There’s something about September’s light. Slanted and golden. Carrying the weight of summer’s end. Subtle foreshadowing of deeper seasons ahead. It’s the month and moment to retreat inward—when all the external noise, accumulated from warmer months, finally becomes unbearable enough to shut out.
Now it is perfect for a periodic withdrawal from the overstimulation that the internet serves us endlessly. And reflection. One question in particular for me all year cuts deeper the longer I leave it unanswered:
How much of what I think is actually mine?
I catch myself mid-scroll, mid-conversation, even mid-thought, wondering if what I’m doing is what I want to be doing. Or if it’s just the latest instalment from borrowed aspirations. With the first two months of my new job behind me, I've become acutely aware of how overstimulation hurts my capacity for authentic decision-making.
Overstimulation is one answer to why we’re so unhappy. Adam Gazzaley delved into what many of us feel viscerally: our brains weren’t ready for the information density of modern life. It’s long been said that we process roughly 34 gigabytes (likely much more) of information daily—enough to crash a laptop from the 1990s. Yet we expect ourselves to handle it seamlessly. The result isn't just fatigue; it's a kind of cognitive diaspora where our attention is so scattered that we lose track of our own preferences entirely.
It’s what popularised Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism” and the idea of a “cluttered mind”; constant input prevents original thought. And it’s more insidious than what Cal even suggests. It’s not that we can’t think clearly; we begin thinking in other people’s patterns, making choices from their palette of desires and slowly forgetting our own.
Byung-Chul Han names it "the burnout society", which is how we exhaust ourselves through the constant performance of borrowed identities.
In an age of infinite scrolling, how we spend our attention determines how we spend our consciousness. The quality of our inner life (the texture of our thoughts, the depth and trueness of our convictions) depends on the quality of what we allow past our gates.
This is why September reflections feel so necessary. Cold weather brings cold truths about what owns our attention. When quieter days and longer nights are almost enforced, we’re confronted with everything we let through.
Do we still recognise our own voice? Or have we become so accustomed to thinking alongside other people's cadences that silence feels like emptiness?
Every decision you make will ripple outward, affecting your trajectory and the culture you create around you. So you need to know that your choices emerge from a core that remains invariant regardless of social setting—something the Stoics called the "inner citadel", that unchanging centre that external circumstances cannot disturb.
Virginia Woolf wrote that "the mind of man is the most capricious of insects—flitting, fluttering", and today’s world has made that butterfly mind only more fragmented. So, let September be an experiment in allowing consciousness to settle and discover what it naturally alights upon when not directed by algorithms or noise.
As autumn deepens, start returning to fundamentals: work that emerges from internal conviction rather than external validation, thoughts you develop in solitude, and choices that serve your story.
When we stop consuming other people's realities, we make room for our own to be created. That’s the beauty of our own inertia. And perhaps that's the deepest truth: we must learn to be alone with our own mind before we can trust it to navigate the world authentically. In the quiet months ahead, we build not just discipline, but discernment—the ability to distinguish between what's ours and what we've been told should be ours.
Because in the end, the most radical act might be the simplest one: choosing to live from the inside out, rather than the outside in.