We’ve spent the better part of seventy years trying to understand ourselves through psychology. We know about attachment styles, childhood trauma, unconscious motivations, and all the reasons we supposedly behave the way we do. We’ve diagnosed our exes, analyzed our childhoods, and built an entire industry around the promise that knowing ourselves better will help us live better lives. And yet, despite everything we’ve learned, we seem increasingly unsure about what makes life meaningful in the first place.
In 1957, an American psychologist called Ira Progoff wrote an introduction to a medieval Christian mystical text called The Cloud of Unknowing. He was troubled by how readily modern psychology dismissed centuries of knowledge about the human mind simply because that knowledge came from religious traditions. Reading his observations nearly seventy years later, I was struck by how little some of our underlying assumptions have changed, even as psychology has gained so much influence over the way we understand ourselves.
His writing got me thinking about the history of psychology, the decline of Christianity’s influence in the West, and something I’ve been describing as spiritual homelessness. We’ve gained considerable freedom to decide what we believe and how we want to live. But we’ve also inherited the responsibility of figuring out what any of it is for. Psychology has offered us ways to understand our suffering, while the bigger questions about meaning and how we ought to live remain unsettled.
Meanwhile, self-understanding has grown into a very profitable business. There’s now a psychological explanation available for almost every uncomfortable feeling or disappointing relationship, usually followed by a book, a course, or another video promising to help us understand ourselves a little better. And the more time we spend searching for answers, the more money there is to be made from keeping us searching.
This episode explores why we’re so uncomfortable with uncertainty, how psychology came to occupy such a central place in Western life, and whether our endless search for explanations is making us any wiser.
There’s a certain irony in all of this. We tend to look back at the Middle Ages as a time when people understood very little about the world. Yet medieval Christian mystics were already asking questions about the limits of human knowledge that our own culture seems increasingly reluctant to face.
We know a great deal about how the human mind works. We seem far less certain about what makes a life worth living. I wonder whether the next great intellectual revolution might involve revisiting some of the things we were so confident we’d outgrown.
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