Meaning Junkies

Plutonium, beer cans, and the crisis of meaning.

Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) from Back to the Future (1985) holding the plutonium needed to power his time machine (left) and a beer can to power his later model in Back to the Future Part II (1989) (right).

Why is it that reading, writing, enjoying hobbies, and spending time with friends and loved ones is enough for me? In other words, why is it that I don’t need a belief in a higher power, a religion, or a political ideology or social cause that functions as one? Why is it that seemingly millions would, in my place, find my life unbearably hollow, not because we have different interests, but because they deem it too shallow, too devoid of “meaning”? Something you hear with increasing frequency in educated circles is that society is undergoing a “crisis of meaning” — that we have strayed too far from the traditional structures that fulfill our deepest existential needs. Left unchecked, so we are told, civilization will supposedly unravel. There is something real going on here. I see the same patterns, trends, and data as every other informed observer. All is obviously not well. At the same time, I confess to finding this baffling. Why do vast numbers of people need meaning so much? Why don’t I? Well, to answer the second question first, I do need meaning. Virtually everyone needs a sense of meaning in life. But the magnitude and intensity of that need is not evenly distributed.

Some folks are a little like Doc Brown’s original time machine from Back to the Future: they need plutonium to run, and nothing short of it will do. Others are like his DeLorean from the second film, the time machine mark II, that can be sufficiently fueled with naught but a banana peel and an old beer can. There are people for whom only the belief in a personal god or an all-encompassing political ideology will suffice. Only being part of a divine plan, or having a life-orienting political struggle could ever satisfy them. These are meaning junkies. Others need meaning too — they just don’t need as much, nor do they need it as badly. We might call them meaning sensitives. For them, a little dab’ll do ya. They can extract scraps of meaning out of almost anything, and rarely experience periods of existential angst or the tractor beam pull toward fervent, high-commitment sources of purported meaning.

A few caveats before I admittedly sail any deeper into the seas of pure conjecture here: This isn’t to say that sensitives can’t be religious, or that junkies can’t be atheists; nor that sensitives can’t be involved in political crusades, or that junkies can’t be apolitical. Meaning is hardly the only factor determining our life choices. But the need for meaning — and the severity of that need — has a profound impact on how people in free societies choose to arrange their lives. While one can be a preacher, a fundamentalist, an activist, or a campaigner for reasons wholly disconnected from meaning, and a few surely are, I would be very surprised if it turned out to be as likely as not. And while my commentary deals with the extremes referred to as meaning sensitives and junkies, I see this as a spectrum more than a hard dichotomy. That being said, it’s clear which camp I’m in, and what my biases are. I’m not going to disguise that.

It’s worth reiterating that meaning is a genuine human need, and any movement or school of thought premised on denying this fact is doomed to produce an above-average volume of unintended consequences. I have written about how the problem with New Atheism, for example, was that it attracted the kind of hyper-logical, pedantic, “debate bro” whose figurative meaning-shaped hole was small enough to be filled with nearly anything. When the work of discrediting religion was accomplished, New Atheism offered nothing as an alternative, because its meaning-sensitive members could not understand the need for it. When confronted with the question “What is the meaning of life?” secular humanists address it in one of two ways. They either argue that the question itself is incorrect, as though asking what the color of gravity is, or they say that meaning is subjective, and it’s something for each of us to discover and invent for ourselves.

Meaning sensitives cannot see how unsatisfying these answers are to meaning junkies, because the former can make do with just about anything, like Doc Brown’s mark II DeLorean running on a handful of refuse. But the latter needs weapons-grade plutonium. They need powerful stuff. Careers, hobbies, pleasures, and even loved ones aren’t enough. When I was nine, I asked my dad who he loved more, God or me? He chose his imaginary friend. I don’t recall feeling hurt over it. I was religious myself in those days. He obviously loved me, and still does. That has never been in doubt. Looking back on that moment, it’s not so much hurtful as it is insulting. Why wasn’t I, and the rest of our family, enough? Of course, that’s from my meaning-sensitive point of view. 

