Notes From a Drained Mind
from the notebook
Notes from a Drained Mind
On the Ruin of Attention and Creativity
“Fate will have it — and this has always been the case with me — that all the ‘outer’ aspects of my life should be accidental. Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value.”
So goes the passage from C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections that I have found myself returning to because it states with such calm authority what so many modern people seem determined to forget: that the outer life, however crowded with incident, may finally amount to less than the inner life through which it is filtered.
The paragraph bears dwelling on.
Its power lies in arrangement, in the steady contrast between the accidental and the determining, between what merely happens and what acquires substance. Jung opposes the “outer” to the “interior” so insistently that the quotation marks around “outer” begin to seem almost philosophical, as if even he doubts the ultimate reality of the category.
What conventional biography would treat as essential — persons one has met, travels, adventures, entanglements, blows of destiny — Jung demotes to phantasms, survivals, things his mind has “no desire to reconstruct,” because they no longer stir the imagination.
The effect of the paragraph comes from that reversal. What should, in the ordinary accounting of a life, carry the most weight is made weightless; what is invisible, private, interior, and resistant to narration becomes the only thing of “substance and a determining value.” The rhythm of the passage enacts that very movement: it begins expansively, with fate, life, memory, events, biography, persons, travels, destiny, and then narrows, sentence by sentence, toward the one faculty Jung seems finally willing to trust, imagination.
That is what gives the paragraph its peculiar chill. It does not merely suggest that outer events fade. It suggests that they may never have mattered except insofar as they coincided with phases of inner development. One begins reading it as memoir and ends reading it as a repudiation of memoir, or at least of the naive belief that a life can be explained by the visible record it leaves behind.
We all know the “life” of the man who wrote Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The details became fixed early: Jung at Burghölzli, brilliant and ambitious; Jung under Freud, then against Freud; Jung in the aftermath of the break, recording fantasies, visions, voices, making of psychic crisis a lifelong archive; Jung at Bollingen, building in stone what he could not otherwise stabilize in language; Jung in Africa, in India, in the old symbolic worlds from which modern Europe imagined itself to have graduated.
We have seen the photographs, read the reminiscences, studied the house, the tower, the desk, the pipe, the lake. We have inherited the image of the man almost as readily as the work: part doctor, part mystic, part exile from his own age. Freud, in the years before the rupture, regarded him as heir, emissary, son. By the time that promise had become estrangement, Jung had entered the solitude that would define him, a solitude in which the outer incidents of a life began to seem less determining than the inward forces through which they were suffered, transformed, and finally written down.
Jung was a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them cautiously, suspicious even of their elegance, because he understood how quickly language can falsify what it claims to reveal. What concerned him was not merely style, nor even accuracy in the ordinary sense, but fidelity to the inner event. He had entered regions of the self where words seemed both indispensable and inadequate, and so he wrote with the care of one handling fragments from another world. If he distrusted anything, it was the temptation to explain too much, to domesticate the symbol, to turn what had been lived inwardly into something prematurely legible to others.
A friend suggested I had left social media because I was tired of the stupidity there. She was not entirely wrong, but she was wrong in one essential way. Stupidity alone does not drive one away. There has always been stupidity in the world. What drove me away was the feeling that my outer life was being slowly thinned out by constant exposure to other people’s reactions.
There is a deeper habit such places encourage: the habit of living at the surface of one’s own inner life. Social media made me reactive when I needed to be receptive, making me available to other people’s noise when I needed to be available to my own thoughts.
What, then, is worth preserving on social media? Not the ability to keep up. What is worth preserving is the interior condition out of which real work can come. Most worthwhile creative acts do not arrive all at once. They require the feeling, at the start of a day, that one’s attention still belongs to oneself. Writing, revising a page, following an image, sitting with a thought long enough for it to become something more than a reaction — these are small things, but they are the things on which a creative life depends.
That is why I left social media. I wanted each day to begin not with the quarrels of strangers but with some project of my own, however modest, something worth protecting my mind for. Thinking of how easily creativity can be drained away, I have come to believe that each day should begin as the first day of something one hopes to make.
If this sounds abstract, consider the day after the 98th Academy Awards. I was in disbelief scrolling through social media because of how impoverished the disagreement had become. One person declared One Battle After Another a terribly written film. Someone else said it was a travesty that Best Original Screenplay keeps going to writer-directors, as though the act of writing and directing one’s own vision were some kind of corruption rather than one of cinema’s oldest artistic traditions. Others were flattening Sinners into “just From Dusk Till Dawn,” reducing a masterful exploration of brotherly love, historical racism and mythology to the quickest available comparison so they would not have to do the harder labor of actually seeing it.
Everywhere I looked, the same habits repeated themselves. What struck me was not simply that these were bad opinions. Like stupidity, bad opinions have always existed. However, what disturbed me was how confident, how reflexive, and how spiritually empty they all felt. People no longer seem embarrassed to speak with total authority about art they barely know how to encounter, nor do they watch closely. They do not read deeply with the aim of sitting with ambiguity long enough for a real thought to form. Instead, they leap straight to reduction. And social media, more than any other medium, rewards intellectual collapse.
