When a civilisation can no longer answer the question “what are we here for,” it does not become tolerant. It becomes nihilistic.
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, called it the existential vacuum: the feeling of total and ultimate meaninglessness that emerges when a person or a people can no longer locate a purpose for their existence. It is not boredom, though boredom is its surface expression. It is not depression, though depression is its frequent companion. It is the specific, sustained experience of emptiness that follows the collapse of a framework that once made life intelligible.
Frankl observed that traditional societies sustained meaning through inherited structures: religion, family, community, ritual, shared narrative. These structures gave individuals a reason to endure suffering, a context for sacrifice, and a direction for effort. When modernity dismantled these structures, replacing them with individual choice and material pursuit, it did not produce liberation. It produced what Frankl identified as the collective triad of neuroses: depression from the feeling of ultimate futility, aggression from frustrated existence, and addiction as escape from the inner void.
The spiritual void is the civilisational expression of this condition. An entire generation inherits the material infrastructure of comfort while losing access to the metaphysical framework that made comfort meaningful. Identity, which in stronger traditions was formed through divine purpose, family obligation, and communal belonging, becomes a private project. Without transcendental orientation, the self has no anchor. It drifts. It experiments. It performs. It consumes. And it suffers, profoundly, without understanding why, because the tools it has been given (therapy, medication, self-care, material acquisition) address symptoms while leaving the cause untouched.
The cause is not biochemical. It is not developmental. It is spiritual. A human being oriented toward nothing beyond the material will experience emptiness not because something is wrong with them but because something is right with their perception. They are accurately sensing the absence of purpose that a purely material life cannot provide. The crisis of identity, gender confusion, depression, addiction, and escapism that characterises the present moment are not separate problems. They are symptoms of a single condition: the spiritual void that opens when transcendental greatness is replaced by material pursuit.