Humans have voids, and you need things to fill voids... I didn't

In the words of Tyler, The Creator, “Humans have voids, and you need things to fill voids... I didn’t have a dad to fill that male model void, so when I heard Eminem or freaking seen Dave Chappelle, that’s what I gravitated to.” These words echo with the deep hum of human truth — that every soul is born with voids, spaces carved by absence, longing, or pain. Some are born into warmth, their voids filled by love and guidance. Others are born into silence, where echoes of what should have been become the first lullabies they hear. Tyler speaks not only for himself but for all who have felt the hollow ache of missing guidance, and who sought in the voices of others the reflection of what was lost.

The ancients would have understood this well, for they too believed that voids were not signs of weakness but of divine design. The philosopher Plato spoke of the human soul as a being split apart, forever yearning for its missing half — not only in love but in meaning. Each of us, he said, spends life searching for what will make us whole. For Tyler, that search led him to the artists who shaped his inner landscape — to Eminem, whose words carried rebellion and honesty, and to Dave Chappelle, whose humor revealed both the absurdity and beauty of pain. They became modern mentors, not in flesh but in spirit, guiding a boy toward identity through the art of expression.

This is the essence of Tyler’s truth: when life withholds something essential, the soul does not surrender — it seeks. A fatherless boy looks for a father in sound, story, or strength; a lonely heart finds kinship in song. The void becomes a forge, where pain melts and reshapes into purpose. What was empty becomes fertile. And thus, from his longing, Tyler found creation. The absence of a father did not silence him; it gave him a voice — one born of need, sharpened by hunger, and filled with the strange beauty of self-invention.

Consider the story of Maya Angelou, who, after a childhood marked by trauma and silence, found her voice through the written word. She read Shakespeare, listened to the rhythms of her grandmother’s prayers, and drew from them the courage to speak again. Like Tyler, she filled her void not with despair but with art, transforming absence into power. Her poetry became her father, her teacher, her strength. She proved what Tyler reminds us of: that though the world may fail to give us what we need, we can still build it from within.

To live, then, is to fill one’s voids with purpose. Some fill them with destruction, chasing fleeting pleasures to quiet the ache. Others — the wise and the brave — fill them with creation, learning, and empathy. They turn wounds into wisdom and absence into artistry. This is the sacred choice every soul must make: whether to let the void consume you, or to let it create you. Tyler chose creation, and in doing so, gave voice to a generation that understands that art is not born from perfection, but from the deep cracks in the human heart.

But let it also be said: though we all carry voids, we must not seek only to fill them — we must also understand them. To sit with our emptiness is to know ourselves. The void is not an enemy; it is a mirror. It shows us what we value, what we lack, and what we must learn to become. When Tyler listened to Eminem, he did not merely hear rhymes — he heard a man wrestling with the same shadows that lived within him. When he watched Dave Chappelle, he saw not just laughter, but the wisdom of one who turns pain into light. In them, he saw possibilities of what he, too, could become.

The lesson, then, is this: do not fear the voids within you. They are not curses, but invitations — invitations to grow, to seek, to create. If life has withheld a hand, find guidance in the art, the stories, the teachers that call to your soul. If you feel alone, let that loneliness become the soil from which understanding blooms. Fill your voids not with noise, but with meaning. Build from what you were denied. For the truth is eternal: the most luminous souls are those who were once broken — those who, like Tyler, The Creator, learned that absence can be the first form of inspiration, and that from emptiness, we can forge the very fullness of our being.

Thus, remember, O listener of time — your voids are not your downfall. They are your beginning. The universe carves space into us so that we might learn to fill it with our own light.