Six voices on the search for meaning in the modern world

Our world is experiencing seismic change with the rise of power-mad leaders, spiralling conflicts and climate chaos. At such times, the big questions of life are brought into sharp relief. And so amid this turmoil, religious leaders are hoping for a return to faith, while ideologues of all stripes are seeking to exploit anxiety by offering purpose and certainty.

How should we navigate questions of meaning in our increasingly secular society, and how might a humanist approach serve as a guide? In this first edition of our new Voices section, we asked six diverse people for their perspectives.

Purpose and the patriarchy

By Sian Norris

Senior investigative reporter at openDemocracy and author of Bodies Under Siege: How the Far–Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global

One of the main goals of the modern feminist movement was to challenge and break apart traditional gender roles, liberating women from oppressive stereotypes and men from harmful gendered restrictions. While for centuries, women had been told their purpose in life was wifedom and motherhood, feminism offered a new way of living.

Yet in recent years, a worrying number of men and women – particularly in the younger generation – are turning again towards the old stereotypes, seeking meaning and purpose in pre-feminist ideals. From “trad wives” posting on social media about churning their own butter, or otherwise performing the soft and submissive role of a traditional “homemaker”, to influencer men pushing a macho, aggressive notion of masculinity, the gender binary is back with a bang.

It’s impossible to separate the return of strict gender roles from the rise of the global far right, and its desire to restore a so-called “natural order” of male authority and female inferiority in order to return society to a mythic past of gender “complementarianism”. This is especially attractive to the “incel” community – a subculture of men who have forged an identity around their perceived inability to form romantic or sexual relationships. As I read on one incel forum, a hierarchical version of reality solves their perceived grievance, as “every man is guaranteed a wife.”

The far right sells the return of traditional gender roles to both men and women by claiming that feminism has stolen their rightful purpose. Feminism, it argues, has left men weaker and more effeminate. It has deprived them of jobs, status and sexual partners – leaving them rootless and struggling to find their place in society. That meaning can be restored by men becoming more dominant and reclaiming their traditional, patriarchal authority.

While this thinking started in the far right, it has increasingly moved into the mainstream. Influencers like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson offer “rules” of behaviour to follow that claim to help young men find masculine purpose in a so-called feminised world. Right-wing politicians urge and even incentivise their followers to return to traditional values, with women castigated as selfish or individualistic if they don’t choose to become mothers.

Such messaging is more appealing to men. After all, it’s true that feminism has removed some of men’s power. But in order to get women to reject feminism and embrace regressive gender roles, we have to be convinced that modernity and progress has made us miserable. Happiness, and life’s true meaning, by this thinking, is found in home and hearth, rather than what the far right considers superficial pleasure-seeking and career success.

This is the message behind trad wife influencer Ayla Stewart’s online persona, Wife with a Purpose. The trad movement argues that a woman’s value is predicated on reproduction and service. And for the far right, the wife’s purpose, as per Stewart’s avatar, overlaps with race – Stewart set the “white baby challenge” encouraging white women to have as many white babies as possible. In fulfilling this “natural” purpose, women are rewarded as goddesses, liberated from the challenges of modernity and revered as the saviours of their race/nation/gender.

The only problem is that it’s a con. And dangerous to society. At its more extreme edges, trad movements encourage women to give up their financial independence and submit to their husbands, including sexually and via “domestic discipline”, and advise women to “put on the duct tape” if they are frustrated with their partner – in other words, never answer back or complain. That is not healthy for women. Or, for that matter, men.

Under the glossy Instagram posts from submissive female “role models”, and hyped up-TikTok videos of men pushing jaw extension exercises, the return of gender roles is not so much about young people embracing “traditional gender” as it is about the far right gaining a foothold in a new generation – and, worryingly, successfully pushing their narratives into the mainstream.

What if I told you that it is possible to find joy, hope and purpose, even during these difficult times of climate emergency? While we witness weather disasters that increase in frequency, and world leaders who prioritise profit over people and planet, it can feel almost impossible to see what light there is. Additionally, many of us feel disconnected from those around us, and disillusioned with governments we believed would protect us. But, amidst the doom and gloom we feel about the climate crisis, we can still build hope. In the words of the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

I am a climate justice activist, who one day hit extreme burnout. After this, I learned how to navigate the grief, anger and frustration, without letting it consume me or turn to apathy. I even have a phrase I started using, “climate joy,” to explore why finding joy is essential and how we might practise it together. When we rise collectively, a thriving and sustainable future is ahead of us.

