Introduction

In a collection of essays about the hope secularism offers, Italian philosopher of science Paul Acosta (2011, 138) argues that “we cannot help but be affected by things as if we were immersed in a sort of bubble of meaningfulness or, better, in an atmosphere of significance and import that we do not create from scratch but are absorbed by.” Despite this alleged absorption, global heating, biodiversity obliteration, increasingly brazen breakages of the Geneva convention agreements, and what cognitive scientist and cultural philosopher John Vervaeke refers to as a “meaning crisis” haunt a global village suffering from personal-collective incongruences of fact and value.

Given the increasing role psychedelic experiences and media are playing in the mental health crises, in discourses on religious experience, and in the anthropology of ecstatic religions, I claim that though psychedelic research and practices also suffer from crises of meaning, both can have some role in solving the broader meaning crisis. Psychedelics and altered states of consciousness generally have been identified by influential journalists (Pollan 2018; Beiner 2023) as responding to the “meaning crisis” undergirding our coeval economic, military, resource, and ecological crises. As psychiatric penicillin, microscopes for phenomenological psychology, novel sacraments for experientially revivified religion, and neuroplastogens for a healthier mind-body, psychedelic-altered states are addressed by many as potential solutions to issues spanning from prison recidivism, death anxiety, treatment-resistant conditions, and complex scientific problem solving (Leary 1970; Doblin 1998; Luke 2019; Nemu 2016; Riley 2019; Partridge 2019; Mudge 2020; Sjöstedt-Hughes 2021). But as our peak of inflated expectations tips to a trough of disillusionment, the questions I ask are: Why now? What are the actual potentials and drawbacks of psychedelic approaches to the meaning crisis? And do psychedelics exhibit a meaning crisis of their own?

This article first identifies what “meaning crisis” means. Second, it looks at the way in which research into the psychedelic experience suffers from this same crisis. Third, it examines possible solutions to elements of this crisis. Existential philosophy has cast humankind’s search for meaning as an issue that perennially galvanizes rather as than something epochal (Kierkegaard [1844] 1981; [1844] 1992, 89; Schopenhauer [1850] 2005, 17, 74, 100, 114, 118; Nietzsche [1882] 2018, 179; [1886] 2003, 62–63; Heidegger [1927] 2010, 228, 376; Cioran [1949] 2018, 4). Vervaeke’s cultural diagnosis is a departure from the category of meaning as a perennial existential category: he uses a dual methodology of structural-functional and historical explanation. The unique contemporaneity of the meaning crisis operates on three levels: the intellectual, the sensorial, and the social. Implicit throughout my analysis is the question of why psychedelics have been hailed as a solution and, moreover, why now? The final section examines three case studies to illustrate why, despite criticism, hope may still lie in this Pandora’s box.

What Is the Meaning Crisis?

Vervaeke typifies the meaning crisis as a complex of felt incongruences in the contemporary human condition. Existential philosophy has looked at the way in which the human condition is characterized—the Camuian Sisphyus is happy, human beings are always “beings for whom being is the question” in the “decisive significance” of choice and the “dizzy freedom” of anxiety (Camus [1942] 2005; Kierkegaard [1844] 1982, 16; [1844] 2015, 188). Vervaeke’s contribution differs from this by connecting the perennial with the particular, the biological with the cultural—what he names the “structural-functional” and the “historical” accounts of meaning. The meaning crisis is characterized positively (by the contemporary interest in mindfulness, therapy, and psychedelics) and negatively (by our mental health epidemic, suicidality, the prevalence of “bullshit everywhere,” and a prevailing mood of nihilism, cynicism, and futility). Vervaeke (2019a) uses his combined method to answer three questions: 1) What is meaning? 2) Why do we hunger for it? 3) How do we cultivate the wisdom to realize it?

To understand Vervaeke’s diagnosis, I describe how the human mind structures and is structured by meaning, and latterly, how this relates to our cultural moment. Vervaeke first notes that while meaning is central to our evolutionary adaptability, the cognitive tools we use to acquire and develop meaning can also backfire when we mistake salience (importance) for truth (what is the case). The cognitive software required for psychotechnological rituals both of initiation—involving emotional deregulation such as pain, fasting, and drugs—and of trusting the stranger (required by Dunbar’s number¹)—requiring the habitus of language, art, and music—have been exapted into shamanic rituals for participatory knowing in healthcare and hunting (for example, knowing how the deer exists rather than simply about the deer, or to “stimulate the placebo response”). The goal of the shamanic state of mind is the “flow state,” where challenge matches skill without boredom or stress (Figure 1). Vervaeke (2019b) notes that studies from multiple societies prove that the flow state is pancultural, with increased flow states correlating with higher wellbeing and meaning in life.

