I am not a religious person. It was never a part of my childhood and never really stuck with me. I couldn’t separate the religious institutions and church from the people within it. It seemed clear to me, even as a teenager, that "the church" was just "a group of people making decisions" any more or less than Congress was "the country" or "the government".
Still, I maintain a curious and open mind toward some notion of a soul. "The body" is obvious to me. I have one of those. "The mind" is also obvious to me, because I have one of those, too. "The soul", however, I’m less sure about. I am inclined to agree we all have some kind of spirit or energy about us that must go somewhere when we die, as energy can’t be created or destroyed. The most likely place for this energy to go is into the earth. And it’s this reason that makes me cautious about cremation. "If the body and mind are organic, and the energy without cells must go somewhere…do I want to put that energy into the earth, or into a smoke stack?" I increasingly see cremation as more harm than good, but that is a topic for another day.
Today, I am thinking about the division between body, mind, and soul. I will use "soul" as a catch-all term for lack of a better one, but I could just as well replace it with "energy", "spirit", or "ethos" all the same.
And, I am thinking about how dividing the body, mind, and soul, seems spectacularly bad.
That dividing ourselves into three neat compartments is like dividing our bodies into three compartments, or our minds into separate compartments. We can’t just say, "Well, today I’m eating to support my legs." Or, "Today, I’m reading to support this quadrant of my mind."
Yet, this is what we all increasingly do, by having "leg day" at the gym or listening to podcasts at every waking moment to "improve our productivity". We divide our time and attention in ways that support parts of ourselves, but not the whole.
It seems to me that dividing body, mind, and soul can only lead to ugliness, loneliness, and ill health. Because no matter how many lines we draw between these functions, we remain dependent on them. We can’t separate the mind from the body, for instance. A body without a mind can’t move. A mind without a body can’t execute much.
Our current society and economy, at least in the west so far as I can observe, seems to separate these out dramatically through competition and exploiting parts of ourselves. We see this with diet fads, makeup, fashion, and an endless array of quick-fix claims and self-help books for our minds. The end result of this seems to be more ill health, loneliness, ugliness, and warped thinking.
To an economist, this competition for our attention, money, time, and energy is obviously good. That our relation to other creates, each other, and the earth is improved through competition.
Which raises a question: if competition is so good, then why isn’t all this exploitation more successful? Why, having lived to such a pinnacle of human achievement as we have in 2026 are we not healthier and happier than we are? How is it possible that we continue to live under such a threat of suffering, deprivation, and ill health?
To be clear, there are obvious improvements over human history. We don’t all suffer the Black Plague today. And we have remarkable abilities to help people survive trauma. Heart disease and cancers are more treatable than ever. Those kinds of advancements are better than ever.
But as a whole, can we all really say that we’re happier and healthier than, say, our great grandparents? I’m not sure. Certainly generations have faced war and famine. That’s not great. But … happier in spirit? It seems to me our grandparents were often happier in spirit than today. This is not universal, of course. Certainly people have faced innumerable individual challenges. Slavery and other chattel ownership are a blight. But as a whole, it’s hard to argue that people today are happier in spirit. It seems we have separated the body, mind, and spirit so neatly that we can’t work on ourselves as a whole, and, instead, rely on the machinery of capitalism to support some or parts of one or two thirds of ourselves.
Certainly our leaders would claim that because we have more cars, highways, cheap TV sets (I don’t know why everyone is so obsessed with that metric), and gadgets and so on that we are therefore better.
This consumer-first orientation, I guess, makes sense if you’re in it. But if you were an alien who landed on this earth and observed from above the machinations of this industrial machinery, and could somehow observe that over time from outside it with a level of detachment as some alien species, what, then, would you think?
I am writing this in late April of 2026. As the weather warms, much of my adopted home community here in Michigan is gearing up for "tourist season". Where city people from Chicago and Detroit move north to escape the heat, splash in the water, and play around outside like it’s a theme park, all before heading back to their offices. They are as separate from the land as the industrial farms spraying insecticides and other poison. They are as separate from the area as absentee landlords who squat on housing as lucrative Airbnbs for a few months of the year. They are all separating the mind, body, and soul from the larger ecosystem.
Economically, this competition between each other is supposedly good. It is a good thing that people own houses that sit empty for much of the year, for no other reason than they want to go "someplace warmer." Spiritually, this seems to drive a lot of unhappiness. Economically, all that chemical industrial farming is good, because now we have all this food. But spiritually, it comes at significant costs to the welfare of animals.
Yet out bodies remain fat, weak, wasteful, and are the prey of industrial economics and medicine. Taken as a whole over the last 100 years, our bodies have gone from undernourished but spiritually healthy to over-fed (but not nourished) and spiritually unhealthy. The only thing that hasn’t changed as much are our minds.
And now, as AI rushes in to every crevice of our culture, it seems industrial economics is ready to do to our minds what it has done to our food, culture, spirit, and communities. Or, at least, maybe it’s here to finish what started as communication blanketed the earth 20 years ago.
I am increasingly discontent with the notion that our bodies are here to transport our minds and our few employable muscles to back and forth to work. That our spirit can be divorced from all else with no attention.
Our diet of food is, on the whole, obviously terrible. Our diet for our spirit seems to thrive only on manufactured political drama, scandal, greed, and violence. Our diet for our minds is dulling before our own eyes. We even sense it is happening and do it anyway. We sense our minds dulling from an embarrassing array of feeds and, now, LLMs. "No need to cook! Just reheat this TV dinner in the microwave!" came first, now, "No need to think about that! Just let this machine put that together for you!"
I’m not convinced I’m saying my point clearly enough: this rift is going to go deep as industry and "the economy" take a big strike at minds after it has so thoroughly separated our bodies into a vessel for creams, pills, and running shoes and also ejected our soul into a separate dimension entirely. I am not a religious person, but I am someone who wrestles with notions that these three parts of ourselves belong unto ourselves and, broadly, to our community. And it seems like we’re not even concerned with what it’ll do to us and our communities to divorce all three at service to industrial machinations.
