Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.

– C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What is the Meaning Crisis?

In Existential Indifference, Tatjana Schnell writes,

Meaningfulness is defined as a fundamental sense of meaning, based on an appraisal of one’s life as coherent, significant, directed, and belonging. A judgment on one’s life as empty, pointless, and lacking meaning amounts to a crisis of meaning. Although sources of meaning significantly predict both meaningfulness and crisis of meaning, they cannot fully account for them. (2010, 354)

The “meaning crisis” describes a felt state of meaninglessness. Victor Frankl (2006) expressed it as an “existential vacuum,” an aimlessness or disintegration that distends our experience of life in its personal, social, and cultural dimensions and leaves us spiritless, disconnected from a world whose presence seems increasingly insensible and impassive to our touch.

Philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger devoted themselves to pronouncing this crisis, and etiologies are provided in countless other works.[1] For the purpose of this paper, it may suffice to say that a succession of historical forces and influences (including the Protestant, Industrial, and Scientific Revolutions) have decayed the structure of our “worldview attunement,” a cosmos of interlocking orders that provided sustainable intelligibility and generated an ecology for our cognitive meaning-making machinery. As a consequence, we face a sapiential obsolescence: we have lost a spiritual ecology of practices, mediated by institutions of wisdom and religious participation, that allowed us to ameliorate perennial problems of self-deception, self-destruction, nihilism and despair.

All of this amounts to a peculiarly modern declension, a self estranged from its native cosmos. “No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do” (Frankl 2006, 106). The observable indicators of this existential vacuum have competing attributions. This paper will offer an inference to the best explanation of symptoms that are emerging in our current milieu, to paint the portrait of our meaning crisis with a finer series of brushstrokes.

Why a Symptomology? 

A term like symptomology, used to index medical disorders, has a heavy footfall. For certain readers, its use will kick up dusts of positivism and related disapprobations. But it is best to leave aside these occluding prejudices. No such reduction is implied by “symptom.” We attend to diagnosis with the spirit of Epicurus, observing the philosopher as a “physician for the soul.” Likewise, if discussions of the crisis seem recondite, it is because indistinction inheres the character of their subject. We have lost a common language to index disorders of the spirit,[2] and this enfeebles the project of the philosopher-physician: the commutation of suffering through recognition. A taxonomic symptomology is a hypothesizing tool for philosophic diagnosis: to organize a farrago of reactive behaviours into readable syntax, and give a phenomenon as amorphous as the “meaning crisis” its due intellectual solvency.

Why a Continuum? 

The symptoms of our Cimmerian state are not cooperative enough to remain categorical. They present as diffuse dysfunctions in our cognition, consciousness, character, and community, made patent by both social and psychological metrics. Some of these are involuntary, some willful, many are avoidant or anaesthetizing, some anathematizing. Several of them are frenetic, and others contemplative. In most cases, trying to problematize these phenomena is enough to give our physician fits of anomia. A strict typology or feature list withholds access to the “grey life” between categories. So to lay the lantern in the right spot of darkness, we offer a continuum of symptom types ranging from i) reactions to ii) responses to iii) reflective responses—the chiaroscuro, if you will, in our portrait of the crisis.

* Reaction is an instinctive flection, involuntary and unselfconscious, like the spontaneous withdrawal of a hand from a burning stovetop.
* Response is a purposeful attempt to relieve the suffering of meaninglessness. It entails a cognizance of personal crisis that provokes deliberate, lenitive mitigations (e.g., seeking a prescription to relieve an ailment).
* Reflective Response is the realization that one’s own personal suffering corresponds to a broader phenomenon. This realization provokes systematizing attempts to seek and restore the communal provisions for personal meaning by establishing new ecologies of practice (i.e., ways of being religious in the absence of religious credulity).As we adduce symptoms to these types, one might be tempted to read “improvement” from left to right (no politics implied). Though reasonable, this impulse is to be discouraged. Though responses are more reasoned and organized than reactions, they are also susceptible to more pestilent kinds of foolishness. We can touch only briefly on each of these symptoms, so our survey will be introductory; each of these phenomena can—and has—made for its own volume of studies.

