The Hollowing of the Human Soul

We Have Been Robbed.

A Tuareg woman from Algeria, part of the nomadic Berber community of the Sahara Desert, known for their rich cultural heritage and resilience in the arid landscapes.

I was browsing my YouTube feed this morning, then my Substack, then the endless scroll of commentary and confession that constitutes our digital town square. And I saw it everywhere—the fear, the outrage, the pain. A man explaining why he is fleeing Britain because no one can look him in the eye anymore. A woman describing the loneliness of conversations where no one truly listens. Testimonies of exhaustion, of burnout, of lives lived on autopilot. The comments sections overflowing with recognition: “This is me. This is my life. This is what I feel but could not name.” And somewhere between the third video and the fourth essay, it dawned on me with the force of revelation.

We have been robbed.

A Culture of Urgency

In my academic work, I have called our neoliberal capitalist societies “cultures of urgency”—systems designed to keep us perpetually off-balance, forever chasing the next deadline, the next crisis, the next artificial emergency that prevents us from pausing long enough to recognize the cage we inhabit. We move through our days like ghosts haunting our own lives. Bodies occupy spaces while minds fragment across a thousand anxieties—bills, deadlines, the endless scroll of manufactured urgency. We call this living, but it is merely functioning, a kind of spiritual death that has been normalized by a system that profits from our disconnection.

This is not accident. This is design.

Self-Enslavement and The Colonization of Consciousness

The ruling class has perfected what empires of old could only dream of—the complete colonization of human consciousness without the messy business of physical occupation. We police ourselves now, carrying our chains willingly, even gratefully, calling them opportunity. The same imperial logic that once carved up continents now carves up our attention, our capacity for connection, our ability to simply exist without the anxious buzz of productivity echoing in our skulls.

The corporate state has achieved what military force never could—the transformation of entire populations into willing servants of their own exploitation. We no longer need overseers. We oversee ourselves, internalizing the master’s voice until it becomes indistinguishable from our own thoughts.

Consider the last time someone truly listened to you. Not the performance of listening—the nodding, the strategic pauses before launching into their own concerns—but the rare gift of complete presence. When did you last feel fully seen, fully received by another human being? For most of us, such moments have become so scarce they feel miraculous when they occur.

This scarcity is deliberate. Authentic human connection is the greatest threat to elite power. People who truly see each other, who listen with their whole being, who refuse the narcotic of constant distraction, cannot be easily controlled. They ask dangerous questions. They form bonds that transcend the artificial divisions of race, class, and nation that keep us fractured and compliant.

So we are fed a steady diet of crisis and stimulation, our nervous systems hijacked by technologies designed to fragment our attention into profitable units. We scroll through lives we are not living, consume stories we are not writing, pursue achievements that leave us hollow. The very architecture of modern life—the commutes, the open offices, the gig economy—is structured to prevent the deep encounters that might remind us of our humanity.

Scattered Consciousness

We sit across from friends and family, physically present but mentally absent, our consciousness scattered across digital platforms engineered to maximize engagement and minimize reflection. We mistake information for connection, reaction for response, the simulation of relationship for its reality. Our children learn to perform childhood while we perform parenting, both of us colonized by metrics—developmental milestones turned into competitive achievements, screen time measured in precise minutes, academic performance reduced to standardized scores, social interactions quantified through likes and followers, even sleep and steps tracked by devices that profit from our anxiety about optimization—that reduce the sacred to the measurable.

The tragedy runs deeper than individual suffering. We are witnessing the systematic destruction of presence itself—that fundamental capacity to be fully here, fully available to the moment and to each other. What our ancestors understood intuitively, what indigenous cultures still practice despite centuries of assault, we have forgotten: that presence is not a luxury but the foundation of all meaningful existence.

This forgetting serves power. A population that cannot be present cannot truly witness. We cannot see the violence being done in our name, the exploitation that funds our lifestyle, the slow-motion catastrophe of a civilization built on the extraction of everything valuable—resources, labor, attention, life itself, even children—for the benefit of the few.

Donald Trump at the Epstein Estate.

The ruling class understands what we have forgotten: that authentic human encounter is revolutionary. When we truly see each other, the artificial hierarchies that justify inequality begin to crumble. When we listen deeply, we hear the lies that keep us divided. When we are present to our own lives, we recognize the cage we have been trained to call freedom.

Endless Urgency

The mental colonization runs so deep that we blame ourselves for its effects. We are told to practice mindfulness while working jobs that crush the spirit. We are encouraged to build families, buy a house, while drowning in debt designed to keep us enslaved. We seek meditation retreats and self-help seminars, individual solutions to collective trauma, never questioning the system that creates the very stress we pay to escape.

But presence cannot be commodified. It cannot be optimized or monetized or reduced to an app notification. Presence is the one thing that remains stubbornly human in a world increasingly designed to strip us of our humanity. It is our birthright, stolen by a class of people who understand that awake, connected human beings will not tolerate a world where abundance is hoarded while billions suffer.

When we reclaim presence—not as a personal achievement but as an act of resistance—we begin to remember what we have lost. We see through the illusion of inevitability that keeps us trapped. We recognize that this grinding, anxious, disconnected existence is not the natural order but a carefully constructed prison.

The revolution we need is not merely political but spiritual. It begins in the radical act of being fully here, fully human, fully present to the beauty and terror and sacred mystery of existence.

They fear nothing more than a population that has remembered how to see, how to feel, how to be truly present to one another’s joy and suffering. Because in that presence lies the seed of transformation—not just of who holds power, but of what power means. The transformation that makes the world new.

The choice before us is not between comfort and discomfort, but between collaboration and resistance, between accepting the colonization of our souls or fighting to remember what it means to be fully, dangerously, radiantly alive.

- Karim

Yahyah Sinwar and Hassan Eslaiah. Both were killed by Israel.