The "Meaning Crisis" Misdiagnosis

How prominent commentators misdiagnose the cause of our problems

In the first article in this series, I laid out a broad case that the currently-popular idea that contemporary society is suffering from a “meaning crisis” is a myth. I presented three major problems with that thesis: the meaning crisis narrative misdiagnoses the ills we currently face; it therefore prescribes the wrong treatment for those ills; and in the process it under-appreciates secular resources for responding to life. In this article, I turn my attention to the first of these problems, exploring how “meaning crisis” mythicists misdiagnose the cause of contemporary ills, providing an implausible, vague and ultimately unconvincing account of why we’re in the situation we’re in.

The “Meaning Crisis” Misdiagnosis

First, a recap. Remember that the myth of the “meaning crisis” is based on a central diagnostic maneuver: the idea that many of our contemporary challenges are caused by a breakdown of metanarratives which previously - but no longer - helped situate us in the world. Some thinkers talk about religious narratives breaking down, while others talk about broad psychological or philosophical frameworks, but the central idea is always the same: something has gone wrong with the stories we use to make sense of the world, and therefore something has gone wrong with the world. The causal variables, in this theory, are metanarratives.

This may seem strange to you, so I’m going to quote a few of these thinkers saying precisely this so it’s clear I’m not misrepresenting their ideas. Keep in mind that these thinkers all use the term “meaning crisis” a bit differently (some use the term “meta-crisis” instead, or use the term inconsistently), so what they’re saying isn’t exactly the same - but the diagnosis of society’s ills stemming from some sort of metanarrative problems is always present:

• John Vervaeke (the single figure most responsible for the idea of a “meaning crisis”) says that the meaning crisis is “deeper than social media problems, political problems, even economic problems” and leads to “an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future”.

• Orthodox YouTuber Jonathan Pageau, in a discussion with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, describes the meaning crisis as “a general sense that the West has lost its way in the sense of giving people a place where…they belong [and] that they have purpose”. Christianity used to give people this sense, but it has since been increasingly deconstructed, and this “manifests itself in all kinds of ways, from the breakdown of the family, people feeling nihilistic…ideological capture like crazy environmentalism or extreme nationalisms or ethnic identities or the LGBT stuff - all that stuff is in some ways a symptom [of the meaning crisis]…They’re all symptoms of the same problem…The promise of the Enlightenment didn’t deliver.”

• Tomas Bjorkman (an entrepreneur and philosopher) expresses a similar view in a discussion with John Vervaeke (who clearly agrees with Bjorkman): “all these different crises is that we see today - the environmental crisis, political crisis or psychological crisis - cannot be addressed individually because the crisis is on such a fundamental level that it is really in our collective imaginary …I believe that we have now…reached the end of the capacity of this both worldview and collective imaginary”.

• Christian author and podcaster Justin Brierley, in the 23rd episode of his The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast, uses slightly different terms, but clearly has the same basic thesis: “We’ve spoken of many crises so far: the meaning crisis, the meta-crisis, the mental health crisis - all accelerated by technology and modern life - but I believe they all stem from the underlying story we’ve all imbibed: this mechanistic, materialist story.”

• Bishop Robert Barron offers a fragment of this sort of view in a discussion about the mental health crisis, in which he restates Jung’s view that “all of our psychological problems are spiritual problems”. Our society, he argues, is “running counter to this absolutely elemental human longing”, and so the crisis of mental illness is “deeply related” to religious disaffiliation.

Common to all these views is the theory that some sort of “deeper” spiritual, meataphyiscal, or metanarratological (!) problem causes various concrete problems, like a mental health crisis, family breakdown, polarised politics, and (my favourite) “LGBT stuff”.

