This concept cannot be understood without creative-practice and psychology simultaneously: the artistic encounter (Popova in nature, the writer with their material) requires the psychological framework of selfing-and-suffering, and the psychological framework requires the artistic-encounter framework to be operationally available rather than merely theoretical. Neither domain alone explains why standing in the woods unselfs you or why most of human suffering is a problem of selfing.
Popova is talking about poetry. She drifts into the line that does the load-bearing work.
Science will never tell you the meaning of a bird. And I also think it's dangerous to search for the meaning of a bird. There is no meaning of a bird. There's only an encounter between us and what is not ourselves. This practice of unselfing. And the moment we try to find meaning in something that is not ourselves, that's also a danger.1
Perell catches the word. Unselfing.
Popova nods. Unselfing. This is actually — I love that notion.
She names where she got it. Iris Murdoch, in a book called Existentialists and Mystics, uses the word almost as an aside. She talks about how art and nature — encounters with art and with the natural world — are occasions for unselfing. And I read this maybe ten or fifteen years ago, and it has never let me go because it immediately landed so true when I spend time in Patagonia, or in the woods where I live. It is absolutely the work of unselfing — and then kind of absorbing external reality in a way that changes my internal reality, so that I can then give it shape in the writing as something that is not just me.
The word becomes operational for her. Unselfing is what happens in the encounter with what-is-not-self. The encounter changes the interior. The changed interior produces writing that isn't just me, because some of what isn't me has been let in.
Murdoch's Existentialists and Mystics essays argue that the moral life requires what she calls attention — sustained, careful regard for what is actually there. The opposite of attention is the fat relentless ego that imposes its preferences on whatever it encounters. The ego perceives the world only insofar as the world serves the ego's storylines. Anything that doesn't serve gets distorted or filtered out.
Unselfing is the practice of letting the ego's interests go quiet enough that what's actually there can be perceived. Murdoch's primary examples are aesthetic. Standing in front of a great painting. Sitting with a difficult poem. Watching a bird in the field. In each case, the self relaxes its grip on the experience. The painting or the bird is allowed to be whatever it is, not what the self wishes it were. The relaxation is the unselfing.
The corollary that does the work: most of our suffering as human beings is a problem of selfing.1 Popova names this almost in passing. The spiral that burrows inward and inward and inward, to the exclusion of the outside world, is suffering. The relief of suffering is partly the relief from being so selfed. The encounter with what-is-not-self relieves selfing for a moment. The relief is what nature and art are for, in part.
This isn't escape. The encounter isn't dissociation. The self doesn't disappear. The self relaxes. The bird is allowed to be a bird, not an instance of one of the self's pre-existing categories. The painting is allowed to be a painting, not a confirmation of one of the self's pre-existing aesthetic theories. The reality is allowed to be reality. The self is released from the work of constantly making it serve the self's storylines.
Popova's strongest unselfing experiences come from time in remote nature. Patagonia. The woods where she lives. She's specific about why. I feel very much like I'm just a creature among creatures, and I become so much less interested in the stories that we call self.
The remote-nature condition contains less material the self can use to maintain itself. In the city the self is constantly fed — billboards, conversations, work emails, phone notifications, the constant micro-interactions that confirm the self's existence as a specific person with specific concerns. Remote nature gives almost none of this. The self doesn't have its usual reinforcements. The grip relaxes. The unselfing happens with comparatively less effort.
Art can do the same operation in less stripped conditions. A great painting in a museum can produce the unselfing for the prepared viewer. A poem can, for the prepared reader. The condition for the operation is the viewer's willingness to let the work be itself rather than to use the work to confirm the self. Most museum-goers can't do this. Most readers can't either. The capacity is trainable. Some forms of art-training are partly training of this capacity.
Murdoch's frame is more clinical-philosophical. Popova brings it into the writer's life. I become so much less interested in the stories that we call self. The self is a story. The self isn't a fact. The story can be loosened — it can be allowed to be less interesting than it usually is to itself. The loosening produces room for the world to enter on its own terms.
For writers specifically, this matters. Writers who can't unself produce writing that is mostly about themselves even when the surface topic is something else. The bird gets used as a symbol for the writer's mood. The painting gets used as evidence for the writer's argument. The world gets folded into the writer. The writing is selfed. Readers can feel it. The writing thins.
