How your need to be special can lead you astray

Spiritual starvation creates the perfect audience for false masters

This might seem like a detour from my usual writing, but it’s not. The emotional and relational patterns I often explore: narcissism, manipulation, discernment are deeply tied to the spiritual hunger beneath them. Consider this an extension of that inquiry.

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I’m hungry.

I’ve been starving for years, despite being well nourished by my food sources.

I’m talking about spiritual starvation. The kind that no food diet, cacao ceremony, psychedelic experience, or meditation retreat will satisfy.

And I’m not alone.

I’m surrounded by spiritually starved people who don’t even know they’re hungry. Their status-seeking, corporate ladder climbing, life hacking, trad living, and transcendence mining all look different on the surface but it’s the same thing underneath:

A desperate quest for spiritual nourishment that keeps them famished.

I emphasise the importance of discernment in navigating the content we consume. There are plenty of writers who have appointed themselves cultural tastemakers and who want you to feel as special as they do for their seemingly heterodox takes.

I’m talking about the writers who craft something that creates an impulse to instantly like, subscribe, and pay for their work. Now I’m not suggesting there’s something wrong with that. I appreciate when that’s how people feel about my work. But I’m conscious of not doing this one thing:

I don’t want to make you feel special because you read and agree with my work.

In fact, I want you to treat feeling special for liking my or others’ work as suspect, because this is the first red flag of being manipulated. I’ve written about this many times on my Substack in the context of being a target of narcissistic grooming, joining a cult, staying in a cult, and participating in bullying or scapegoating others.

This reveals a weakness in the human condition: the need to feel special by drawing close to those perceived as rising in status, even when the connection is entirely parasocial and the object of your attention remains unaware of your existence. The effect of aligning with their thinking and adopting their prescribed tastes is that you feel special and therefore more powerful. It is a seductive feeling that places you into a collective psychic and metaphysical field, what some call an egregore, which becomes fuelled by your sense of superiority.

An egregore is a shared thought form or psychic entity created by the collective focus and emotion of a group. The idea has roots in occult and esoteric traditions, where such entities are thought to take on an autonomous life, shaped by the mental and emotional energy of those who feed it. As Erik Hoel wrote, this can be seen as the group mind or an “incorporeal ghost” formed through synchronization and repetition.

My observation of this phenomenon is informed by animism and the presence of invisible forces that respond to emotional energy, attention, and repetition as animated intelligences found across esoteric traditions. In Vedic and Tantric cosmology, collective psychic fields are described as matrices of subtle forces such as yoginis, matrikas, and elemental intelligences that influence perception and behaviour. These are seen as energies with distinct qualities that arise through emotional charge and shared ritual. Viewed this way, emotions are both internal states and relational conduits — portals that invite or repel certain forces depending on how they are activated and maintained.

From an animist perspective, repeated patterns of attention when driven by unmet longing or unacknowledged shame, create habits and shape psychic terrains. These terrains become inhabited by emotional narratives that take on a life of their own. For example, disowned envy distorts admiration into rivalry. As explored in my piece on envy, it often disguises itself as concern or critique but is driven by an unconscious status anxiety and an effort to restore a disrupted hierarchy. Spiritual hunger generates openings that allow anything promising relief, no matter how shallow to appear sacred.

When these patterns coalesce, they produce emotional ecosystems, which are fields that feel affirming but actually trap us in loops of validation-seeking.

What we feed with our emotional attention begins to feed on us in return.

This is not metaphor in traditions where consciousness is relational rather than one’s private property. Using this view, resonance doesn’t mean something aligned found you. It often means that you were already seeking it and the thing mirrored your psychic landscape back to you. The moment something feels like it found you, rather than being recognised as something you were predisposed to seek, you have entered a mutual binding, an emotional contract if you will. Once bound, the energetic structure begins to demand more of you ie. your attention and superiority, creating a renewable energy source to sustain the system itself.

This binding creates the conditions for influence to become loyalty, especially when the source of resonance flatters the self or channels unspoken grievance.

Overall, this isn’t a problem as you’re free to like and vibe with whoever you want. The problem arises when these writers fuel their content with contempt for those who are not like them or who have what they want. They are often driven by envy to diminish those they disdain while propping themselves up with a belief in their own refined taste and superiority. By aligning with them, you get to tap into that sense of superiority, not realising that it is your contempt, not genuine desire, that is now shaping your evolving taste.

This is how false masters are born. They play their part to set themselves apart from the mediocrity they perceive in others, enlist their narcissistic traits to rise above, and you do your part by buying their shtick and paying for it, believing you’re now a better person, transcending the pack.

Over time, this reciprocal performance calcifies into a new kind of elite: self-anointed authorities who curate personas around refined disdain for the ordinary. Their appeal lies in the illusion of insight, produced through aesthetic control and carefully distanced language and not through integration or earned wisdom. They cast spells on their readers with ambiguity and poetic prose, offering ideas just out of reach, making you strive to understand and embody them in hopes of becoming the ideal they’ve constructed. They perform as enlightened guides, presenting their ideas with the air of self-evidence, leading you toward their position so you, too, can feel the untouchable grandiosity they project through the screen.

This is, unfortunately, just shame wrapped in glittery paper.

