John Vervaeke on the Meaning Crisis, Relevance Realization, Religion and the Search for Wisdom

High-Level Overview

Lex Fridman talks with John Vervaeke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto and creator of the 50-part lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Vervaeke explains why so many people today feel depressed, lonely, cynical and surrounded by "bullshit (in philosopher Harry Frankfurt's technical sense), and he builds a detailed account of meaning, intelligence, rationality and wisdom around his central idea of relevance realization, the brain's ability to zero in on what matters out of an overwhelming flood of possibilities. From there they discuss death, consciousness, truth and illusion, the meaning of life" question, religion and non-theism, four kinds of knowing, dialogue and collective intelligence, mindfulness, flow, psychedelics, the religious pull of Marxism and Nazism, evil and sin, and love.

The tone is dense, philosophical and friendly. Lex often plays devil's advocate, pushing back on Vervaeke's rejection of the "meaning of life" question, on Donald Hoffman's illusion argument, and on claims about video games and social media, and Vervaeke answers patiently with arguments and examples. The conversation moves from cognitive science to spirituality to practical advice, ending with Vervaeke's own struggle after leaving fundamentalist Christianity.

The Discussion Explores:

• What meaning is: connectedness to things real and independent of you, and why the meaning crisis is both perennial and historical
• Death and finitude: mortality as a present condition, and what terror management research shows
• Relevance realization: how minds filter overwhelming information, and how that same ability makes us prone to self-deception
• Intelligence, rationality and wisdom, and "bullshit" as self-deception
• Truth, illusion and the meaning-of-life question, including Lex's disagreement
• Religion without theism: four kinds of knowing, myth, and a "religion that's not a religion"
• Practices: dialogue, mindfulness (meditation plus contemplation), flow and psychedelics
• Ideologies, evil and love: Marxism, Nazism, sin as failing to love wisely, and Vervaeke's own dark period

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

What Meaning Is, and Why It's in Crisis

Vervaeke is careful to separate "meaning in life, not the meaning of life." Meaning in life refers to what makes people rate their lives as worth living and worth the suffering. Research shows it is a sense of connectedness to yourself, to others and to the world, and specifically to things whose value and existence don't depend on your own egocentric preferences. That's why having a child is so meaningful. One test he suggests is to ask what you would want to keep existing if you were gone, how you are connected to it, and how you matter to it. When that connectedness is missing, people fall into depression, addiction and self-destructive behavior.

The meaning crisis, he argues, is where perennial threats to meaning (absurdity, existential anxiety, alienation, the despair of Ecclesiastes) meet historical forces that have stripped away the resources humans traditionally used to cope with them. He sees clear evidence in his classroom. Asked where they go for information, students hold up their phones. For knowledge, they say science or the university. For wisdom, there is silence. "Wisdom isn't optional," he says, yet we have no respected home for the practices that cultivate it, which is why the fastest-growing group are the "nones" who call themselves spiritual but not religious.

Death, Finitude and the Temporal Horizon

Lex raises Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and terror management theory. Vervaeke takes human finitude seriously but tells Lex that "your mortality is not an event in the future. It's a state you're in right now." The universe is indifferent to your personal story. You could meet the love of your life and be hit by a truck. He cites research showing that reminding people of death in an abstract, third-person way makes their thinking more rigid, but having them imagine their own death surrounded by loved ones increases openness and flexibility. What matters, he suggests, may be whether a death is meaningful rather than death itself, since people will sacrifice their lives for deaths they consider meaningful.

Personally, Vervaeke doesn't long to live forever. Buddhist practices show both the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality. He believes the mind ends at death, like a song ending when the last instrument is put down, which doesn't make the song less beautiful. Somewhere in your 30s or 40s, he says, your temporal horizon flips: "you don't live from your birth, you live towards your death." Following the Stoics and Buddhism, he now focuses on two meta-desires: that whatever satisfies his desires be real, and that it bring peace of mind rather than inner conflict. He takes panpsychism seriously but rejects it, and argues that while groups show collective intelligence, there is no good evidence of collective consciousness, only because the bandwidth and density of connection don't yet exist.

Relevance Realization: The Core of Intelligence

At the heart of general intelligence, Vervaeke argues, is a problem machines haven't solved. The information in any room, in your memory, in your possible actions and possible thoughts is combinatorially explosive, yet you reliably zero in on what matters, somewhere between arbitrary guessing and exhaustive algorithmic search. He calls this relevance realization and describes it as working much like evolution. Opposing systems generate variation and apply selection: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems balancing arousal, and the mind-wandering default mode network pushing against the task-focused network. The result is what Merleau-Ponty called an "optimal grip on the world. Even categorization reflects it: we say dog" rather than "German shepherd" or "mammal" because it balances similarity and difference best, what Eleanor Rosch called the basic level.

