soul-destroying

English

Adjective

soul-destroying (comparative more soul-destroying, superlative most soul-destroying)

1. Causing erosion of moral fortitude or that eliminates hope or motivation

   War is a soul-destroying experience for soldiers: you're never the same easy-going person after you've killed.

   The daily rat race is soul-destroying: you soon give up all aspirations and just try to survive the boredom.

   • 1916, Friedrich von Hügel, The German Soul, pages 183–184:

     The results of such excessive concentration and production are, sooner or later, huge, soul-destroying Trusts, immense national rivalries, and appalling bloody wars largely occasioned by the existence and ever-growing needs of such insatiable machines.

   • 2020 June 3, “Network News: Graffiti attacks on WMR trains”, in Rail, page 15:

     A spate of graffiti attacks on West Midlands Railway trains has prompted the operator to warn vandals that they are posing a risk to public health. [...] "At a time when our cleaning teams are working extremely hard in challenging conditions, it is soul-destroying for them to face this pointless additional workload just to get carriages back on the tracks.

   • 2023 May 8, Naomi Klein, “AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Generative AI won’t be the end of employment, we are told, only “boring work” – with chatbots helpfully doing all the soul-destroying, repetitive tasks and humans merely supervising them.