self-occupation

So self-occupation is hardly ideal, but at least it leverages our strengths.

Michael B. Laskoff: America Occupies Itself 2009

Absorbed in her own hopes and fears, whilst every hour harassed her more intolerably, Marian was unable to play the part of an encourager; she had never known such exclusiveness of self-occupation.

New Grub Street 2003

The self-occupation, the pride, the abstraction of the former are to the female mind disagreeable; studious habits and unusual self-denial seem to it purposeless; lofty enthusiasm, public spirit, the solitary pursuit of an elevated ideal, are quite out of its way: they rest too little on the visible world to be intelligible, they are too little suggested by the daily occurrences of life to seem possible.

Harvard Classics Volume 28 Essays English and American Various

The self-occupation, the pride, the abstraction of the former are to the female mind disagreeable; studious habits and unusual self-denial seem to it purposeless; lofty enthusiasm, public spirit, the solitary pursuit of an elevated ideal, are quite out of its way: they rest too little on the visible world to be intelligible, they are too little suggested by the daily occurrences of life to seem possible.

John Milton (1859) 1909

But can't you see that it is self-occupation, the being absorbed with your own sensations and feelings, and with trying to imagine what people are thinking about you, that makes you so miserable?

A Little Country Girl Susan Coolidge 1870

Mr. May looked at him with scientific observation, and Ursula with half-affronted curiosity; his self-occupation was an offence to the girl, but it was only amusing to her father.

Phoebe, Junior 1862

It is mere self-occupation, and helps to make you blunt and shy. '

The Young Step-Mother Charlotte Mary Yonge 1862

"chaperone," and he would most willingly have planted her in the congenial soil of the Shoshone House, which would have provided a wider field for her restlessness and self-occupation, and many more people to listen to her narratives and sympathize with her complaints.

Clover Susan Coolidge 1870