Why modern life feels meaningless

Burnout, alienation and the death of purpose

Nov 18, 2024

This is an extract from my seminar.

Let me begin with some striking statistics.

The past 30 years have seen an alarming rise in global suicide rates. In the United States alone, suicide rates have risen by 30% since 2000. Among these figures, the most shocking and unexplainable trend has been the rise in teenage suicides — a demographic that, for all of human history, have been the most optimistic about life. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among individuals aged 10 to 24 increased by nearly 60%. Even more distressingly, the rate for girls aged 10 to 14 tripled during this period. Many researchers argue that social media is a significant contributor to this crisis.

Meanwhile, mental health challenges are becoming the defining issue of our time. According to the CDC, nearly one in five adults in the U.S. now report living with a mental illness. Depression, in particular, has doubled since 2019, with over 45 million adults grappling with some form of mental health disorder. The American Psychological Association (APA) has found that young people are increasingly hopeless about the future, with more than 70% of surveyed members of Gen Z reporting feelings of burnout.

Notice that these grim realities have nothing to do with how comfortable our apartments are, how affordable our clothing is, how luxurious our cars might be, or how quickly our food is delivered. Money, pleasure and health are nothing more than the means by which we build a meaningful existence. Yet, in the grip of a late-capitalist culture, these means have become ends. Money, pleasure and health, instead of supporting a life of noble purpose, have become the ultimate purposes of life. We endlessly optimize our lives — but for what, exactly?

In developed countries, we're the most pampered and comfortable group of zombies ever.

To give a more personal touch to the meaning crisis, let me quote from an article that went viral this year:

“‘People are so worn down,’ my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that ‘this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.’ It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.”
— Catherine Shannon

Even the most time-honored methods for finding meaning in life are beginning to feel broken. The rot seems to be running too deep. What can one person do in the face of such systemic decay? The sheer scale of it all makes any effort feel futile. It’s no wonder that so many are succumbing to a sense of hopelessness.

Viktor Frankl, author of the great Man’s Search for Meaning, writes:

“Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression, and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them. Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

Yet, despite all of this, we must agree with Frankl that, more fundamental than our will to success or our will to pleasure, human beings are driven by a will to meaning.

“Man’s search for meaning,” Frankl writes, “is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives.”

To understand why modern life feels so hollow, we have to look at two core causes: the nature of modern work and the loss of purpose.

Two major causes of meaninglessness

The Nature of Modern Work

First and foremost, we have to talk about the nature of modern work. More specifically, of wage work. The corrosive effects of wage work on human life have been catalogued for generations. From Thoreau’s Walden and Marx’s Capital to Adorno’s scathing cultural critiques and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, the same alarm has been sounded again and again.

Let me highlight some of the dehumanizing effects.

First, no one can build a truly great life without a significant degree of autonomy and leisure — something which is very difficult to do when you’re under the control of another person. There are exceptions to this of course: if your employer pays you handsomely for only a small demand on your time or if your employer gives you almost complete autonomy over your work.

I know professors who are paid very well just to research and write on whatever they want, without having to teach a single class. These jobs are incredibly rare.

Historically, work looked very different. In the 1700s, approximately 90% of Americans were self-employed or engaged in family-owned trades or agriculture. Even by the early 1800s, around 80-85% were independent artisans or farmers, continuing the tradition of self-employment. However physically demanding the work may have been, it was theirs. It belonged to them, to their identity, to their community. Their work carried significant authorship and meaning.

This dynamic began to shift dramatically with industrialization, as employment-based wage labor increasingly replaced autonomous entrepreneurial work.

So work itself is not the problem, it’s ‘wage’ work: work we don’t care about, work we’re forced to do for the majority of our lives. Everything else follows from this. When we’re alienated from our labor — when our best creative energies are spent on meaningless projects that serve someone else’s vision — we experience profound psychological estrangement.

Most people feel that their true selves exist only outside of work, which means they’re only themselves for a tiny portion of their lives. They live for the weekend or for the evening hours when they can finally pursue what they want, while the rest of their lives are put on hold. This fragmentation between “who I am” and “what I do” erodes any sense of a coherent identity. Wage labor doesn’t just alienate, it imposes a kind of low-grade schizophrenia on all of us.

The 2022 TV show Severance exploded in popularity because it captured, with nightmarish clarity, this reality.

