Most people reading this do not have the problem that organised their ancestors’ lives. You are safe. There is food around. You have choices your grandparents could not have imagined, and the education to make use of them. If you listed what previous generations lacked and you possess, the list would be long enough to feel obscene.
Something should follow from this. Freed from survival and scarcity, a person should be able to turn toward what matters in a good life: purpose, creativity, relationships sustained by more than necessity, a life shaped by meaning. Progress has always carried some version of this promise.
That is not what happened.
The search for meaning is difficult enough. But beneath it is a stranger problem, one that is harder to articulate. Life feels thinner than it should. You long for something more fully real in your work, your relationships, even in the culture that surrounds you.1
Gratitude does not resolve it.
Work
You close the laptop after a productive day. Tasks cleared, replies sent, the project moved forward. Your shoulders drop. Something registers as complete.
The evening that follows feels like most.
You’ve been doing this for years. The title, the salary, the responsibilities: all improved. If someone asked whether your professional life is better than it was five years ago, you would say yes. If someone asked how your sense of purpose has deepened alongside it, you would take longer to answer.
You remember when the work felt different. Something in this line of work pulled you. Earlier in your career, you would lose hours to a problem without noticing. There was satisfaction in absorption, your capacity meeting something that required it. That quality still visits, but less often. Deep work has became a luxury. The work now runs on e-mails, deliverables, timelines, meetings, the rhythm of execution.
You do good work. You know this in your body: in the slow accumulation of skill and judgment, in the feel for what a situation asks, in the instinct for when patience matters more than action. The performance review translates this into competency ratings. Development plans encourage you to become even more productive and successful. Each promotion confirms your value to the organisation and establishes the next threshold. You bring your full humanity to work. The system receives it as KPIs.
You care about the people you manage. You show this by completing the mandatory training on psychological safety. You face an ethical dilemma. You navigate it by raising it through a compliance framework designed to minimise institutional liability.
The work demands a lot, and you want to meet it with energy, not just endurance. So you track sleep, steps, heart rate variability. You optimise recovery. You schedule rest. You catch yourself checking the app before checking how you feel.
Your success has a curious weightlessness to it, as though it is happening slightly to the left of where you actually live. “Is this all there is?” Some people carry that weightlessness for years and call it maturity. Some burn out. Some leave. The leaving has become its own genre, complete with podcasts and memoirs. A life can narrow for so long that departure itself becomes a necessary act of honesty.
“And I never looked back.”
After
You did something brave. You left a corporate career to rebuild your life around freedom and meaningful work. Now, you need an audience. You post about the journey. The certifications, the Instagram account, the personal brand. Within a year, the new venture has metrics, a growth strategy, and a familiar feeling.
You left to do the work you love. But you spend a large fraction of your day on content creation, social media, invoicing, emails, branding, proposals. You open your phone to engage with potential clients. One hour later you surface, having followed a chain of links into territory you can barely remember entering. Along the way, you feel morally activated by events on the other side of the world that you cannot influence.
Your weekends are your own now. And still, when you stop, a faint guilt. As though you are falling behind a creator, somewhere, who didn’t stop.
You have more time to invest in your relationships. But your closest friendships now run on logistics. The group chat is active. The actual time together has been three months. You keep meaning to fix this. The weeks keep passing.
You open a dating app. You become a handful of photos, a line of text, a height. Someone decides in under two seconds. You exchange messages carefully calibrated to seem effortless. You meet and the conversation is pleasant. Nobody says anything too vulnerable or too controversial. You both perform a version of yourselves designed to secure a second date, which means you hide the version of yourselves that would make a second date worth having. You go home and one of you doesn’t reply. You can't tell whether you were rejected. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter. Someone more attractive is a swipe away.
You left the office but feel the loss of the default community that came with it. You join online groups, attend co-working days, spend a season with the digital nomads. There is no shortage of groups and communities to join. What's missing is the thing that made community work in your corporate life: the same people, in the same place, often enough that something accumulates. You have a platform, collaborators, a network. What you don’t have is an actual place where people would notice your absence by Thursday.
Your freedom allows you to travel, but you also want to put down roots. You find a place that feels like home. Without your corporate income, you get outbid by a property investor who will never live there.
Your story doesn’t have the mythic arc worthy of a podcast. The world feels as complex and uncertain as ever.
The Proxy Layer
Coordinating large numbers of people across multiple scales requires a shared reality. Institutions need to evaluate employees. People who have never met need to decide whether to trust each other, date each other, belong in the same community. All of this demands compression: taking something that would require sustained contact to know and rendering it into a form that can travel between strangers who will never have that contact. Scores, grades, credentials, star ratings, profiles, stories.
A proxy is any compressed stand-in for something richer, a representation that travels more easily than its referent, the reality it points to. A credential is a proxy for mastery. A dating profile is a proxy for a person. Consider what we say we truly care about. Meaning, purpose, aliveness, belonging, happiness, truth, goodness. Proxies work because they strip away the qualities that make these things hard to transmit.
In every domain where a proxy and a referent compete for attention, the proxy wins on efficiency and scalability. Sending a message takes thirty seconds. Sitting in someone’s kitchen through an awkward silence takes an evening. Swiping through profiles takes a lunch break. Getting to know someone takes months of shared time.
The proxy also wins on visibility. You spend the morning in meetings, on email, responding to messages. The thing that required sustained concentration and would have produced something genuinely good, sits untouched by afternoon. Productivity measures output. Whether the output mattered is another question.
The displacement compounds through a mechanism identified by Charles Goodhart: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. A university degree certifies an education. At its best, an education reshapes how a person thinks, what they notice, what they find worth pursuing. But when the degree is what opens doors, the rational move is to secure the credential at minimum cost. The force holding the proxy-referent link in place is intrinsic motivation. That force is real, but the current runs the other way.
