Why The Modern World Feels Meaningless

An exploration of narrative, individualism, and Byung-Chul Han

This is a transcript of a YouTube video. If you would prefer to watch it, you can find it here:

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Many people complain that the modern world is in some way meaningless. Numerous thinkers have analysed this in various ways, from pointing to the decline in religion, to economic factors, to those darn phones.

But the philosopher Byung-Chul Han views things from a different angle. In his book The Crisis of Narration, he attributes much of modern meaninglessness to the decline and perversion of narrative. That is, the stories we tell ourselves and other people about life and the world.

Han thinks that the way we interpret the world has become increasingly self-destructive, empty, or manipulated, and he wants to know how we can rescue meaning from the jaws of modernity.

But the idea that nihilism is the result of a problem with narratives is a bit abstract, so let's explore exactly why Han thinks they are so much more important than most of us realise.

1. Narrative as Meaning

Almost everyone, from almost anywhere, will have a narrative or a story that they find gripping. This is something we just take for granted, but it is incredibly strange. A great narrative structure grabs someone’s attention, seizes control of their emotions right to the base layer, and imbues that present experience with a sense of deep emotional meaning. At least as far back as Plato, philosophers have noticed the extreme impact of narrative on the human mind. Plato even thought that it was so effective and so potentially dangerous that in his ideal state stories would be tightly controlled so that they could not wreak havoc on the populace. This powerful view of narrative has found increasing empirical support from the world of narrative psychology, where thinkers like Jerome Bruner posit that we understand ourselves and our experiences primarily through narrative structures. When we organise our memories, we do not do so like a hard drive, coldly sorting them into a neat system, but like storytellers crafting our story. Bruner thinks this is incredibly important, and suggests that narrative manages to tap into both factual information, but also emotional resonance. It does not just promote understanding, but feeling and therefore action. We can see this pretty clearly in our own lives. If you read some statistics about the water crisis, then you are unlikely to be moved to donate money. But if instead I told you a story of a child growing up, loving their family and friends, before slowly succumbing to water insecurity, and meeting a tragic early death, this does not just teach you the facts about water shortages, it makes them salient to you. For whatever mysterious reason, narrative is one of the key ways we humans make our lives seem meaningful. But Byung-Chul Han thinks we are slowly losing our ability to create narratives in this way, and that this threatens our capacity to make sense of the world, and of our own lives.

I want to distinguish narratives in a few different ways that are not explicit in Han’s work but seem at least implied. First, there are the stories we tell ourselves about us and our lives, and then there are the stories we tell about the world at large. I will call the first a personal narrative, and the second a world narrative. Obviously these two are interconnected, but they approach the problem of meaning in slightly different ways. Han also thinks personal narratives are not crafted in isolation, but through dialogue with our societies and cultures. Let’s use two classic examples from existential philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Throughout Nietzsche’s works, there is a great emphasis on “making your life a work of art”, that clearly intersects with forming a personal narrative. One of his first works, The Birth of Tragedy, was specifically about the role of stories in helping us bear the sufferings of the world, and his project of “creating values” is swept up in ideas of pushing through tragedy to get to comedy. His figure of passive nihilism, The Last Man, has nothing to make his suffering meaningful, and so all he does is pursue short-term pleasures. So much of Nietzsche’s work, from the Free Spirit Works to Ecce Homo, is Nietzsche telling his own philosophical journey as part personal philosophy and part therapeutic exercise. Even his idea of organising the will draws from narrative concepts like having the will all pointing in a single direction, and a sense of progressing towards something. Seizing control over your life, and supreme authority over yourself, is partly a matter of personal narrative. This is how he creates meaning - emphasising a very particular kind of individual heroism.

