Many of us have now reached the limits of that promise. As a result, a subtle crack has formed in our sense of meaning and orientation, one that is easy to overlook at first but difficult to ignore once it is felt. This essay turns toward that moment, exploring ways modern life responds when the fracture becomes visible, and the impulse to seal it quietly takes hold. What follows is a look at six distinct ways we attempt to live with, manage, interpret, or move beyond this fracture once it can no longer be ignored.

In my bathroom, there is a medicine cabinet above the sink. While shaving one morning, I noticed some small cracks in the drywall by the mirror. As I stared at them, I wondered how long they had been there, since I’d not noticed them until this moment. Because it wasn’t doing any obvious harm, it was easy to dismiss. So I did. I went on with my busy day and quickly forgot about it.

For many people, a momentary sense that something is off in their lives can arise and quickly fade, as life continues to function well enough. Over time, work, success, productivity, and forward movement provide sufficient meaning and orientation. Even if a sense of disorientation appears now and then, external validation through activity and accomplishment is enough to hold one’s identity intact, with no felt sense that something needs to be repaired. This response is reinforced by a culture that rewards productivity, achievement, and progress, which supplies enough external validation to keep the deeper questions of life at bay.

When I first began to sense something was off in the way I was living, I pushed it aside. I didn’t want to examine this feeling further, so I kept moving forward and ignored the unease, focusing instead on my major tasks and responsibilities.

Another response, rather than ignoring the cracks in the wall, is to quickly paint over them, without trying to understand what caused them, but to make the wall look normal again with minimal effort. It’s a reasonable response, especially if you don’t like home renovations or don’t want to waste time messing around with a bathroom wall.

Once the unease of an unsettled mind is felt, a common response is to find a way to calm it without wanting to know what lies behind it, or, in the case of the bathroom wall, what lies behind the crack itself. Life still functions. Work moves forward. Relationships are intact. Yes, the crack is noticed, but there’s no felt need to open up the wall to see further into the source of the problem.

A variety of contemporary wellness modalities operate on the assumption that distress is primarily a physiological or cognitive imbalance, rather than a signal of disorientation within a larger cultural or existential context. In this view, the cracked wall of unease can be smoothed over by providing the self with relief, calm, stability, and emotional breathing room.

Programs such as stress-management techniques, mindfulness practices, self-care routines, and wellness coaching are among many approaches that acknowledge something feels off and offer pragmatic, often helpful ways to restore stability. They allow life to continue with minimal disruption.

These responses are like painting over the cracks in the bathroom wall so it looks normal again, without needing to examine the underlying structure. They help manage the self more effectively, but leave unaddressed how to re-situate the self within a larger, shared framework of meaning, one able to provide genuine direction beyond continual self-repair.

As the practices and strategies I’d relied on for years no longer seemed as effective, I started to explore alternatives to stabilize my growing sense of discomfort and confusion. More than anything, I wanted to quickly recapture a feeling of safety and support that I felt was slowly slipping away.

Over time, for some people, reframing and self-management start to feel inadequate, as deeper, unaddressed needs keep returning. The crack begins to call for something more than effective techniques or sound explanations. At this point, there is a felt pull to look more closely, even if that pull is accompanied by hesitation or a resistance to getting too entangled in trying to make sense of what’s really going on.

Instead of quickly painting over the wall crack, time is taken to sand the paint down to the drywall and apply joint compound to the exposed area. Once it dries, it’s sanded again and repainted. Although the underlying cause of the cracks lies hidden, no attempt is made to explore further. The wall is assumed to be fundamentally sound.

At this level of response, specific program types help people to regain their footing, sense of direction, and a sense of meaning. Work around life purpose, values clarification, and restoring a sense of personal power all aim to help people find their way out of disorientation. For some, this also includes re-engaging with an institutional religion or becoming involved in a fringe or minority religious group, not necessarily out of conviction, but in search of structure, language, and a sense of cohesive belonging.

When I reached a point where I felt like there must be something wrong with me, I did something I’d never have considered before: I saw a professional counselor. My loss of confidence and sense of failure in my life orientation demanded more than a surface coat of paint.

There comes a point when fixing the crack through repair and management no longer feels like the right response. Instead, we look further, perhaps for the first time, at what the crack itself might be trying to reveal. Is there a structural issue with the wall itself that is causing the cracks to appear? The crack shifts from being a problem to solve to a signal of a larger issue we’ve not yet considered. In this light, our experience of unease or disorientation is no longer treated as something to eliminate or solve, but as an indication that the larger structure we’re living within may be under a hidden strain.

