The Crisis of Meaning

The Crisis of Meaning Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
… and AI is about to pour gasoline on it

Three years. That’s how long I’ve been quiet here.
Not because nothing was happening. The opposite. So much happened that writing about it was inside, in my diary. In my personal self-therapy. Now I‘m back.

Let’s start with something Demis Hassabis posted recently. The CEO of Google DeepMind — a man who has spent his entire adult life accelerating the arrival of artificial general intelligence — publicly acknowledged that AI will produce a crisis of meaning. I want to add. It doesn’t cause it. But it will intensify it. He knows it’s already here.
He’s right. It isn’t a new story.

This crisis has been building since we fired God, or rather Catholicism and Protestantism. Those „isms“ that caused so much havoc.

The West’s quiet exit from Christianity didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow bleed across the 20th century — the erosion of shared myth, ritual, and the certainty that your suffering meant something.

Existentialism tried to fill the gap. Then consumerism. Then self-help. Then hustle culture. Then wellness.

None of it stuck because none of it answered the actual question: What is the meaning? 42? Why am I on planet earth?

Materialism offered a trade — meaning in exchange for stuff, status, and productivity. Enough people took the deal that it held together for decades. Then Covid cracked the container wide open.

Suddenly, people with laptops realized they could work from anywhere. Bali. Chiang Mai. Ko Phangan. The 4G got good enough. The Airbnbs got cheap enough. The deal got renegotiated unilaterally. Thousands, maybe millions quietly opted out of the treadmill. Me, one of them.

But here’s what nobody tells you about the beach.
The girls are beautiful. The sunsets are absurd. The coconuts are cheap.

And at 11pm on a Tuesday, staring at the ceiling fan, the question finds you anyway.

What am I actually doing with my life?
Changing the geography doesn’t change the software. If you carried the void into the airport, it arrives with your luggage.

The digital nomad scene is full of people who traded one form of avoidance for another — hustle culture for hedonism, the open office for the open water, the performance of productivity for the performance of freedom.

Meaning doesn’t materialize with nice weather. Now add AI to this.

Here’s what’s coming. The jobs that gave millions of people their identity — their reason to get up, their social structure, their sense of competence — are going to be automated.

Not all at once. But steadily. Starting with the knowledge work that the educated class built their self-worth around.

When your job was also your answer to “who are you,” losing it isn’t a career problem. It’s an existential one.

The question Demis flagged isn’t abstract. It’s going to land in people’s laps with a severance package and a lot of suddenly free time. And free time without inner resources isn’t freedom. It’s just a longer Tuesday night with the ceiling fan.

There is a way through. But it requires going in, not out.

I’ve spent years — genuinely, not as a brand — exploring what actually works. Not as philosophy. As practice.

One of the simplest things I know: the BLISS state. It sounds almost embarrassingly soft. It isn’t.

This is not the answer to every question AI raises. But it is the prerequisite for finding your own answers. You can’t think clearly about meaning from inside the anxiety the question creates.

Two things worth knowing about:

More soon. I’m back.

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