Unicef refers to climate anxiety as a heightened emotional or physical distress in response to the climate crisis. A 2021 Lancet study found that 59 per cent of teens and young adults globally were very or extremely worried about climate change. In 2023, a YouGov poll also discovered that one in three young people in the UK were scared, sad or pessimistic about climate change. So if you feel this way, you definitely are not alone. However, hope is not only possible, it can actually mobilise climate advocacy.

So, how does one hold on to hope and joy in these times? We need a balance between resistance, community care and rest. First, it is crucial to identify how we feel. If you are finding it difficult to come to terms with your emotions, talk to a friend or family member, check in with someone who feels similarly, and speak honestly about how you feel. This eco anxiety is a sign of your humanity, and that you deeply care about what is happening.

After that, find the intersection of what brings you joy, what skills and experience you have, and what needs doing. It could start with simply searching online for a local climate or environmental group in your area, or even a national or international one. Can you dedicate any of your time, knowledge or resources? There is a role for everyone in the climate movement: artists, designers, those good at logistics, caretakers, noise makers, writers, researchers, visionaries, filmmakers, financial experts, legal advisers, or maybe you are just great at spreadsheets. I promise, there is something out there.

And remember: perfectionism is a myth. People can feel that, in order to act on climate, they must know everything and make perfect choices. While it is important to do the best we can individually, governments and corporations are leading the destruction. Blaming yourself for imperfection is a distraction.

There is also a lot we can learn from nature about community. In healthy forests, each tree is connected to others via the mycelium network where they share resources in the “wood wide web”, as it was dubbed by German forester Peter Wohlleben. Mycelia are incredibly tiny threads of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or into tree roots. Just like this network, we are also a movement dependent on each other. We support others with time, advice, love and care through uniting for a better future.

One way I find joy through my activism is through harnessing the power of music and culture, being in community and making sure to spend time mindfully outdoors. Being out in nature brings me a sense of solace. After you read this, consider when you can next go outside, and challenge yourself to identify two birds, plants and trees.

Finally, never underestimate our power collectively, and what is within you to create ripple effects of change. The oceans are rising, but so are we.

A great malaise is upon us, we are told. Prophets of our time warn of a growing “meaning crisis” in the western world. They preach: in this sickly modern age, wrought by secular liberalism, we have lost the shared narratives that once gave us hope and gave coherence to our lives. This existential disaster is leaving us adrift, unmoored from tradition, community and purpose.

Don’t believe it. All this is just the latest version of an age-old fear that has dogged many an anxious man who has lived long enough to witness the world change around him in disappointing ways.

There is nothing so perennial as the myth of the crisis of meaning. Perhaps every generation, upon reaching a certain maturity, looks at the world it once understood and feels some sense of disorientation. The structures that made sense of events shift beyond recognition. The institutions that once seemed permanent are revealed as contingent. New ideas – unfamiliar and unsettling and challenging – take centre stage.

Some people, faced with this natural discomfort, take aim at the changes and, because they represent a different view from their own, accuse them of being wicked, bankrupt or both. The idea that we are living through a uniquely precarious crisis of meaning, on this view, is less a diagnosis of our times than a near-universal experience of middle age.

Or perhaps there is something more cynical going on. The loudest voices warning of our existential vacuum are those who have something to sell – literally or metaphorically. Religious institutions and individuals whose ideas (debunked by history, physics, anthropology and a dozen other disciplines) have long been in decline in most of the west, see in this narrative an opportunity and support it fervently in the hope of a stampede in their direction.

If modernity leaves us lost, the argument goes, then surely a return to tradition, to faith, to the old certainties, is the solution? This is a well-worn strategy. Exaggerate a natural condition of human life and then present yourself as the only remedy. It has been used by the hawkers of outmoded ideas since the beginning of recorded history.