Writers who can unself produce writing that lets the world stay world. The bird is the bird. The painting is the painting. The writer's contact with these things produces the writing, but the writing isn't about the writer's contact — it's about the things, in a way that includes how the contact felt without making the contact the subject.
This is why Popova's essays often feel both intimate and not-narcissistic. She is present in the work; the work isn't about her. The unselfing is operational. She's developed the muscle. The muscle is what makes the essays work.
This page pairs with Poetry as Back Door of Consciousness (Popova) — the back-door page describes one mechanism by which unselfing happens (poetry positioning the reader inside something). The two together describe Popova's full account of what literature does.
It connects to Look for a Reason to Love Them (Hari) — Hari's interview-stance is the journalistic version of unselfing toward another person. The writer drops their own categorizations and lets the subject be the subject. The pages share an underlying operation.
It connects to In and Out of Solitude as Strategy (Powers) — Powers's solitude phase is structurally an unselfing phase. The pulled-up covers and the bare ceiling are the conditions for the self's reinforcements to go quiet. Powers describes the cycle in writer-craft terms; Popova describes the same cycle in art-and-nature terms. The vault should hold both pages as instances of the same operation at different scales.
It's October. Popova is on the property in the Hudson Valley where she lives. She's been walking for an hour. The trees are mid-turn — some still green, some yellow, one specific maple already deep red. The air is cold enough that her breath shows.
She stops at a clearing where she usually doesn't stop. There's no particular reason. A jay is doing something with an acorn. She watches. The jay places the acorn between its feet, holds it, then moves to a different spot in the clearing. Then places it again. Then moves again. It's caching food. She's seen jays do this before; she's never quite watched one do it from this angle.
The self relaxes. The jay isn't an instance of jay — the category — to be checked off a mental list. The jay isn't a symbol for something Popova feels. The jay is doing what the jay is doing. The jay's caching is not for her. The jay's existence doesn't refer to her at all.
She stands there for maybe four minutes. The jay finishes, moves to a higher branch, looks somewhere else. Popova hasn't been thinking. She's been with the jay. The interior reality that was tight when she started the walk is now slightly less tight. Something has shifted.
Two hours later she sits at the keyboard. The morning's encounter shows up in what she writes. Not as a description of the jay — the essay she's writing isn't about jays. As a quality of attention. The essay carries the texture of someone who has, this morning, let the world be the world. The reader, reading the essay, can feel that texture even though they can't locate where it came from. The unselfing made the writing different. The reader is the beneficiary even though they don't know they are.
You're a writer or a reader who wants to develop this. Three operational moves.
Go to places where the self has fewer reinforcements. Remote nature is the most direct. Cathedrals can do it. Certain museums in the off-hours. Long-distance trails. Any place where the typical micro-interactions that maintain the self don't reach. Spend hours, not minutes. The self relaxes on its own timescale, not on the visitor's schedule.
When you're there, let yourself notice. Specific things. The texture of bark on a specific tree. The exact angle of light at this exact moment. The sound the wind is making in this specific pine. The noticing is the operation. The noticing is what unselfs. The noticing is also harder than it sounds — most contemporary attention is generic (you've seen trees before, this is just another tree). The discipline is to attend to this specific tree, as if you'd never seen a tree before. The discipline often fails on first attempts. Keep attempting.
Read writers who model the capacity. Annie Dillard. Loren Eiseley. Robin Wall Kimmerer. John Berger. Mary Oliver. These writers have developed the muscle and their writing is partly a transmission of it. Reading them slowly, repeatedly, over years, builds the muscle in the reader. The transmission is somatic — you become more like the writer's attention by reading the writer's attention.
The work compounds. Year five is different from year one. The capacity becomes available not just in remote nature but in the ordinary day. The bird in the city park can produce a small unselfing. The conversation with the stranger can produce one. The cup of coffee at the kitchen table can produce one, if the prior years of work have built the muscle that can attend.
You've collapsed when you find yourself exhausted by being yourself. The interior chatter never stops. The world feels like background to the self's continuous monologue. Nothing arrives from outside that isn't immediately metabolized into the self's existing storylines. The exhaustion is the diagnostic. The self is doing too much work. The work would be relieved by unselfing.