Nobody designed this as a system. You text your friend instead of seeing them, because you're busy and tired and next week will be easier. That choice makes perfect sense. That’s life. But the choices accumulate, and they accumulate in one direction. The things that compress well thrive. The things that don't, thin.
Proxies Change Us
Something else happens when you live inside the proxy layer long enough: it shapes what you desire.
In dating, you are a profile before you are a person. Someone evaluates you in under two seconds. You do the same. Even when you finally meet, the person sitting in front of you is not quite a person to you yet. They are one option filtered through the statistical promise of someone better.
When the signals around you are proxy-shaped, you develop fluency in reading and pursuing proxy-shaped signals: likes, ratings, credentials, rankings, status markers. The proxy layer trains what gets attention, what feels rewarding, and what feels like too much effort. Over time, the proxy version of value starts to feel like value.
The referent provides slow, ambiguous, often uncomfortable feedback. It may start to feel uncomfortably slow, not quite worth the cost. Learning feels like frustration for months before it feels like competence. The referent asks something of you that the proxy does not. Deep work confronts you with what you can actually produce. A relationship gets real when the other person stops being who you want them to be and starts being who they are. The proxy layer is also, for each person navigating it, a buffer against the full weight of reality.
Before you know it, you’ve assembled your identity inside the proxy layer. Your sense of purpose, your contribution, your sense of where you stand, your sense of direction: all organised around proxies. Achieve good grades. Get a credential. Climb to a prestigious role. Share a good story about who you are and where you are going.
This is not a personal failing. It is the shape a life takes in a world that requires coordination.
Coordination and Orientation
Choosing meaning over the proxy, in any moment, is straightforward. Reorganising your life around that choice is not. This is what the exit from corporate life attempts. The question is whether you are genuinely choosing meaning, or simply exchanging one set of proxies for another that feels better.
A human life requires two things that are easy to confuse. It requires coordination: how you cooperate with strangers, how institutions evaluate you. It also requires orientation: your sense of what matters, what deserves your attention, what you would sustain even if nobody saw it.
Proxies are coordination tools. A credential lets strangers evaluate qualifications without watching you work for a year. A rating lets customers choose between providers they’ve never met. These signals answer real questions: Is my work reaching people? Am I gaining trust? Am I making something others can actually find, use, or value? If we want to collaborate and bring to others, we need this kind of feedback. Your work has limited value if nobody knows about it. Reach is a legitimate referent.
The trouble is when we use tools designed for coordination (“is my work reaching an audience?”) as orientation (“is my life meaningful?”).
A common suggestion is to design better proxies. Replace GDP with well-being indices. Swap performance ratings with 360-degree feedback. Replace follower counts with engagement depth. Each attempt is valuable, but replicates the system it is trying to fix. A better proxy is still a proxy.
Where Orientation Lives
Seeing the distinction between proxy and referent is the easy part. The map comes quickly, but the map is another proxy. The capacity to stay with the referent, to tolerate its slowness, its ambiguity, its refusal to update in real time, is not mainly a matter of understanding. It is a discipline of attention, and it atrophies in an environment saturated with faster, easier, more legible substitutes.
My exploration of the question of orientation points toward contact: direct participation in what is here, before compression into a signal. Response arises from what the situation asks of you, not from the need to evaluate, perform, or optimise. It is what happened when you stayed with a friend through something difficult simply because the moment called for it. Contact orients because it reorganises attention.
But contact alone is not orientation. A life also needs continuity: some coherent sense of what matters, strong enough to guide attention across moments. The difference from a proxy-shaped narrative is that this coherence is built from contact, calibrated against reality, and revised when it no longer fits. For me, that meant staying with the question of what my life is for until the answer stopped being a story I was telling and became something I could test against reality.
Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke arrives at a similar conclusion from a different direction. His account of the meaning crisis centres on the collapse of cultural worlds that once cultivated direct contact with what matters through shared practices and forms of life. In his language, meaning is a matter of relevance realisation: what shows up as salient, significant, and worth responding to. His prescription is to rebuild these functions in contemporary form through new ecologies of practices.
While we converge on direct participation, the proxy layer adds a complication. Contemporary versions of these practices are already widespread. Yoga operates as a global industry. Meditation apps serve hundreds of millions of users. Breathwork, psychedelics, retreats: the supply has never been greater. Watch what happens when they enter wide circulation. A yoga school becomes a certification mill. Meditation becomes a productivity tool with a streak counter. A breathwork session produces a cathartic breakthrough. The breakthrough fades by Wednesday. The slower process that would actually change something is not as Instagrammable. The proxy layer does not spare the medicine.
The things that make life meaningful require conditions that large-scale coordination selects against. Coordination is also what produced the freedoms and prosperity we would not relinquish.
How to maintain contact with the things that matter to you, in an environment that systematically rewards compressed signals, may be one of the defining questions of our times.
Acknowledgements
This essay draws on several intellectual traditions and thinkers. John Vervaeke's work on the meaning crisis and participatory knowing is the main inspiration. The proxy-referent analysis is informed by Charles Goodhart's law, Bryan Caplan's signalling model of education, and Robin Hanson's work on hidden motives and social signalling. The concept of reward hacking in reinforcement learning provided a structural analogue for how systems optimise proxies at the expense of intended outcomes. James C. Scott's account of how legibility destroys local knowledge shaped my understanding of what compression costs. The phenomenology of technological attunement draws on Heidegger. The orientation toward contact, purpose, and direct participation reflects the influence of Bill Plotkin, Jonathan Gustin (Purpose Guides Institute), and Steve March (Aletheia Unfolding).
Footnotes
This essay is concerned primarily with forms of existential thinning that arise when material security and choice are already sufficiently in place for questions of orientation to become central.