Grief

What's behind that perpetual feeling of emptiness?

Read time: Approx 5 min

We live in a culture that’s terrified of the notion of stillness.

A quiet room, a blank weekend, a paused conversation…these things don’t feel neutral anymore. They feel threatening. Like something’s missing, and we need to fix it fast. So we reach…mindlessly, habitually…for whatever fills the silence. A screen. A snack. A new subscription we’ll forget about in a week. If you’ve ever found yourself ordering a desk lamp at 2 a.m. not because you need one, but because your heart feels like a hollow cave, you’re not alone.

Underneath this frantic, and sadly normalized, consumption is something deeper than boredom. It’s grief. A lot of it.

Not the kind of grief that gets casseroles and “my condolences.” This is ambient grief. Deep, soul-level grief. The low, persistent ache of losses never fully acknowledged. Relationships that faded. Dreams deferred. A parent slipping into dementia. A global pandemic that quietly rewired our sense of time, safety, and purpose. It’s a loss that was never given a proper funeral.

When COVID arrived, it didn’t just take lives. It took certainty. It took rhythm. It took the illusion that the world, with all its flawed routines, was at least predictable. We didn’t mourn that loss…we adapted. We “sucked it up".” We “moved on.” Quickly. Mechanically. Zoom calls replaced birthday parties. Masks became accessories. Bread-making became therapy. And in the midst of it all, we quietly buried the enormity of what was lost.

Not just loved ones. But the life we thought we were building.

Graduations, weddings, first jobs, travel dreams—all paused or permanently reshaped. Economic upheaval shredded long-held career paths. People who thought they were on solid ground suddenly found themselves asking: “What now?” And looming behind it all, the existential gut punch: we could die at any moment.

That kind of seismic loss historically came with rituals. Communal pauses. Collective reckonings.

Instead, we tried to bounce back. But bouncing back is NOT healing. It's avoidance. It's fear.

You can’t bypass grief with productivity. You can’t detox it with a green juice and a gratitude journal. When it isn’t processed, it doesn’t disappear—it just metastasizes. Into anxiety. Into numbness. Into physical pain. Into autoimmune conditions. Into compulsive scrolling. Into compulsive cleaning. Into constant second-guessing of the outfits we wear or the decorations we hang. Into mindless consumption.

We Mistake Accumulation for Evolution

Our culture has sold us a counterfeit version of growth.

Humans were meant to evolve. Spiritually. Emotionally. Slowly, and often painfully. Through heartbreak, quiet revelations, and the hard-earned wisdom of loss. That’s what growth was supposed to look like: the shedding of ego, the expansion of empathy, the deepening of presence.

But capitalism…slick, tireless capitalism…rewrote the story. Now growth means getting richer. Smarter. Hotter. More productive. It’s LinkedIn résumé lines. It's followers. It's moving up, scaling faster, doing more.

So we strive. Endlessly. With no end in sight. Because you can't fill a void with things.

And even when we “succeed,” something still feels hollow.

That’s why the brilliant doctor—letters trailing his name like medals—is still quietly miserable. Depressed. Empty. Because he was taught that collecting accolades was growth. But no one taught him how to sit with grief. How to release old identities. How to love himself through transformation, not just through triumph.

We don’t lack ambition. We lack spiritual scaffolding. We don’t know how to become. We only know how to perform.

The Grief of the Self You Used to Be

Part of becoming…REAL becoming…is learning to say goodbye.

We all carry images of who we once were. The jacked dude. The funny one. The pretty one. The college athlete. The life of the party. The one with zero back pain and a metabolism like a furnace. There’s a strange kind of reverence we carry for those versions—an unspoken desire to hold on, just a little longer. “I’ll start on Monday.” Just one more weekend where I can eat Ian’s pizza at midnight and still feel okay at 8 a.m. Just one more summer where that swimsuit feels like it used to.

But bodies age. Faces change. Life accumulates…on our hips, in our joints, behind our eyes. And every wrinkle, every ache, is a subtle invitation to let go of someone we used to be.

That’s grief, too. And it deserves to be honored.

Letting go isn’t rejection. It’s gratitude. It’s saying, “That version of me mattered. They carried me here. And now I have to keep going.”

It’s a kind of emotional shedding. A quiet, tender funeral for a former self.

And it’s okay to miss those past identities. But clinging too tightly to them…trying to resurrect the athlete, the ingenue, the best dressed, the one with fewer lines and more swagger…it only deepens the void. It buries the new you that is just waiting to be seen.

When we don’t allow ourselves to say goodbye to who we were, we block the beauty of who we’re becoming.

We Can’t Selectively Numb Our Way to Wholeness

The heartbreaking truth is that we’ve mistaken stimulation for satisfaction. We’ve mistaken excitement for happiness. That little rush when you buy something, when you match with someone, when you get likes on a photo—that’s dopamine. Not joy. Not peace. Not even happiness in its truest form. Just a chemical blip that says, “Hey, you’re still alive. This feels kinda good. Get me more of that.”

But to actually feel alive? That takes depth. And depth requires grief. Depth requires the full spectrum of human emotions—not just the warm, fuzzy ones.

Because love doesn’t exist without loss. Peace isn’t just the absence of noise; it’s the presence of integration. Of having felt what needed to be felt, and letting it settle.

And yet, the collective glue that once held us together…ritual, community, shared mourning…is dissolving. We grieve in silos now. Individual therapy has replaced the fire circle. Self-help books stand in for elders. Instead of wailing together, we put in our AirPods and try to “process” with the immaculate and feigned wisdom of faces, like Andrew Huberman, or Joe Rogan.

Grief isn’t meant to be carried solo. It's meant to be witnessed. Shared.

In our failure to do that, we’ve built a world that constantly chases wholeness but rarely sits still long enough to find it.

So What Do We Do With the Void?

We acknowledge it.

We say, “I see you,” to the empty spaces inside us.

We stop trying to fill them with stuff and start filling them with presence. With permission to feel. To remember. To release.

Maybe next time you feel the tug-that urge to distract, to consume, to run—pause. Ask yourself not what you want, but what you’re holding on to. Or refusing to let go of.

You might find it’s not a product, but a person. Not a craving, but a memory. Not a need, but an old version of yourself who just wants to be lovingly laid to rest.

And on the other side of that release?

That’s where the real joy lives. The kind that doesn’t shout, but hums quietly. Steady. Human. Whole.

---

Check out more free articles here.