This concept cannot be understood without psychology and creative-practice simultaneously: the claim that most people lead with identities and opinions which are the least interesting parts of them requires the psychological framework of self-structure and the writer's framework of what makes prose interesting. Neither domain alone explains why opinion-driven discourse produces thinner human contact or why writing through opinions produces thinner writing.
Perell asks Popova how she defines soul. She gives him a careful answer that distinguishes soul from self and locates contemporary cultural dysfunction in the substitution of one for the other.
It is like the function of what we call soul is real. Whatever it's made of, where it is — the part that I worry about is that today most people live on the level of the self and not the level of the soul. Which is — the costume of personality over the soul. It's what the self is. And I don't find that terribly interesting.1
Perell catches the phrase. The costume of personality. That's a good turn of phrase. Explain that.
Popova does. It's the performance of personhood, not the essence of personhood. The self. And, you know, today most people lead with identities and opinions which I think are the least interesting, least true parts of people. Because they're the most mutable and the least anchored in what you call the soul.
The position has two halves. First: there is something underneath identity-and-opinion that's more interesting and more durable than identity-and-opinion. Call it the soul or call it whatever you want. The vocabulary is less important than the recognition that something underneath the surface presentation is the load-bearing part of the person.
Second: contemporary culture has been pulled toward leading with identity-and-opinion specifically because identity-and-opinion is what social-media and political-discourse forms reward. The forms have flipped the relationship — what would have been the surface of a person is now what the person leads with, and what would have been the load-bearing substrate has become hard to reach because the substrate isn't what the forms surface.
She's ambivalent about whether the soul is immaterial — she says explicitly that she believes the universe is knowable and isn't claiming the soul lies outside the reach of physics. What she's claiming is that the function called soul is operationally real. Whether it has a non-material substrate is a separable question.
The position has three parts that hold each other up.
Part 1. Persons have substrate. Whatever you call it — soul, character, deep self, fundamental temperament — there's something about a person that's not their stated positions on issues. The substrate is what someone is like at 2 a.m. when they're alone. What they care about when no one is watching. The texture of their attention. Their actual moral commitments as expressed through years of small choices rather than through performative statements. The substrate exists. People who know a person well know the substrate. People who only know the person through their public-facing presentation don't.
Part 2. Contemporary life rewards surface presentation. Social media. Political opinion. The brand. The avatar. These forms reward legible identity-positions. The forms don't reward the slow accumulated texture that is the substrate. People who optimize for the forms therefore develop the surface and let the substrate atrophy. By forty they have a substantial brand and not much substrate to back it up. The forms have produced the people the forms reward.
Part 3. Writing across the surface produces thinner writing. Conversation across the surface produces thinner conversation. Most contemporary public-facing material — articles, social posts, op-eds, much of what passes for political discourse — is operating at surface-level on both sides. The writer is performing their identity; the reader is performing theirs. The exchange is between costumes. Whatever might have happened between the persons underneath the costumes doesn't happen because the costumes are doing the talking.
The implication for writing is operational. Writers who can reach beneath their own costume produce work that has substrate. Writers who can't, don't. The reader can feel the difference, even when they can't name what's missing in the costumed work.
Popova is using the word soul without committing to a particular metaphysics. She's using it as the most-available English word for the substrate of a person. Other words could substitute: character (with reservations about its moralized history), fundamental temperament (clinical-sounding), the deep self (vague). Soul carries the most resonance because the word has been in English use for centuries pointing at exactly this substrate.
The risk of the word is that it imports religious connotations the reader may bring or reject. Popova accepts the risk. She'd rather use the word that points at the territory than use a more-clinical word that points at it less effectively. The word's resonance is part of what makes it operational.
The alternative — self — has its own problems. In contemporary use, self often means the constructed-presentation, the brand, the persona. The contemporary self-help genre uses self in this constructed sense. The deep substrate the person carries underneath the constructed self isn't usually what self-help is addressing. Soul points at the substrate. Self points at the costume. Popova holds the distinction.
