The Hollowing
In the fading hours of twilight, where shadows stretch their thin fingers across landscapes that have long lost their meaning, he observes a world now entrenched in the dull hum of transaction. Once, there was depth. The waters of life felt bottomless, rich with the sediment of genuine connection, of shared experience. But now, in the calcified architecture of society, everything had been traded for something cheaper, quicker, more hollow.
To exist in this world is to swim in a river that drags you further from your soul. From the moment you wake, you negotiate your worth, but the currency is no longer empathy, nor understanding. It is a number, a set of digits on a screen, a swipe, a click, an exchange devoid of the soul it was meant to represent. He, like so many others, notices how the very fabric of interaction, the lifeblood of existence, has become nothing more than a ledger of transactions.
In the once quiet moments of contemplation, he sees how everything has collapsed into commodification. Relationships that once bloomed slowly, nurtured over time, now wither in the glare of efficiency. Love, friendship, trust, all calculated as though weighed on scales too indifferent to understand their fragility. People don’t meet anymore to share; they meet to extract. A smile, once a symbol of warmth, is now a shallow precursor to demand. What can you do for me? What can I take? Even in the intimate moments where vulnerability once thrived, there is now a creeping sense of obligation — a quid pro quo, the suffocating awareness that nothing is given freely anymore.
He walks through this landscape and sees only emptiness masquerading as abundance. The glinting lights of the city, once a beacon of aspiration, now resemble gaudy signposts leading to nowhere. In its heart, people are not living but performing. They dress up their hollowness with shallow displays of status, flashing lives curated for screens, always for others, never for themselves. In this theater of pretense, depth is an afterthought. It’s easier to skim the surface than to plunge into the waters of authentic connection.
Even work — once imbued with a sense of purpose, of contribution — has been reduced to mere labor for a faceless machine. The fruits of one’s efforts, once a reflection of identity, now vanish into the abyss of someone else’s balance sheet. They toil, not to leave a mark, but to survive a system that thrives on their futility. And this is what strikes him most: the futility of it all.
Underneath every hollow transaction, behind every swipe and trade, there is a growing awareness of how little it all matters. And yet, this futility is not freeing. It is a trap. For the more people realize the emptiness of it all, the more they cling to the system that perpetuates it. They have been sold a lie so convincingly that they no longer know how to live outside of it. Meaning is now a product, sold in neatly packaged experiences that fade the moment they are consumed.
And then there is time — once infinite, now rationed. Time, the great equalizer, has become a commodity. No longer an endless river in which one could wade freely, it is now parceled out in shrinking increments, bartered for at great cost. People no longer exist in time, they battle it, racing against its relentless march, only to find that the race was rigged from the start. In the end, everyone loses, but not before they have traded away everything for a chance at some fleeting moment of triumph.
He looks around and feels the weight of this slow hollowing out, this transactional life that has made everything worse. The warmth of human connection, once the glue that held the world together, is now fraying at the edges, worn thin by the constant exchange of goods, services, and even emotions. People no longer give; they invest, expecting returns, and if those returns don’t come, they move on, leaving nothing but a void where something meaningful once stood.
But in this world, there are no victors. Everyone plays the same game, and everyone loses in the end. The joy of living has been replaced by the compulsion to keep up, to do more, be more, have more. The only escape, it seems, is to withdraw entirely, but even that comes at a price.
What happened to living for the sake of living? When did breathing, feeling, and thinking become mere steps in a process of endless optimization? The world has become a system that rewards the shallow and punishes the deep. It has made depth obsolete. Wisdom is no longer revered but dismissed as inefficiency. Contemplation, once the domain of the enlightened, is now seen as laziness. Everything has become instrumentalized, everything must serve a purpose, or it is cast aside.
This is the world in which he finds himself, and there is no exit. The machine rolls on, indifferent to the cries of those it crushes underfoot. Life is now measured in metrics, and the soul is the first casualty. What was once sacred is now trivial. What was once profound is now cheap. The hollowing is complete, and what remains is a shell of what once was.
In this darkened landscape, he sees the slow decay of everything that ever mattered. Perhaps that is the worst of it all — not that life has become transactional, shallow, futile, and hollow, but that in its wake, it has left nothing behind. Just echoes, barely heard, of a time when life meant more than mere survival in the ruins of meaning.
As the final light of day fades, he knows this : they traded away everything that made life worth living, and in return, they got nothing.
In shallow trade, the soul is sold,
The warmth of life grows dark and cold.
We chase the fleeting, lose what’s deep,
And in the hollowed silence, weep.
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Disclaimer : Everything written above, I owe to the great minds I’ve encountered and the voices I’ve heard along the way.