You're running the discipline when you find yourself, occasionally, interested in something for its own sake rather than for what it means about you. A bird. A stranger's gait. A specific shade of green you've never paid attention to before. The interest is brief. The interest doesn't have to produce anything. The interest is itself the success. Over years, the brief interests accumulate into a different relationship with the world.
The phenomenological tradition has substantial overlap with Popova's claim. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception argues for a similar architecture. The contemplative-Christian tradition has run the same operation under different names (kenosis, self-emptying). The Buddhist tradition has the deepest articulation (anatta, non-self). Popova is in a wide and well-supported tradition.
The tension. The capacity can be theorized into something therapy is supposed to deliver and then either taken as a goal or abandoned in frustration. Popova doesn't quite say this, but the way unselfing gets recommended in contemporary wellness culture often turns it into one more thing the self must achieve, which is itself a selfed orientation. The mature practice is paradoxical: you can't unself by trying harder to unself. The trying is the selfing. The practice is more like creating conditions for the unselfing to arise, then letting it arise on its own.
A second tension. The capacity can be used to avoid responsibility. The person who unselfs themselves into the woods and disengages from the social-political-relational obligations the self carries has used the practice as escape. Murdoch's frame doesn't endorse this. The unselfing is meant to return the practitioner to the world more capable of attending to it. Unselfing that produces withdrawal is a misuse. The vault should keep the distinction.
Spend an afternoon with a Mary Oliver poem about wild geese. The poem doesn't argue. It doesn't analyze. It describes the geese flying over and what it's like to be in the field with them. You read the poem. You're in the field for a moment. The geese are real, the field is real, and you've been there with the writer for the duration of the poem. The unselfing has happened, briefly. You can feel it before you can name it.
Now spend an afternoon with a critical essay about Mary Oliver. The essay analyzes her work, places her in literary history, identifies her techniques, situates her in relation to other poets. The essay is informative. The essay does not unself you. The essay keeps you in the critic's self — the critic's expertise, the critic's judgments, the critic's frame.
Both kinds of writing are real. They do different work. Oliver's poem produces unselfing in the reader. The critical essay analyzes the conditions under which Oliver's poem produces unselfing in the reader. The first is the operation. The second is the description of the operation. Both are valuable. Most contemporary literary education trains students to do the second and not the first. Most readers leave education able to analyze poems but not to be opened by them.
Whyte and Karlsson run adjacent positions. Whyte's overhearing yourself as good writing is the writer's version of unselfing — the writer's self quiets enough that what's underneath can speak. Karlsson's don't think, look is the receptive-mode version — the writer doesn't pre-categorize, lets the world enter, then writes from what entered. Three writers, three angles, one underlying practice: the work happens when the self gets out of the way enough for what isn't self to come through.
This page lives at three intersections.
In creative-practice, it names the capacity that distinguishes writers who produce work that doesn't feel narcissistic from writers who don't. The capacity is trainable. The training is largely a matter of giving the writer conditions where the self can relax.
In psychology, it identifies a mechanism that's been described under different vocabularies (ego dissolution, non-self, flow, peak experience). The convergence across psychological traditions confirms the phenomenon is real. The operational instruction varies; the underlying mechanism is the same.
In contemplative practice, it's continuous with two and a half millennia of explicit practice across Buddhist, Christian, Sufi, and Vedic traditions. The traditions developed sophisticated technique for the operation. Most contemporary writers and readers don't know the techniques exist. The literary practice rediscovers them in a thinner form.
The page is genuinely cross-domain because the operation requires all three frames to be operationally available rather than merely theoretical.
The Sharpest Implication The contemporary attention economy is structurally hostile to unselfing. Every minute of distracted attention is a minute of selfing — the self being maintained by continuous micro-interactions. The aggregate cultural effect is that most people are operating at substantial selfing-saturation and don't know it. The exhaustion they feel they attribute to overwork or family obligations or the news cycle. Some of the exhaustion is actually the cost of maintaining a self continuously. The fix isn't more rest in the conventional sense. The fix is time and conditions where the self can stop maintaining itself. Most people don't structurally have access to those conditions. Popova has carved them out of her life through specific decisions (months in Patagonia, ad-free website, no editorial calendar). Most people can't replicate the structure. The aggregate result is that the population is running at higher selfing-load than is sustainable, which produces both the mental-health symptoms and the increasingly self-referential culture. The fix is structural, slow, and unlikely to come from the institutions whose economic models depend on the attention economy.
Generative Questions