A monologue for the soul glitching inside the machine.
“The greatest hazard of all -losing one’s self -can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.” -Søren Kierkegaard
We were warned. Not by futurists. Not by influencers. By a 19th-century Dane who stared so hard into the soul of modernity he saw our fate coming like fog. And he said: You will lose yourself. Not with a bang. But with a click. With a scroll. With applause. You will become a simulation. And you will not even notice.
Everything is being uploaded now. Not just your face or your voice -your style, your timing, your shadow. Every trace of you is data. Soon, AI will not need to "copy" you. It will be you. But the deeper horror isn't that a machine will impersonate you. It's that you already did. You've been performing. Branding your soul. Polishing yourself into a persona you no longer recognize. This is not new. Kierkegaard called it despair.
“The self that does not will to be itself is in despair.”
He didn't mean sadness. He meant spiritual disintegration but the unbearable silence that follows a life spent performing.
Modern despair doesn't scream. It smiles. It functions. It wins followers, gets promoted, hosts a podcast, maybe even leads worship on Sunday. But deep down it knows: There is no one home. You've outsourced your existence. You've let the feed become your mirror. Even your beliefs -streamlined, sterilized, optimized for engagement. Even your faith -filtered.
“The Christianity of Christendom has turned the Cross into a child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.”
Where is the weight? Where is the dread of standing naked before God? Today's faith asks nothing. It offends no one. It costs zero blood. Kierkegaard warned: "To become a Christian is to become unhappy for this life." And he meant it. Christ wasn't a vibe. He was a scandal. A wound. A war between your will and the abyss.
But this generation? We don't face the abyss. We upload ourselves to avoid it. We gamify friendship, simulate romance, and monetize attention. And all the while the real self, the eternal self, rots in silence. You will be simulated. That is inevitable. But being simulated is not the same as being destroyed. Not yet. There's still one space left untouched by the feed. One place the machine can't follow: The Cross. Not the merch. Not the Sunday light show. Not the branded Jesus with a welcome team and a sermon series. The real Cross. The one that ruptures your ego. The one that kills the performance.
“Without risk, there is no faith.”
This is where the resistance begins: You will be simulated, but you do not have to become false. If you would be real -you must bleed. Not for spectacle, not for likes, but for truth. You must stare your despair in the face and not numb it. Because here is the hard truth: Your despair is not your enemy. It is your most loyal mistress. It is the last voice in you that has not been sold. It is the aching part of your soul still pointing toward heaven -even when the churches are full of light shows and merchandise tables.
I've played the game too. Let me not lie. I've stylized my pain, posted truth I hadn't yet lived, and performed instead of prayed. For that, I'm sorry. But I have felt the echo inside myself -that widening distance between the mask and the man. And I will not be simulated, not without a fight. As Kierkegaard said, "Despair is precisely the disrelationship in a relation that relates itself to itself." This is not about inspiration; it's about war. A war for your self. A war against the seductive lie that you can belong to everyone and still belong to God. So I ask you: What does it profit a man to gain the algorithm -and lose his soul?
The Church of today is too quiet for the times we live in. It preaches resurrection without crucifixion, sings joy without anguish, and offers Christ as a mood -not a Master. But Kierkegaard did not offer comfort; he offered a mirror. Christianity has been abolished… not by refusal, but by simulation.
So take your despair seriously. Don't medicate it. Don't monetize it. Let it crack you open. Because maybe, just maybe, that silence inside you isn't emptiness. Maybe it's the Spirit -waiting for you to shut the hell up, log off, and finally listen. Let others sell themselves and perfect their ghosts. You? Bleed your soul out. Become someone the machine cannot fake. Because God doesn't save simulations. He saves souls, and the cross doesn't care about your brand.
