https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZYyVOz-eTUI
So the title is a little bit misleading because I wanted to really work at trying to introduce what the crisis is in case some of you are unfamiliar with my work and then just at the very end point to how we should try and respond to it. So I’m going to start with sort of I guess distressing news. So especially in the United States but around the world it’s more and more the case that people are living by themselves, that they’re living alone, that they’re not fundamentally woven into any kind of extended family and as Eberstadt showed in her book How the West Really Lost God, great title for a book, right? This has profound consequences. Her point is this tending to live alone and secularization go seem to go hand in hand. I’m not confident about her particular causal story but the fact that these two are interrelated seems to be very well made and so people’s sense of the sacred and how they’re related to the depths of things including the depths of other people seems to be seriously challenged and that is becoming more and more prevalent. This is related to the consistent finding that across the decade the number of close friends you have is reliably declining. And I want you to remember that all of this is taking place during a period in which we have the greatest opportunity to socially connect and yet we’re in decline. Loneliness of course is on the rise. People are talking about a loneliness epidemic. The UK has famously set up a Ministry of Loneliness which sounds like something George Orwell would have written about. And so there’s a lot happening. There was a survey in the UK. I’m trying to put a lot of UK stuff in as you can see. The trick is always appeal to the narcissism of your audience. OK so 2019 this was a national survey. 80% of people feel their lives are meaningless. OK. 43% attribute it to financial reasons even though that goes against overwhelming amount of research that once your finances get you out of poverty finance doesn’t contribute very much to meaning. You have to do huge increases in finance to get very small increases in meaning and of course we all have a lot of there’s a lot of famous tropes around this. Now that’s interesting because notice if you put those two facts together there’s a tremendous evidence of lack but there’s also evidence for significant confusion about that lack. What is it that the meaning that is missing. Oh well if I had more money. And that seems to be very indicative of both a lack and the confusion together. Hence the word crisis. Now if you take a look 34% of those people said the reason why their lives were meaningless was because of anxiety. Now here we’re at a particular issue. We have to be very careful about that and I like to invoke the distinction that Tillich invoked between psychological and existential anxiety. And it’s unclear in this survey which is being pointed to because people often mix the two together. Psychological is you have sort of the distressing symptoms associated with sort of generalized anxiety disorder. Existential anxiety is you’re reflecting on sort of the nature of reality and you feel fundamentally disconnected. Both of them are important though because they’re both distinct from fear. In fear you have an object towards which you can direct your action. There is a well defined problem. You might not solve the problem the tiger will still kill you. But at least it’s well defined. The thing about anxiety is it’s not. It doesn’t have a focused object because it generally points to a fundamental sense of disconnection. You feel disconnected from something in an important way and that is causing you significant distress. The coupling between the agent and the arena of the world is not properly in place for you. That’s anxiety. So we’ve got loneliness and anxiety and of course talking about anxiety brings up the United States. Interestingly in the place that’s supposed to be the epitome of success, Silicon Valley, we have a considerable spike in anxiety, depression, a tendency towards suicide. Now that tendency towards suicide of course in the younger generation is that’s a much more worldwide phenomena. Of course there’s considerable variation due to socioeconomic factors. But in general in the West whatever that means there’s a considerable amount of mental health distress going on. Now this shows up in I talk about the two ends and how they’re sort of dancing to each other with each other. These two things that people are commenting a lot on as sort of epidemic narcissism and nihilism and they’re actually just two sides of the same coin. Nihilism emphasizes the objective sense of a lack of meaning and narcissism is the subjective. Well I am the self. There’s a great whole of meaning and I am the answer. And of course we can see how that is central in American politics, the bouncing between nihilism and narcissism. But of course the United States is just the rest of the West on speed and so what we have to do, we just have to understand that this is indicative of something larger happening. So another phenomena and I wrote a book with Christopher Mastapietro and Philip Misovic about