In this reflection on an Unbelievable? conversation, author Erik Standness explores how John Vervaeke and Malcolm Guite diagnose a modern “meaning crisis” first glimpsed by Douglas Adams - and why restoring purpose may require more than facts, pointing instead to imagination, community, and the sacred.

Douglas Adams Saw It Coming  

Douglas Adams, in the prologue to his highly entertaining and insightful book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” prophetically highlighted the distinct features of our current meaning crisis. 

“The planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should have ever left the oceans.”  … (Register to read the rest of the article)