The premise of the show is that, sometime in the near future, companies will offer employees a procedure called “severance,” which surgically splits their consciousness into two selves. One self exists only inside the office and remembers nothing of personal life. The other lives outside the office and remembers nothing of work. Neither self has access to the other’s experiences.

The genius of the show is showing that this “severed” state isn’t some far-fetched sci-fi horror, but the ordinary reality of most of our lives.

Most people sever themselves as soon as they become adults. We cleave our lives in two and turn our identity into a part-time job. Thus beginning early a life of fragmentation.

The professional world doesn’t accommodate wholeness. Just as a student leaves their personal belongings in a locker before going to class, the wage worker must put into storage essential aspects of their humanity before stepping into the office — their curiosity, their creativity, their autonomy.

Severance explores this fragmentation with unsettling clarity. We’re forced to confront such questions as:

How much of my real self do I suppress when I enter the work world?
How has prolonged exposure to my “work self” eroded the integrity of my real self?
How much longer do I want to live a divided life?

The drive for wholeness, the drive to live as an undivided being, is irrepressible. It’s something that can never be extinguished. At best, it can be pacified — numbed by money and prestige — but it’s always there, gnawing at us beneath the surface.

Another unsettling aspect of Severance is the sheer normalcy with which employees accept their machine-like existence. Their existence — shallow and robotic — ought to provoke immediate rebellion. And yet, with the exception of a single character, all passively carry on with their lobotomized lives.

Henry David Thoreau delivered what might be the most scathing comment in human history about wage work. On his morning walks, he would pass by laborers engaged in some monotonous work task, and upon returning in the late afternoon, would find them still engaged in that same monotonous task. His conclusion? That we should, without irony, applaud such a person for not committing suicide. How does a human being turn himself into a machine like that and not go mad, he wondered.

The tragic reality is that those subjected to years of wage work grow acclimated to their dehumanization. We participate in our own unmaking. Erich Fromm diagnosed this pathology with astonishing clarity in The Sane Society:

“Today, we come across a person who acts and feels like an automaton; who never experiences anything which is really his; who experiences himself entirely as the person he thinks he is supposed to be; whose artificial smile has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech; whose dulled despair has taken the place of genuine pain…”

In isolation, we’d all look at such a person as dead inside, but because millions of people share his deadness, culturally we call him normal.

Such a person is severely defective — creatively, intellectually, spiritually — but since he shares this defect with so many others, he ceases to be aware of it as a defect. Fromm concludes:

“What he may have lost in psychological richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind… As a matter of fact, his very defect may have been raised to a virtue by his culture, and thus may give him an enhanced feeling of achievement.”

In other words, if enough people share a disorder, it stops being diagnosed as such and just becomes part of the culture.

Modern work has also given rise to a new kind of psyche: homo economicus.

The sheer amount of time we spend thinking about money — the centrality of money making in our lives — has produced a new kind of human being. The values of work are becoming the values of life. Busyness and productivity is our meaning. Everything becomes a cost-benefit analysis, including people.

Whether we notice it in ourselves or not, competitive individualism has become our religion. We’ve internalized the belief that we’re all rational egoists meant to compete rather than collaborate.

If I came to your house after you got off work and said “Hey, do you want to help me pick up trash in the neighborhood?”

Deep down you do care about your community, but you’d probably be annoyed or fatigued by the request. The issue isn’t that you’ve become a bad person, it’s that your relationship to effort and to people has fundamentally changed. You’ve conditioned yourself to relate to your effort only as something of exchange value. Effort has been stripped of all it’s social, moral or creative value.

This reprogramming of all effort into exchange value has subconsciously made us all more cold-blooded towards each other. Now if you can’t afford groceries or rent, somewhere along the line you failed. Your poverty is a sign of your failure or laziness. You didn't make the right transition — the transition into making money the focus of your life. This is the false freedom at the heart of late-capitalism. That you’re free to choose, so long as you choose money. Meaning that you’re free to choose your line of work, as long as you choose from a narrow set of occupations that are economically viable. The logic of late-capitalism is one of a rigged freedom, not a substantial choice.

So we no longer see ourselves as part of a society, a collective, or a unified organism working toward shared goals. The old notion of being “our brother’s keeper” has faded, replaced by an ethic of self-interest and survival.

Marx and Engels capture this transformation with remarkable clarity in The Communist Manifesto. They write:

“[Capitalism] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

Everything human is subordinated to the bottom line. “What’s in it for me?” becomes the guiding question of life.

