What if the rise in people who seem to lack inner depth isn’t just your imagination, but a symptom of humanity growing faster than consciousness itself?
Before we go further, let’s be clear: this is speculation. A thought experiment. A way to explore something many people have noticed but struggle to explain. This isn’t proven science or established metaphysics. It’s an idea worth considering as we try to make sense of why so many people seem to be going through life on autopilot, with no spark of genuine consciousness behind their eyes.
The question we’re exploring is simple but unsettling: What if there’s a finite pool of souls, and humanity’s explosive population growth has stretched that pool too thin?
The NPC Phenomenon: What Are People Noticing?
The term “NPC” comes from video games. Non-Player Characters. The background people in a game who follow scripted routines, offer the same dialogue options, and exist primarily to fill the world rather than actively participate in it.
In recent years, people have started using this term to describe real humans who seem to exhibit similar qualities. People who appear to lack:
Inner monologue – Studies suggesting that a significant portion of the population has no internal voice, no constant stream of thought narrating their experience.
Self-reflection – No examination of their own beliefs, behaviors, or choices. They simply accept what they’re told and repeat it.
Genuine curiosity – No drive to understand, explore, or question anything beyond their immediate routine.
Original thought – Conversations that feel like they’re pulling from a limited script. Predictable reactions. Borrowed opinions presented as personal beliefs.
Emotional depth – Responses that feel performative rather than genuine. Going through the motions of appropriate emotional display without the substance behind it.
This is controversial territory, and rightfully so. The term “NPC” applied to humans can be dehumanizing and cruel. We’re not using it as a judgment of human worth. Rather, we’re acknowledging a pattern that many people have independently observed: some people seem to operate with a different level of consciousness than others.
The question is why.
The Soul Pool Hypothesis
Here’s one possible explanation, rooted in spiritual and metaphysical traditions from around the world.
What if human souls aren’t created fresh for each new birth, but instead are recycled from a collective pool of consciousness?
The mechanics might work like this: During a person’s lifetime, their soul grows, accumulates experience, gains depth and complexity. When they die, that enriched soul returns to a common pool, a reservoir of consciousness that all souls draw from. When a new person is born, they receive a portion of this pool as their soul, their inner essence, their spark of awareness.
This concept appears in various forms across different spiritual traditions. Reincarnation suggests souls move from body to body. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious proposes a shared reservoir of human experience and archetype. Ancient Greek philosophy discussed the world soul, the anima mundi, from which all individual souls derive.
But here’s where it gets interesting, and potentially troubling.
What if the pool is finite, or grows more slowly than the human population?
Consider the numbers. In 1800, the global population was roughly one billion people. By 1950, it had reached 2.5 billion. By 2000, six billion. Today, in 2024, we’re over eight billion and climbing.
That’s an eight-fold increase in just over two centuries. An explosion of human bodies needing souls.
If the soul pool is finite, or if it grows through the accumulation of lived experience (which takes time), then each new person born in this population boom receives a progressively smaller slice of consciousness. A diluted soul. Less depth, less awareness, less of that ineffable quality that makes someone feel fully present and alive.
This isn’t a new idea. Various mystical traditions have warned about the thinning of spiritual essence in the material world. The Kali Yuga in Hindu cosmology describes an age of spiritual decline. Gnostic traditions spoke of the prison of matter and the scarcity of divine spark. What if these ancient warnings were observing the same pattern we’re seeing now, just through a different lens?
The Population Problem
The timeline of population growth is staggering when you map it out.
For most of human history, population grew slowly. It took until around 1800 CE to reach the first billion. Then something changed. Industrialization, modern medicine, agricultural advances. The second billion took only 130 years. The third billion, 30 years. The fourth, 15 years.
We’re adding billions of human bodies to the planet faster than ever before in history.
If souls are a resource, even a renewable one, this creates a supply and demand problem. Too many bodies, not enough consciousness to go around. The result? People who are biologically alive and functional, but spiritually diluted. Present, but not fully there.
Signs of Soul Dilution?
If this theory holds any truth, what would we expect to see? What evidence might point to a thinning of consciousness across the population?
The rise of people without inner monologue. Studies and viral discussions have revealed that many people genuinely have no internal voice. No constant stream of thought. They think in abstract concepts or images, or perhaps not at all in the way that people with active inner monologue do. For those of us who experience constant internal narration, this is almost incomprehensible. How do you exist without that voice?
The “loop runners.” Pay attention to the people around you. How many follow the exact same routine every single day, year after year, with no variation and no apparent desire for anything different? Same route to work. Same lunch spot. Same weekend activities. Same conversations on repeat.
This isn’t about comfort or preference. It’s about the complete absence of curiosity or growth. Suggest something new and you’ll often encounter not just resistance, but hostility. As if the very idea of deviation from their loop causes distress. They’re running their programmed route, and questioning it seems to threaten their entire existence.
Surface-level social media existence. Millions of people whose entire life appears to be performance. Curated images with nothing substantial underneath. Following trends without understanding them. Repeating viral phrases without processing what they mean. Existing for the appearance of life rather than the experience of it.
The automation of behavior. More people seem to operate on pure conditioning and social programming. Stimulus-response patterns with no apparent processing in between. They react rather than respond. They echo rather than consider.
The “dead eyes” phenomenon. This one is visceral and disturbing. An increasing number of people, particularly visible among violent criminals but not limited to them, have eyes that appear completely lifeless. No light, no presence, no indication that anyone is home behind that gaze.