Relevance realization comes before beliefs. A cup has countless properties and could be a hat or stand for the letter V. "Representations presuppose relevance realization," so framing is not a set of propositions but an ongoing "salience landscaping" of what stands out to you. Salience, he explains, is relevance that has passed through working memory, which his University of Toronto colleague Lynn Hasher describes as a higher-order relevance filter. Consciousness is needed most in situations that are novel, complex and ill-defined.

Intelligence, Rationality, Wisdom and Bullshit

Vervaeke's definitions stack. Intelligence is what you use to solve problems. Rationality is using intelligence to overcome the self-deception that arises while solving them. Because we have multiple ways of knowing, we have multiple rationalities, and wisdom coordinates them so they constrain and support each other: "wisdom is rationally self-transcending rationality." Put another way, "whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness," meaning self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. A wise person walks into a messy, novel situation, zeroes in on what really matters, and responds appropriately.

He rejects the idea that self-deception is lying to yourself, since lying requires knowing the truth. Instead, drawing on Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit, he says we bullshit ourselves. A liar relies on your commitment to truth, while a bullshit artist tries to make you indifferent to it by making things salient and catchy. A liquor ad with gorgeous, laughing people doesn't fool anyone, yet the product catches your eye in the store. Because attention drives salience and salience grabs attention, we can get caught in loops cut off from reality. He cites a classic Simpsons parody of empty political speech ("twirling, twirling towards freedom").

Truth, Illusion and Whether "the Meaning of Life" Is a Real Question

Following Spinoza and Plato, Vervaeke says we know truth retrospectively, in moments of insight when we move to a broader frame and can see the distortions of the old one. We are capable of "finite transcendence" but never a God's-eye view. "Real" and "illusory are comparative terms, so the claim that everything is an illusion makes as little sense as saying everything is tall. He presses this against Donald Hoffman: arguing from evolution presupposes that evolution, and the geology, genetics and instruments that support it, are real, and knowledge is interwoven, not like Lego." Lex plays devil's advocate with nested simulations and video-game worlds that have consistent internal truths. Vervaeke answers that if an illusion can never be discovered it makes no practical difference, and if it can be, science and self-correction are the way out. He also defends partial knowledge against Meno's paradox.

On the meaning of life, Vervaeke calls it a malformed question, like asking what time it is on the sun, because it assumes meaning is a property of the universe. Meaning is "transjective, a relationship between subject and world, like a cup's graspability or a shark's fit to the ocean. Meaning isn't in me, I think that's romantic bullshit, and it isn't in the universe. Lex pushes back hard. For him, the question reaches for the connection between the Big Bang and the feeling of love, shakes us out of the daily hamster wheel, and leads back to finding magic and beauty in ordinary things. Vervaeke agrees it is good insofar as it asks how the whole of your life connects to reality, but warns that it can send you looking in the wrong place. He notes that when he asks students in happy relationships whether they'd want to know if their partner was cheating, about 95% say yes, because it's not real."

Four Kinds of Knowing and Religion Without Theism

Vervaeke explains why religions work despite their disputed doctrines. Studies of people cultivating wisdom find that religious practitioners often score higher than secular ones, but no particular religion does better than another. He argues the transformation happens beneath propositions, and lays out four kinds of knowing, each with its own memory. Propositional knowing is knowing that something is true (semantic memory). Procedural knowing is skills (procedural memory), which is why someone with Alzheimer's can still play piano. Perspectival knowing is what it's like to be you here now (episodic memory), tied to "adverbial" qualities like hereness and togetherness. Participatory knowing is the fit between you and your world, like the way gravity makes walking possible, stored in your very sense of self and felt most when it's missing, in loneliness or culture shock.

He calls himself a non-theist: both modern theists and atheists wrongly assume the sacred is a supreme personal being to be related to through correct beliefs. "Being is not a being," he says. It is the ability of things to be, which many mystical traditions call no-thingness. Classical Christianity, he notes, looks more like non-theism than modern theism does, which is where he finds common ground with Jonathan Pageau, while he challenged Jordan Peterson's case for God in a three-way dialogue. Nietzsche's madman was warning atheists that rejecting doctrines doesn't replace what religion did. Vervaeke proposes rebuilding that function with the best cognitive science and respectful borrowing from traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism, "the religion that's not a religion." Stoicism, he notes, arose in a similar crisis of lost home and belonging after Alexander's empire broke up. On myth, he says "a myth is like a public dream": myths are "stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness," and early Christian readers themselves ranked literal readings lowest.

Dialogue and Distributed Cognition

Most human problem-solving is collective. In the Wason selection task, a reasoning test, only about 10% of individuals get it right, but groups of four who talk it through reach about 80%. Vervaeke describes dialogos, conversations that take on a life of their own, produce insights no one could reach alone, and create a shared flow state. He thinks this is even more basic than myth and ritual, which grow out of it. Lex notes that podcast listeners join such conversations too, and Vervaeke says podcasts and YouTube blur the line between speech and writing, creating a new medium for distributed cognition. He describes taking part in emerging communities, including Rafe Kelly's movement-and-nature retreats, which participants who weren't religious agreed had amounted to "a religious act." He also describes a gathering in Vermont working on a shared curriculum and on ways to vet communities of practice so they don't turn into cults.