Symptomology of the Meaning Crisis 

The Deaths of Despair (Reaction)

 Now, by 2020, the mental health crisis in the West has been thoroughly reported. This paper will not generally linger on empirical statistics—these are abundant in more specialized studies—but it merits noting that the United States has tracked precipitous increases of substance abuse and suicide associated with feelings of hopelessness and futility. In recent years, these reports have given rise to the neologism “deaths of despair.”[3] In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an average increase of 25% of suicides in the United States across most demographics since 1999. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, where suicide is also rising, a recent study by Yakult UK relayed an 80% average of people across age brackets reporting their lives to be meaningless. While these results do not obviate the influences of economic factors, the Frankl–Nietzschean adage that “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” (Frankl 2006, 104) has been supported by research evidencing that prosperity is only facilely correlated with meaning in life, which is advancing as its own subject of psychometry and assessment.[4] This research indicates that, if meaning in life is protective against suicide and substance abuse, then meaninglessness is—independent of classic or “clinical” depression—a sufficient condition for suicide. This hypothesis is dawning into the mainstream; behavioural scientist Clay Routledge (2018) made a similar argument in The New York Times:

In order to keep existential anxiety at bay, we must find and maintain perceptions of our lives as meaningful. We are a species that strives not just for survival, but also for significance. We want lives that matter. It is when people are not able to maintain meaning that they are most psychologically vulnerable. Empirical studies bear this out. A felt lack of meaning in one’s life has been linked to alcohol and drug abuse, depression, anxiety and — yes —suicide. And when people experience loss, stress or trauma, it is those who believe that their lives have a purpose who are best able to cope with and recover from distress.

In the context of sacredness, it is best not to think of Routledge’s sense of “purpose” or Frankl’s “why to live for” as the telos of a single goal, but as an existential mode of renewable relevance, contact, and co-development with the world. Hence, the responding literature within philosophy and cognitive science generally focuses on “meaning in life” rather than “the meaning of life.”[5]

The Loss of Communitas (Reaction–Response)

After suicides and substances, Routledge goes on to describe another modern infection, the atomization of social and family life: shorter marriages, fewer children, smaller families, and more individual solitude, all yielding another well-documented phenomenon: loneliness. The ebbing of family is the ebbing of rituals, customs, and activities—e.g., religious tradition—that were conveyed in identification with a broader communitas. Some have plausibly reasoned that a recession of fellowship is therefore a principle cause of meaninglessness; family formed an integument over the individual that encouraged their “being as a part” (Tillich 1952), the binding that entrusted their participation in the sacred. Mary Eberstadt (2013) makes this argument cogently, proposing that the decline of the natural family co-conditioned the decline of Christianity.

The slackening of family ties slackened the ontogenetic relation of the self to itself, to the world, to the affordance of further development, introducing an arbitrariness to individual identity that deepened the existential vacuum. Freed from familial bindings, pathologies of narcissism, nihilism, and creedal arrogation become markedly more seductive.

Hence kinship, to repeat, does not define modern men and women as it did our ancestors; for many people, “family” is instead, at least in part, a series of optional associations that can sometimes be discarded voluntarily depending on preference. To put it lightly, when measured against the sweep of human history, this is rather a new and potent sociological fact. (Eberstadt 2013, 14)

The sustained loss of intimate and meaningful relationships poses another loss to the individual, a loss of philia. In both Greek philosophic and Christian traditions, philia mediates the relation between an individual’s eros[6]—their drive for vitality, relation, and consummation—and their state of being in relation to the world. This intercession is symbolized, for instance, by the procession of relationships that surround a couple in matrimony. These rituals are not just displays of amity. The communal disposition of eros is a significant factor in our existential moding, and the agony of unintimate encounters can amount to craven existential frustrations,[7] and an “involuted self” (Robinson 2010) that, by its own indentation, is unmoored from other selves and foreclosed from transcending relations that evolve it. This makes it more susceptible to symptoms of addiction, virtual isolation and deaths of despair. 

