Something has collapsed in the architecture of modern life – and most people feel it without being able to name it.
The anxiety, the low-grade dissatisfaction, the sense of reaching for something that keeps receding: these are not individual psychological problems. They are symptoms of a collective condition. The structures that once gave human longing somewhere to go – community, ritual, shared meaning, ceremony – have thinned almost to nothing in a single generation. Most of us are carrying profound yearning with no container for it and no vocabulary to describe what we’re carrying.
This is the collective dimension of what the first piece in this series described individually. The burning that many people feel isn’t only personal. It’s historical. And the traditions have a name for the age we’re living in.
My daughter, born Gabrielle, now lives in an ashram as Govinda-Kāntā. She found what I’m describing – not a solution to the longing, but a container for it. A way of life that honours the reaching rather than trying to dissolve it. Watching her settle into that life helped me understand something I hadn’t been able to see clearly when I was only sitting with my own burning in isolation.
There is a difference between carrying longing alone and carrying it within a tradition that recognises what you’re carrying. The longing doesn’t change. But the loneliness of carrying it does.
A Daughter’s Renaming: What It Revealed About Carrying Longing
There’s something I want to say about her name. She was born Gabrielle, a name I gave her with love. She received Govinda-Kāntā when she entered the tradition, a name that means beloved of Govinda, beloved of Krishna in his role as the keeper of cows, the protector, the one who calls the soul home with the sound of his flute. The renaming itself is part of the practice. It isn’t a rejection of who she was. It’s a recognition that there’s more than one layer of identity, and the deeper layer, the one oriented toward source, deserves its own name.
When she first messaged me with that name, I felt something I didn’t expect. Not loss. Not grief. Something closer to recognition. As if a name I had given her for one purpose had served its purpose, and now she had received a name that served the next. I had named her once. The tradition had named her again. As her mother, and as her friend in Krishna, I could see the beauty in both. Both names belong to her. Both are true.
I thought about that for a long time afterward. The idea that naming is layered. That the name we’re given at birth anchors us in a particular life, in a particular family, in a particular set of stories. And the names we receive later, the ones the tradition gives, or the ones we give ourselves when we undergo something that changes us, those names anchor us in a different way. They anchor us in what we’re becoming, or in who we already are at the layer that matters most.
I haven’t been renamed. I’m still Leigh. But I understand differently now what it would mean to have a name that acknowledged the burning rather than simply the person carrying it.
The Difference Between Carrying Longing Alone and Within a Tradition
This is what the previous article in this series began to point at. Unfulfilled longing isn’t a malfunction. The mystic traditions across cultures have understood it as something closer to a sacred condition, a particular orientation of the soul that keeps it facing toward source. The reed cut from the reed bed cries, and the crying is the music. The longing is not the problem. The longing is the doorway.
But there’s something we haven’t addressed yet. Why does this feel so acute now? Why are so many people in this particular moment of history walking around with unnamed yearning, vague dissatisfaction, the sense that something is missing without being able to say what?
I don’t think this is purely individual. I think we’re living in a particular kind of cultural moment, and the moment itself produces a specific quality of longing that previous ages didn’t carry in quite the same way.
My daughter stepped into a container that holds her longing. Most of us haven’t. Most of us are carrying what she carries, the viraha named in Part One, the sacred reaching, without any of the architecture that makes it livable. And the particular condition of this age is that the architecture is largely gone.
Kali Yuga: The Vedic Name for Our Age of Disconnection
The Vedic tradition has a name for this moment. Kali Yuga, the age of disconnection, distraction, and forgetting. I want to use the term carefully, with respect for the depth of the Vedic cosmological tradition it comes from. Whether Kali Yuga is approached literally, symbolically, spiritually, or philosophically, its description of fragmentation, confusion, moral inversion, and disconnection carries an uncanny resonance with the world we are living through now. Kali Yuga is the age when the cultural and spiritual architecture that previously held human life thins out almost to nothing. Community fragments. Ritual disappears. The connection to land, to ancestors, to ceremony, to sacred time, all of it gets eroded by the conditions of modernity.
The Vedic texts are specific about what Kali Yuga looks like from the inside. People will be governed by appetite. The false will appear as true and the true will be dismissed. Community will exist in name but not in practice. People will be surrounded by others and profoundly lonely. The sacred will be commodified. What was once held in common will be privatised, including the inner life.
I do not read this as prophecy of doom. I read it as an accurate description of what’s happened to the containers that once held human longing. We are living in the age of container collapse. And when the containers collapse, the longing they held doesn’t disappear. It scatters.
What the Collapse of Cultural Containers Has Cost Us
I notice this when I look at what’s happened in my own lifetime. When I was a child, communities had density. People knew their neighbours, not just their names. Extended families lived within reach. Religious or spiritual community, whatever form it took, provided structure for the year, for the week, for the life. Even those who weren’t religious carried inherited frameworks for meaning. There were stories everyone knew. Songs everyone sang. Rituals that marked the transitions of a life.
I remember the texture of that, even though I couldn’t have named it at the time. Sunday was different from other days, not because of church, though there was that, but because it had a quality. The week had rhythm. The year had shape. Christmas wasn’t perfect but it was held, held by shared expectation, shared ritual, shared story. There was a container, however imperfect, and the container meant that the longing had somewhere to go.
Most of that is gone now. Not entirely, pockets remain, my daughter has entered one, but the dominant culture no longer holds these things for us. We are largely on our own. We have to construct meaning piece by piece, from fragments. We have to find our own community. We have to invent our own rituals. We have to figure out, by ourselves, what to do with the deep human longing that previous generations had at least some help carrying.
