Why So Many People Feel Existentially Disconnected From Reality
How mechanistic worldviews flatten participation, meaning, and consciousness
“”In the world of the atheists nothing is meant to be, unless by human agency. In the spiritual world-view, everything is meant to be.””
— Jonathan Black —
I know I must surely not be the only person to, at times, feel an emotional, psychological and spiritual disconnect from the world around me. For me at least, it often appears as feeling like life is chronically meaningless. That I suffer from a kind of emotional numbness, alienation, and existential fatigue. Modern culture tells me that it’s because I’m depressed, or stressed, or purposeless. Or that maybe I should pop a pill or two because there must obviously be some kind of chemical imbalance or psychological pathology at work.
But what if the problem isn’t with me or with you, but with what I’ve been told to believe is real?
Because the way a civilisation understands the nature of reality also shapes how its people experience themselves within it. And ours has persistently reinforced the idea that reality is fundamentally material, mechanical, and indifferent, reducing human beings to something similarly impersonal and mechanistic, until we eventually begin to experience ourselves that way too.
How Reality Became a Machine
The material reductionist model emerged during the Scientific Revolution, a period of drastic change in scientific thought that started during the 16th century and evolved through the 17th and 18th centuries. This was a time when an irreversible break with the natural philosophy that preceded it occurred, moving us away from nature as animistic, sympathetic and participatory, and towards a world consisting of inert matter, predictable processes, and linear, mathematically describable systems.
This period birthed what we now know as modern science, replacing the ancient Greek philosophies and Esoteric wisdom traditions. With a new focus on empirical observation, the experimental method, and mathematics, it proposes a world, and everything in it, as nothing more than matter and machinery, and consciousness as accidental, secondary and isolated inside the individual brain.
The key reframing of how we understand our world transformed how we investigated nature, and is brilliant at explaining function. It’s a great framework for allowing us to predict, engineer, and control the material world. But it’s not so brilliant when trying to explain meaning, experience, and felt existence.
The Psychological & Spiritual Consequences of a Dead Universe
As human beings we not only think in terms of the worldviews we hold, but we also tend to psychologically integrate and inhabit them. We are biologically and socially hardwired to. It’s what kept our tribes whole, happy and functional back in the stone age, and it’s what unifies our societies even today. So, when we are taught to frame reality as something that is fundamentally dead and impersonal, it follows that we, ourselves, also become something fundamentally dead and impersonal.
Material reductionism teaches us that being conscious is incidental, and thus also renders it empty — maybe even somewhat cheap. Meaning becomes something self-invented and almost narcissistic. Agency becomes an illusion. The worldview that’s been drummed into us from the moment we first opened our eyes, reduces our existence into nothing more than external, measurable processes,, with our inner lives being nothing more than a biologically reducible accident. No wonder then that this inevitably leads to a narrowing of how we experience not only ourselves, but also our place within reality itself.
As children, we inhabit an enchanted world where our minds are unsullied by this mechanistic materialism. This is why children believe in fairies and goblins, why they can see their dead grandmothers, and why they can remember past lives. But then, as we “grow up”, we are taught to shift our perception towards the culturally dominant framework, where those dimensions of experience simply don’t exist because they can’t be quantified. Meaning, inner depth, symbolic experience, spiritual intuition, felt participation, and existential significance all lose legitimacy, and are relegated to the domain of childish foolery and superstition. It gets drummed into us that everything comes down to matter, behaviour, computation, survival, productivity, and neurochemistry, gradually narrowing both how we experience ourselves psychologically and spiritually, as well as how we understand the nature of reality and our place in it.
Instead of looking at ourselves as the conscious participant embedded in a meaning filled reality, psychologically and spiritually we come to experience ourselves as detached observers, isolated biological objects, and temporary accidents in an indifferent cosmos. And as we begin to see ourselves primarily as biological organisms, economic units, human resources, and cognitive systems, existentially, reality starts feeling thinner, flatter, and less alive.
The Consequences of the Collapse of Participation
This disconnect is more often than not pre-conceptual. We absorb these assumptions indirectly through our educational systems, the social and main stream media, institutional language, scientific popularisation, and economic systems.
If we compare this with cultures and societies that have not adopted the same degree of reductionist and mechanistic thinking found in the modern West, a very different relationship to reality becomes visible. Many indigenous cosmologies, ancient philosophical traditions, and participatory metaphysical systems do not experience consciousness as something isolated inside the human brain. Nor do they observe the external world from a distance. Instead, consciousness is understood as embedded within reality itself. Nature is viewed as more than inert matter, but rather as something relational, alive, and participatory. Human beings are seen as more than detached observers moving through a meaningless universe, but instead as participants within a larger field of existence structured by relationship, symbolism, reciprocity, and interiority.
This does not mean these cultures are free from suffering.. But their underlying metaphysical orientation often preserves a stronger sense of existential embedded-ness, meaning, value and worth than that of modern material reductionism which interprets reality through abstraction, quantification, and separation. The contrast here is that mechanistic frameworks position consciousness as outside reality looking in while participatory frameworks position consciousness as intrinsically involved in the unfolding of reality.