Programs and practices designed to help people step back from trying to fix, optimize, or master, but stay with uncertainty and listen to what the fracture is revealing, operate at this level. Contemplative traditions, silent retreats, therapeutic inquiry without guaranteed outcomes, and presence over problem-solving offer no quick wins and no clear metrics to measure results.

Four years ago, I attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the Vipassana tradition. No talking. No eye contact. Eight hours of meditation every day, with the first group session starting at 4:30 AM. I wasn’t looking for answers, but was curious to see how I’d respond to the experience of remaining present with reality as it is, without reaching for explanation, relief, or escape.

Up to this point, the crack has been treated either as a problem to fix within the wall or as a signal revealing something about the structure itself. At this stage, some people decide to open up the wall, exposing what’s going on underneath, to see what the exterior has been hiding from view. This is the point where the work moves beyond solutions and reflective inquiry into direct encounter.

The opening up to what’s been hidden is often marked by risk-taking, vulnerability, and exposure. It involves being acted upon, not just acting, allowing individuals to come into contact with forces larger than the self. Here, the work is no longer about fixing what feels broken or mastering oneself more effectively.

This response is marked by experiences and containers that deliberately open up the wall, allowing the individual to be in contact with forces larger than personal control or explanation. Meaning is not constructed or managed here, but it is encountered through vulnerability, risk, and surrender. The self is no longer doing the acting, but is being acted upon, altered, and addressed in ways that are unpredictable and cannot be fully contained.

Extended retreats, initiatory rites, depth-oriented therapeutic work, carefully held psychedelic experiences, wilderness solos, and contemplative disciplines can all function in this way when approached with care and seriousness. These modalities are united by a willingness to enter spaces where the self can no longer manage outcomes, but instead, must be opened, addressed, and reshaped by forces beyond its own authorship.

Two years ago, I found myself in a carefully contained setting where my habitual sense of self as manager and interpreter of events quietly failed. What followed was not understanding, but a sudden release of tears, along with involuntary shaking, sadness, and grief, suggesting a process happening through me rather than one directed by me.

What becomes clear at this level of engagement is that opening the wall does not, by itself, restore stability or meaning. Something essential has been touched, but how that encounter is held, interpreted, and lived with over time remains an open question.

Across these varied responses, it also becomes clear that modern life offers several ways to deal with fracture once it has been noticed. People are not sitting around in passive indifference. They are actively searching for ways to live in the aftermath of a shared story once largely carried by religious institutions, stories that no longer hold the imaginative or communal commitments they once inspired.

Some approaches downplay the fracture, while others attempt to explain or open it up for repair. Each approach has its appeal, and each can help in limited ways. Taken together, they also point to a deeper question: whether the unease we feel is less about finding the right response and more about considering the larger framework within which we are trying to respond at all. Is our task ahead about repair and management, or about re-orientation? That is the question our next essay takes up.

Unlike the little dog we can point to and shoo away, this gnawing feeling is difficult to name. Today, many of us feel a strange emptiness. Not because we’ve failed, but because we’ve lost access to a larger story that once gave meaning to our lives.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that for most of Western history, the world was viewed as a place where mysterious powers of cosmic origin intermingled with human life. Whether influenced by angels or demons, the stars and planets, or seasonal changes, human beings didn’t see themselves as walled off from outside forces, but rather, vulnerable to them.

These forces, at times incomprehensible, were always at work in the background of daily life. Nothing was viewed as random or empty of spirit. Cooperating with these invisible forces was necessary to ensure a prosperous and blessed life. According to Taylor, this was a time in Western history when not believing in God was nearly inconceivable. But not anymore.

Perhaps the gnawing at our souls comes from the modern tendency to reduce life to what can be measured and explained through the sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry. We’ve become ill-equipped to speak of mystery, meaning, and the sacred in a culture that no longer makes room for them.

It’s as if the predominant modern worldview has locked the sacred and mysterious into a closet and thrown away the key, insisting there’s nothing inside worth remembering.

Yet still, many people who identify as agnostic, atheist, or secular humanist speak ardently about the magnificence of our universe, the mystery of human consciousness, and our ethical responsibility to one another. But without a shared framework to hold them, it’s like trying to cobble together scattered stones without a blueprint to erect a cathedral, and not knowing what is meant to be inside.

What happens when we live for too long in a world that seems flat and without any mystery or sacredness? A world where the most important things are already figured out and self-assuredly explainable? A world where there are no surprises outside of our neatly constructed views on how the world works—and doesn’t. How might this affect our inner world, our ambitions, and our relationships?

In Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, there’s a scene that depicts this tendency to rule out or deny the mysterious and the unknown.

