crappy, boring story about themselves.
But not all therapeutic modalities are the same, just as not all schools of philosophy or religion are interchangeable. Increasingly, serious and novel approaches, such as those I present here, treat “feelings-talk as insight-begetting” as increasingly unimportant.
In my decades-long observations, it is also true that not everyone is born with the psychological toolkit to thrive, and highly competent people cannot understand this.
Some people, probably like Marc and his mates, luck into a potent mix of crippling autism and adjacent traits. Excellent or sufficient parenting, genetic intelligence and other advantages, and let’s not forget very fortunate timing and luck. I would imagine it’s easy to paint over the cracks when you’re a billionaire, and well, this X exchange kind of displays that.
AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Feelings and emotions are actually reasonably well understood in neuroscience, so it’s worth defining our terms. According to Jaak Panksepp, the founder of affective neuroscience, at core, affective arousal states (what we call “feelings”) serve homeostatic and adaptive functions.
They exist in layers: basic brainstem and limbic responses, mammalian emotional operating systems and so on. You may have seen SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY referred to before. In affective neuroscience, these designations form the base of foundational arousal systems in humans and other mammals. On top of this, mammals and hominids have higher levels of integration and more complex emotions. Even they all roughly serve the same purpose: a response geared towards homeostasis.
Directed conscious awareness, what I think should be meant by “introspection”, shines a light on what’s working and what isn’t. Integrating novel information and eliminating outdated information enables the organism to adapt.
Fundamentally, emotions compel movement. SEEKING drives foraging, LUST drives mating, and FEAR drives avoidance or attack, and so on. They are action-oriented by design. I suppose even freezing is a type of action.
Here’s the key point the anti-introspection/feelings crowd misses: feelings and cognition cannot be cleanly separated in living human brains. Consciousness is itself affective and wouldn’t exist without it. These hierarchies interact not only bidirectionally but in a million other directions. The “higher” parts of our brain feed back to the lower, and vice versa.
For humans, our beliefs, language, ideas and ideologies powerfully shape what we feel and how we interpret those feelings. Changing how people think is often harder than changing how they feel. Precisely because cognitive adaptation determines so much of the affective response. Even if we’re not aware of it, outcomes of prior cognition is still regulating and providing feedback.
THE CRUX OF THE MATTER
The target of the original critique seems to be a specific Silicon Valley archetype. One that, because I’m a sugar-cane peasant from Australia, I’ve only ever seen it in terrible and annoying movies or TV shows, or online: the somatic, Vipassana, guys that say “agency” a lot, valley-girl-accent therapy-culture type. I get it, it’s annoying.
However, that person isn’t primarily “driven by feelings” in a raw sense, or even by introspection or navel gazing. They are driven by a philosophy or set of assumptions about the world. Their feelings reinforce this, but the root is cognitive, conceptual and often ideological.
The true assumption they likely run, a cognitive one, is as follows:
“Feelings are proof”, or “Feelings are evidence of x truth”
Introspection and feelings may be involved, but they are not causative in themselves. What deserves scrutiny is the ideology that teaches people to treat transient, ephemeral affective states as authoritative proofs of what they think to be the case. Or that these states are a gold standard on which to base policy, or anything else important. Like life decisions. In order to do this, you would need to take a shot at progressives.
Not all feelings are bad, however; feelings are obviously useful, as long as they’re in the right context. And that’s for the individual to decide and to know.
INTROSPECTION IS GOOD, ACTUALLY
My main gripe in all of this was the cheap shot at introspection. Good therapy (we prefer the term therapeia now to destigmatise it), some active philosophy, and genuine introspection do the opposite of what Andreesen appears to imply.
Effective introspective practices - whether ancient or modern - are process-oriented tools for self-mastery. They help us observe, compartmentalise, reframe, or redirect feelings so we can function better, and despite them. The goal is not typically endless wallowing but getting on with it. And in fairness to the wallowing/trauma methods (I can’t believe I’m saying this), even for them, the desired outcome of their wallowing is to no longer wallow - which is silly - but they’re trying their best with all the IQ points Jesus gave them.
Introspective practices - Zazen, Stoicism, yoga, serious weightlifting, long solitary walks, “solitudianity” in general, extended silence, cold exposure, hypnosis, competent strategic psychotherapy, or any rigorous askesis you can think of, all aim to no insignificant degree at the same thing: taking the vast reservoir of affective energy and channelling it into something higher, sharper, and less tyrannical on individual. Freeing up energy for more conscious control over life. More flexibility. What they do with it may differ, but again, that’s a matter of epistemology.
Askesis almost universally short-circuits dysfunctional up-down and down-up neural loops precisely so feelings stop running the show.
The ancients understood something that Andreessen and his fellow travellers seem to downplay: humans are typically not brilliant by default. There’s no magnificent blonde beast of tech that’s going to tear off his ritual Macaw and Toucan feather headress after reading this X debate and storm back into the office cubicle to solve dating app problems. Not in any significant numbers. If they’d just drop the gosh darn icaros and orange essence and get in the damned office, we’d all be ok.
As you know, I agree with David J. Linden that our brains are a kind of shambles. What he calls a “kludge”. In my view, real introspection, a real therapeia, is a kind of corrective maintenance and an integrator of the happenstance, hodgepodge, shambolic insult to biological existence that our brains really are (I jest, I jest).
If someone concludes from introspection that they and no one else should ever feel bad, or that their emotions are sacred and must always be validated. And that policy of any kind should be based on this, and they decide to drop out of HR mammy office life and pursue turtle farming or out the brakes on AI - that’s not the fault of the introspection or the feeling, even. That’s a cognitive choice based on conceptual principles.
That’s a downstream philosophical or ideological commitment. It says nothing about introspection done right, which has always been aimed at resilience, clarity, action and knowledge.
For me, this style of debate is never really feelings versus no feelings, or introspection versus action. It’s, ironically, more a case of sloppy emotional thinking that means well, but lacks the perspective of scientific precision I’m presenting here.
In a way, given all that we know about the brain and body, I am always surprised it keeps coming up.
Until next time.
If you reframed introspection as a PROTOCOL the techwits would lap it up. There would be an app, an overpriced supplement line, and a string of podcasts.