Macro level
Truth, meaning and the loss of the greater whole
After the personal (micro) and societal (meso) perspectives, this essay turns to the macro level: the spiritual and metaphysical layer in which the narcissism of our time takes root. Beneath the psychological and social symptoms lies a deeper deficit — the disappearance of truth, meaning and orientation. When the human being can no longer mirror themselves in something that transcends them, the self remains the only center of significance.
This essay explores how that loss of the greater whole has unanchored humanity and how within that emptiness a new form of consciousness may arise — one not based on control, but on receptivity.
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The disappearance of shared truth
Once, truth existed between people — a shared field in which one could encounter the other, even in difference. Truth was not only factual but also moral: it offered a common orientation. In modern times, that truth has been replaced by opinion and narrative. The postmodern individual, weary of absolute certainties, rightly discovered the multiplicity of perspectives but gradually lost the ground that connects those perspectives.
The result is a world in which everything can be both true and untrue at once. Information and disinformation merge into a continuous stream of interpretations. Facts have become interchangeable with beliefs and beliefs with emotions. Pew Research shows that in many Western countries, less than one fifth of the population still trusts government, media or science. What remains is a culture in which truth is no longer a compass, but a matter of taste.
When truth disappears as a shared point of orientation, the ego seeks footing in itself — in its own experience, its own moral rightness, and its own story. It becomes the perfect breeding ground for narcissism: the inner certainty that arises in the absence of a larger frame of reference. Jonathan Haidt describes this as the moral tribalization of modern democracy: moral judgment is no longer carried by universal principles, but by group identity and affect.
This shift also affects the moral dimension of empathy. Where moral thinking once had a transcendent measure — something that rose above personal preference — it has now become largely psychological. “What feels good?” has replaced “What is good?” As a result, moral language shifts from responsibility to experience.
Immanuel Kant already warned that a human being must never become merely a means, but always remain an end in themselves. In a society where truth and morality lose their common foundation, that principle becomes increasingly difficult to uphold. The other is no longer recognized as a moral being, but as an opinion, a function or a projection.
Truth is thus not only divided but also deprived of soul. It has lost its human dimension — the space in which people can truly meet without one having to win or dominate the other.
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The death of the transcendent
Modernity has emptied the heavens. What was once sacred has been explained, measured and managed. Humanity became the measure of all things — and in doing so, lost its relation to the infinite. Where religion once offered a symbolic language for connection with something greater, there now remains a rational universe in which meaning no longer has a natural place.
Research on secularization shows how deeply this shift has penetrated our culture. In the Netherlands, only a minority now identify as religious or spiritual in the traditional sense, while feelings of purpose and moral direction continue to decline. Large European studies show that younger generations have not only abandoned religion, but also the very idea of a shared moral compass. When transcendence disappears, humanity loses its measure: there is nothing left outside of us against which we can mirror ourselves.
The American psychologist Viktor Frankl already saw this in the last century. He described the existential vacuum of modern man — a sense of emptiness that arises when life no longer has direction beyond self-interest. In that void grows a subtle restlessness, a hunger for meaning that is no longer satisfied spiritually, but consumed materially. Success, status, sex, or experience replace the sacred, yet fail to nourish.
As a result, the modern individual stands alone — not as a hero facing their fate, but as a being without orientation. Without transcendence, the world shrinks to a mirror: there is nothing left to look at but ourselves. Thus emerges a culture in which the self becomes the altar — not out of pride, but out of emptiness. The gods have died and humanity now prays to its own reflection.
The disappearance of transcendence also carries moral consequences. Where no greater whole provides direction, responsibility shifts toward choice and preference. Ethics becomes pragmatic: good is what works. In that process, not only faith in God disappears, but also faith in the good as a principle. Humanity does not become worse, but aimless — not without conscience, but surrendered to circumstance.
The philosopher Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame: a worldview in which everything meaningful must fit within the boundaries of the human. The transcendent is not denied, but rendered unthinkable. And yet, something continues to stir — a faint awareness that the world could be more than what's visible. That lingering awareness is the shadow of our time: a homesickness for something we ourselves have abolished.
The exhaustion of inner life
Byung-Chul Han calls our era the age of the exhausted soul. In a world that wants to make everything visible, the inner realm has become an anachronism. Silence, shame, contemplation and mystery — the raw materials of a soulful existence — have lost their habitat.
In psychology, researchers speak of a decline in introspection and empathic capacity, especially among younger generations. Studies by Konrath and colleagues show that the average empathy level of American students has dropped by nearly forty percent over the past thirty years. Similar trends are visible in Europe. People still feel emotions, but more quickly and less deeply. The attention span grows shorter; the inner space contracts.