The Challenges We Face

Before I dig into why I think the meaning crisis theory is wrong, I want to acknowledge that contemporary society faces many profound challenges - indeed, one of the reasons the meaning crisis myth is so compelling is that the problems it claims to be able to solve are (for the most part) real. Briefly describing some of these challenges will help, I think, make clear why I think the crisis of meaning (such as it is) is caused by these problems, rather than the other way round.¹

The Political Challenge

Both the US and the UK are currently undergoing a crisis of political legitimacy and trust. Trust in government is exceedingly low in both the US and in the UK - people don’t trust politics as a whole, political parties, or individual political leaders. Disaffection in politics has resulted in low turnouts - the 2024 UK general election saw the lowest turnout since universal suffrage, and while turnout in recent elections in the USA was relatively high it’s still much lower than in many other countries. Another outcome has been the rise of smaller parties (mostly in the UK, where it is easier for small parties to make a difference), and the success of more radical elements within the legacy parties (mostly in the USA, where the system squeezes very wide ranges of political opinion into two parties).

At worst, this collection of problems can lead to political extremism, as people frustrated with and distrusting of “politics as usual” look elsewhere for answers. The murders of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess in the UK, along with other disturbing trends, led the last government to declare “The threat from extremism has been steadily growing for many years.” The USA has in recent years seen an increase in domestic violent extremism, of which the attack on the US Capitol of January 6th 2021, and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump (which occurred as I was writing this article) are high profile examples.

These are all signs that our politics is broken, unable to represent those it is supposed to serve while hastening the rise of those who wish to serve themselves at the public’s expense.

The Economic Challenge

Our economic system is, like our political system, struggling. The UK is in a particularly bad way, with a sluggish economy and high inflation precipitating a cost of living crisis. The price of essential goods has been increasing faster than wages, squeezing many, mostly lower income, people and forcing record numbers to use food banks. People struggle to find the money to heat their homes and to rent or buy a home. Local government is broke, and some are even bankrupt. The UK economy is, in short, doing very poorly.

The USA is doing better, but exemplifies another problem: truly staggering inequality. Whether measured by income or by wealth, inequality in the USA is getting worse, not better. Pew, for instance, considers a host of inequality indicators, and not one of them is improving: the gap between upper and middle/lower income families is increasing; the share of US income received by upper income families is increasing; income inequality is increasing. Perhaps most startlingly, they report that “the richest families are the only group to have gained wealth since the Great Recession" - part of a broader picture in which “the richest are getting richer faster​​”.

Stagnating quality of life and increasing inequality are a toxic combination. While people may be convinced that economic inequality is a reasonable tradeoff for economic growth, they will not buy into a society in which they are getting worse off while others, already much richer than them, are getting better off.

The Climate Challenge

There is now both an overwhelming scientific and growing popular consensus (yes, even in the USA) that human beings are altering the climate of this planet, causing a host of problems. The climate challenge is, in the long term, the biggest of them all. Let's start with the direct effects: both small-scale changes, as we raze our forests and pollute our oceans and large-scale changes, as we alter the ecosystem of the planet itself. This is not a distant threat – the effects of climate change are happening right now. The UK government flatly declares “The UK’s climate is changing already”, while NASA says “Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.”

But these are just the direct effects of climate change. We must also consider the indirect effects climate change could have on our civilization and our way of life. As retired Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly wrote in a report on National Security and the Threat of Climate Change: 

"Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world… Climate change involves much more than temperature increases. It can bring with it many of the kinds of changes in natural systems that have introduced instability among nations throughout the centuries”

He lists some of the “instabilities” climate change could cause: 

• Some nations may have impaired access to food and water. 

• Violent weather, and perhaps land loss due to rising sea levels and increased storm surges, can damage infrastructure and uproot large numbers of people. 

• These changes, and others, may create large number of migrants. When people cross borders in search of resources, tensions can arise. 

• Many governments, even some that look stable today, may be unable to deal with these new stresses. When governments are ineffective, extremism can gain a foothold. 

• While the developed world will be far better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change, some of the poorest regions may be affected most. This gap can potentially provide an avenue for extremist ideologies and create the conditions for terrorism

In other words, it's not just the direct results of climate change which should concern us. We must also attend to the possibility that changes in climate will pile ever increasing weight on the very structure of our civilization, until the steel which undergirds our way of life bends, becomes misshapen, and finally – collapses. A cheery thought.

