Amid the rush of contemporary life and the acceleration of its pace, a vague and heavy feeling creeps into the depths of the human soul — a sense of detachment, estrangement, and the gradual dissolution of meaning. Psychology calls this condition "psychological alienation," while philosophy has long known it as "human alienation," considered one of the most profound questions concerning the relationship between a person and their own self. Alienation begins when the distance between a person and themselves grows wider than the distance between them and the world. At that point, they stand before a mirror and fail to recognise the features of their own soul; they look at what surrounds them and find it familiar in appearance yet foreign at its core — as though performing a role in a play whose beginning they do not know and whose end remains unknown.
The concept of alienation has preoccupied philosophers for a long time. Hegel held that a person ventures into the world through what they make and create, then returns to discover themselves in all of it; he therefore regarded alienation as a stage that leads to consciousness. Marx, for his part, began from a different question, arguing that a person consumes their life in labour whose fruits they do not own, gradually growing distant from their effort and then from themselves. Existentialist philosophy later shifted the question inward: the inquiry was no longer focused on the world alone, but on the person who found themselves compelled to create meaning for their own life. Despite the differences between these visions, they converge on a single idea — that alienation does not begin when a person withdraws from the world, but when they lose their relationship with whatever gives them the sense of being "present."
Today, our alienation is not measured by the degree of solitude or brokenness, and it may not be the fruit of a single moment of collapse. Rather, it is the accumulated result of years of adaptation, until a person grows accustomed to the distance separating them from themselves. And so life continues at its familiar rhythm, responsibilities multiply, and achievements accumulate, while the inner sense of belonging to what we live gradually recedes — without our noticing the moment that retreat began.
Years ago, I read Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, and its central idea stayed with me for a long time. It tells of two men standing on a desolate road, waiting for someone named Godot who never arrives — and they do not even know why they are waiting for him. They are aware of the absurdity of this waiting, yet they persist, until the waiting itself becomes a way of living and adapting. Here the play transcends the boundaries of a story to reveal the person who postpones confronting their great questions, continuing to run toward a goal whose nature they do not know, hoping that tomorrow will bring what the present has failed to offer. That is why this literary work has endured through the depth of its philosophy.
The paradox deepens when modern life offers solutions that do not touch the core of the problem. Whenever a person feels emptiness, they are directed toward greater productivity, tighter time management, and improved performance — so that the question of meaning is reduced to a matter of efficiency, while existential anxiety is compressed into tips for self-improvement. Over time, a person learns to move past their pain before they have even understood it, and busyness becomes a permanent means of deferring any confrontation with the self.
As this pattern repeats, a person loses their sensitivity to what is happening within them. What once caused them anxiety becomes familiar, and what once made them feel estranged becomes part of their daily routine. In this way, alienation is no longer a passing experience but the very framework through which life is understood, decisions are formed, and a person's image of themselves is shaped — without them ever realising it.
There is another face of this alienation that few pay attention to: alienation from language itself. When a person cannot name what they feel, they gradually lose the ability to understand themselves. Words give a person the capacity to perceive what they feel as much as they give them the capacity to express it. What cannot be named remains suspended in the soul and being, silently reshaping one's relationship with the self. Linguistic poverty is therefore not merely an inability to describe; it also narrows the space of consciousness, because a person cannot know themselves outside the language in which they think and through which they give their experiences their names and meanings.
True salvation, then, begins when a person restores their connection with themselves — not through desperate attempts to change the world. The deepest alienation occurs when a person becomes a stranger to their own self, while continuing their life in the comfortable belief that everything is proceeding as it should.