Modern life leads us nowhere

Modern life is saturated with insights. Everywhere we turn, we're inundated with small, digestible pieces of wisdom — self-help snippets, therapy-speak, pop philosophy, viral tweets that momentarily illuminate some aspect of our experience. But these insights never seem to cohere into anything larger. They come and go like waves.

This is because, despite access to unlimited information, we lack a coherent framework to make sense of it all — we lack a guiding philosophy that provides continuity, structure and an enduring vision.

We learn things, but only for the duration of the episode.

Episodic Living

Consider how insight is presented in shows like Girls and Sex and the City. Characters experience moments of revelation, but these insights are fleeting, confined to the episode in which they arise. Carrie (Sex and the City) might learn something profound about the nature of conflicting desire, only to engage with that realization superficially or provisionally. Hannah (Girls) might momentarily grasp that marriage — or any form of deep commitment — offers a kind of fulfillment and stability she lacks, but by the next episode, is back to her transient ways.

Hannah’s recognition of her self-sabotaging tendencies or Carrie’s acknowledgment of her own immaturity are never presented as serious calls to moral transformation but merely as therapeutic episodes, almost like Instagram-worthy moments of self-awareness. There is no sustained attempt to transcend oneself, but simply a parade of personal trials that resolve in temporary insights that may or may not transform.

This pattern of fleeting insights mirrors the way modern people live their lives: not as a unified whole, but as a series of disconnected phases, each governed by its own transient meaning. We cycle through thin frameworks, adopting them when they serve a temporary need and discarding them when they demand too much.

We might try on stoicism for resilience, therapy-speak for relationships or secular Buddhism for detachment. But none of it amounts to much. These are not integrated systems, but individual coping mechanisms, applied and discarded when convenient.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman perfectly describes this condition as “liquid modernity” — a world in which identity, relationships and morality are always shifting, never settling into anything stable. The liquid individual is forced to construct meaning on the fly, improvising as they go, assembling a bricolage of self-help axioms rather than rooting themselves in anything enduring.

Traditionally, people saw their lives biographically. They moved through stages of development, guided by established milestones: initiation into adulthood, moral trials, deepening self-knowledge, the embrace of duty or vocation, and, ultimately, the consolidation of a meaningful life.

Life was essentially a moral project, not an endless variety show.

But in a liquid culture, people experience life episodically. Instead of seeing ourselves as moving toward a unified and higher self, we see our lives as a series of disparate experiences, each governed by a different self-conception. A person might see their twenties as a phase of wild exploration, their thirties as a phase of financial focus, their forties as a phase of spiritual searching — each with its own fleeting reference model, none binding them to a coherent whole.

This explains why so many people feel lost well into their adulthood — they're simply incapable of forming a unified narrative of selfhood.

Perhaps you've also noticed a revival of traditionalism and conservatism as of late — not of the naïve or reactionary kind, but rather the recognition that something very important has been lost. People look around and see family bonds weakening, romantic relationships becoming more transactional and social cohesion deteriorating.

What people are lamenting, I believe, is the loss of stability — materially and metaphysically. They crave rootedness and a sense of belonging.

People want more continuity between their past and present selves, they want a guiding vision that does not expire after one season of life. They want worldviews and institutions that foster long-term commitments rather than endless reinvention. They are drawn to ways of being that offer shared meanings and purposes — something that boundless individualism, by definition, cannot provide.

Historically, the greatest civilizations cultivated frameworks of thought that integrated knowledge into a harmonious whole. The Greek philosophical tradition, the great metaphysical systems of Asia, the spiritual and intellectual edifices of the Abrahamic faiths — all sought to marry knowledge with purpose, action with vision. These were not mere intellectual schemes, but living traditions that bound individuals into a shared horizon of meaning.

We, to our psychic demise, have severed ourselves from such frameworks. What remains is an endless circulation of perspectives, none of which coalesce into anything stable. Instead of a coherent philosophy, we are left with a marketplace of ideas where wisdom is just another commodity — packaged, consumed and discarded with the next trend.

What modern people lack in depth, they try to make up for in variety.

Modernity is well aware of the problem it has created. The proliferation of therapy, mindfulness and various forms of self-help attest to a widespread hunger for a unifying and inspiring vision of life.

The Absence of Higher Ends for Our Lives

This leads to another important point. Even when characters like Hannah or Carrie do undergo some lasting change, even when they begin to take themselves and their choices more seriously, a deeper problem remains: what exactly are they changing into? Unlike in older traditions, where characters are often striving toward a recognizable ideal — the courageous hero, the just ruler, the saint, the wise woman, the virtuous man — modern narratives lack a robust vision of what a fully realized, morally serious person actually looks like.

Hannah, Carrie and their friends may, over time, develop a greater sense of self-awareness. They may shed some of their more destructive tendencies, make better choices and move toward greater emotional stability. But toward what end? There is no higher directionality, no guiding vision of the good life, only vague aspirations — hints and guesses based on whatever happens to be en vogue at the time.

One moment, fulfillment is framed as fierce independence, the next, as radical vulnerability. Some episodes suggest that true happiness is found in romantic commitment, while others present it as the ability to walk away from any attachment. The closest these shows come to an ideal is a kind of well-curated emotional intelligence — knowing the right words to describe one’s wounds, understanding one's relationship patterns, developing enough self-awareness to avoid self-destruction — but this is a far cry from the robust moral and spiritual vision that once shaped the narratives of human development.

The Path Forward

“Your life is shaped by the end you live for.” —Thomas Merton

To escape episodic living, we must relearn the art of thinking in wholes. Instead of treating life as an assemblage of phases, we must begin to see it as a trajectory — one that demands commitment, moral orientation and a larger frame of reference.

We must revive the notion that human development is teleological — that we’re not simply drifting through an indefinite sequence of experiences but ought to be moving toward an ideal of human flourishing. We need something more than just therapeutic self-awareness; we need heroic ideals and principles. Without a vision of what we are striving toward, self-knowledge becomes sterile.

This topic requires a much longer treatment, which I plan to undertake in the future.