A Thorough Critique of Popular and Psychological Accounts of Meaning of Life
Release Date: 11/07/2025
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info_outlineThis is John’s second video essay, and it delivers a thorough critique of contemporary theories of meaning in life. With his student Arjun Arora assisting, John dismantles the standard psychological and folk categories — purpose, coherence, significance, and mattering — showing why they fall short of capturing the depth of what “meaning” actually is.
Arjun Arora is a cognitive science and physics scholar whose work bridges science, philosophy, and the search for meaning. As a student collaborator of Dr. John Vervaeke at the University of Toronto, Arora explores questions at the intersection of cognitive science, metaphysics, and existential psychology. His research focuses on the nature of meaning in life.
Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study
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00:00 Welcome to the Lectern
01:16 “What makes a life worth living, even when we are faced by frustrations, failures, and our faults?”
01:30 Meet Arjun Arora
03:00 Critiquing the standard model of meaning in life
04:30 Purpose and orientation
06:00 Coherence and its challenges
08:00 Significance and mattering
11:30 Meaning in life vs. meaning of life
14:30 Worldviews and meta meaning systems
17:00 The role of affordance and adaptivity
22:00 The normativity of meaning in life
47:00 The developmental dimension of meaning in life
52:00 Exploring the connection between wisdom and meaning
52:30 Modal confusion and existential modes
53:00 The having mode vs. the being mode
53:30 The cost of modal confusion
55:00 Existential resilience and meaning in life
58:00 The normative aspect of meaning
01:04:00 The role of trust and belonging in meaning
01:08:00 The problem with the current meaning in life construct
01:12:30 The need for a new metaphysics
01:43:00 The importance of phenomenology in meaning
01:45:00 Concluding thoughts and future directions
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Ideas, People, and Works Mentioned in this Episode
Philosophical Silk Road
Intersection of Neo-Platonism and Judaism
Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy of matter and form
Fountain of Life and the concept of God
Dialogical nature of reason
Jewish mysticism and its influence
Potentiality and actuality in Neo-Platonism
Receptivity and creativity in philosophy
Coupling of form and matter in existence
Desire and the divine essence
Logos as the “virtual engine”
Purpose of mankind and knowledge
Self-organization and complexity
The mystery of the divine and analogy of language
Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron)
Sarah Pessin – scholar, Theology of Desire
Zevi Slavin – host/interlocutor
Andalusian thinkers
Fountain of Life
Selected Poems of Ibn Gabirol
Theology of Desire
Books and literature on Ibn Gabirol generally
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Thank you for Listening!