The Meaning Crisis Cannot Be Solved by Explanation
Why awareness, information, and online discourse fail to restore meaning—and why embodiment, proximity, and lived responsibility still matter more then you think.
The idea that modern society is suffering from a meaning crisis is no longer fringe. It has entered academic discourse, popular psychology, and long-form media with increasing urgency. Rising suicide rates, particularly among younger people, widespread depression, disengagement from work and community, and a persistent sense of emptiness despite material abundance all point to the same conclusion. Something essential has eroded, and people feel it even if they do not posses the understanding to articulate it.
Much of the contemporary discussion around this issue has been articulated clearly and rigorously by thinkers such as John Vervaeke1, whose work maps the breakdown of meaning across cognition, culture, and consciousness. His explanations are careful, expansive, and often compelling. He traces how modernity dismantled the religious, cultural, and communal structures that once embedded individuals in systems of value and purpose. He shows how we replaced lived wisdom with information, participation with observation, and formation with abstraction. On the level of diagnosis, this work is difficult to dismiss.
And yet, there is an irony running through the entire meaning-crisis discourse that I think deserves to be named directly. The very medium used to explain the problem is structurally incapable of resolving it. Long lectures, books, podcasts, and online platforms can describe the absence of meaning with great precision, but having a description alone does not restore what has been lost nor does it provide healthy role models—as John refers to. In the large majority of cases, it intensifies the problem by making people more aware of what is missing without giving them any place to stand on their own.
A common framework used in these discussions is the hierarchy from data to information, from information to knowledge, and from knowledge to wisdom. The model is sound as an abstraction. Data becomes information when it is interpreted, information becomes knowledge when it is understood and internalized, and knowledge becomes wisdom when it is lived and applied. The failure occurs when we assume that explaining this hierarchy moves people up the ladder. It does not. And what is potential, or effectiveness, if it is not measured through feedback? Explanation increases cognitive clarity, but meaning does not arise from clarity alone.
Meaning is not a mental state; it is an emergent property of lived alignment. It arises when perception, action, responsibility, and consequence are integrated over time. You cannot think your way into that integration. You cannot watch someone else achieve it and inherit the result. Meaning requires participation in conditions that demand coherence, and those conditions cannot be transmitted through content.
One of the more accurate aspects of contemporary cognitive accounts is the idea that consciousness functions as a filter rather than a mirror. Human beings do not perceive reality directly. We filter it based on relevance, salience, survival, and learned patterns. Most of this filtering happens unconsciously, shaped by embodiment and environment rather than deliberate thought. From this perspective, meaning is not something you add to life; it is something that emerges when your own definitions of relevance are calibrated and improved upon over time.
This is precisely why explanation reaches a hard limit. You cannot explain someone into a different relevance structure. Relevance is shaped by what you must respond to, what depends on you, and what you cannot escape, within the current moment. It is shaped by proximity, getting up close to to the dirty work. A screen can inform you, but it cannot obligate you. And without obligation, finding relevance actually collapses in on itself.
This brings me to the question of role models, which is often raised as a missing ingredient in modern life. The claim is that people lack figures who embody wisdom, integrity, and responsibility in ways that can be emulated. This diagnosis is again largely correct. But the mistake comes in assuming that role models can be scaled or mediated. A role model is not someone you admire from a distance—the one-sidedness of social media will not work. A role model is someone you observe across many different contexts, including failure, pressure, boredom, an conflict. Do not forget that experiencing how someone celebrates happiness are equally important. All sides of the spectrum, the less filtering involved the better.
This is why online figures, no matter how thoughtful or sincere, cannot fulfill this role. The internet only ever shows what is selected. Even books, especially books, are controlled narratives. You only see what the author chooses to reveal. A real role model cannot be edited out of your life. Their inconsistencies, limitations, and reactions are part of what makes them instructive in the first place.
If we follow this logic honestly, the absence of role models does not begin with social media or modern philosophy. It begins much earlier, within the family structure itself. For most people, the first and most influential role models are their parents. Not because parents are perfect, but because they are present, observable, and formative from very early on in our lives. When parental authority, responsibility, and coherence weaken, meaning does not transmit forward. No amount of cultural explanation compensates for that loss—in fact, it tends to highlight the loss.
