The Open Frontier of Meaning
The collapse of old worlds, the failure of quick fixes, and the call to explore [Existential Explorer: Part 2]
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The Way of Work explores stories of where we fit in the world of work. This is part of my 5th series, Existential Explorer, exploring the uncharted edges of who we become when we try to matter.
Part 1: From Businessman to ‘Existential Explorer’ – An attempt to explain what I’m doing
Also, check out my last series, Not Obvious (why work advice fails us) or The Other Side of Enough (what’s life is like when you have enough).
Let’s get caught up: God is dead. We’re connected but alone. Work feels hollow. And most days, we struggle to form a coherent narrative about the events of the world, let alone our own lives.
We are freer than ever, and have no idea what to do with it. In the vacuum of meaning, we cling to substitutes, but their effects are thin and fleeting.
Meanwhile, we race to conquer new frontiers: AI, outer space, even immortality. We fund expeditions and issue grand pronouncements about the future. But we ignore the other frontier that sits closer to home: our search for meaning.
In the busyness of modern life, “meaning” doesn’t feel urgent. It feels abstract. Optional. A luxury problem.
You may not think about meaning when you’re busy. But you’ll feel its absence when you’re bored, broken, or burned out.
Without meaning, success feels empty.
Without meaning, productivity feels purposeless.
Without meaning, suffering feels unbearable.
Without meaning, freedom feels unmoored.
Meaning is the quiet sense that our life is coherent, that our days add up to something more than survival. And right now, it’s up for grabs.
The structures that once gave life coherence have eroded (“The Old World”). In their place, we hastily fill the void with quick but empty fixes (“The Now World”). So we have a choice: go back to the old, grasp for the new, or step into the wide-open landscape ahead, where meaning must be explored, not inherited (“The New World”).
This essay is an attempt to trace that collapse, the frantic grasping that followed, and the open frontier that remains.
Let’s get into it.
I. The Old World:
Collapse of Inherited Maps
Meaning used to come with instructions. You didn’t have to find it, you inherited it.
Not long ago, the question “what is the meaning of life?” didn’t feel like a personal burden. It was given to you, in prepackaged boxes with rituals, hierarchies, and hand-me-down beliefs.
The Old World offered maps. Crude, maybe. Incomplete, often. But they pointed somewhere.
You inherited a religion, which told you who you were and why you were here. It gave you a moral structure, a shared community, and a set of rituals to shake you out of distraction. This solved a lot of problems.
You chose a profession (or more likely, it was chosen for you). That career came with stability, status, and a story: a known path to follow, a sense that you were part of something. Work was identity, structure, contribution.
You belonged to a place. A neighborhood or church or club. There was a we to belong to, with others to share the journey. That place also shaped a collective narrative for understanding the world.
These maps weren’t perfect, but they worked. Consider that once, you had an answer to all the big questions:
an explanation of the world and your place in it,
a structure for creating purpose,
moral guidance to keep you in line, and
community to hold it all together.
Now? That scaffolding has collapsed, or, at best, has become optional. Religion is less a way of life and more treated like a lifestyle brand, as if the nature of the universe came down to one’s personal preferences. Religious participation is down, especially the organized kind. And even the devoted can agree that it's lost its cultural relevance, no longer at the center of defining our collective values.
Careers are volatile and uncertain. You're unlikely to spend your life doing just one thing anymore. Even more urgently, your employability comes down to your performance last quarter. And with AI, what work will even be safe anymore? How can you find meaning in something that might not be around next year?
Meanwhile, you’re more connected than ever, yet lonelier than ever. You may now find more friendship with pixels on a screen than people in real life. Or wait, was that a bot? And any collective identity has been replaced by fragmentation down to the individual, with algorithms pushing you this way or that. The town square, a ‘For You’ feed.
Some celebrate the collapse of The Old World. But I’m not so sure. Even if their maps were flawed, they functioned. They offered direction, connection, and a sense of contribution. And as they fade, most people haven’t fully reckoned with what we’ve lost.
What we’re left with is a world where the maps are gone, the signs are unclear, and the burden of meaning falls entirely on the individual.
II. The Now World:
Grasping for Quick Fixes
When traditional meaning structures collapse, we don’t sit calmly inside the emptiness. We don’t float serenely into enlightened freedom. We reach for something – anything! – that might hold us. Often without realizing it.
