Another great presentation.

I think the "meaning crisis" is similar to the classic Aristocrats joke in standup comedy, about which they made a documentary. Each comedian tells the joke differently, and the fun is in improvising and elaborating on the main idea. Likewise, critics of modernity suspect there's something fundamentally wrong, but their diagnosis will amount to a hobby horse. We can see signs of the meaning crisis everywhere, and critics will emphasize the signs that fit their worldview. The concept of this crisis is almost an unfalsifiable theology. The crisis is just what it feels like to be relatively aware and informed, regardless of the social circumstances.

Is the crisis really more acute now than it was, say, 1,000 years ago? Or 3,000? How could we possibly know what it felt like to live in the ancient world? We can just surmise, based on our scientific models, that the ancients, too, grew up after passing through relative periods of naivety, in their childhood. There are historic turning points, of course, such as Alexander the Great, the Black Death, and the Scientific Revolution. But these likely just affect the style of expressing what I think the existentialists are right to call the universal plight of being a person. The "meaning crisis" is endemic to being that anomaly.