Why Life Can Feel Empty Even When Everything Is Fine

The modern ache

There’s this strange kind of misery that arrives unannounced, almost as if it got the good manners your Mam tried so hard to teach you.

No funeral has wrecked the week. No sex-crazed lover has run off with a tantric plasterer from Kilkenny. The bills have been paid, the fridge still hums its song, the job hasn’t yet driven you to fake your own death in rural Slovenia.

On paper, life’s decent enough. You’ve got friends, or a few half-mad pals you text every so often. You’re not in open crisis. Nevertheless, there comes the odd gray hour when you notice your life and feel like a ghost renting a room in it.

That’s what makes the whole thing so maddening. If something obvious had gone wrong, you could point at it and say, “Oi, you’re the gobshite villain, the rat bastard causing the trouble.” But when life is technically fine and still feels hollow, the mind begins sniffing around like a starved German Shepard loose in a graveyard for reasons.

You wonder whether you’re ungrateful, lazy, spoiled, melodramatic, secretly depressed, or simply turning into one of those adults who call emotional bankruptcy “maturity” and then reward themselves with a sad little flavored, protein-packed, Skyr yogurt.

How many of us have lived in this state for years? You keep functioning. You keep replying to emails. You keep buying groceries and watching streaming series you don’t really enjoy, but all your mates say it’s good.

You keep saying “I’m grand” in that old Irish style, which can mean anything from “life is tolerable” to “I’m pretty much one more parking ticket away from pitching a tent in a forest and shunning the lot of yous.”

What we rarely do is admit that something essential has gone dim.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

When nothing is wrong but everything feels flat

Modern psychology has names for all of this. There’s anhedonia, the reduced ability to feel pleasure. There’s burnout. There’s emotional blunting.

There are also, thankfully, older and richer words. Medieval Christians wrote about acedia, a spiritual listlessness, a deadening of care.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called despair a sickness of the self, and he knew perfectly well that despair doesn’t always stagger into the room weeping like a Jane Austin character. Sometimes it arrives washed, dressed, punctual, and highly employable, more like a Dan Brown character.

I think you’ll agree with me on this, but I’ve gotten into my auld noggin that many people have been sold a childish picture of suffering. They think pain has to look dramatic to count. We all know the archetype of the suffering artist, who cannot make art unless they’re in immense turmoil.

They think if they’re not weeping on the bathroom floor or setting fire to a relationship out of boredom, they must be fine. A person can be safe, solvent, well-liked, and inwardly stale as week-old bread.

Part of the trouble is that our culture worships stability but says very little about aliveness. We are trained to aim for being busy wee bees, all productive and able to manage; we weren’t trained to find meaning.

Aye, get the job, keep the peace, pay the rent, stay hydrated, optimize your calendar, buy the orthopedic pillow, and perhaps, if the various archetypes larping as gods are smiling, spend sixty quid on a candle that smells like “forest ritual,” but really smells like a cow elk’s vagina, while your soul quietly evaporates in the corner.

This is presented as adulthood. Really, though, lads, it’s organized sleepwalking.

For many of us, life feels like maintenance. Admin, updates, reminders, passwords, errands, notifications, performative self-care, endless low-grade digital nibbling.

You wake, you scroll, you answer, you commute, you consume, you collapse. Then the machine politely asks whether you’d like to track your mood. Ah yes, cheers exploititive techbro, that ought to sort the metaphysical famine.

Why modern life deadens the spirit

Boredom is too small a word here, the issue ain’t simply that people are bored. What many are suffering from is disenchantment because the magic of life we experienced as children is gone.

Haven’t we been flooded with stimulation and starved of encounter? There’s always something to be looking at and almost nothing to behold. Every spare second gets filled with sound, image, argument, sales pitch, outrage, podcasts, hot takes, memes, and all the other little pellets of novelty fired at the skull from a glowing rectangle of dread.

The nervous system is never still enough to deepen, and never nourished enough to wake up. It jitters, then flattens. It gulps sugar and fog.

South Korean German philosopher Byung Chul Han has written about the exhaustion and smoothness of modern life, the way endless productivity and overstimulation wear down the self. British cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote about the emotional mess of late capitalism, that thick air in which people begin to feel privately defective for what are often public conditions.