We are desperate to fill the void.
In theory, freedom offers space for transcendent discovery. But in practice, it’s terrifying to not know who you are. We’re confronted with endless possibilities, and no clear direction. Viktor Frankl called it “the existential vacuum.” Søren Kierkegaard called it the “dizziness of freedom.” A place of disorientation and vertigo, where we cling to whatever promises quick relief.
I’ve seen it firsthand. Many who chase freedom, especially the financial independence kind, fail to realize: freedom just gives you freedom. I can assure you, it doesn’t tell you what to do with it.
The Now World is not just the era we live in now. It’s also the speed at which we demand answers. We need meaning, like pronto!
Because in a world where nothing is inherently meaningful, the pressure is on you to define it. And if you don’t? The world is happy to fill the hole for you. Someone else – your employer, your political tribe, your local influencer – will do it for you. These Existential Grifters. Gurus, not gods. Promising the latest “unlock” to a spiritually starved audience.
So we inhale meaning the way we scroll content: passively and reactively. We follow without reflecting. We’re nudged into new identities. Caught in this existential drift. And when one fails to deliver the feeling we’re after? We move on to the next. Meaning, just another subscription we cancel when it stops delivering.
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life… there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.” – David Foster Wallace, from This is Water
Work is no longer just a place where we find purpose, structure, and community. It’s now where we sacrifice ourselves at the altar of hard work, impact, and achievement. It was my drug of choice. Workaholism is modern life’s fools gold for fulfillment, and the market is happy to abide. Even the most cynical hustlebro, in a weird way, is just looking for meaning.
"They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are." — Aldous Huxley
Our identity becomes a performance, an aesthetic of meaning we project for others to see, even when we don’t feel it inside. We polish our personal brands, pretend we’ve figured it out, and try to optimize/habit/goal our way into feeling whole. But it never quite lands. Even the wins feel thin on arrival, with the need for a new one now in its place. The self-help junkie keeps needing more reassurance, and the void keeps leaking through.
We are bored as fuck, but won’t give ourselves even a second to sit with the void. Distraction becomes the norm: constant entertainment, political theater, parasocial intimacy (e.g. Joe Rogan feels like your friend)… anything to avoid being alone with the uncomfortable questions.
“The mind wants to wander from the meaty big questions, which are completely daunting and unanswerable, to the diverting candy right on your phone.” — David Brooks, from The Second Mountain
What we’re experiencing is an epic-sized rebound. After breaking up with The Old World, we’re grasping for the next thing to give us structure. The void hasn’t been left empty. It’s been hastily filled with pseudo-relationships that masquerade as meaningful.
Salvation won’t come from grasping. (It hasn’t.) So what happens when we stop pretending we’ve found the answer?
III. The New World:
Exploring Without a Map
When faced with the big questions of meaning, we can retreat back to the old maps. We can reach for the quick fixes. Or… we can keep asking. We can stay in the search.
If the Old World is a cathedral,
and the Now World is a carnival,
then the New World is an open landscape.
We’re standing at the edge of something vast. Because without inherited meaning, and without easy replacements, we’re left with open space. And space, in the right light, is opportunity.
There are no official maps. No consensus truths. The terrain is a jungle of psychological, philosophical, social, and spiritual domains. Some of it may feel familiar. But most of it will ask more from you than The Now World ever did.
I’m not here to act like a guide, like I know exactly where we’re going. Sorry, this is not a how-to blueprint. It’s an open frontier for me too. But what I’m confident in is that there’s no answers in the quick fixes. We don’t need more maps. We need more people willing to wander.
I know transitional periods, having gone through one myself, and their potential for a positive reinvention. But only if done well! Transitions can leave us worse off than before, especially when we rush to get to the other side.
“Man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.” – Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning
Instead of stopping at the first off-ramp, with the need to define or distract, we replace trying to answer with asking. True exploration demands that you sit in the fog, and stay lost on purpose. It’s deeply unproductive, often lonely, maddeningly inconclusive. But it requires loosening your grip: on certainty, on speed, on the self you think you have to be.
If you’re an atheist (or even ambivalent), exploration may be recognizing the role religion used to play and what we’ve lost without it. If you’re religious, exploration might mean confronting the outdated holes in your faith.
