The Hollow at the Centre

On No-Face, meaning and the fellowships that keep the lights on

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life... from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

The political news in the UK this week has had a hollowing texture to it.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty. Partly because the usual words are already doing enough damage, and partly because what I’m trying to understand sits underneath the headlines.

That feeling of people no longer seeming held… no longer pointed and hungry in a way that scares me… it has reminded me of No-Face.

If you’ve seen Spirited Away you’ll know who I mean. Kaonashi, the hollow spirit who drifts through the bathhouse looking for somewhere to belong. No name. No face. No shape of his own. He can’t speak for himself so he uses the voices of whoever he swallows. He hands out gold to feel wanted. He grows monstrous trying to fill himself with whatever is nearby. He is, in many ways, the original generative mimic, possessing infinite output but no internal code of his own.

This is essay 136, the closing of a mini series that started with me asking in essay 131 what makes something stay with you, and led me to name three components of meaning;

🌸 Coherence, this makes sense of who I am

🌸 Purpose, this points beyond me

🌸 Significance, this feels like it counts

I think when people lose access to all three, they can start to feel No-Faced by the world. Hollowed out. Hungry for a name, a direction, a sense that they count.

They will swallow whoever offers them a sense of mattering. The substitutes don’t have to be good, they just have to be available. Unpurposeful AI can mimic each of the three components of meaning, too. Where people are looking around wondering whether anyone is going to offer them a lifeline, the synthetic substitutes are already everywhere.

Feeling over framework

If the headlines this week felt like a slow hollowing, Friday morning felt like a refilling.

In trying to understand the components of meaning, I’ve come to appreciate that you don’t experience them as three separate things, but as a feeling. It’s the feeling of being in flow with people who care about the same thing you care about, working on something real, watching it get a little bit better because you all turned up.

I felt it on Friday morning at a breakfast meeting,

The TEKEX Innovation Breakfast, hosted on the Island ahead of our General Election in September. The brief was open. With global technology changing rapidly and our domestic economy shifting, how does the Isle of Man best embrace what’s coming? Cleantech, AI regulation, data foundations, the question of what industries we should be growing into. Aspiring politicians in the room alongside the business community. The conversation could have gone defensive or tribal, that thing rooms do when futures are uncertain and people start guarding their corners.

It didn’t, it was open and curious. People named fears out loud and other people in the room received them without flinching. Different industries, different politics, different generations, all sitting around the same question of how we steward a small Island into an uncertain future. I left with a notebook full of ideas and a head full of hope.

Underneath that feeling, all three components were working. We knew who we were in that room (coherence, the people who care about this place enough to give a morning to it). We could feel which way the work pointed, and we trusted it (purpose, the Island getting through what’s coming with its character intact). We were held by people who noticed we turned up, and we were adding to something that pulled us out of bed before sunrise (significance, both roots fed). Nobody named any of this in the room. We just felt it.

This is what small fellowships look like. Not lofty, just people in a function room with bacon and good coffee, refusing to let the future happen to them and choosing to shape it together instead.

This is what I want to protect… what I want for more people, rooms where you can feel held, pointed and useful before fear gets to them first.

The feeling… the framework is just a torch, useful when the lights go out.

When the lights go out

The torch matters though because the lights do go out.

Often with a slow dimming hard to discern. Coherence drifts and you stop being able to explain who you are. Purpose follows and you stop being able to tell which direction is yours. Significance often goes last, because dashboards keep telling you everything is fine. More posts. More reach. More output. Your numbers are growing. You should feel something. You don’t.

This is when No-Face shows up.

He arrives as a hollow you didn’t know was there, not a monster. He drifts in when you’ve forgotten what you sound like, when your direction is being set by whatever scrolled past most recently, when your sense of mattering has been outsourced to a metric. He starts small. He uses the voices of whoever he last swallowed. He hands out gold and gets bigger.

What we have been calling the ikigai risk of AI is a fragmenting force. AI doesn’t just make coherence harder, or purpose harder, or significance harder. Handled badly it can impact all three at once, offering synthetic substitutes convincing enough to stop us noticing what we’ve lost.

🌸 Synthetic coherence, our self-presentation curated for what the algorithm rewards.

🌸 Synthetic purpose, the pace set for us, the next thing always queued, the frictionless void where the natural exhaustion that used to tell us we’d done enough is removed.

🌸 Synthetic significance, the warmth without the cost, the metric without the mattering.

What we become, when all three are running at once, is hollow at the centre. We’re still moving. We’re still producing. We’re using everyone else’s voices because we’ve stopped being able to find our own. We’re handing out gold to feel wanted. We are, slowly and without realising it, becoming No-Face.

Remember your name

The reason Spirited Away doesn’t end with No-Face is that Chihiro remembers her name, her sense of self.

