Technically, I'm writing this in the earliest hours of Black Friday, but the subject of my thought remains in the day prior: Thanksgiving. 2025 has been a year defined by reflection and contemplation for me. So, naturally, I've been pondering the essence of the Holidays as they pass. In the case of Thanksgiving, I can't help but feel that the version we celebrate today is a perverse, hollow, inversion of the essential spirit of the holiday.
Let me bring this down a few layers of abstraction. Thanksgiving today is defined by food, company, and gratitude. You gather with your friends and family, prepare heaps of food, and then share what you're thankful for in your lives. Right? I worry that this is being lost, and that this itself was already only the shadow of what Thanksgiving means. Realistically, Thanksgiving in America is — for the majority of us — about fulfilling an obligation to gather with relatives we feel divided from, making the choice between walking on eggshells the entire evening or turning the home into an ideological warzone, and surviving a gauntlet of social policing from relatives about whether or not you're living up to a laundry list of social standards they hold unquestioning devotion to. Not the most attractive way to spend your night.
Even as I write this, I find myself wanting to say that I am "fortunate" to spend Thanksgiving with only my immediate family who all hold a relative level of agreement on most social and political issues. But as I write that statement down, I feel that it is terribly sad. Connecting with the broader whole of your family ought to be a privilege to be cherished, something to be sought out, not avoided in fear. This tells me a few things:
Somewhere along the line, we took connection and community off the top position of the cultural podium and replaced it with ideological agreement and adherence to social standards.
We've become viscerally uncomfortable with genuine displays of love/care and instead perform what we think will grant us the perception we want; and when we do encounter these genuine displays of love/care we treat them with suspicion.
Our whole worlds have become subordinated to a monolithic sense of valuation that leaves love out of the equation so we no longer have the framework to understand where love fits into our lives.
Okay, I admit these points are not directly connected to what I've said about Thanksgiving, but I'm sure if you tried hard enough you could find a connecting thread and these are the points I want to write about right now. I consider all of these as connected so speaking on them with a hard separation feels foolish, but I do think there is a best order to develop their connecting ideas through.
Man and Material: A Tale as Old as Johann Sebastian Bach
To know how we wound up here, we need to open our history books. We will find a few important touchstones. Let's begin with enlightenment. The 17th century brought us a new way of thinking novel to humanity. This new way of thinking known chiefly by its reason, logic, and materialism. However, for this essay I will refer to this new cosmology and epistemology by one word: Materialism. Through Materialism, all matter was made unconscious and inert. (Of course, for many centuries Cartesian dualism remained dominant and the mind/consciousness was set separate before later being paradoxically brought into the realm of unconscious matter. This will be important later) However, what I find most notable about this change in our way of thinking, is the societal path it set us down. Materialism — in the cosmological and epistemic sense rather than economic — opened the door for a new kind of uninspired monism of the universe.
Before Materialism, the universe was the creation of God(s) and Spirits. There was intention in everything that was and an unquestionable harmony for us to strive for accordance with. This was its own kind of monism, but it was one which invigorated the human spirit and promoted aesthetic and spiritual pursuits to sustain the human spirit. Materialism broke this. It denied the human spirit its own existence and demoted the natural world to one big accident in a spiritual void.
However, for many centuries the traditions of cultures were able to continue and hold their non-materialism traditions at the same time as continuing down the path of Materialism. Things like honor, dignity, and love held their place as the primary pillars of society. Materialism was a tool for the divine man to impose his will onto the universe. Yet, in the 19th century the cracks began to show symbolized by a growing inability of philosophers to explain this separation of man and material (I'm looking at you Darwin and Marx). Then came WWI — or as they knew it, The Great War.
The Great War was the most horrific, and global conflict the world had ever experienced. It was a turning point. The things which had been holding society together: honor, dignity, love, suddenly became the things which had led the world into its greatest disaster. This led society to question and doubt their old ways and left an empty void of meaning to be filled. The thinker who's ideas would fill this void would be none other than Sigmund Freud.
That fuck.
