What do we even mean when we talk about emptiness?
When we talk about the emptiness of our lives, we try to describe an emotion that is hard to grasp, a nebulous feeling of unease and discomfort. More often than not, we might even try to point to a lack of feeling. There is no spark, no joy, no hopes or dreams, not even fear or anger. The heart feels heavy, yet so hollow at the same time.
The reasons for those feelings, or the lack thereof, can be manifold. Just as complex as people are, so are the mechanisms of our suffering. And before we can talk about the many flavors of emptiness, we need to get something out of the way:
Feeling empty can be a symptom of underlying disorders.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder often describe a hollow, aching feeling in their soul. Depression almost always manifests itself in a feeling of emptiness and a lack of drive. Autistic people report not experiencing a certain range of emotions, even though the suffering might come more often from the alienation and rejection this supposed lack brings.
Addictive personalities are also no strangers to the gaping void. Filling that void with substances and a whole variety of dysfunctional habits lies at the very heart of addiction. Emotional numbness is also a familiar companion for people dealing with posttraumatic stress. Their emptiness might be the very thing that helped them survive the turmoil of their traumatic experiences.
Sociopathy and psychopathy also come with a strong feeling of emptiness—a flatness of affect, cutting people off from a whole spectrum of emotions that neurotypicals feel.
I believe that everyone dealing with those personality patterns can benefit from exploring their relationship with their inner void. And that’s what I want to do in this post.
Emptiness is not a new thing. And it’s not your personal failing.
While the feeling of emptiness has taken deep root in modern, capitalist society, the problem definitely isn’t new. 200 years ago, people had already been discussing the loss of meaning and purpose. A whole literary and philosophical genre has its origin in the feeling of boredom and detachment.
But let’s not pretend that aching souls appeared out of nowhere with the beginning of the industrial revolution (around 1760). Facing our existence with dread and overwhelm seems to come with the territory of having a mind that is self-aware. But the invention of corporate greed surely didn’t help. It has complicated the already complicated conundrum of being a sentient lifeform even further.
Why is it so hard to live in these times?
For most of human history, our work, communities, and rituals were tangible: we created, tended, and nurtured things that directly mattered. Then came industrialization and urbanization. Work became abstract, communities fragmented, and the link between effort and meaning blurred.
When we no longer relied on the land we walked on to provide us with food, we lost connection to nature. When we no longer had to depend on our closest community, we stopped learning our neighbors’ names. When fathers started migrating to the cities to offer their labor to factory owners, they severed the ties to their families and their work. When the pursuit of worldly belongings and status started occupying our minds, we stopped searching for a connection to the divine, to something greater than ourselves.
Today, that legacy shows up as a quiet, persistent emptiness: a sense that life is happening around us, but we are only half-present, no longer tethered to our bodies, our creations, and each other.
Am I really not supposed to feel this way?
And when you add (social) media into the mix—constantly convincing us that life has to be bigger than it is, that we’re just not trying hard enough—then nobody should be surprised that emptiness became a festering wound in our collective psyche.
Yet somehow it is supposed to be my own personal responsibility not to feel the aching lack of aliveness? Am I really supposed to drag myself out of bed at 6 o’clock, ride a giant tin can filled with smelly strangers to make it to a 40-hour desk job that I hate? All so I can pay for a place to crash at, eat junk food on the couch, and fall asleep to rich people on TV? And we have to do that until the day we die? Possibly even throwing offspring into that mix?
Am I wrong for not finding that very exciting?
Even highly accomplished people with seemingly fulfilling lives talk about the emptiness in their souls. No matter what they might achieve in life, there always seems to be something missing.
Do you really feel empty? Or are you just numb?
A lot of people who struggle with their feeling of emptiness—though not all—are people who, in fact, feel very deeply. They just happen to live in a world that doesn’t really reward being sensitive and hungry for meaning. So, as a learned defense mechanism or a way to adapt to their surroundings, they shrink themselves into this unfeeling version.
For a lot of us, the seeds for emptiness were planted in our early childhood. Remember kindergarten and school? What a nightmare.
I was such a curious, caring, and attentive kid. I wanted to learn so bad. But all I learned was the sad truth that school is not really the place to gain knowledge but to practice conformity and suppressing my inherent need to move my body, to communicate, to question, and to explore.
And at home, things weren’t a lot better. A family burdened by trauma, depression, and alcoholism quickly snuffed out any joy or hope I could muster after school. Not only did I inherit my family’s sadness and pessimistic outlook on life, but it also set me up for a life devoid of ambition and passion. They also signalled to me that my feelings were invalid, too big for such a small house.
Expressing emotions is a skill that can be taught. Or slapped out of you.
The depression that started growing in my creative, joyful soul was almost a logical consequence of the abuse and neglect—and also a strategy to survive those early years. It numbed me to the pain of being misunderstood, misguided, and misaligned with my needs and capabilities.
That depression, that emptiness, didn’t just lift when I finally moved out of that house. I took that depression with me because it was everything I knew. But calling it depression or emptiness isn’t accurate; beneath that hollow feeling lies a maelstrom of feelings, dreams, and ideas. It points to a void when, in reality, there was a maelstrom of feelings, dreams, and ideas swirling underneath that hollow feeling.
I had just never allowed myself to explore those feelings, had even learned that the voice of my soul is shameful, a thing to be muffled and kept a secret. It didn’t help that my parents were volatile people. Their feelings were something that was hard to understand and deal with as a kid. I learned that feelings were unsafe, erratic, and, quite frankly, pretty embarrassing.
