The Crisis of Meaning

We are all becoming zombies

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

Victor Frankl, the psychologist who famously survived four concentration camps, was someone intimately aware of the importance of meaning in life, the absence of which he saw as a larger social problem that he called “the existential vacuum”. Those within it experience the following: “no instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what others wish him to do (totalitarianism)”.

This diagnosis of collective nihilism is something that appears in the work of many thinkers. Usually it involves a general sense of unfulfillment, something that goes beyond mere unhappiness. A society may be directed towards a great deal of pleasure or its population may work long hours. Nonetheless, there is something that many philosophers and psychologists point to as fundamentally absent in such societies. Where Frankl calls it “the existential vacuum”, the cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke calls it “The crisis of meaning”.

For Vervaeke, he draws comparisons to the hopeless and mindless population of Western societies and an obsession with zombies. Zombies, meandering aimlessly, mindless and without a home, reflect some of our own anxieties about the current state of things…