THE PEOPLE WE THINK WE KNOW

There comes a point in life when you have to stop judging people simply by how long you’ve known them and start paying attention to what they actually bring into your life. Familiarity can fool you, history can fool you, and even family ties can fool you when emotional attachment causes you to overlook what’s happening right in front of you. Sometimes the person standing closest to you isn’t necessarily walking in the same direction you’re walking, and sometimes the person you believe understands you may only understand the version of you that they’ve become accustomed to seeing.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again because I believe it’s something people need to seriously think about: everybody around you doesn’t have a soul in the sense that you may understand the word. I’m not talking about whether someone has a physical body, a personality, a job, a family, or a social life. I’m talking about what’s happening inside of them, including their sense of purpose, conscience, spiritual awareness, discipline, compassion, and willingness to rise above the lowest parts of human behavior. A person can be physically alive while being completely disconnected from the deeper purpose that gives life meaning.

That’s what I mean when I talk about the hollows. A hollow can look completely normal from the outside because they can laugh with you, eat with you, work with you, socialize with you, and even call themselves your friend. Yet underneath that appearance, there can be a tremendous emptiness, with no real desire to grow, no desire to become wiser, and no desire to develop beyond satisfying the immediate demands of the flesh. They can become comfortable simply eating, sleeping, indulging, reproducing, entertaining themselves, and repeating the same cycle without ever asking whether life has something greater waiting for them.

The danger begins when someone carrying that kind of emptiness gets close to somebody who actually has vision and purpose. When you have purpose, you can naturally become uncomfortable to people who have become comfortable with having none. Your growth reminds them of what they aren’t doing, your discipline reminds them of their lack of discipline, and your spiritual development can remind them of the places inside themselves they have refused to examine. Sometimes your very existence becomes an uncomfortable mirror because your progress forces them to see possibilities in themselves that they have chosen not to pursue.

That’s why I want to explore this idea of the hollow, because life has a strange way of revealing what’s really inside people. You can walk with someone for twenty years and still not fully understand what they’re carrying inside, but eventually circumstances come along and stir everything up. It’s like putting chocolate powder into a glass of milk and leaving it sitting at the bottom. From a distance, somebody might think they’re simply looking at a glass of milk, but once that glass gets stirred, everything that was hidden beneath the surface suddenly becomes visible.

CIRCUMSTANCES REVEAL WHAT’S INSIDE

That’s one of the great lessons of human relationships because you don’t always discover someone’s character during peaceful times. Sometimes you discover it when money gets involved, sometimes you discover it when jealousy appears, sometimes you discover it when somebody else succeeds, and sometimes you discover it when temptation walks through the door. You can also discover it when you need help or when you finally decide to change your life, because the moment your behavior changes, the people around you are forced to respond to a version of you they may not have expected to see.

A person can tell you they love you while their behavior tells you something completely different. Somebody can say they want the best for you while constantly encouraging the very behaviors that are destroying you, and they can laugh with you while secretly enjoying your downfall. They can encourage your weaknesses because your weaknesses make them feel comfortable around you, and when you’re struggling, they may feel powerful because your confusion gives them a position of influence they might not have if you were standing firmly on your own two feet.

That’s where things become dangerous because the hollow doesn’t necessarily have to attack you directly. Sometimes all they have to do is encourage you to attack yourself. They may know that you have a weakness for alcohol, and instead of helping you control it, they’re always ready to pour another drink. They may know that you struggle with sexual temptation, and instead of encouraging discipline, they continually push you toward situations that feed those impulses. They may know exactly where your weaknesses are because you trusted them enough to tell them, and instead of protecting that information, they use their knowledge of you to keep you trapped inside the very behavior you’re trying to overcome.

Eventually, consequences arrive, and that’s when the relationship can become even more revealing. You may lose money, damage your reputation, destroy an opportunity, damage a relationship, create an unwanted pregnancy, contract an infection, lose your focus, or create problems that follow you for years. Meanwhile, the same person who helped push you toward the edge may be standing somewhere laughing about what happened, telling stories about your mistakes as though your pain was nothing more than entertainment.

That’s not friendship, and that’s not genuine concern for your well-being. When somebody repeatedly studies your weaknesses, feeds those weaknesses, encourages you to continue destructive behavior, and then takes pleasure when those weaknesses produce suffering, you have to stop calling that relationship something it isn’t. Human beings make mistakes, and sometimes people encourage things without understanding the consequences, but repeated behavior reveals a different kind of intention because there comes a point when ignorance can no longer explain the pattern.