This page pairs with Currents vs. Winds (Hari). Hari's distinction at the political-discourse scale is structurally the same as Popova's at the personhood scale. The Cleveland woman's stated Trump-support is the wind; the when I was alive is the current. The contemporary political-discourse operates at wind-level. Popova names the same operation at the cultural level — most contemporary public exchange operates at the costume-level rather than at the substrate-level. Same operation, two scales.
It connects to Unselfing (Murdoch / Popova). The unselfing operation requires the self's costume to relax enough that the substrate underneath can encounter the world. The two pages combined describe what happens at both ends of a properly-functioning self — the self stays out of the way (Murdoch's unselfing) and what's underneath the self stays alive (Popova's soul).
It sits in productive tension with Reader as Mirror, Not Information (Tucker). Tucker's frame says the memoir-reader is meeting their own substrate through the writer's substrate. The reading works only because both parties have substrate to meet across. The vault should hold the relationship — Tucker's mirror requires Popova's soul to be operationally real on both sides.
Picture two people at dinner. They've known each other for a year through professional contacts. The dinner is the first time they're alone together for an extended conversation.
Surface-level conversation. They talk about the political news. Their stated opinions are sharp, well-defended, articulate. They mostly agree on the political stuff. They both like the same shows. They both think the same restaurants are overrated. By the end of dinner they know each other's positions across multiple domains. They don't know each other any better than they did when they sat down. The conversation has been between costumes. The substrate underneath has not been touched.
Now imagine the same dinner with a different conversational architecture. One of them notices that the other looked tired when they walked in. They ask about it. Not how are you doing — actually about it. The other person hesitates, then talks. Something they've been carrying about a parent's decline. The first person listens. They share something they've been carrying too. The conversation moves to what each of them is actually inside.
By dessert, the substrate has been touched. The two people now know each other in a way they didn't before. The political positions haven't come up at all. The political positions don't matter for this kind of knowing. What matters is what each person is actually like underneath the political positions, and the kind of conversation that lets that emerge.
Popova is naming the second kind of conversation as what reading at its best produces. The reader meets the writer's substrate through prose that wasn't optimized for the surface-presentation. The writer was writing toward something real. The reader receives toward something real. The two halves meet. The reader is no longer alone with what they're inside in the way they were before they opened the book.
Most contemporary conversation is the first kind. Most contemporary reading is the first kind too — articles and posts written for the surface, read at the surface. The substrate-level operation has become culturally rare. Popova's site is partly an argument for restoring it.
You're a writer who has been operating at the identity-and-opinion level. Three operational moves to test the substrate-level.
Notice your stated positions. Before you write, list what you'd say about the topic if asked at a dinner party. Those positions are your costume. They are real but they are not the load-bearing material of the writing you're about to do. They might appear in the writing or not. They aren't the source.
Reach underneath. Ask yourself: what about this topic do I actually carry? Not what do you think about it abstractly. What does the topic touch in your specific life-history that makes you the kind of writer who could write about it? The reaching is uncomfortable. Most writers don't do this work because the work is uncomfortable. The work is what differentiates substrate-writing from costume-writing.
Write from what you found. The piece you produce may not contain your stated political positions. The piece may contain what your actual relationship with the topic is at the substrate level. Some readers will be put off by the absence of the expected positions. Most readers will recognize they've encountered something different from the costumed pieces they're used to. The difference is what makes the piece worth reading.
The discipline is hard because the contemporary writer-economy rewards the costume. Substack subscribers come for the persona. Twitter followers come for the takes. The substrate-writing has a smaller market. Popova's twenty years are partial evidence the market exists. The market is smaller than the costume-market and operationally more valuable per reader.
You've been captured when your writing is essentially brand maintenance. The pieces all sound like you. The sounding-like-you means the brand is recognizable. The brand-recognition is what your readers come for. The work is consistent and recognizably yours and operationally limited to what the brand can carry. The substrate underneath the brand has stopped contributing because the brand has become the entire surface.
You're writing from substrate when occasionally a piece surprises you. The piece doesn't sound exactly like your previous pieces. The piece reveals something about you that the brand-version doesn't include. Readers may complain — this isn't what I expect from you. The complaint is operational confirmation that you've reached underneath the brand. Some of your existing readers will leave. Some will stay differently. New readers will come who weren't reading for the brand. The change is uncomfortable. The change is also what the substrate-writing does.