If you define yourself by work, imagine who you’d be if you stopped working. If you’re anti-work, consider what might happen if the world stopped working.
If you measure life by being useful, always productive, exploring may be finding something useless and seeing where it leads. Following a curiosity with no promise of return. Letting a project be unfinished or unshared.
If ambition drives you (the need for impact, scale, applause) exploration may be shrinking your horizon, trying something so small that nobody else notices. If you’re unambitious, exploration may be attempting one bold project outside your comfort zone.
If you run on virtual connection (social media friends, podcasts filling your commutes) then exploration might mean risking the awkwardness of real connection again. Join a community (not as just a follower). Build one of your own (not just a following). Exchange self-help for other-help.
These are just examples, some I’ve tried and some I’m trying. They’re ways to tinker and experiment with new ways of looking at the world. Attempts to slow the existential drift. You can’t force your way into meaning, but you can design conditions to encourage it. All this poking around may evolve into what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls an “ecology of practices” – an organic system of habits, rituals, and communities that support meaning over time.
But don’t confuse exploring with escaping. It’s not about following your anxiety, but your curiosity. It’s not about fixing discomfort, but sitting with it. Not quick emotional relief, but deeper fulfillment over the long-term. It’s slow, imperfect work, and it demands more patience than The Now World ever asks for.
So you can take those psychedelics and sit in those saunas. Just be careful not to mistake the first rock you find for a home. It may just be a rock.
We are in the early days of The New World. Exploration may never be enough. The systemic problems may be too deep. Some may need a map, unable to construct meaning on their own. And we may be so far gone that we wouldn’t recognize meaning even if it smacked us in the head.
But I can offer this: it’s okay to not know. To believe something might still yet be found. It’s okay to embrace the frontier of meaning, not because you know where it leads, but because it’s the only honest move left.
I'm not here to give you a map, but a call: It’s time to explore. To embrace the open frontier, and the chance to find something real along the way.
The Old World is collapsing. The Now World is hollow. The New World is waiting.
📚 Further Exploring: For those curious enough to continue exploring…
The Creation of Meaning (podcast), by Stephen West
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (video series), by John Vervaeke
This is Water (speech), by David Foster Wallace
The Second Mountain (book), by David Brooks
The Purpose Code (book), by
⍰ Question: This essay is the start of a larger exploration and I invite feedback. What resonates (or not)? What questions does it raise? And what are other ways to explore?
👀 Next up: we’ll dive into the light subject that hits too close to home: The Midlife Crisis!
🙏 My Ask: the only way writing gets discovered by new readers, is when it’s shared. If you enjoy this essay, please ❤️ or 🔄 or send it to a friend.
Thanks everyone, for reading!
Question... This essay is the start of a larger exploration and I invite feedback. What resonates (or not)? What questions does it raise? And what are other ways to explore?
Thanks for the essay Rick :)
Something that stood out to me a bit is your metaphor around exploration and maps. And, the setup had you talk about the "Old World" in very "map-like" ways, like we were handed a map with some "answers" filled in.
I've been reading The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist, and he adds a new layer to the mapping metaphor that has felt fruitful for me.
As I understand it so far, I (and more broadly, western society) have grown up accustomed to "reading a map" to navigate life, and implicitly derive meaning. My mind spends its time paying attention to using abstracted, analytical, and ultimately simplified models of the world. Squiggly lines for ocean, upside down Vs for mountains, stick figures for communities... All very useful in surviving the demands of the world, but a simplified reprojection of nuanced reality. McGilchrist argues we largely miss the *terrain* that the map is representing - the verdant colors of a valley, the billows of each snowy peak; the uniqueness of each person we encounter. We rarely look up from our map and pay attention to the broader context of lived reality - to notice the details elided from our mapped models. We easily lose our bearing if we try to live purely without the map, but also we become hollow if we do not appreciate the terrain.
So, I am trying to re-learn how to immerse in the terrain, and put the map in my pocket a bit more often - perhaps I will learn what that form of attention can teach me. I'm not tearing up my old maps, but instead trying to integrate two different forms of attention together, and I hear that meaning can alchemize from that - through cocreating a map and a terrain together.
If you haven't heard of the book, I encourage you to check it out!