How modern life thins meaning

Research and Sense-Making
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I’d love to share an essay that I think names an important thread for the 2R / metacrisis conversation.

A lot of metacrisis thinking rightly critiques modernity’s fixation on measurement, abstraction, optimisation, and instrumental reason. But there’s a harder problem underneath: any complex society still needs coordination.

And large-scale coordination requires proxies: compressed signals of value that allow strangers to trust, evaluate, collaborate, choose, and organise at scale. Credentials, metrics, ratings, profiles, institutional roles, personal brands, public narratives.

The problem is that proxies begin to colonise orientation: our sense of what matters, what deserves attention, what counts as success, and even what we come to desire. We cannot simply move beyond them.

That gives us a slightly different explanation for the meaning crisis. It is not only that modernity disenchants the world or neglects the inner life. It is that the systems required to coordinate modern freedom also train us to pursue compressed substitutes for direct contact with what matters.

So one challenge for any Second Renaissance is this: how do we re-establish contact with what matters without losing the coordination capacities that modernity made possible?

I’d be very interested in how it lands here.

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Love it! Lots to chew on here.

Something like non-attachment to proxies seems indicated. Use them, yes, for reasons you point out. But not in any ultimately serious way.

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re: “A yoga school becomes a certification mill.”

No way to avoid this. I left a career as an software engineer to study philosophy (NOT a career move), then ended up teaching foraging because nobody would employ me. I became very good at this and ended up writing the most comprehensive book on European fungi foraging ever published. I was running courses that made a nice profit, but increasingly had to scour the countryside to make sure I had enough fungi to teach and feed people. My hobby had become my job…a lot of forager’s dream job…but it was now a job, not a hobby. Eventually I just wanted to get out of it, and now I run a smallholding as ecologically as possible. BUT…we don’t make enough money, so now we are planning on running courses on sustainable smallholding and country crafts, and I am keenly aware of the repeating pattern.

I can see no solution short of a total rethink of the way civilisation operates.