What You Use to Fill the Void Is What Makes It Deeper
The More You Consume, the Less You Dwell
There’s a question I want to ask you first:
When was the last time you genuinely felt that this moment is different from all the others?
Not because you bought something. Not because a post got likes. But because the thing itself had a weight — an ineffable sense of the sacred — that made time seem to pause here, made this moment feel unlike yesterday, unlike tomorrow.
Can you remember?
I’ve asked many people. Many of them thought for a long time and couldn’t say.
Many people in our generation actively abandoned those things.
Don’t go back to sweep the graves at Qingming — too far, too short a break, holding it in my heart is enough. Cut the New Year rituals wherever possible — staying up until midnight is pointless, the visits are just formality, the red envelopes are just accounting. The elaborate customs around weddings and funerals — simplify wherever you can. We’re modern people. We don’t need to be bound by old things.
We called this progress. We called it freedom. We called it refusing to be held hostage by tradition.
And that wasn’t wrong. Within those traditions, there genuinely were real constraints — constraints of gender, of class, of a feudal order. Breaking them was right.
But there’s something no one warned us about: in the process, we took something else along with it.
Roland Barthes once said that ritual is the varnish of life.
Wood needs varnish — not for appearance, but to keep from rotting. The function of varnish is to build a protective layer between the wood and the outside world: keeping out moisture, keeping out air, keeping out the slow erosion of time. Without that layer, even the finest wood will decay quickly.
He said ritual is that same kind of thing.
Not decoration. Not superstition. The thin but real layer of protection between human existence and the abyss of existence.
What is the abyss of existence? The questions with no answers — what life means, what death means, where suffering comes from, what the relationship between ourselves and others is actually built on. These questions have no final rational answers, but they are real, and they produce real fear and anxiety in the human interior.
Ritual protects people not by providing answers, but by providing form.
Why does a funeral matter? Not because it resolves the question of what death is — but because it gives grief a container. You know what to wear, what to say, at which moment to weep, how to say goodbye. That form doesn’t suppress grief. It holds grief. It means you don’t have to face the abyss alone, stripped bare — instead, you’re held up by a symbolic framework shared with a community, moving through that time together.
Why does the New Year matter? Not only reunion — but because it gives time a shape. A beginning, an ending, the ritual sense that this year has now passed. Time becomes habitable, rather than a current with no rhythm.
Why does Qingming matter? Not only remembrance — but because it keeps a thin thread running between the living and the dead. That thread tells you that you did not appear here from nowhere — that you have real connections to certain people, certain places, certain times.
This is what the varnish does.
Then we stripped it away.
The wood is exposed to the air directly.
That feeling of exposure isn’t freedom. It’s a groundless weightlessness — time has lost its shape, grief has no container, relationships have no anchor, meaning has to be carried alone.
Most people can’t say where this feeling comes from. They only sense that something is off: why am I always busy but don’t know what I’m busy with? Why is there no obvious pain in my life, but always this inexplicable emptiness? Why do I stay in contact with so many people, and yet sometimes feel suddenly that I have nothing at all?
This isn’t a psychological problem. It isn’t a problem of character.
It’s the feeling of wood beginning to rot after the varnish has been stripped away.
So we start filling.
Buy the next thing. Experience the next place. Finish the next episode. Get the next like. These things can produce an instant feeling of fullness, can temporarily cover the abyss. But they share one feature: none of them can bring real satisfaction, only lead to the next one.
And so we begin furiously producing ourselves on social media — building an image, documenting a life, accumulating an audience. Because when community dissolves and symbolic bonds break, the individual self loses its external anchor, and can only confirm its own existence through the gaze of others. Follower counts, engagement numbers, become substitute sources of the sense of existing. But this kind of recognition is deeply unstable — attention can vanish, numbers can fall, algorithms can change at any moment — so it demands ever more continuous, ever more intense self-performance to maintain, driving deeper anxiety.
There is a brutal paradox here:
The very means we use to fill the abyss are what make the abyss deeper.
The more intense the consumption, the stronger the dependency on novelty, the less the genuine sense of dwelling, the deeper the void. The more frequent the performance, the heavier the self becomes, the stronger the loneliness of existing. Not bad habits, not insufficient willpower — the entire social structure sustains this cycle. Algorithms, markets, cultural norms all reinforce it. You can’t jump out through “more rational choices,” because the trap itself was built using the words: this is your free choice.
Byung-Chul Han writes: we believed we had broken the old shackles and won freedom. In fact, we only exchanged the old shackles for a new pair — more invisible, harder to name, and therefore harder to resist. The old shackle was called religious discipline. The new one is called self-actualization.
Do you still have that varnish in your life?
It doesn’t have to be ritual in the traditional sense. Maybe it’s some habit that belongs only to you. Something you do every year. A moment that makes you feel this is different from all the other moments — doing the same work as the varnish: not giving you answers, but meaning you don’t have to face the abyss bare every single day.
If you have it — it’s more precious than you know. Hold onto it.
If you don’t — it’s not too late to start looking.