Finding Meaning in An Increasingly Absurd World

Although society at large will never find the courage to acknowledge its existential descent, there is a growing unspoken feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with “The World”: it has simply stopped making sense. Today I pose the question: did it ever make sense?

Many try to rationalise today’s state of the world as a temporary downturn, perhaps a new dark chapter in humanity’s tumultuous yet cyclical history. What very few of us realise however is that, unlike other species which are truly cyclical and sustainable, humanity is as linear as they come. In fact, it is exponential. Our civilisations are shooting stars that burn brighter than all others, vanishing into the night just as quickly as they appear.

Those of us overcome by frustration seek villains to blame for “the state of the world”. Rather than contemplating the unsustainable nature of humanity itself, something which has been an intrinsic element of human existence since the beginning of time, we choose to blame the world on the latent emergence of “bad actors”: greedy oligarchs, capitalism, technology and industrial society, Satan, or simply the next-door neighbour. If only things were that simple. I’m afraid the answer is “all of the above and much, much more”.

Because when we say, “the world makes no sense anymore”, we are exclusively referring to the human world, and all that comprises human civilisation. We forget that the rest of the world is actually fine, as long as it is left alone by humans. The human world never made sense and it never will, at least from the viewpoints of biology, mathematics, and physics: exponential population increase and use of resources are self-limiting processes whatever the Church, the stock market, or your favourite politician may spin. But in the post-science society we live in, you may disregard what I’ve just said as a “personal opinion”. Sadly, physics and biology are as much personal opinions as death is an optional elective. No one can fight thermodynamics and extinction when they knock on their door.

Within this incredibly limited version of “the world” humanity therefore inhabits, this civilisation managed the impossible: to bury the truth of its unsustainable existence under countless economic and religious dogmas backed by several thousand-year-old mythologies, ideological narratives and cultural traditions that continue to pay homage to all our favourite lies. It is only outside of this “human world” therefore that truth can be found, but this requires breaking through the miles-thick, solidified mess of the Civilisational Lie: the collection of narratives which allow us to keep calm, overshoot and self-destruct.

The non-human world is the only one which makes sense, and this is where immense meaning, joy and consolation can be found by those of us desperate for answers and solutions. The natural world, what remains of it, is bound by irrevocable laws that are unbreakable and undefeatable, and this is a source of reassurance which is much more reliable than God. Nature is more pure and more balanced than any human spiritual practice or meditation, exactly because it is bound by physical laws which are universal, impartial, and eternal. Those who tend to gardens know very well what I’m talking about.

Take for example a poppy growing in my garden: if it receives enough water and sunlight, it will bloom. If it receives less, it will struggle and possibly even die. As it seeds itself around the garden and beyond each year, it will only populate areas where there is adequate sunlight, water, nutrition and little competition. If these resources are scarce, the poppy doesn’t drill the ground for water, kill neighbouring plants, or kill and exploit its fellow poppies to gain territory and resources. It lives within the limits to growth it is subjected to by what is available, which is in turn determined by physics and biology.

Human civilisations are ignorant of physics, and this is why they disappear. But the poppy always continues because it knows how to wait, how to conserve, and how to pause its consumption. All organisms do, except human societies. Rather than repeating its history of one after another civilisational collapse, humanity needs to emulate viable examples of ancient civilisations which continue to thrive to this day: they are called ecosystems.

As long as humans continue their futile battle against the physics of the ecosystem, they will ultimately always be a casualty of that ecosystem. Any civilisation which attempted to create order out of chaos and destruction eventually went down in history as a temporary aberration within an immortal energy system that will always be bigger than any civilisation.

Our generation is the first in thousands of human generations to be forced to come face-to-face with the Civilisational Lie. How do we then expand our definition of “the world” beyond the limiting dogmas of human culture? For a start, people can free their minds from this corrupt dystopia if they search for meaning outside of it, rather than through consuming the clickbait thrown at them by the Unhappiness Machine. The greatest fraud capitalism committed was convincing everyone they can find meaning through a series of transactions. Most humans today simply do not know how to be happy, exactly because of this massive indoctrination. We are sacrificing our own well-being, health and freedom so we can have the very things which leave us increasingly trapped, sick, and unfulfilled: meaningless stuff, meaningless jobs, and meaningless distractions. Our economic system is a global marketing campaign against true happiness. Why? Because the biggest threat to this economic system is a satisfied consumer. Capitalism’s job is to breed emotionally amputated humans that will keep coming back for more distraction narcotics and retail painkillers. We are being purposely directed by this system to search for our missing parts in the very places where we’ll never find them: fear, insecurity, consumption and mutual destruction.

We need to begin taking all our references from nature rather than the echo chamber of the Civilisational Lie. The search for a meaningful existence cannot be found in a version of the world consisting of millions of addictions and psychological pathologies. Humans have become owned by their obsession to own, but ownership and accumulation are passive forms of connecting with the world: desperate attempts to find meaning which always fail, because they lack genuine curiosity. Meaning is only found by walking alone in the darkness and filling in your own gaps, rather than following the meandering paths of a retail society that has set itself on a self-destruction sequence.

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George is an author, scientist and researcher covering the polycrisis

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