We sensitives often discount the role that meaning plays in motivating junkies because, lacking such cravings ourselves, we find it difficult to empathize with. This can be especially blinding when one’s inner circle is comprised entirely of like-minded people. We are drawn to supposing that behind seemingly meaning-driven choices lie more mundane and material motives, or simply that people are duped or brainwashed into it. These things do happen, but to regard that as the whole picture is to view the world through a peep hole of your own creation. Those of us who have closely known people who’ve been radicalized, or sucked down ideological rabbit holes, or who really “found religion” are offered a window into this otherwise mysterious psyche.

A childhood friend, a guy I’ve known since the second grade, and who was raised in a mostly secular household, walked away from the filmmaking career we had been jointly pursuing out of college in order to go to Israel and attend yeshiva. He spent most of the next decade studying Torah and Jewish law around the clock, and is to this day ultra-Orthodox. There was something deep inside this person, some itch wholly unconnected to material conditions and mundane concerns, that needed so direly to be scratched that he up and left his life behind. To fail to recognize this is to be just as insane as this behavior seemed to me. This empathy deficit runs both ways, of course. Every meaning junky I’ve known doesn’t know what to make of me. They can’t seem to wrap their minds around or fully believe that the sun raging inside them is a candle’s flame in me, as though I’m a person claiming that I only need to inhale air a few times a year. My time machine runs on garbage. I see that as efficient. They can only see garbage. But plutonium creates more concerning waste than the dregs of a Miller Lite.

One need only look through history to see the desolations of death and suffering trailing in the wake of religion, in both its theistic and political varieties. Collectivism, Manichaeism, and dogmatism are natural companions. Together they form the processed food of the meaning diet — not the only way to nourish oneself, nor the most wholesome, but certainly the most convenient and readily available. Likewise, the lack of meaning among those who need it most produces a hunger and desperation that leaves them susceptible to any group or movement peddling a meaning-like product. Just as someone on the brink of starvation will eat things no normal person would stomach, a meaning-starved individual will be far more receptive to all manner of extremists. This despair could also manifest in antisocial behavior. Scratch the surface of many senseless acts of violence, and you see young men desperate for something of significance, and who, on not finding it, resolve to express their misery by spreading it as widely as possible. Of course, what one also finds behind such incidents is mental illness.

Unflattering though it sounds, I chose to call this phenomenon meaning junkyism for a reason. I do see it as a sort of addiction. Just as many can enjoy alcohol in relative moderation, for others, it sends their lives into a harrowing spiral of self-destruction that only herculean effort and sturdy support structures might keep at bay. If I could wave a magic wand to make sure that no one ever reacted to alcohol that way, I would. So, too, I would do it for meaning. But that wand doesn’t exist, and it never will. This isn’t about changing human nature. When we take a more international view of the matter, we find that while the need for meaning varies among individuals within a society, it also appears to vary between societies.

The crisis of meaning is not a uniquely American phenomenon, but it seems to be a predominantly American one. Why? There are many differences between the US and the rest of the West. The two that appear most relevant are the comparatively emotional, sentimental, heart-on-sleeve American culture, and the enormous amount of ambient religious energy in our society that exists nowhere else in the developed world. Why is it that this crisis of meaning is everywhere evident in America, but a relative non-issue for the Dutch, the Danes, and the Swedes? It’s not because they’re more religious. It’s not because they’re more obsessed with politics. You can informally take stock of the prevalence of meaning junkyism in a free society by observing how prevalent religion, culture wars, social movements, and zealous activism are. Herein may lie a path to progress.

It has become a popular talking point that America’s crisis of meaning mostly stems from the decline of organized religion and the rise of “nones” — those who answer the pollster question “What is your religious affiliation” by answering “none.” The proffered solution is unsurprisingly that we must return to religion. Not necessarily to the most hardcore varieties. You won’t come across many respectable think pieces arguing that we need to become Dominionists, but you get the sense that these writers would consider the problem solved if most of the nones became Unitarians. I don’t think this is the answer, especially given a more global perspective. At bottom, this isn’t a problem of meaning. It’s a problem of culture.

Sure, there are some wayward people who would be less of a problem to themselves and the rest of us if they joined some liberal church instead of becoming deranged political obsessives. That’s a band-aid fix. The longer term goal is figuring out why American culture produces more meaning junkies than other prosperous nations, and how we might nudge it in other, more meaning-sensitive directions. Instead of distributing meaning methadone across society, maybe we ought to figure out why we are so addicted to meaning in the first place.

See also: “Did New Atheism Enable Wokeness?”

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