By contrast, Dostoevsky is far more focused on our narrative for the world. As a Christian, he viewed the very universe as imbued with story. It had a beginning when God created it, it has the trials and tribulations of humanity’s struggle against sin, and it has an end when Christ returns and, as CS Lewis put it “the author walks on to the stage”. But beyond this, Dostoevsky sees the world-narrative as tied up with love of one another. He thinks the end goal humanity must strive towards is one of universal brotherly love. All his other goals are intended to point to this end. It is the lynchpin of his ethics. And it immediately provides a personal orientation as well. Like Myshkyn, Alyosha, or the Ridiculous Man, Dostoevsky wants us to devote our lives to earthly, active love. He ultimately thinks this is not just in service to his version of Christianity, but equivalent to it.

In both cases, a narrative is formed that adds a sense of coherence to life, and in some intuitive sense, makes life “worth living”. This is obviously especially valuable when someone is suffering, since pleasant experiences do not often raise the question of whether they are worth going through. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, narrative structures also propose ethical systems, and help answer questions like “who am I?”, “what is good?” and “what does it mean for me to be good?”. Narrative arcs are not simply auxiliaries to more serious studies of existentialism, ethics, and life, they are an integral part of them.

This even comes across in what happens when narratives are removed entirely. I have mentioned this on the channel before, but many pictures of nihilism involve structures that defy narrative components. In the book of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon describes the monotony of each day beginning and ending and beginning again, with “nothing new under the Sun”. Albert Camus draws upon the image of Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to fall right back down. This is a perversion of the narrative arc of overcoming a challenge - one that explicitly defies resolution. Nietzsche thought that the ultimate sign you have overcome nihilism is if you would be happy living this same life over and over again for all eternity. That is, if you would gladly submit to your existence being circular. This was his sign that you truly had made your life a work of art, since you are now strong enough to overcome even the most narrative-defying picture of the world. Someone like Dostoevsky viewed nihilism as partly stemming from a crudely materialistic view of reality, where nothing holds significance, and there are only incidental events, robbed of any value.

Beyond any of this, narrative is even key to how we understand and process the world. It lets us know what information is significant and needs remembering, and what can be discarded. By tying together fact and action, it outlines which paths are significant, and which to ignore. No person can learn everything, observe everything. So we require structures that draw us to the important information, and protect our limited processing power from being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what is out there. Like an author choosing to describe the trees but not each individual leaf, we act as the drafters of our own experience, predicting, revising, and prioritising partly according to narrative. Hell, if you subscribe to Bayesian models of perception, this picture may be much more literal than it initially appears. Here narrative in a loose sense is not just the way we inject meaning into the world, it is the way that world becomes comprehensible to us. This is inextricably linked to meaning-making, since another way of saying something “draws our attention to what seems important’ is that it “makes us focus on what is meaningful”.

All of this means that which narratives we pick, and the health of narration as a whole, is perhaps one of the most important philosophical questions of the age. It also has bipartisan interest. While Han is a left wing philosopher, the same importance on narrative is found in the conservative thinker Roger Scruton’s work, especially on Wagner.

But this is only one function of narrative events. In addition to providing meaning, they are also a lynchpin of how we form our communities.

2. Narrative as community

In the UK, we have an organisation called The Scouts. This is, essentially, an afterschool club for adolescent boys where you learn basic outdoor skills, form social groups, and generally have a pretty decent time. When I was in the scouts, we often went on camps, and invariably part of those camps would involve sitting around a campfire, telling one another stories. One of those stories was about a Scout from years ago who was known for making a lot of mischief. He was there long before any of us, and yet each camp we would hear stories about him, which were undoubtedly a little embellished, from the older scouts. When we were older, we would tell the same stories to the younger scouts, probably with our own unconscious alterations, and so we kept the tale of this nascent trickster hero alive. He became part of the backdrop of our little community - our own little Robin Hood. And it drew the group as a whole closer together. It was like having an inside joke - something that we were all a part of. Except it was even better, because not only were we guarding this legend, we were constructing it. Each time the tale was told, the storyteller put his own definitive stamp on it. It was part of the structure of our community.