Freud's ideas take the cart of Materialism and give it one final push — after Darwin — and cement man as simply an irrational animal. He argues that we are controlled by unconscious drives and our behavior is better explained by these than some kind of divine rationality. This notion was already gaining traction prior to the war as it was the next progression of the Materialist path, but in the wake of the war, his ideas caught fire. In a way, I imagine such a theory of man would have been a comfort to those who had witnessed such atrocities of man against man during the war. Such actions certainly must seem inconsistent with a theory of man that holds him to divine rationality. After witnessing the world acting like beasts, we became easy to convince that we were beasts.
There is much more to say on the subject, but I feel this is a schema of the progression of Materialism and how it brought us to the current age's idea of common sense. Of course, the rise of capitalism coincided relatively closely as the predominant economic vision of the world while Materialism became our cosmology and epistemology. For a long time, they were mutually supporting and beneficial theories for society. So, we fed them. But now, they have gained the strength to imprison us.
I won't spend too much time tracing their development in the last century, but I would highly recommend the BBC documentary The Century of the Self to do a deeper dive (you can find it on YouTube). But, for those alive today the consequences of these developments are our only reality and many of us simply accept it without question since we've never known otherwise.
(Side tangent: this is why history is so important, so we can see visions of humanity different than our own and see how ours came to be.)
It's probably about time I bring this back to my main points; but I felt it important to shine light on the foundations of the assumptions we may take for granted. With the stage set, I can properly talk about my three main points: lovelessness, superficiality, and suspicion.
Lovelessness
I must, and happily, pay my respects to the legendary Bell Hooks for coining this idea. Presenting a full taxonomy of the causes of lovelessness in the modern age would trap me here writing for far longer than I would like, so I will summarize the cause with a quote from her book All About Love.
"Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced with the passion to possess. While emotional needs are difficult, and often are impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill. (emphasis mine)"
You see now why the context of the rise of Materialism is necessary to understand this idea. Within the cage of Materialism the idea of a "spiritual lack" is at worst nonsensical and at best naive. But we are seeing in the world around us that this lack is very much real to humanity. It's been a cancer on our species which is currently metastasizing. As its grown we have created consumerism to fill the growing void in our souls. Shockingly, this has been a temporary fix and I feel society is approaching rapidly to the point where the bandaid can no longer cover the wound.
Love has been ripped from its sacred (I use this term loosely) position in human life over the last century by an organized onslaught of insecure greed. When we live in a culture where the belief that the accumulation of material goods and power will satisfy us, people will let their greed run amok, unrestrained. The outcome of this will be a few very wealthy and powerful people under a capitalist economy, and these people will realize something once they reach the heights of wealth and power: they still aren't satisfied. The Materialist promise was a lie. While I have not experienced this personally, I can only imagine it must be a deeply disheartening experience that undoubtedly leaves most of them very bitter. Unfortunately for us, the reaction that they all seem to come to, is that if they are miserable, then if the rest of us are even more so then their misery is tantamount to the satisfaction they feel they ought to have earned.
This is a process that has been going on for many decades and has almost fully shaped the world we live in. Not only are they intent on making us miserable to elevate their satisfaction in a relative sense, but they also cannot let go of the Materialist promise because they have devoted their whole beings to it. Lucky for them, they can continue to nurture this promise and make us all miserable! It's almost like they cannot do one without the other. Their method of choice has been to attack love.
How do you attack love? Well, you attack the conditions that nurture it. You promote alienation from the spirit, you make them see each other as enemies, you isolate them from each other in every way you can, you tell them love is a naive fantasy for fools, you tell them that what really matters is material, you tell them that they are unequal in whatever way they're willing to believe, and above all, you tell them they are alone. That feels like a pretty concise description of the modern world. The world and people's personal lives are seen transactional and as a machine to optimize. Patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, religious dogma, and any kind of ideology which creates an "us" and a "them" is thriving, especially those with supremacist characteristics. Learned helplessness and insecurity has been systematized to indoctrinate us into the idea that we are not enough and are powerless to change things in a meaningful way, about the world or ourselves. Basically, we all feel like we're being fucked with a burning iron twice daily.