The Rise of Addiction (Reaction–Response)

The climbing rates of suicide and loss of communitas are coincident with another symptom of despair that has been given the status of an epidemic in certain areas: the rise of addiction. Reports of addiction surge in the West are now mostly linked to opioids, but the symptom also finds objects in pornography, shopping, gambling, social media, and video gaming. The latter has now found its way onto the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list.[8] It is impossible to fully separate these trends from those related to loneliness and suicidal ideation. Hence, the symptomology as a continuum.

Two frameworks may help us to understand addiction and its relation to other symptoms. Erich Fromm (1976) provided a dichotomy for our existential moding that has significant import: the having mode, which frames our encounters with a productive, telic purpose: control, consumption, and problem solving (as you would eat an apple or assemble a bookshelf) and the being mode, which frames the world with a processual, paratelic arousal to develop, aspire, and engage in processual meaning-making (as you would carry a relationship or undertake artistic projects). “Modal confusion” is a mistaken decussation between “having” and “being,” whereby an adopted mode is ill-fitting to the natural demands of a situation—you would not, for instance, make yourself vulnerable to a bookshelf. Conversely, addiction is a form of modal confusion wherein the having mode is applied as a frame for all encounters, even the intimate and familiar. When we treat close relations or rituals of sacredness in the having mode, we predispose them consumptively and forestall the possibility of metamorphosing through them. This relational ossification contorts the countenance of eros (described above), and corrodes its intimacy. Hence, addicts often lack the capacity to maintain relationships, e.g. with family, that aspire and develop. The loss of communitas eventuates.

Fromm’s dichotomy is complemented by another account of cognitive debility. Relegation to the having mode snares us into a reductive state that neuroscientist Marc Lewis calls reciprocal narrowing:

Although they indeed result from and contribute to brain changes, addictive activities also feed back to the social environment, further narrowing what are often already limited opportunities for well-being, which in turn further narrows cognitive and neural flexibility. It follows that the narrowing seen in addiction takes place within the behavioral repertoire, the social surround, and the brain—all at the same time. (2018, 1558)

This narrowing results in a phenomenal barrenness: a diminished capacity on the part of the agent, and a depleting scarcity in their arena. The addict does not know life in terms of potential, or aspiration, or any such hope for a greater becoming. The addict’s environment—including their relationships—becomes a finite something to be plundered and exhausted. When it is exhausted, it leaves them evermore existentially vacuumed, trapped in a lonely decadence with indigence for company.[9] 

The Virtual Exodus (Response)

The degenerative effects of social media—now nearly as accepted as those of tobacco—are causally inseparable from the dissolution of family and philia, but more ‘responsive’ in our continuum of symptoms. The over-communicative, under-conversing influence of virtual fora are justly accused of enflaming loneliness and social anxiety rather than relieving them. Here, pathologies like narcissism and other egocentric impulses are rewarded, and the consequent dependency lathers the conditions for addiction. These dangers are especially applicable where virtual sociability has been grafting to video gaming, which has precipitated a retreat from social life that Edward Castronova (2007) called the virtual exodus. In some cases—e.g., the hikikomori in Japan—the withdrawal into virtual environments has been declared a psychiatric or cultural emergency. Virtuality is a powerful siren song. Online networks provide simulacra of communitas, and the phenomenology of video games recreate the world with coherent physiognomy, providing a cosmos of orders that recall our ancient worldview, but remain elusive in the implacable absurdities of waking life:

* A nomological order, wherein the world is governed by coherent laws that correspond to the movements of the player, who has a well-defined place in its hierarchy of being.
* A narrative order, in which the character’s story unfolds and resolves synchronously with the meta-narrative in the depicted world.
* A normative order, whereby goodness and evil are manifest, and the character’s growth is linearly progressive (i.e., is able to “level up” with his experience and the accession of his quest).

