Why awareness, information, and online discourse fail to restore meaning—and why embodiment, proximity, and lived responsibility still matter more then you think.
Strong and precise, Wout. What you’re exposing here is not only a meaning crisis, but also a terminological one.
The deception rarely lies in explicit falsehoods, but in language that renders the underlying mechanism invisible. Dominant ideologies are most powerful when they become nameless—when they no longer appear as a choice, but as “the way the world simply works.” What is politically designed gets framed as natural law or common sense.
That logic runs straight through your essay:
citizens are reframed as consumers, democratic agency becomes buying and selling, responsibility is individualized while its causes are structural. Terms like investment, freedom, or reform often mask extraction and dismantling, yet sound like progress. An architectural problem is moralized—and therefore made untouchable.
Within such a linguistic frame, explanation cannot restore what has been lost. More awareness inside the same vocabulary only sharpens the friction and deepens the sense of exhaustion. Meaning does not return through better descriptions, but when people are placed back into conditions where language is no longer sufficient—where proximity, consequence, and responsibility cannot be outsourced.
This is why your insistence on embodiment and physical presence lands so clearly. Meaning will not re-emerge through scale, reach, or content, but through breaking the semantic membrane that has separated us from lived reality.
Whoever controls the words controls the frame. And as long as that frame remains intact, meaning will stay something we talk about—rather than something we once again inhabit.
Thanks Ron. Exactly! Just like George Orwell's newspeak, the less we are able to describe in words and have ownership over, the less it will be for anyone of us step of it. And simply because we have, after long and endless iterations, no idea anymore what we were talking about in the first place 🤦♂️
Great piece. Do I understand correctly that you limit meaning only to the interpersonal realm? Didn’t you find it meaningful to write this very essay? Or create your NEXUS program. Was that only a meaningless step towards real and direct engagement with people? Or is meaning maybe more versatile and can be found in a multitude of things? I certainly think I found meaning in writing. In reading. Im thinking. But maybe they’d feel less meaningful if I didn’t have a wife, son, family and friends. Maybe they are the foundation in light of which other things can be meaningful as well.
To clarify: I’m not limiting meaning strictly to the interpersonal realm, and definitely not only to relationships between people. My argument is more radical than that. I’m saying that meaning doesn’t exist in things themselves at all. Not in objects, not in activities, and not even in relationships themselves. Meaning is something the observer (the subject) brings to the situation.
So writing an essay, reading a book, or building NEXUS, none of those things inherently contain meaning to me. They’re tools, contexts, or environments through which I express or discover what I already consider meaningful.
For example, I personally don’t find the act of writing particularly meaningful. Writing is simply the mechanism that allows the ideas in my head to exist outside of it. The value comes later. When someone reads it, responds to it (like you just did), and a real exchange or connection emerges. The essay itself is just the bridge.
The same goes for NEXUS. The project itself isn’t where the meaning lies. It’s simply a structure meant to create the conditions for something that might be meaningful: real conversations, shared thinking, building things together, having fun with people who operate on a similar wavelength.
In that sense, writing, reading, and thinking can absolutely lead you toward meaning, but they’re not meaningful on their own. They’re more like instruments. A piano doesn’t contain music; it only makes music possible when someone plays it.
Your last point about family is actually a good example of the mechanism. Having a wife, son, family, and friends likely shapes how you interpret everything else you do to a much larger extend, that includes your writing and reading. They become part of the internal framework through which your meaning is understood.
So I’d frame it like this: meaning isn’t located in the world and discovered by us. It already resides within us, is understood by us, and then projected onto the world in what we build. The outside world simply gives us mirrors, tools, and triggers (each of these right or wrong, good or bad — because that too requires meaning to define) that help us recognize what matters to us in the first place.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. That's a very insightful perspective. So when we call something "meaningful," it's not that the activity itself carries meaning — it's more like that we live out the meaning already inside us. The activity is an expression, an acting out, not a source for meaning. In a similar vein, a soulless job doesn't strip you of meaning. It just blocks you from expressing what's inside. The meaning is still there, trapped. So the crisis isn't that the world lacks meaning or that it has become meaningless. It's that fewer people get to live out the meaning within.
