Stay soulful
In my view, a person’s soul is their capacity to express themselves authentically, connect with others, and feel that they belong to something larger than themselves. This is a part of what it means to be human. Something feels soulful when it expresses or facilitates connection and belonging and becomes soulless when connection is subordinated to other goals such as money, efficiency, status, or attention.
Many of us spend our lives seeking substitutes for genuine connection, such as wealth, power, fame, pleasure, and achievement, without realising that none of these can replace the real thing.
For instance, a person who would do absolutely anything to make more money or elevate their status often comes across as soulless. The same is true of a corporate human resources memo filled with terms such as “wellness” and “support” whose main purpose is to protect the organisation from legal trouble. Language can mimic human concern while primarily serving a different purpose.
Any intimacy attained through payment or manipulation betrays a similar tension. Even if an escort says all the “right” things and behaves the way their client requests, both parties tacitly understand that the interaction is fundamentally conditional on payment. A person can memorise pickup lines and learn rhetorical techniques for attracting romantic attention, only to discover that the “success” achieved through those techniques fails to satisfy their deeper desire to be loved for who they actually are. Despite getting what they thought they wanted, something still feels missing.
Consider instead the living room of an elderly couple who have lived in the same home for decades. We might notice ornate furniture from an earlier era, portraits of their children lining the mantelpiece, souvenirs from old holidays, and awards from their younger years standing proudly on a cabinet. None of these things may be particularly valuable on their own, but they offer an intimate glimpse into who these people are. We encounter traces of their earlier lives, relationships, memories, and aspirations. We may even recognise aspects of our own lives in the things they have chosen to preserve.
Now imagine a very different environment that many of us would be familiar with. A wide road lined with power cables and repetitive buildings constructed as cheaply as possible. Such places may be highly functional, cost relatively little to build, and generate considerable economic activity. Yet we often describe them as soulless because they tell us very little about the spirit or people of a place.
Landmarks such as the Sagrada Familia, the Eiffel Tower, and the Taj Mahal are distinctive human creations rooted in the particular history and culture of the places where they were built. People visit these monuments in hopes of encountering something sublime. But as tourists flock to them, souvenir shops, street vendors, and advertisements emerge to take advantage of the commercial opportunities. The experience of visiting these places starts feeling more transactional. We arrive searching for an encounter with something unique and find ourselves moving through a system designed to process us as consumers.
Modern technology, despite its promises, has not solved the problem of disconnection and may in some ways have made it worse. The internet promised to make humanity more interconnected than ever before, yet many people experience a profound sense of alienation while spending hours scrolling through social media. Many of us turn to online gaming, parasocial relationships with celebrities and livestreamers, and other distractions to avoid these feelings of loneliness and despair.
Artificial intelligence is touted as an even more sophisticated band-aid. AI can listen with infinite patience, respond sympathetically, remember what matters to us, and increasingly simulate the experience of being understood. But however convincing chatbots and humanoid robots become at simulating companionship, we can recognise that the simulation of connection is not genuine connection itself.
The mistake we’ve made is thinking that connection is something we experience by attaining something, rather than something we must actively cultivate ourselves. We often pursue efficiency, wealth, technology, and achievement because we believe they will help us create more of the things that make life meaningful. But if the direction of these pursuits takes us away from authentic expression, connection, and belonging, becoming more efficient at travelling in the wrong direction will not bring us any closer to what we were looking for.
The first step towards a more authentic sense of connection is therefore to become more authentic ourselves. This means loosening our dependence on socially imposed expectations and making room to discover and engage with the things that genuinely matter to us. From there, we can seek relationships with people who see us and wish to connect with us on the basis of who we actually are. In order to connect with the souls of others, it’s best first to elevate ourselves spiritually and get to know our own souls.
See you tomorrow with something new!
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