Some of the most meaningful experiences people have are completely ineffable—impossible to put into words—suggesting that meaning is not reducible to propositional knowledge or belief.

Wisdom is not merely abstract knowledge but is fundamentally about realizing meaning in life in both senses: becoming aware of it and making it real in practice.

Western culture is experiencing a mental health crisis with rising suicide rates, increasing prevalence of nihilism, cynicism, and sense of losing touch with reality among both individuals and groups.

Exaptation is an evolutionary mechanism where structures that evolved for one purpose are repurposed for another; the brain frequently uses this mechanism, taking existing cognitive processes designed for one function and exapting them for different functions.

Therapy is booming in modern culture partly because of the meaning crisis and partly because people seek therapy to recover lost kinds of knowing—insight, transformation of how they see things, and transformation of their sense of self and realness rather than just transformation of beliefs.

It is possible to develop a scientific, cognitive-scientific account of enlightenment and explain why it alleviates suffering from lack of meaning, a phenomenon that is both historically perennial and particularly acute in modernity.

There is an increasing prevalence of BS (bullshit, in Frankfurt's technical sense) pervading culture, society, and academia, which has spiked in concordance with other increases in dark cultural factors.

There is increasing academic and public interest in wisdom as a topic, with books on stoicism and other ancient philosophies becoming popular, signaling a cultural hunger for wisdom that was not present in recent decades.

Psychedelic therapy achieves healing rates of approximately 80 percent for post-traumatic stress disorder, compared to conventional therapy's 20 percent success rate, representing a radical improvement in treatment outcomes.

Meaning in life is highly predictive of well-being and how well people are doing in life generally, making it a central factor in human flourishing that people are increasingly seeking.

Zombies and superheroes have become pervasive in entertainment and mythology because they are cultural expressions of a sense that people are stuck, unable to act with full agency, reflecting the existential sense that civilization is in crisis or collapse.

The meaning crisis is distinct from but interdependent with the environmental crisis and socioeconomic crisis; all three crises are interconnected and cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

Awakening experiences are a subset of mystical experiences characterized by a sense that the experience was more real than ordinary reality and requires radical life transformation; research shows lives genuinely improve after these experiences.

The machinery that makes humans adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that makes them susceptible to foolishness and self-deception, suggesting a deep structural vulnerability in human cognition.

Foolishness is distinct from ignorance: ignorance is lack of knowledge, while foolishness is lack of wisdom—a failure of one's capacity to pursue one's goals due to self-deception and self-destructive behavior.

Most horror movies are not truly horrific; real horror is an experience in which one's grip on reality itself is being undermined, which is why people find it terrifying.

Meaning can be understood through metaphor: just as sentences have meaning through pieces fitting together and making cognitive impact, life has meaning when its pieces fit together and connect one to the world in an analogous way.

This series will develop both a historical account of the meaning crisis (how it arose) and a structural-functional account of meaning (how its cognitive mechanisms operate), and these two accounts will inform and constrain each other to provide a comprehensive understanding.

This is a complex and difficult problem for which there are no simplistic answers; anyone offering a one-hour solution to the meaning crisis is either deceiving, manipulating, or significantly self-deceived.

Vervaeke commits to offering rigorous, rational argumentation with proper scholarly credit to others, but acknowledges he cannot be unbiased; instead, he will present his arguments and explain why he believes them to be highly plausible.