Why do modern humans struggle with meaning?
Modern humans often lack meaning due to a lack of purpose and direction. With the rise of technology, many people feel disconnected from the physical world, their families, and their communities.
This disconnection can lead to apathy and a feeling of insignificance. Additionally, today's consumerist society encourages us to focus on material possessions and short-term gratification, which can lead to a lack of meaning.
The Problem → Meaning Crisis → Why are modern humans miserable, despite unlimited abundance?
The Why → Because No Community, which causes no meaning
Humans need others for meaning. → The single most crucial factor in human meaning is other people.
Solution Phase 1: Rebirthing → Creating your own life of meaning → Opting out
Solution Phase 2: Living together in communities—a new lifestyle
Causes
Modernity, mass psychosis, consumerism, populism, nihilism, Humans are designed to look for meaning outside of themselves. It’s a byproduct of evolution. So we’ve been inventing Gods, shamans, and myths since our brain fully developed to the size of calling us homo sapien sapiens.
Modernity → removed from nature. Isolation. Selfishness. And faux meaning created through consumerist pursuit (celebrity, MSM, the State)
Money/fame/power/status → These are our culture's false idols, Gods, pursuits, and meanings. Unsurprisingly, those who reach them end up no better or even worse off than everyone else.
Mass psychosis → This creates a mass psychosis. The status quo, what’s expected, and the death of the individual
The breakdown of the family unit is a direct byproduct/cause of our isolating, rich, consumerist culture, which results from mass consumerism and profit.
Humans do this because we are tribal creatures; because we no longer have community, everything else follows - all bad behavior, broken family unit, etc.
When you remove community, you remove the checks that kept ancestors working together cohesively. Today, you can hide from the shame, guilt, and risk of exile that kept the worst parts of human behavior in check. When you remove that and give power to one over another, you get the ugliest of human nature. (Every tyrant in history.) Our ancestors knew this was a risk, so nature evolved behaviors we call fierce egalitarianism, enforced through shame, guilt, and ridicule. (Shaming the meat story). If you acted up, you'd get a bad reputation in the group. And that would keep you from sex and food and possibly get you clubbed to death or kicked out.
This is why men beat women and children. (And why women do as well). It’s why it’s easy for the human brain to justify something like the Holocaust. When one believes he is doing what’s necessary for his people, it’s easy to see other people as lower than human or a threat to the group. Humans have slaughtered our species and other species in numbers never seen in any other species on Earth. We win that award.
Since the invention of personal property, our species has experimented with ways of organizing. The problem with organizing large groups of strangers is the lack of check-on power, which always leads to a small group getting power over another. This power eventually leads to complete collapse and, along the way, to mass human suffering. (This is why Bitcoin is so revolutionary. It’s the most crucial technology ever created.
Because the powerful can use everything else to control the powerless, Bitcoin cannot be and gives power back to the people.) Electricity, gunpowder, technology, digital, oil, etc., are all powerful tools, but they all have no checks on their use. They are cooped by the powerful as a natural magnetic law of energy like attracts like.
The Individual
The problems for the individual stem from his/her inability to go INWARD to build a life of meaning for him/herself based on becoming reborn again, a la Nietzsche’s three-step metamorphosis
There are many reasons for this—all those mentioned above, but fundamentally, biology. Nature’s evolutionary strategy thus far has been to make humans who fit in with, protect, and support the group because that produces the most healthy babies that carry those genes.
Today, in a world decentralizing through technology, the Internet, the spread of democracy and democratic ideals (not without their problems), and now Bitcoin, privacy, and cryptography, the winners of NOW are the few that THINK FOR THEMSELVES. These individuals, from a Darwinian perspective, are outliers. These individuals would have been weeded out long ago before civilization because their behaviors did not support the group. So, the few who came into the world with delusions of grandeur would quickly have been checked (physically or at least mentally). But since civilization came around and we had the power dynamics that come from resources, commerce, free markets, and the ability for individuals to benefit themselves and earn resources and power through their specific thinking and action aside from any group restriction, these became the evolutionary winners.
The story of civilization is the story of a few who do what others are unwilling to do.
But nature learns, adapts, and builds, and that’s why the next epoch of humanity will be based on individual sovereignty, freedom of thought, and organizing in a less top-down and more miniature (less humans) opt-in way. This can extend down to the sovereign individual thesis, that one individual can be completely sovereign—mobile, accessible, and control money and financial energy—by going anywhere in the world to where you are treated best, where you have the freedom to express your life and property rights as you please.
Since humans will not be social creatures, at least not anytime within the next few hundred thousand years, the immediate need and solution for modern humans is SMALL COMMUNITIES.
These communities will be formed around leaders and a shared set of beliefs. They will not be organized through geography or a monopoly on violence like traditional city-states. They will instead be based on opting in, just like one would join a gym or social club. This will keep market forces in place to ensure that there is no abuse of power—because when an individual can leave to find another group (just like any business is beholden to market forces), the group falls apart. With it, the financial and human energy are needed to maintain it.
Back to the issue of meaning:
Human meaning is derived from other humans—helping, raising, and struggling with them. This is why people with big families living in modern industrialized societies are happy (though they could still be happier).
And since modern life is based on isolation and the meaning is making money, modern humans fail. They fail before they make the money and want it, and they fail when they get the money and “make it” because then they have the same meaning problem—where is my meaning? Where are my relationships? Where are people? Do I buy them? What do I do? Everyone I know is trapped in the same mess, chasing the same things.
And the answer most people faced with this quagmire come to is MORE.
But more didn't work in the first place. This results from not knowing what meaning is and how to get it.
The answer is available right now regardless of the economic situation—a closely lived-together community—daily, not getting together here and there and calling it community, but actually living together or nearby, cooking together, eating together, loving, raising children, and struggling—all together, all in real-time, all daily and nightly.
This kind of community requires collective resources to make it happen. You need financial and human capital.
Humans understand this different way of life and then opt into it, support it, and be part of it.
Financial capital to build and maintain what’s necessary to live.
Modern humans face a meaning crisis because they
Isolate themselves
Pursue fake meaning from social media
Chase hollow pursuits - fame, money, status
And a byproduct of this culture is no community, which is central to human meaning and flourishing.
What is the solution:
Escape - the life you’ve accepted, what’s expected, that you’ve lived/built unexamined
Rebuild your mind/body - reborn and build a new life of meaning based on your own self-created beliefs, principles
Build a tribe, live with other humans as central to your life, prosper
How can individuals find meaning in their lives?
Connect with Nature: Spend time outdoors, appreciate the beauty of nature and reflect on the wonders of the world.
Foster Relationships: Develop meaningful relationships with family, friends, and your community.
Find a Purpose: Identify your passions and determine how you can use them to benefit yourself and others.
Practice Gratitude: Take time to be thankful for the simple joys of life and the blessings we receive.
Explore Your Faith: Find solace and strength in your faith and spiritual beliefs.
Give Back: Invest your time and energy in a cause that is important to you.
Create Meaningful Goals: Set goals that align with your values and challenge you to grow.