The term navel gazer comes from the Greek word omphaloskepsis, and it didn’t enter the English vernacular until the 20th century. But omphalopsychoi (people having their souls in their navels) was initially a pejorative name given to the Hesychasts, a monastic faction of Eastern Christianity in the 14th century.
Central to Hesychasm was a practice of contemplative prayer, where the attention was fixed on the middle of the body. The idea was to connect to one’s breath by literally gazing at one’s navel. Rather than just self-reflection, this practice was a way to find the quietness necessary to commune with God.
In the centuries since the Hesychasts gazed at their belly buttons, belief in the transcendent has eroded. Navel-gazing as we know it is no longer a way to commune with the divine but to seek deeper communion with ourselves. And you, as it turns out, make both a fascinating and a disturbing subject of study.
Documenting this phenomenon, I recently did a social experiment on my Instagram account. The self-obsessed “hot girls” on the platform were driving me mental—the ones defined less by their physical attractiveness and more by their incessant, vapid posting about themselves. So I decided to try posting like one. My goal was to get to the root of my own annoyance.
For two weeks, I posted only self-aggrandizing photos of myself: “fit check” videos, self-timer photos, selfies in bed. I kept a record of how it was making me feel and how other people responded to my posts. And then I wrote a whole essay about it.
In essence, I was doing some navel-gazing.
G. K. Chesterton, in his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition,” writes: “Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.” We are complicated, living beings, ignorant of even ourselves most of the time. Some amount of self-observation is necessary if we want to pursue wisdom and even love. But self-reflection is a kind of Goldilocks game. Just enough of it is immensely helpful. Too little or too much can warp us in unintended ways of being.
And then social media enters the chat—an addictive platform defined by the currency of attention. It’s become a kind of marketplace where we are rewarded for navel-gazing and then encouraged to do even more of it. Find your perfect color palette, discover your metabolic rate, unearth your trauma through this new therapy technique, figure out your attachment style. All of these are invitations to look at ourselves and attempt to heal the wounds within us—a frantic scramble to look better, to be better and to do it in front of each other online.
This content is packaged with the underlying assumption that you can fix yourself only if you put in enough effort. But just because you know something doesn’t mean you actually have the capacity to change it or yourself. Thus the apostle Paul says at his most relatable, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Rom. 7:19).
During my own social media experiment, I learned a lot of things, both about the way that others reacted to my posts and what it did to me as I engaged in it. Put simply, the posts that were directly and unabashedly about me got more attention. That feedback loop was addictive. Yet it also tormented me. Why didn’t more people respond? Why did that person respond, but that person didn’t?
I also started to notice how the act of taking photos of myself and posting them was making my lens of the world even more self-focused. On one particular walk in the woods with my mom, I caught myself thinking, That patch of sunlight would be the perfect place for a photo of me.
Thankfully, I capped my experiment at two weeks. The attention-grabbing made me feel gross inside, and I wanted to go walking in the woods again, unencumbered by the narrative of my own psychodrama.
Ironically, navel-gazing about my own navel-gazing helped me to disengage from it. Yet I was still left with the palpable feeling that those things at the root of my irritation with the hot girls, as well as of my tendency to get caught up in other people’s attention, were buried so deeply in my heart that I couldn’t reach them all by myself.
Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor and social scientist, in one of his recent columns for The Atlantic, writes:
The rate of depression in the United States has risen to its highest level on record. Behavioral science offers a compelling thesis that may explain what we’re seeing, as a result of what has been termed the “self-reflection paradox.” An intense focus on self is an evolved trait, scientists suggest, because it confers competitive advantages in mating and survival. But research has also shown that to be so focused on self can be a primary source of unhappiness and maladjustment. So what appears to be happening is that we have developed culture and technology that together supercharge this primal drive of self-reflection—to such an unhealthy and unnatural extent that it has the paradoxical effect of ruining our lives.
It seems that a small dose of self-reflection is some kind of evolutionary elixir, but too much and it becomes a poison to our well-being.
The Hesychasts were criticized for their navel-gazing, but there may be something in their practice we could learn from—both their search for quietness and their hunger to commune with Someone other than themselves. I think of the psalmist’s words: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts” (Ps. 139:23). We could keep gazing at ourselves with our critical, fallacy-prone human eyes. Or we could invite the perfect gaze of God.
I quoted G. K. Chesterton above. But I withheld the last part of that quote because I wanted to save the best for last. Chesterton finishes with this: “Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance; and a divine ignorance may be called the definition of romance” (emphasis mine).
Could it be that our inability to truly know or fix ourselves is a kind of beckoning portal to divine communion—a prompt to invite the divine gaze that always looks with unflinching honesty and kindness? The gaze that knows the way out of the quagmire of your brokenness. The only gaze with the power to truly heal you.
Maybe this secure affection could allow you to participate in the adventure, the romance that is your life; to let yourself be revealed over a lifetime and not scrutinized, dissected, overanalyzed like a thing. You are a person, a story within a story. And you cannot only be studied, you must be known, treasured, loved into becoming who you are.
A young man struggling with excessive self-awareness once wrote C. S. Lewis asking for advice. Lewis responded with a beautiful letter, at the end of which he writes, “I sometimes pray, ‘Lord, give me no more and no less self-knowledge than I can at this moment make a good use of.’ Remember He is the artist, and you are only the picture. You can’t see it.”
As an Enneagram Four, a hopeless romantic, and a highly sensitive, navel-gazing prone woman, that prayer from Lewis brings me relief. While I may have stopped posting vapid selfies, I still scroll Instagram too much. Sometimes I see reels of therapist interviews and am tempted to diagnose myself with the latest trending mental health problem, like a hypochondriac reading too many WebMD articles and convincing myself I have cancer.
I come back to Lewis’s prayer often, whispering the words to myself, asking God for my daily bread of self-awareness and nothing more.
Sarah Jane Souther is a graphic designer and the founder of Unfortunately, i Love You, a poetry collective centered around the theme of unrequited love. Her writing has been published online at Fathom and Woman Alive. She currently resides in Manhattan and writes about culture, literature, and faith on her Substack, The Other Darlings.
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