Why Do You Feel Hollow When Everything Is Fine? ► Explained With Dark Souls

Why do you feel hollow when everything is fine? Your life is not actually that bad, but something just feels off. You’re not even sad, it’s more like an empty feeling. And the worst part is you don’t feel like you have any right to feel this way, because on the surface everything looks great. For me personally, I have a super loving girlfriend, a nice place to live, and something actually meaningful to me that I can work on every single day, YouTube.

And yet some days I still feel nothing. I feel like the most ungrateful person in the world. I have so many good things in my life, so how could I possibly be unhappy? At this point you don’t even care if you’re happy, you just don’t want to feel like this anymore. But recently something started to change. I didn’t suddenly just become happy all the time, but that empty feeling started to disappear. And it wasn’t because my

Life got better, it was because I finally understood something clearly. Something that the game Dark Souls has been trying to teach us the whole time. You don’t need to have ever played Dark Souls to understand what I’m about to tell you right now. All you need to know is that in the game there’s a curse. The undead curse makes it so that anyone in the world who loses their purpose goes hollow. And when you’re hollow, you look

Like this. Basically just a zombie with nothing left inside of who you used to be, hollow. Now, if you’ve watched video essays on YouTube about Dark Souls or even watched any of my videos, you might be getting tired of always hearing hollowing being talked about in the same way. Every Dark Souls video already out there will say how hollowing is like losing your purpose and Dark Souls is the cure for depression and Dark Souls saved my life, stuff like that. But what

If I told you there was something so much more important about hollowing that I haven’t seen anyone else talk about? Because there is something about the hollows in the undead curse that’s been right in front of our eyes the whole time. Look at these guys. Look familiar? These hollows are scattered all throughout the game. Some of them are naked, but some of them are wearing armor. Why? Why aren’t all of the hollows the same, just naked?

Why do some look like soldiers defending something, ready for battle, holding swords and spears and shields and even crossbows? It’s because before they went hollow, they were doing something. They had a purpose, defending against some threat, gathering up all their soldiers, ready to fight. Soldiers always have a purpose. Whenever you hear about soldiers or war in movies or stories from real life, warriors are always filled with purpose. They’re fighting for something, protecting something, moving towards something. Even just

Regular people, when something they care about is threatened, they become warriors, too. A reason to fight becomes the purpose, whether you’re a soldier or not. So I want to ask you, how is it possible that these apparent soldiers in Dark Souls have gone hollow? Shouldn’t they have had enough purpose to stop the hollowing curse? What’s the difference between us as the chosen undead in the game and the hollow soldiers? If we both have purpose, why have we not gone hollow and they have?

It’s because people go hollow when their purpose turns into meaningless repetition. And that’s why war and action in general gets the spirit flowing in people. It’s all happening right now and they have a fire burning in their hearts. But what happens when the battle goes on for too long? In the beginning it feels real. There’s urgency and meaning and something at stake. But then every day starts to feel the same. Nothing is really even happening anymore. You’re just going through the

Motions. >> You start living on autopilot. Nothing feels real, but you still need to be on guard because those are your orders. And you’re following your orders, but you don’t even really remember why you’re following them anymore. Look at these hollows. Look at this place. How long have these guys been here waiting for action and defending? From the look of how worn their armor is and how overgrown and old everything looks around them, I’m guessing they’ve been

Here for a while. They forgot why they were even doing what they’re doing, but they’re still doing it. It’s not enough to just have purpose. You need to feel like you’re actually moving toward it, like you’re actually doing something important. Any purpose you might have had starts to fade away. It’s not that your purpose doesn’t exist anymore, but it just doesn’t feel real anymore. That’s why even with purpose, even when there’s a battle to be fought, a home to

Be defended, you can still go hollow. You probably have a lot of things in your life which actually do matter to you. A girlfriend, a good job that you were so excited to get hired for, or maybe a cool car that you’ve always wanted. You have things to be happy about, but you’re not, though. You chase a goal for so long and then you finally get it and it’s just like meh. You know you should be grateful

Because you know you have a lot of good things in your life on paper, but you just feel hollow these days. You might even have a purpose that you work toward every single day, but all you can really think about is maybe this isn’t actually my purpose because I don’t feel very fulfilled. Or maybe we’re like the hollows in Dark Souls. We have a purpose, we have a proper purpose, a reason to fight and a clear objective

For what we should do, but maybe we’ve just been standing around for way too long. Mindlessly doing the things we know we should do, but we don’t really remember why we’re even doing them. Your life is not bad, but you feel like it’s not going anywhere. So how do you make life feel like it’s going somewhere again? You need to capture that feeling of urgency and high stakes and meaning, like you’re about to go to war. You don’t need a

Completely new life or a different, better purpose. You need to feel like you’re actually doing something important, making your life feel real again. And it doesn’t matter how big or small the progress you made actually is. It’s all about how you perceive the meaning in your progress. I realized that in my own life, the days where I felt the worst weren’t the ones where everything was going wrong, like I’m tripping all over the place and dropping stuff everywhere. It

