Awakening From the Meaning Crisis

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, whereas foolishness is a lack of wisdom. Foolishness occurs when your capacity to engage your agency or pursue your goals is undermined by self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. This behavior is a perennial vulnerability in your cognition.

the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.

flow,⁠11 a state of heightened attention that sharpens our consciousness and competence while deepening our participation in the world—the feeling of “being in the zone.”

Foolishness occurs when your capacity to engage your agency or pursue your goals is undermined by self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. This behavior is a perennial vulnerability in your cognition.

As C. G. Jung once wrote, one of the perils of having a soul is the risk of losing it.⁠14

Myths are not false stories about the ancient past. They are symbolic motifs that represent and dramatize perennial patterns, the structures of meaning that are always with us. Myths allow us to bring these intuitive, implicit patterns into consciousness to make them shareable and allow us to internalize, ritualize, and apprehend them in more revea

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, whereas foolishness is a lack of wisdom.

We cannot just treat the Meaning Crisis as a scientific problem, but we can certainly argue for it in a highly plausible way.

Wisdom is ultimately about how to generate and enhance this meaning. Wisdom is about realizing. This means that cultivating wisdom generates realization in both senses of the word: becoming aware and making real. Wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way.