The position has support across contemplative-philosophical traditions (the distinction between persona and Self in Jungian psychology; frontstage and backstage in Erving Goffman's sociology). The cross-tradition convergence on the distinction confirms it's operationally real. Popova's specific vocabulary (soul) carries connotations the other vocabularies don't. The phenomenon is the same across vocabularies.
The tension: the position can be misread as anti-political. Identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people could be read as dismissing the political concerns that legitimate identities and opinions express. Popova isn't going there. The political stakes are real. The identities and opinions matter operationally even when they're surface. The frame is that politics has been swallowing all of personhood and people would benefit from also having access to themselves underneath the political-discourse register. Not less politics. More-than-politics also available.
A second tension. The vocabulary of soul invites religious uptake. Some readers will hear Popova as making a religious claim. She's careful — she's ambivalent about whether the soul is immaterial. The frame is functional, not metaphysical. The reader who hears it as religious has imported the religious framing. The vault should preserve the distinction.
Spend a year reading mostly opinion writing. Op-eds. Substack posts. Political analysis. You learn what various commentators think about various issues. By year-end you have a substantial map of contemporary positions. You also have not, in any deep sense, met any of the writers. The writers were performing their positions; you were reading the performance. The reading produced an information transfer and almost no substrate-meeting.
Spend the same year reading writers who reach toward substrate. The Popovas. The Eiseleys. The Kimmerers. Certain memoirs that don't operate at the persona-level. You finish a substantially smaller number of pieces. The pieces you do finish have given you something the opinion-year couldn't give. You feel you've spent time with specific minds rather than with positions. The accumulation across the year produces a different kind of reading-life.
The two years compound differently across decades. The opinion-reader's library is mostly disposable — most opinions age out within five years and aren't worth returning to. The substrate-reader's library is mostly durable — the substrate-writing remains alive across decades because the substrate it touches doesn't expire on the news cycle. Different libraries, different reading-lives, different people.
Hari and Popova converge from different angles. Hari's currents-vs-winds at the political-discourse level. Popova's soul-vs-costume at the personhood level. Both writers are reaching past the surface where most of the cultural action is to the substrate where the actual conditions are. Their two pages combined describe a single operational discipline that operates across personal, interpersonal, journalistic, and political registers. Same operation, four scales.
Tucker and Popova also converge. Tucker's truth-memoir vs. legacy-memoir distinction is the operational form of Popova's soul-vs-costume. The truth-memoir reaches the substrate; the legacy-memoir is the costume in book form. The vault should hold the convergence as confirmation that substrate-reaching is a domain-general operation available to writers in any form who choose to do the work the operation requires.
This page lives at three intersections.
In creative-practice, it gives writers a way to think about what their writing is actually doing — is it brand-maintenance or substrate-reaching. The distinction is operational. The reader can feel the difference.
In psychology, it tracks the persona-vs-Self distinction Jung made central to clinical work and contemporary depth-psychology continues to use. Popova arrived at the same distinction from a writer's life. The convergence underwrites both.
In behavioral mechanics, it provides a diagnostic for the contemporary public-discourse failure. The discourse-economy rewards costume. The discourse-economy is therefore systematically thinning the depth of public exchange even as the volume of exchange increases. Operators who recognize this can navigate the discourse differently than those who don't.
The Sharpest Implication The contemporary culture is systematically pulling people toward leading with their costumes — their identities, opinions, brands, takes. The forms that distribute writing reward the costume. The conversations that happen across screens reward the costume. The substrate that previous generations had access to as the foundation of friendship, love, work, and political community is being eroded at the population scale. Most people don't notice the erosion because they've never not been inside it. The fix can't come through individual choice alone — the forms shape the people who use them. The fix would require some form of cultural recovery of the conditions under which substrate-meeting is possible. The conditions are slow time, sustained attention, certain kinds of reading and conversation, and probably some form of direct contemplative practice. The conditions are increasingly unavailable. Popova's site is one small piece of infrastructure trying to make them locally available. The work is slow and culturally marginal. The work is also operationally important — the populations that lose access to substrate become operationally smaller in their capacities for love, work, citizenship, and meaning. The loss compounds across generations.
Generative Questions