There’s a meaningful difference between being dispirited and being soulless — and midlife often confuses the two.
To be dispirited is to feel temporarily drained of energy, hope, or momentum. Your spirit is still there; it’s just tired. Dispirited people can feel cynical, flat, or discouraged, but beneath the fatigue there’s still a pulse — a quiet ember that can be reignited with rest, purpose, connection, or truth. Many of us feel this way about the current political situation in the U.S. and globally.
To be soulless, on the other hand, suggests something more structural. It implies disconnection not just from enthusiasm, but from meaning itself. A soulless experience — a job, a conversation, even a culture — feels hollow, transactional, stripped of humanity. There’s no animating force, no interior depth. It doesn’t just exhaust you; it diminishes you.
Midlife is often mislabeled as soulless when it is, in fact, more dispirited. We assume something essential has vanished when what’s really happened is depletion. The remedy for depletion isn’t escape — it’s restoration. The remedy for soullessness is re-alignment.
One calls for renewal.
The other calls for redefinition.
And knowing which one you’re experiencing can make all the difference between running away from your life and reshaping it. Either way, MEA can help with both so you feel more spirited and soulful. I can tell you that this new MEA grad’s face at the end of the week looked a whole lot different than it did at the start. Check out our Santa Fe and Baja workshops, 3-, 4-, and 5-day.
-Chip