The Mental Health Crisis, Loneliness Epidemic, and Meaning Crisis are the Same

A meta-crisis

Photo by Ihor Malytskyi on Unsplash

Last week I published an article with The Dispatch arguing that our mental health crisis and our crisis of meaning are related (not a wholly original argument, but an important one, I think). Because our lives lack meaning, we are depressed, anxious, and agitated. But why do we lack meaning? I think our environment is not shaped for us to find meaning. The elements we need to discover meaning in the world are dulled, mediated, and overwhelmed, particularly by technology. As I sat with this thesis after publishing it, I recalled that we’re also in what the Surgeon General has called a “Loneliness Epidemic.” And it seems to me that each of these crises feeds the others, creating a cycle of disharmony in our lives. Creating a meta-crisis.

I believe that meaning is discovered or revealed through an intimate interaction with the world. This is contrary to the view that we impose meaning on the world with our wills. The existentialist/materialist account of existence is that all we have is brute material existence and it is only through the force of our wills that we shape this existence into something meaningful. And when we don’t choose to create meaning, then we are inauthentically resigning ourselves to the meanings imposed upon us by external forces. So the meaningfulness of my marriage is only ever a result of evolutionary, biological, societal pressures or it is something that I have made up in my head.