Recently, it has become unfashionable to speak of the soul, or of compassion. Yet a life built only on achievement, influence, or longevity cannot satisfy the deeper longing within us.
This essay explores what endures when everything else fades: youth, status, power, legacy, even certainty itself. Drawing on personal experience, history, and the quiet wisdom of compassion, it points toward a different way of seeing, one grounded not in the material, but in lived meaning.
When power fades and certainty dissolves, what remains?
The Soul’s Business
It has become increasingly unfashionable to speak of the soul. Compassion, too, has fallen out of favor, considered weak and too feminine for the aggressive masculine energy currently in vogue.
Not to worry. AI has come to rescue us. We are, it turns out, nothing more than a series of synapses and neurons, a biochemical machine whose behaviors can be mapped, manipulated, and repaired mechanically.
All of our sorrows –our mental illnesses, our physical suffering, even our death– can potentially be overcome by our powerful new machines. So persuasive and pervasive is this idea that the BBC and CNN reported that Putin and Xi were overheard discussing how their own life spans could extend to 150 years; they might even become immortal.
But, I myself don’t feel mechanical, and have no desire to be a well-oiled machine. I feel the presence of my soul as temporarily inhabiting this body in this time; I believe that when I “shuffle off this mortal coil” my soul will continue its journey, hopefully even more connected to what has sustained me in this world.
I have had visions from other realms that have directed my life. You could argue that my visions are a product of my own brain, that my visions and beliefs are delusions, that there is no God. But I don’t base my life on what can be proven in a laboratory, or on what is currently fashionable. I base it on what I know in my soul to be true.
And I’m not here to tell you what to think or who to be. I’m simply telling you what I believe.
I can’t prove the materialists wrong, but in any case I have no need to prove anything.
What I know begins here: a life without meaning is a very sad affair. And a life built purely on power and influence, even beauty, however dazzling it appears from the outside, is, at its core, sorrowful. Because power, like youth, fades, and power doesn’t satisfy; it always wants more. The sexy young body becomes the matron; the matron, with insight and work, a wise elder. The athlete’s muscles soften. The famous face blurs. We watch our idols struggle as their circumstances change, as what they built for permanence, turns out not to be so stable after all.
Shakespeare knew this. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. The very powerful are always worried their heads are about to be cut off. And they feel the hatred waiting at the edges, not only from distant enemies but from within the circle closest to them. History gives us no shortage of examples. “Et tu Brute”. No one is exempt from the vicissitudes of aging, from reversals of fortune.
You can feel yourself king of the world, certain your presence will echo for thousands of years. And then one day someone finds your statue broken and abandoned in the desert. In Shelley’s words:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair”.
Only the despair remains.
Some people bet on their legacy continuing because of their work or through their children. But children have a way of becoming only- themselves, disappointing their parents. We raise them and they adore us absolutely, and then they grow up and see our weaknesses, and push against us to find themselves; and then if we live long enough we watch them mature, hopefully do well; and then they age too, and perhaps even die before us, and the whole idea of being above it all, of having secured some permanent place, dissolves.
The monument crumbles. The children go their own way. The work we thought would last doesn’t hold beyond a generation or two, then gets nullified, or transformed beyond recognition, or simply forgotten.
This is not tragedy. The world doesn’t let us down. Life simply Is. It is our expectations that let us down.
There is a wider seeing available to us, though. It doesn’t stand above life or apart from it. It sees the way a parent sees a young child’s tantrum — knowing that underneath the fury there is just hunger, or exhaustion. It sees the way a seasoned adult sees an adolescent’s protracted and noisy drama, with shock or bewilderment perhaps, but with the knowledge that this is a stage, that adulthood is trying to emerge.
As you age, you can fight your own ultimate insignificance or come to this kind of seeing. A sense of love and continuity. A humble place, not the performative humility of someone announcing their own modesty, but a genuine respect and acceptance of your actual position: standing between the past and the unknown future, soon to be gone from the scene.
The soul knows its place. It knows, what it came here to do. It yearns to return to the source, which can put it in conflict with our ego. We need and want to feel whole. And that yearning is not a dysfunction. It is not a symptom. It is the most reliable thing about us.
We suffer, and our suffering can bring us to a compassionate acceptance. Compassion, it turns out, is not weakness. It is the most practical thing available to us. In my own experience, I have been the recipient of this kindly, non-judgemental approach from friends, relatives and passers-by. By their example, I have learned to step away from fault finding and victimization to a better approach, to one of self-acceptance, the acceptance of others, and finally to greater happiness.
There is also research, if research is what you need: studies of Buddhist monks who have spent twenty years meditating on compassion showing that their brains actually change. The neural architecture shifts. They are measurably happier, not because they have been exempted from suffering, but because they have stopped pretending they are immune. They feel tenderness toward their own pain, their own misjudgments and ignorant actions. And from that tenderness, comes the kindness toward the pain and missteps of others, clearing the way for moments of pure joy.
Compassion works because it is honest. It acknowledges what is actually true: that you will get sick, that you will lose people, that your powers will change, that despair visits everyone. You are not above this. Neither is anyone else. And in that shared vulnerability something opens, a kind of warmth toward yourself and toward every other person struggling with the same impossible and beautiful task of being alive.
I am a person of faith, not a faith that needs to prove itself, or recruit anyone, or win arguments. My faith is simply this: life is more mysterious than what we see on the surface, each have a role to play, in this life and beyond it. I believe that my behavior influences what comes next. That is reason enough to try to behave well.
Because of that faith, my life feels meaningful, loving and connected. I feel, even in difficulty, even in uncertainty, a connection that I can only call a soul connection. It is not something I acquired. It was always there. I just had to clear away the noise and falsehood to feel it.
That is the soul’s business. And it turns out to be the only business that endures.
©2026 Shulamit Elson