The Social Challenge

Finally, both the US and the UK are facing a number of social challenges (most of them, I believe, related to the challenges already discussed). Two often mentioned in relation to the meaning crisis discourse are the crisis of loneliness and the recent rise in mental ill health, especially among young people.

In the UK rates of loneliness have long been the topic of public discussion - so much so that in 2018 the then Prime Minister appointed a “minister for loneliness”. In the USA, loneliness has long been referred to as an “epidemic” - a description reaffirmed in a 2023 report from the Surgeon General’s office. Loneliness is a global problem: the World Health Organisation recently “declared loneliness to be a pressing global health threat” and established an International Commission on Social Connection to address the problem.

Alongside the crisis of loneliness is a crisis of mental health. A 2023 report for Pew called mental ill health “a new public health threat”, noting that “38% more people are in mental health care since the onset of the [Covid] pandemic than before.” Youth mental health is picked out as a particular problem - including a disturbing and recent increase in youth suicidality. Across the pond in the UK the state of mental healthcare has been called a “a national emergency” as millions await treatment in what feels like a never-ending backlog. Again, young people are particularly at risk: a 2024 report from The Health Foundation and the Resolution Foundation charted the shocking rise in mental health problems among young people. They wrote “Young people today have the undesirable attribute of having the poorest mental health of any age group; two decades ago, young people had the lowest”.

So, people in the UK and the USA are increasingly lonely and mentally unwell, which causes a number of institutional challenges as mental healthcare services are stretched and people feel disconnected from broader society.

My Diagnosis

Back to the “meaning crisis”. Remember that the thesis I’m critiquing suggests that the sorts of problems I describe above are themselves caused by a “deeper” problem - the breakdown of a metanarrative which previously shaped our lives and situated us within the cosmos. My diagnosis flips the direction of causality: instead of problems with our metanarratives causing concrete problems, concrete problems are causing a sense of meaninglessness, despair, and dislocation for many.

Why do I think this? I’m going to make my case in three parts: first, I’ll argue that the meaning crisis hypothesis is simplistic, replacing what are likely multiple and complex causes with a single, relatively simple one; second, I’ll explore the emptiness of the theories presented by promoters of the meaning crisis narrative; third, I’ll suggest that there are alternative theories, both more plausible and better evidenced, as to why people are suffering right now.

The “meaning crisis” hypothesis is too simplistic

Let’s start with a basic gut check: looking at the problems I’ve listed, how likely do you think it is that they are fundamentally the result of a single underlying cause? How likely is it, for instance, that economic problems like high inflation and social problems like an increase in loneliness have the same fundamental cause, such that if you trace their proximate causes back far enough you get to a single “deeper” problem? I don’t think that hypothesis likely. I think it is prima facie much likelier that these problems have their own individual causes, which sometimes overlap and reinforce each other but are not the reflection of a single bigger problem.

Many of the thinkers I’m discussing in this series share a tendency to relate everything to one undergirding problem - here the collapse of some previously-effective metanarrative. I think this is too simplistic: in general, complex social problems are caused by a variety of factors, and each problem has its own set of causes. Very rarely can disparate challenges be traced back to the same cause, and I see no reason to think we can do that here. Jonathan Pageau may think that “extreme nationalism”, “breakdown of the family”, and “LGBT stuff” have the same root cause, but I think this implausible: I suspect that each of the those phenomena have their own set of causes, and that it would be better to address them as distinguishable issues rather than to present a reductive causal picture. (It is amusing to me that so many of these thinkers decry “reductionism” in other areas of thought, but are very reductivist here.)