The video game cosmos is not simply well-ordered, but participatory. It is an immersive myth that coopts powerful cognitive machinery by inducing us to flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1997), a state of optimal performance marked by reduced self-consciousness and enhanced problem-solving. This state is intrinsically absorbing, cognitively rewarding, and increasingly correlated with positive reports of meaning in life.[10] For all of these reasons, the flow state is pursued assiduously, and any activity that induces it—particularly one with fewer costs to homeostasis—is also vulnerable to addiction. One can only assume that the WHO has noticed this as well.

It is important to note here that there is nothing pathological about video games per se, any more than there is with solitude, or YouTube. This critique is not composed to fulminate against a culture’s pastimes. The crisis symptom is the exodus rather than the activity, in other words, when one limited form of play begins to substitute for meaningful participation, effects a reciprocal narrowing of the agent to their non-virtual environment, and locks them into a “having” mode of engagement. It is at this stage that virtuality begins to exacerbate other symptoms of meaninglessness, deepening loneliness, atomization, addiction, and erotic and existential frustrations. Moreover, the added profiling of social media redoubles the involution of the self with modal confusion, training us to reflex as autopoetic entities, as though self-authored, disjoined from the necessities of constraint and the humilities of confrontation. These conditions have now been conferred onto online dating, which likewise suffers frequent solecisms from the loss of familial structures and legible customs to negotiate behaviour. We want to be affirmed but not corrected, adored but not improved, loved but not transformed; the performative contradictions of narcissism are abundant as they are idolatrous. The latter symptom will be explored in the next section.

Idolatries of the Sacred (Response–Reflective Response)

The gradual fall of the “sacred canopy” (Berger 1967) has left a vast, empty sky to fill. The past century has darkly witnessed many would-be successors elevated to the religious stratum of (meta)meaning, straining to become the system of systems that can provide a view of what the world is, who we are within it, and how we must act and interact, a system replete with marks of realness, morality, and a manner for being-in-the-world.[11] There have been many candidates vying to recast the three orders that video games render so seamlessly. Traditional religiousness—with its cosmology, communitas, ritual, mythos, mystical experiences, and symbolic participation—provided worldview attunement. It is, contrary to the pugnacious claims of certain atheists, far more than a set of creedal beliefs, and not easily replaced with the unhallowed humanism it begat. “The basic fact,” as John Hicks observed,

long evident to common sense but now scientifically elaborated in the modern psychology of religion, that there are innumerable correlations between the forms taken by human religiousness and the other aspects of our experience and our mental structure is beyond dispute. (1992, 114)

The mournful acknowledgement, or denial, of this “common sense” is part of the modern complex. Many have tried, often inconsciently, to reanimate the God that Nietzsche pronounced dead in the nineteenth century. The inflated attempts to recapture sacredness and relieve the existential vacuum are “idolatrous” in the religious meaning: they brandish something less-than-ultimate and plunder it for ultimacy (Tillich 1958) until, and inevitably, the aloft candidate yields insufficient mystery, cannot bear the weight of our wonder, and fades into ignominy. Whether they be political ideologies, social movements, new age mysticisms, or conspiracy narratives, the attempts to raise new canopies consistently gift us with modal confusions that court cultural—even epochal—misadventures. These imitators, hereafter enumerated, generally, and to varying degrees, contribute to the reciprocal narrowing of our cosmic relations. It has been some time since our human reflection bore the imago dei, the affined microcosm of the Platonic, Neoplatonic and Christian hypostases. The following idolatries are responding to the phantom presence of this severed divinity:

Neo-gnosticism: Perhaps the most pervasive of our cultural atavisms: the belief that the natures of reality and the self are obfuscated by chthonic forces that have pulled a veil over our perceptions, and if we could but perforate the veil, we would find a wonder that redeems the inchoate darkness. This kind of thinking is endemic to conspiracy narratives, like the protestations of “flat earthers” and survivalists, or the nostalgia for a utopic state of tribal bliss and belonging. New Age movements and other decadent romanticisms are most exemplary of this symptom: that if we only knew the hidden secret, pushed on the right wall, met the right person or said the right phrase, the vacuum of the universe would reveal its mirage and arrange into a meaningful order.