And we’re not very good at it. How could we be? We were given no training. The institutions that might have trained us were either dismantled or became so unrecognisable that they stopped serving the function. The church hollowed out, or became about something other than the sacred. Extended family scattered across cities and continents. Ceremony got reduced to events, and events to social media posts. The container became the photograph of the container.
Why So Many People Feel Empty Despite Having Enough
This is what produces what I’d call the contemporary ache. The longing is the same longing humans have always carried, the viraha the bhakti tradition names, the reed’s complaint Rumi described, the wound Teresa knew. But the support structure is gone. The vocabulary is gone. Most people don’t have a name for what they’re feeling. They just know something is wrong. They just know they should be happier than they are. They just know they’re reaching for something they can’t quite identify.
And so the reaching gets misdirected. I’ve watched this in friends, in family members, in colleagues over the years. The unnamed dissatisfaction that gets channeled into the next purchase, the next renovation, the next holiday, the next relationship. Each acquisition produces a brief sense of relief, followed by the longing returning, often more acutely than before. The cycle accelerates over time rather than slowing. By middle age many people are deeply tired of it but don’t know how to stop, because the alternative looks like nothing. Just the longing, naked, without the buffers.
The wellness industry tries to soothe this. The achievement industry tries to outrun it. The therapy industry tries to resolve it. The consumer economy tries to fill it with products. None of them quite touch what the mystics named long ago. Because the longing isn’t asking to be soothed, outrun, resolved, or filled.
The longing is asking to be honored.
The mystics would say we’re hungry for the divine and trying to feed that hunger with everything except the divine. Nothing else works. Nothing else can work. The hunger keeps coming back because what we’re hungry for isn’t food.
Two Ways to Respond to Persistent Longing
I want to be careful not to romanticise my daughter’s path. Not everyone is suited to ashram life, and the bhakti road isn’t superior to other roads. Some people honor their longing through art. Some through service. Some through deep relationship. Some through nature. Some through practices like tarot, which is, after all, a way of sitting with uncertainty without trying to dispel it – a discipline explored in Tarot as a Pre-Symbolic Interface and in the attentional conditions named by the COMPASS Method. There are many doorways. What matters is that the longing is recognised as the doorway, not avoided as the problem.
And don’t get me wrong about the material world either. I love being human. I love having a physical body. I love the explorations available to embodied existence, the food and the dance and the conversations and the work. The longing doesn’t ask us to renounce the world. The bhakti tradition is particularly clear about this. We are meant to fully inhabit our human lives. We are also meant to remain oriented toward what’s beyond them. Both at once. Always.
But I do notice when I’m with people who are locked entirely into the material, who have no framework for the longing they’re carrying, no name for it, no doorway. They don’t seem happier than I am. They often seem more anxious, more driven by appetite, more easily destabilised by ordinary disappointment. Because they have nowhere to take the longing. It just keeps generating restlessness in them, and they keep trying to silence it through acquisition.
What the Traditions Offer That Satisfaction Cannot
What the traditions offer isn’t a solution to the longing. It’s a different relationship to it. Instead of trying to extinguish the longing through acquisition, you turn toward it. You ask what it’s actually for. You let it teach you. You discover, slowly, that the longing was never asking to be filled with stuff. It was asking to be honored as the orientation toward source it actually is.
This is hard work. It runs against everything the consumer culture trains us to do. We are trained to fix discomfort, not to befriend it. We are trained to seek satisfaction, not to recognise satisfaction as a brief moment in a much longer rhythm. The traditions train us in the opposite direction. They train us to stay with the longing, to let it be the teacher, to receive what it’s actually offering.
The longing is the compass. Follow it, not by trying to satisfy it, but by attending to what it’s actually pointing at.
It points toward presence, toward connection, toward whatever name we want to give to that which our soul actually recognises as home.
For my daughter, that home has a specific form. The ashram, the practice, the community, the daily devotion. For me it’s looser, more itinerant, more cobbled together from fragments of bhakti and tarot and contemplative practice and the slow attention I try to bring to my own life. We’ve found different containers. But we are reaching for the same thing.
And I think this is what the broader collective is reaching for too, even when it doesn’t know it. The dissatisfaction so many people carry isn’t really about jobs or relationships or living conditions, although those things matter. Underneath those particulars is something deeper. People are starving for what the traditions used to provide. Meaning. Belonging. Sacred time. Connection to something larger than the individual self. The architecture for honoring longing rather than trying to silence it.
We’re not going to rebuild that architecture by going backwards. The old containers don’t fit the contemporary world, and forcing them produces its own pathology. But we might be able to build something new from the fragments. We might be able to honor the wisdom of the old traditions while finding forms that work for this age.
The first step is naming what we’re actually feeling. The longing is real. It is sacred. It is not a malfunction. It is not something to be eliminated. And we are not alone with it, even when the contemporary culture leaves us feeling like we are.
The shape of your longing is your own. The name you give it is your own. The container you build or find or stumble into is your own. But the longing itself is the oldest human thing there is. You are not broken for having it. You are, in the most fundamental sense, responding correctly to what it means to be alive.
Mind the gap, the voice says in the London Underground. Mind the space where you could fall.
Mind the gap. Tend to it. Recognise it. The gap is not your failure to arrive. The gap is the doorway you came here to walk through.
You’re not alone in standing at it.
The next article, How to Actually Live with Longing: A Practitioner’s Guide, is the practical piece – what works, what doesn’t, and how to build a container for the burning without being consumed by it.
Leigh Spencer is the founder of Tides of Knowing and founder of the COMPASS Method, a framework for the conditions of attention that make intuitive reading reliable under pressure. With 30 years in professional journalism and 40 years as a tarot reader and intuitive practitioner, she writes at the intersection of symbolic literacy, perceptual development, and the changing landscape of human knowing.