Inverted Darwinism
On meaning-fitness, and what dies when survival becomes easy
A friend of mine, successful by every external measure career, family, health, financial security said something to me recently that I have not been able to stop thinking about. We were walking through a park in Berlin, the kind of autumn afternoon that should feel like a gift, and he stopped mid-sentence, looked around, and said: I have everything I’m supposed to want. So why does it feel like I’m slowly disappearing?
He is not depressed, not in any clinical sense. He functions. He even, at times, enjoys. But there is a hollowness underneath the functioning that he cannot explain and that no amount of gratitude practice or perspective-taking can fill. He has won the game and discovered that winning feels like nothing in particular.
I want to propose that what my friend is experiencing is not a personal failing or a chemical imbalance or a spiritual deficiency. It is an evolutionary mismatch so profound that we have not yet developed the language to describe it. He is suffering from what I will call meaning-extinction the death of meaning-structures that evolved for conditions of scarcity and have no function in conditions of abundance.