When the adults who raise you throw tantrums at the slightest inconvenience, you might be tempted to believe that suppressing your feelings is the preferable alternative. You would never want to embarrass yourself like that, or burden someone else with such a display, would you?
Or maybe you had guardians who never shared their feelings at all, reacting bewildered and punitive when you showed yours. They might have been struggling with their own neurodivergence, trauma, or emotional inarticulacy themselves—making them incapable of teaching anyone to give a voice to what they’re feeling. And so you never learned either.
But what if I’m really empty inside?
In many eastern religions and philosophies, emptiness is the thing to strive for. In Buddhism, you empty yourself of the burden of human desires and earthly attachments to end your suffering. And while this kind of emptiness isn’t what we mean when we talk about loss of meaning and connection, it’s also not completely unrelated.
Fundamentally, the Western ailment of emptiness signifies absence, while the Eastern concept embodies presence. One gnaws at the spirit, the other marks the road to freedom and peace. My intention in this blog post is not to convince you of adopting the Buddhist idea of emptiness. I want to invite you to explore the reasons why this empty feeling inside you creates so much suffering. Because the answer to that is not as clean-cut as you might think.
Is something missing, or are you just not allowed to be?
I already compared the feeling of emptiness to the feeling of numbness. I described from my own experience that the inner void might not be a black hole but a layer of fog covering a storm. And that limitation creates suffering because the storm has no room to release, forever trapping any feelings inside—the yucky ones as well as the yummy ones.
However, some of you might truly feel empty. There’s a hole where feelings ‘should’ be, not a veil covering a deep-rooted pain.
You don’t get excited for anything. You have no hobbies, maybe no friends, no interest in your career, not even TV shows to look forward to. And while there’s great value in being critical of that perceived emptiness—really questioning whether you’re suppressing something or just never learned to work those emotional muscles safely—I also want to validate anyone who simply might not experience certain parts of the emotional spectrum.
If you’re autistic and you don’t experience the kind of joy that makes you want to jump up and down, is that so bad? If the prospect of a seven-day beach vacation does absolutely nothing for their spirit, who is to say that that’s not a normal reaction?
For someone who considers solving a 10000-piece puzzle to be a perfect weekend, suffering doesn’t come from having such a simple, low-thrill hobby. It comes when their environment tries to shame them into believing they should want something more from life.
Who decides what we’re supposed to feel? And can I talk to them?
Our society possesses an infuriating tendency to neatly define away vast swathes of the human experience, branding everyone who doesn’t perfectly fit the narrow, cookie-cutter definition of what it means to be a well-rounded person as inherently abnormal.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of expanding my comfort zone and getting over my avoidant disposition, but I would never tell anyone else that they really should prefer going clubbing on a Saturday night instead of puzzling their little heart away. Because that is the root of unhappiness for a lot of people: denying themselves what they really need and prioritizing some feelings over others. Being content is fine. Not everything needs to go skydiving or build a business. Let them puzzle, for crying out loud.
Emptiness is a feeling, too. And it has the right to exist.
When other people define what we’re supposed to do with our time on this planet and how to feel about it, getting depressed and disconnected is almost guaranteed. Not just for us neurospicy folks. Most people would benefit from questioning this hedonistic idea of endless joy, constant excitement, and superficial fulfilment.
There is so much pressure to be happy, to make every aspect of our lives instagrammable, that the mundane reality of our lives can only create discontent.
And by the way, why is it not normal to feel numb in the face of so much injustice and grief? Have you watched the news lately? Society is a mess, and if you have some sensibility and sensitivity to what’s going around you, is a little emptiness not a natural response to the overwhelming state of things?
I would only argue that this emptiness doesn’t necessarily need to cause so much pain, or become the default state of your psyche. Instead, I would recommend examining that feeling, letting it show itself, letting it breathe.
Bottled up feelings only grow stronger.
No matter what the nature of your emptiness is, whether it’s an inherent part of your personality pattern, a reaction to an overwhelming reality, or the symptom of a deeper pain, it is allowed to exist, and it needs to be heard.
Bottled-up feelings do not disappear. They become stronger. They create pressure. They create suffering.
By allowing this feeling of emptiness to exist and express itself, you might not get rid of it instantly. But you will create more room around it, alleviating the pain and opening a space inside your soul to possibly invite in other sensations. That is true for all feelings. And it is true for the inner void.
Okay, but how to actually fill the emptiness?
In future blog posts, I will talk more about exploring this emptiness further, understanding it better, and finding ways to fill that aching void—with something other than dysfunction, harmful habits, or substances, I mean.
But the reader’s digest for now:
I soothed my emptiness and numbness with meaning and purpose, silliness and play, but most importantly: acceptance and curiosity.
Emotions need a space to exist and expand in. They need to flow. And nothing flows in a stagnant life. I created an environment in which I can be my authentic self, no longer denying myself the reality of what I feel, or don’t feel.
I also started connecting to my body, instead of trying to solve any inner disconnect cognitively. We often experience feelings—or the lack thereof—as something solely mental, when the emotional landscape expands outside our brains into our physical self.
Trauma therapy has also healed the child-version of myself, who had learned that her feelings are unsafe, creating a deeper sense of trust in myself and making me feel less like a ghost haunting my own life.
If you think this is impossible for you, I would like to bring your attention to the fact that you are here. You are searching. That means you have curiosity and hope. And those things are not only feelings, very distinct from emptiness. They are also the basis for any meaningful change.