When we talk about communities, we often think in terms of abstract “values”. But as anyone who has been a part of a community can attest, they are just much weirder than this. In Britain we are very keen on defining what “British values” are, when the recognisable markers of Britishness are mostly a selection of odd but distinctive habits that happened to pop up a lot in the UK, like having strong opinions on how to make a cup of tea, or having been once told what Morris dancing is, but not remembering much about it. You cannot form necessary and sufficient conditions from these observations, and yet this patchwork of trivialities is significantly more British than anything that could be cooked up by a philosopher or a politician because communities are contingent, ever-evolving organisms, not abstractly defined sets. This is not my observation, it has been pointed out by such wide-ranging thinkers as Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu. Each region of the UK will have their own versions of these. I am originally from Essex, and can often spot the strange subtleties in Essex culture, because I lived there for a long time. One of my friends is from Western Russia, and according to him a key marker of Russian-ness is that you wouldn’t smile at a stranger - it would come across as over-familiar. Another is from Germany, and swears that there is a distinctive way people from his city check their watches. I cannot attest to either of these, but my point is that what brings communities together, what makes them seem like “us” is a huge contingent accident filled with strange things. And one of the most important strange “us-creating” things is the act of storytelling.

Similar to last section, Han talks about storytelling in roughly two different ways. There is simply having shared narratives, and there is literally telling stories with people.

The strengths of having shared narratives for a community are pretty intuitive. If we think of narratives as giving us an orientation, then having shared narratives is likely to help us move in similar directions. This is both in having shared narrative touchstones like certain myths or legends, but also a similar story for the community itself. If everyone has a rough idea that their community is ‘pointing towards’ an end goal of mutual support, and brotherly love, then that is likely to be quite a cohesive society. If the whole community is pointing towards mutual competition and anti-cooperation, then that will look very different, but in a strange way, it will still be aligned. But if different groups hold radically different narratives regarding the community itself, then the community will become fragmented. For Han, this is partly how extreme polarisation occurs. In his Infocracy, he even describes people living in different worlds, where the facts of reality are organised in radically different ways, and they may even disagree on the nature of truth. In such a scenario, the very possibility of societal cohesion dissolves. It doesn’t even seem enough to say they are disagreeing, since they cannot even understand one another’s worldviews anymore. Even talking to one another becomes borderline impossible. We no longer just disagree on interpretations of facts, but on facts themselves, and how to organise them. For Han, this is what inevitably awaits when narratives diverge beyond mutual recognition.

Of course, this is not to say that everyone having a totally shared narrative is necessarily brilliant. If a community narrativises itself as inherently superior to all others, and as having a right to dominate them, then that will likely have undesirable consequences. But even this speaks to the raw power of narrative to facilitate terrible things. It could also be used to create successful, cohesive societies.

And, as Han points out, even in extremely destructive shared narratives, a strong sense of in-group solidarity tends to be fostered. It is just that this is done at the cost of a demonised out-group. A narrative like Dostoevsky’s vision of universal brotherhood or Theravada Buddhism’s idea that we are all sufferers in the same boat might be able to create a more universal sense of a unifying story. Similarly, Han thinks that narrative is part of what makes political action possible. When French Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, they were partly spurred on by the narrativized visions of humanity put forward by philosophers, writers, and other thinkers in the preceding decades. So for Han, narrative is not just about forming communities, but also about having sufficient orientation to change them.

Han also highly praises the act of telling narratives. In listening to one another tell stories, we practice the art of sitting still and paying attention to someone else for a prolonged period of time. Ideally, a great narrative helps us to forget ourselves temporarily, and instead appreciate someone else, and what they are doing with their story. For Han, this is direct engagement with another person without getting caught up in what we get out of the interaction. We are all immersed in serving a higher goal - the narration itself. This is all a bit abstract, but we have probably all experienced something like this. Again I am drawn to my old Scout group, and how we would work together to keep a particular story alive. We were all participating in a shared project that brought us closer together, and we became more skilled at storytelling itself. To draw from the previous section, we were not just creating something meaningful, but creating it as a group. It is a trivial example, but it goes to show how impactful shared storytelling can be. Think about how when you meet up with old friends you will reminisce about past adventures and tales from days gone by. This is not just fun, it also keeps a part of you from that past alive, and allows you all to participate in crafting the legend of that past. We become like ancient chroniclers, jotting down embellished interpretations of past events, viewing them partly through the lens of history, and partly through myth.

