Why does it mean for something to be soulless

People often say things feel “soulless,” or that someone has “sold their soul.” These terms have always felt woo-woo because a soul is not something you can see or prove. It exists outside anything tangible and is a little bit abstract. Yet the feeling itself is real. We all seem to know when something lacks it.

For me, “soulless” does not mean evil or bad. It means something feels hollow. Empty. Like something essential has been removed. I think this happens when hardship, risk, and human dependence are taken away.

I grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria. Life there was not glamorous. Things were chaotic, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes hard. But nothing felt hollow. I had family around me, people relied on each other, and everyday life required effort. There was friction, and because of that, everything felt real.

When I moved to London at eleven, I felt something shift. London was cleaner, richer, more organised. Objectively, life was “better.” But it was also the first time I felt a kind of emptiness I couldn’t explain. Everything worked, yet something was missing. That feeling became even stronger when I later spent time in Japan. 

Japan is extremely safe, efficient, and predictable. Trains arrive on time. People follow rules. Systems function almost perfectly. This is not a bad thing. But when everything works flawlessly, nothing feels earned. Life becomes routine. There is no chaos, no uncertainty, no sense that anything might go wrong. And without that, life starts to feel flat.

I noticed this most clearly in transportation. Riding a motorcycle in Bali feels alive because there is danger. Anything can happen. You are alert, present, fully engaged. Your brain is awake. In contrast, trains feel monotonous. Modern cars feel boring. Safety rules, automation, and self-driving features remove risk, but they also remove involvement. The experience becomes smooth, but soulless.

Again I am not arguing against safety. Safety saves lives. But it comes with a trade-off. When danger and failure are removed entirely, so is intensity. Soul seems to live where error is possible.

Technology does the same thing to human relationships. In Nigeria, people rely on each other. If my mum needed help, she called family. Neighbours helped neighbours. Community was not optional; it was necessary. In more “advanced” societies, technology replaces that dependence. Instead of calling family, we call an Uber. Instead of cooking for each other, we order food. Instead of socialising, we scroll.

These tools are convenient, but they don’t replace what they remove. They only imitate it. Social media replaces social life, but feels hollow. Corporations replace community roles. As technology makes us more independent, it also makes us more isolated.

I was once told by a Korean friend that people are having fewer children because society has become too comfortable. You no longer need family or community to survive. Everything you once needed people for can now be bought. Japan feels like the extreme version of this. Convenience has replaced connection.

When people say someone has “sold their soul,” I think they mean this: the person traded struggle, values, or authenticity for comfort, security, or status. The same thing happens on a societal level. Many of the most valuable companies in the world profit by removing friction from life. But friction is where meaning forms. This tension is captured clearly in Brave New World. In the novel, suffering has almost been completely eliminated. Humans are engineered in hatcheries, conditioned into rigid castes, encouraged to consume endlessly, and pacified through pleasure and a drug called soma. Nothing is allowed to disrupt comfort. What makes this world dystopian is not violence or oppression, but ease. When John, a man raised outside this system, enters the World State, he cannot accept a life without pain, uncertainty, or emotional depth. He would rather suffer than live in a world where nothing is at stake. His rejection exposes the problem at the core of that society: a life designed to remove struggle also removes what makes us feel human.

This is not a new pattern. Human progress has always come from life pushing back. When the cold was unbearable, we invented clothing. When distance limited us, we created transport. When nature resisted us, we adapted. Comfort has always been the reward for overcoming hardship. Each solution created new challenges, new skills, new forms of effort. The issue today is not that we make life easier, but that we remove resistance without replacing it. We smooth everything out, then wonder why nothing feels sharp.

Technology improves our lives, but it also takes things away. Every gain removes something else. When effort disappears, meaning weakens. When risk disappears, presence fades. When dependence disappears, community collapses.

A useful way to think about this is physical training. When you lift a heavy weight, it strains you, sometimes even hurts, but it makes you stronger. If a machine lifts the weight for you, your muscles don’t grow, they shrink. Over time, they atrophy. A life without resistance does the same thing to the mind. When effort is removed, when challenges are automated away, we don’t become fulfilled; we become weaker, less alive.

What we call “soul” might not be mystical at all. It might simply be the accumulation of irreducible human experiences: effort, risk, genuine dependence, and the possibility of meaningful failure. These are what give life depth and texture. Things matter because they might not work. When outcomes become predictable, when effort becomes unnecessary, when nothing is at stake, experience flattens.

This feels like one of the central tensions of our time. We are extremely good at solving problems and removing obstacles. But we rarely talk about the fact that human meaning seems to be generated by obstacles. We keep improving conditions while quietly wondering why satisfaction doesn’t rise with them.

I don’t think the answer is to reject technology or artificially create hardship. Comfort and safety are real achievements. But maybe the solution is being more intentional about preserving spaces where life still pushes back; physical challenge, creative work that might fail, relationships that require real vulnerability, commitments that can’t be easily undone.

The soul, as I see it, is what emerges when life still has the capacity to surprise us, challenge us, and demand something real in return. A life that never resists us may be easier, but it no longer feels alive.