Between Immediate Comfort and the Search for Meaning
The Void Left by Religious Decline
In contemporary Western societies, the progressive decline of religious influence has created a profound structural void. For centuries, religions provided not only a belief system but also a complete moral framework that guided individuals through the complexities of existence. They offered answers to major existential questions, structured time through rituals and celebrations, and clearly defined what constituted a good and virtuous life.
This framework, although sometimes rigid and constraining, brought a sense of direction and certainty. Values were not to be discovered or invented individually but were inherited and collectively shared. Suffering, sacrifices, and difficulties were part of a larger narrative that gave them meaning and justification.
The New Dogma of Comfort and Immediate Pleasure
In the space left vacant by the retreat of religions, a new value system has gradually emerged, almost by default rather than by conscious choice. This system places the avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of immediate pleasure at the center of our daily concerns.
Our consumer society, reinforced by decades of sophisticated marketing, has trained us to consider comfort, ease, and immediate satisfaction as goals in themselves. Technology amplifies this trend by making possible instant gratifications that would have seemed miraculous just a few generations ago.
However, this new "religion" of immediate comfort presents a fundamental paradox: the more actively we pursue pleasure and avoid discomfort, the more the feeling of existential emptiness and dissatisfaction seems to intensify. We observe this contradiction in the increase of mental health problems despite the continuous improvement of material conditions in developed countries.
The Loss of Meaning and Its Consequences
The consequences of this transformation are profound:
Social atomization: Without shared values, communities fragment into individuals pursuing personal satisfactions in isolation. Traditional communal bonds—once reinforced by common rituals, beliefs, and moral frameworks—dissolve into networks of convenience. We increasingly live as consumers rather than citizens, evaluating relationships through the lens of personal utility rather than mutual obligation. This atomization manifests in declining civic participation, weakened community institutions, and a growing sense of disconnection even as digital technologies ostensibly connect us more than ever.
Psychological fragility: The absence of resilience-building value systems leaves us ill-equipped to face inevitable life difficulties. Traditional frameworks provided narratives that contextualized suffering within larger meaningful stories, offering both explanatory power and coping strategies. Without these frameworks, ordinary hardships become existential crises. We see this fragility in rising anxiety and depression rates, increasing sensitivity to minor setbacks, and the widespread pursuit of "safe spaces" that shield us from challenging ideas or experiences—a phenomenon unimaginable to previous generations who embraced discomfort as essential to growth.
Existential void: The "why" of our lives becomes blurred, replaced by an endless series of tactical "hows." Without transcendent purpose or meaning, we redirect our energy toward optimization—how to be more efficient, more productive, happier—without questioning what these improvements ultimately serve. This creates a peculiar modern condition: lives that are technically optimized yet existentially empty. We become experts in means while remaining novices in ends. The explosion of self-help content, productivity systems, and wellness trends reveals our desperate attempt to fill this void with procedural solutions to what are fundamentally questions of purpose and meaning.
Moral relativism: Without common moral foundations, ethical debates degenerate into contests of emotional intensity rather than reasoned dialogue. Claims of harm or offense replace discussions of right and wrong, as subjective experience becomes the ultimate arbiter of moral truth. This relativism creates paradoxical effects: extreme tolerance alongside extreme moral condemnation, with little coherent framework connecting them. Public discourse increasingly resembles tribal signaling rather than genuine ethical deliberation, with positions adopted based on in-group loyalty rather than principled consideration. The result is a society simultaneously more moralistic yet less capable of sustained moral reasoning.
This situation creates a paradox: we have unprecedented freedom, but this very freedom becomes a source of anxiety and disorientation.
The Responsibility of Axiological Freedom
Facing this values crisis, we must recognize two fundamental truths: first, the freedom to determine our own values implies the responsibility to choose them consciously; second, our inherently social nature means this axiological project cannot be purely individualistic.
Living without an explicit value framework is not neutrality but passive submission to the dominant currents of our time. Yet developing such a framework in isolation contradicts our fundamental need for belonging and shared meaning.
This responsibility has several dimensions:
Recognition: Acknowledging that we cannot live without values and that, in the absence of conscious choice, we adopt by default those of our environment. This recognition requires honest self-examination to identify which of our current "values" are truly chosen and which have been unconsciously absorbed from consumer culture, social media, peer groups, or family traditions. It means facing the uncomfortable truth that many of our priorities and daily decisions stem not from deliberate choice but from cultural programming designed to prioritize consumption and comfort. Recognition also involves accepting that value neutrality is impossible—even the attempt to live "without values" is itself a value position that privileges detachment and noncommitment.
Exploration: Examining different wisdom traditions, philosophical and spiritual, not to adopt them blindly but to draw inspiration from them. This dimension involves intellectual humility—acknowledging that centuries of human thought have produced profound insights about how to live well. It requires stepping outside our presentist bias to engage with timeless questions through diverse lenses. This exploration might include studying Stoicism's emphasis on virtue and emotional regulation, Buddhism's insights on suffering and attachment, or Judaism's profound balance between individual interpretation and communal wisdom through practices like Torah study and collective debate. We might also explore existentialism's focus on authentic choice or other religious traditions' perspectives on transcendent purpose. The goal is not syncretistic cherry-picking but rather serious engagement with coherent worldviews that challenge our default assumptions.
