Planting Crops Of Meaning

A primer to John Vervaeke

“We are suffering from a wisdom famine in the West.”

To anyone who has ever seriously wondered about the meaning of life and their place within it, or feels adrift in making sense of the world, the growing sense of unease, or the ongoing culture wars, I contend that the work of Dr. John Vervaeke provides an indispensable contribution to the cultural conversation.

Growing up, I would often experience recurring bouts with existential angst – like a backdrop of my psyche throughout adolescence up to and through my mid-twenties. 

The opening quote from Vervaeke mirrors a comparably pithy observation from the comedian Louis C.K. – “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.”

Who is John Vervaeke? 

John Vervaeke is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. 

Like his famous colleague Jordan Peterson, Vervaeke bridges science and spirituality while exploring topics including existential meaning and the cultivation of wisdom. 

One of his key public projects is Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, a 50-hour lecture series freely provided on YouTube that was recommended to me by a friend.

While one could balk at a 50-hour lecture series in this era of 8-second attention spans, to concisely summarize one’s life work so thoroughly is a remarkable achievement. He skilfully synthesizes history, religion, philosophy, Buddhism, spirituality, cognitive science and tackles topics like knowledge, meaning and purpose. Though it was first aired in 2019, I encountered it during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and remains one of that year’s personal highlights.

My encounter with the meaning crisis

As a young man, I resonated with the antinomian and carried a general distrust of capitalism and government as many raised in the West do.

I was swept up in the gaming distractions that appeal most to disaffected young men – a not uncommon phenomenon in modern times. 

The appeal of these virtual worlds intersected with my worldview endarkened with the dysphoric cocktail of nihilism, existentialism, depression, meaninglessness, escapism, hedonism, and triviality.

At the time, the problems of the world seemed overwhelming along with the quintessential problem of my life and what I was supposed to do with it  – freshly graduated from university and thrust into the “real world”. I left university with a tone of overall disappointment as my studies had not provided any meaningful guidance in that regard.

By comparison, here was a virtual world where progression was given by clear feedback, I had a definite purpose within the context of the game and was promptly rewarded for my efforts – other players welcomed my presence and contributions while the promises of pseudo-accomplishment drew me in through increasingly larger scales of cooperation within virtual worlds – whether competing with other groups of players or tackling scenarios within the game world. 

The discovery of pseudo-community through the adoption of voice chat (while modern gamers may scoff, this would have been around 2002-2005) greatly enhanced the social aspect.

At its peak, I would log well over a dozen hours per day oblivious to mundane concerns save for the barest of biological necessities. I began to suspect all was not well when my dream content featured in-game scenarios and culminated in a relatively gentle family intervention.

On reflection, it may have been an unintended consequence of my time at university and exposure to post-modernist ideas like moral relativism and deconstructivism that paved the way for gaming addiction. While there were definitely highlights around this formative period, my undergrad encompassed the lowest emotional trough in my life arc.

While I used to carry much shame around gaming addiction, I have resolved it through compassionate self-reflection around accepting the role gaming played in addressing my needs at the time.

Symptoms of the meaning crisis

I am certainly not alone. 

There is widespread disenfranchisement with institutions – one does not have to look very hard to see the bitter cynicism and nihilism found in dark corners of the Internet like Reddit or YouTube comments. Vervaeke points to the decline of religion and increasingly widespread norms of secularization with amazing explication, taking us on a journey from Ancient Greece to the present featuring influential figures throughout Western history.

Early on, Vervaeke situates the meaning crisis as one part of a larger meta-crisis: 

• the environmental crisis

• the health crisis (mental, physical, etc.)

• the socioeconomic crisis

• the political crisis

• the judicial crisis. 

He argues that these are interdependent and not separate.

On the lighter side of the coin, there is also an upwelling of interest in: the mindfulness revolution, the intersection of Buddhism and scientific investigation, Stoic philosophy, research on happiness and existential meaning.

4P’s of knowing and a diagnosis

A core concept from Vervaeke is his four P’s of knowing. Here is a brief take on them:

• propositional - declarative knowledge -- “book smart”, facts or knowing about something.

• procedural - skills -- knowing how to do something like tying a shoe or playing a musical instrument.

