The Buffered Self: Why the World Feels Quieter Than It Used To

As part of our sermon series, Discipleship in a Secular Age, I'm writing a few blog posts between Sundays. The scholars I’m drawing on in this series, people like the philosopher Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa, have spent decades trying to understand the world we now live in. Their ideas are rich and genuinely helpful, but they come out of academic philosophy and sociology, and there's only so much you can unpack in a 25 minute sermon. These posts are a chance to slow down and dig a bit deeper. My hope is that they help us understand the situation we find ourselves in, so that we can follow Jesus more faithfully within it.

This week, I want to introduce one of Taylor's most important ideas: the shift from the "porous self" to the "buffered self".

The world our ancestors lived in

Imagine living five hundred years ago. The world around you is alive. It's not just scenery. Spirits, angels and demons are real presences. The harvest fails and you wonder who cursed it. You fall into a deep sadness and you don't think, "I'm feeling a bit low this week." You believe something has taken hold of you, that the sadness itself has entered you from outside.

Taylor calls this the porous self. Porous, like a sponge. The boundary between you and the world was permeable. Forces could get in. Meaning didn't live inside your head. It lived out there, in an enchanted cosmos, and it pressed in on you whether you liked it or not.

This sounds frightening, and it often was. But notice what came with it. You were never alone. You belonged to a community, a cosmos, a story bigger than yourself. The heavens declared the glory of God, and everyone could hear them.

The world we live in

Then something changed. The Reformation, the rise of science, and the long march of modernity slowly drained the enchantment out of the world. A firm wall went up between the self and everything outside it.

Taylor calls the result the buffered self. Where the porous self was open, the buffered self is sealed. We live behind a kind of conceptual armour. If we feel melancholy today, we don't suspect spirits. We talk about brain chemistry, hormones, stress. We can step back from the feeling, name it, manage it. The sadness is in here, in my head, not out there in the world.

This shift gave us some real gifts. We gained a sense of mastery and self-control our ancestors never had. We are no longer terrified of curses and omens. And meaning moved indoors. Where people once spoke of the soul, oriented towards God, we now speak of the psyche, oriented towards ourselves. Truth and meaning became things we generate from within rather than receive from beyond.

It also made us radically individual. The buffered self is detached, a bounded unit, free to invent itself. We can assign whatever meaning we like to our lives. We can reinvent our identities endlessly, something you can see vividly in our online lives, where personas can be created, curated and discarded at will.

The cost of the buffer

Here's the catch. The buffer doesn't discriminate.

The wall that keeps out the demons also keeps out the divine. The armour that protects us from a frightening cosmos also seals us inside a silent one. Taylor argues this is the source of what he calls the modern malaise: that widespread, hard-to-name feeling that life is somehow flat. Empty. That something is missing, even when everything is fine.

We were built for connection with God and with one another. C.S. Lewis named this ache long before our digital age sharpened it. He described an inconsolable longing that haunts us in music, in landscapes, in memory, a desire for something we have never actually seen, as though every beauty in this world were the scent of a flower we have not found, news from a country we have never visited. The buffered self has gained control and lost resonance. We are safe, autonomous, and strangely alone. The buffer that began as protection can start to feel like a prison. 

I suspect many of us know this feeling personally, even if we've never had words for it. We live full lives in a universe that seems to have gone quiet.

Punching holes in the buffer

And yet. People keep trying to get out.

Think about how hungry our culture is for fantasy. Stranger Things, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Dune, endless stories of enchanted worlds where the supernatural is real, and the stakes are cosmic. This is no accident. Fantasy lets buffered people taste the porous world again, safely, on screen, without any of the risk. We've evicted enchantment from our universe, but we keep inviting it back in through fiction.

And the buffer leaks in other ways too. Moments of awe that we can't explain away. The ache for truth that won't settle for "whatever works for you". Experiences of beauty, birth, grief and wonder that punch holes in the wall and let something else shine through. Even in a secular age, we keep finding ourselves reaching for the transcendent. As the Apostle Paul said in Athens, God "did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17:27).

It's also worth saying that not everyone in the modern world lives behind the buffer. Much of the global church, particularly the Pentecostal movement sweeping the majority world, has simply never accepted the sealed-off self. These Christians remain open upward to the Spirit and embedded deeply in community. The buffered self is our local situation, not a universal human destiny.

Why this matters for discipleship

So why spend a blog post on a philosopher's diagram of the self?

Because this is the water we swim in. The buffered self isn't a belief we chose. It's the default setting we inherited, and it shapes how all of us, Christians included, experience God. It's why prayer can feel like talking to the ceiling. It's why faith can feel like a private opinion rather than a response to a living God. It's why we instinctively treat our spiritual lives as one more project to manage from inside our own heads.

The good news is that the gospel was never a message for sealed-off selves. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. The Spirit is not a concept we hold but a presence who fills. Discipleship in a secular age means learning, slowly and together, to let the wall become porous again. Not to a world of curses and fear, but to the God who "is not far from any one of us", who has been speaking all along.

Over the coming weeks, we'll explore what that openness looks like in practice. For now, here's something to sit with: where in your life does the universe feel silent? And what might it mean to believe that the silence is not empty, that on the other side of the buffer, Someone is there, and has been calling your name?