A 30 something figuring life out, one step at a time. Expect a little bit of everything. 📍 Singapore
I've been thinking about where the world is going.
Not in a grand geopolitical sense (although, sometimes that too), more like, what are people actually hungry for right now.
Here's what I keep coming back to: we're in a meaning crisis.
That sounds dramatic, but look around. The loneliness epidemic. The wellness industry exploding. People quitting stable jobs to become pottery teachers. The psychedelic renaissance. Trad-revival movements.
Even the manosphere, in its broken way, is a meaning-seeking project.
Secular, affluent societies got very good at material provision and very bad at providing meaning, belonging, and purpose. Religion declined in most developed countries but nothing replaced its social and psychological functions. So people are assembling meaning from fragments.
Fitness culture, online communities, identity politics, entrepreneurship-as-spirituality. It works, sort of. But it's ad hoc and often brittle.
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Allison Pugh, writing in Aeon, argues that what we're experiencing isn't even loneliness exactly — it's depersonalisation. The feeling of being profoundly invisible. What's missing, she says, is "recognition, mattering, or being seen.”
https://aeon.co/essays/our-crisis-is-not-loneliness-but-human-beings-becoming-invisible
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And here's what I find interesting: people are already responding to this. Quietly, without manifestos.
Someone signs up for a pottery class after a decade of screen-based work. Someone else starts showing up to the same park bench every Sunday to read with strangers. A guy in his thirties picks up a partner dance and commits to training a few nights a week, not because he's trying to compete, but because it's the first thing in years that requires him to be fully in his body and fully with another person at the same time (cueing some friends I’ve made recently).
None of these people would call what they're doing a rebellion.
But I think it is one.
Against the idea that life is optimized rather than lived. Against the assumption that if something can't be measured or monetized, it doesn't count. Against loneliness as a personal failing rather than a structural one.
The meaning crisis gets talked about as a problem to be solved. But maybe it's already being answered in dance studios, community gardens, open mics, writing groups, trail runs, repair cafes, shared meals.
Not by thought leaders with frameworks, but by ordinary people who got tired of feeling empty and decided to try something with their hands, their bodies, their presence.
It's not loud. It doesn't scale. It probably won't trend.
But I think it might be the most important thing happening right now.