Scrooge, an 18th-century, miserly businessman in London, is suddenly confronted alone at midnight on Christmas Eve by the ghostly appearance of his then seven-year-dead former business partner, Jacob Marley. Frightened and confused by this phenomenon, Scrooge is desperate to deny and explain away what is happening:

Ghost of Jacob: You don’t believe in me.

Scrooge: I don’t.

Ghost of Jacob: Why do you doubt your senses?

Scrooge: Because a little thing affects them — a slight disorder of the stomach. You… you might be an undigested piece of beef….

Unlike the earlier worldview in which the cosmos and human life were seen as deeply intertwined and penetrated by divine powers and spirits, the rise in modern science gave us a new understanding: we now inhabit a vast universe governed by impersonal laws that are measurable, explainable, and devoid of mystery. Any phenomenon viewed as out of the ordinary is promised to eventually be understood through the penetrating, trusted lens of the scientific method.

But what if the gnawing feeling we have isn’t something to be fixed?

What if it’s a call to remember something we’ve forgotten?

And what might that be?

Perhaps life once felt rooted in something larger than our personal goals, aspirations, and obligations. It belonged to a deeper story, a story that we still long to return to. A story in which our lives weren’t random happenstance or solely self-constructed, but woven into a larger tapestry of meaning.

A story that reaches back to what has been alive in us before we were self-aware, before we even understood human language.

Is there a shared presence we belong to?

The next time the barking chihuahua tries to chew on your heel, don’t just swat it away.

Ask it what it wants you to notice.

Is it true that American culture produces too many people who live with chronic discontent and quiet, existential anxiety?

Ask a devout practicing Christian, Muslim, or Jew, and they will likely agree and claim it’s because we sin and have strayed from God and His commandments.

A seasoned meditator or Zen practitioner might say we’ve been distracted and cut off from the “stillness” inside that allows us to see the illusions built around who and what we think we are.

Self-proclaimed atheists might point to American consumer culture, hyper-individualism, and technological overstimulation, all part of a system never meant to make us whole in the first place.

This essay doesn’t pretend to supply a definitive answer. But it does offer something to reflect on.

What we might be longing for, beyond the noise of our hypercompetitive, consumer-driven, and overly stressful lives, is a return to something always with us from the beginning, beyond words and beyond description.

You don’t have to give it a name.

You don’t have to believe in it.

You don’t have to be for or against it.

Try this the next time you interact with someone: While they are speaking, quietly ask yourself:

What is it that has been alive in this person since the beginning, before they were self-aware, and before they could understand human language?

How about asking the same question of yourself?

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If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com

Hmm…. Act naturally, as a human being… What’s that all about?

In the natural world, whether animals, birds, or insects, we observe patterned behaviors that scientists call “instinct.” It is a scientist’s way to try to explain how these seemingly unlearned behaviors are possible.

Let’s take the case of spiders. Spider researchers know spiders get no instruction on how to make a spider web. For example, experiments have been done where researchers take spider eggs and raise the hatchlings in separate containers with no mother, no contact with other spiders, and in environments where they cannot see any webs.

In a matter of a few days or a week or more, these spiders build complex, intricate webs made of silk that are stronger than steel by weight, more elastic than rubber, and light enough to float on air currents.

Somehow, a “something” inside the spider, its “nature,” causes it to weave its web, often in the dark. Every spider will act and behave the same, according to its nature. This is why you will never see a spider bark like a dog.

But scientists don’t know what that “something” is comprised of, calling the spider’s behavior “instinctive.” So the instinctive idea acts like a placeholder, a way for scientists to say there’s something that guides this behavior, without having to say they don’t fully know what that is or how it works.

Neuroscientist Mark S. Blumberg examines this complex and unresolved problem in his 2017 article, Development Evolving: The Origins and Meanings of Instinct.

“Invoking instinct to explain behavior is a way of closing inquiry rather than opening it. It is an admission of ignorance dressed in the language of understanding.”

Blumberg says that the simplistic notion of instinct as a fixed, inborn, genetically pre-programmed behavior is inadequate and misleading. Instead, a richer, more interactive developmental process, built up over aeons, is unfolding as an organism grows within its species-typical environment. Even the most automatic actions may be the result of a long evolutionary process that expresses itself through the body, nervous system, and the environment, according to Blumberg.

But why is life built like this? Why would evolution spend millions of years to give that spider the ability to weave its web?

And what about human beings? What is our distinctive nature? Are you curious?

Let’s say you grew up on a remote farm with no mechanical machines and never saw or heard of a car. One morning, you wake up and walk outside of your farmhouse onto the front porch, where you see a strange metal creature, shiny, enclosed, and resting on four round black legs in the front yard. Would you be curious about what it is, how it got there, and how it works?

Have you ever wondered why human beings appeared on Earth and why we act the way we do? What is this human nature that has evolved over millions of years?

