A Nervous System Reckoning with Hookup Culture

Part 2: The Hollow

Virtue, Reverence, and the Collapse of the Inner Sanctum

There’s a reason intimacy is called that.
It was never meant for mass consumption.
There are no open days to the body—no tourist passes to the soul.
Even if you’re not religious, there’s something sacred about your inner sanctum.
And it’s been stripped bare.

In tearing down the walls of taboo,
we didn’t just lose repression—we lost reverence.
And with it, the quiet virtues: patience, discernment, devotion.
Not as rules, but as architecture. As protection for something sacred inside us.

What we called “liberation” became an unchecked burn of the moral codex—
not to replace it with something wiser, but simply to escape it.
We ran from anything that even smelled like morality,
treating all structure as oppression—
without asking what those structures were trying to preserve.

And now we sit in the ash, mistaking collapse for evolution.
Calling numbness sovereignty.
Calling chaos freedom.
Because we forgot that morality wasn’t just control—it was containment for meaning.
And once the container shattered, so did the soul.

We Weren’t Built for This

We weren’t designed for emotional drive-bys.
We weren’t meant to absorb trauma through Tinder.
We weren’t built to disconnect every time something gets real.

We were built for coherence.
We were designed to sync with each other—not steal from each other.

Sex isn’t a sport.
It’s the most powerful energy in our human system.
It creates and destroys life.
The way we use it is either evolving us—or killing us softly, one disembodied orgasm at a time.

This isn’t judgment. It’s a wake-up call.

Closing Prayer

We can’t regulate in isolation.
We can’t heal in chaos.
We can’t build coherence by selling each other’s pain as freedom.

Society has lost its baseline for coherence,
and sees house after house crashing down—
burnout,
relationships,
meaning,
and the inner sanctum of intimacy.

But we can remember.
We can return.
And we can fucking feel and relate again.

Stay tuned for Part 3: The Comeback – Coherence, Reclamation, and the New Intimacy.