The Epidemic of Meaninglessness and Healing the Digital Wound
August 9, 2025 | By Cheryl Hanley
The Lackawanna Valley (c. 1855)
George Inness, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Public Domain
What gives life meaning?
Connection. Connection to others, connection to the land, connection to a place, a cause, an idea, a community. The people we have helped, the people who have helped us. The places we have been. The places we return to daily. The rocking chair your grandfather sat in every evening on his front porch. The place where you took your first steps, or had your first kiss, or first fell in love. The cafe you were sitting in when you realized what you wanted to do with your life, or who you wanted to marry. The only remaining photograph of your mother when she was only three years old, worn and stained, and priceless. The first song you learned on the guitar, the movie you saw on your first date, the town you went to college in, the bicycle you rode on your paper route, your first job. The first car you bought yourself.
The plants you watered and worried over all summer long, the book that took you ten years to write, the job that you’ve been working toward your whole career, the girl you waited for every day after school, just to walk her home. The children you stayed up with on so many sleepless nights, who you poured your love out for, who you gave your life to.
The last time you saw your grandmother, when you sat with her and held her hand in the hospital room. The flowers you leave on your father’s grave every spring, snowfall in the winter, and torrential summer rain, the laughter of children, the smell of fresh baked bread.
We experience life as meaningful to the extent that we connect and invest in reality. Like neural pathways, connections to the world around us are strengthened by repetition, time spent, love spent, effort spent. The more you spend on something, the more valuable it becomes to you.
Digitalization[1] and the Epidemic of Meaninglessness
What happens when we move the tasks, tools and processes of daily life into the virtual world (a process known as digitalization)? As our waking hours are increasingly spent in the virtual, do we find the same return on investment there? Many of the activities that consume our time spent online are forms of passive or low energy content consumption. We show up, and at the click of a button, we are being entertained, stimulated, rewarded for doing absolutely nothing. We are wired to seek out the best return on investment, and on paper, the return on investment of on-demand entertainment looks pretty good. In fact, it often looks like we’re getting something for nothing. But if the experience of meaning in life turns out to be a function of energy expended and effort exerted, then perhaps we are actually getting nothing for something. And if that “something” turns out to be our time; our life, then maybe it isn’t such a good trade after all.
But on the surface, this is not so obvious. The amount of time spent creates an illusion of cultivating meaningful connections and investing in worthy pursuits.
Our online interactions mimic connection and meaning convincingly enough to allow us to construct a sort of hologram of meaning in our minds. “I have 3000 friends” we say. But what do these virtual connections amount to? Do you have 3000 people you can call if you are having car trouble? 3000 people willing to babysit for you? 3000 people who will pay you a visit if you are laid up in the hospital for a week? 3000 people who will show up at your funeral and mourn? Or is it only a collection of fleeting points of contact- people who don’t really know you at all, who would be very surprised if you were to knock on their door asking to borrow an egg or a cup of sugar.
Increasingly, the amount of time we are investing in the virtual world is leaving us nutrient deficient. Though we are thoroughly entertained, and probably completely overstimulated, we are not satisfied. The result is an epidemic of meaninglessness. Collectively, we find ourselves lonelier, lazier, distracted, and more depressed and anxious than ever. We find that our real world is not reflective of the many hours we have spent curating our instagram profiles and pinterest pages. And that when we look up from the screen, our chatbot friends and lovers are nowhere to be found. Disoriented and disappointed, we retreat into the world that has become so comfortable, so familiar, the world of the screen. Through the one way mirror, we watch others living their lives, doing all the things we dream of doing, and all the things we are far too afraid to really do. When the loneliness becomes unbearable, we swipe left and right, avoiding the sting, the disappointment and embarrassment of risking real life rejection, in the process eliminating all adventure and any possibility of the thrill, the joy, the drama, the relief of real life success in meeting someone.
