Thirty years ago, Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul was a massive bestseller, a phenomenon sitting up on top of the New York Times bestseller list for a year. I recently reread Moore’s book and was amazed at how many of its 1992 prescriptions are desperately needed. Moore might not have known about cellphones, cancel culture, or the mental health crisis now plaguing young adults, but he knew about the human soul, which is suffering in our modern world.

Moore defines the soul as “the life in us that is immeasurably deep. Sometimes it feels like a spring or font of existence, making us feel alive and giving us something of a direction and identity.” The soul “to a large extent is autonomous, having its own purposes, desires and intentions.” It is connected to God and destiny and is the expression of “the basic themes” that touch all of us: “The need for love, the desire to create, the comfort of home, the excitement of travel — these aren’t the characteristics of any particular person. They are, at least potentially, ways in which all people may experience life.”

Moore writes: “Our job is to get to know the soul and cooperate with it, understanding that our happiness and peace on earth depends on a positive and creative response to it.”

While the ability to care for the soul was difficult in 1992, when Moore’s book was first published, it is facing an insupportable environment in 2023. The last several years have been catastrophic for the soul. The pandemic shut us off from friends, family, and social life, which are rivers that feed the soul. Our addiction to digital devices is epidemic. Traditional religion is in decline, and younger generations manifest soul sickness in depression, anxiety, and self-harm. George Will once called politics “statecraft as soulcraft.” Now we have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, two soulless politicians.

Our lives were once full of soul. We talked face to face, were less narcissistic and demanding, laughed at jokes that were sometimes raw and ribald, and forgave sins. Older people remember what was once the country's great nightlife, what Norman Mailer referred to as “the nocturnal dream life of the nation.” Without cellphones and immersed in soulful nocturnal energy, people went clubbing and to bars and concerts to encounter romance, danger, mystery, and the other elements that formed the soul and determined its direction. “When these archetypal patterns [of the soul] come to life in a person,” Moore writes, “they usually have a strong force and allure. You are happy to be in love and can think of nothing else. You fear illness and death, and that emotion, with its clinging thoughts, gets hold of you. You glimpse a certain career, and you go after it with a passion.”

Moore notes that the soul can have things in store for us that are difficult and unpleasant: “As I see it, this other being in us, the soul, is vaster than our small minds can contain. It’s strong and mysterious, and at times a true adversary.” The soul can tell us that our destiny and responsibility is to care for an aging parent or to take a hard manual labor job or go to war.

Moore addresses the rise of “family therapy” by noting that, while therapy exists in order to “get to the root” of problems and “hopes to find a cure,” “care of the soul doesn't require fixing the family.” Moore argues that the Bible says that Adam was “formed from the mud” and that the family is “a veritable web patch of human foibles.” We should avoid “hygienic notations of what a family should be — a sometimes comforting sometimes devastating house of life and memory.”

What does not feed the soul is the refusal to engage with difficult people or ideas we may find offensive and challenging — in short, cancel culture. This is why belligerent college students protesting ideas they don’t like, such as the Stanford Law students who berated a Trump-appointed federal judge last month, seem so lightweight, so soulless.

Also constricting the soul is digital addiction, which conceals the inner voice telling us we have a connection to God and a destiny. Moore studied in a Catholic seminary and then became an expert on Jungian psychology and myth. He can be critical of conservative religious dogma that fails to see the value of sex, creativity, jokes, and spiritual curiosity. Yet he also defended traditional institutions such as the Catholic Church. “Religion specializes in rituals that help us treat our complexes in highly symbolic ways,” Moore wrote. “In traditional Catholic confession, for example, you acknowledge dark spirits that invade your life, and the confession of these presences goes a long way toward dealing with them.”

At the root of our addictions, our depressions, the disconnect between ourselves and the natural world, our lousy politics, and the struggles of our children is a simple idea: Our souls are not well.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.