This results in an overwhelming pressure and terror to succeed financially, even at the cost of your own self-destruction. People destroy themselves physically, intellectually, morally, creatively and spiritually in order to get ahead financially. And many stay in this deformed state until they reach the grave.

Whatever rhetoric we might preach about mental health and social justice, we know that if we don’t make enough money to be self-sufficient in our society, we’re next to worthless, we’re good for nothing.

Let me move on to another point.

I talked about having to put into storage essential aspects of yourself when you enter into work. One of those aspects is the desire to follow your genuine productive interests. Human beings have a natural curiosity that, if denied, creates a psychic rot.

Have you ever tried to focus at work after sleeping poorly the night before? It’s extremely difficult. Your attention drifts, your thinking is scattered. The reason is that you’re in a biochemical battle with your own body. You’re trying to will concentration while your chemicals are willing distraction. You’re trying to push forward while your biology is pulling you back.

Well the exact same thing happens when you do work you don’t care about — your psyche resists. Your psyche wants to be gripped and fulfilled by what it does; if you subject it to monotony, it short-circuits.

You may have heard of the old Chinese practice of foot binding — physically breaking and reshaping young girls’ feet using specially made shoes in order to make them look more dainty. Small, intricately bound feet were a mark of high status, proof that a woman was so privileged that she need not walk or work.

The wage worker does the same thing to their mind. Instead of letting their thoughts stretch, wander and form their own natural shape, they’re hamstrung to serve an artificial function, day in and day out. Just like those bound feet, your creative and mental muscles atrophy over time; your natural curiosity, once enchanted and animated, becomes smaller, weaker.

As you can see, we could go on unpacking the damage that wage work does to a person. Let me close with one final point — wage work turns leisure time into a form of labor.

Wage work is so destructive because what’s left of you after work is only a fragment of a person. By the time you clock out, the damage is already done. You’re too drained to do anything interesting or worthwhile with yourself.

“Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for one’s own maintenance and repair.”
— Robert Black

Evenings and weekends become a desperate attempt to recover the self that has been annihilated during the work week.

As such, modern work cannot survive without a culture of hedonism.

Pleasure-seeking and escapism rise to meet the pain of burnout and endless fatigue. The worker who is nourished by his work doesn’t need to erase himself in hedonism.

Wage work doesn’t just make life exhausting — it makes life shallow.

Okay, so much for the first cause of the meaning crisis, let’s move on to the second.

The Loss of Purpose

The second main cause of the meaning crisis is the loss of great ends or purposes in our lives.

One of the central principles of a wise life is that idealism must guide pragmatism. The ideal must guide the real.

Of course we have to deal with the practical realities of life — bills, health issues, family demands — but the ideal must always be the north star, it sets the direction and the tone of your life.

We operate almost exclusively in the opposite way today, which is why we’re in such a horrendously uninspiring and demoralizing slump. We’ve sacrificed the ideal for the real. The mature adult, we’re always told, is realistic not idealistic. That’s the motto of the modern adult — ‘be realistic’.

(You'll notice, by the way, that whenever someone says “I’m just being realistic”, they’re about to do something morally lazy or compromising.)

Realistic adults would rush to tell Abraham Lincoln or Gandhi just how unrealistic they’re being.

The consecrated life — the life devoted to becoming great — is just as real and possible as the ‘realistic’ life. One of the main reasons we think the latter is more true is simply because it’s more common.

We’re incredibly mimetic creatures. We imitate. We look around and almost everyone lacks conviction and devotion to something great, so we forget that that dimension of us exists. We forget our higher capabilities.

And so our culture becomes a shrine to mediocrity. Our parents, our friends, our coworkers, our institutions all reflect this lack of greatness — and so who are we to try and be special?

French philosopher and sociologist, Jacque Ellul, noticed a widespread feeling of impotence among modern people. He observed that:

“The individual who burns with desire for action but does not know what to do is a common type in our society. He wants to act for the sake of justice, peace, progress, but does not know how.”

There are just so few templates for us to follow. There’s a kind of mass hypnosis in our culture. Largely because people are stuck in survival mode, but also because the route to personal greatness is snuffed out at every turn.

Something I want to emphatically remind you, dear reader, is that the world isn’t as it is, it’s as you are. If you don’t like your life, you can change it.

