The meaning crisis refers to the widespread contemporary condition of existential disorientation, disconnection, and loss of coherent frameworks for generating purpose, wisdom, and deep engagement with reality. Coined and systematically explored by John Vervaeke, the term diagnoses not merely individual psychological malaise but a civilizational rupture in humanity’s capacity to make sense of existence in ways that feel genuine, transformative, and grounding. The crisis emerges from modernity’s double movement: the scientific worldview successfully dismantled pre-modern cosmologies as literally true while simultaneously undermining the symbolic, Participatory, and communal practices through which humans historically cultivated meaning, wisdom, and existential orientation.
Vervaeke traces the meaning crisis to what he calls the “two worlds mythology” - the Cartesian-Kantian division between the measurable, objective world accessible to science and the subjective, mental world of experience, value, and purpose. When the former is declared “real” and the latter relegated to mere projection or preference, the result is not liberation but profound alienation. The sacred becomes unintelligible, wisdom traditions appear as superstition, and individuals are left with instrumental rationality and consumer satisfaction as impoverished substitutes for existential depth. This contributes to epidemics of anxiety, depression, addiction, political tribalism, and susceptibility to conspiracy theories - all symptoms of systems desperately seeking patterns of meaning in a worldview that declares meaning subjective and arbitrary.
The concept connects to Richard Tarnas’s diagnosis of the modern subject-object split, Participatory knowing frameworks, nonduality as antidote to dualistic alienation, and the recovery of contemplation and wisdom practices. It resonates with critiques of nihilism, discussions of emergence suggesting reality contains depths beyond mechanistic reduction, and efforts to cultivate what Vervaeke calls “ecology of practices” - integrated approaches to transformative knowing that honour both rigorous inquiry and lived wisdom.