Three Crises in Our World Today
We speak of an identity crisis, a loneliness epidemic, and a crisis of meaning. I have come to believe they are all different names for the same problem: the loss of belonging.
I have spent most of my adult life studying what makes people flourish. I have also spent most of my adult life trying to flourish. Some seasons it was easier. Some seasons it was not. What I can tell you is this. Something is hurting people in our day that was not hurting them in quite the same way before. Three things, really.
These were also reiterated during David Rosmarin’s talk at the APA Division 36 mid-year conference this year at Harvard University last month. Photo credit - David Rosmarin
They show up in my classroom. They show up in my consulting room. They show up in my own quiet hours. And the strange part is that they are usually treated as three separate problems. But I no longer think they are.
The Crisis of Identity
The first crisis is the problem of identity. I spent some time in South Africa about 15 years ago doing a fieldwork on youth identity crisis. I have seen how young people, struggling with a poor sense of identity, get plunged into despair. Our culture has given each of us a strange job. Build a self. Make it from nothing. Curate it. Defend it online. Revise it when it stops working. Then sell it back to people so they will give you the approval you need to keep going. The self has become a small business. And the business never closes.
By no slightest measure is this freedom. Frankly, I think it is a kind of homelessnes. We were never made to build the self from scratch. We were made to receive and embody a sense of identity that require a transcendent marker. One that is to be named and known before it is seen.
When that gift is missing, the self gets thin. It goes up with every compliment and down with every slight. It cannot carry suffering, because suffering breaks the performance. It cannot carry aging, or illness, or failure, because all of those feel like attacks on the self. They are not. They are chapters in a longer story. But you have to know the Author to read them that way.
The Crisis of Loneliness
The second crisis is loneliness. We talk about it as if it were a problem of contact. Not enough friends. Not enough community. Too many screens. Those things are real and quite honestly true. But they are not the main issue.
I have sat with people who have full calendars and full homes. They still lament about how lonely life can be at the top. I have sat with people who are surrounded by family and still feel completely alone. The ache is not really about contact. From my own research, I can confidently (and humbly) say that it is about attachment—secure, healthy attachment at that.
Attachment is one of the oldest things in us. It starts when we are babies, reaching for a parent who can soothe us and does not end there. We carry that reaching for the rest of our lives. We need someone or something to be our safe place when we are afraid, and our secure base when we want to explore. The need is always running in the background, and the only question is whether it has found a home.
Billions of people across history have found that home in the Sacred. God is a better understanding of this divine entity throughout history. I talk about this in my new book Bonding with God. God does not abandon. He does not die. He does not fail. Others find a smaller version of it in family. Some find it in significant figures. A mentor. A spouse. A community that has been there for them for years. Some find it in significant places of attachment. The home that holds memory. The land that holds belonging. These objects of attachment are not all equally strong. Attachment science shows that the more enduring the figure, the steadier the security. Loneliness, on this reading, is the felt sound of a heart that has not yet found its secure object of attachment or source of security.
Loneliness is not the absence of people but the absence of an enduring object of attachment that keeps us safe and secure.
The Crisis of Meaning
The third crisis is meaning. And here I want to push back on something I have heard repeated in psychology, in therapy, and even in pastoral care. We say, almost without thinking, that human beings are meaning-makers.
I understand the impulse. It honors how personal meaning is. It is true that no one can hand you your meaning the way they hand you a coat. What is meaningful is personally your own.
But there is a problem with that phrase, and I do not think it is right. To make something is to bring it out of nothing. Or out of materials you control. We do not make meaning out of nothing. We do not stand outside the world and decide what counts. We stand inside a world whose meaning is already pressing on us. Its beauty stops us. Its suffering wounds us. Its mysteries call us. All of this happens long before we have written a single sentence about it. We sense, even before we can say it, that meaning is bigger than we are.
Augustine said it best. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. The restlessness itself is the clue. We did not invent the longing. The longing found us. And by its very shape, the longing cannot be filled by anything we could make ourselves. It can only be filled by Someone greater than we are.
This is why I think we should retire the language of meaning-making. I would replace it—like my colleague Eric Johnson suggested in a facebook post—with meaning-discovery, or, better still, meaning-realization. This shift is not small because it changes how the we makes sense of life. Meaning-making puts you in the position of source. Meaning-discovery puts you in the position of finder. You are not the author. You are the one who is invited in. Meaning-realization adds one more note. As you find the meaning, the meaning is also shaping you—hence, you become part of an ongoing story.
Meaning-making says: I author my significance. Meaning-discovery says: I find a significance already authored, and I am invited to live inside it. The first centers you. The second frees you.
Is this an excessive correction? I do not think so. Words shape how we feel. And how we feel shapes how we suffer. If you believe you have to make meaning, then in the dark seasons when no meaning comes, you will think you have failed at one of life’s most basic tasks. If you believe meaning is to be found, you will keep looking. And you may discover, as I have, that sometimes meaning finds you first.
The Three Are About Belonging
I said at the start that these three crises are connected. They address the inherent psychological need of being connected, associated, or linked by origin, kinship, or shared characteristics. I hope you can see it now. Each one is a crisis of disconnection.
I have a book coming out this Fall with my philosopher friend Shaun Respress titled “Caring with Despair: Disconnection as a Public Health Crisis”.
In the book, we show how disconnection is crippling all of the human ecosystems, and offer a simple solution of “care”.
The crises of identity, meaning, and loneliness are the problem of belonging and disconnection. The identity crisis is a self trying to anchor itself in itself. The loneliness crisis is a heart trying to anchor itself in no one. The meaning crisis is a soul trying to manufacture an anchor it was always meant to receive.
The way through is not a new strategy. I propose a “turning”. To be a self that is known before being seen. To be held by Someone who endures. To live inside a meaning that was given before it was found. These three crises only require one answer. And like St. Augustine knew, our hearts, are restless. The good news is that restlessness has a destination.