• perspectival - the ability to have and hold one or more points of view -- the basis of empathy, theory of mind, deception, imagination, etc.

• participatory - knowing how to act in a given “agent-arena” environment i.e. a domain where flow is possible.

One aspect of his diagnosis of the meaning crisis is our overemphasis on the first two and neglect of the last two. 

To that end, it is up to you to discover and formulate your own ecology of practices to develop these undernourished capacities of perspectival and participatory knowing. Vervaeke weaves a compelling case connecting faculties like insight, mystical experience, wisdom and rationality with these latter two ways of knowing. Indeed, he introduces the concepts of making and breaking frame (i.e. “reframing”), wisdom as a function of cultivating insight, and insight as a capacity to afford changes in perspective. 

Perspectival Knowing

One example of perspectival knowing is the bidirectionality of irrelevance. Anyone can easily conjure an arbitrary time-scale that provokes the chorus of the dejected, disillusioned and nihilistic: “Why bother?” 

For example, in a few billion years the sun will expand and life on Earth will be uninhabitable, the inevitable heat death of the universe, a comet or asteroid will hit the planet, humanity is like a plague, virus or cancer, etc. The counterargument to that is quite simple – that imagined apocalypse is equally irrelevant to you and your life right now. 

In some respects, this parallels the advice of his colleague Jordan Peterson’s to clean up your room – focusing on aspects of your life you directly control and influence.

Another example of reframing involves handling a common existential question, “What is the meaning of life?”

Expecting such a question to be answered propositionally is symptomatic of our culture’s emphasis on easy answers in the age of Google, Siri and Alexa – that life with all of its richness could be reducible to a pithy sentence or two, though it appears as of this writing, ChatGPT offers a passable AI-generated attempt.

To expect that such a question could be answered prescriptively at all is problematic and to realize it is a misapplication of propositional knowledge provides a manner of relief.

On a personal aside, when I was a young man, a dear family friend offered his advice that life is intrinsically meaningless and that it is our life’s task to fashion it in our own lives. While this was somewhat helpful, it did not provide the existential relief I sought as I have revisited it throughout different points in my life. I have later encountered similar perspectives mirrored in the work of Victor Frankl’s logotherapy and is thematic in Stoicism – Epictetus in particular stresses that discerning and attending to what is and disregarding what is not in our control will yield freedom or suffering accordingly. 

Participatory Knowing

Along with perspectival knowing, a deficit in this fourth way of knowing is another piece of Vervaeke’s breakdown of the meaning crisis.

‘Worldview’ is a key elaborative term.

As John Vervaeke, Filip Miscevic and Christopher Mastropietro’s Zombies In Western Culture explicates:

“A worldview is two things simultaneously: (1) a model of the world and (2) a model for acting in that world. It turns the individual into an agent who acts, and it turns the world into an arena in which those actions make sense.” The congruence between “agent” and “arena” leads to meaning in life. They “mutually make sense of one another, and ratify each other’s existence and intelligibility.”

If we combine this definition of worldview with the observation that “we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are,” then perhaps we are on our way to “a problem well defined is a problem half solved.” 

To put it succinctly, I see now that prevalence of nihilism, anomie, ennui or an ongoing sense of existential angst is symptomatic of disconnection and disengagement at the cultural and individual scales. 

Recapitulating the definition as “a domain where flow is possible”, some examples of participatory knowing would include all manner of artistic, athletic and creative expression such as sport, the martial arts, dance and music.

My own awakening…

Personally, it was relieving to discover that my own ongoing journey and exploration of spiritual traditions and practices aligned with Vervaeke’s call to action. My own ecology of practices features meditation, yoga, qigong, and martial arts alongside my decades-long dedication to musical performance and education as a creative and professional practice.

Other Individual and relational practices include journaling and my involvement in transformational communities around men’s work, plant medicine, meditation, and dynamic group work.

In my estimation and highest praise I can offer, I surmise that had John Vervaeke’s lecture series Awakening From The Meaning Crisis been available when I was a young man, it would have obviated my undergraduate studies and likely saved me from years of aimless drifting. It provides in no small measure what I was hoping to find during that pivotal coming-of-age. 

Thank you, John.