John Vervaeke on Wisdom and the Meaning Crisis

Do scientists know how to make life meaningful?

For thousands of years, philosophers and theologians have talked about the meaning of life, yet we currently face a crisis of life’s apparent meaninglessness. Perhaps the tiller should be turned over to cognitive scientists so they can finally solve the problem.

Enter John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist whose long YouTube video series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, competes with his colleague Jordan Peterson’s videos in showing the relevance of cognitive science to philosophical and religious issues. Recently, Vervaeke gave a talk at Lakehead University which provides an overview of his series, and there’s a telling moment in the talk, I think, which may point to a fundamental problem with his approach.

Vervaeke on the Meaning Crisis

In the overview video, Vervaeke lays out the meaning crisis as a pervasive feeling of alienation from the world and from each other. Suicide rates and loneliness, depression and anxiety are increasing even in affluent societies like the United States and the UK. Video games and social media exacerbate these “First World Problems” which were diagnosed as far back as Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Kafka.

For Vervaeke, the essence of the modern sense that there’s no meaning in life is a feeling of disconnectedness. He turns, then, to cognitive science to show how this happens and how we can counter that tendency by opening ourselves to more uplifting kinds of experience. In particular, he says, we should be striving to achieve flow and peak states, including a “cascade of insights” and a broadening of perspective which amount to wisdom and to “optimal connectedness” between the agent and his or her arena.

A lack of meaning in life occurs when a person is stuck in a rut. Translated into Vervaeke’s cognitive scientific language, this means she’s unable to grow and challenge herself, because her perspective has been narrowed by “parasitic mental processing.” She’s been paralyzed by suboptimal assessments of what’s relevant in her environment, so that she no longer fits well into it. Instead of flowing like an artist who’s “in the groove” or like an athlete who’s on a winning streak, she’s at a standstill and can’t break out of a counterproductive way of thinking.

Vervaeke explains this parasitic mode as a byproduct of how the brain is wired. We have two main ways of thinking that correspond to algorithms (slow and serial processing that’s guaranteed to solve the problem with step-by-step inferences) and heuristics (rules of thumb that are probabilistic shortcuts in that they prejudge the conclusion and can therefore fail).

A heuristic is a leap of logic that amounts to a bias or prejudice about the relevance of factors. For example, there’s the availability bias, which is that we give undue epistemic weight to whatever immediately comes to mind. If we didn’t trust ourselves in that way, we might never learn or solve problems, because we’d be endlessly searching for alternative sources of information; when alone in the wild, we may have only our mind to rely on and we may have to make snap judgments to escape danger.

Still, cognitive biases like this one can lead us into error. More importantly, the biases can produce the opposite of insight and of the flow state. Instead of realizing how to creatively solve a problem, we may cling to certain biases that blind us to other options and restrict how we view our environment.

We go into tunnel vision, as in depression, which causes us to fail so often or so profoundly that we’re no longer aligned with reality. Our biases cause us to think that X, Y, and Z are the relevant factors, but that entire mindset may be suboptimal in which case it should be replaced with a fresh perspective. Doing so, however, is notoriously difficult since it means abandoning part of our self-image.

Nevertheless, for Vervaeke, meaning in life is found in the wisdom to realize what’s relevant or what’s useful in connecting us with the world in the optimal way such that we’re on an exhilarating upward trajectory, “in the zone,” creatively solving problems with insights. Here, he says, cognitive scientists can learn from religion and ancient philosophy, since acquiring wisdom isn’t a matter of passively reading books, but of joining a wisdom community that teaches us how to improve our mindset and lifestyle.

Socially speaking, then, the contemporary meaning crisis is due to the lack of such communities or to what we might call the capitalistic bias against philosophy in the modern sense of the word, that is, against the entire pursuit of wisdom for the masses. The death of God doesn’t help either.

Depression, Psychiatry, and Vervaeke’s Reinvention of the Wheel

There’s much that’s valuable in Vervaeke’s account. The first half of his video series is a detailed exploration of the history of the meaning crisis as it unfolded mainly in Western religion and philosophy, going back to the Axial age, and his insights and explanations are admirable. The breadth of his knowledge is impressive and I applaud how he doesn’t indulge in a wholesale dismissal of religion and philosophy from a scientistic standpoint.