Investigators, journalists, and witnesses describe it the same way: a hollowness that goes beyond mental illness or emotional detachment. An absence. Looking into their eyes is like looking into a void. Whatever animating force should be there simply isn’t.
Declining engagement with depth. Studies show dropping rates of reading, especially literary fiction and non-fiction that requires sustained attention and thought. Reduced capacity for complex reasoning. Shorter attention spans. A population that increasingly operates on the surface level of existence, never diving deeper into ideas, emotions, or self-examination.
Rising rates of dissociation and depersonalization. More people report feeling disconnected from their own experience. Going through life as if watching themselves from outside. Feeling unreal or dreamlike. As if they’re not fully inhabiting their own existence.
Simulation theory overlap. It’s worth noting that many people who believe we live in a simulated reality point to these exact same patterns as evidence. They describe “background characters” or NPCs as people who exist to populate the world but aren’t fully conscious players in the game.
The loop runners become literal NPCs following their programmed paths. The limited dialogue trees and predictable responses. The people who seem to have no existence outside your direct interactions with them, as if they’re only rendered when you’re there to observe them.
Whether you frame it as soul dilution or simulation theory, people are noticing the same thing: a subset of humanity that appears to be operating with less consciousness than others.
An important caveat: Correlation doesn’t equal causation. These observations might have nothing to do with soul dilution and everything to do with social, technological, and cultural changes. We need to consider that seriously.
Why This Theory Might Be Wrong
Let’s pump the brakes and acknowledge the very real problems with this theory.
We might just be noticing normal human variation more. Throughout history, there have always been people who were more introspective and people who weren’t. More curious and less curious. More emotionally complex and more simple. The internet and social media might just be making this natural variation more visible. We’re encountering more people than ever before, so we notice patterns we wouldn’t have seen in smaller communities.
Cognitive diversity has always existed. What we’re interpreting as “lack of soul” might simply be different ways of processing and experiencing the world. Not everyone thinks in words. Not everyone needs constant variety. Not everyone values the same things. Different doesn’t mean deficient, and different levels of introspection don’t necessarily indicate different levels of consciousness.
Technology and culture shape how people think and behave. The rise of smartphones, social media, and constant digital stimulation has rewired how brains develop and function. The loop runners and surface-level existence might be products of our environment, not a shortage of souls. We’ve created a world that rewards shallow engagement and punishes deep thought. People adapt to their environment.
Confirmation bias is powerful. Once you start looking for NPCs, you see them everywhere. It’s the same psychological trick that makes you notice a particular car model constantly after you buy one. We’re pattern-recognition machines, and we’re excellent at finding patterns even when they’re not there. The NPC phenomenon might be entirely in our heads.
Dehumanization is dangerous. There’s a very real risk in labeling other humans as having less consciousness or soul. History is full of atrocities justified by claiming certain groups were less human, less deserving, less conscious. Even entertaining this idea as a thought experiment requires acknowledging that risk. Every person deserves to be treated as fully human, regardless of how they think or behave.
We might fundamentally misunderstand consciousness. What if consciousness doesn’t work at all the way we assume? What if the soul pool theory is completely wrong about the nature of awareness and being? We’re operating from enormous amounts of ignorance about what consciousness even is, let alone how it’s distributed or created.
Population growth might be completely irrelevant. Even if souls are real and recycled, there’s no reason to assume they’re finite or limited. The pool might expand infinitely. New souls might be created constantly. The mechanics might work in ways that make population growth a non-issue.
All of these objections are valid and important. The soul dilution theory might be completely wrong. But that doesn’t make the underlying observations go away.
Questions This Raises
If we entertain this theory, even just as a thought experiment, it opens up fascinating and troubling questions.
Is there a natural limit to human population based on available consciousness? If souls are truly finite, are we approaching or past a critical threshold? What happens when dilution reaches a certain point?
Can individuals cultivate more soul? If consciousness can be grown through experience and introspection, can someone born with a diluted soul develop more depth? Is spiritual practice, self-examination, and genuine experience a way to increase one’s share of consciousness?
What’s the value of depth versus numbers? Is a world with eight billion partially conscious people better or worse than a world with one billion fully conscious people? What does this mean for how we think about population and resource allocation?
How do we treat those with less consciousness? If some people genuinely have less soul than others, does that change their moral status? Their rights? How we interact with them? The answer, ethically, has to be no. But the question still hangs there.
What role does technology play? Are we artificially sustaining population levels beyond what consciousness can support? Does technology allow bodies to function without the depth of soul that would have been necessary in earlier eras?
The Mystery Remains
Here’s what we can say with certainty: something is happening. People across cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems are independently observing the same patterns. More people who seem to lack inner depth. More loop runners. More dead eyes. More surface-level existence.
The soul dilution theory is one possible explanation for these observations. A way to make sense of the pattern using metaphysical concepts that have existed in human thought for thousands of years.
But it’s speculation. We don’t know if souls are real. We don’t know if they’re recycled. We don’t know if consciousness works this way at all.
What we do know is that the NPC phenomenon describes something people are experiencing and struggling to understand. Whether the explanation is spiritual, technological, psychological, or something we haven’t conceived of yet, the underlying question remains:
Why do some people seem so much more present, more aware, more alive than others?
Maybe it’s soul dilution. Maybe it’s the simulation rendering background characters. Maybe it’s just normal human variation amplified by modern technology and culture. Maybe it’s something stranger we haven’t imagined yet.
The mystery, as with most things in the paranormal and metaphysical realm, remains unsolved.
Have you encountered people who seem to lack that inner spark? Or do you think the NPC phenomenon is just confirmation bias?
Post a comment below with what you think about this!
