For something to happen, for someone to come along and rescue me from the tedium of life. But no one ever came.

“I have led a toothless life,” he thought. “A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on, and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done?” Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

Self-rescue

A man with a black beard and glasses sits in a black armchair next to a sleeping black dog.

The pivot

I founded the Society of Lost Souls out of necessity.

I was at a pivotal time in my life, fast approaching sixty, feeling purposeless, with each day blurring into the next. I had lost track of life and the seasons, and felt increasingly unmoored.

Two hands hold a framed cracked picture of a man and a woman in colour, alongside grey ghostly outlines of others.

Over the years, friendships had faded

I found myself increasingly isolated, rarely speaking to anyone.

I believed people thought I was boring, an inconvenience, and an unwanted disruption in their day.

The only meaningful conversations I had were with the strangers I met on holiday. I lived in a state of subdued loneliness, and was so anxious that I rarely left the safety of my armchair, numbing myself with endless TV murders.

“But I sat there for hours watching whatever came on, never planning it, just letting it happen. And if you had one chance to change, would you review your plans?” adapted from Kathryn Williams, ‘Flicker’, Little Black Numbers (2000)

A man with a black beard and glasses floats in blue water near a periscope, a shark fin, and a television.

I felt like I was drifting through days without connection

It was only when I realised I wasn’t wearing a life jacket that I understood how lost I had become, drifting through a world that seemed indifferent to where I was going.

I wanted to talk with interesting people (curious souls and deep thinkers) about philosophy, our lives, ambitions, the questions we were facing, and the dilemmas we were navigating.

I longed for the philosophical conversations that I’d experienced when I was younger.

For many years, I had dreamed of a community where people could meet and talk in depth, to have the kind of conversation I’d been missing.

My ideas stayed confined to my notebooks

At the time, I was writing outlines for books that I would never finish, and this felt as though it were going the same way.

I had a rough idea of how it might work, but it felt beyond my reach and stayed confined to my notebooks for years.

“The worst prison in the world is having the talent and intelligence to achieve something great but lacking the courage to go out and do it.” Sahil Bloom, 34 Life Lessons from 34 Years

A lighthouse keeper stands on the edge of his lighthouse shining a beam into the sea onto a lost soul.

The lighthouse

I knew I needed to build a lighthouse, as a beacon to find other people who were drifting in the same sea, and to create a place where we could talk honestly, exchange ideas, and begin to feel that life had meaning again.

A man with a black beard and glasses sits in a black chair firing a revolver at a shattered television screen.

So, I switched off my television

But the distance between my armchair and this page turned out to be longer than I expected.

There were mornings when it was much easier to pick up the TV remote than to do anything useful, and I distracted myself more often than I’d like to admit.

But one small detail led to another. A sentence. A rough idea for a session. A name: The Society of Lost Souls. It was built from hundreds of sketches in notebooks drawn together over time.

Why the Society of Lost Souls?

What’s in a name?

The name came from noticing that so many of us feel lonely, isolated, or disconnected, even when we’re surrounded by people. Hence ‘lost souls’. In a touch of pretension, I added ‘the Society of’, but it felt fitting.

I have spent a lifetime waiting...