So when Han says that narrative is under threat, this is again an indication of the stakes at play. Narratives are not just fun stories we tell one another, but part of the threads that connect us. For Han, to threaten narrative is to drive us all towards isolation, loneliness, and alienation.

So why exactly does Han think narrative is being threatened? And why is he so worried about it?

3. Positivity, productivity, and profit

A key part of Han’s general philosophy is that we have become too positive. By this he doesn’t mean we have become too upbeat, but rather we do not recognise the importance of limitation. We want to have everything, consume everything, and be everything. He notes that products are often marketed on their ability to speed life up, and an increase in information is seen as good, regardless of how that information is sorted or interpreted. This attitude may even be beneficial when it comes to a business, but Han thinks it is a disaster when it is applied to people.

The aim of a business in our current economic system is to grow. It wants to make itself larger, and to beat out competition. But this often runs counter to what makes individual people or agents fulfilled. We often desire cooperation in communities and connection with others, so an excessive focus on us and our self-expansion can be deeply isolating. For Han, this extreme positivity is part of why he thinks narratives, and specifically our ability to craft our own narratives, are in danger.

As we discussed earlier, Han thinks narratives are just as much about what you don’t notice as what you do. They are about assigning significance to particular facts. But if we have an overwhelming deluge of information hurtling towards us at any given moment, then this prioritisation process becomes much more difficult. Orienting narratives are prevented from forming, and we instead fall into a kind of paralysis. We cannot check all the information for ourselves, and so we give up, throwing up our hands and dismissing the world as a confusing, unintelligible mess that no one could possibly make sense of. Han talks about the pace of information. How the relevance of a particular piece of news becomes briefer, giving us no time to process or understand what we are looking at. At best, we just accept whatever narrative we are given, and hope that there was no nefarious intent or incompetence behind it, and at worst we are left trying to empty the ocean with a spoon.

For Han, it takes time to build narratives, and this is unsurprising. Think about how long it takes for a single story to settle into a culture, or even a small group of people. Think about how long it takes to sit down and try to make sense of your own life. It requires deep, focused reflection and a slower pace of thought. There is a reason Aristotle thought that wisdom required contemplation, and narrative is no different. But contemplation is a slow process, and relies on us carefully sorting through the information we receive, ascertaining what its significance is to us and to the stories we are telling. This is even reflected in the length of important cultural stories. Homer’s epic poems are hundreds of pages long, as are the holy texts of almost every religion. Han argues that the acceleration of information threatens our ability to sit down and craft narratives like this.

Moreover, an excess of mere information can trick us into thinking that we are much wiser than we actually are. It is very easy to read a series of articles on a topic and think that you understand them, but understanding can be had to a greater or lesser extent. This is one reason I am such a fan of re-reading books. I almost always begin re-reading something thinking that I will not discover much new in the book, and I am almost always wrong. I must have read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground over 10 times now, and yet each time there is something new to discover, and new to reflect upon. But this kind of repeated exposure and slow processing is far more difficult when there is the constant pressure to keep up with new information. It can seem like a waste of time, even when it definitely isn’t. Han thinks this shallow, surface-level way that we often engage with information slowly erodes our ability to form our narratives. It makes life seem totally bewildering since nothing “sticks around” for us to dwell on or digest. Instead he thinks we have the worst of both worlds - we are extremely disoriented yet somehow also convinced that we are more informed. The world appears both entirely unmysterious, and yet too complex for us to make sense of. And since the endless production of information is extremely profitable, this process shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, Han expects it to speed up. And the further we undermine narrative, the less we can make sense of the world. For Han, we are treating the human mind like a database you put facts into, without recognising the particular ways we humans need to organise information to make it compelling and directional .

