Why we have Everything—except meaning…

If an alien anthropologist landed on Earth today and studied the modern West, it might file a bewildered report: “Subject species achieved unprecedented prosperity, technology, and education, then deliberately dismantled the one thing that seemed to hold it all together. Results: mixed, trending toward tragicomic.”

We are that experiment. Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are abandoning organized religion—especially Christianity—at record speeds. Churches stand emptier, “spiritual but not religious” has become the default polite dodge, and outright atheism or downright apathy surges. Commentators celebrate this as enlightenment, the final graduation from superstition into the clear light of reason.

Before popping the champagne, perhaps we should check the scoreboard.

We live in the most materially comfortable civilization in human history. Pocket supercomputers grant us food, rides, entertainment, and infinite information on demand. Kings of old would have sold their kingdoms for our air-conditioning and antibiotics. Yet anxiety, depression, loneliness, and purposelessness are skyrocketing among the young. Birth rates collapse. Trust in institutions evaporates. Communities fray. The very generation with the most options reports feeling the least reason to get out of bed.

In short, humanity has acquired nearly everything it wanted except the thing it actually needed.

MEANING.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw this coming. When he declared “God is dead,” he wasn’t throwing a secular keg party. He was issuing a grim warning. Western morality, dignity, and purpose had been built on a religious foundation for centuries. Remove the foundation and the building eventually sways. Many today insist we can be “good without God.” Individually, sure. Civilizations have a harder track record.

The trouble with secular ethics isn’t that smart people can’t propose moral systems. They can, and have. The trouble is the follow-up question they dread:

Why?

Why should humans have equal dignity? Why shouldn’t the strong dominate the weak? Why is sacrifice for strangers noble rather than sucker behavior? Why does future generations’ welfare bind us? Why, exactly, is cruelty wrong rather than just personally distasteful?

If morality is evolutionary residue, it’s a useful survival hack we can outgrow. If it’s social convention, majorities can rewrite it whenever convenient. If it’s personal preference, your compassion and my cruelty stand on equal footing. Secular reason excels at how—how to build bridges, cure diseases, optimize economies. It is far less persuasive on whether we should, or toward what end. Reason makes for a wonderful and superb GPS. But, it cannot choose the destination. Tell it to drive into a swamp and it will cheerfully narrate the most efficient route while you sink and inevitably drown.

History keeps providing education on this point with very expensive tuition. Consider the Third Reich. The regime ran on time, mobilized science, passed laws through proper channels, and enjoyed popular support. Its leaders saw themselves as rational, progressive, and biologically enlightened—building a stronger future by shedding outdated sentimentalities and suspicions. They weren’t cartoon villains twirling mustaches. They were modern materialists following their premises to their logical conclusions.

Today most everyone agrees the Nazis were evil. In fact, the agreement is so universal it is used as a go-to perjorative for most things people don’t like.

Don’t support Mass Migration?

Nazi.

Don’t support gender ideology?

Nazi.

Don’t support unregulated abortion?

Nazi.

The revealing question is why. When the discussion happens, appeals to “human dignity,” “objective rights,” or “inherent worth” inevitably sneak in. But, one is forced to ask: where do those concepts originate? Nature offers no such guarantees—only hurricanes, parasites, and the strong eating the weak. You cannot derive intrinsic human equality from chemistry, weigh it on scales, or discover it under a microscope. It is a profound metaphysical claim about reality. Secular systems borrow this claim but lack the vocabulary to justify it. Human rights become beautiful but strangely groundless.

This exposes the deeper limitation of unaided human reason. It is an extraordinary servant and a terrible master. The twentieth century was not run by idiots but, instead, by highly educated people armed with sophisticated secular theories. The body count is sobering. Reason can split the atom with tremendous releases of energy. But, reason cannot tell us whether we should harness such energy release to power cities or to destroy them. It can design very efficient bureaucracies but it cannot stop them from becoming efficient at evil.

Human beings are not mere thinking machines. We seek meaning. We crave purpose, belonging, moral clarity and the hope that suffering is not pointless. We seek assurance that love is more than biochemistry in organized meat. When traditional faith recedes, these hungers do not vanish. They simply migrate.

Enter the substitute religions of modernity—hilariously earnest and often merciless. Consider:

Politics becomes salvation history, with its own elect and damned.

Activism supplies saints and inquisitions.

Consumerism promises transcendence through purchase.

Social media delivers liturgy, apostles, heretics, and excommunications.

Forgiveness? That’s so 4th century. Five minutes on Twitter (or whatever it’s called this week) reveals secular cultures recreating every vice of religion—tribalism, purity spirals, public shaming—minus the mercy or self-awareness. The human need for transcendence is apparently hardwired; unplug the church and it simply reroutes into something usually worse.

Civilizational history reinforces the pattern. Long-lasting societies—from ancient Rome to imperial China—rested on shared transcendent visions that transcended individual whim or momentary majority. These frameworks were imperfect, yet they supplied cohesion and continuity. When confidence in founding beliefs erodes, fragmentation and exhaustion follow. Telling every young person to “build your own meaning” sounds empowering until you realize it’s like asking each freshman to independently derive calculus and quantum mechanics before lunch. Exhausting, lonely, and prone to error.

This is where the Catholic Church, viewed coldly through a secular lens, becomes fascinating. No marketing department or venture capitalist could have engineered its survival. It has outlasted empires, plagues, barbarian invasions, Protestant revolts, Enlightenment skepticism, world wars, scandals, and repeated expert predictions of its demise. For two millennia it has stubbornly insisted on wrestling with the same unavoidable human questions:

What is a person?

Why does human life have irreducible value?

What is justice when majorities fail?

What is truth when power shifts?

What makes a life good rather than merely successful?

How should we face suffering and death?

Young people today swim in a culture brilliantly equipped to extend lifespan and optimize productivity, yet increasingly mute on why any of it is worth the effort. Invent your own truth. Curate your own identity. Maximize personal happiness. It sounds liberating until the existential dread hits at 3 a.m. and none of the apps have an answer.

Faith—particularly the Catholic tradition with its intellectual depth, communal rituals, moral continuity, and insistence on objective reality—offers something different. Not a personal hobby or lifestyle accessory, but a coherent account of existence that places the individual inside a story larger than their own anxieties. It refuses to reduce humans to economic units, genetic vehicles, or pleasure-maximizers. It asserts that the universe is not a random accident, that persons possess genuine dignity, and that meaning is discovered rather than arbitrarily invented.

None of this requires checking one’s brain at the door. The Church has historically been a patron of reason, science, and the arts precisely because it believes reality is intelligible. The call is not to abandon evidence or inquiry but to recognize their limits. Reason without an anchor drifts. Autonomy without obligation becomes isolation.

The modern West has mastered how to live longer and more comfortably. It has grown strangely incompetent at answering the question every serious person eventually asks:

What is all this for?

That question refuses to die. Younger generations, amid the very abundance that was supposed to silence it, feel its urgency more acutely than most.

Returning to faith is not regression. It is recovering the missing software that makes the impressive hardware of modernity actually habitable for creatures like us. The alternative—drifting through substitute faiths and self-curated meaning—isn’t working. The data, increasingly, is in. The alien anthropologist would probably conclude we tried the experiment. Time to stop pretending the results were a success.