Personal Summary
Vervaeke’s work first found me in the midst of the COVID pandemic, in a bit of a meaning crisis myself. What I valued about this video series the first time I watched, was that it weaved a singular thread through a multitude of ideas that were hitting me at this time.
On this first watch, I made it probably 1/3 of the way through the series. The Notes I have below (and in future entries) are what stands out to me on my 2026 revisitation of this series. The links lead to individual concept notes within my garden, which as time goes on - should form a bit of through line across the layers of my public thinking.
Notes
- Rising public + academic interest in meaning, not just happiness/contentedness - meaning in life is strongly predictive of wellbeing
- Convergence: Buddhism, the mindfulness revolution, renewed interest in wisdom traditions (Stoicism), psychedelics/transformative experiences, academic interest in meaning
- A parallel “dark side” cluster is converging alongside the light side
- Mental health crisis, spiking suicide rates
- Collapse of trust in institutions — political, judicial, religious, civic/club participation all declining
- Too much time in virtual environments — social media linked to depression/loneliness, echoed in the entertainment and mythologies people gravitate to
- Core thesis: the light and dark factors share a single unifying explanation - the culture is going through a meaning crisis
- Wisdom is framed as the cultivation/realization of meaning - “realizing” in both senses: becoming aware and making real
- Foolishness vs. ignorance - a key distinction
- Ignorance = lack of knowledge; foolishness = lack of wisdom, agency undermined by self-deception/self-destructive behavior
- The same cognitive machinery that makes us adaptively intelligent is what makes us susceptible to this — sets up later themes of absurdity, alienation, futility, horror
- Stated approach/stance for the series
- Not claiming to offer uncontested truth - offering arguments and evidence
- Deep roots of meaning-making predate humanity - this is a continuum, not a hard start point
- Co-author Philip Miscoh’s concern: meaning-making/cognition trace back into evolutionary heritage well before humans
- Starting point chosen (Upper Paleolithic transition, ~40,000 BCE) marks when recognizably human culture emerges, not an absolute origin. See Upper Paleolithic Transition
- Evidence for a cognitive shift at the Upper Paleolithic transition
- Representational/symbolic art, sculpture, cave painting, music appear
- First calendars - symbolic tracking of moon phases/days, prior to numeracy
- Framed as a software change, not a hardware change - brain itself (~160,000 years old) wasn’t changing; how it was being used was
- Citing David Lewis-Williams, Matt Rossano (Supernatural Selection, “Did Meditation Make Us Human?”), Michael Winkelman
- Context: a near-extinction bottleneck preceded the transition
- Population crunched to maybe ~10,000 individuals (~30,000–70,000 years ago), tied to climatic shift at end of last ice age and a supervolcanic eruption in Africa (~70,000 years ago)
- Pressure drove migration to coasts and, per Vervaeke, a distinctive cognitive/cultural response
- Distributed cognition + trust rituals as a survival response
- Networked cognition across culture (brains, not computers) becomes a powerful problem-solving tool
- Living/cooperating with strangers outside one’s kinship group is a civilizational precondition most people take for granted
- Ritual (e.g., handshake) emerge to build trust/relationship with people you don’t personally know
- Links → Distributed Cognition
- Mindsight (Daniel Siegel) - the ability to read others’ mental states
- As this capacity increases, so does the ability to read one’s own mental states
- Proposed as an origin point for metacognition and mindfulness
- Initiation rituals as costly signaling
- Historically involved real risk, threat, sacrifice — enduring pain/fear as proof of commitment to the group
- Modern initiation rituals are a tamed-down version of this
- Shamanism as a psycho-technology
- Defined psycho-technology as the systematic use of a tool to enhance the software of cognition (cites Andy Clark’s “natural-born cyborg”)
- Analogy: removing literacy from someone’s head collapses the range of problems they can solve — same hardware, degraded software
- Shamanic techniques: sleep deprivation, extended singing/dancing/chanting, imitation (masks/costume of animals or figures), social isolation, sometimes psychedelics
- Cites Steve Taylor (Waking from Sleep) on disruptive strategies used to induce awakening experiences
- Shaman as participatory knower
- “Becoming the deer” - adopting the deer’s perspective/way of being to enhance tracking, not a metaphysical claim
- Combines traits usually distributed across separate people: charismatic, artist, therapist, healer - able to trigger the recipient’s own placebo response
- Notes placebo effect accounts for 30–40% of the efficacy attributed to real medication
- Etymology ties shaman to wisdom
- “Shaman” = one who knows/sees/has insight; historically regarded as wise - parallels the word “wizard” (wise person)
- Sets up the throughline: meaning-making, altered states of consciousness, and enhanced contact with the world are linked from the start
- Series roadmap