By Eric Parker, TGC. (Photo: Samuel Martins/Unsplash)
We live in an age of longing—for significance, permanence, purpose. We see it in the stories we tell, the goods we consume, and the goals we pursue. And amid what some have called our meaning crisis, these longings have intensified because our civic and religious lives have been hollowed out, leaving us with a profound sense of emptiness. While this existential ache takes many forms and has many sources, the existentialist philosophers were spot on in thinking that we feel the pain most acutely when it comes to our choices.
We know this pain all too well. We feel it in those key moments where we know the decision we make could change the course of our lives. Do I take this new position with more pay and more responsibility, even though it will keep me away from my spouse and children? Should we move across the country for a new opportunity, even though we will leave behind everyone we love? Faced with the life-altering consequences of these choices, we go searching for the deeper values within us to help make the decision more clear. Some, however, are left wanting. Lacking some larger story which grounds their decisions, the search within only compounds their crisis.
It was assumed that liberating ourselves from any story not created by ourselves would make us feel freer, more alive. But the opposite has occurred. As the West unmoored itself from both religious and institutional authority by redistributing it among the masses, it has simultaneously increased and undercut the very freedom it sought. It increased freedom by removing restraint—only to find that the conditions for freedom actually lie not in the removal of all restraints, but in the acceptance of the right ones. Without a shared story that we tell ourselves, we live these dizzying and disorienting lives and call it freedom. Freedom is a profound burden in a storyless world.