Pseudo-religious ideologies: Recognition of this pathology reached critical mass when Jordan Peterson took to YouTube to dispraise political correctness. The consequent logomachy had bivalent effects: it ratcheted the ideologizing, yet also regathered due attention to the sacred (see Renewing Gnosis). We are witness to the rise of an idolatrous normativity, sociocultural codes inflated to moral arbitrators, redrawing the boundaries of transgression, simplifying the identity of the self and the metanarrative of the world. The intransigence of these ideologies, their modern Promethean quest to reanimate the world in their image, recalls the obduration of totalitarian thinking, signaling that the West “lost the protection of the ecclesiastical walls carefully erected and reinforced since Roman days, and on account of that loss has approached the zone of world-destroying and world-creating fire” (Jung 1938, 59).

Ersatz mythologies: Even the most resolute among the non-religious show unwitting transference in the lap of popular culture. The genre of superheroes, for instance—a combination of Bronze Age deities, Christian morals, and modern technologies—has reached new zeniths of obsessive fandom. In the case of other mythologies, like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings, the religious overtones are still more explicit. As with video gaming, there is no illness to these pleasures except in their inflation. Many mythoi can sublimely symbolize the phenomenology of meaning and sacredness—that is, until they are idolatrously believed to share its identity.

Fundamentalism: Present in each of the above is a posture that Paul Tillich (1958) called “literalism:” a creedal form of idolatry that syncopates the meaning of scripture (or any such source) by forcing it into materiality, denying access to its symbolic, non-literal wisdom, and the sacredness we live out in metaphor, mythologies, and relationships. This abjection, promulgated by theists and atheists alike, has retrofit religious meaning with a taxonomic facticity, reciprocally narrowing its phenomenological play for the individual, and perversely disambiguating a phenomenon as complex as “faith” by turning it into a lowly, dogmatic form of fantasy.

Nihilism: Espoused and Performed (Response–Reflective Response)

Even when the noise of these idolatries subsides, we are left again with the silence of the universe, our existential vacuum, and the nihilism that falls out of our culture’s cosmic narrowing. For some, this nihilism becomes espoused, a decision to requite the disinterest countenanced by the universe and resign to a negated role in its cosmogony. Yet cosmic diminution need not mean meaninglessness. Nagel (1986) has pointed that this modern absurdity—i.e., our “smallness” in the scheme of time—can be sufficiently disarmed with reason, and its expression wants of a better theory. Byung-Chul Han (2017) provides one: the “atomization” of time, he argues, is a feeling of hyperventilated “whizzing.” The temporal strait no longer leads into eternity, but instead skirts around and away from it, like a series of offramps veering us from life’s main artery, vexing each movement with a feeling of performed nihilism that amplifies the other symptoms of meaninglessness:

Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety. Atomization, individualization and the experience of discontinuity are also responsible for various forms of violence. Today, those social structures which create continuity and duration are increasingly disintegrating. . . . Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are all losing their importance. (Han 2017, 18)

Renewing Gnosis (Reflective Response)

If there is good news to be found among these symptoms, it is that they have not gone unnoticed. Peterson’s controversy, for instance, incited de novo interest in the autochthonous nature of our spiritual dimensions, and pedagogical communities have sprung from the awakened appetite. Many are reframing their ambitions around projects of existential restoration, to countervail idolatries of the sacred and treat the symptoms of loneliness, addiction and narcissism. Serious forms of play[12] are trying to emulate the participatory valence of religious life, using elaborate games to adapt the flow state to concerted problem-solving, and recollect the meaning of symbolic identification to resolve the discontinuities of time and self, nurturing what Han (2017) calls the vita contemplativa.