This acceleration also disrupts our ability to share narratives among ourselves, and so tie our communities closer together. As Han puts it:

“Narrating presupposes close listening and deep attention. The narrative community is a community of attentive listeners. But we increasingly lack the patience for attentive listening, even the patience for narrative.”

For Han, the pressure to constantly be up-to-date, to be consuming endless information, causes us to forget the importance of simply listening to someone for an extended period of time. One of my friends has met a lot of politicians, and he says that one distinctive characteristic many of them seem to have is looking over your shoulder to see if there is anyone else they really ought to be talking to instead. Han thinks we have all become a bit like those politicians. Either we are waiting for someone to finish so that we can impose our ego again, or we are just biding our time before the next urgent piece of information arrives. This makes the kind of enduring, enveloping focus that characterises a real connecting interaction with someone much more talk to their friends with their phones on the table, so that if a new stimulus comes flying in, they will not miss it. And when the phone does buzz, and they glance down at it while you are talking, doesn’t that make you feel just a little less connected with them, a little less close?

And what narratives we have left do not fill Han with confidence. He identifies the dominant modern narrative to be individual success, to the exclusion of others, and ultimately to the detriment of ourselves. He terms this the ‘neoliberal worldview’ but it stretches far wider than a mere economic concept, and is as much influenced by Han’s spiritual beliefs as his political ones. He judges that our current societies reduce the human down to a producing and performing object. We are primed to behave as good workers, and strive for high achievement, but not necessarily become fulfilled people. Above all, we are told that our individual, isolated, economic success is the metric through which we are and ought to be judged. With such a dominant narrative, we are likely to treat ourselves more as cogs than people, and more machine than man. You can really see the input of Han’s Catholicism here. He views the person as a fully rounded soul, whose ultimate orientation ought to be towards God and His divine law. But even apart from a religious dimension, you can see how the dominance of an individualist, achievement-oriented narrative might blind us to the connection and community we could find with other people.

Han’s ultimate picture is incredibly pessimistic. He both thinks that current economic and cultural forces are undermining our ability to create new narratives, and also that we are left with narratives that encourage us to become increasingly isolated units, striving for material success, but kept lonely and nihilistic by the lack of helpful storytelling in our own lives.

But what can actually be done about this? How could we work on taking back creative control over our narratives? And what can we learn about the importance of narratives in general? Han does not say, and I am not sure whether he even thinks it is possible to recover from here. But there are certainly some places I think we could start.

4. Stories, Narrative, and Creation

The founders of awareness logic, Joseph Halpern and Riccardo Pucella, worked from a key point of intuition: awareness is the first step to knowledge, understanding, and action. If you are not aware of something, then for the moment it is barred from your conscious knowledge, and you cannot commit reasoned action based on it. This is one reason philosophical reflection on everyday life can be so helpful. It can draw our attention and awareness to areas that may previously have lain hidden.

So the first lesson Han’s work contains is just how important narrative is. We often talk about stories as if they are simply entertainment. We judge them on how lucrative they are, and think they ought to be left to the novelists and the filmmakers. But if Han is right, this is far from the truth. Narratives are not separate from us, but are an integral part of how we interact with and process the world. And whether we like it or not, they are influencing our feelings, thoughts, and behaviours at every moment of every day. To leave such powerful forces entirely up to chance seems at best short-sighted, and at worst outright self-destructive. But now that we are aware of how important narratives are, we can begin to understand and question them.