The Road to Digital Nihilism[2]
As we move more of our real lives into the digital world, we inevitably reduce our capacity to invest in reality. Many of our engagements in the virtual world are non-reciprocal, or superficially meaningful. At best, we are able to learn something new in the virtual world and apply our new knowledge in reality. But the temptations of engagement in the virtual world are myriad, and if we are not careful, it is easy to fritter time away in cyber space that would be better spent attending to our real lives. In spite of technology’s promise of efficiency, the algorithms and the apps that dominate our tech use are often designed to distract, derail, and pull you back in. As the scales tip in the direction of the virtual, we run the risk of finding ourselves more and more displaced and disenfranchised, as we neglect our real responsibilities, our real world existence can become less and less attractive, more hostile and frightening. Meanwhile, on the internet, our hours spent surfing and watching and liking and sharing and commenting profit little, while still managing to diminish our energy and other resources.
Especially concerning, there are times when our virtual engagement is being used as a substitute for a real and essential good. Social media, video games and pornography are a few particularly potent examples. In social media, we are offered a facsimile of community, of friendship, and collaboration. But it is a very poor substitute for real community, a real network of friends and acquaintances; a real social life. Young people used to go to dances on Friday night, and now they sit at home, communicating from a distance with the digital avatars of people they may or may not know in real life.
Video games offer a visually and mentally stimulating simulation of the call to adventure, heroism, accomplishment, and completing objectives, and even manage to reproduce some of the neurochemicals[3] of challenge, risk and adventure, such as cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine. But they do so without requiring any real risk or any real growth. While they stimulate the part of us that desires adventure, freedom, fun, and challenge, they offer none of the lasting rewards that the real pursuit of adventure or achievement do.
Pornography exploits our sexual desire and instinct, capitalizing on the ability of strong visual content to capture and hold our attention, and create a cycle of addiction. Meanwhile, the drive that is meant to propel us toward others, inspire us to better ourselves in order to be seen as worthy and attractive prospective partners, and ultimately to motivate and sustain love and family, is wasted in solitude, bereft of meaning and devoid of reward beyond temporary pleasure seeking.
Like fast food, which can fill you up without satisfying your body’s real nutritional needs, these artificial substitutes for real life ventures can leave you feeling temporarily satiated or accomplished, but in the long term, the habitual substitution begins to wear on your health, and the cumulative effect of expending your energy where there is little to be gained gradually amounts to a life devoid of meaning and purpose.
While the ever expanding digital landscape offers endless options and possibilities, it is full of empty promises. Ultimately, replacing intrinsically meaningful parts of life with meaningless substitutes results in a festering sense of pointlessness, futility, meaninglessness- also known as nihilism.
Healing the Digital Wound
Though countless hours have been wasted and lost in the virtual world, restoring meaning and purpose to our lives is as easy as putting your phone down, closing your laptop, and looking up at the world around you. We can begin to heal the digital wound as we return to our neglected real lives- our real families, our real bodies, our real homes, our real purpose. There is plenty of work to be done there, and when we look up, we may even find a backlog of unattended tasks and duties, just waiting to be noticed- waiting for our attention. No doubt, there are some things about the real world that may take some getting used to: waiting in lines patiently, chatting with people we may not agree with, making eye contact with strangers, asking someone a question instead of googling it, and maybe even sitting in silence. But maybe these uncomfortable and inconvenient real-world tasks have something to offer us that high-speed entertainment cannot. Growth, substance, inspiration, and responsiveness. The real world responds to us in the way that an anonymous online interface can never quite replicate. The real world changes as we move through it and act upon it- and not merely by adapting to our preferences, noting our reactions as data, and logging our online behaviors for algorithmic optimization. The real world is different because we are in it, and especially our immediate environment. People are different when we listen to them, plants are different when we water them, our homes are different when we care for them. As G.K. Chesterton said “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her”.
When our environment responds to us, it also tells us something about ourselves: “The world is different because I am in it. My actions matter, my words matter, my life matters, I matter. Because this rose grows when I water it, because someone laughs when I tell a joke.” Perhaps this is the very proof that life has meaning.
Merriam-Webster: NIHILISM (noun) — a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless
Merriam-Webster: DIGITALIZATION (noun) — the process of converting something to digital form
Hempe, Melanie. (June 20, 2019). How Gaming Changes Your Child’s Brain. screenstrong.org.