Although it is a strategy that should be threadbare, our current media have burnished it. A burgeoning industry of podcasters and popular authors thrives on stoking fears of cultural decay. They tell us that we are lost because we have abandoned the wisdom of our “Judaeo-Christian” heritage, or that we must rediscover our primal selves. They promote a return to authoritarian structures, bait-and-switching hierarchy and control as a substitute for communal bonds. Others peddle their own bespoke spiritualities, selling millions of copies to an audience primed by this industry to believe that something is missing.

This is another reason for humanists to be sceptical of the claims of the doom-mongers. The principal villain in the cause of the “meaning crisis” – named or unnamed – is humanism itself. The supposed crisis is framed as a loss – of shared moral foundations and of faith.

But these things have never been, and should never be, uncontested. Meaning, belonging and purpose have never been the exclusive province of religious or authoritarian beliefs. From the connections we find in friendship and family to the pursuit of knowledge and the joy of artistic expression, from the struggles for justice to the wonder of scientific discovery, the sources of meaning in modern life are as numerous as they are profound. The fact that they do not come prepackaged is an advantage, not a deficit, and a liberation, not a loss.

I’m not saying we don’t live in a precarious age. We do. But the search for meaning is not a crisis. It is a condition of being human. And what we should attend to is not some so-called crisis of meaning but the ongoing, millennia-old battle of ideas. A humanist response should not deny the unease that can accompany change, nor dismiss the yearning for connection and purpose and the virtue in seeking it. But we should not buy the wares of the revivalists, because they are wrong, and rather than panic in the face of change, we should embrace the opportunities it offers – to grow, to rethink, to imagine new and better ways of living together.

We should reject the idea that we must achieve this through a swerve towards the past; towards conformity, ignorance and obedience to external authorities, to give our lives structure. Meaning is not something given from above, but something made, something emergent in our interactions with the world and each other. We should affirm that again and again – and the immense potential within each of us to live lives of deep significance in the here and now.

When I was a student in the 90s and noughties, I learned that religion all over the world was in a slow but inexorable decline. It was a given. In many countries, including here in Britain, this process has largely unfolded as predicted. But the theory of secularisation has a big problem at its heart: it is obsessed with religion. When we describe society or ourselves as “secular”, the main thing we reveal is our parent complex.

This obsession with religion distracts us from the alternative sources of meaning that have taken the place of faith for so many people. It discourages us from thinking about or even noticing that we make meaning in conversation with other people and as part of broader meaning-making cultures, as part of “worldviews” – or “existential traditions”, as I call them in my work. Some have argued that philosophies of life are rarified things, of interest only to cerebral types – writers, artists and academics, perhaps. But these meaning-making cultures are all around us, in great diversity.

Even quite young children who do not have traditional existential beliefs – beliefs, that is, centred around God – still reflect upon and are able to talk about existential issues, as explored in the book Growing Up Godless by Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe. The children interviewed for the book, aged between eight and 11, were all able to say something about the origins of the Universe and of life itself; about religious ideas and identities, and how their own are similar and different to those around them; or about that particular uncanny quality that is shared, they think, by a special category of beings – Father Christmas, unicorns and God. These children are meaning-making creatures, exploring the world to try to make sense of what it means to exist, to be real.

I collaborated in the research underpinning Growing Up Godless, involving children, their parents and teachers in schools across England. The findings were also published in sociology journals. Children were interviewed in pairs, and their conversations show that they work out their metaphysical and existential orientations together – in conversation with their friends, as well as with parents and teachers. This and other research also points to the arts, literature and other media as sources people draw on to develop their existential orientations and identities. So it is that existential beliefs develop into traditions, shared between people and passed on over time.

However, although kids are thinking about existential issues from a young age, they are not encouraged to think of themselves as doing this. If our capacity to think and experience the world existentially has not declined with “secularisation”, our capacity to understand this aspect of our lives maybe has.

The big factor here is the decline of institutions dedicated to existential meaning-making, as the churches and other religious institutions decline but are not replaced by non-religious alternatives. Children – just like their parents – build their meaning-making positions in interaction with people around them, directly and mediated through culture. These loosely shared beliefs, ethics and aesthetics are not, however, associated with centralised, dedicated worldview institutions.