Deliberation: Reflecting deeply on what constitutes for us a good and meaningful life beyond immediate pleasures. This involves asking ourselves penetrating questions: What would I consider a life well-lived when looking back at age 80? What activities give me a sense of purpose beyond fleeting satisfaction? What kinds of relationships and contributions would make my existence meaningful? This deliberation requires creating mental space away from constant stimulation and distraction—perhaps through practices like meditation, journaling, deep conversation, or periodic solitude. It also means distinguishing between what we think we should value (often based on social approval) and what truly resonates with our deepest sense of purpose.
Construction: Developing our own coherent axiological framework, not arbitrarily, but in dialogue with our experience and understanding of the world. This goes beyond listing abstract values to creating an integrated system that addresses fundamental questions: What constitutes human flourishing? What obligations do we have to others? What gives life meaning? What virtues should we cultivate? This construction process requires intellectual rigor to ensure our framework avoids internal contradictions. It also demands honesty about our human nature—creating a value system that works with, rather than against, our psychological realities while still challenging us to grow. The framework should be comprehensive enough to guide decisions across various life domains yet flexible enough to evolve as we gain new insights.
Commitment: Living according to these chosen values, even when it involves short-term discomfort. This is where theory meets practice—where values transform from abstract concepts to lived reality. Commitment involves developing concrete practices and habits that embody our values, establishing accountability systems that help us stay aligned with our principles, and making difficult choices that prioritize our deeper values over immediate comfort or social approval. It means creating decision-making frameworks for navigating conflicts between different values. Most importantly, commitment requires developing resilience to withstand the inevitable resistance—both internal and external—that arises when we live counter to prevailing cultural currents that prioritize ease and immediate satisfaction.
Beyond Comfort: The Necessary Discomfort of Long-Term Wellbeing
Ironically, it is often in experiences that demand effort, perseverance, and even a certain amount of suffering that we find the deepest meaning. This points to a critical truth we must confront: genuine long-term wellbeing frequently requires us to endure short-term discomfort.
To build lives of authentic meaning and sustained fulfillment, we must engage in honest self-reflection about what truly contributes to our long-term wellbeing. This reflection reveals several uncomfortable realities:
Our lack of clarity: Many of us haven't clearly defined what constitutes genuine wellbeing beyond immediate pleasure. Without this clarity, we drift toward whatever feels good now, regardless of future consequences.
Entrenched behavioral patterns: We've developed habitual ways of responding to discomfort that prioritize immediate relief over growth. These patterns—procrastination, distraction, numbing—provide temporary escape but prevent us from developing the resilience needed for lasting fulfillment.
Missing skills: We often lack the emotional, social, or practical skills needed to create meaningful lives. Acquiring these skills invariably involves the discomfort of incompetence before mastery.
The unavoidable passage through discomfort: Perhaps most importantly, we must accept that the path to our most meaningful goals necessitates traveling through discomfort. Whether building deep relationships, creating meaningful work, or developing wisdom—all require us to confront limitations, experience failure, and persist through difficulty.
Psychologists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have documented how the optimal state of human experience ("flow") occurs not in passive relaxation but in total engagement with challenges that match our abilities. Similarly, Viktor Frankl discovered through his concentration camp experience that meaning emerges not from pleasure but from purposeful work, loving connections, and finding significance even within suffering.
These perspectives suggest we must fundamentally reorient our understanding of discomfort—seeing certain forms of it not as threats to be avoided but as necessary passages to the lives we most deeply desire.
Conclusion: Embracing Necessary Discomfort for Meaningful Freedom
The values crisis we are experiencing is not simply nostalgia for an older, more rigid order. Rather, it represents an invitation to a more mature form of freedom – a freedom that recognizes both its responsibility and the necessity of strategic discomfort.
This new paradigm requires courage to confront what truly separates us from lasting wellbeing. We must honestly assess where lack of clarity clouds our vision, where ingrained behavioral patterns limit our growth, and where missing skills prevent us from building lives of depth and meaning. Most importantly, we must accept that meaningful progress often requires walking directly through discomfort rather than around it.
Unlike the traditional religious framework that offered stability but sometimes at the cost of individual autonomy, this approach seeks to combine modern freedom with the depth and coherence of traditional value systems. It invites us to become not just the architects of our moral lives, but also individuals willing to endure necessary growing pains for the sake of authentic flourishing.
In this perspective, avoiding discomfort and seeking immediate pleasure find their proper place – not as supreme values, but as occasional elements in a life guided by the wisdom that some discomfort today creates the foundation for deeper fulfillment tomorrow.
The question is therefore not whether we need values – we unquestionably do – but which ones we will consciously choose to cultivate and transmit, and what temporary discomforts we are willing to embrace in service of the lives we truly want to build in a world where this responsibility now falls fully upon us.
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