The Hollow Civilization Thesis: Why Modern Society Feels Empty from Top to Bottom

Despite technological advancements and economic growth, a pervasive sense of emptiness afflicts modern civilization across all social strata. This paper argues that the structural and thermodynamic dynamics of modern society incentivize short-term optimization over long-term meaning, producing systemic entropy in psychological, social, and institutional domains. We analyze how bottom-tier populations experience hopelessness due to systemic precarity, while elites face existential anxiety despite material abundance. This structural hollowness contributes to societal instability, polarization, and civilizational decay, suggesting that the “Great Filter” may manifest not solely through physical collapse but through a civilization’s gradual loss of collective purpose. We conclude that without restructuring societal priorities toward meaning-centric sustainability, civilization risks entering a terminal phase of entropic self-collapse.