Lack of a plausible causal mechanism

This basic implausibility is compounded by the fuzziness in many of these thinkers’ accounts of how a breakdown in our metanarratives is supposed to result in other problems. It will help to revisit one of our thinkers here, to see how the causal pathway is unclear. I mentioned above that Jonathan Pageau claimed that the meaning crisis “manifests itself” in a number of problems. Here’s his argument at greater length:

“as Christianity deconstructed…we had this secular promise: we just give up these religious superstitions, and we have enough stuff, then we're going to be good to go - we'll all be rational beings that live in a rational world and we'll be happy…but it turns out that we actually need more than that. Human beings actually need more than just a bunch of stuff and being rational in order to exist. They need to feel connected, they need to feel like they they're part of something that's larger than them, that they're pointing towards a purpose that's higher than them - and that's the that's the problem of the meaning crisis.

But it manifests itself in all kinds of ways, from the breakdown of the family…people feeling nihilistic, people not having purpose in their personal lives. But then also our society's kind of just wandering and looking for for purposes to to to grab on to and so we're in danger of also ideological capture and which is why…over the top environmentalism, or or even extreme nationalisms or ethnic identities or also the LGBT stuff - all of that stuff is in some ways a symptom….They’re all symptoms of a the same problem:….the promise of the Enlightenment didn’t deliver.”²

What do we think of this analysis? I am happy to accept that human beings need to feel connected to something bigger than ourselves to flourish - this is a well-documented psychological fact. I can imagine that shifts in how we think about our place in the world could make affect our sense of purpose. I can even grant this might have an effect on people’s mental health.

But I cannot see how any of this relates to the breakdown of the family or “LGBT stuff”, and Pageau gives absolutely no reason to think these phenomena are connected. Why would the failure of the Enlightenment to deliver on its promises (if that did indeed occur) lead to changes in family structures or the increasing visibility of LGBTQIA+ people? Pageau doesn’t say. But if you want to claim that broad shifts in how we think about the world result in certain social changes, you must demonstrate how this occurs, either by providing evidence there is such a causal link, or at least by presenting a plausible causal pathway by which they might be related.

This is another common problem with the meaning crisis mythicists: they hardly ever (if at all) present a clear, step by step argument as to how the effects they describe come about from the causes they posit. They never answer basic questions like “If societies have been secularising for decades, why are these problems only manifesting now?” or “If a breakdown in metanarratives is the cause of all these problems, why do different countries - including countries more secular than the UK and USA - experience them so differently?” In short, their causal theory is weak, more of a vague gesture than a clear series of links from cause to effect.

Alternative, more plausible causal theories are available

The third (and most important) part of my argument is that, in contrast to the weak causal theory presented by the meaning crisis theory, there are plausible causal mechanisms relating the challenges we face to mundane problems. I’m not going to do an in-depth analysis of the causes of each of the challenges I mentioned above - that would make this article too long and is, I think, unnecessary to secure my point. Instead, I’ll look at one - the political challenge - closely, and give briefer outlines of what I think is causing some of our other challenges.

The challenge of people’s disaffection with politics is, I think, more the result of inflexible and unrepresentative political systems than any problem with our metanarratives. Both the USA and the UK are saddled with outdated political systems which can no longer capture and represent the full range of views among the populace. In the USA, a constitution that is unusually hard to change enforces a deeply unrepresentative political system which distorts the popular vote. The Senate is unrepresentative by design, while the Electoral College is an outdated mess which distorts political campaigning profoundly. Widespread gerrymandering (the practice of redrawing the boundaries of electoral areas to benefit one party) makes electeds unresponsive. And laws enacted by both Democrats and Republicans prevent the growth of political alternatives and force basically everyone into the two large parties.

In the UK, the “first past the post” electoral system (in which the winner of each electoral constituency is determined by a simple majority vote) leads to wildly unrepresentative outcomes, in which political parties rarely have a percentage of seats in parliament matching their share of the popular vote. In the most recent general election, the Labour Party secured just 34% of the popular vote, while winning a whopping 63% of the seats in parliament. By contrast, the Reform Party received 14% of the vote but only received less than 1% of the seats.

