Dictionary

soul-destroying en · ADJ

Meanings

1. Synonym of soul-crushing.
   • 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. 2020 June 3, “Network News: Graffiti attacks on WMR trains”, in Rail, page 15:
   • War is a soul-destroying experience for soldiers: you're never the same easy-going person after you've killed.
   • The Harry Potter star, who has not acted in a film since 2018, says she found promotion duties ‘soul-destroying’ but is now ‘maybe the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been’ 2025 September 23, Catherine Shoard, “Emma Watson explains long break from acting: ‘I do not miss selling things’”, in The Guardian, →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. 2023 May 8, Naomi Klein, “AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
   • 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. 1916, Friedrich von Hügel, The German Soul, pages 183–184:
   • The daily rat race is soul-destroying: you soon give up all aspirations and just try to survive the boredom.

Forms

Synonyms

soul-crushing