Everyone’s Existential Crisis

And maybe there never was. But at least we maintained the illusion better before. We used to be told how to live, provided lore that outlined where the lines were drawn between right and wrong, and granted something resembling safety and stability in exchange.** Yes, I’m talking about the glue of society: religion. **“Literally false but metaphoric... See more

One of the core needs of humans is a sense of belonging. For centuries, religion, our tribes, our communities, our families have given us that sense, but modern culture, catalyzed by the internet, has broken down a lot of these connective tissues. And so we look desperately for other places for belonging, places where we can participate in some way... See more

It is pretty hard to address the meta-crisis when a meaning crisis and culture war is happening. If many people are living in a way that does not engender a sense of meaning or are too busy yelling at each other via memes, how are we going to address our greatest collective challenges?

Being regarded as authentic is a function of others’ evaluation of your performance. But if everything is in upheaval, then those others doing the evaluating have few points of reference. Because the network society is global in character, identity is constantly being contested and threatened from all sides. The freedom of the paranoid, just like t

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I like trying to find truths around the question of “why are we all here?”

And something I find interesting is the broad sense of “we don’t know where anything is going”-isms that I feel has tech people in a chokehold. The result of this is a lot of wandering about the desert, abandoning technology totally, an angst and lack of dedication to the wor... See more

In addressing the meaning crisis — the vacuum left by the failures of religion, modernism, postmodernism, and today’s online alternatives — it takes a return to what bona fide religion really captures. The communitas. The ecstasy. The ritual.

The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of reality, of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvi... See more