Souls With Empty Bottoms

How society stunts our access to trauma, responsibility, and growth

This is the kind of article for which I create a paid-access Substack instead of a free one. Get ready for some probably inappropriate views in liberal culture, y’all.

Yesterday, I was out for a walk with a friend, and began talking about why I had decided to marry my husband. I’ve dated a lot of people. Why did I choose to spend my life with him?

I’ve considered this before, of course, but on this walk I thought of something new. I compared Geof to many of the other men I’d dated, and considered how there is something different about Geof. His soul has depth in a way I have rarely seen before. He knows his values and lives by them; he can trade momentary pleasure for lasting integrity; he considers the consequences of his actions. (This is not to say that none of my former partners had this, but he takes it to a new level.)

If souls have depth, it feels like many of the people I know (including me, up until the last few years) are building an edifice over emptiness. And they feel it. Their morals, their sense of purpose, their internal stories; all somehow have no bottom to them, no consistent center. They cast about in the void for meaning, and find only their own voice echoing back.

This is not a defect of character. I’ll write about this in future articles, but I firmly believe that almost everything in our personalities - present and particularly past - is determined by our environment. There are no “weak willed” or “strong willed” people who are born that way. We are trained that way. And if you put a “weak willed” person (or a drug user, or criminal, or [insert trait here]) into an environment that calls them higher, you’ll be amazed how fast they seem like a different person - a person who will “change back” as soon as you return them to their original space. We are what our environment makes us, from moment to moment and over time. As Rumi says, “Judge the moth by the beauty of the candle.”

So, in my opinion, those whose souls have empty bottoms, who are building an edifice over emptiness, never had a chance in their environment to fill.

All images in this post were created by GPT-4 using DALL-E