Imagine a person who was born without the ability to hear. Ask yourself “what does their interior monologue sound like?”

You can tax your imagination trying to answer this, but you can also do another thought exercise that might explain why the question is a trap:

Imagine a new species of animals that communicate with each other through wireless signals, broadcast directly from one mind to the next, without anything visible or audible occurring. To be clear, this is not like using a telephone. They're not sending the sound of spoken words on some other frequency. The information that passes between them has no real equivalent in audible sound at all. You could try recording it and then playing it back as audio but it would sound like garbled hash to your ears.

Imagine that the animals call this activity “wiring”, and they can understand each other quite well using it.

Now imagine that, like you, these animals have an inner monologue -- the equivalent of what happens in your mind when you think a bunch of words, to figure something out, without actually speaking. But it's not exactly the same thing, because their primary method of communication is "wiring". So appropriately enough, when they think about sending signals without actually doing it, they call it “inner wiring”.

Now ask them what their “inner wiring” would “wire” like if they couldn’t “wire”.

The question is crazy because you don't know what the noun is, what the adjective means, or what the verb is doing. So you have to throw all that away. What you're really asking is, "how do you communicate with yourself, if you can't use the units of expression and reasoning that you need to communicate with others?"

It's obvious that you can think without "inner wiring". You yourself are proof of this. Want to know what it would be like? You have an answer: It would be like you. And yet, you can still think quite complicated things without engaging a wireless transmitter ... or opening your mouth.

You're using something adjacent to - underneath - those sensory means of communicating. It would be there, even if those means were stripped away. But here's a fun riddle for you: What would thinking be like, if all those sensory tools were stripped away? I don't mean, "what if you were suddenly struck deaf," I mean, "what if you somehow learned to think without having any senses at all?"

Give us even the faintest, most tenuous sense - anything at all - and with time and willpower we can conjure the most amazing thoughts. But what if there was nothing? I rather suspect there would be no thought either.

And so we arrive at ... "Sum, ergo cogitare possum". René Descartes would be proud?? Hmm.

Outside the cafe today I heard a bunch of kids in their early 20’s reminiscing about the "good old days" of being ten years old, talking about console games, bumper cars, candy bar fundraiser campaigns in school, and lemonade stands.

"Bruh, I made 120 dollars selling lemonade in one day. I sat outside with a guitar, bruh. In a chair."

"Nice bruh!"

"I was, like, learning how to play and I thought I was real good. So I’d make up songs about lemonade. And so many people walked by. One guy gave me a 20 dollar bill for a cup of lemonade, bruh."

"Haha! What!"

"I was like, what do I even do with this money? Can I take this? Bruh, he walked away without asking for change. I don’t even remember what I bought with it."

"My Dad’s friend is like, a gardener at Disneyland, bruh."

"You mean, a dream maker, or whatever they call them."

"Yeah bruh. He has a special card that’s green. All the normal people get cards when they go in, but his was green."

"Yeeeah!"

"He took us on the Toy Story ride when it wasn’t open for the public yet, bruh. It was so amazing, bruh, I was like, oh my god, I’m VIP at Disneyland.

"Ballin’ bruh."

"I was so ballin' bruh."

The speech patterns are so weird! I was packing up my bike so I heard a lot of it, and I wanted to make some kind of friendly comment, but I had no idea what to say. "Bruh, if I made 120 dollars at your age, I would have gone to Fry's Electronics and bought a hard drive."

(Long, confused, pause.) "Okay, sir."

It’s like ... a thousand hours of urban influencer prattle and braggadocio, flattened down and then used as a strainer, to create this very specific dialect, and so help me I know these people are smart - they’re Berkeley suburban kids, basically raised in luxury, with every resource at their disposal - yet I hear that dialect floating out of their mouths and I want to deduct five hundred points on the "reliable", "dependable", "interesting", and "experienced" scales, and start from the assumption that all they’re really good for is being crass consumers and working service-economy jobs, because they would slack off, and crap on, anything harder.

Yes, I am definitely too old, and I know it. What's amusing to me is, it's the dialect, not even the subject matter, that's messing with my head.

And also, yes: For a certain amount of time at that age, I slacked off, and crapped on, most of what adults claimed was worthwhile!