A friend asked me what I meant by interspection.

By interspection, I mean our attention is neither turned inward toward ourselves, nor outward toward the world, but rather otherward into each other’s inwardness.

Everyone else’s inner life is now everyone’s problem — both their phony public passions they pass off as their subjectivity, and their more authentic personal perspectives they mistake for objectivity.

We’re all interspecting interverts, and we are still pretty horrible at it. We celebrate it as “empathy” but very little of it penetrates beyond our collectively-believed, individually-imagined amateur sociologist fantasies.