Figure 1

Mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level, according to Csikszentmihalyi’s (2008) flow model (Vervaeke 2019b).

Moving to the historical, Vervaeke examines how the human view of the self has culturally changed in the Axial Age in a way that utilizes these cognitive skills. Implementing a Platonic trichotomy, Vervaeke uses the notion of the human condition as symbolized by Man, Monster, Lion² to illustrate what can become dissonant or incongruent, leading to a meaning crisis. The Man is “motivated by the truth,” and so the meaning crisis operates in contemporary cognitive dissonances. The Monster is “motivated by pleasure and pain,” fundamentally operating on a hedonic axis but also in the reactive axiological realm of a value such as beauty. The Lion is “motivated by honour and shame” (Vervaeke 2019c). This operates in the axiological realm of values such as what is considered the good life and the “religare” (binding) between people, combined with an onus on the individual to succeed and create their own meaning rather than be given, for example, a role, as in traditional societies, something referred to as detraditionalization (Vervaeke 2019k; Giddens 2002).

Vervaeke’s (2019c) interpretation of Plato emphasizes achieving a balance between understanding (truth), salience (relevance), and sociocultural “participatory epistemology”: the Socratic “examined life” where basic needs become collective duties.

A key distinction is between truth and salience. Truth involves correspondence with reality, while salience focuses on what is important and where our attention is directed (Vervaeke 2019a). Socrates’s paradox (being the wisest despite knowing he lacks wisdom) highlights the inadequacy of two other philosophical methods in his time—and ours. Sophists sacrificed truth for salience, selling arguments without regard for their truth, while natural philosophers focused on irrelevant truths (Vervaeke 2019c). Today, truth and salience often remain disconnected, as seen in advertising. Advertisements act as sophistry, leading to rewards contrary to societal thriving—read consumer holidays, monocrop fast foods, child-slavery chocolate (Vervaeke 2019c). I first flesh out the notion that advertising, religion, mental health, and politics all provide examples for the meaning crisis in this time. I then turn to psychedelics.

Walter Benjamin ([1982] 1999, 171) stated that “the advertisement is the ruse by which the dream forces itself on industry, suggesting that capitalist desires exploit dreams and make them hyper-salient.” Take Joseph Campbell’s idiom, “Myths are collective dreams, and dreams are individual myths.” This is reflected in consumer choices, like buying sugar or chocolate not linked to slavery or the rise of “vintage” second-hand stores, and the commercialization of psychedelic wellness culture. Our friendliness with strangers and ethical considerations shape meaningful lives—but can you afford to be ethical (Vervaeke 2019b)?

Contemporary religions these days often feel like empty motions, notes Vervaeke, disconnected from wider truths. Theonarratives fail to align with experience. For instance, the Bible, which grounds the ethics of so many Jews and Christians, does not explicitly mention abortion (Wilson-Kastner and Blair 1985). Mental health becomes individualized, with one pithy coinage being the “privatisation of stress” (Fisher [2016] 2018), which combines with the increasing medicalization of the human condition (Laing [1960] 2010; Foucault 1994; Szasz 2003; Conrad 2007).

Mainstream science, concerned with truth, continues to struggle to account for a meaningful life. The description of consciousness and the brain as juggling molecules may attempt to account for truth but lacks relevance for our quotidian and existential choices. Philosophers from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Alfred North Whitehead have argued that the Cartesian cogito mystified the realm of the soul to a point, post-Enlightenment, where it became normal to speak of consciousness as either unreal or an insubstantial function (Dennett 1991; Seth 2021), rendering us ghosted machines (Whitehead [1925] 2011; Adorno and Horkheimer [1947] 1972).³ In the existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s ([1960] 2010, 12) formulation, “who says that men are machines may be a great scientist . . . who says he is a machine is ‘depersonalized’ in psychiatr[y].” Adorno ([1947] 1972) anticipated this move: “Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits.” Psychedelics inflected the drab workaday iron cages of postwar metropolitan life, giving the disenchanted and secular elite experiences that made congruent “intellectual attempts to understand the world and our existential attempts to dwell within it” (Vervaeke 2019c) in a way scientific articulation of the brain organ had not.