This kind of carelessness does not come from nowhere. As one arts-education report put it years ago, “study of the arts is quietly disappearing from our schools.” The line still feels current because the underlying neglect never really ended. In a 2024 national survey, only 55 percent of U.S. public schools reported having adequate funding, facilities, and materials for arts instruction.
In schools with fewer than 300 students, that number fell to 49 percent, compared with 74 percent in schools with 1,000 or more students. Schools in higher-poverty neighborhoods were also less likely to have full-time arts teachers or specialists than schools in lower-poverty neighborhoods.
I would not claim that bad online criticism is caused in some simple, mechanical way by cuts to arts education. But the two belong to the same civic failure. When a culture treats art as expendable in the classroom, it should not be surprised when people grow up unable to meet art with patience, seriousness, or care. The collapse shows up later as consumption without attention.
Even the data suggests that access to the arts is unevenly distributed. The NEA reported in 2025 that students from higher-income families tend to earn more fine-arts credits, and that high schoolers from the highest-income bracket were generally more likely to attend live performances, visit museums, or participate in arts creation.
Most people do not know how to create, but increasingly, they do not know how to consume either. And after enough time online, you begin to feel what that does to your own mind. I could feel my creative forces draining in the presence of so much unserious noise. I would open the apps for a few minutes and leave feeling vaguely contaminated.
I’ve seen users hover around the work of others not to learn from or deepen it, but to pick at it. This kind of permanent dissatisfaction masquerades as thought, and you start to lose your appetite for complexity.
What I have wanted, more and more, is not simply to avoid waste but to belong to something that continues beyond the day’s distractions. A worthwhile project stretches over time. It gives the mind a future. Social media threatens that future by breaking attention into fragments and making reaction feel like contribution. I began to feel that if I stayed there too long I would be cut off, separated from the slower commitments out of which any real work must come.
I do not want to be taken from myself in the middle of the feed. I want to be found inside something that matters to me, something unfinished because it deserved more life than I had to give it. That is why even the grimmer examples of conviction retain their power. What one admires in them is not suffering but the refusal to let the final moment belong to fear alone. One admires the attachment to meaning. And this, finally, is what the platforms erode: not only taste, not only literacy, but the capacity to remain inwardly attached to something larger and more durable than opinion.
I have often been inspired by artists who seem, for a brief period, to live inside a current strong enough to carry more than one major work ashore. One thinks of Steven Spielberg making Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List so near each other. Creativity is sometimes a matter of momentum, of one exertion forcing open the next. Twyla Tharp, writing about creativity more broadly, put it plainly: “It’s a practice and it’s a daily practice, and it’s a commitment.” That seems closer to the truth than all the romantic talk about genius. The artist does not wait to be chosen by the muse so much as return, again and again, to the conditions under which making becomes possible.
And yet such momentum is not weightless. Spielberg later recalled that making those two films in such close succession produced “a tremendous amount of resentment and anger”; it “was a burden.” He was in Poland shooting Schindler’s List while still having to turn back toward the mechanical astonishments of Jurassic Park, and the split was not merely logistical but spiritual. If the first film demanded historical and moral surrender, the second still required technical command. “Jurassic Park didn’t challenge me a tenth as much as Schindler’s List did,” he said later. Which is another way of saying that creative productivity is not one thing. Sometimes it is flow.
What made Schindler’s List so difficult for Spielberg was not merely the severity of the material, though the material itself was nearly unbearable. It was that the film collapsed the distance between history and inheritance. Spielberg said the project became, for him, “not just a film” but “a personal journey,” one bound up with the Jewish world that had formed him: the grandparents’ stories, the childhood fear, the knowledge of what had been done to his people, and the responsibility of one day having to tell his own children. The film brought, as he later said, his “Jewish life pouring back” into his heart. In that sense the challenge was Jungian as much as cinematic. Spielberg was being forced inward, into the region where public history becomes private burden, where inherited memory becomes part of the soul’s own biography.
When Schindler’s List arrived, the Academy responded with unusual force. The film received twelve Oscar nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director for Steven Spielberg, along with awards for Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, Cinematography, Film Editing, and Art Direction.
This, finally, is what Jung helps me name. The real danger is that one begins to mistake the outer life for the whole life, and in doing so loses contact with the inward regions where experience acquires meaning. I do not want to live entirely at that surface. I do not want to become a creature of reaction, forever available to the next opinion, the next outrage, the next diminishing comparison. I want to protect the part of the self that cannot be rushed without being damaged. I want to remain faithful to the inner event. And so if I am stepping back from social media, it is not because I have ceased to care about the world, but because I want to care for it from a deeper place, one less contaminated by performance and more answerable to the difficult, private work of seeing.
— Rais