Last year, in the midst of a particularly harrowing time in my personal life, I booked a sixty-minute appointment at a “modern float therapy studio.” “Float therapy” is a form of prolonged sensory deprivation, in which you place your body in a sealed, dark, noiseless tank that contains a shallow pool of saltwater, perfectly calibrated to be the same density as your body so that you float effortlessly. The idea is that you shut out the outside world and are alone with your thoughts. I told a few people I was doing this beforehand. The reaction was, almost exclusively, “why would you want to be alone with your own thoughts?”

This sort of unmediated communion with the self remains, even in this time of our individual isolation in our respective homes, a terrifying prospect. As a popular meme goes, we want the rewards of being loved without the mortifying ordeal of being known — even by ourselves. And we have ample options — TV, the internet, social media — to help avoid that whole ordeal. I wanted to reject that. I was having a lot of thoughts, and I figured they could use my company.

In a recent New York Times magazine piece, Kyle Chayka describes the phenomenon of sensory deprivation at length. Chayka sees it not as a way to get closer to yourself but as an example of the cultural phenomenon of our growing desire for self-obliteration. “A little death, as a treat,” he calls it. The world around us can be so difficult to understand, so overwhelming, so addled with inputs, all of the time, that many of us have slid slowly but persistently toward nothingness as a reaction to the muchness.