WHEN YOUR WEAKNESS BECOMES THEIR ENTERTAINMENT

There’s something deeply disturbing about people who enjoy watching someone with enormous potential become a reduced version of themselves. They may recognize your intelligence, your talent, your creativity, your ability to build, and even your spiritual potential, but instead of encouraging you to develop those qualities, they look for ways to keep you distracted. They want you chasing temporary pleasure instead of building something lasting, arguing instead of creating, consuming instead of producing, reacting instead of thinking, and remaining emotionally unstable instead of becoming centered and disciplined.

That’s because a person who discovers their purpose becomes much harder to control. When you become disciplined, you become less dependent on outside approval. When you become spiritually grounded, you become less desperate for acceptance. When you understand your weaknesses, you become harder to manipulate through those weaknesses, and when you learn to say no, people who benefited from your lack of boundaries may suddenly become angry with you because your boundaries have changed the relationship they once controlled.

That’s when you find out who was actually attached to you and who was attached to the version of you they could influence. Some people don’t miss you when you leave; they miss the access they had to you. Some people don’t miss your presence; they miss the opportunities your lack of boundaries gave them. Some people don’t miss your friendship; they miss having somebody nearby whose weaknesses made them feel better about their own lives.

The hollow doesn’t necessarily want to destroy you in some dramatic way. Sometimes they simply want you diminished, distracted, confused, addicted, angry, sexually reckless, financially irresponsible, emotionally unstable, or constantly trapped in the same problems. They may want you functioning below your potential because your potential makes them uncomfortable, and they may prefer seeing you struggle because your struggle gives them a strange sense of superiority.

Sometimes they don’t even understand why they’re doing it. That’s what makes this so important to recognize because not every destructive person sits around making conscious plans to destroy somebody else. Some people are simply so empty, wounded, jealous, selfish, or undisciplined that they naturally pull others toward the same level where they exist. Their emptiness becomes contagious when you stay close enough for long enough.

THE SPIRITUAL BATTLE BEHIND THE HUMAN BATTLE

For me, there’s also a spiritual dimension to this conversation because I believe there’s more happening in this world than what we can physically see. I believe the visible world is only part of the story, and I believe human beings have a spiritual responsibility that goes beyond simply satisfying the body. We have minds, wills, consciences, imaginations, and the ability to create, and those abilities point toward something much deeper than simply eating, sleeping, working, reproducing, consuming, and eventually dying.

You can understand the word salvation through whatever spiritual framework speaks to you. For some people, it means their relationship with God and their hope for eternal life, while for others it can mean being saved from destructive behavior, ignorance, addiction, hatred, fear, confusion, or a life without purpose. However you understand it, the basic idea remains powerful because there’s something higher that many of us believe we’re supposed to move toward rather than spending our entire lives trapped at the lowest level of human desire.

If you believe in God, then you also have to recognize the existence of forces that pull human beings away from that higher purpose. I use the image of Satan as a representation of those destructive forces because the struggle between good and evil has always been part of the human story. The world itself can be beautiful while human behavior within that world can become corrupted, and that contradiction can be seen everywhere when you look at how much beauty exists alongside violence, greed, hatred, exploitation, addiction, and selfishness.

That’s why good people can experience terrible situations. People who try to live by principle can still experience betrayal, loss, injustice, disappointment, and pain, because living according to your values doesn’t mean you’re going to be protected from every storm. Sometimes the storm itself becomes part of your development, and sometimes the hardship that you desperately wanted to avoid becomes the very experience that forces you to discover strength you didn’t know you possessed.

The question becomes whether the storm destroys you or reveals you. When everything around you becomes unstable, what remains inside you becomes more important than what’s happening outside of you. That’s when faith, discipline, purpose, and self-knowledge stop being abstract ideas and become tools that help you keep moving when life gives you every reason to stop.

THE WORLD ISN’T THE END OF THE STORY

I don’t look at death in the same way I once did because as I get older, I don’t see death simply as a final stop where everything disappears. I see it as a transition, and I believe there’s more to existence than what our eyes can presently see. I believe the creative force that gave us consciousness is greater than anything we can fully explain with our limited human understanding, and that belief changes how I look at the passage of time and the different stages of life.

Think about the first moments of life because before you entered this physical world, you had no understanding of what was waiting for you. Then suddenly, you were here, and you had to learn how to breathe, walk, speak, understand gravity, communicate, think, and navigate an environment you had never experienced before. You didn’t understand what was coming, but you were developing toward it anyway, and every stage of development prepared you for a stage that previously seemed completely unfamiliar.

That’s how I look at the different stages of existence. When a child is in the third grade, the fourth grade can seem like some distant unknown territory, but after completing the third-grade curriculum, that child has already developed into someone capable of entering the next level. The transition may feel uncertain, but uncertainty doesn’t mean the next stage doesn’t exist, and fear doesn’t necessarily mean that something terrible is waiting on the other side.

