And the Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

It's now widely acknowledged that even in the most affluent societies,

perhaps especially in the most affluent societies, there's a crisis of meaning.

There are many signs of this.

There's what's often described as an epidemic of loneliness.

There's also a widespread erosion of social trust and new

extremes of political partisanship. There are soaring levels of drug addiction and

overdoses in many Western countries.

It's pretty clear that the abundance of modern life is no guarantee of living a good life.

Simply buying more stuff and watching hours of Tik-Toc each day can't be the final fruition of

millennia of human striving. It certainly seems like something is missing.

The question is what? Well there are many levels on

which our collective problems need to be addressed and there may be many ways to

alleviate this apparent crisis of meaning.

But one remedy is for more of us to understand our own minds directly

and to take responsibility for them.

All the chaos we see in the world beyond natural disasters is a symptom of human

minds being out of control. Greed, fear, hatred, ignorance, false certainty.

These states of mind can reduce whole cities to rubble.

Of course, most of us can't change the culture

in any significant way. We can't change the laws. We can't change our

institutions. We can advocate for change. We can add our voices to the

...