Alright, I must remind myself to return to my original intention: lovelessness. The things that all of this has in common is that it keeps us from learning about, or performing love in our lives. Be it by constraints on material conditions, time, or even our mental lives, we do not have the time, money, or vocabulary to even learn what love means anymore. Moreover, our traditions that taught us about it such as intergenerational living, reading classics, or intentional contemplation are being erased before our eyes. To add insult to injury, mass media force feeds us an inverted vision of love and tells us to aspire to it so that we feel inadequate when we inevitably fall short.
To be clear, I don't mean love in the romantic sense. I mean love as the phenomenon of genuine connection to another entity and the genuine desire for its wellbeing to be nurtured by oneself and others. This can apply to all kinds of relationships: friendships, nature, ones nation, activities, stories, and eventually, everything that is. Some of these may feel unintuitive to imagine loving in the sense of nurturing wellbeing, but this is because our thinking has been hamstringed by Materialism. I love the Lord of the Rings story. I feel a genuine connection to the story and the way my genuine desire for its wellbeing to be nurtured is expressed is as appreciating the impact it had on my own life and wishing it to do the same for others, which might be passing on the books to a friend. The wellbeing of a thing is for it to be its best self, and the best self of a story is as a vehicle for a specific experience which will improve the life of its reader. This same general framework can be applied to saying that one loves their sport or field of study as well. Those things at their best are about improving the lives of their practitioners, so loving them means recognizing and appreciating the benefits it provides you and wishing it upon others.
If this feels like a foreign concept, that's because it is. Our society doesn't talk about love in this way, not even close. The notion of love that we espouse as a society is confused, incomplete, and distinctly Materialist. We use vague sayings like, "you'll know it when you feel it." Yes, you will feel it, but if you have no proper idea of how to conceive of it, then it will confuse and frighten you. In this confusion, we have tried to turn love into something more visible by making it a performance. If you love someone you must adorn them in expensive gifts. If you love nature you must go plant trees and donate to environmental causes. If you love your nation you must defend it from accusations of wrongdoing and attack its enemies. All of these are the outcome of what love is turned into when churned through the grinder of Materialism. Incomplete, measurable, and spiritless.
Yet, we all still search for love in our lives (which supports my personal belief that love is basic to human life). We search for things outside of ourselves to love: a nation, a career, a cause, a person. And we also search to receive love — in whatever form we can conceive of it in. Sadly, the Materialist common sense notion of how to both show and gain love has been narrowed so far into performance that our whole lives become entrenched in the realm of…
Superficiality
"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self-aware (emphasis mine)."
This is a quote from Matthew McConaughey's character in the show True Detective. I haven't seen the show, but I imagine whichever writer came up with this line was darn proud of themself. It sounds profound, insightful, edgy. And — in part — I agree with it. The problem is, the more important part is how I disagree. I agree that our self-awareness has the potential to cause us to be incredibly neurotic and become too concerned with both our own self-perception and our perception by others that it bars us from living a full human experience; however, I believe that the level of self-awareness which leaves us in this state is merely a shallow pond in the lake of our consciousness. Unfortunately, some people have designed the world to keep most of us in the pond.
What happens when you put something with a basic drive for giving and receiving love in a loveless environment and feed it an endless stream of Materialist messaging? Go ask your friend Kyle. Our whole existence can easily fall into a trap where we become consumed with applying our knowledge and understanding of the world to creating an image of ourselves that we feel is worthy of love from another and visibly performs love — to our understanding of it. The issue with this is that it — by our definition of love — step one is genuine connection. If your whole being is devoted to performing something, then that performance can never create a genuine connection to something, or be the object of a genuine connection. The only thing genuine in that kind of existence is the devotion to the performance.
We are left with the dystopian reality of our current culture. Social media has become a mainstay of society because of its ability to maximize our ability to perform for the world. I'll leave the work of dissecting the depths of superficiality's expression in our culture to many fine video-essayists on YouTube and perhaps my future self; but for our current purposes, I feel it wise to remain focused on the nature of superficiality itself.