Does this matter? Maybe not, at least on a personal level. But it does make contemporary existential outlooks much less visible in society, even to those who hold them – and that can have consequences. It can allow the spaces carved out for existential reflection to remain dominated by institutionalised worldviews – that is, religions – even though those worldviews are less and less common. For kids, this means religious education classes that disproportionately focus on traditional religion, in schools that tend to see discussion of non-religious worldviews as a matter for the science classrooms.

More generally, it means widespread illiteracy in nonreligious existential culture that can impact public life in diverse ways. Without making the spaces we dedicate to existential reflection and identities accessible to all, we end up with multiple lines of inequality. Non-religious worldviews sometimes occupy privileged positions in our culture, but are less often subjected to the same historical and critical reflection that their religious counterparts are. The religious, on the other hand, benefit from recognition of their worldviews, as well as extensive dedicated resources for their existential development that are not available to the non-religious.

The majority of people living in Britain are now non-religious, yet they lack dedicated institutions that encourage and support existential reflection. Given this imbalance, schools and universities are of great importance. The humanist movement is part of an important campaign to rename religious education as “religion and worldviews” education, and to fully incorporate the study of non-religious worldviews, which would be a step in the right direction. Meaning-making is for everyone. Our social institutions and common culture should reflect this.

In our age of choice, the decision to have children can no longer be taken for granted: having and raising children has ceased to be the standard outcome of adulthood, and is no longer understood to be a necessary or constitutive feature of a good life. In a UK study released last year, less than half of those surveyed who were 25-34 years old said they “definitely or probably” intended to have kids. In a US survey, only 26 per cent of people agreed that having children is important for living a fulfilling life, compared to 71 per cent for “having a job or career they enjoy”, and 61 per cent for “having close friends”.

When the old frameworks – religion, tradition, social convention – no longer hold sway, what’s left? In recent years, amid cratering global birthrates, crackdowns on reproductive rights and rising concerns about climate change, the role of children in human life has become an ever more politically loaded and personally fraught subject. Against this backdrop, for many liberal and progressive people, the decision around whether to have children must be backed up and justified, either on the basis of personal satisfaction and individual desire – or else by vague appeals to higher forces or callings.

“All the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted,” Rivka Galchen writes of the early months of motherhood in her autofictional novel Little
Labours. “The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning.” Having a baby thrusts Galchen into a strange new world: she describes her encounters with her daughter as if she were a wild animal, or an alien. The forays into spiritual seeking and surrealism that punctuate Galchen’s book are meant to express the way that both the decision and the experience of having children exceed the ordinary.

This very contemporary tendency to mystify and exalt the experience of motherhood (the “extreme sport” and “shamanic experience” of natural birth; the intense, “eerie” but beatific first days with a newborn) reflects the fact that, for many secular people, the decision to become a parent – with its unavoidable implications of identity, sacrifice and fate – is as close as we can get these days to genuine religious questioning.

But the temptation to transfigure parenthood into a quasi-religious experience – redeeming it as a series of signs from another realm of meaning – testifies at the same time to how difficult it is for us to embrace the decision and its aftermath on its own terms. Having children is understood as a worthy choice only once it’s been sublimated into some greater cause or struggle: it must be made “sodden with meaning” to mean much of anything.

But we needn’t protest too much that parenting is the most meaningful or important activity one can ever undertake; we can, with bell hooks, “simply state that it is meaningful and important”. And so we must. For the mystical flights of fancy are always also an implicit admission that our ordinary ethical resources are not sufficient to the task of finding value in the work of raising the next generation, of doing one’s share to contribute to a flourishing human future.

To do so, we don’t have to look far: we can forgo insisting on parenthood’s otherworldly charms and instead focus on the lives we lead, retraining our gaze on the commitments we make every day. Becoming a parent is a tremendous ethical task – nurturing a dependent, helpless being, preparing them to confront life’s endless challenges, their fellow humans’ endless faults, teaching them to affirm life in the face of these difficulties and failings.

There are, of course, other ways of participating in this ethical project: one could be a teacher, a godparent, an aunt or uncle, a mentor, a foster parent. But the brief is the same: “What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken,” wrote the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg. “And what is a human being’s vocation but the highest expression of his love of life?”

This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.