Mindfulness: Meditation Plus Contemplation

Vervaeke, who has practiced since 1991, rejects defining mindfulness as nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment and says it is wrong to equate it with meditation. Using his glasses as a metaphor, meditation is taking your frame off to look at it for distortions, and contemplation (from the Latin for looking up to the sky, a translation of the Greek theoria) is putting it back on to see through it more deeply. Mindfulness includes both, which is why it boosts insight: you have to break a bad frame and make a new one. Meditation alone risks withdrawal and spiritual bypassing, and contemplation alone risks inflated fantasy.

His practical advice is to combine three practices. First, a meditative practice like Vipassana: attend to the sensations of breathing, and when the mind wanders, label the process with an "-ing word (listening, planning), then return to the breath without fighting or indulging the monkey mind" or "puppy. Second, a contemplative practice like metta, interpreted existentially, or the Stoic view from above," done step by step as you imagine rising above the room, the city, the country and the Earth. Third, a moving practice that brings on flow, like Tai Chi Chuan. His free courses on these practices are on his YouTube channel.

Flow, Intuition and Its Limits

Drawing on the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Vervaeke describes flow as occurring when a task's demands slightly exceed your skills, producing both optimal experience and optimal performance. It requires clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and errors that matter, as in rock climbing. People in flow feel at one with the world, lose the self-critical inner narrator, and act effortlessly. In work published in an Oxford handbook, he proposes that flow is a cascade of insights, and that it trains good intuition. Implicit learning picks up patterns but can't tell causation from correlation (which is how prejudice forms). Following Robin Hogarth's Educating Intuition, those three flow conditions are the same ones that make experiments reliable, so flow shapes intuitions that fit real causal patterns.

Flow predicts well-being and meaning, but he warns it can be hijacked. He says the WHO now recognizes that some people flow in video games at the expense of flow in real life, and depression has been called "anti-flow." Lex pushes back that younger people who grew up with games may transfer flow better and be more resilient to social media. Vervaeke points to his own students who couldn't transfer it and to evidence linking social media with depression through constant, illusory social comparison. He contrasts this with his own years of three to four hours of daily Tai Chi, after which friends in grad school noticed he had become more balanced and flexible in conversations.

Psychedelics, Ideologies, Evil and Love

Vervaeke compares psychedelics to techniques used in neural networks, like dropout or adding noise, which prevent "overfitting by loosening constraints so the system can generalize. Even static on a screen can trigger insight. Humans, unlike networks, need practices to integrate what opens up, so beyond Timothy Leary's set and setting" he adds a third S, "sacred": a framework for cultivating wisdom, as indigenous cultures use. In Roland Griffiths's psilocybin research, only those who had a full mystical experience showed a lasting increase in openness, which can be risky without discernment. Oddly, people returning from such states judge them more real than everyday life, which drives transformation.

On Marxism and Nazism, he traces how Hegel turned Christianity's story of progress into philosophy and Marx relocated it to class struggle, offering religious hope for a "new man with scientific legitimacy. Both were driven by a Promethean spirit, the hubris that we can make ourselves godlike, which licenses the ends justify the means. Nazism, emerging from the Weimar Republic's meaning crisis, borrowed twisted Gnostic themes, rituals and myth. Vervaeke defines sin not as mere immorality but as a failure to love wisely, putting a lesser good in place of a greater one, which can build up into collective hyper-agents capable of evil beyond the sum of individual choices. He also sums up Heidegger (the mistake of treating being as a supreme being), Tillich (faith as ultimate concern"), and why he prefers Jung's organic model of the psyche to Freud's hydraulic one.

Finally, he shares that after leaving fundamentalist Christianity he went through years he calls "the black burning: a taste for the transcendent with no food for it, loneliness, absurdity and self-destructive behavior. Therapy, meditation, Tai Chi and cognitive science helped, and seeing his students recognize the same struggle showed him it wasn't only personal. His advice to young people is to find a community and set of practices that cultivates wisdom without requiring beliefs that contradict science, and to put relationships first, since those are what matter as you approach death. On love, he cites Spinoza on love freeing reason from egocentrism, and Iris Murdoch: love is when you painfully realize that something other than yourself is real."

Conclusion

John Vervaeke offers a demanding but rewarding framework: meaning is connectedness to what is real, relevance realization is how we achieve it, and the same machinery that makes us intelligent also makes us prone to bullshitting ourselves. That is why we need rationality, wisdom and practices that work below the level of beliefs. His proposals include non-theistic spirituality, real dialogue, a mix of meditation, contemplation and flow, and treating psychedelics as sacred tools rather than products. Lex's pushback, especially on the meaning of life and on technology, keeps the exchange lively. The central thread is his call to learn to love wisely, which he treats as both the antidote to the meaning crisis and the core of the good life.

This is a summary of "#317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom" from Lex Fridman Podcast, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.