Last night I had an argument with myself that lasted three hours. It was about whether I had wasted my life. Both sides made excellent points. The debate was fierce, eloquent, profound. When it ended, I had reached a conclusion that felt like wisdom.
No one will ever know this happened.
I got up this morning, made tea, went to work. My colleagues saw the same person they always see. They have no idea that inside my head, a three-hour philosophical battle had taken place. They cannot know. The theater of my mind admits only one audience member, and that member is me.
This is the strangest fact of existence. We are completely alone inside our heads.
I have thoughts every day that feel important. Realizations that seem to unlock something. Connections between ideas that arrive like small miracles. Sometimes I am so excited by a thought that I want to grab someone and share it. But by the time I find words, the thought has already faded. It was perfect in my head. It becomes ordinary in my mouth.
My friend Selim once told me he has entire conversations with people who are not there. He rehearses arguments he will never have. He explains himself to audiences that do not exist. He wins debates against opponents who cannot respond. I told him I do the same thing. We laughed about it. But we both knew we were laughing at something lonely.
Inside my mind, I am brilliant. I am witty and wise and always know the right thing to say. The version of me that exists in my thoughts is better than the version others see. He is more articulate. More confident. More fully himself. But he lives in a room with no windows and no doors. He performs for an audience of one and receives applause from no one.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if people could hear my thoughts. Not all of them—that would be unbearable. But the good ones. The insights that feel genuine. The moments of clarity that visit me at 3 AM when the world is quiet and my mind is finally honest.
Would anyone care? Would anyone understand? Or would my private brilliance turn ordinary the moment it became public?
I suspect the latter. Thoughts are like dreams—vivid and meaningful inside, but flat and strange when described to others. “I had the most amazing thought last night” sounds as foolish as “I had the most amazing dream.” No one wants to hear about your dream. No one can enter the experience that made it feel significant.
This is the isolation we all carry. We walk around in crowds, surrounded by people, and yet completely alone in the most fundamental way. My consciousness is a country with closed borders. Yours is the same. We can send messages across the border—words, gestures, expressions—but no one can actually visit. No one can see what it looks like inside.
I have been married for twenty-two years. My wife knows me better than anyone. She can predict my moods, finish my sentences, read my silences. But she has never heard my inner monologue. She does not know the voice I use when I talk to myself. She does not know the questions I ask at midnight or the answers I sometimes find. She knows the external man, the one who speaks and acts. The internal one remains a stranger.
This should make me sad. Sometimes it does. But there is also freedom in this solitude.
Inside my head, I face no judgment. I can think terrible thoughts and no one will condemn me. I can fantasize about impossible things without embarrassment. I can be petty, jealous, afraid, angry—all the things I hide from the world—and no one will know. My mind is the one place where I am not performing. The one place where social expectations do not apply.
I think this is why we value privacy so deeply. Not because we have secrets to hide—though we do—but because we need a space where we can be completely ourselves. The external world demands a curated version of us. We present what is acceptable, hide what is not. Only inside our own heads can we drop the act entirely.
My father used to sit quietly for hours. We thought he was resting. After he died, we found journals filled with thoughts we never knew he had. Ideas about God, about death, about what it meant to be a good person. He had been having conversations with himself for decades. He had been running a private philosophy seminar in his head. None of us were invited.
I think of him now when I have my own private thoughts. I wonder if everyone carries this secret intellectual life. The bus driver, the vegetable seller, the security guard—do they have midnight debates with themselves? Do they arrive at conclusions that feel like wisdom? Do they perform their own one-person plays in theaters no one can enter?
I think they must. Consciousness is not distributed by education or status. The mind’s private theater operates in every human head. We are all alone in there, all running our own shows, all sitting in audiences of one.
The loneliness of this is profound. But so is the intimacy. No one knows me like I know myself. No one has access to the raw material of my being—the unedited thoughts, the unfiltered reactions, the honest assessments that I would never say out loud. I am my own closest companion. I have been with myself every moment of my life. I will be with myself until the end.
Perhaps this is enough. Perhaps the private theater is not a prison but a sanctuary. A place where we can process the world without interference. A place where we can be fully human—contradictory, confused, occasionally brilliant, often foolish—without anyone watching.
I had another thought last night, during my three-hour debate. I thought: maybe the point is not to share everything. Maybe some thoughts are meant to be private. Maybe the inner life is valuable precisely because it is inner. A garden you tend alone. A conversation you have with yourself. A theater where you are always the only audience member, but where the performance is real, and honest, and entirely yours.
This morning I made tea. I went to work. No one knew about the debate. No one knows about any of it.
That is okay.
Some things are meant to be witnessed by one.
Some things are sacred because they remain unseen.
My mind is a secret library. I am its only visitor.
And the books in there—they are enough. They have always been enough.