This Is What Your Soul Is Missing

Finding our way in an upside down world.

I look at the men around me and see that we are all deeply lost. It’s heartbreaking. We’re all —myself included— a product of postmodernity. I too am one of the millions of men who are desperately stumbling in the darkness, reaching out blindly, trying to find something to hold on to.

Slowly, over the past few decades, the good things we had built stopped being good, because we never stopped, and continued building to the point of absurdity. All the good things we had, which increased our freedom and wellbeing, became the complete opposite: prisons, chains, and tools to aid in controlling every aspect of our lives. We became enslaved by our own fears and by a disordered attachment to comfort and safety, and as a consequence, men lost all opportunities to be men and act as men should.

I understand. I understand the persistent feeling of despair, the tempting grip of nihilism, the seductive allure of the void. I understand how your soul screams for something more, something to awaken in it a reason to truly live, and I understand all too well how often it doesn’t find it. I know firsthand how it feels to wake up each morning in an unnatural world, to feel this disconnection from your labor, and to be incapable of maintaining a spirit of hope for more than a few minutes.

I’ve lost my soul many times before. I have let the crushing weight of modernity bury me deep into my own fears. I have felt my spirit wane when looking at a night sky in which there are no longer any stars. I know what this is like.

And while I have no definite answers for you, because not even after 10 years of trying am I completely free from the demons that haunt this world, there are some things that I’ve discovered that could help you in your own fight against the darkness. They have helped me keep the abyss at bay and they continue to be part of a growing arsenal against the invisible forces that reach out to me and attempt to drag me into hell and hopelesness. The testament of their effectiveness is the simple fact that I’m still standing.

I want you to understand that what the world has taken from you is your fire.

The greatest crime of all is the fact that they have numbed us down and anaesthetised our capacity to feel. Cheap dopamine, synthetic substitutes, and the degradation of beauty, among all the other tactics designed to make the human spirit suffer, have made it so every day is just something to get through, instead of the blessing and the gift it was designed to be. We are no longer overwhelmed by the beauty in the simplest of things, our brains victims of overstimulation. What was once colorful and vibrant is now gray and dull.

I want you to understand this is true, and a consequence of your inner fire having been put out.

What your soul is missing is the revival of this fire. Your soul cries out for you to let it burn, to let it loose and stop taming it with pornography, cheap dopamine, fake food, fake labor, fake friendships and a synthetic existence. Your spirit is crying out for you to release it, to let it fly free, to let it soar high and even descend to hell if it needs to, for everything is better than this sedation, than this grayness that kills all life.

Your soul is missing the power of intentionality, and it dreams of a burning purpose to surrender itself to.

It wants to live, truly live. It wants to feel the highs and lows more intensely, with all that that implies. It wants love and pain, it wants nostalgia, sadness, and beauty. Your soul desires art, it desperately seeks to be manifested in your own creations. You have let it be beaten down by the overwhelming numbness of modern life, and it is desperately asking for you to save it before it’s too late.

What you are missing is intention, drive, fire, love. Intensity is preferable to this life that is no life, even if living too intensely means suffering more strongly, even if it means you fly too close to the sun and crash and burn spectacularly.

Anything but failing to live. Anything but not feeling. You cannot pick and choose the emotions you feel, but you can choose their depth. You can choose to feel everything a bit more intensely, or you can choose to kill your soul and die before your time.

Maybe this intensity will save you and me from following in the footsteps of all of those who died without ever living, or maybe it will be a futile effort to break free from this crushing, purposeless world. But I refuse to stand still and let it kill me without a fight.

I choose to rebel against it with all my might and try to live, to suffer, to feel pain, and true joy, to love more intensely, to hope too much, too quickly and be broken by disappointment. To rebuild myself again, and again, to rise and fall. Anything but this endless nothing.

I rebel against the numbness, against the lonely nothingness of comfort.

I will set my soul on fire, even if it means I shall burn.

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