These structural problems have been compounded in recent years by the poor professional and personal behaviour of many leading politicians. The examples are too numerous to list: both the UK and the USA have been saddled with some spectacularly poor political leaders in recent years, of whom Donald Trump and Liz Truss are only the worst of a very bad bunch. It is startling that both the UK and the USA were recently led by individuals who since have been found guilty of offences, and high profile concerns about corruption dog both parliament and the Supreme Court. One article in The Guardian puts the UK problem very starkly: speaking of the last parliament, it described “financial misconduct, lobbying abuses, lockdown parties, sexual harassment, bullying allegations, absenteeism and misleading ministerial statements”. In the USA, the problem is exemplified by the conduct of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been repeatedly accused of outright corruption, but who cannot effectively be held to account under the current system. Through both incompetence and corruption successive administrations have demeaned their offices, besmirching the practice of politics in the eyes of the public.

I think the dramatic and obvious unfairness of our political systems leads to a sense that we are not fully in control of who represents us. Their inflexibility means that it is difficult to resolve the unfairness. Over time, people feel increasingly disconnected from politics, as if their voices don’t matter - because, for large parts of the electorate, they objectively do not. The corruption and bad behaviour of political leaders makes people think that all politics is corrupt.

People’s political disaffection - and their increasing interest in extremist alternatives - can thus be understood as a response to concrete problems with our political system. The disaffection and anger many people feel at our political situation is justified by how bad it truly is, with ancient unresponsive systems and self-interested politicians stymying reform and preventing the growth of new political potentials. I believe this is a much more plausible and direct cause of our political challenges than the collapse of any “metanarrative”.

The other challenges can likewise be understood as the result of concrete problems. The economic crisis in the UK is more plausibly the result of Brexit, the war in Ukraine, Covid, and bad political decisions like the disastrous Liz Truss budget than it is the result of “outgrowing our collective imaginary”. The climate crisis, too, has concrete, physical causes related to how we are treating the planet. Contrary to Jonathan Pageau’s assertion that “Millennials hate their lives” because “they’re being told…the world is falling apart because of ecological reasons”, I propose that Millennials (and Gen Z) might have higher levels of climate anxiety because of the actual problems with the environment, and because being young they will have to live with more of those problems for longer.

At first blush it might seem that the social challenges of loneliness and mental ill health might more plausibly be related to the “meaning crisis” - and I think it’s reasonable to pursue that line of inquiry. But these, too, have more proximate and realistic causes. Developments in technology - from the television to smartphones - have long been theorized to be one cause of a breakdown in civic life which might result in less participation in the community and therefore more loneliness, for example. As for mental ill health, this itself could be caused by the other concrete challenges: a world in which your political systems are not working for you, you’re getting poorer, and the environment is degrading is not one likely to result in mentally healthy individuals. As with the other challenges, mundane explanations are available.

The power of mundane explanations

In my view, explanations like this - concrete, mundane relationships between everyday problems and broader social challenges - are much more convincing and much more useful than the baggy, vague idea of a “meaning crisis”. More convincing because they rely on well-established, well-understood causal mechanisms and are based on easily observable evidence. More useful because understanding things this way enables us to tackle the concrete challenges and genuinely make the world better Because however difficult changing a voting system is, at least we know in principle how to do it - I have no idea how we would recreate a metanarrative.

That - how the “meaning crisis” myth disempowers and distracts us from our genuine challenges, and where we might look for solutions instead - is the subject of the next article.

1. In these short analyses I’m going to restrict myself to writing about the UK and the USA, both because these are countries where I’ve lived a long time and therefore know about, and because these are the countries where the “meaning crisis” discourse is most prominent - but much of what I say is applicable to other similar nations. The way that this discourse is presented as a global challenge to humanity, when in fact it the problems it responds to may be particular to some nations in some parts of the world, is an interesting feature which I won’t have time to go into in this article.

2. I’ve cleaned this up a little for readability, removing repetitions, but the words are all Pageau’s.