You're not broken. You're starving for meaning.
"The best predictor of depression and anxiety for people under 30 is to say that 'my life feels meaningless.' We have a meaning crisis."
— Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor & author of The Meaning of Your Life
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There is an existential health crisis. And most people have no language for it — so they assume something is wrong with them.
It shows up as depression, restlessness, and a loeliness that doesn’t lift no matter who’s in the room. Western culture has spent the last 30 years deconstructing religions, culture, gender, and society, while building technology that out paces our ability, ethics, and morality. This kind of change has never rebuilt the foundations of meaning. I believe this has left people empty, clinging for grounding in a state of the world that is only moving towards more complexity.
You’ve likely experienced the dizzying, sometimes headache inducing state of drowning in information. With the advent of AI, you will need to know how to process even more.
Furthermore, politics has turned into identity, meaning is often found through identification, clothing, and superficial selections that require no thought, just signal. The deep human questions — what is this for? who am I? what matters? is God listening? — got left with little support and nowhere to land. A mind with nothing solid to ground in will spin out.
The surrent state of the world weighs people down with issues much too big for any one person to hold:
A crisis of meaning and purpose
Defining religion, spirituality, and God for themselves
Loneliness and rising despair
Religious, cultural, and gender deconstruction with nothing to replace it
Political confusion and exhaustion
Information overload with no room to think
Conflicting messaging; a culture in confusion
Disconnection from a greater purpose, greater picture (hope)
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For almost all of human history, the big questions weren't a luxury — they were built into the day. Socrates practiced philosophy as a way of living, not a subject to study; the Stoics wrote their questions to themselves each morning as exercises; whole religious traditions gave people a rhythm — prayer, sabbath, pilgrimage, the wilderness retreat — for regularly stopping to ask what their lives were for and whether they were living in right relationship with God and each other. People didn't just ask these questions; they carried them out into their work and their communities and made something of them. That machinery is what we've quietly lost. We kept the progress and threw out the practices that kept the deep questions alive — and a person with nowhere to bring those questions doesn't stop having them. He just stops having anywhere to put them, and starts to spin.
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The term was coined by author Jim Palmer, who defines it as the dimension of human well-being concerned with meaning, belonging, identity, purpose, and our ability to navigate the fundamental conditions of being alive — a person's capacity to live with meaning and coherence even in the face of uncertainty, suffering, and change.
We track our physical health. We've finally started taking our mental health seriously. But underneath both is a quieter question: how are you relating to being alive at all? You can be healthy, successful, and admired and still feel homeless inside your own life. That's not a mental illness and it's not a moral failure — it's your existential health asking for attention. And like anything else, it can be tended, strengthened, and healed.
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I’m attempting to solve this very big problem, in the best way I can, becuase I’ve been through it myself and had to find answers.
Today, when you’re experiencing the darks nights of the soul (which is a very normal human experience) someone might send you to a doctor and medicate you. Through personal trial and error, I don’t believe you need that.
I believe you need a community of people who can help you wrestle with life’s woes, a deep curiosity about yourself, and to stop scolling so much and DO. Go build, write, draw, sing, create and explore as only you can.
I believe we don’t need to change the state of the world (there’s nothing wrong with the world), and instead we are being asked to adapt. This is my answer for adapting.
How I know
I had the crisis before I had a name for it
I was exactly where you are. From the outside, I had it together — a decent job, my own little condo, the life you're “supposed” to want. Then I hit a point where I couldn't keep doing the same day-to-day anymore. It culminated in me getting a new job and quitting it the same week. My tolerance for a life that didn't mean anything to me (because I hadn’t defined it for myself) was simply gone. And in its place I sought anything the culture handed me.
What followed was the most confusing stretch of my life—which I want to save you from. I was depleted, burned out, and quietly grasping for something I couldn't name. I walked away from a friend group and spent a lot of money on bullshit.
And I had nowhere to bring any of it. No one who truly understood. I was drowning in conflicting messages online — every side of the political and cultural divide handing me a different answer about what I was worth, what mattered, who to blame, how to live. No real leaders showing a way through. And a New Age spiritual scene that mostly wanted to sell me something. I was completely lost.
So I searched — for years. I found God. I did the deep inner work. I had a genuine awakening. And here's the strange part, the part that makes this real instead of a sales pitch: my life today looks a lot like it did before. I still work remotely. Most days are very ordinary. I fight with my partner. I rebuild my savings, slowly.
But I live them from somewhere completely different.
My life is grounded in meaning and purpose in a way that brings forth confidence and ease. Maturity is the ally. Spirituality is both felt and deeply understood. Embodied—if that means anything to you. I ask the big questions every day — not to escape ordinary life, but to ground it — so that even the most menial work has purpose, because I remember who I am and what matters before I begin.
I'm not preaching from the summit. I'm a few steps ahead on the same trail, turned around, hand out.
How I’m Doing My Part
There is a goal no one told you about: to stand steady, to grow old
You can't think your way out of a meaning crisis, but you can't bypass it either. You build ground to stand on — the fundamentals no one taught you, spiritual and practical — and you learn to hold the paradox and complexity the modern world demands. I understand the Western mind deeply, and why it needs the Eastern wisdom I had to go find. This is the stuff I wish someone taught me. I teach it as I’ve learned it.
Grow
Think
Creative Practice Group
Rites of Passage
Doing stuff!
Taking action
Publishing
Completing things
Building something you didn’t think you could
Pushing your limit. Bringing it into the physical.
Learn
Philosophy & Spirituality Learning Group
