Why life feels empty

Hollow experiences, bullshit, material consumption, and a constant sense of isolation and abandonment.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

— Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote rings as true today as it did in the 19th century. Why do most of us accept a status quo that forces us to give our lives to empty, most often corporate, tasks in soulless offices that provide no meaning or value whatsoever except enhancing the profit margins of owners and CEOs? Why is there no widespread resistance to a system that is the most unfree in the history of humankind?

There is one way to live, one way to survive — their way. Do not fool yourself into thinking otherwise. Do not be gaslighted by the propaganda of ‘freedom,’ consumerism, and material wealth. Your life, more likely than not, is lacking in true meaning, purpose, and breadth of human experience and emotion. Your soul craves for something you know, in your heart, exists and has existed for all human history, yet seems so unattainable now.

What, in fact, are you missing? Why are younger generations more depressed, more consternated, more apathetic than any that came before?

Why do our lives feel so empty?

1. Community

The socioeconomic system we find ourselves in, i.e. capitalism, influences every aspect of our lives, including the type and intensity of relationships we are able to build and the social groups and communities we can maintain.

The alienation of the individual from one another and their own labor is a well-documented consequence of the status quo. As we toil in our cubicles or remote workspaces, often disconnected from the tangible fruits of our labor, the bonds of community are strained as well.

In the constant race for efficiency and productivity, we may find ourselves working long hours, leaving little time for meaningful interactions with friends, family, and neighbors. Children are a luxury and a moral dilemma; caring for our own elderly or sick relatives — a social, communal practice that has endured the millennia — has now become virtually impossible. Competition — for workplaces, resources, housing, money, prestige, political influence — has all but extinguished any form of social cohesion. Hate and (online-) isolationism have become the new norm.

Relationships have mostly been relegated to the workspace, taking the form of brain-draining small talk and empty phrases dominated by the ever-present power-relationships of hierarchy. Take care of what you say, for your career depends on it. A never-ending reserve supply of labor ensures your compliance.

The atomization of the individual — never before have there been so many ‘single-households’ and people who have entirely given up on any social connection — is progressing with frightening speed, contributing to the aforementioned rates of depression, as well as drug use and other short-term dopamine fixers such as alcohol.

2. Purpose

What is the purpose of life? — A question that has haunted us since the first cognitive thought undertaken by homo sapiens. Yet never before with such intensity.

Modern life provides few avenues for release in that regard. While capitalism has undoubtedly led to economic growth and material comfort in the West, it prioritizes profit above all else. This results in a narrow focus on financial success and material accumulation as the primary markers of achievement. As a consequence, most individuals find themselves in careers that do not align with their true passions or sense of purpose.

As David Graeber so thoroughly and convincingly documented, most jobs today are bullshit jobs serving no social or otherwise purpose. On the contrary, the highest-paying jobs are often harmful (marketing, insurance, finance, lobbyism, career-politicians, and so on). Considering that jobs take up most of our time and energy, the psychological consequences of working such a job for years and decades are terrifying. Suicide rates in the Western world are exploding, and the most work-focused societies of all — Japan and South Korea — are the depressing forerunners in that regard.

For most of human history, community has been the highest-valued purpose in one’s life. Your family, your friends, your tribe, your group… for the most part, they do not exist anymore. Survival, at least in the West, is ensured, too, and adventure has been commodified to degrees that climbing the highest mountain is not a matter of skill or daring, but one of money. Nature is being annihilated. We are left with consumerism, entertainment, and drugs.

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.

— Paul Lafargue

3. A common goal

Is there any vision of a Utopian, or at least better society we can work toward? We live in the uncontested rule of Capital — where will it lead us? I have discussed the lies of progress and development before. And I have written about that intangible fear of the dystopian future our societal consensus appears centered on.

We all feel it in our hearts that the future is a dark one; that there is nothing to inspire the human mind. As the climate disaster, precipitated by an economic collapse, is looming ahead, we seem unable to take any meaningful action. Solarpunk, which I have written about as well, provides a futuristic vision of harmonious, yet comfortable co-existence with nature. It seems as unattainable as human colonization of Mars.

Most societies throughout history had something that bound them together, be it religion, nature, or culture. The only thing our leaders seem to be able to conjure up is common enemies — Russia, China, another ‘enemy of the week.’ The Western mind, unable to comprehend its own propagandization, finds meaning only in supposed superiority, internal culture wars, and common hate of the foreign.

The optimism of the 20th century, reflected in popular media such as Star Trek and actual achievements such as Yuri Gagarin leaving the confines of planet Earth, have long given way to Cyberpunk-esque resignation and an acceptance of the corporate, anti-human dogma.

4. Nature

When Henry David Thoreau found his society lacking in actual meaning, he retreated to the birthing womb of our kind — nature. It is this primal home we have collectively decided to tear apart in its entirety. Ancient ecosystems, older than humankind, are failing; countless species disappearing forever in what is the Sixth Mass Extinction (‘Anthropocene Extinction’) of this planet.

Nature has never been separate from humans; we are, quite literally, a part of it. The duality between us — ‘God’s chosen species, made in his semblance — and the rest of the natural world has only appeared when a tiny subsection of the population decided to rise above all else, exploit all else. Enclosure, privatization, ‘the improvement and taming of nature,’ and the unquestioned supremacy and guardianship of the human race have estranged us from our surroundings. Humanism and egocentric individualism have taken the place of our ancient, spiritual bond to all that lives. If we are guardians, we have failed.

Our connection to the living world has been replaced by artificiality in all its kinds; by darkness and fakeness and overstimulation and addictive dopamine feedback loops. All that packaged — in the ‘developed world,’ that is — in comfort and the allure of the habitual.

Soon, it will all be gone and we will be alone in this world. Only then will we realize what we have done.

5. Freedom

The most important spared for last.

In The Dawn of Everything, their comprehensive ode to freedom and liberty, David Graeber (may he rest in peace — how can he be dead when politicians and billionaires are allowed to live?) and David Wengrow demonstrate with scientific rigor and impassioned work how humans throughout the ages have always valued one thing above all else: freedom.

And I mean not the absurdist, utterly bastardized definition (mostly Western) politicians preach from the rooftops (‘9 to 5, or die’). I mean true freedom. This incorporates the possibility of seeking out different, individualized social arrangements, disobeying the system’s commands, and, in serious cases, just leaving.

All three of those freedoms have been made impossible by the emergence of the modern nation-state and its corresponding systems of socioeconomic oppression and monopolization. (Try leaving society to ‘live in the woods’ — soon, you will find yourself unable to turn up food, for the natural world is being killed, and thereafter you will likely occupy a bed in the many prisons that speckle our world, for every square meter of land is ‘owned’ by either private or national entities.)

The realization that we are all prisoners to an abstract scheme often dawns when one leaves school to explore the ‘real world.’ Except that there is nothing to explore. Every joy and happiness you feel, every speckle of purpose you cherish; it’s all at the mercy of someone else.

The day a racist police officer decides he is bored and really wants to try out his new government-issued weapon is the day you realize you have no control over your own life whatsoever. The day an empire decides that your leader harbors imagined weapons of mass destruction to strip your land of resources, killing millions in the process, is the last day of your innocence.

It’s the day your illusionary house of cards comes crashing down. And it should be the first day of your radicalization.

Thanks for reading,

Antonio Melonio

---

If you don’t want to support me on Substack, you can also help sustain my work on Patreon or with a one-time donation.

Thank you.