Have you ever been somewhere or met someone and instantly felt zero connection? Nada… Zip…! Absolutely no connection, no empathy, not an emotional twinge what so ever.
Perhaps you’ve just experienced a soulless moment.
You’ve heard people say lots of times ‘..that building has no character..‘ or ‘..that person has no culture..‘. One has to look beyond the obvious literal sense of the words and to the more cryptic or esoteric and figurative meaning to gauge what it is exactly the person was trying to convey with their utterances.
Lets look at a few examples:
A prison cell or a hospital ward. Now obviously these spaces have a character – its hard, austere, uninviting and unengaging but that’s everything that makes it almost impossible to empathise or connect with that space! This generates our response of ‘..its got no character..‘
An immigrant or person from a different class background. Again these people must have a culture, a culture derived from their family ancestry and the environment that they have developed in. The fact that we are unable to empathise with or understand or even agree with their culture, illicits our response of ‘..he’s got no culture..‘
So you get the idea of connecting with or not connecting with character or culture. And in fact you could have one but not the other, for example:
A hospital ward with a wild party in progress. You probably wouldn’t comment on the lack of character due to the obvious or overriding sense of culture.
And conversely, an anarchist sitting in an esteemed 18 century museum probably would not get a mention due to the overriding sense of character that the building exudes!
But what happens when you get both simultaneously? You come across a situation where both the building or space or environment AND the person or persons there, have no apparent character or culture (and not necessarily respectively either) readily seen by you. You do not connect. You stand there and absolutely nothing is engaging you or pulling you in, making you converse or offering your mind a reason to be, to look around. You are numb, blank, catatonic… devoid of emotion.
Well that my friend was a soulless moment.
And it doesn’t stop there, you can extrapolate this phenomena to peoples homes, to shopping malls, to cities… but perhaps that’s best left for another time.