The Lost Souls Society

Join us as we chant mysteriously during the witching hour

Dear Reader,

Here on the The Island of Saints and Scholars, the nights are drawing in and Halloween is approaching. The holiday, which comes from the Irish pagan festival of Samhain, was said to be a night when the souls of the dead could rise and rove amongst the living. In a memoir which I recently read, “The Farm by Lough Gur”, country Irish people are described eagerly hoping for a full moon at Halloween, to guide the dead souls home, that night.

Evocative! This week I am writing about a different kind of soul – the earthly “lost souls” who wander the world, looking for unconventional ways to live, work and socialise.

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I went to a language exchange last week, which was a language exchange in name only. In a corner of the bar, happy-looking groups of foreigners huddled around the tables, newcomers and regulars alike, and I soon realised that everybody was speaking English. That was fine too, and I was secretly relieved to have the pressure taken off my rusty smattering of languages.

I started talking to a German guy at the bar who was giving me the lowdown on the situation. It seemed he was a veteran of the meet-up and he quickly ushered me to a table down near the back where we engaged in the usual small talk, albeit with a slightly more searching air. When it came up that I am a doctor, he was surprised, and I asked him why.

Well, he said, the kind of people you usually find here are lost souls – people without jobs, or oddballs, or travellers passing through.

As he said it, I realised that those were the kind of people I often gravitate towards. Maybe he was onto something. I also began to think he was a bit of a lost soul himself – he looked shiftily around and told me he was sick of his job in tech sales and planned to move to Australia in a couple of months.

In the following days, I thought about his observation. It was a good insight, perhaps, and it made me wonder: Am I a lost soul? There was something faintly pejorative about it, as if it was something your mother would disapprove of. Nevertheless, I did empathise with what he was saying – I have always loved people who sort of…do their own thing, far from the madding crowd. Some of these are adventurers and buccaneers, others are independent in a more shy and retiring way, but neither group is really comfortable with what could be described as a conventional life.

If I am a lost soul, I’m proud of it. It explains why I’ve always enjoyed staying at hostels, why I love going to random events, and why I’m generally open to new experiences, sometimes at the expense of old friends or old hobbies. Most of my friend group don’t do this and they would probably think it is a sign of loneliness, rather than of intrigue. They are pretty happy to stick to their established social circle, to meet for drinks and coffee now and then…but they don’t really go out of their way to mingle with new people and, if they go on holiday, it’s usually with a partner or a trusted group of friends.

Paul Millerd wrote last week about “Third Culture” adults, the people who have left their own cultures and their own pathways. These people are searching for something, inside of themselves, but they have to get outside of themselves to find it.

The one thing that’s helped loosen my need for such approval is befriending “third culture adults” - those who have disconnected from their own default paths and exist with similar contradictions. These people seemed to intuitively understand that like them, others need space for their current lack of legibility and that sometimes it’s better to let people be a bit confusing without needing to get them to try to force them into a “somebody” container.

I think there is overlap here, between the lost souls and the third culture folks. Both are on the lookout for new ways to be in the world. Neither are necessarily unhappy or disillusioned with the world, but both believe that there are many paths in life and not all of them are signposted.

This kind of outlook, high in openness, tends to lend itself to living a rather curious social and work life. These kinds of people are more likely to be entrepreneurs or remote workers and are less likely to be doing an office 9-5. Many are writers, poets, dancers, mystics. Some of them, or course, are doing the corporate grind.

Finding the lost souls

In hindsight, lots of people I have met in life could be described as lost souls. When you work in a very conventional career, you tend not to meet these people and you might not even know they exist. But once you step off the treadmill, you see them pop up everywhere.

When I went through medical school, I was always aware of one or two people who didn’t entirely drink the kool-aid, but it took some time for that to manifest in their working lives. Now, years later, I often bump into them and find they are doing slightly atypical jobs or working at the confluence between fields or generally carving out a work-life balance which suits their lifestyle, if not necessarily their bank account. At the time, if I had known about these other ways to be in the world, it would have been a source of solace.

It’s not simply that these people didn’t like their specific jobs – I think it’s more likely that any job which constrained them, their social lives, their sense of independence and spirit, would have gone by the wayside. It’s more of a personality type, and most people with these types of personalities usually don’t end up in careers like medicine, or law, and if they did, they generally aren’t interested in the political game of climbing the ladder.

You begin to meet these people when you dabble in the peripheries. When I began to work on a part-time or locum (covering doctor) in rural Australia, I started to meet some of these people. Why? They prized the flexibility of having full control over their schedule and were less concerned by the optics of their CV of not being in a training post. And when I came back to Ireland and began to work on a locum basis in private emergency departments, I began to find the same kind of people.

A doctor I met at an urgent care clinic told me she used to work as a doctor in Spain but it took her ten years to get her Irish training recognised. So, in that time, she did various. non-clinical medical roles, rather than scurrying home in a panic. Another guy told me he worked half the year in Ireland and half the year in Australia. I suspect my friend at the bar would have called these people lost souls if he met them, especially if he met them earlier in their working lives.

Being a lost soul isn’t necessarily the sole preserve of youth, either. Many of the unconventional doctors, and unconventional people I met at work, or even at these kind of meet-ups, were in their fifties and sixties and still making it work for them.

Outside of work, the lost souls can be found in dive bars, in cafes, in hostels, and many other places, too. When I was in a hostel in New Zealand I met a girl who made all her own clothes. She wouldn’t be doing a 9-5 anytime soon. If you go to expat meetings in foreign countries, you will encounter the same kinds of people. Sometimes they say they didn’t fit in at home, or they wanted a change or were drawn to certain aspects of life in a different place.

These people will usually fiercely defend their independence. Like cockroaches, they can’t be wiped out – if one of their enterprises runs aground, they will find something else, will transform, will work a new angle.

I’m not sure at what point these people cease to be lost souls. Do they ever find themselves? I think we find ourselves in certain ways, in certain jobs and roles and countries, but we’re also still always on the lookout for the next opportunity. But maybe some of us…just settle down, happily into their new and unconventional life path. That’s the beauty of it all – no two trajectories will ever be the same.

Personally, I’m always on the lookout for something unconventional, different, a new and interesting way to live my life which allows space for creative projects like this little “newsletter.” And I’m not alone – there’s no shortage of us out there, seeking a purpose, a lifestyle, a community, or just a path. One day, I imagine us all convening in real life, and chanting obscurely in a forest somewhere at night, like the Dead Poets Society. Then, we would disband and scatter silently through the fields, disappearing mysteriously until the next meeting.

The chances are, if you are a reading this, you too probably have some lost soul DNA, or maybe you are lying low on Halloween night, steering clear of the other lost souls, from the underworld, and reading this article to stay out of trouble. Either way, you are welcome to join the club.

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Thanks again for reading. I hope this week’s effort said something to you and, if you have any comments, don’t hesitate to illuminate me below.

You can also support me by joining the Pathless Path Community which was set up by my friend Paul to help people to become creatively fulfilled, as well as to find alternative ways to live and work in a sustainable and meaningful way. I hope you can join us over there, it’s a fun place to hang out – click on this affiliate link and I will see you on the other side.