Neurobiological research helps explain why. The constant influx of digital stimuli activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system, accustoming it to shallow, rapid gratification. What once required time — thinking, waiting, feeling — is replaced by instant stimulation. This constant activation weakens precisely those neural networks needed for reflection, empathy and self-regulation. Inner depth requires stillness — the ability to endure discomfort without reaching for the next stimulus.
Without that stillness, consciousness becomes fragmented. We still feel emotions, but without anchoring. We still know what we want, but no longer why. Self-knowledge gives way to self-management and self-inquiry to self-optimization. The individual tries to manage their inner world as if it were a project — measurable, controllable and efficient.
Contemporary culture reinforces this shift. In coaching, therapy and the self-help industry, the focus is no longer on understanding the inner life but on optimizing it. The goal is no longer meaning, but functionality. The inner life becomes a means to success, not to truth. The boundary between self-care and self-exploitation has grown thin.
Han argues that transparency is the enemy of truth: what is constantly illuminated cannot develop depth. Inner life needs shadow. A person who wishes to expose and understand everything about themselves loses the experience of mystery — that which cannot be reduced to data, goals or diagnoses.
In a society obsessed with performance and visibility, emptiness has become the greatest fear. Yet it's precisely that emptiness which allows the soul to breathe: the quiet field where meaning can appear. When the inner world is constantly filled with stimuli, it loses its capacity to resonate.
What remains is a consciousness without an inside — a functioning organism that no longer feels its own emptiness. In such a world, narcissism is not a deviation, but the natural form of consciousness: the mirror is all that remains when the window has been closed.
Technological Conditioning
Technology did not invent human consciousness, but it has rewritten it. What was once a tool has become a living environment. Screens now mediate our relationships, our perceptions, and even our memories. The interface is no longer a window to the world — it is the world itself.
The digital infrastructure is designed for efficiency, not for meaning. It teaches us that speed is better than depth, that visibility matters more than authenticity and that the world truly exists only when it can be shared. In this way, technology shapes not only what we do, but who we become.
Neuroscientific research shows that digital stimuli have a direct effect on the brain. Every notification, like, or update activates the dopaminergic reward system — the same circuit involved in addiction. The user learns to shift attention constantly, which erodes sustained concentration and inner calm. The brain adapts to a pattern of continual interruption.
Shoshana Zuboff described this as surveillance capitalism: technology that not only gathers data but shapes behavior. Algorithms do not simply learn what we think, but how we react — and they use that knowledge to steer those reactions. The user becomes an unwitting participant in an experiment where attention is the currency and predictability the profit.
Jean Twenge and her colleagues speak of a dopamine culture: a society in which immediate stimulation has become more important than lasting satisfaction. The craving for affirmation — likes, followers, visibility — is reinforced neurologically and normalized socially. Narcissistic traits find structural reinforcement in this context: self-presentation is no longer deviant behavior but the cultural norm.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard foresaw this. In his analysis of simulacra, he predicted a time when images would become more important than reality itself. The digital culture has fulfilled that prophecy. The line between real and representation has blurred: what is visible is taken as true. Authenticity becomes performance. Even intimacy has become a form of display — carefully curated for an audience that is never absent.
The psychological consequences are subtle but profound. People look more, yet see less. They communicate constantly, yet rarely speak meaningfully. The perpetual need for external affirmation weakens internal reference points. Visibility replaces introspection and dopamine replaces meaning.
Technology has thus created a new type of consciousness: outward, reactive and driven by projection rather than reflection. It's the perfect breeding ground for narcissism — a self that constantly displays itself, yet experiences less and less.
The erosion of fidelity and empathy
In the relationships of our time, we can read the moral and psychological shift of an entire culture. What was once a bond between two people who entrusted themselves to one another has increasingly become a temporary collaboration between two self-projects. Fidelity has not disappeared, but its meaning has changed — from a moral principle to a negotiable option.
Recent studies illustrate this shift. According to the Rutgers Knowledge Centre for Sexuality, roughly one in four Dutch people have cheated on a partner. International research, such as that of the Institute for Family Studies, reports similarly high numbers. Among young adults, the figure continues to rise, partly due to the normalization of online contact and dating apps. The boundaries between temptation, flirtation and infidelity have grown increasingly blurred.
Psychological research shows that narcissistic traits are correlated with a higher likelihood of infidelity. Campbell and Foster described this as the self-enhancement motive: the need to affirm oneself through desire and admiration. Infidelity, in that sense, is not a random moral lapse but a behavioral pattern consistent with a culture of instant gratification.
