November 22, 2025
A cloudy melancholy for an indifferent world.
I’m not even back home for a day and I’m already underwater again. Emails. Team chats. Project change updates. My phone fills daily with scam calls and phishing texts. Voices that sound credible and are not. Voices that sound human and are not.
So much noise. All this noise.
What is it all for?
What is it leading to?
Grace and Kansas City feel distant now, though I’ve been back only a few days. Fading like a dream. And all dreams are too hard to hold.
There’s a certain melancholy in this feeling. An emptiness. Almost banal.
Then the fear returns. Can I keep doing this? Can it continue to work in a world where reason and caring are quickly becoming anachronistic? That whatever talent or luck carried me this far will somehow run dry. And I’ll be forever empty—unable to help others. Or myself.
I find joy in helping others constructively, so they may improve their way of life. And that joy, in turn, helps me improve mine. Or, at least, sustain it. But what happens when the capacity for that work disappears? When the desire to lift even a pen vanishes?
Everybody’s talking at me. Online. On the street. But is anyone listening? Maybe they’re hearing. Maybe. But is anyone really listening? It doesn’t feel like it. Listening, like thoughtfulness, was once both a virtue and a skill. Now, it feels llike neither.
Never have we had such unfettered access to the thoughts and feelings of others. And yet, never have we been so wholly disconnected. Isolated. Alone.
A world of global communications. A world of global isolation.
These are strange days.
I’m thinking of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on this. About “the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.” This is not the loneliness of solitude. This is the loneliness of alienation.
It is said that we are now in an era of epidemic loneliness. Where there is a historic record number of people to interact with. Where the quality of presence of those interactions is in doubt. If not non-existent.
I can be in a room full of people. I can be on a feed full of voices. But the experience is one of emptiness. A loneliness more acute than sitting alone.
Sharing person to person has become a machine-mediated performance. We no longer relate to each other. We relate to machines that can’t relate to us. And that relation may only be one of our imagination. Where the interface both defines and becomes the relationship.
Chronic loneliness is an insidious fog. A slow-motion cloud-like catastrophe engulfing populations globally. In some ways, it may be now surpassing threats posed by other health risks, though these appear to be growing too. Loneliness as a social epidemic is another crisis on top of the many other emerging crises that we are not prepared to handle.
One in six people worldwide is suffering from chronic loneliness. That’s roughly 1.35 billion people, the equivalent of the entire population of China, scattered across the globe. That’s 16.67% of all humanity. That’s almost a million deaths annually linked to loneliness and social isolation. That’s more than 100 deaths per hour.
These are not isolated, disconnected people. These are also people drowning in information, swimming through data, constantly “connecting” without actually acheiving it. And feeling more abandoned as a result. We aren’t experiencing loneliness despite our connectivity. No, we are experiencing it because of it.
Connection today isn’t really connection, just an empty facsimile. It’s a dry mirage we keep reaching into, unable to quench our ever growing thirst. With each cupping of our hands into this mirage, our thirst for connection—true human connection—only grows stronger. Driving us mad.
Camus and David Foster Wallace probably understood this. Perhaps they saw it coming. How we now trade real relationships for the anesthetic of pseudo-connection. Why? Probably because it’s easier. More expedient. Less messy. No burden of authentic presence. No investment of self in others.
All the while, the pace of life has become faster than my ability to keep pace. The time I need to connect with others is far greater than the time I actual have to invest in my relationships. And people are more and more unwilling to take the time to connect, even though there are more ways now than ever to do so. Even on video calls, I find people reluctant to go on video. To stay on perpetual mute. They seem to lack the energy or interest in providing me with at least the shadow of their presence. You may be disengaged. You may be disenfranchised. But I am still a person. Despite this, I remain on camera. I will not rob them in such a way.
And I find this all exhausting. The efforts made with little or no return. The hearing without listening. The hearing without compassion. The hearing with only cynicism, prejudice, and self-centeredness. That is the real substance of pseudo-connection—emptiness. Cruel emptiness. Indifferent in composition. Banal in experience.
This exhaustion is especially hard on my journaling. When I lose my capacity to even lift my pen. The desire is there. Buried. The voice is there. Buried deeper. But my mind is cloudy. Heavy. Feeling distant even from myself.
In these moments my confidence wanes. Uncertainty creeps in, whipsering its will, painting pictures of gloom and doom. Its stale odor is an all-encompassing nausea. A choking of my soul.
When I’m this tired, my mind goes meta. I retreat into theory. Into literature. Into philosophy. Into diagnosing civilization rather than myself. This body. This soul, in this study, in this moment.
Perhaps it’s my defense mechanism at play. Perhaps it’s easier to talk about Arendt’s warnings and Schopenhauer’s wisdom than to admit what is happening to me. Maybe it’s happening to you.
But the meta voice in my head is still my voice. One of many. Many, out of one. It, too, has something to share.
The first sign of the end of civilization—and, perhaps, even the end of our species—is when we lose the capacity for empathy. When we lose the basic human capability to help one another htrough our indvidual and collective vulnerability and recovery. When we see other people only as tools for exploitation. Not to mention, our own selfish ends. When we can no longer truly see others as people. When we can no longer sit with each other’s pain, or communicate in ways that create true bonds of caring mutualism. Uncommodified. Unselfish.
Instead, we have a world built on a language that is quickly collapsing because the shared part of shared meaning has eroded. We now exist in a world where we can speak the same language but inhabit completely different semantic existences. When friend no longer means friend. When connection is a single-player game.
This is where we have come. Individually. Collectively. We may have inherited the institutions and language of community. But they are hollow, devoid of any and all substance. They are an artifice. The walls and buildings may appear intact, but the people inside no longer believe in them. No one expects them to be anything more than the contrivance they’ve proven to be.
I’m finally back home in Denver. Well, not really. Back at my modest corner of Denver that is my residence. But I have many homes. Scattered across time and space. I can’t occupy them all at once. This is the result of the nomadic life this liminal creature has lived from the start.
And as I grow older, it’s harder for me to reach them in person. So I must appreciate the times when I can be there, less they all fall into memory—as so many already have.
The young may live for tomorrow. But the old live for yesterday.
I feel that now.
I feel myself succumbing to complacency. Not indifference. Not victimhood. Just a growing helplessness, ever present in teh shadows of exhaustion and melancholy.
Fatigue brings the shadows closer. and with them, all the dark things that live within.
Loneliness is a form of violence. It precedes totalitarianism. It’s a symptom of a catastrophic failure of recognition—not just communication. It’s a global state where the world will not hear the people who need to be heard the most. Where people have lost the capacity to think together. To cooperate. To thrive.
We are all desperate to matter in a narrative that increasingly leaves us out in the cold wastelands of false narratives and even falser choices.
Perhaps my exhaustion is the internaliztion of the external reality of our tired civilization. Mortified. Petrified. Zombified. Where scrolling through each other’s lives like teh restless dead will somehow satisfy the connection we crave and so desperately need.
If human-mediated connection is the cornerstone of our humanity, then I can draw but one conclusion—
We are no longer human.
I’m too tired to finish these thoughts tonight. Too tired to seek out other kindred spirits. Too tired even to escape into words of the great poets and philosophers of antiquity. Too tired to be anything but tired.
Someone said or wrote something about the first sign of the end of humanity. I can’t remember who. I can’t remember what. I can’t remember when. I can’t remember why.
These are strange times.
Dean Bowman
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