Why We Should Create Personal Mythologies

In John Vervaeke’s amazing 50-episode YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (which is very long but completely worth every minute if this topic is of interest to you), he articulates 3 Perennial Problems that cause us to feel like we’ve lost our grasp on the meaning of our lives

We’ve lost our sense of connection to an unquestionable shared ideology. Whereas throughout most of history we could rely on very specific cultural traditions, stories, a wise leaders that told us what is true, what is important, and what we should do with ourselves, for the most part those traditions have been exposed as being mistaken and in many cases harmful. There aren’t any unquestionable ideologies we can just assume we all agree on anymore. We can’t take anything for granted, and this causes us to feel like life is absurd. At best, we can suspend ourselves a bit above nihilism with secular humanism, but it’s not very stable because there’s nothing unquestionable about it.

We’ve lost our sense of belonging and connection with others. Our identities have fragmented, intersected, complexified, and polarized. We’re swirling around an inescapable web of cultural systems that continue to rely on tribalism and oppression to maintain cohesiveness, and we can’t figure out how to connect with each other when every one of us has both benefited from and been complicit in perpetuating the problems at hand. The only tribes that create belonging these days seem to be those engaged in war with other tribes, and it’s tough to feel like we truly belong in any of them. Expressed as feelings of alienation and loneliness.

We’ve lost our sense of connection to ourselves. Without an ideology we don’t question, and a community we truly belong to, it’s tough to know who we even are. We don’t have mentors and rituals to help us find ourselves. Even as we present ourselves as personal brands, we know that there’s no true soul there. We’re stuck with questions about every belief system, feeling like an outsider to every community, and don’t even know what we want or who we truly are. This expresses itself as a pervasive anxiety, and we soothe ourselves by taking up a regimen of escapes from that anxiety.

But where can religion live? Where can spirituality live? Where can angels, demons, heaven, hell, ghosts, muses, superstitions, horoscopes, etc live? If you put them in the realm of the head (information) they quickly fall apart due to lack of tangible evidence. If you put them into the realm of the heart (personal values), there’s no way to say that these subjective values connect to universal truths, which most of them try to claim at some point. If you put them in the realm of the hands (useful proposals), we quickly learn that they have very little predictive power and usefulness compared to other belief systems. Before the meaning crisis ate it all up, there was another realm that we could all use by referring to “God’s Word” or “Divine Will” or fate or destiny or prophesy or what have you. That realm has been destroyed, bit by bit, over the last couple centuries, and it was eaten up by the other realms: the head realm invalidated its truth claims, the heart realm showed how its belief systems had the effect of reducing our agency against our values, and the hands realm pointed to other belief systems that were much more effective at building useful proposals about the world, and profiting from them.

One strategy for figuring out what to put into the mythical realm is to look for real problems that we haven’t had much success addressing within the other realms. The realms of Head, Heart, and Hands are designed to resolve conversations in their own unique ways, so what kinds of problems or conversations could a mythical realm address that the others can’t?

The real bottom line here is that we have a deeply embedded need to feel connected to the meaningless universe. The realms of Head, Heart, and Hands have nothing that can help us with this.

I think of this category of problems as “wicked problems” and have written some thoughts about it with a few others. I’ve tried to articulate the qualities of a wicked problem as:

1. Personal, unavoidable, and existential
2. Difficult, requiring lots of investment up front, and ongoing
3. Complex and impossible to really pin down for sure
4. Lacking in any viable solutions

Dark Forest is filled with disquieting truths that we can’t escape and even in our tiny corner of it there are existential problems expanding like a cancer across the land. The Dark Forest is teeming with giant monsters like political polarization, environmental disasters, systemic discrimination and inequality, human rights, morality, and the problem of mortality itself. There are also smaller monsters like personal fulfillment, creative energy, mental and physical health, difficult relationships, power dynamics, personal responsibility, financial independence, and job satisfaction

This isn’t a realm that responds readily to facts, values, and proposals like we’re used to. It’s a realm that requires impossible trade-offs between existential needs, personal transformation, and enlightenment to transcend our understanding and become able to see the problems from a higher perspective. All we have is a problematic forest so far — we don’t have any gods to pray to for help, or prophesies of heroes that will rescue us. In fact, the reliance on heroes and saviors and gods was part of what made the realm fall apart last time, so we need something that not only integrates with the other realms but that also makes them stronger as well.