Empathy — the essential precondition for fidelity — seems to be depleting in that same process. Over thirty years, the average level of empathy among young people has declined by about forty percent. Digital communication increases access to information about others but weakens our feelings for others. We learn about each other’s viewpoints, yet lose touch with each other’s inner worlds.
Social media environments further amplify the moral ambiguity of relationships. Where one once risked exposure through physical encounters, every interaction is now mediated by screens, where anonymity and distance lower inhibitions. The possibility of infidelity, as psychologist Esther Perel calls it, has never been greater. Technology not only facilitates temptation, but also rationalizes it: everyone does it, so why not me?
This normalization of boundary-crossing behavior is symptomatic of a deeper moral phenomenon. In a culture where authenticity is confused with self-expression, responsibility loses its moral foundation. Moral choices are reduced to personal preferences: what feels good is deemed good. The individual uses the other to experience themselves rather than to truly connect.
The fading moral compass is closely tied to the decline of empathy as a social anchor. When the gaze of the other no longer mirrors but compares, the capacity to be moved begins to vanish. The other becomes a means of self-confirmation. Kant’s principle — that a human being must never be treated merely as a means but always as an end — has, in practice, been inverted.
The erosion of fidelity is therefore not merely a relational issue, but a cultural symptom. It reveals how an era that elevates freedom above all else struggles with responsibility. In the emptiness that follows, only desire remains — but desire without grounding turns into consumption. Thus, the same pattern that pervades the entire culture reappears in love: humanity seeks itself in the eyes of the other but loses, in doing so, its ability to truly see and be moved.
Alienation from the earth
Alongside the loss of transcendence, we witness the loss of immanence: the alienation from the Earth itself. Humanity no longer lives within nature but on top of it. Where the Earth was once experienced as mother and mirror, she has now been reduced to a resource, a backdrop or a threat. This detachment from the living whole carries not only ecological but also existential consequences: it renders the human being homeless in the most literal sense.
Ecopsychology shows that our psychological health is directly linked to the quality of our relationship with the natural world. Research by Richard Louv, David Strayer and others demonstrates that contact with nature reduces stress, restores attention and strengthens feelings of connectedness. Yet people in industrialized societies now spend more than ninety percent of their time indoors. Our connection to the Earth and the seasons has been largely replaced by screens and climate control — a constant, synthetic environment that flattens the rhythm of life.
Across spiritual and philosophical traditions, nature served as a mirror of the soul. From the Stoics to Spinoza, from Eastern mysticism to Romantic poetry, humanity found meaning in the resonance between inner life and the living world. When that resonance disappears, the self loses its measure. Arne Johan Vetlesen therefore speaks of ecological blindness: the inability to be affected by the world that sustains us.
Ecological decay, then, is not merely an environmental issue but a symptom of a deeper loss of consciousness. The destruction outside mirrors the impoverishment within. Those who treat the Earth as an object learn to treat others — and themselves — as objects too. Narcissism and ecological destruction are two expressions of the same movement: the disappearance of reciprocity.
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes this as a loss of resonance between human and world. Where resonance is replaced by control, alienation arises. In our efforts to master nature — through technology, efficiency and production — we have lost our own receptivity. We measure, plan and manage, but we no longer listen.
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The consequences reach far beyond ecology. The absence of natural boundaries feeds the illusion of unlimited growth — the same illusion that drives the narcissistic self. A humanity that no longer experiences limits loses its sense of proportion. The Earth is depleted just as the soul is exhausted.
Ecopsychologists note that grief for the loss of the Earth is not merely an emotion but a form of reconnection. Those who truly mourn deforestation, warming, or extinction remember that they are part of a greater whole. In this sense, ecological awareness can become a moral and spiritual awakening — the realization that life is reciprocity, not possession.
Alienation from the Earth is thus not an isolated phenomenon but a mirror of the human condition. As long as we treat the world outside us as an object, we will continue to reduce ourselves to function. The path back to wholeness begins when we dare to experience once more that the Earth is not beneath us, but that we are part of her.
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The vacuum of meaning
The convergence of these losses — of truth, inner life, transcendence and Earth — has led to what Viktor Frankl called an existential vacuum: a world without sustaining symbols. Where religion, community or nature once provided a natural bedrock of meaning, the human being must now manufacture it. But meaning cannot be made; it arises only in relation to something greater than ourselves.