Clamoring with noisy self-assuredness, animal behaviorists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and psychologists try to tell us what our human nature is and how we acquired it. But no scientist, if honest, knows exactly how our human intelligence, awareness, morality, and social nature emerged from millions of years of evolutionary pressures.

The monotheistic faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assert that the deeper aspects of our human nature are derived not from accident or evolution alone, but from a “meaningful source beyond ourselves.” But what is this source, and where is it located?

Cultural-philosophical traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism allow people to explore the nature of reality, suffering, consciousness, and human behavior, without a single creed or fixed set of beliefs, like in the Western religious sense.

Various African cultural traditions indicate that our human nature isn’t a fixed, programmed essence, but flows from the Creator through people, community, nature, and ancestors.

Perhaps the farm boy we spoke of a moment ago glanced at the car in his front yard, shrugged his shoulders, and moved on with his required daily tasks, starting with milking his herd of cows in the barn. The decision to examine or not the strange shiny object in his front yard is his to make, based on what he considers most important in life.

But you or I are not the farmboy. Something has appeared before us: the question of who we are and why we are the way we are.

If life has woven millions of years of developmental evolution to shape the patterns of all species, what has life been shaping in each of us that longs to be expressed, just as the spider cannot help but weave its web?

If this essay sparked a question or stirred something in you, I’d love to hear it. Add your reflections below.

This pattern occurs over and over again in the stories we tell ourselves. In George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, Silas comes to believe the only thing he can trust in life is his hoard of gold coins. Similarly, we can be tempted to idolize the smaller part of ourselves, the part that desires to stay independent and self-contained, cautious about committing to anything beyond our well-placed plans for success and security. The tension only increases when the question of religious commitment, belonging, and spiritual devotion enters the picture.

Between the 1970s anti-cult messaging and today’s self-help industry, we learned to treat serious commitment to anything outside our immediate ambitions as something to avoid if we want to stay “whole.” Commitment came to feel like captivity. Yet, in playing it safe with our souls, we may have lost, or maybe forgotten, a depth of meaning that makes life feel fully alive.

I know this tension from the inside. When I was young, I gave myself completely to something I still can’t quite name, a current of faith and belonging that outsiders tried to define, but never fully understood. To me, it was a community, a shared search for God, purpose, and belonging. It shaped the trajectory of my twenties and thirties, and it shaped me.

There were lessons I had to unlearn later, but what I carried away wasn’t just disillusionment or bitterness. I held a memory of what it felt like to live with that much meaning, to wake up every morning believing my life was part of something larger than my own comfort or personal ambition.

When I hear people say that seriously committing to any form of religion or devotional spiritual path is suited to people who “can’t make it on their own,” I think of someone who tunes a musical instrument but never plays the song. Many of us weren’t trying to escape responsibility or let someone else run our lives; we were trying to find a reason big enough to take on responsibility, not run from it.

In desiring to protect ourselves from any perceived dangers of devotion, we’ve made devotion itself taboo. But what if commitment to something larger than your own preferences and inclinations isn’t the enemy of independence, but its foundation?

The anti-cult panic of the 1970s quietly reshaped our collective imagination. In fear of losing our freedom to a charismatic leader’s manipulation, we transformed that fear into a deeper suspicion, not only of authority, but of devotion itself. Now, any language that sounds like self-surrender, implicit trust, or spiritual obedience triggers a gag reflex in our culture; if commitment requires a cost beyond what we’ve planned for, it must be dangerous.

We like to celebrate autonomy, self-actualization, and endless choice. Sociologists call this expressive individualism. Philosophers like Charles Taylor go further, describing the modern world as an “immanent frame” — a world that runs smoothly without any reference to anything beyond the self and everyday human interactions. Here, all meaning-making is self-manufactured rather than “received from above.” There is no above; only what comes into view within the boundaries of our carefully drawn horizon.

This self-manufactured life results in a peculiar kind of existential fatigue, like a low-grade toothache that sometimes flares up, then recedes from our awareness for a while, only to reappear and remind us that something is out of alignment.

We feel strangely restless in our quiet moments, in the way even success or victory can feel hollow. We are masters of our own fate, but have forgotten the experience of awe.

Commitment, rightly understood, is not captivity; it’s the structure that allows meaning to deepen. It’s the hand reaching beyond the finger, the part of us that remembers how to belong, to serve, to be changed by something greater than our own self-design.

When we risk devotion, we rediscover a dimension of life that the modern unconsciously longs for: the joy of being held by what is worthy of our trust.

Agh… and what might that be that is worthy of our trust?

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If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com

I’d love to hear what’s moving through you.