What we see when participation disappears is the weakening of meaning and the collapse of symbolic depth. Nature becomes objectified, and experience becomes transactional, while reality becomes something to extract from, rather than relate to.
As this shift takes place in our minds, the psychological and spiritual consequences are an increasing sense of loss, and an absence of sacred enchantment that leaves us unable to feel existentially grounded. We become fragmented, we flatten our emotions, we become hyper-intellectual, and we engage in chronic abstraction. So, this feeling of disconnection may arise less because we as humans lack existential meaning, but may actually have more to do with this dominant worldview that excludes meaningful participation at its most fundamental levels.
Why Technological Hyper-Connectivity Increases Alienation
Although this material reductionist worldview has been with us for a few centuries now, its effects have maybe never been felt as much as it has since the age the ubiquitous algorithms that dictate what we are fed on the omnipresent glass windows we stare at for hours on end each day.
We now have entire generations that know nothing else but a digital culture that commodifies attention and encourages performative identities that are externally validated, all which amplifies mechanistic, material, and reductionist assumptions. Together, these forces contribute to a world in which human experience — and by extension human beings themselves — is reduced to metrics, and becomes increasingly objectified, quantified, and optimised.
The point I’m making is that technological connection is not the same as actual connection. I’m Gen X. I remember playing outside with my friends and their friends, and their friends’ friends. We were different ages, sizes, and sexes. We learned how to relate to each other directly as human beings despite being different, as well as how to negotiate those differences through connection and meaning. We used our imaginations to build worlds in our collective minds that allowed us to have shared adventures.
These were deeply magical, and connected experiences because they happened in real and meaningful ways, in a real and meaningful world. Technology has now lead us into a world where the self has been replaced by an imaginary avatar that is treated as data, shaped for the purposes of behavioural prediction, and connection means being permanently “online”, “available”, and “networked”. The result is an existential detachment from ourselves, nature, meaning, and at times, even reality itself that has lead to the great paradox of our modern western world; We have unprecedented informational and social access, but at the same time we suffer from a widespread existential dissociation and disorientation.
Consciousness & the Return of Participation
So maybe the antidote to all of this is to return to a world in which we are conscious participants in a conscious cosmos, and reclaim our agency, attention and intention. New developments in quantum physics, consciousness studies, as well as information and systems theory are all pointing to something our ancient ancestors, as well as modern nature-based shamanic and animistic cultures, have known all along: that consciousness is fundamental rather than derivative, that reality is relational rather than purely object-based, and that at the centre of it all is us, the conscious observers, who play an intrinsic role in how it all unfolds.
However, reconnection does not mean we need to abandon science or rationality, but rather that we should recognise the limits of, and guard against, a metaphysical reality and existential worldview built purely on mechanistic and material reductionist frameworks. It’s also important to distinguish this consciousness-first perspective from naïve or exploitative forms of spirituality. I’m not talking about willing a parking space into existence, or manifesting money out of thin air. What I am talking about is that there are philosophical, psychological and ontological implications of taking consciousness seriously as participatory in reality.
A participatory, consciousness-first worldview simply says that matter alone is insufficient to explain the emergence of mind, and that our rich lived experience cannot be reduced merely to neurons and chemistry. Once we are open to acknowledging this, existential meaning and spiritual connection — both within ourselves as well as within the world we inhabit — can once again become structurally possible.
The Crisis May Be Metaphysical Before It Is Psychological
A civilisation built upon assumptions of materialist reductionism will eventually, and quite inevitably, produce individuals who feel psychologically, existentially, and spiritually disconnected from themselves as well as from reality itself. This disconnection is not the result of personal failure or individual pathology, but a symptom of a larger issue. One in which we have built a society in which everything is reduced to matter and machinery that created a deep sense of disconnection and separation from ourselves, our fellow human beings, and the very world we inhabit. And much like Plato’s Atlantis, we are at a precipice where there exists an imbalance between intellect and wisdom and there is a separation from nature and consciousness where we now suffer from excessive materialism along with a loss of alignment with larger cosmic or spiritual principles.
So perhaps the growing sense of existential disconnection is not evidence that we are failing as human beings, but evidence that our dominant model of reality is failing us. And perhaps the antidote lies in reintegrating consciousness into our understanding of reality so we can change not only how we view ourselves and our place in the world, but how we experience life itself.
This essay draws on ideas from my books Living in a Quantum Reality and A Participatory Cosmos. For a deeper exploration of these ideas, consider purchasing your copy. To support the work you can subscribe to my Substack, or make a small donation.
Lieze Boshoff is an author and researcher exploring consciousness, metaphysics, and anomalous experience through the lenses of contemporary science, psychology, and philosophy. With a background in clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and doctoral research on consciousness and perception, her work examines reality as a participatory, holographic field in which mind and matter are inseparable. She writes at the intersection of science, symbolism, and the unseen, investigating how experience itself shapes the cosmos we inhabit.
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