This is where the meaning crisis reveals itself as less accidental than we might like to believe. Modern systems are not designed to produce strong families, intergenerational continuity, or localized responsibility. They are designed to produce workers, consumers, and compliant participants. Strong meaning anchors create friction in such systems. Weak meaning anchors make people easier to redirect, replace, and manage. Whether intentional or not does not matter, the outcome is the same.
The most uncomfortable truth in this entire conversation is that explanation can make the crisis worse. For people who already sense the misalignment—especially high-bandwidth individuals—greater awareness without new structure increases despair. Seeing the problem more clearly while remaining trapped inside it is destabilizing. This is why so many intelligent, perceptive people feel exhausted rather than empowered by meaning-crisis discourse. They do not need more insight; they need viable environments!
This is also why the problem is not fundamentally cultural or even ideological. It is architectural. Modern life lacks the structures that once stabilized embodied wisdom. Online platforms, influencer culture, and parasocial authority are predictable substitutes that cannot carry the load they are asked to bear. They collapse because they were never intended to hold meaning in the first place.
NEXUS operates from this recognition. It does not claim to solve the meaning crisis, and it does not offer role models for the world at large. That would be dishonest. What it offers instead is orientation for those whose internal operating system no longer fits the structures they are embedded in. It is explicit about its limits and intentional about scale. Meaning does not return through mass transmission. It stabilizes locally, through proximity, responsibility, and lived coherence.
Online material can point you into a direction. It can help you clarify. It can help people recognize what they are experiencing. But it cannot replace embodied relationships or real consequence. Anyone claiming otherwise is still operating inside the abstraction layer that produced the crisis to begin with.
If meaning is to return at all, it will not come from better explanations or larger audiences. It will come from fewer abstractions, smaller circles, and environments where people can no longer outsource responsibility. That is not a comforting conclusion, but it is an honest one. And honesty, at this stage, matters more than reassurance.
Closing Thoughts
One final note, because this critique applies to NEXUS as much as to anything else. I am fully aware that if NEXUS were to remain purely digital, it would reproduce the same structural limitation as described above. That is why, while our work currently still only has an online presence, beginning with our first webinar, the direction is to be explicitly physical.
In early January 2026 I will be relocating to Berlin, with the intention of bridging this gap in practice, not theory. The aim is to create situations where people can actually meet, spend time together, see each other in ordinary and difficult moments, and allow meaning to emerge through proximity rather than performance. This is not about me trying to be a role model for others, and certainly not about building a digital persona. It is about making myself reachable, open to conversation, and present in real space.
If you happen to be in Berlin, passing through, or simply feel the need for human contact rather than discourse, you are most welcome to reach out. It does not have to be deep or formal; a coffee is enough. NEXUS is not here to solve the meaning crisis, but it is committed to moving out of abstraction and back into lived contact, where meaning has always actually formed.
Crossing the Threshold
On January 18th, from 19:00 to 20:30 CET, we’re hosting our first webinar: Crossing the Threshold. It’s about moving beyond the familiar 3D script into a grounded, autonomous way of living—how to truly hold yourself in that space.
We won’t dissect this article directly, but the themes overlap. If this piece resonated, this session will take it deeper. Tickets are available at TheNexusFormula.com
See you there!
You can watch the following podcast to get a sense of the meaning-crisis concept.
Strong and precise, Wout. What you’re exposing here is not only a meaning crisis, but also a terminological one.
The deception rarely lies in explicit falsehoods, but in language that renders the underlying mechanism invisible. Dominant ideologies are most powerful when they become nameless—when they no longer appear as a choice, but as “the way the world simply works.” What is politically designed gets framed as natural law or common sense.
That logic runs straight through your essay:
citizens are reframed as consumers, democratic agency becomes buying and selling, responsibility is individualized while its causes are structural. Terms like investment, freedom, or reform often mask extraction and dismantling, yet sound like progress. An architectural problem is moralized—and therefore made untouchable.
Within such a linguistic frame, explanation cannot restore what has been lost. More awareness inside the same vocabulary only sharpens the friction and deepens the sense of exhaustion. Meaning does not return through better descriptions, but when people are placed back into conditions where language is no longer sufficient—where proximity, consequence, and responsibility cannot be outsourced.
This is why your insistence on embodiment and physical presence lands so clearly. Meaning will not re-emerge through scale, reach, or content, but through breaking the semantic membrane that has separated us from lived reality.
Whoever controls the words controls the frame. And as long as that frame remains intact, meaning will stay something we talk about—rather than something we once again inhabit.