Exactly. To that extent, the idea of “living things out” is really more of a conscious process of (re)discovery, if you know what I mean. The more you rediscover (often through failing and getting back up) the more your outward expression (in what you build, do, and create in the world) begins to resonate with who you actually are, with what was already within you to begin with.
I know that can sound a bit abstract or floaty, but you can see it very practically in everyday life. Take a simple question: why would anyone continue doing something they don’t actually want to do (whether in work, relationships, or the way they live)?
Usually it comes down to two things.
First, they may simply be in the “fail and get back up” phase. Most people spend a large part of their lives here. Trying things, realizing what doesn’t work, and slowly becoming more aware of themselves through that process.
Second, they may have reached a point where they no longer do things they fundamentally don’t want to do. At that stage, they’ve started to truly listen to themselves. In other words, they’re beginning to live in resonance with who they are.
Naturally, what you do from that second place becomes an expression of meaning you’ve already found (or rather rediscovered) within yourself and aligned with. In the end, it always comes down to walking the talk.
Someone might stay in a soulless job not simply because they’re trapped, but because that experience is precisely what eventually opens their eyes. At some point it becomes clear enough that they quit. Or at least become conscious of what they’re doing and start making deliberate choices.
So, indeed, the real issue isn’t that the world lacks meaning. The world was never meant to provide meaning in the first place. The problem is that the systems we live within don’t give us the space or the conditions to rediscover our own meaning, and therefore to express it.
Every system requires control to be called a system, and control inevitably places limits on individuals for the sake of the system’s stability. That’s why something can appear to offer freedom within a system, while still not being true freedom to someone who sees the constraints more clearly.
In relation to the soulless job example, the system is not pushing people enough. Also, the “fail and get back up” stage is not something we should collectively discourage. Just like how a good parent, wouldn’t punish his/her kid for dropping their ice cream on the floor.
Strong and precise, Wout. What you’re exposing here is not only a meaning crisis, but also a terminological one.
The deception rarely lies in explicit falsehoods, but in language that renders the underlying mechanism invisible. Dominant ideologies are most powerful when they become nameless—when they no longer appear as a choice, but as “the way the world simply works.” What is politically designed gets framed as natural law or common sense.
That logic runs straight through your essay:
citizens are reframed as consumers, democratic agency becomes buying and selling, responsibility is individualized while its causes are structural. Terms like investment, freedom, or reform often mask extraction and dismantling, yet sound like progress. An architectural problem is moralized—and therefore made untouchable.
Within such a linguistic frame, explanation cannot restore what has been lost. More awareness inside the same vocabulary only sharpens the friction and deepens the sense of exhaustion. Meaning does not return through better descriptions, but when people are placed back into conditions where language is no longer sufficient—where proximity, consequence, and responsibility cannot be outsourced.
This is why your insistence on embodiment and physical presence lands so clearly. Meaning will not re-emerge through scale, reach, or content, but through breaking the semantic membrane that has separated us from lived reality.
Whoever controls the words controls the frame. And as long as that frame remains intact, meaning will stay something we talk about—rather than something we once again inhabit.
Thanks Ron. Exactly! Just like George Orwell's newspeak, the less we are able to describe in words and have ownership over, the less it will be for anyone of us step of it. And simply because we have, after long and endless iterations, no idea anymore what we were talking about in the first place 🤦♂️
Great piece. Do I understand correctly that you limit meaning only to the interpersonal realm? Didn’t you find it meaningful to write this very essay? Or create your NEXUS program. Was that only a meaningless step towards real and direct engagement with people? Or is meaning maybe more versatile and can be found in a multitude of things? I certainly think I found meaning in writing. In reading. Im thinking. But maybe they’d feel less meaningful if I didn’t have a wife, son, family and friends. Maybe they are the foundation in light of which other things can be meaningful as well.
