jimoeba mentioned that he enjoyed an interview with Vervake and Fridman in a comment, so I thought I’d give it a listen. It turns out there are several including a 3-plus-hour version. Arbitrarily, I chose this one. Even if it’s not the particular interview on the meaning crisis, it gives me a sense of the two and their dynamics. I’m glad I listened to it. I like Vervaeke. I can’t say I’m much of a Fridman fan on first listen.
This interview content provides an orientation of where Vervaeke is coming from. It helps to clarify his position. His claim seems to be that many people today identify as having no religion but being spiritual. By extension, he posits that this cohort is searching for meaning. I can’t disagree. What it tells me is that I am not in his target demographic. I have no religion, as I am an atheist. I have no spiritual void to fill. This is Vervaeke’s goal—to find something to perform the function of the religion without the, perhaps, baggage and dogma.
I sympathise with his goal. He brings up Nietzsche’s “God is dead” quote, famous or infamous depending on your worldview. Essentially, he wants to answer Nietzsche’s query of what to do now that it’s been revealed that humans created God, not the other way around. His aim is to replace the font of wisdom for this generation.
For me, wisdom is a heuristic, part of the Gestalt McGilchrist mentions. McGilchrist’s work is even referenced here. Of course, I interpret McGilchrist’s references in this space to be metaphorical. It seems that he views it as ‘real’. I’m not sure where Vervaeke places it. Somehow, I feel that if there is a spectrum, Vervaeke leans closer to McGilchrist than me, and that’s OK. They just happen to be wrong.
I still don’t get the need for meaning. I don’t feel despondent that there is no inherent meaning in anything, but we are free to invite or adopt one or many. I remember a Christian mate of mine who explained that people have a God-sized hole that can only be filled by God. Essentially, Vervaeke is making a similar claim, but his void is filled by wisdom. I suppose that I don’t feel I have a void doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Philosophics 
I think the void is largely in part, creativity. I ask a lot of people, if they could do anything at all and money were no issue, most of the time they don’t know. Even my two that are about to graduate from college have no idea. The creativity void is filled with a search for useful value—meaning religion can offer platitudes and answer questions for you while simultaneously and perpetually stunting true meaning.
Life is no fun, nor is it useful when you think you have all the answers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Personally I don’t feel I have all of the answers. In fact , I probably don’t even care about most questions, let alone their answers. But most questions have nothing to do with ‘meaning’.
As far as ‘creativity’ is concerned, I think that’s a personality/temperament issue. I happen to have that interest. I’ve been a musician; I like writing; I’ve dabbled in painting and photography. But not everyone has this creative drive.
And just because I am serching for something doesn’t mean it’s there. I sould search all me life for a XSKJDSHDS, whatever that might be. I can imagine there might be a thing called meaning, but thinking doesn’t make is so.
For me, a search for meaning is a left-hemisphere folly. Being the hemisphere for instrumentation, it’s made the mistake of overfitting and pesumes that everything has purpose and even more pointedly as designed with a purpose. But I can hammer a nail with a rock. The purpose of that rock was not to hammer nails by design. It just so happens that I can fashion that purpose. But I’d be mistaken if I felt that the universe created rocks so that someday I’d be able to hammer nails, I’d be deluded.
I do wonder why some people seem so drawn not only to ‘finding meaning’, but in ‘finding themselves’. Again, there is no ‘there’ there.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For me I would find great satisfaction in cracking the code—a non-contradictory path to what is. Makes me a bit of a nihilist sometimes, but explaining how everything is in reality one thing, which is not a thing at all but an illusion. We may as well analyze the pixels from a projector as analyze matter. To me that is fun in itself.
Richard Feynman stated there is enough energy in a cubic meter of space to boil the oceans. That is an incredible amount of energy yet we fit quite comfortably in it. What does that say about us?
LikeLike
As far as the ‘what to do if money were no issue’, some people are just more driven than others, and some feel compelled to do this or that—to feel they are following their calling. But no one is particularly calling. In some cases, it’s great that Beethoven or some such followed what his calling was.
I like to think that some people on the autism spectrum like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg were lucky their interest was in computers and not collecting toy plastic army men or buttons. Some people’s interests can’t be easily monetised. Others aren’t at the right place or time to capitalise.
Some people are drawn to produce, some to invent, and others to create. Others would be content to watch TV for hours on end. That’s what their answer would be. My late father-in-law was a doctor and his wife talked him into retiring at 55. He did, and they did the world travel thing for about a decade before it got old. Boredom set it, and he came to regret his choice. He lived until 94 with not even really a personal purpose other than just to get to the next day. At 90, his wife of 70-odd years died, and he didn’t even want to get to the next day. He just wanted to expire.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I tend to think of things in terms of Asian culture. Things have no inherent existence, they only exist by their relationship to other things. I consider that in the empirical, scientific sense first, as a basis. Then, once that is well established in methods and modeling, one can proceed to interpret other domains. I like to write, too. I wrote two books on how people came to the pattern of being ever more removed from congent thought through narrowing scopes that only support the users ever more narrow interests. For example, economic interest displaces human interest. This trend is in every area of human activity. The conformity to centralized group conventions is a key dynamic to understand the loss of meanig. Being able to reference this process as over 12,000 years old is also essential to understanidng how the judgement and decision making process has got us where we are now. YT contextual expansion.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree.
LikeLike