And we are not starting from a blank slate. We will have inherited a whole host of narratives and assumptions from our environment that may or not be helpful. The one that Han singles out for special critique is the “human as achievement” narrative, where the correct story of someone’s life is of a lone achiever, producing and consuming as much as they can before they shuffle off this mortal coil, and holding no duties to anyone and no connections to others. The idea of depending on another person is demonised despite the fact it is something most of us do every day. I don’t know about you, but I don’t collect my own rainwater. Han thinks anything that threatens this narrative is condemned. So this is a reasonably good place to start. What alternative ways are there to look at the story of a human being than as a productive agent? We may not have to look far. One of the most famous stories in history - that of Jesus Christ, is not about production or personal power, but of sacrifice and love. So much so that the embodiment of that love becomes one third of the trinity. Now I am not a Christian, and you might not be either. But my point is that this is a radically different kind of story to the one Han thinks we have inherited today. “Forgive them father, for they know not what they are doing” is worlds away from “become a totally independent, competitive, and powerful individual”. To draw from the late pope Benedict the XVI, the story of Jesus is not about power, but charitable love. You might end up rejecting this narrative as well, in favour of something else. But exercises like this are helpful for realising that there is more than one personal narrative - more than one way of answering “who am I?” and “what should I be doing?”. To become conscious of the inner workings of narrative on your mind is the first step to having some control over them. As Socrates pointed out, investigating yourself is a key part of any philosophical project.

Secondly, the community aspect of narrative can help us appreciate that unquantifiable togetherness that comes from having shared stories in our societies. We humans have a bias towards things we can measure, because those things are more available to us, and we can get a clear idea of what they are doing. But when stretched to its extreme, this can lead to us ignoring anything that is more difficult to measure. But just because the value of community narratives cannot be directly plotted on an excel spreadsheet does not mean their impact is not there. Something Han critiques about the way we often analyse our societies today is that we treat people as if they are cold-hearted, individual, economic agents, when we are unavoidably social creatures with complex emotional landscapes. We have needs that cannot be reduced simply to monetary factors. He is not the only person to point this out. Perhaps the most popular figure today making the same point is the advertising executive Rory Sutherland. Building communities as if we are working with homo economicus simply will not work. We also have to account for our irrational, meaning-seeking, and narrative-loving aspects. Participating in shared stories and shared narratives may be a key part of how we rescue ourselves from our increasingly lonely, atomised, and isolated existence.

And this recognition of the human need for narrative also extends to ourselves. This is just me spitballing, but I think that one reason we have seen such a visible decline in young people feeling their lives are meaningless is because we don’t have access to a clear narrative of improvement and progression. People are struggling to achieve the milestones that used to constitute the broad “narrative of adult life”. Many of us grew up being told that we would finish school, maybe attend university, find a job, buy a house, have a family, and provide a decent life for our children. But as many young people can tell you, buying a house is becoming more of a pipe dream for a large proportion of the population, and providing for a family seems like an increasingly daunting prospect. In some ways, we are being fed a narrative of life that is no longer accurate, and I am not overly hopeful that the probability of achieving it will be restored anytime soon. So the question is raised: what narratives are we going to replace it with? And it is worth this being a conscious effort on our part. What does the narrative of being an adult in the modern world look like? What are we, and what should we do in this context? It is no surprise that young people often feel nihilistic, when they are essentially stuck at the end of act 1 in their inherited narrative, with no sign of act 2 beginning for at least a while. This transforms life from a satisfying story structure into a cycle, and considering what we said earlier about the link between cyclical structures and nihilism, should we really be shocked at how young people have reacted? Of course, I am a young person, so take what I am saying with a grain of salt. But I do think that being stuck in the narrative of a world that no longer holds is part of the general malaise that many observe in the young.

And finally, our personal narratives are some of the key ways we can wrest control over our lives. Epictetus once noted that we cannot always control what happens to us, but we do have some control over our interpretations of these events. This is sometimes interpreted as a simple command to control your emotions, but incorporating this into our accounts of narrative, we can view it from a slightly different angle. Whereas the world itself is a huge eldritch beast that will remain out of our power much of the time, our personal narratives, crafted with the people closest to us, provide us with a handle of agency in what would otherwise be a bewildering and confusing universe.

Because, to reiterate what we said at the start of the video, narrative is not something we lay on top of reality, it is the very means by which we understand that reality. And the narratives we create, both within ourselves and with others, are perhaps some of the most vital projects we will ever undertake. However, if we don’t recognise the importance of narrative, then we will forever be in the dark, or at the mercy of the narratives that have been crafted for us.