Thanks Dennis for the thoughtful comment.
To clarify: I’m not limiting meaning strictly to the interpersonal realm, and definitely not only to relationships between people. My argument is more radical than that. I’m saying that meaning doesn’t exist in things themselves at all. Not in objects, not in activities, and not even in relationships themselves. Meaning is something the observer (the subject) brings to the situation.
So writing an essay, reading a book, or building NEXUS, none of those things inherently contain meaning to me. They’re tools, contexts, or environments through which I express or discover what I already consider meaningful.
For example, I personally don’t find the act of writing particularly meaningful. Writing is simply the mechanism that allows the ideas in my head to exist outside of it. The value comes later. When someone reads it, responds to it (like you just did), and a real exchange or connection emerges. The essay itself is just the bridge.
The same goes for NEXUS. The project itself isn’t where the meaning lies. It’s simply a structure meant to create the conditions for something that might be meaningful: real conversations, shared thinking, building things together, having fun with people who operate on a similar wavelength.
In that sense, writing, reading, and thinking can absolutely lead you toward meaning, but they’re not meaningful on their own. They’re more like instruments. A piano doesn’t contain music; it only makes music possible when someone plays it.
Your last point about family is actually a good example of the mechanism. Having a wife, son, family, and friends likely shapes how you interpret everything else you do to a much larger extend, that includes your writing and reading. They become part of the internal framework through which your meaning is understood.
So I’d frame it like this: meaning isn’t located in the world and discovered by us. It already resides within us, is understood by us, and then projected onto the world in what we build. The outside world simply gives us mirrors, tools, and triggers (each of these right or wrong, good or bad — because that too requires meaning to define) that help us recognize what matters to us in the first place.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. That's a very insightful perspective. So when we call something "meaningful," it's not that the activity itself carries meaning — it's more like that we live out the meaning already inside us. The activity is an expression, an acting out, not a source for meaning. In a similar vein, a soulless job doesn't strip you of meaning. It just blocks you from expressing what's inside. The meaning is still there, trapped. So the crisis isn't that the world lacks meaning or that it has become meaningless. It's that fewer people get to live out the meaning within.
Exactly. To that extent, the idea of “living things out” is really more of a conscious process of (re)discovery, if you know what I mean. The more you rediscover (often through failing and getting back up) the more your outward expression (in what you build, do, and create in the world) begins to resonate with who you actually are, with what was already within you to begin with.
I know that can sound a bit abstract or floaty, but you can see it very practically in everyday life. Take a simple question: why would anyone continue doing something they don’t actually want to do (whether in work, relationships, or the way they live)?
Usually it comes down to two things.
First, they may simply be in the “fail and get back up” phase. Most people spend a large part of their lives here. Trying things, realizing what doesn’t work, and slowly becoming more aware of themselves through that process.
Second, they may have reached a point where they no longer do things they fundamentally don’t want to do. At that stage, they’ve started to truly listen to themselves. In other words, they’re beginning to live in resonance with who they are.
Naturally, what you do from that second place becomes an expression of meaning you’ve already found (or rather rediscovered) within yourself and aligned with. In the end, it always comes down to walking the talk.
Someone might stay in a soulless job not simply because they’re trapped, but because that experience is precisely what eventually opens their eyes. At some point it becomes clear enough that they quit. Or at least become conscious of what they’re doing and start making deliberate choices.
So, indeed, the real issue isn’t that the world lacks meaning. The world was never meant to provide meaning in the first place. The problem is that the systems we live within don’t give us the space or the conditions to rediscover our own meaning, and therefore to express it.
Every system requires control to be called a system, and control inevitably places limits on individuals for the sake of the system’s stability. That’s why something can appear to offer freedom within a system, while still not being true freedom to someone who sees the constraints more clearly.
In relation to the soulless job example, the system is not pushing people enough. Also, the “fail and get back up” stage is not something we should collectively discourage. Just like how a good parent, wouldn’t punish his/her kid for dropping their ice cream on the floor.