A Year in Reading: Inward Journeys
December 11, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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This month marks exactly 35 years since the birth of the first web browser, and our world today is nearly unrecognizable from what it was in 1990. That’s not yelling at clouds, it’s simply a fact. We can do more, do it faster, are expected to do more faster. We’ve ceded our attention and emotional valence to parties who have demonstrated in every conceivable way that they’re not the good actors they claim to be. We’ve developed and discarded more in the past three decades than in the three millennia prior. We’ve managed to re-enact a discouraging number of sci-fi movies and social satires. Even if the velocity of our change is constant, try telling that to anyone seated at the end of a centrifuge arm, lips peeled back, cheeks fluttering. Whatever we’re rushing toward, the experience is anything but smooth. It’s little wonder, then, amid so much bumping and buffeting, that people are turning inward.
To be clear, this is a very good thing. Turning in isn’t turning away. It’s something more like attunement. Just as you need a strong core to overcome the ergonomic siege of sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, navigating upheaval Out There demands at least a passing understanding of who you are, what you think, how you feel. Some of my favorite pieces from this year speak to that.
Of course, there are many ways to go inside yourself. The easiest, and possibly the oldest, is an intense hallucinogen. Enter Sarah Miller, who headed to Peru for a week of ayahuasca therapy and in the process delivered one of the funniest, most acerbic stories of 2025. From travel to preparation to her septet (!) of supervised voyages, Miller spares no detail, and seems to revel in being as hard on herself as she is on the cast of characters around her, from the ethereal facility administrator to her fellow pasajeros. Her piece would have been a natural fit for a dozen magazines or more, but n+1 feels like a perfect match, especially given that the Spring 2025 issue bore the theme Harsh Realm. After all, what realm is harsher than the one we shape ourselves?
Not all hallucinations are induced. You can also tour your interior via deprivation, as Chris Colin did during a three-day darkness retreat for The New York Times Magazine. “On Day 3, I started seeing Rothkos,” begins his story. (Better Rothko than Bosch, especially when you’re in a setting out of Horror Movies 101: a blacked-out basement in the woods in the middle of nowhere.) One doesn’t get to the third day without a first and second, which for Colin means a psychic purgation not unlike the corporeal one Sarah Miller endured. “It’s not that I don’t ponder these horrors in daily life,” he writes of the real-world atrocities his mind conjures up in vivid detail, “it’s that I contain them. I’ll read the latest awfulness and then veer into outrage, or political strategy, or more reading, and then leave for car-pool duty. Now all I could do was sit with that awfulness.” The first deluge gives way to more fantastical visions: snow caves, outer space, a Hapsburgian fortress. Seth Meyers slicing cheese makes a cameo, as does Colin’s own gravestone. The aforementioned Rothkos, of course. At the end, Colin emerges, scrubbed rawer than he’d anticipated, but with a new sense of what his guide calls “spaciousness.” From time to time, he writes, “a look or a conversation or some news or just a passing shadow seems to open like an accordion.”
That opening demands noticing, which is the true aim of many forms of meditation—another age-old method of heading inward, and a bedrock of Simon Wu’s Buddhist upbringing. The thing is, “upbringing” doesn’t equal “ongoing practice,” so Wu and his brother chafe a bit at the prospect of spending a weekend with their male relatives in a version of a shinbyu monkhood ceremony. But for their mother and grandmother, they consent to having their heads shaved and spending the weekend steeped in monastic ritual. While Wu’s Paris Review essay about the weekend primarily observes family and tradition, it also unpacks the role of discomfort in reflection, and the ways we seek to slough off our false selves. “There is a heat to sitting still,” he writes. “But the sitting, at long intervals, can become euphoric, even transcendental.” He thinks back to another meditation retreat, one in which the agony of stillness gives way to “a clear and free and blue release of pain; a hidden attic I hadn’t known existed in my brain[.]” We all have these spaces inside ourselves. Whether we can find our way there, or even dare to try, is another question altogether.
Then there is the body: the vessel our mind inhabits, and one we often assume we know more about than we actually do. Our muscles might ache, or a headache might disrupt our day, but barring extreme inflammation we have no sensory awareness of our innermost, visceral workings. Only in rare moments do we meet those workings—and recovering from surgery is one of those moments. Ben Lerner’s essay “Cardiography,” in The New York Review of Books, details such a period, and does so with all the spare vividity you’d expect of the acclaimed poet and novelist. “It isn’t the pain that I need to describe for you; there was little pain,” he writes of having his chest tubes extracted after heart surgery. “It is how I suddenly became aware of a space . . . inside my body that I did not previously know existed, that hadn’t existed until they pulled something out of it. It’s how I could feel the tube moving along the tissue, a shifting deep in my thorax where I previously had no sensory awareness at all, where I was never meant to have sensation, my interior becoming wrongly tangible.” Wrongly tangible. It’s remarkable how our bodies react to such instances of sudden awareness: People faint at the sight of blood, get weak-kneed at the thought of the inside being out. But in a cultural moment when our minds and our bodies have never been more distinct from one another, it’s urgently important to consider what familiarity with oneself really means.
Armed with a deeper sense of these systems—our minds, our bodies, our conscious and unconscious patterns—we can start to consider how the world affects us. In The Atlantic, Jason Anthony details mheibes, an Iraqi bluffing game that makes high-level poker’s mental warfare feel like a freshman psychology seminar. Again in NYTM, Sam Anderson confronts his “[struggle] to metabolize the daily news” by retracing the steps of a 19th-century folk hero known only as The Old Leatherman. It is, he writes, “an excuse to step outside my own life—to look at old American places, firsthand, slowly, to think about how they had changed. To walk around like a weirdo, knocking randomly on doors, talking to people whom I had no business talking to.” And in Harper’s, none other than Karl Ove Knausgaard stretches his arms wide around technology: not just today’s destabilizing digital milieu, or the computer that led us here, but how our quest to understand the things around us has led us away from understanding the things within us.
It’s this last piece that most succinctly articulates the need for all of this self-investigation. In a twist, though, it doesn’t come from Knausgaard, a man who has spent multiple volumes seeking to understand himself. Instead, it comes courtesy of cognitive scientist James Bridle, author of a book about human and nonhuman intelligence called Ways of Being. “The world is fucked because we are fucked,” Bridle tells Knausgaard. “Healing ourselves is part of healing the world.”
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