Life itself is filled with transitions because we move from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence, from learning to teaching, from building to reflecting, and eventually from this physical experience into whatever comes next. Every stage requires us to leave something familiar behind, and yet we keep moving because remaining in the same stage forever simply isn’t how life works.

So why should I live in fear of a transition that every human being eventually faces? I would rather spend my time developing while I’m here than waste my life being terrified of where I’m going next. That doesn’t mean I pretend death isn’t serious, and it doesn’t mean I know exactly what happens afterward, but it means I refuse to let fear of the unknown prevent me from fully experiencing the life that’s right in front of me.

THE HAND INSIDE THE PUPPET

That brings me back to the hollows because I keep thinking about the image of a hand puppet. Sitting on a table, that puppet doesn’t move on its own. It has a shape, a face, clothing, and an appearance, but it requires something inside of it to make it move. Without the hand, it’s simply an empty shell waiting for something to give it motion, and that image helps explain how I view people who seem to have no meaningful internal direction of their own.

That’s the metaphor I see when I look at the hollow. There’s a body, a personality, a name, a history, and perhaps even intelligence, but the deeper sense of purpose can be missing. Then something comes along and fills the emptiness, whether that something is greed, envy, lust, hatred, addiction, the need for power, the desire for attention, or the urge to destroy somebody who reminds them of what they refuse to become.

The empty space gets occupied by something, and that’s why I believe we have to be careful about what we allow inside ourselves. You can’t leave your inner world empty and expect nothing to eventually occupy that space. If you don’t develop your mind, something else will develop it for you. If you don’t examine your values, somebody else will sell you theirs, and if you don’t establish your purpose, the world will gladly give you a purpose based on consumption, pleasure, competition, status, and constant distraction.

That’s how people become tools without realizing they’ve become tools. They can believe they’re making independent choices while their desires are being shaped by everything around them, and eventually they may find themselves defending behaviors, beliefs, and lifestyles that they never consciously chose in the first place. That’s why inner development matters because the stronger your sense of self becomes, the harder it becomes for outside forces to decide who you’re going to be.

DON’T LET SOMEONE ELSE DEFINE YOUR DESTINY

This doesn’t mean I believe you should walk around suspicious of everybody because that kind of thinking can become destructive in its own way. You still have to love people, communicate, build relationships, forgive mistakes, and give people room to grow. The goal isn’t to become paranoid and assume everybody is secretly working against you, because that can turn your own mind into another prison.

But you also have to pay attention to patterns. Pay attention to what happens when you improve, what happens when you become disciplined, what happens when you stop participating in something destructive, and what happens when you establish boundaries. Pay attention to what happens when you become comfortable saying no and when you stop needing everybody’s approval, because those moments can reveal relationships that were built around your weaknesses rather than your potential.

Those moments can stir the glass, and suddenly the contents that were sitting quietly at the bottom begin rising to the surface. You may discover that someone you thought was celebrating your growth was actually celebrating your stagnation, or you may discover that somebody you thought was protecting you was really protecting their access to you. You may even discover that some relationships survived only because you remained the same person, and once you changed, the relationship had nothing left to hold it together.

That can hurt, but sometimes pain is simply the price of seeing clearly. You don’t have to hate somebody because they revealed themselves, and you don’t have to spend years trying to punish them for being who they showed you they were. Sometimes the healthiest response is simply to understand what you’ve learned and adjust your distance accordingly.

Sometimes growth requires distance, sometimes wisdom requires silence, and sometimes spirituality requires solitude. There are moments when protecting your future means accepting that somebody from your past can’t come with you into your next chapter, and that doesn’t always mean there’s hatred involved. Sometimes two people simply reach different stages of development and can no longer travel together in the same way.

YOUR PEACE HAS VALUE

That’s why protecting your peace isn’t just some trendy phrase because your peace has value. Your peace gives you room to think, and when your mind is constantly occupied with conflict, drama, temptation, jealousy, arguments, distractions, and emotional chaos, you have less mental space available for your purpose. You can’t build a meaningful life while constantly fighting battles that never needed your attention in the first place.

You have to learn which battles deserve your energy and which ones are designed to drain it. You have to recognize that not every argument needs your response, not every insult deserves your attention, and not every person deserves unlimited access to your time. You also have to understand that not every relationship deserves the same level of emotional investment, because giving everybody equal access to your mind can eventually leave you with very little energy for the things that truly matter.

Sometimes protecting your peace means stepping back from people you care about. Sometimes it means refusing to participate in conversations that always become destructive, and sometimes it means accepting that you can love somebody without allowing their chaos to become your lifestyle. There’s a difference between having compassion for somebody and volunteering to be consumed by their problems.

Your purpose requires energy, and your peace helps protect that energy. When you stop wasting your life proving yourself to people who have already decided not to understand you, you create room for something better. When you stop chasing validation from people who only recognize you when you’re struggling, you create room for self-respect. When you stop feeding relationships that constantly leave you empty, you create room for relationships that actually nourish your development.