In politics, the meaning crisis is evident in alliances with nations that have questionable human rights records, such as Britain’s ties with Saudi Arabia. These relationships, often justified by economic benefits, clash with democratic values, causing a disconnect between ideals and actions. This incongruence leads to a psychological imbalance where truth and pleasure become interchangeable. Such crises demand catharsis and resolution, as suggested by the phrase “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” which points to the need for a meaningful life to be grounded in both true knowledge and ethical action (Bartol [1938] 2007; Jay 2023, 282).

These are crises because they require catharses; tensions require resolutions. All pullulate into what can be specifically termed a meaning crisis because such a crisis operates in the individual and collective psyches, which ask “why?” without a satisfactory answer. Meaning therefore means being “in touch with reality” (Vervaeke 2019a). The introduction of psychedelics into contemporary metropolitan culture is therefore finding its niche in the field of meaning (Vervaeke 2019h). I ask whether the peg is the shape of the hole: Are psychedelics immune from the problems the meaning crisis poses?

How Does This Relate to Psychedelics?

So far I have described Vervaeke’s theoretical account of the meaning crisis based on cognitive science and the history of human and cultural self-understanding. But Vervaeke’s own empirical research has also shown that altered states of consciousness, as “psychotechnologies,” can bring about “quantum changes” in the “radical transformation of experience” and that entering the flow channel (Figure 1) increases one’s propensity to find “meaning in life,” “insight,” and “wellbeing.” The cognitive mechanics of an insightful altered state operate, Vervaeke found, on two axes (Figure 2). On the first axis is a “transparency to opacity shift” or the reverse: this is defined as the shift between focal or explicit awareness of the content of the observation and the subsidiary or implicit awareness of how one is looking; it is analogized as looking through glasses versus looking at glasses. It is a heuristic to hermeneutical shift, from the problem being solved to the how the solving solves. The other axis moves between the gestalt—the whole—and the features—the parts. This is studied neurobiologically by the neuroscientist and English professor Ian McGilchrist (2009), noting that the physiological asymmetry of brain hemispheres affords each type of awareness. Recent research shows greater “functional connectivity” between brain regions during psychedelic experience, including possibly between hemispheres (Tagliazucchi et al. 2016; Levin 2024).

Figure 2

The axes of operation for cognitive mechanics (drawn and adapted by author from Vervaeke (2019h)).

According to Vervaeke, it is possible to “scale up” to the gestalt and the opaque filter of perception or “scale down” to the transparent features. The former allows for knowledge of self, the latter for knowledge of world. At the peak experience of the scaling up is the “pure consciousness experience,” at the peak of the scaling down is the “reasoning at-one-ment.” Insightful altered states allow the individual to move between both peak experiences “fluently.” Vervaeke then asks what this twin axis grants access to in terms of meaning specifically. He says it makes one aware of “causes” that make things happen and two types of “constraints”—“enabling” and “selective”—that make actions more or less possible (Vervaeke 2019f). Our worldview has become meaningless because our accounts of the world no longer correspond to how it is we know the world. Here, Vervaeke uses Erich Fromm’s ([1976] 2013; emphasis added) noted confusion regarding capitalist society: in our situation, “to have is to be.” To have “meaning” there must be “nomological order”: a congruence “between our intellectual attempts to understand the world and our existential attempts to dwell within it” (Vervaeke 2019c). But if psychedelics and the flow state have always been with humanity, why is the interest in psychedelics undergoing a resurgence at this time? To answer this requires an assessment of recent cultural history.

