If you took all of life on Earth and  you compressed it into one 24-hour day,  

anatomically modern man shows up at four  seconds before midnight, cave paintings at  

one second before midnight. We've been playing  at civilization for a fraction of a second.

Everything is going into exponential change, from  education to quantum computing, to cryptocurrency,  

to transport, to macroeconomics, to  geopolitics, to climate crisis, to everything.  

It's breaking our brains. We're overwhelmed,  we're collapsing in grief. It does feel that  

the handrails, the things that we used to  look to for stability and security, have just  

evaporated. If we've experienced a collapse  in meaning how do we go about restoring it?

I'm Jamie Wheal, founder of the Flow Genome  Project, and author of "Recapture the Rapture:  

Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World  That's Lost Its Mind." The collapse in meaning,  

that I think you can at least argue we're in the  midst of right now, is complex and multivariable.  

We've had a collapse in traditional organized  religion, what you could call kind of Meaning 1.0.  

For the first time ever, the nuns, the spiritual  but not religious, like the "none of the above's,"  

is the largest and fastest growing  religious movement in North America.  

There are increasingly folks that feel like, "Hey,  those stories, those codes, those ways of being,  

don't match my identity. Don't match my choices.  Don't match my community." So organized religion  

is no longer a place to hang our hats.  And at the same time, modern liberalism  

has also been getting a little creaky. That's  Meaning 2.0. Think of the ivory tower in academia,  

news media, businesses, and corporate titans  and leadership, potentially even medicine. And  

you just take those and you just go one by one.  You're like, oh, well, Goldman Sachs sold middle  

America down the river in 2008. And McKinsey  helped Purdue Pharma sell more OxyContin well  

after the negative effects were demonstrated.  The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal,  

which used to be considered the journals of  record are now imploding. And the same thing  

with doctors, the same thing with corruptions  in peer review, and the replication crisis.  

Basically everything you've ever seen  on a TED Talk is probably not true.

So all of the places that we  used to use rules of thumb  

or decision-making shortcuts,  that's just evaporated.  

So in that collapse, we're getting fundamentalism  on one side, and we're getting nihilism  

on the other. We're getting diseases of despair.  We're getting real heartbreak. I think you could  

make a case that that is why we're seeing this  uptick in conspiracy theories of all stripes.  

Will anybody make sense of all of this nonsense  for me? If you can give me a happily ever after,  

if you can tell me that I'm one of the good guys,  and you promised to get me to the other side,  

hundreds of thousands of people these days, are  deeply vulnerable to that promise. These are  

rapture ideologies. We can see examples of  that with ISIS and Christian Zionism. But I  

think what is equally important to note is that  they show up in Wall Street, in Silicon Valley.

All of these rapture ideologies  share the same structure. Number one,  

the world as we know it is screwed. Number  two, there's an inflection point coming soon.  

Number three, as soon as we get to that inflection  point, me and mine, the elect, the saved,  

are going to score one of the golden tickets to  the other side. Number four, so let's get there as  

fast as possible. Don't worry about the collateral  damage of the world we're leaving behind.  

So the question then is, how do  we create liberating structures  

so that a lot of people all around the world,  can experiment, innovate and adapt their own  

approaches to finding and restoring meaning,  without it coming tops-down? If we want to create  

Meaning 3.0, which is a blend of traditional  religion, and modern liberalism, how do we  

have the salvation that religion promises, and the  inclusion that modern liberalism is committed to?  

From Meaning 1.0, we need healing, inspiration  and connection. From the modern liberal side,  

we want this to be open-source. We want  anybody anywhere to have access to this,  

needs to be scalable, really cheap  or outright free. And then the third,  

is it has to be anti-fragile. But as Mike Tyson  said, "everybody's got a plan until they get hit,"  

right? So the idea of an anti-fragile  solution is one that actually digs in  

and get stronger, more rooted, more  effective as things deteriorate around it.

If you want to do things that everybody has access  to that are effective, start with evolutionary  

drivers like breathing, sexuality, embodiment,  substances and music. Our nervous systems and our  

bodies can actually be profoundly potent tools  to discharge trauma, and to prompt peak states  

and inspiration. Bringing that design thinking  approach is an attempt to support that.  

So that would be the hope for Meaning 3.0.  It doesn't promise an out for an escape.  

It doesn't promise a happily ever after that is  structurally different from right here, right now.  

We need tools to mend our trauma,  

tools to reconnect with inspiration, why we're  here and what it all means, and tools to better  

connect with each other. And if we can do that,  then we stand a chance of recapturing our rapture,  

our bliss, our contentment, our belonging, our  passion, and the story of who we are, the story of  

where we're going, and the commitment to  figure out together what do we do now.