These figures endure because the hunger is real. Spiritual starvation has created an audience that is more receptive to symbolism and posturing, more drawn to aestheticized suffering than to mature insight. These performers mimic nourishment in response to the described deprivation. They are adept illusionists with the power to reflect your longing back to you so your ideal self feels understood just enough, but never enough to offer direction. The result is a cycle of recognition without resolution, where hunger itself becomes content.

This is the threshold where aesthetic influence mutates into emotional conditioning. Resonance begins to displace discernment, and the reader is no longer engaging with content but being subtly shaped by it, often without realising the shift.

Distorted perception. Credit: EyeEm Mobile GmbH via Unsplash

How you know you’re being emotionally hijacked

Here’s how you know you’re being emotionally hijacked by someone who seems wise beyond their years and speaks directly to your longing, yet offers no practical, substantive, or generative path forward.

1. You’re flattered into believing your dissatisfaction is depth.
   Writer’s implied narrative: “People like us are tired of the noise. We see through the charade. Others are too distracted to notice.”
   Reader’s narrative: “Maybe all the stuff I’ve been through means I see things others can’t. It makes sense now why this hit so hard. It’s like proof that I’m different.”

2. You feel special for getting it.
   Writer’s implied narrative: “I’ve always been the most perceptive person in the room. People just weren’t ready to hear me.”
   Reader’s narrative: “This makes sense to me in a way it clearly doesn’t for most people, so maybe that means I’m the kind of person this was really meant for.”

3. You feel deeply understood without having revealed anything.
   Writer’s implied narrative: “If I make this beautiful, indirect, and emotionally rich, people will assume it’s profound.”
   Reader’s narrative: “This hits so hard. I completely get it, even if most people probably wouldn’t. It’s deep in a way you can only feel.”

4. You're invited to reject the mainstream (and feel above it).
   Writer’s implied narrative: “Everyone who didn’t see my value before is basic, blind, or compromised.”
   Reader’s narrative: “This is exactly why I don’t relate to most people. What they praise feels empty to me. I see through it because I’m operating on a different level.”

5. You’re offered prestige through your struggle.
   Writer’s implied narrative: “Being misunderstood proves I’m ahead of my time.”
   Reader’s narrative: “All this discomfort must mean I’m not like the rest. It makes sense now…my burnout, my isolation is refinement.”

6. You’re consuming aesthetics without acquiring tools.
   Writer’s implied narrative: “If I can’t be seen by the world, I will create a world that sees me.”
   Reader’s narrative: “This moves me so much…I can’t quite explain why, because it’s profound. I feel like I’ve entered a deeper realm.”

Unconscious emotional drivers

The sense of superiority expressed in these dynamics is not always deliberate or manipulative. They might reflect unexamined emotional patterns that shape how a person presents themselves and relates to others. Disappointment in what intellectual or cultural spaces could have offered, compared to what they now seem to reward, can lead to cynicism or withdrawal. The pain of being overlooked or undervalued can create a deep need to feel exceptional, often appearing as self-importance. In some cases, a defensive strategy emerges, where the appearance of superiority is used to protect against criticism, rejection, or emotional exposure. These patterns are commonly found in people with strong ideals and high standards who feel intellectually stranded, out of place, or unseen in emotionally shallow environments.

Each of the red flags outlined above functions as a proxy for discernment, generating the impression of perceptiveness while bypassing the difficult and necessary process of self-examination required to develop it.

Discernment is the ability to remain with discomfort without rushing to resolve it, to pause in the presence of contradiction, and to respond from inner authority rather than from emotional hijack or social scripts. It is a practice of staying with what is unresolved without needing to explain or control it, and it does not depend on feeling special for undergoing it.

Instead, these performances of insight mimic depth without requiring any of the work that real discernment demands. They create an immediate feeling of resonance, which can be easily mistaken for understanding. They reward the appearance of intelligence while bypassing reflection, self-inquiry, and moral development. The result is a sense of instant resonance, which tricks people into believing they’ve seen clearly when all they’ve done is felt deeply.

What does spiritual hunger look like when it seeks nourishment? And what if I’m not religious or spiritual?

It doesn’t matter what your beliefs are. There is a current in each of us, compelled by a longing for connection and significance. People often assume this is about human intimacy, but the pull runs deeper. Many of us have learned to suppress or rationalise a more primal longing for a higher connection that lifts us out of the loop of striving and self-doubt, into a state of peace where ambition no longer governs self-worth. In that state, status games seem absurd, and the need to feel special in someone else’s eyes becomes irrelevant.

This is the deeper need for spiritual nourishment: to live and relate with purpose and integrity, while resisting the traps that hijack the ego and reduce us to children chasing attention. It is a hunger we often avoid confronting, because doing so demands that we meet the parts of ourselves we try to bypass through performance, ambition, or control.

We are here to mature morally and emotionally, so we can be of service to others without needing anything in return. That maturation comes through experiences—often irritating or painful—that demand reflection, disrupt habitual reactions, and guide us toward building character and cultivating virtues rather than chasing status.

Much of my thinking on spiritual starvation and psychic ecosystems has been shaped by Josh Schrei’s work in The Emerald podcast, which explores the mythic and relational dimensions of life.

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

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