The narrative of the introduction of psychedelics into the quasi-religious countercultural movement in the 1950s and 1960s is complex with contrasting stories (Roszak 1968; Marcuse 1971, 78; Ohler 2024; Dickins 2024) Psychedelics were available to occidentals yet considered aberrant and useless for four hundred years before mainstreamization (Breen 2022). Key scientific figures include the chemists Albert Hofmann (the discoverer of LSD) and Alexander Shulgin (the discoverer of MDMA’s pharmacological properties as well as the developer of many contemporary psychedelic party drugs). Key popularizers and philosophers include Aldous Huxley (and his The Doors of Perception) and the 1990s mushroom prophet Terrence McKenna. Such canon, however, ignores the fact that women played a key role in the development of psychedelic therapy (Eisner 1997; Papaspyrou, Baldini, and Luke 2019) and the troubling appropriation and epistemicide of Indigenous colonised peoples’ worldviews (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990, 1997; Partridge 2006, 2018; Labate and Cavnar 2021; Hauskeller et al. 2022) There are also stories about the entheogenization of Christianity/Christianisation of entheogens (D’Azevedo 1985; Smith and Snake 1995; Schunemann 2020; de Assis 2022).

Though a comprehensive historiography is beyond the scope of this article, this plurality is acknowledged. Psychedelics gave a hyper-rationalized, bureaucratized, and disenchanted secular elite experiences of divinity that seemed to respond to the existential dimension of the meaning crisis, reviving a “sense and taste for the infinite” (Schleiermacher [1893] 2006, 39). On Vervaeke’s first level, psychedelics enabled new political and theological realities. On the second level, they made pleasure morally discussible in a postwar austerity atmosphere. On the third level, they motivated individuals to fight for what they believed was right, fostering group therapy, ecological activism, civil rights, and the New Left. They blurred the sacred and the profane, bringing religious experience to the forefront of human experience. Though social justice improvements in the 1960s and 1970s occurred in part due to economic growth, psychedelics also played key a role (Partridge 2006; Riley 2019; Davis 2019).

Even Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned LSD advocate, however, later reflected on the lack of comforting routines during this cultural upheaval (Partridge 2018). Joan Didion’s ([1968] 2017) Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the chaos and disarray of the counterculture, exemplified by a child on acid in a scene of familial neglect. These literate prophets and cultured despisers are not mere idealizations or demonizations of what was happening on the ground. Such postmortem reflections and journalistic descriptions of the counterculture correspond directly to a meaning crisis because they expose three aspects of the human psyche in disbalance. The quest for an altered state of mind and a society that would allow for a truth to be glimpsed (by the Man) and pleasure to be felt (by the Monster) is sought at the expense of social bonds such as parenting or traditional agreements (coveted by the Lion). The truth sought through psychedelic mystical questing drowns the salience of what is to be enacted afterward.

In an empirical example of this, an ethnography conducted in the 1970s (Tipton 1982) found that many people who left communes entered either ethically or ritually stringent evangelical churches, Buddhist lodges, or human potential training organizations. Why? Simply, “to make moral sense of their lives” (Tipton 1982, xii, 232). What moral nonsense did this moral sense preclude? Flower children saw their parents’ generation as ethically inconsistent, following styles of ethical evaluation emphasizing obedience and biblical rule following inside the home and utilitarian cost–benefit hedonic calculi outside the home (Tipton 1982, 26–27). The countercultural solution was an “expressivist” ethic whose “cardinal virtue was authenticity” (Tipton 1982, 18). The trouble with this new ethic was that acting it out in the communes led to a hyper-individual asociality wherein one’s own pleasure (the monster) made the quest for peak experience more salient than the truth to which that experience claimed to point. In Vervaeke’s Platonic conception of the meaning crisis, the monster overtook the man. The peak experience was not met by the kind of world it was worth coming down into. I now turn to how the psychedelic experience and psychedelic science itself have been impacted by the meaning crisis.

Psychedelics Impacted by the Meaning Crisis

The field of psychedelic studies faces its own crisis of meaning on three levels.

1. The psychedelic sciences rely on mapped descriptions and physicalist reduction. Leading neurophysiology researcher Robin Cahart-Harris (2007) uses “neuro-psychoanalysis” to map the brain’s physical basis of the “ego structure” in the “default mode network” (Cahart-Harris et al. 2008; Gatusso et al. 2023). While this may help us verify the notion that depression and the ego are linked, can it help people with their ego? Like Vervaeke’s interpretation of Socrates’s response to natural philosophers, truth becomes disconnected from individual transformation and daily life—truth is sacrificed for salience.

2. Medical mysticism requires functionalizing spiritual experience, which is usually considered an end in itself. This creates a paradox where madness heals madness (Hauskeller 2022, 124). The medical framework becomes self-contradictory, and by treating psychedelics as mere therapeutic tools rather than sources of enjoyment, pleasure is pari passu de-emphasized, frustrating the Monster.