Wasn’t those days. They were the days when I felt like nothing really happened today. The same routine, the same thoughts, the same actions, just repeating over and over again. Even when I was technically making progress, it didn’t really feel like it to me because nothing about it felt new or real. It just felt like maintenance. Nothing is wrong in your life. You have goals and you have a loving girlfriend, but it just feels like nothing new is happening anymore. What’s the

Point of it all? Even something that means so much to you like your girlfriend can start to feel like routine if it stops feeling alive. But progress isn’t always clearly visible. You go to the gym and you do your reps and you try your best and it just feels like you’re kind of the same as you were before. We’re never able to actually see the progress we’re making because we can’t see it physically and it’s not exciting. It’s

Just working hard for nothing. But progress can be slow. Building muscle can be slow. So what if we changed the way we saw things? What if we started rewarding ourselves for the progress itself and reminding ourselves the importance of what we’re doing? What if at the end of every week you sat alone in your room and just wrote down on some paper like your actual goals that are actually important to you? Remind yourself how much what you’re

Doing means to you and how badly you want to achieve your goals. If you’re reminded of the importance of what you’re doing, then you get that same feeling of urgency and high stakes and meaning that was lost from just focusing on doing the task. You need to focus on the small picture like doing the tasks themselves and making progress, but you also need to not lose sight of the big picture and why you’re doing it at all.

Because just going to the gym every day endlessly sounds extremely lame to me. I don’t want to do that, either. But if I’m reminded that if I keep it up, I might be able to look like a superhero someday, then I might be able to keep that fire inside me going. That makes going to the gym feel like a mission and an adventure rather than making you feel empty inside. So remind yourself why you’re doing what

You’re doing. Have something to look forward to. Don’t be like the hollow soldiers who maybe were once excited to go to war, but are now empty. You know you have so much good in your life and there’s so much more good to come. So get excited for it. And to be honest, I can’t tell you what will make you excited to actually keep you going because this kind of thing is up to the individual. So I’m trusting you that

You’ll search your feelings and give yourself your own reasons to keep going. If you do that, you won’t feel hollow or empty. You’ll feel full of energy and life and ready for war. So if you’ve been feeling hollow lately, maybe it’s not because your life is actually bad. Maybe it’s because your life stopped feeling like it’s going anywhere. You’ve been standing still for too long, doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts, waiting for something to

Change, but nothing changes if nothing changes. So don’t try to fix everything that’s not even broken. Remember why you’re doing what you’re doing. Reignite the fire inside of you that made you want to start in the first place. That remembrance will help you perceive how important everything in your life really is and will stop you from feeling hollow even when everything is fine. And just one more thing I want to leave you with is like So you imagine those hollow soldiers,

Right? They have a purpose and they know what they’re supposed to do. Everything is clear to them what they should be doing. Somewhere along the way they lost their purpose and they went hollow. I feel like part of it is what we already talked about, like having to remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing, right? But also tracking yourself because you can’t see your progress, right? Maybe intruders came through where they were posted up and they had

To defend it every now and again, but it doesn’t feel like they’re doing anything because they don’t feel the progress. They don’t see any progress. And I like to use the metaphor of the gym a lot because it’s really easy to understand, like you go to the gym and you’re lifting these weights, but it doesn’t really feel every single time you go like you’re making progress, right? You come come back from the gym and it’s like, yeah, you see a

Little bit of a pump, but then you just return to normal. >> And it never really feels like you’re making any progress. But a way that you can actually feel and see your progress is by tracking yourself. And a lot of people do that. They They track how much weight they’re doing, how many reps they’re doing of that weight, and then you can see clearly how much progress you’re actually making. And I’m not trying to like sell you on anything, but

In my free community, we’re doing the exact same thing. I’ve set it up so that like the community fights a boss together. Right now, we’re on the Hollow. The Hollow has like a certain amount of health, I think it’s 1,000. And the way that you do damage to the boss is by doing your good habits like on your habit tracker. So, every time you do a good habit that you wanted to get done that day, and you check it off, that check

Mark counts as one damage towards the boss. And right now, me and my community are almost halfway done that boss’s health. And again, I’m not trying to like sell you on my free community. Like, why would I? It’s It’s free anyway, right? But like, I’m just trying to say that it’s a way that you can see how much you’re doing your good habits, how consistently, and where you can improve, and where you’re doing great, you know? And I don’t think

It’s just some gimmicky thing to do just for my community. I genuinely wanted this to be something like valuable for the people in the community. And I’m doing it myself. Every week, we check everybody’s uh damage done. And honestly, like I’m even surprising myself, you know? Like, a week where I thought I was less consistent, I was more consistent. And a week where I thought I was more consistent, I was doing worse. So, this is another good way to just

Track yourself and see if you’re actually making progress or not, you know? So, if you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I have that free community that you can join with just the link in the description. I also have a course inside of that community, which is how to genuinely fix your life but explained with Dark Souls. So, if that sounds interesting to you, then that’s also going to be a link in the description. No pressure for either of

Them, but I just feel like if you’re having this trouble in your life where you’re feeling hollow for no really good reason, then come check it out, all right? Come see the progress that you’re actually making, and you might surprise yourself. Anyway, that’s everything I have to say for today, guys. You take care, okay? Don’t you dare go hollow.