These tidal changes are long anticipated. A wisdom renaissance is reacclimating philosophic traditions of antiquity (e.g., the revival of Stoicism) to steer us from their New Age imitators. A mindfulness revolution is spurred by new models of cognition. An entire genre of literature—to which this paper humbly contributes—devoted to the meaning crisis is spilling beyond the boundaries of academe into more accessible media. A psychedelic revolution is exploring a confluence between psychotherapy and mystical experience. Methods like Circling compose the vanguard of an authentic discourse movement laying the conditions for meaningful relating. Taken collectively, these emerging praxes, new and old, are aspiring ecologies of practice committed to renewing gnosis—not gnosticism, but a participatory form of knowing that reconnects our being to the disclosing experience of sacredness, in other words, to what is most real, significant and inexhaustible.

Conclusion

“I am only a man” Czeslaw Milosz (1961) wrote. “I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway to abstraction” (223). So must the philosopher-physician. As they now peer into the vacuum, one gets the feeling that their work has barely begun.

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Notes

[1] Our own account, authored with Filip Miscevic (Zombies in Western Culture: A Twentieth Century Crisis, 2017), provides a detailed explanation of worldview attunement, and an introduction to the genealogy of the crisis.

[2] Emphasis here on “common.” After Freud and Jung, psychoanalysis espoused some authority on the logos of the psyche, and many psychological models, ranging from behaviourism to more recent, synoptically integrated cognitive science, have done the same. But this pluralism is precisely the challenge; no one discipline saturates the vernacular of selfhood the way the Christian spiritus did for fifteen centuries.

[3] The phrase cannot help but evoke Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. His Christian, proto-existential account of despair was among the first modern pronouncements of a crisis in meaning.

[4] See Schnell, Tatjana, “Individual differences in meaning-making: Considering the variety of sources of meaning, their density and diversity,” 2011 and Brandstätter et al. “Systematic review of meaning in life assessment instruments,” 2012

[5] For further reading, see Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters, 2010 and Hicks and Routledge (Eds.), The Experience of Meaning in Life: Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversies, 2013.

[6] Eros is a fraught concept, but a number of historical definers, ranging from Plato to Freud, have read the erotic drive with more significant ideations that those of mere sexuality, i.e. the striving for being, the pursuit of eternity in the relations of our finitude. It is in this broader scope of meaningful connection that the term is here invoked.

[7] For a recent, thoughtful exegesis on this phenomenon, read Han, Byung-Chul, The Agony of Eros, 2017.

[8] See https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/97/6/19-020619.pdf

[9] Heidegger gave a prototypical account of this, or at least related, pathology in The Question Concerning Technology (1977, 1993); he explores a contortion in our modern relationship with the world, a technological “clearing” defined by instrumental use—i.e. the world as a standing-reserve to pilfer, rather than indwell.

[10] For a cognitive scientific account of flow, see Vervaeke, Ferraro and Herrera-Bennett, “Flow as Spontaneous Thought: Insight and Implcit Learning” in The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming, 2018.

[11] Theories of religion are, as one would hope, well beyond the scope of this paper. Yet certain key works are worth mentioning here, either because of their seminal influence in the discipline or direct import for the authors: John Hicks, An Interpretation of Religion, 1992; Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, 1973; and Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, 1938. For phenomenological accounts of the mystical dimensions of sacredness, see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902 and Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 1923.

[12] The forms of “serious play” are many and varied: improv communities, role-playing games (e.g., Jeepform), dramatic and musical enactments (e.g. The Jazz Leadership Project), etc.

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———. 2017. The Scent of Time. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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———. 1958. The Dynamics of Faith. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

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