Still, it looks as though Vervaeke is reinventing the wheel. In particular, as he stands between cognitive science and the humanities, he faces a challenge from the side of science: Why not just identify the feeling that life lacks meaning, with depression? What exactly does Vervaeke add to the established psychiatric capacity for the diagnosis of mental disorders?

After all, depression can include anhedonia, the disconnectedness from life’s activities due to a loss of interest in them and a decreased capacity to feel pleasure. Depression is the most common mental disorder, and anhedonia doesn’t require a mental illness. Then there’s anosognosia, a person’s inability to recognize her mental illness, because the illness distorts her capacity for introspection, leaving her with her earlier, obsolete self-image that reflects her inner state prior to the illness’s distortions.

Indeed, Freud’s pessimistic conclusion in Civilization and its Discontents was similar to Rousseau’s: mental illness is pervasive because it’s caused by the compromises that sustain peace in large societies. We repress our animal instincts and can’t be our true selves, because we have to conform to the social order and the rule of law, to avoid the anarchic state of life in the wild. The tradeoff of the social contract, then, is inherent discontent with the societal impositions, including the degrading roles we’re forced to play to fit in.

The advantage of this underlying cause of mental dysfunction is that it secures a line of work for psychiatrists, and this was a primary interest of Freud’s, to put psychiatry on a secure scientific footing.

Likewise, for Vervaeke, the loss of enthusiasm for faith is currently so prevalent because it’s a byproduct of the brain’s reliance on biases and snap judgments. The novelty in Vervaeke’s account is mainly that he turns to science for the diagnosis, but to religion for the treatment. Contrary to psychiatrists, he seems to want to say, drugs won’t relieve us of the cognitive biases that can lead us into dead ends, and historically speaking, purpose, mental health, and contentment have been maintained by religious traditions.

In so far as modernity has undermined those traditions, we’re only being afflicted with the default flaws in human mentality and we’ve abandoned the ability to trust in the myths that drive the religious mission to enlighten ourselves, to meditate or experiment with peak states of consciousness to achieve insights and wisdom. In that respect, Vervaeke’s account overlaps with Freud’s, at least.

Social Dysfunction and the Atrocities of Religious Tribalism

But even here, psychiatry has a response, which is that cognitive behavioural therapy can replace religion. If the problem is the parasitic mode of thinking, the therapist can confront the offending thoughts or attitudes and develop coping strategies and skills to guide the patient. The therapist’s office acts as a secular version of a church.

It’s hard to see how Vervaeke could resist the secular, psychiatric solution to the meaning crisis unless he could show that religion is empirically more effective at empowering people to solve their problems. This is because there’s another overlap between his account and the psychiatric approach, which is that both are pragmatic.

By identifying the brain’s heuristics as the source of cultural disconnectedness, Vervaeke appeals to how the brain evolved, which is why he equates the sense of meaninglessness with a defect in human intelligence: the biological function of intelligence is to enable us to survive by coping with our environment and solving problems.

Psychiatry is similarly conservative in deferring to the environment, except that Vervaeke’s stance as a cognitive scientist obliges him to defer to the ancestral environment to which our brain adapted, whereas the psychiatrist’s medical approach compels her to defer to the prevailing social norms, which is why she defines “mental disorder” in terms of social dysfunction.

The psychiatrist can intervene only when a person’s suffering exceeds her capacity to work well within society. The therapist acts on behalf both of the patient and of society, since only the latter can supply the values that govern whether behaviour is unhealthy. That’s the price of psychiatry’s scientific status: as a therapist she can’t make value judgments, but can only channel social conventions.

In any case, whatever health benefits religion may have, they would seem to be offset by the familiar downsides. Religion exacerbates tribalism, and organized religion enforces mass delusions that fly in the face of science and modernity. To preserve the merits of his prescription of religion, Vervaeke would have to conceive of wisdom in such a way as to exclude the egregiousness of various kinds of religious behaviour.