They were both circling the same beast. A culture can be functional and spiritually grotesque at the same time. We are both witnesses and experiencers of it.

Then there’s the body, the poor neglected beast that carries the whole show. How many of us now live from just the neck up? We think in abstractions, worry in abstractions, compare ourselves in abstractions, and spend half our waking hours staring at pixelated counterfeit life.

No wonder life feels unreal. When the body is treated like a taxi for the brain, the world loses texture. Days become informational. Nothing is tasted properly. Nothing lands.

That’s one reason why people do mad things in periods of flatness. They start rows, quit jobs, spend dosh they don’t have, text old flames, drink too much, attach themselves to charismatic lunatics with podcasts, or convince themselves they need to move to Lisbon and become a ceramicist.

They are trying, however clumsily, to feel the voltage of being alive again.

The old philosophers and mystics knew this feeling

Long before neuroscience gave us words like dopamine and reward circuitry, smarter folk understood that human beings can lose contact with life while continuing to move through it.

Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argued that people need meaning as surely as they need food and shelter. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that modern people suffer when they lose contact with symbol, depth, and soul.

German theologian Meister Eckhart spoke of the need to wake up to the divine ground of ordinary life. Chinese sage Lao Tzu, the head honcho of Taoism, warned against overforcing, overgrasping, and losing one’s alignment with the living flow of things.

Different tongues, aye, but all talking about the same trouble. Life goes dead when nothing is met deeply. When everything becomes utility, task, status, performance, noise, we’ve stopped looking long enough for reality to strike us as strange, intimate, and, well, holy.

A leaf in the wind, a dog waiting outside a butcher’s, a church bell tolls on a wet and misty morning, the steam rising from tea on a sad morning, these things can still break a heart open if the person hasn’t sealed themselves shut.

That is the mystical dimension of this whole business, though I use the word carefully because the internet has done fearful damage to it. Mysticism isn’t posting moon memes and buying crystals from a woman named Starfire who lives in Seattle.

It’s the recovery of direct contact, the stripping away of dead perception, the rude and beautiful realization that existence is here, now, immense, unfathomable, and scandalously alive.

How to feel alive again without reinventing your whole life

Begin with proper attention. Sit somewhere alone without your blasted smartphone and watch the world do its thing until it stops looking like background wallpaper.

Read a short story or a poem. Listen to one piece of music without multitasking like a possessed secretary from hell.

Go for a stroll with no audio in your ears other than the soundtrack of reality. Stretch. Lift something heavy-ish a couple of times. Dance like your old uncle Ned in the kitchen. Breathe deeply enough that your ribs are forced to remember they are part of the great kingdom of your great self.

Do something before you consume ten more things. Write a page of internal monologue gibberish. Cook your mother’s stew. Draw cartoons badly. Plant herbs. Repair a chair. The point here is participation, not excellence.

Invite a little risk. Speak more honestly. Take a different route home. Visit somewhere unfamiliar. Ask a better question in conversation. Pray, if prayer means anything to you. Sit in silence, if silence terrifies you. Actually, especially if silence terrifies you.

And do something for someone else. A self-sealed container becomes stale very quickly. Service is a great way of reopening the windows. None of this is glamorous. That is partly why it works.

Joy ain’t permanent excitement

Some days will be plain. Some weeks will be tiring. Some seasons will be fog. That’s just part of the deal of existence.

But there’s a difference between an ordinary life and an absent one. There’s a difference between peace and numbness. There’s a difference between rest and drift. A good life will still contain boredom, grief, chores, waiting rooms, tedious tax forms, and all the rest of the human comedy.

But, even within those humble and irritating passages, a person can remain in contact with the fact of being here, and that contact is what many people are missing when they say, “Nothing’s wrong, so why do I feel dead inside?”

Sometimes the answer is psychological, and professional support is needed.

Depression, trauma, grief, and burnout are all too feckin’ real, and a brisk walk in the park and a better playlist won’t cure every sorrow under the sky. But often there’s another truth lurking nearby. You haven’t failed at life. You’ve just drifted from participation in it.

And that can be mended by a return to attention, embodiment, meaning, small risk, and the old neglected art of letting the world touch you again.

If you liked this article, check out my book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

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