Research on purpose and well-being confirms this deficit. Large international surveys — such as the World Values Survey and the Gallup Global Wellbeing Index — show that more and more people experience their lives as empty or directionless, despite increasing prosperity. Especially among younger generations, reports of meaninglessness and emotional exhaustion are growing. Rates of depression, burnout and loneliness rise year after year. In the United States, the Surgeon General even speaks of an epidemic of loneliness — not caused by isolation, but by a lack of meaningful connection.
In that emptiness, people try to prove that they are alive. We produce images, opinions and goals in a constant attempt to fill the silence. We no longer live from meaning, but for meaning — in a state of perpetual self-affirmation. Social media intensify this dynamic: the desire to be seen replaces the desire to truly be. Inner experience is projected outward and measured by visibility, response and effect.
Byung-Chul Han calls this the shift from being to performance. The modern individual no longer lives to be, but to prove existence. Even spirituality and therapy are often used instrumentally — as methods to optimize the self or make emptiness productive. In doing so, the essence of meaning disappears: that it cannot be produced, only received — in encounter, in silence and in surrender.
The vacuum of meaning manifests not only in personal experiences of emptiness, but also in the collective loss of direction. We live in an era where progress has lost its moral substance. Technology and economy develop faster than our ability to understand why. The question of purpose has been replaced by the question of function.
In this context, narcissism is more than a personality structure: it is an existential compensation. The polished self serves as a substitute for the lost foundation. It fills the void with form — perfect on the outside, but hollow within: a mirror without a soul.
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The human longing for recognition is, at its core, a longing for meaning. But as long as that meaning is not shared, it remains fleeting. Humanity lives in what the British psychiatrist John Bowlby once called relational hunger: the desire to come into contact with something that truly responds. Without that response, we return to the echo of our own voice — heard, but not touched.
The vacuum of meaning is therefore not merely a crisis of faith or culture, but a crisis of resonance. What is missing is not information but wonder; not direction, but receptivity.
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The forgetting of mystery
Where humanity forgets mystery, it loses its capacity for wonder — and with it, its ethical compass. Philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas and Buber did not see wonder as a naïve feeling but as a moral attitude: the ability to be moved by what is greater than oneself.
Levinas spoke of the face of the Other as the source of responsibility — not because we choose to be good, but because the Other calls us morally into being. When that call fades, the Other becomes an object — something to use or to ignore. Empathy, once the bridge between self and world, withers into projection or sentimentality.
Psychological research shows how this moral numbing unfolds. Studies on empathy by Konrath and others reveal not only a decline in emotional attunement, but also in moral engagement. People feel more, yet act less. Moral awareness has been replaced by moral fatigue: we know what is good, but feel too little connection to live by it.
Hannah Arendt warned that this creates the breeding ground for the banality of evil: the moment when people stop thinking from the standpoint of the Other. Where the dialogue with mystery falls silent, the capacity to be addressed disappears. Truth becomes arbitrary, love becomes strategy and empathy becomes a risk.
What remains is a human being who places themselves at the center — not out of arrogance but because they know no orientation beyond themselves. The forgetting of mystery thus marks the completion of the narcissistic age: the moment when the mirror has taken the place of the horizon.
Summary
On the macro level, it becomes clear that the rise of narcissism does not stand alone. It reflects a far deeper shift: the disappearance of the frameworks that once helped human beings understand their place in the world. As truth, inner life, transcendence and nature have lost their self-evident meaning, only the self remains as the center of orientation.
Within such a context, narcissism becomes understandable — almost inevitable. It is the human attempt to anchor oneself in a reality that no longer offers supporting structures. Where one was once held by community, faith or symbolism, we now live in a culture of self-reflection without resonance. The mirror is everywhere, yet the window is closed.
The consequences are visible across all domains: moral relativism, declining trust, relational volatility, diminishing empathy and ecological alienation. Each symptom points in the same direction — humanity has lost its connection to something greater: to truth, to Earth, to the Other and to itself.
Restoring that connection does not call for nostalgia or a return to dogma, but for a new form of transcendence: a rediscovery of what Levinas called responsiveness — the capacity to be moved. Only where we allow ourselves to be addressed by what is other can responsibility return.
In moral terms, this is what Kant meant when he urged that the human being must never be treated as a means but always as an end in themselves. In an age that increasingly reduces the human to data, image, or instrument, that thought is once again radical. It reminds us that dignity arises not from function but from being.
Thus, the narcissism of our age becomes a mirror of our dislocation — a humanity that places itself at the center because it no longer knows any center beyond itself. The path toward restoration begins not with more knowledge or control, but with renewed receptivity: the courage to be still, to be moved and to rediscover meaning in that which cannot be possessed.