For example, the militant jihadists may enjoy peak and flow states, and their religious traditions inform them that modernity must be destroyed to glorify God. Were the 9/11 terrorists suffering from parasitic processing or were they wise, enlightened, and in the grip of a deeply-felt, meaningful life? Indeed, Vervaeke would have reason to agree with the terrorists’ assessment that modernity and the United States, in particular, are the “Big Satans,” that is, primary causes of nihilism and of the collapse of Islam, owing to former US support of dictators in the Middle East that stifled homegrown Islamic religiosity.

In short, if all religions perpetrate atrocities, because the main religious beliefs themselves are delusions and easily-exploited by predatory demagogues, the kind of religious tradition Vervaeke prescribes may have to be thin gruel indeed. Likely, he’d prefer Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism, since these are less proselytizing than the obnoxious Western ones.

Meaning in Life versus the Meaning of Life

However, the appeal to the more pragmatic traits of the Eastern religions raises a challenge to Vervaeke from the other side of the divide, from philosophy. The problem is that the Eastern religions are pragmatic and therapeutic because they tend to accept that life is meaningless. Those religious practices are so many ways of escaping from nature’s absurdities that cause our suffering, the escape being the elimination of the worrying self and the loss of the will to live (and to return through reincarnation). To be enlightened in most of the Eastern traditions is typically to withdraw from conventional pastimes, to avoid succumbing to society’s fostering of the illusion of our ego.

Daoism is something of an exception to this pessimistic, ascetic, and anti-natural character of Eastern religions. For the Daoist there’s wisdom in nature’s ways, and these are simple and therefore antithetical to artificial social niceties such as those celebrated by Confucians. It’s very hard to see how the Daoist is in any better position than the Aristotelian, then, with respect to the need to avoid the naturalistic fallacy. Science showed that there are no final causes or inherent purposes in nature, so Vervaeke’s cognitive science will be at odds with Daoism in particular.

More generally, there’s a telltale moment in Vervaeke’s talk which is found between the 23:07 and 24:50 minute marks. There he says that the question of meaning in life is metaphorical, since it derives from the question of linguistic meaning. According to Vervaeke, just as a sentence is supposed to be connected with its referent, a person is supposed to be connected to the world. The meaning of a sentence or of a person’s life is in each case a kind of proper coupling with something else. The word “dog” latches onto a natural kind, just as a meaningful life for a person will consist of her having healthy, uplifting relationships with others and with her environment.

Notice that this metaphor is consistent with Daoism and with the conservative deference to environmental conditions (the ones to which we’re supposed to feel connected). Of course, the progressive, humanistic, Faustian alternative is that the environment should be transformed to suit us. Hence the great technoscientific project of civilization, to which cognitive science contributes, the project being our mastery of nature with technology that enables us to build an artificial replacement for our erstwhile habitat. If our human-made refuges foment anxiety, depression, and other illnesses, this is likely because we haven’t reckoned with the existential stakes of this enterprise.

A prime example of this flight from the sobering truth is Vervaeke’s key distinction between meaning in life and the meaning of life (24:04). For him, the meaning crisis that he addresses has to do only with the above practical and medical issue of the loss of wisdom to solve our problems and improve our circumstances.

As for the famous philosophical question of the meaning of life, Vervaeke mocks it by saying “you have to say it in a sonorous voice: what’s the meaning of life?” and he adopts a pompous voice to illustrate what he means. The implication is that the philosophers and theologians who for centuries considered whether life has “a cosmic or metaphysical purpose or destiny,” as Vervaeke puts it, have been fooling themselves and wasting social resources. As for Vervaeke, he hastens to reassure his audience that “I don’t talk about that. That’s not my purview.” The reason, he says, is that that’s “not what people talk about when they talk about meaning in life,” so only the latter “is at risk in the meaning crisis.”

