I had the privilege of having an old soul as a spiritual mentor for much of my adult life; I wrote a book about Herr Müller and learned so much from him.
Some people like him move through the modern world with a quiet sense of being out of step. Not superior to it or contemptuous of it, just oddly misaligned. The pace of the world feels wrong, the noise excessive, and the constant demand for reaction feels like static interfering with a signal they can almost hear but not quite articulate. These are often the people who get described, sometimes affectionately and sometimes dismissively, as being old souls.
They tend to notice things others rush past. They remember conversations long after the room has emptied. They feel the weight of history in ordinary places. They’re rarely impressed by novelty for its own sake and often suspicious of anything that insists on being urgent without explaining why. In a culture that worships speed, this can feel like a flaw.
Modern life is built around acceleration. Faster responses, faster growth, faster consumption, faster cycles of outrage and forgetting. The reward systems of our modern screen- and work-based culture are tuned to visibility, productivity, and immediacy. What matters most is what can be measured, optimized, scaled, and monetized.
Less Interest In What’s New Than In What Endures
Old-souled people tend to value different things: depth over reach, meaning over metrics, and continuity over disruption. They’re less interested in what’s new than in what endures. Less concerned with being seen than with seeing clearly.
This mismatch often shows up early. As children, they may feel older than their peers, more serious, more inward, more attuned to adult conversations than playground politics. As adults, they may feel younger than their age in spirit but older in temperament, carrying concerns about things like purpose and ethics, while others chase milestones and status.
None of this fits neatly into a system designed to reward hustle and performative confidence. The result is often a quiet loneliness. Not necessarily the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of being misunderstood. Of having to translate oneself constantly. Of feeling that the questions that matter most to you are treated as indulgent, impractical, or even vaguely embarrassing.
It’s easy, under these conditions, to assume something has gone wrong — to believe that you failed to adapt properly, that you’re too slow, too sensitive, too reflective for the world as it is.
Wisdom Traditions Across Cultures Tell A Different Story
Every society needs both people who can move quickly and people who can stand still. It needs both builders and maintainers, pioneers and keepers of memory. When a culture becomes dominated by speed alone, as ours has, it loses perspective. It forgets why it’s doing what it is doing, confusing motion with progress.
Old-souled misfits often serve as a kind of societal ballast. They remember, question, and notice unintended consequences. They carry values forward when fashions change. They ask whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
When systems fail, when bubbles burst, when certainties collapse, old souls are the people others quietly turn to — the ones who warned without shouting.
This role is rarely celebrated in real time. Most modern cultures tend to reward those who amplify momentum, not those who apply brakes. Reflection, as a result, is often mistaken for resistance, caution is framed as negativity, and historical awareness is dismissed as mere nostalgia.
And yet, when systems fail, when bubbles burst, when certainties collapse, these are the people others quietly turn to — the ones who warned without shouting. The ones who kept their footing while others sprinted toward cliffs.
Making Peace With Being Out Of Step
Being an old soul in a speed-obsessed world requires a particular kind of resilience. It means learning when to engage and when to step back. It means finding or creating pockets of slowness in a culture allergic to pause. It means accepting that not everything you value will be rewarded with applause.
It also means resisting the temptation to romanticize one’s own difference. Being out of phase doesn’t automatically confer wisdom. Reflection, after all, can harden into rigidity and depth can curdle into withdrawal. The work we face is to stay porous, to remain curious, and to let the world challenge you even as you challenge it. The goal here isn’t to escape the modern world, but to inhabit it without being consumed by its tempo.
For some, this means choosing fewer inputs, fewer platforms, and fewer commitments that require constant self-fragmentation. For others, it means grounding daily life in practices that reconnect them to time measured in seasons rather than seconds — reading books that were written before you were born, walking without destination, listening more than speaking. Most of all, it means making peace with being slightly out of step.
Misfits often assume they must eventually catch up or be left behind. But history suggests another possibility: sometimes the people who seem behind are simply on a different clock altogether. And sometimes, when the frenzy exhausts itself, it’s their sense of time that endures.
Reprinted with permission from Thom Hartmann’s substack The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human.
Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages and the nation’s #1 progressive radio host, as well as a psychotherapist and international relief worker. Sign up to receive The Hartmann Report, a daily newsletter of Renaissance thinking about progressive politics, economics, science, and the issues of our day.
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