this, about zombies. Zombies have become a prevalent myth. And just when you think they’re going away, the last of us comes out and the zombie myth gets spun up again. Well why? Well what we argued in the book, and please look at the book for the deeper argument, is that zombies are a mythological expression of the meaning crisis. Because the zombies are unlike other monsters. They’re not supernatural. They are us, decayed. And if you didn’t get that, in multiple times in The Walking Dead, you get we are the walking dead. The humans say that to each other. Just so you know. Really clear. We. So they’re us, decayed. They’re in groups but they’re not communal. They drift. They drift. And this is very easy for me in Canada. Go in the streets of Toronto in February and people are drifting. There’s lots of people but there’s no contact, no communication. They drift. They have an insatiable desire to consume. They often want to consume the organ of meaning making, brains. That’s a really freaking weird thing by the way. Think about it. And then you get the weird thing that you get the zombie walks, people want to enact being zombies. The zombies are us. We are them. And they’re the meaning crisis. And then the weird thing is the zombie myth, which is a perversion of the Christian notion of resurrection, where you come back to the renewed life. You come back to the decadent life. And we found this other Christian myth, the apocalypse, which is the renewal of the world. And it brought them together in the zombie apocalypse, which is not the resurrection to a renewed world. It’s the return to a decadent life into a world that is constantly in decay. Why is this myth so prevalent? Well, because it speaks about us and therefore speaks to us in a profound way. I’m going to use this term in a technical sense. I’m not trying to be offensive. I’m using it the way Frankfurt did. The rise in the sense of the pervasiveness of bullshit in the society. And people are more, if you just track how more and more people are invoking the term, referring to it, explaining things in terms of there’s so much bullshit. And the thing about bullshit is it’s different from lying. The liar depends on your concern for the truth to manipulate your behavior. The bullshit artist tries to get you unconcerned with the truth so that you’re caught up in the mere salience of something. This is how commercials work. Right? Here’s a person. They’re in a bar. They’re gorgeous. There’s other gorgeous people around them. They’re all happy. There’s the alcohol. Go into a bar. Is that what a bar is really like? You know it’s not true, but it doesn’t matter because they know that you know that it’s not true. They know that you’re sort of laughing to yourself. And what happens? You buy the damn alcohol because it has been made salient to you. You see, and you can’t lie to yourself. That doesn’t work as a model. We use that as a metaphor. It’s not a good metaphor. But what you can do is you can bullshit yourself. You can direct your attention to something and that makes it more salient, which means it’s much more likely to catch your attention, which means, and then you circle. And you deceive yourself by getting your attention spiraling into something so that you find yourself buying the product, adopting the ideology. And so bullshit and the prevalence of self-deception are interwoven. And of course, they express itself in responses to a meeting crisis with things like what’s called conspirituality, which is the weird integration we have between conspiracy theories and spirituality, a conspiracy theory that is supposed to save you and redeem the world. And of course, COVID made all of this worse. One of the weird moments I’ve had in my career was at the beginning of COVID, I predicted a massive, two things, massive sort of increase in mental health issues. And because of the increased domicile killing of a sense of home in COVID, we would get conspirituality ramping up. And that’s what happened. So I was happy as a scientist because you make a prediction, yay. And then as a human being, oh, no. And so all of this, of course, is spiraling. We have the weird political paradox of our times. People are universally feeling disenfranchised and disillusioned. And at the same time, politics has taken on a religious fervor for us in which it is pursued with a kind of religious intensity. People are turning over their identities and meaning to political ideologies. And so there’s weird paradox. There’s weird paradox. We have the virtual exodus that people in general are preferring being in the virtual world rather than the real world. And so the WHO has recently admitted that there’s such a thing as video game addiction. It’s now official. I don’t know what, I mean, after COVID, the standing of the WHO was like, mm, but anyways. But I think that was a legitimate thing they did. Now think about what’s in, let’s take a video game. What are they finding in the video game that is obviously lacking in the real world such that they prefer the video world? Well think about a video game. There’s a clear narrative order. There’s a story, and you play a pivotal role in realizing the purpose of that story. There’s a