Life’s Objective Absurdity

This strikes me as crucial and disingenuous; indeed, it’s what the philosopher Derrida would call a telling lacuna in Vervaeke’s discourse. The suggestion that whether life has an objective, cosmic purpose is not in Vervaeke’s purview must be dismissed outright, since this is hardly a cognitive scientist who stays within his discipline’s lane. Here’s a psychologist who competes with Jordan Peterson in holding forth on all manner of philosophical, religious, and historical topics in his courses recorded for YouTube.

Why, then, does Vervaeke not just decline to consider whether life itself has a meaning, but is quick to disparage that question? The answer is that he’s protesting too much. He knows from his science background that the answer is no, there’s no such meaning. But instead of confronting the implications of that greater debacle — that being the absurdity of intelligent life and of every natural event — Vervaeke switches to a problem he thinks we can solve.

If people speak only of whether there’s meaning in their life, perhaps that’s because they don’t see the connection between the fear that they’re stuck in a rut and the underlying sense that nothing has inherent value. Certainly, Vervaeke chooses not to clarify that connection. The connection seems to be that the flow and peak states of consciousness are still only distractions from the more rationally-justified recognition that all human pursuits are as inherently pointless as physical events.

If we’re immersed in an arena we can conquer as we broaden our horizons and flow with the challenges we set for ourselves, moving from triumph to triumph thanks to our healthy mindset, we still haven’t come close to altering life’s objective pointlessness. God is still dead and it’s science that showed as much, including the very science Vervaeke practices.

The dichotomy, then, isn’t just between parasitic and insightful mental processing, but between social functionality and the debilitating, philosophical recognition of our existential situation. When we succeed in wisely overcoming local obstacles, we still have what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the “view from nowhere,” the capacity to see things objectively, with which we can’t help but notice their blatant absurdity.

Objectively speaking, things are as they are: indifferent, amoral, unintended, and heading ultimately towards unimaginable destruction. In so far as it’s scientifically explained (objectified), the world is inhuman in that it mocks our social instinct to personify whatever we encounter, to project mental categories onto nature, including intelligent designs and purposes.

The existential problem, then, is that meanings in life are subjective and they can be undermined by the objective meaninglessness of life and of existence in general.

Flourishing, Creativity, and Mental Illness

That’s why even highly successful and creative people suffer from depression and anxiety. Far from being associated only with the poor and unsuccessful, depression affects all social classes and rich as well as poor countries. Indeed, wealthier countries like the US have the highest rates of depression, perhaps because of the attendant economic inequality coupled with the greater potential for upward mobility, which increases competition and stress.

There are also reasons to think wealth can cause depression, by isolating the wealthy person, forcing her to work long hours, putting her on a treadmill and multiplying her desires beyond anyone’s capacity to satisfy them, pampering her and making her less resilient, and by compelling her to work in a dehumanizing industry. (For more on this point, see here and here.)

Creativity is associated with the artistic personality, and artists are notorious for their mental instability. Perhaps the link here is that freedom of thought and the broadening of perspective entail setting aside traditions and social conventions, which invites the creative person to grapple with unpleasant truths that are typically swept under the rug for the sake of social cohesion. As a result, artists and intellectuals can suffer from social anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, and schizophrenia. Indeed, as psychiatrist Gail Saltz says in The Power of Different, these disorders can contribute to their creativity by providing the mechanisms for their divergent thoughts.

Again, then, the kind of wisdom Vervaeke champions should be thin gruel, as it were, since it must be divorced not just from religious zealotry but from the unpleasant practical realities of success in overcoming obstacles and of artistic and intellectual creativity.

Objective Horror and Subjective Meaning

To return to Vervaeke’s likely preference for Eastern religions, the point now can be updated. Those religions are mystical, pantheistic, or atheistic; in any case, they don’t assign purpose to nature in the naïve, theistic way by positing a supernatural person who creates the world for an intended purpose. For the most part, the Eastern traditions agree with science-based naturalism and maintain that for all the order we can explain, everything that happens in nature happens for no reason; natural events are objectively pointless. The cosmic cycles just come and go with no moral plan in mind.

