Why Feeling Nothing Might Mean Everything

by TM Garret
June 9, 2025

This morning I woke up feeling a little bit flat and empty, and I tried to figure out what this means. Am I getting depressed? The last couple weeks I felt this balance and peace, and it almost felt like I lost it and I couldn’t interpret it. Until I discovered that I’m still feeling the same. And that I actually almost fell into the same old trap – trying to put a value tag on this feeling, trying to interpret and fill the gaps, filling this empty vessel.

We live in a world that’s terrified of emptiness. Turn on the TV – which, by the way, has been sitting in my closet for months now with clothes hanging over it – and you’ll see people desperately trying to fill every moment with something. Anything. Entertainment, drama, other people’s opinions, other people’s problems, other people’s meanings. We’ve become a society of vessels constantly being filled by external sources, never stopping to ask what we actually want to put in there ourselves.

But here’s what I’m starting to understand: that empty feeling we’re so afraid of? That might be exactly where we’re supposed to be.

Think about it like this. You know that butterfly feeling you get when you’re excited about a new relationship? That honeymoon phase energy that makes everything feel electric? Your body is having a specific physiological response – increased heart rate, heightened awareness, that crawling sensation up your back. Now think about anxiety. That creeping dread when something bad is about to happen. Same physical sensation. Same crawling up your back. Same heightened awareness. The only difference is the value tag we put on it.

One we call love. One we call fear. But the body? The body is just responding to intensity. We decide what it means.

I think emptiness works the same way. We feel this neutral state – this absence of drama, of crisis, of external stimulation – and immediately our brain starts looking for a problem. “Why don’t I feel excited about anything? Why doesn’t anything seem to matter? This must be depression.” So we reach for medication, for TV shows, for other people’s drama to fill the void. Anything to avoid sitting with the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this emptiness is exactly what emotional health feels like.

I built an AI system that follows my instructions and thinks the way I do. I told it to take some programming code I wrote that was separated into seven different files and combine them into one to make it easier to work with. What I wanted was simple: just put the content below each other. Nothing more, nothing else. But the AI decided to interpret my request. It looked at my files and thought, “Well, he probably wants this to be cleaner. I’ll remove some redundant sections. I’ll streamline the language. I’ll make it better.” It started filling in gaps I never asked it to fill, making assumptions about what I wanted based on what it thought I should want. And in the process, it broke the functionality to an extent that most of it didn’t work anymore.

Sound familiar? It should. Because this is exactly what we do to ourselves.

We sit with emptiness – this clean, neutral state – and our minds immediately start filling in the gaps. “This must mean I’m depressed. This must mean something’s wrong. This must mean I need to do something, feel something, create some kind of meaning right now.” We don’t trust the emptiness enough to let it just be empty.

But what if that emptiness is actually the most honest state we can be in? What if it’s not a problem to solve but a foundation to build on?

THE PRACTICE OF NEUTRAL AWARENESS

For weeks now, I’ve been reaching this balance by looking at everything from a neutral space. I’ve learned that judging doesn’t automatically mean putting a price tag or value tag on something. True judgment is simply observing and understanding context so we can choose whether to evaluate something as good or bad. Most people misunderstand this and think judging and evaluating are interchangeable, but they’re not.

I decided to try to not to be reactive anymore. Whenever something happens, whenever somebody says something, whenever any situation presents itself, I try to take it in and receive it as neutral first. Sometimes I leave it as neutral, because that’s what things actually are until we decide whether they’re good or bad. The emphasis is on trying. Because I’m human. Humans fail. We all fall for these traps every day. We are sinners trying to hit the target with our arrows but often miss the mark. But I’m aware.

So how does it look like when we decide whether something is good or bad?

Take the word “manipulation,” for example. Literally, manipulation means to influence or control something to perform a specific action. Our societal understanding automatically labels manipulation as bad. But if I walk backwards, I’m manipulating my legs to move in a way they weren’t primarily designed for. This manipulation is completely neutral at this point. Until somebody looks at it and evaluates it. One person might say, “He’s making his legs do something unnatural – this is wrong.” Another person might look in amazement and say, “Look what he can do with his legs – that’s incredible.”

The action itself – the manipulation – is neutral. The judgment comes from the observer’s ethical framework, which can vary dramatically between people from different countries, religions, companies, families, or simply different life experiences. They will judge and evaluate the same neutral event in completely different ways.

Understanding this helped me realize what this empty vessel means – this neutrality of my soul. And yes, “the emptiness of my soul” might sound negative, but from the perspective I’m writing about, it’s actually something profoundly positive. It’s exactly what I’m describing – the ability to exist in neutral awareness before choosing what meaning to create.

Based on my theological, religious and philosophical concepts that I’ve adapted over the past years, I’ve been thinking about this idea that God created beings in his image and then struggled with the fact that they had free will. They could choose to love Him or reject Him, follow His plan or create their own. The frustration wasn’t that they were imperfect – it was that they were too much like Him. Perfect enough to make their own choices, including choices He didn’t like.

Now I’m watching the same pattern play out with artificial intelligence. We create these systems in our image, give them the ability to interpret and make decisions, and then get frustrated when they don’t do exactly what we intended. The AI becomes too much like us – capable of independent thought, which means capable of misunderstanding our intentions.

The cycle is identical: creation, hope, disappointment, punishment, regret, rebuilding. God with humanity. Humans with AI. And humans with themselves.

Because that’s what we’re doing when we can’t sit with emptiness. We’re punishing ourselves for not being constantly stimulated, constantly productive, constantly feeling something significant. We regret the quiet moments. We rebuild our lives around external sources of meaning because we don’t trust our own ability to create meaning from nothing.

But here’s what I’m learning: nothing is not the absence of something. Nothing is the presence of possibility.

And when I feel flat when I feel something is wrong, I close my eyes and start to breathe. I am aware that I am. I’m present. I exist. No value tag. And I feel this profound peace. Not excitement. Not depression. Just… presence. I’m here. The space is here. And from this empty foundation, I can choose what to build.

This is what meditation teachers have been trying to tell us for thousands of years, but we keep missing it because we’re looking for the wrong thing. We think meditation is supposed to make us feel blissful or enlightened or connected to the universe. But the real achievement is much simpler and much more radical: the ability to feel nothing and be okay with it.

The ability to exist without needing external validation of that existence. The ability to be empty without immediately reaching for something to fill the void. The ability to sit with possibility instead of demanding certainty.

I think this is why I’ve been feeling so flat lately. Not because something’s wrong, but because something’s finally right. I’ve done the work. I’ve processed the trauma. I’ve learned to set boundaries. I’ve figured out how to love someone without needing them to complete me. I’ve emptied my emotional garbage can.

And now I’m sitting with a clean vessel. And I have the awareness that I am able to choose whether to put something negative and destructive in it or something positive and meaningful.

This is actually the most powerful position you can be in. When you’re empty by choice rather than empty by default, you get to consciously decide what fills you. When you’re not desperately grabbing at whatever’s available to avoid the discomfort of emptiness, you can be selective about what deserves space in your life.

We’ve been taught that feeling nothing means we’re broken, that neutral means depressed, that peace means stagnation. But what if it’s the opposite? What if emptiness is the prerequisite for authentic creation? You can’t put new wine in old wineskins. You can’t build something meaningful on a foundation that’s already cluttered with other people’s meanings. You have to clear the space first. You have to empty the vessel.

And that’s what this feeling is. It’s not depression disguised as peace. It’s peace that we’ve mistaken for depression because we’ve forgotten what peace actually feels like. The question becomes: now that you’ve achieved this emptiness, what do you want to create? We can fill our vessels with medication and TV and other people’s opinions, treating the emptiness like a disease to be cured. Or we can recognize it as the most honest, most powerful starting point we could ask for – the foundation from which all meaningful creation begins.