What if the problem isn’t that we’ve lost our stories—but that our nervous systems can no longer hold them?
I’ve been thinking about something Yuval Noah Harari said recently, and it won’t leave me alone. Not because it was shocking—more because it named something I think a lot of us can feel but haven’t quite put words to.
We’re living in the most materially abundant time in human history, and yet people are falling apart. Anxiety, burnout, depression, this persistent sense that something fundamental is missing. Harari calls it a crisis of meaning. Religion’s fading, nationalism doesn’t hold the way it used to, capitalism as a belief system feels hollow, and we’re all just supposed to figure out who we are and why we’re here on our own, every morning, while everything accelerates around us.
I think he’s onto something. But I also think he stops one step too early.
What if meaning isn’t actually the first thing that’s breaking down? What if it’s just the most visible symptom?
Because before anyone can meaningfully ask “what gives my life purpose,” something more basic has to be working. You need capacity. The capacity to be present with yourself. The capacity to actually feel what you’re feeling without immediately trying to fix it, optimize it, or numb it out.
Meaning doesn’t vanish because we ran out of good stories. It vanishes when your nervous system is so overloaded that nothing can really land anymore.
Think about what Harari’s actually describing: infinite choice, constant comparison, time that feels like it’s speeding up, algorithms interrupting your attention every few seconds. That’s not just an intellectual problem. That’s a nervous system under siege.
Our bodies evolved for slow time, small groups, stable roles, physical ritual, predictable rhythms. They did not evolve to curate an identity online, compare themselves to thousands of perfectly optimized lives, make existential decisions at the speed of a newsfeed, or stay alert across 24-hour news cycles while also processing endless moral and political choices without any real rest.
In that state, freedom doesn’t feel liberating—it feels threatening. Choice doesn’t feel expansive—it feels exhausting. And meaning doesn’t feel available—it feels abstract, distant, like something other people have figured out but you can’t quite reach.
A crisis of meaning asks: What should I believe? What story should guide my life?
A crisis of capacity asks something deeper: Can my body tolerate uncertainty without shutting down? Can my nervous system stay present long enough for meaning to actually be felt? Can I be with my life as it is, instead of constantly trying to escape it?
When capacity erodes, attention fractures. Threat detection stays online. Rest feels unsafe. Stillness feels uncomfortable. Silence gets immediately filled with noise. And in that state, meaning can’t land. Not spiritually, not psychologically, not in your relationships.
Here’s what I think we get wrong: we treat meaning like something you construct, optimize, or design. But meaning doesn’t work that way. It’s not something you build—it’s something that emerges when the conditions are right.
Capacity creates presence. Presence creates coherence. Coherence creates meaning.
The medieval peasant didn’t need to go searching for meaning because his nervous system was embedded in rhythms larger than himself—seasons, rituals, roles, relationships. We’ve stripped away the rhythms but kept the nervous systems. And then we act surprised when people feel lost.
So if Harari’s right—and I think he is—the answer isn’t more ideology, more productivity, or more acceleration. But it’s also not just “finding better narratives.” The work is more foundational than that. It’s about restoring the conditions that make meaning possible in the first place.
Things like: safety before certainty. Regulation before reflection. Presence before purpose. Relationship before ideology.
This is why I don’t think nervous system work is some niche wellness thing. I think it’s becoming culturally necessary.
I don’t help people find meaning. I help them recover the capacity to feel their lives again. Because once the body settles, meaning doesn’t need to be chased. It starts to show up on its own—quietly, imperfectly, in small moments. In a slowed breath. In a real connection with someone. In a sense of “this matters” that doesn’t need justification.
If the crisis is real, then maybe the most radical thing we can do isn’t to speed up our answers—it’s to slow down our nervous systems. Not to escape the world, but to actually be able to meet it.
The crisis of our time isn’t that life lacks meaning. It’s that we’ve lost the capacity to feel it. And capacity, unlike certainty, can be rebuilt. One breath, one relationship, one moment of presence at a time.