How do we become so single-mindedly devoted to this performance of a life? Well, I'm sure you can answer that: feeling like your real self is undeserving of being shown to the world. This is the key. This is the crux of the attack on love. If they can convince you to hide yourself behind a mask your whole life, they can prevent you from genuinely connecting to anything or anyone and condemn you to a life without real love. Set the standard higher so that it becomes unattainable and then deny its unattainable nature leaving the only rational alternative as a personal deficiency. Distort all the mirrors more so that people see a pathetic image of themselves when they look toward the world to see themselves. Stoke their fears that they are an embodiment of or are associated with something you already taught them to hate. Perfectionism, inferiority, and insecurity. These are the mechanisms wielded against you in an effort to convince you that your real self is undeserving of even being allowed presence in the world.
Okay, let's take a second and breath. I know the last few minutes of reading have been intense and demoralizing. I do apologize, there is not really any cheerful way to bring up these kinds of things. But, I want to take this moment to reassure you that you are more powerful than you know and have in your soul the strength to overcome all of these challenges put out against you. My job right now is just to shine the light on the phenomenons themselves and their mechanisms so that you have the conceptual resources and apparatus to dismantle them within your own mind and to recognize and confront them with confidence as you move about in the external world. You are incredible, beautiful, and perfect in the old sense of the word (look it up) and I love you very much my dear reader.
Suspicion
Thus far, I have spoken about society and its woes quite generally and as if it may all act the same. Of course, this is inaccurate. Not everyone in society is bound by their superficiality and condemned to lovelessness. There are, and will always be, those who have either avoided the traps set before them, or fallen into them and dug their ways out. These people are openly themselves and capable of genuine love. Sadly, many times when they express themselves lovingly to the world they are met with suspicion and accused of ulterior motivations.
This is because the Materialist worldview values everything in a narrow way and enforces transactional logic onto the world as "the way life is." Love, generosity, and care do not fit into this picture. The only way they can be conceived of is through the transactional logic of Materialism. Nothing is free. Every "gift" has a hidden cost that must be paid. Perhaps it is an expectation of a favor, or an upholding of a societal standard and image. The bill always comes due in the mind of Materialism. But, for those actions driven by real love, these rules don't apply. It really is a gift and there is no expectation of reciprocity. This extends beyond material goods, it could be the gift of advice, conversation, listening, or any manner of non-material things.
Capitalism makes it worse. Well, it makes just about everything worse, but here I mean it makes the suspicion of love worse. Materialism as a cosmology already sets the subtle thought patterns of equivalent exchange by its doctrine of finite resources (which human love does not fit into because it is infinite), but capitalism makes these thought patterns explicit and loud. Consumerism has taken capitalist logic, simplified it, and made its best attempt to thrust it into the minds of everyone. Money has become the measure of value for all things material, and now much of what is immaterial such as intellectual property. Now, even sharing an idea for the sake of nothing other than a belief that hearing it may improve someone's life, can be held in suspicion of ulterior financial incentive. Shit, am I going to ask you to pay me if you want to read the rest of the essay? (No, no I will not. Everything I write is free and I leave Substack's subscription feature on only as an option for people to show love for my work and to support me in bringing it to more people.)
Our notions of common sense have placed so many restrictions upon themselves that we have narrowed the world into a shadow of itself made to be much simpler than reality. Except, reality still exists. The cracks are showing and it's causing people to suffer. We cannot continue to live in a world where the simplest generosity is met with suspicion because this a world where good will and love have died.
Wrapping up Thanksgiving
I must confess, the intended scope of this essay was much smaller when I wrote the first words. A kind of waterfall of ideas possessed me and demanded to be placed upon a page, so I do hope this essay has been not too difficult to follow and maybe even comes off as inspired! It's unlikely, but a boy can hope.
Thank you kindly for reading my extra long ramblings today and I remain always open to questions and feedback.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst