Is It Burnout Or Are You Soul Sick?
Notes on what the dominant culture does to our inner lives
We are living through a weird experiment in the externalization of human experience. Most of us spend our days in near-constant contact with information, stimulation, and noise. Sitting quietly with ourselves has become rare and (for me at least) often a challenge, and the inner life, which used to be something people stumbled into during idle moments, now requires deliberate effort to access.
Rollo May was writing about a version of this in the 1950’s, describing an “age of anxiety” shaped by geopolitical and social instability, and by the anxious reach for solid ground these circumstances produced: a relentless pursuit of external validation in the form of money, prestige, or the approval of others. It seems to me that what he diagnosed then has only intensified. We are not failing to cultivate our inner lives out of laziness or weakness; we are attempting to do so in an environment that …