3. The era of monopoly pharmacy and profit-driven medical systems creates inherent paradoxes. Reducing psychedelic experience to safety, efficacy, and pathology transforms care into economic transactions, denying access to the disenfranchised⁴ and making a business of symptom cessation, frustrating the honor of the Lion.

For psychedelics, a key question emerges: Do they blur sacred–profane distinctions or help rediscover the sacred in a disenchanted world? This question reveals deeper aspects of the meaning crisis. The sacred–profane distinction constantly evolves, viewed both sociologically and phenomenologically.

Sociologically, Emile Durkheim ([1915] 1964, chapt. II) defines the sacred as “set apart and forbidden,” noting that sacred and profane categories were “wholly different.” Sacred things transcend “day-to-day facts” through social elevation (Durkheim ([1915] 1964, chapt. III). Durkheim’s view, in Vervaekean terms, suggests the sacred gains special salience through social highlighting.

Phenomenologically, Rudolf Otto ([1923] 1952, chapt. 4) describes the sacred as “mysterium tremendum et fascens”—the frightening, fascinating mystery—characterized by radical otherness and complete dependence. Unlike pleasure or moral exaltation, this holy experience emerges spontaneously from the uncontrollable other. LSD psychiatrist Stanislav Grof (2009) applied Otto’s summary concept of the “numinous” to psychedelic experiences. The holy confronts individuals as undeniable truth. It does not appear phenomenologically as a social highlight but as an experience central to existence.

Contemporary psychedelic research places religious experience under scientific scrutiny. Some philosophers argue that reducing religious experience to molecular and neuronal activity oversimplifies through a reductio ad absurdum fetishization of consensus and agreement (Hauskeller and Sjösdedt-Hughes 2022, 4). Furthermore, despite attempted explanations for the psychedelic experience, research shows the actual experience of psychedelics often shifts metaphysical views toward panpsychism or animism and can lead to solipsism or ontological shock (Timmermann et al. 2021; Sjöstedt-Hughes 2023; Argyri 2024).

Psychedelic research objectifies not only subjective experience but also the subject herself (Foucault 1994; Noorani 2020). As Christine Hauskeller (2022, 124) notes, this creates a paradox where “the specialism that defines madness induces a psychological state that is defined as mad . . . to induce sanity.” This reflects Vervaeke’s (2019g, 37:15) description of the meaning crisis as a “nomonoligical disorder” between understanding and experiencing the world, between “our intellectual attempts to understand the world and our existential attempts to dwell within it . . . people say their existence is absurd.”

Scholars have invoked the sacred to bridge these epistemic gaps (Vayne 2017; Davis 2019; van der Brak 2023). But it is clear the sacred and profane are woven fine. Erik Davis introduced “the weird” to explain the sacred–profane intersection in psychedelic discourse. The weird represents active mind–culture looping through “cultural gnosis” (Davis 2019, 5). It creates new forms neither fully transcendent nor culturally determined, functioning as both experience mode and cultural constructor. Even for those with expectations, psychedelics communicate beyond preconceptions (Davis 2019, 85), contributing to Western re-enchantment, counter to Weberian rationalization (Partridge 2005, 2006).

“The weird” represents a dynamic interplay between mind and cultural reality in psychedelic experience—a “creative and reflexive engagement” with culture through “visionary skepticism” (Davis 2019, 5). Davis frames it as a loop where experience and cultural interpretation continuously reshape each other, comparing Lacan’s symbolic to Berger’s “consensus reality.” The weird transcends pure aesthetics, functioning as a mode of experience that both shapes and is shaped by culture: “[U]nder conditions of high weirdness, the causal relationship between cultural codes and ‘experience itself’ gets twisted into a loop” (Davis 2019, 6).

This phenomenon aligns with Andres van der Braak’s (2023) interpretation of Latour’s “true constructions”—a collapsing of the artificial/authentic dichotomy—suggesting that psychedelic experiences are simultaneously made and real—not merely subjective interpretations but genuine encounters with true realities always already shaped by cultural and linguistic frameworks (Latour and Woolgar 1992). It also resonates with Otto’s concept of the holy, contributing to what Partridge (2005, 2006) terms the “re-enchantment of the West”—a cultural shift where rationalistic materialism gives way to new forms of spirituality and meaning-making, particularly through experiences that bridge scientific and mystical worldviews.