“There is only one sort of man, who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change... when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it.”
— H.G. Wells

Let me share a slightly modified statement by the child psychologist, Haim Ginnot, who gives us a creed to live by:

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

Reading that last line always makes me emotional. Notice how treating people as they are is to be realistic, but Ginnot transcends that. Treat people as they ought to be and you help them to become what they’re capable of becoming. Always look at what someone could be. That same logic applies to ourselves. Treat yourself as greater than you are and you will be.

Now the loss of purpose isn’t just a personal or cultural problem, it’s institutional. It shows up everywhere there is supposed to be a sense of mission. Education, for example, has become one of the clearest casualties of this loss of great ends.

Neil Postman, one of the greatest cultural critics of the last century, makes this point with devastating clarity in his book, The End of Education. Postman’s argument is simple: without a great purpose or narrative, schools inevitably devolve into shallow information-processing centers. They lose their life spirit.

They become, in his words, “houses of detention rather than houses of attention.”

Postman asks a question that almost no one asks anymore: What are schools for? Not what subjects should they teach or how they should teach it, but what purpose do they serve? He writes:

“At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living… In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. Should we privatize our schools? Should we have national standards of assessment? How should we use computers? What use can we make of television? How shall we teach reading? And so on. Some of these questions are interesting and some are not. But what they have in common is that they evade the issue of what schools are for.”

Postman calls this the difference between the engineering problem of education — the technical questions of how to teach students — and the metaphysical problem of education: the question of why we are learning in the first place, and what kind of person this learning produces.

We face the same dilemma with our own souls. We obsess over the engineering problems — better jobs, better diets, nicer apartments, more efficient routines — but we rarely ask the metaphysical question: why are we optimizing ourselves in the first place? What purpose is this optimized self supposed to serve?

Without a transcendent end, without what Postman calls a “god to serve,” education collapses into busywork. Students become technicians, not full human beings. He explains:

“To become a different person because of something you have learned, to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered — that is a different matter. For that to happen, you need a reason… without it schooling does not work.”

As soon as you strip away the higher end of something, its animating spirit dies. A job becomes empty labor, a marriage becomes a comfortable arrangement, and a society becomes a collection of strangers. A school without a higher narrative becomes a test-prep center. And a life without a higher narrative becomes an endless variety show.

Postman calls these higher purposes “gods,” though he uses the term with a small ‘g’. A god, in his sense, is not the capital ‘G’ God of religion but a great narrative — a story large enough to unify your life and point it toward something beyond itself.

“It is the purpose of such narratives to direct one’s mind to an idea and, more to my point, to a story — not any kind of story, but one that tells of origins and envisions a future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and, above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose. A god, in the sense I am using the word, is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one’s life around it.”

Without a unifying narrative — without a noble trajectory to follow — the self wanders around at half-capacity. You can see it in the quiet unease that so many carry into midlife: the sense of drifting, a sense that life ultimately leads nowhere.

A noble purpose does more than just give direction — it acts as a furnace — burning off the shallow and the trivial parts of ourselves, and unlocking and setting fire to our deepest energies.

Abraham Maslow saw the same tragedy on a broader scale. Decades before Postman, he warned that we were perfecting our tools while forgetting to ask what they were for. He saw a civilization racing ahead with neither knowledge of nor regard for the most basic humanistic principles. He writes:

“In the last few years there has been a rash of conferences, books, symposia, not to mention newspaper articles and Sunday magazine sections, about what the world will be like in the next century. I have glanced through this ‘literature’, if one could call it that, and have generally been more alarmed than instructed by it. A good 95 percent of it deals entirely with purely technological changes, leaving aside completely the question of good and bad, right and wrong. Sometimes the whole enterprise seems almost entirely amoral. There is much talk about new machines, prosthetic organs, new kinds of automobiles or trains or planes — in effect, bigger and better refrigerators and washing machines… This is all a sign of blindness to the real problems that are involved… It is quite clear that the questions of ‘improving’ are very much a question of the improvement of means without regard to ends… it is as if we were helpless to master or to plan our own future.”

We must recover the ancient, yet urgently modern, truth that man is a teleological creature — a being whose nature is fulfilled only in moving toward worthy ends. The self is not an empty canvas to decorate with arbitrary preferences; it is a seed with a specific potential, and there is a right way for it to unfold.

The Autodidact

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