Awakening From the Meaning Crisis

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.

Bullshit, unlike lying, works by making you unconcerned with whether speech is true or false. The bullshitter, like the sophists of antiquity, does not appeal to any measure of truth outside of the needs of the moment. Instead, he tries to capture your attention with the catchiness of his claim and how much it provokes something inside of you: some

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

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

We will begin with the Upper Paleolithic transition, which occurred around 40,000 BCE. Many people think of this period as the time when humanity—as we now define it—came into form. While we wouldn’t be able to relate to these ancestors culturally or linguistically, we would nevertheless recognize their kind of humanity as akin to ours, a humanity

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.”

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

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.

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.