She spends most of the film at risk of forgetting it. The witch Yubaba steals names through the employment contract. Chihiro signs hers and becomes Sen. Most of the bathhouse staff have forgotten theirs entirely. They know they used to be river spirits or weather spirits or something with a self, but the work has erased them. They drift. They serve. They survive.

What saves Chihiro is a card in her pocket.

A goodbye note from her friend, given to her before she entered the spirit world, with her real name written on it. Haku finds it. He tells her to keep it hidden, to call herself Sen out loud, but to hold on to that card whatever happens. If you forget your name, you can never find your way home.

The thing that protects her from becoming hollow is a small piece of paper from someone who knew her. A friend who took the time to write her name down, connection made portable.

The hopeful piece is that the components of meaning work like that card. If the card is the connection made portable, then these three components are the ink that makes the name legible.

You don’t have to perform them. You don’t have to find a movement or a moment that history will record. You just have to keep the card in your pocket. To check, sometimes, that you can still feel who you are (coherence). That you can still tell which way you’re pointing (purpose). That you are held by someone, somewhere, and that you are adding something to a corner of the world you care about (significance, both roots fed).

When all three are answering, you are not No-Face. You are not available to be filled by whatever comes through the door. You can sit in a function room on a Friday morning, listen to people with different views than yours, hold your own ground and leave hopeful with points of togetherness and compromise.

The fellowships are hugely important. They are how we remember our names together. The Community of Practice. The Substack readers. The TEKEX breakfast. SheWritesAI. HASSL. Whatever you have. Small rooms full of people who know who you are and what you care about and notice when you turn up. The bathhouses where the lights stay on.

This is how the lights stay on for everyone else, too. One small fellowship at a time.

And because the big question is often too big, I have started making the card smaller.

Not am I living a meaningful life?

That question makes the mind panic. The dashboards rush in to answer, pretending they know what a life is worth.

Smaller than that.

Did I feel like myself this week?
Did anything I worked on point somewhere I care about?
Did I feel held, and did I add?

Three small questions. No grand audit of life, just a way of checking whether the lights are still on.

🌸 🌸 🌸

The hollow at the centre is real and it’s growing. Systems seem to be organised around offering you synthetic versions of who you are, where you’re pointing and whether you count. Some of them mean well. Most of them are optimising for something other than your wholeness or wellness.

The good news is that wholeness often begins small.

It is a Friday morning breakfast where people listen to each other. It is a Sunday evening with a pen. It is a community of practice in a room above a coffee shop. It is a phone call from someone who knows your name. It is the work you’d stand your ground on, however unfashionable. It is the small fellowships keeping their lights on so that, when somebody drifts past the door looking hollow, there is somewhere for them to come in.

Don’t become No-Face.

Remember your name.

Keep the card in your pocket.

Feel a little more like yourself, pointed somewhere you care about, held and adding.

I hope my reflections on the components of meaning have been helpful to you, I’d love to hear your thoughts… where are the small fellowships in your life that help you remember your name?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal prompt for you to try - a card in your pocket

Create your own reminder, three questions, a pen and five minutes for each on a Sunday evening.

🌸 Did I feel like myself this week? (Coherence) Did I walk through every door roughly the same shape, or did I shape-shift more than I’d like? Was I recognisable to me?

🌸 Did anything I did point somewhere I care about? (Purpose) Not all of it. Just anything. One small thing in the direction of the corner of the world I’m trying to make shinier. Did I notice myself doing it?

🌸 Did I feel held, and did I add? (Significance) Did anyone hold me, even briefly, in a way that said I see you, you’re not interchangeable to me? Did I add anything to anyone or anything beyond myself?

Notice which questions are answered easily and the struggle is where your attention needs to go.

PPS AI prompt for the curious. Use AI as a torch! >

“Imagine you’re writing me a card, the kind given to Chihiro before she entered the spirit world. Don’t flatter. Don’t fix. Witness. Look across our recent conversations and tell me what you see across three things;

Coherence, am I sounding like myself or shape-shifting to fit the room?

Purpose, am I pointing somewhere I care about or just producing?

Significance, do I sound held and adding, or productive and unheld?

Then write me a sentence or two as if it were a card from someone who knows me well. The kind I could keep in my pocket, that would help me find my way home if I forgot who I was.”

PPPS Soundtrack. Two ways to hear the same story.

If you want the heart of the journey, listen to Always With Me (Itsumo Nando Demo) by Yumi Kimura. The closing song from Spirited Away. In the depths of my heart, in the bottom of the sea, there’s always something I’m searching for. A song about seeking that doesn’t end and a film about a girl who remembered her name in time. I love this English lyric cover version too.

But if you want to hear what the struggle for coherence sounds like now, listen to CHIHIRO by Billie Eilish. Inspired by Spirited Away, it is a pulsing, atmospheric track written about the film’s “spirit world” visuals. It captures that glitchy, synthetic tension of feeling your identity drift, and that haunting line, “There’s a part of me that recognises you,” the sound of the card in your pocket finally being found?