Eastern wisdom is an austere mental state which is based on an existential grasp of harsh reality. Nietzsche famously said, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” (BGE, #146). The Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist consider nature maya, illusion that causes suffering, and like the Gnostic and the Essene the Eastern mystic renounces the world of commonplace perceptions and habits.

In short, Eastern wisdom is radical and subversive. Even Daoist nature-worship is subversive since it’s comparable to ancient Greek Cynicism; indeed, the Daoist has no compelling reason to reject social Darwinism or the most offensive, anachronistic conclusions of evolutionary psychology.

Towards the end of his talk (56:00–57:15), Vervaeke says, “I’m constantly projecting a salience landscape, what’s standing out to me is relevant, and I bind myself to it and then I re-change it. That agent-arena relationship is looping all the time.”

Notice that the arena, then, isn’t exactly the objective state of the world. It’s more like what the philosopher Kant called the “phenomenon,” the objective state of something in so far as it’s been humanized by our capacities for understanding. The meanings in life, for Vervaeke, are “projected” and our goal should be to commit ourselves to ever-expanding conceptions of what’s important.

Vervaeke is emphatic on this question of subjectivity. He says, “Something being relevant is not a subjective feature of my mind, because if I don’t find things relevant, I don’t solve my problems. But it’s not an objective feature of the world, because nothing is objectively relevant and things are relevant one minute and irrelevant the next.”

It’s all about the connectedness, Vervaeke insists. Relevance realization is “how you’re dynamically coupled to the world. It’s transjective, neither subjective nor objective. It’s about the connectedness between them that grounds both of them.”

Contrary to what he says there, it’s hard to see how the judgments of relevance aren’t subjective. Vervaeke says we need to make such judgments to solve our problems, but that’s just it: they’re our problems. The world doesn’t care whether we solve them or not, and the world-as-it-would-be-without-us would have no problems since everything in it would be equally irrelevant and insignificant.

Our Care for the World in an Indifferent Universe

But that can be put aside, because what Vervaeke’s after is what he calls “religio,” which is the spiritual feeling of being bound to the world. The lack of meaning in life is the feeling that we don’t belong anywhere, because we’re ill-prepared for the challenges the arena’s throwing our way. Presumably, there are religious and therapeutic techniques for reestablishing that groundedness, self-confidence, and preparedness.

Nevertheless, there will be an overriding basis for alienation, which is the divide between what Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest” and “scientific images” of human nature. We feel at home when we’re able to think in our instinctive ways, as we socialize with each other, solve problems, and begin to flourish. Alas, science informs us that there’s really something else going on, namely the physical or otherwise natural and inhuman concatenation of events. That objective flow is appalling because it makes a mockery of everything we care about. Are you a person as you naively think of yourself or are you really just a lump of deluded matter and energy?

Vervaeke quotes approvingly from Paulo Costa’s “A Secular Wonder,” when Vervaeke says that the concern with the world that makes things matter to us creates “a bubble or meaningfulness” or “an atmosphere of significance or import that we do not create from scratch but are absorbed by.” We become aware of that bubble only in non-focal states such as wonder and awe but also absurdity and horror, says Vervaeke.

That can all be granted, but the bubble of meaning still comes across as maya or at least as self-serving fiction that’s dwarfed by the scientific image and by that which we behold from “nowhere” (as Nagel put it). No matter how wise or flourishing we may be in Vervaeke’s terms, the wise, enlightened person can still collapse at any moment from the existential recognition that the sum of human triumphs is like a grain of sand blowing in the wind and will one day be forever forgotten.

The connectedness or love of the world that spares this flourishing person from horror is a distraction or a coping mechanism. Indeed, horror or at least subversive awe is the more authentic relationship of disconnectedness to reality, because that’s what follows when we see beyond our bubble of meaningfulness and confront how the world at large really is in its inhumanity.

Concern for solving the problems that matter to us in our arena connects us not with the scientific facts as they really are, but with the world as we prefer to think of it with our cognitive biases. Regardless of whether those biases are suboptimal or more enabling for us from a pragmatic or evolutionary standpoint, the resulting behaviour is still objectively foolish.