Davis (2019, 27, 20) writes: “The world is full of constructions, but it is full of encounters too, and the vibrant margins wherein we meet these Others shape and sometimes shatter those languages, concepts, and identities that, equally inevitably, map and manufacture the frameworks within which we make do.” This perspective, aligned with Vervaeke’s approach, simultaneously scales up to the gestalt while examining granular details, at-one-ing the plural world in a strange loop.

The economic realities of the psychedelic renaissance present their own challenges. While most molecules remain in the public domain, private investment has followed philanthropic funding. Recent controversies, such as Wonderland Miami’s ban of Psymposia critical theorists—accused as witch-hunters despite the reality of sexual abuse among researchers—along with Compass Pathways’s patenting attempts—exposing a psychedelic research company as an attempted monopoly, highlight how psychedelics can operate within, rather than disrupt, systems that generate meaning crises (Noorani 2020; Pace and Devenot 2021; Andrews and Wright 2022; Hausfeld 2023). In light of these problematics, what can be said of practical ways in which psychedelic experience and research can aid the meaning crisis? I turn to three examples: the moral psychology of psychedelics, the politics of peacebuilding, and ecodelia and animism.

Psychedelic Solutions to the Meaning Crisis: Moral Enhancement and Two Case Studies

Much of the appeal behind the contemporary use of psychedelics falls into the bracket of “wellness culture.” They are substances touted, with evidence, as good for the brain organ and the body as a whole. They can contribute to “cognitive enhancement.” This has given birth to a limited discourse surrounding “moral enhancement” and what this might mean. The first subsection here makes the argument that because moral enhancement is social, the socially plastic nature of psychedelics must be taken into account, and for this there are two contemporary pragmatic examples in peacebuilding and the perception of nature as personal or ensouled. Psychedelics allow for a congruence between the inner and the outer, the individual and the social, or the perception and the act, via a “fidelity to the event” (Rosemanl and Karkabi 2021; Badiou [1998] 2006), but this is not an inevitable affordance. The first two of these applications—moral enhancement and peacebuilding—build on previous arguments I have made in the fields of ritual theory and mysticism. The argument here is similar but applied to the meaning crisis instead of ritual theory (Schunemann 2024, 2025).

Conclusion

The meaning crisis is a disjunct between salience and truth that undergirds a polycrisis in human thought and action. Psychedelics have helped highlight much regarding human flourishing in political sectarian conflict and ecological motivation. Whether psychedelic revelations inevitably resolve into action, however, seems unlikely. The political programmatization of ritual may engender fidelity to events in the interest of political ends such as peace, but the question of what is worth emphasizing—and who has the power to guide these—also presents problems. Despite this, the study of psychedelic states of consciousness, and especially psychedelics’ impact on the perception of fact and value, deserves rigorous context articulation and can have positive consequences for the meaning crisis when the relationality between humans and environment is emphasized.

While psychedelics are not immune to the problems the meaning crisis poses—being part and parcel of a perceived set of felt incongruences in the contemporary condition, especially around physicalist articulation, growth ideologies, and monopoly capitalism—the still small hope psychedelics bring many is one of the being-possibles of a better world. They can galvanize the bringing about of a world where, for example, military and ecological crises meet actual solutions. If the affordances psychedelics can provide are to be realized, though, this necessitates psychedelics being placed in particular enabling conditions with particular causal intentions.

The psychedelic psychiatric pioneer Stanislav Grof (2009, 29-30) describes psychedelics as “unspecific amplifiers that increase the cathexis (energetic charge) associated with the deep unconscious contents of the psyche and make them available for conscious processing,” referring to their impact on the individual psyche. Though this term has been used to describe the way psychedelics intensify what is already present in the mind set and wider setting of the individual, it is clear that psychedelics also make the crisis of meaning louder. If the use and study of psychedelics is to help the meaning crisis in any way without falling prey to the same issues that undergird it, then the words of Emile Cioran’s friend prove sage: “I’m tired of people telling me life is meaningless—life isn’t even meaningless” (Doyle 2021).

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Katie Forcer and Sam Drysdale for helping in the editing of this essay.