THE REAL QUESTION IS WHAT’S INSIDE YOU?

The deepest lesson here isn’t simply about identifying hollows around you because it’s also about making sure you don’t become one yourself. It’s easy to point at somebody else and call them empty, but it’s much harder to look inside ourselves and ask whether we’re actually developing. Are we becoming wiser, more disciplined, more compassionate, more honest, more purposeful, and more capable of learning from our mistakes, or are we simply repeating the same patterns while blaming everybody else for where we are?

Nobody should become so focused on exposing the hollowness in other people that they fail to examine the emptiness developing within themselves. That kind of self-examination can be uncomfortable because it forces us to admit that sometimes we’ve been the problem, sometimes we’ve encouraged our own destruction, and sometimes we’ve remained in situations that we already knew were beneath the person we wanted to become.

The goal isn’t to walk through life believing that everybody is against you. The goal is to become spiritually and mentally aware enough to recognize what feeds your life and what drains it. You have to become conscious of what you consume, who you listen to, what you normalize, what you repeatedly participate in, and what kind of person those choices are turning you into.

I believe we’re here for more than simply consuming everything the world puts in front of us. We’re here to think, create, learn, experience, develop, contribute, and leave something behind that carries our influence forward. We have the ability to create things that didn’t exist before, and that ability alone should make us question whether we were placed here merely to consume what somebody else created.

That’s why your potential matters. Your life has possibilities that you haven’t even discovered yet, and sometimes the greatest tragedy isn’t failing after trying. Sometimes the greatest tragedy is never discovering what you could have become because you spent your entire life listening to people who benefited from you remaining small.

WHEN THE GLASS GETS STIRRED

Life will continue stirring the glass because circumstances will continue exposing people. Success will expose some relationships, failure will expose others, money will expose some people, hard times will expose others, and your growth will expose even more. You don’t have to force the truth out of people because eventually life has a way of doing the stirring for you.

When that happens, pay attention to what rises to the surface. Don’t panic because somebody revealed themselves, and don’t automatically become bitter because somebody wasn’t who you thought they were. Sometimes the greatest protection you receive isn’t having someone removed from your life; sometimes it’s simply being given the clarity to see them accurately.

Once you see clearly, you can make better decisions about where your energy goes. You can stop confusing history with loyalty, familiarity with love, and participation in your weaknesses with genuine support for your future. You can begin understanding that some people are meant to walk with you for a season while others may be meant to remain at a distance, and that doesn’t automatically make either person your enemy.

So when I say everybody around you doesn’t have a soul, I’m asking you to think beyond the literal words. I’m asking you to examine what’s inside the people you allow close to you and, more importantly, what’s inside yourself. A person can have everything physically and still be spiritually empty, while somebody with very little materially can possess enormous depth, wisdom, love, discipline, and purpose.

Don’t confuse familiarity with loyalty, don’t confuse history with love, and don’t confuse laughter with friendship. Don’t assume somebody is helping you simply because they’re willing to participate in your bad habits, because sometimes the person who tells you what you want to hear is helping you destroy yourself while the person who challenges you may actually be encouraging you to become stronger.

Your life is too valuable to surrender your direction to people who have no direction of their own. You have a mind, you have a will, and you have the ability to create, learn, change, and grow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs may be, you’ve been given an opportunity to experience something extraordinary simply by being conscious enough to recognize that you’re alive, and that opportunity deserves more than a life spent chasing temporary pleasure or somebody else’s approval.

When life stirs the glass around you, don’t panic. Look carefully because what rises to the surface is information, and although that information may hurt, disappoint you, or completely change how you see someone you thought you knew, truth still has a purpose. Truth gives you the opportunity to stop living according to assumptions and start living according to what you can actually see, and once you see clearly, you can finally decide what deserves your presence, your energy, your trust, and your peace.

I’m not telling you to fear people, and I’m not telling you to hate the hollows. I’m telling you to understand human behavior well enough that their emptiness doesn’t become your environment. Protect your mind, protect your purpose, protect your spirit, and make sure that while you’re examining what’s inside everybody else, you’re also putting something powerful inside yourself.

Because when this life eventually reaches its transition, I don’t want to look back and realize that I spent my time trying to convince empty people to understand a journey they had no interest in taking. I want to know that I used my mind, developed my spirit, created what I could create, loved where I could love, learned where I could learn, and kept moving toward whatever higher level of existence awaits beyond what these physical eyes can see. That’s my perspective, that’s my journey, and that’s why I say, protect your peace and keep moving forward. LanceScurv out.

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EVERYBODY AROUND YOU DOESN’T HAVE A SOUL...