nomological order. There are rules, and they make sense of that world. And if you follow the rules, the world unfolds according to those rules. So there’s a narrative order. There’s a nomological order. And there’s a normative order. You know how to scale up, how to actually transcend. You level up in the game. And then within the game, you get into the flow state. You get into a state of intense at-one-ment. So what people are finding is at-one-ment within the three orders, a narrative, nomological, and normative order. That’s what they find lacking in the real world. Now these orders, of course, are at the level of our world view, how we structure our fundamental orientation to reality. I’ll come back to that. Now there aren’t just negative symptoms of the meaning crisis. And some of you might know, I’ve done a video with Christopher Mastapietro on this, and we’ve published this in a couple places. There are also positive symptoms of it. There’s what’s being called now the mindfulness revolution. And I was part of that. I was one of the first people at the university, maybe the first person at the University of Toronto, where I work, to talk about mindfulness in an academic setting. And when I first had to do it, it was like, I’m going to talk to you about mindfulness. And I had to come as a Buddhist. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Right? And now it’s just like, there’s an academic journal. I can talk about it, et cetera. That’s fine. And I publish increasingly on mindfulness. I’m critical, by the way, of how the West is taking up mindfulness. It’s interesting because the mindfulness revolution and how it’s, I think, mindfulness is being twisted are both indicative of the meaning crisis because what’s happening is we’re getting a reduction of this rich ecology of practices around mindfulness to a single thing. Sitted meditation and the function of seated meditation is to make you contented with being a corporate drone. That’s the point of mindfulness. And the Buddha would look at this and go, whew. So this is mick mindfulness, as it’s been called. It’s such a mixed phenomena because the seeking of wisdom in mindfulness is part of a positive response to the meaning crisis. But the perversion is also part of the effect of the meaning crisis. We have Stoicism as a revival. Get this. A Hellenistic philosophy religion that was imported into the Roman Empire. Do you know there are now more Stoics alive than there were ever alive in the Roman Empire? Like, what’s going on there? What’s going on there? Right? Of course, we’ve had the longstanding influence of the Asiatic philosophy religions, Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta. Right? We have the psychedelic renaissance, which I also participate and do work on. I just had a, I just, is it out yet? It’ll come out on Voices with Raviki. Just talking to my good friend, Ali Biner. He’s got his book out, the bigger picture. Some of you know he was, you know with DMT, it doesn’t last very long, but he was in a controlled experiment where it was IV so you could be continuously, repeatedly. And pretty cool. And so what’s going on there is people encounter what many people like Yaden and others, researchers like Yaden and myself, call the really real. This was really real. And that’s problematic because a lot of the specific phenomenology of these things is probably not really real. Like when the hyperspace elves tell you that you should give up your day job. Maybe not. Right? But that sense of, I call it onto normativity. Onto being normativity. So when people can counter this, it’s not just a realization, it’s also a sense of being called and Yaden’s done work on that too. So people feel called to transform their lives so they can get, have more continual contact, be in conformity with that onto normativity. They want to be much more in touch. Notice the metaphors, the contact metaphor. They want to be in touch with this onto normativity. They change their lives and Yaden’s got some research showing that by and large, by several objective measures, their lives get better. And notice that that is independent of this particular metaphysical content because that varies like crazy. People go into this and say, now I know there’s a god. Or they go into this and go, now I know there’s no god. Right? But there is something going on there. There is something going on there. So what is going on there? What is this meaning that we’re talking about? Well, it’s a metaphor. It’s something like this. There’s something like the way a sentence hangs together is coherent and connects the world to you with the possibility of truth. Right? Of course, philosophers will argue about all of that, but that’s the basic part of the metaphor. And then Susan Wolf wrote an excellent book on this, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. And what she says is, first of all, she makes very clear arguments that meaning in life is not reducible to morality, which is kind of a project that we’re trying to try right now as a culture. And given a lot of the psychological research and the philosophical argument, I predict that will fail. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes.