In 5th century BCE Athens, Socrates sat on a street corner and called out to people going to work: “You are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city, with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power. Are you not ashamed that you strive so eagerly to acquire as much wealth, reputation and honor as you can, while you care little or give no thought to wisdom, truth, or the highest possible state of the soul?”
This passage is from Plato Socrates’ Apology, To me, this has always been interesting as a reflection of the way humans do anything to escape the most basic and essential questions of life: meaning, existence, purpose, morality. What were these Athenians distracted by? They had no social media, text messages, or podcasts to distract them on their way to work. What prevented them from using their daily commute as a time to contemplate the “wisdom or truth or the best possible state” of their soul? There is something in the human mind that tries to avoid honest reflection on the meaning of our existence. But at the same time, a meaningless life is hardly worth living.
That’s human duality: we avoid the very things that make life fulfilling.
And I wonder if this tension is contributing to the current mental health crisis that is severely impacting our country. According to the National Mental Health Alliance, more than one in five adults experienced a mental illness in 2021. Younger Americans are especially affected. The situation has gotten so bad that President Joe Biden unveiled a strategy to address the issue in his 2022 State of the Union address. While this crisis certainly has multiple causes, it is reasonable to assume that it is related to a disconnect from meaning. The less we feel our lives have meaning, the more miserable we become.
“The only thing that can console us from our misery is diversion,” wrote philosopher, mathematician and child genius Blaise Pascal in the 17th century. Pensées“But it is our greatest misery, because, above all, it prevents us from thinking about ourselves and leads us to ruin. Without it we would be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek more certain means of escape. But entertainment consumes our time and leads us to death.”
For Pascal, this deep-seated drive for distraction is a kind of will to death: without distraction we must face our existence head on and find a way to escape meaninglessness. One wonders what distractions prevented people in the 17th century from reflecting on the meaning of life, as they did in ancient Athens.
Humans have always had a tendency to dislike contemplation, but our social structures and technologies have not been designed to discourage it in the way that they are today. Everything in our world calls to us, demands our attention, intrudes on our sight and hearing. Even when we pump gas, there are screens built into the pump that play loud videos. Historically unimaginable, it is not only possible but normal for modern humans to be engrossed in some form of media from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. We are never alone. We are never able to contemplate the state of our souls.
In the West, we are currently in the midst of a “crisis of meaning,” a widely shared feeling that life has no substance or meaning. Scholars such as cognitive scientist John Verwaak have linked this to a mental health crisis. And I believe a major cause of this crisis is that the structure of our environment prevents us from engaging with the real world in a way that produces what philosopher Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance.” The experience of resonance occurs when you come into contact with the world and feel that you cannot control or govern it. You are moved by a scene from nature or a line of poetry, and you engage with these things in a way that accepts that they are outside of your control. They have an independence that makes them important and resonate with you, but in order to be meaningful in and of themselves they are not dependent on you being aware of them.
But we also lose one of the benefits of the experience of resonance: meaning and wisdom. The world is out of controlargues that modern people feel that the world is moving backwards. Life feels flat, mundane, and mute. The universe no longer speaks to us with meaning. Instead, we naturally try to give meaning to the world by actively controlling our lives.
Maybe when you watch kids playing in a sprinkler on a hot day, the beauty and simplicity of that experience resonates with you deeply — savoring the moment without having to photograph it, record it, or control it in any other way. Our constant connection to media has stripped us of the ability to experience these moments.
Part of this experience of meaninglessness comes from living in what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “secular age” in his book of the same name. It also involves the widening of the horizon of belief systems we can adopt. This includes traditional worldviews such as Christianity and communism, but also causes and lifestyle choices such as environmentalism, diet and fitness culture, and political activism. All these beliefs, Taylor says, feel tentative, uncertain, and contestable in a secular age. Most of us no longer effectively believe in an external world (a world of resonance!) with inherent meaning. Instead, we believe that all the meaning of the world has been put there by us, by our choices. Flowers are not inherently beautiful; their beauty is what I choose to attribute to them. Sex is not inherently meaningful; its meaning is entirely what I choose to define. The world is silent; it has nothing to communicate to us because it cannot speak. It is a raw, material existence.
The problem with this is that feel You create meaning. I write about this in my book. You Are Not Your Own: God’s Possession in an Inhuman WorldMy love for my family feels real and tangible to me and I can either empathize with it or ignore it, but the meaning is always there, the only question is whether I’m too distracted by my smartphone to notice it.
And this is the fundamental challenge for modern man: to live a good life, we need to contemplate what a good life is and to resonate with the real world. But our environment deliberately prevents this contemplation, mediating the real world so that we do not experience resonance. It prevents us from contemplating both our sins and errors and the reality that we are made in God’s image. If we follow the wisdom of Socrates and Pascal and experience the world through resonance, we realize that existence itself is a miraculous gift. And that gift has a Giver who wants us to know him and believe in him. We realize that by connecting with the real world and understanding our need for a Savior, we can overcome our crisis of meaning.
It is human nature to avoid asking ourselves and life’s big questions. Our modern environment allows for this avoidance through technology. But the result of this avoidance is not peace but what Pascal calls “misery,” and the current mental health crisis that afflicts many Americans is one example of this misery. To overcome this misery, we must work against our environment and discover that the world resonates with meaning imbued by a loving God who invites us in.
