This article explores the significance of meaningful activity in the context of well-being for individuals and  communities in the post-modern era. By picking up on the distinctions between meaningful and unmeaningful activity, it examines how a break down of meaning contributes to “deaths of despair” in Western societies.

 

 

Drawing on Victor Frankl’s Logotherapy, the importance of an enriched environment and social connection is brought into relief. The work highlights the detrimental effects of meaninglessness on mental health and the need for mutual recognition within social interactions as a pathway to healing and understanding.

 

 

Introduction

In this essay I shall be attempting to bring a descriptive lexicon to the material and non-material occupation of individuals and communities in the post modern era stimulated by a discussion in Occupational Therapy. Firstly I hope to identify and distinguish between meaningful and unmeaningful activity, and secondly I hope to make clear the differences between generative and degenerative conditions of living for sentient beings – in particular humans, but these insights apply to many forms of life. There is special interest here with regards to a search for an account of the ‘deaths of despair‘ (Case & Deaton, 2020) and ‘diseases of despair‘ (NORC, 2023) which are on the rise in western societies.

 

 

 

 

The Nature and Form of Meaning

In this section I am going to theorise the nature and form of meaning so that it can be understood contextually in lives. The sentient being requires meaning in order to be an agent in the world. From the internal structure of experience the being feels, as a part of their senses, the state of the environment.

 

From this experience a sense of imperatives become known, available to consciousness and understood in terms of well-being. Meaning comes from structure and meaningfulness is a key part of maintaining well-being as an interaction between the agent and the extended environment. Meaning comes from regularity of form which I suggest as an informational inference coming from pattern of experience; without some regularity or pattern, meaning is not inferred from context.

 

The Extended Mind (Clark & Chalmers, 2010) hypothesis notionalises a scheme of co-constitution between the material and biological which suggests a fuzziness of self and challenges a concrete division between self and environment raising the possibilities of different formulations of sentience. A sentience seeks out meaning as a critical part of living in the same way, and infused with, seeking out physical sustenance to maintain the physical being.

 

 

 

 

Victor Frankl and Logotherapy

Victor Frankl (Frankl, 1969) explores the relationship between consciousness and meaning in his 1946 book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. This work draws from his experiences as a prisoner of war in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war. From these he developed Logotherapy, a therapeutic model involving identifying meaning and purpose in life which they can feel positive about, and using that as a positive meditation to immerse oneself in as an outcome.

 

 

 

 

The Interwoven Nature of Existence

The physical and non-physical are interwoven and cannot be understood by breaking, fracturing, abstracting, and alienating them into hierarchies. I suggest this process as being destructive to meaning if done without a re-contextualising/re-constitutionalising process that leaves experience whole. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943), much used to justify simplistic utilitarian rubrics for resource allocation, are in this argument of interwoven aspects of reality, quantum entangled; bound up with each other and interconnected in that one element necessarily interacts with and alters the state of another when some aspect changes.

 

 

 

 

The Relative Nature of Need

In this scheme I am presenting to the reader, need is a thing relative to the moment and context. A comment in John Reed’s book Ten Days Which Shook The World (Reed, 2019) offers an anecdote highlighting the non-material needs that allow people to continue on surviving:

 

“We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, ‘Did you bring anything to read?’”

 

This anecdote speaks of the imperative to ‘feed’ the non-material and how the non-material aspects of existence can sometimes be more important than the material conditions.

 

 

 

 

Meaningful Activity and its Relationship with Health

It is in this aspect that an important body of what constitutes meaningful activity can be understood; those things which feed the soul, heart and mind inside – and beyond – the purely physical. To further investigate this I draw on Francoise Wemelsfelder’s (1984) work which identifies the importance of living things to be able to perform behaviours that are specific to it:

 

“Boredom implies some sort of awareness, some form of a direct inner experience of selfhood. Because without a sense of selfhood related to the developmental potential of the animal, it would be impossible to ‘miss’ certain things, to be bored. With the phenomenon of boredom one can illustrate the qualitative difference between behavioural and physiological deviations, but is still bored, since it misses the opportunity to perform its specific behaviour. How important behaviour is for an animal is a crucial question in theories on adaptation and stress”

 

Wemelsfelder helps elucidate certain non-material conditions requisite for well-being in other animal species and amongst her findings she has articulated that boredom is a distinct existentialist and ultimately physiological harm. Arguing that boredom is an adverse state, she details how it can be understood and measured as a stressor for living things that negatively effects the homeostasis of the living being commonly altering its behaviour and physiology.

 

She asks the question of ‘what is normal ?’ in terms of habitat and environment moving the bounds of these terms beyond the impulse to reduce the account simply to the material. Wemelsfelder identifies stress as noxious stimuli and stress responses as mechanisms by which animals resist adverse stimuli. A lack of meaningful activity constitutes the foundations of boredom which when experienced in a chronic manner give rise to massive biological damages of the glucocorticoid stress hormones. It is in this way that the non-material can cause impacts and cascades in the material.

 

 

 

Compensating with Surrogates for Natural Reward

Contextualising the outcomes of an absence of meaningful activity, is the notion of natural reward.  For social mammals meaning comes from being in relationships with others which are not solely instrumental or exploitative and so constitutes a source of what we could conceptualise as natural reward.  The physiology of an organism is affected by aspects of the sociological environment allowing them to mitigate stressors so that they do not become noxious and overwhelming.

 

There has been considerable work examining the role of the HPA (Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal) Axis in relation to stress and its role in wellbeing of social mammals.  Social isolation represents a “measurable survival threat to social species”, in particular through the expression of stress hormones known as glucocorticoids (GC) such as cortisol (Hawkley et al, 2012)

 

 

 

 

Stress and Health Outcomes

Robert Sapolsky (2021) has put forward links between stress, glucocortioid production and negative health outcomes suggesting connections with anxiety, depression, suicide and substance use (amongst other things) in humans.  Whilst it is contentious for some to draw comparisons with humans from other species it seems fairly robust common sense to acknowledge that social connection and lack of toxic stress are key factors for wellbeing in humans, and there are a range of related evidence bases which offer possible accounts for the rise in the above coined ‘deaths of despair‘ in seemingly well off countrys (See above Case & Deaton, 2020).

 

Looking at the links with stress Grant, Hamer and Steptoe (2009) offer affirmative evidence through looking at cortisol levels and their correlations with social connectedness and health outcomes.  In terms of stressors, social companionship offers a mitigation which stands out as a form of natural reward.  As a part of happiness and wellbeing, being in healthy relations with other people produces all the psycho-social inputs which result in an array of chemical mediators that move the physiology into homeostatic pro-social states away from adrenal fight-or-flight states.

 

 

 

The Role of Companionship in Wellbeing

The psycho-social inputs which come from companionship may be equated to a sociological habitat that sustains health of the participants.  The best versions of community speak to these environs of nurture and abundance involving what constitutes meaningful activity. Various researchers have been involved in studying the various factors which are involved in abnormal behaviours and problem drug use offering accounts of how environmental constraints play roles.

 

The Impact of Chronic Stress on Behaviour

The work of ethologist John B. Calhoun has been much debated and interpreted in a multitude of ways. Sam Kean (2022) writes “Calhoun’s work functions like a Rorschach blot—people see what they want to see”, and for this reason many rightly problematise it.  In his ‘The Ecology And Sociology Of The Norway Rat’ Calhoun observed what happened to rat populations “over a 27 month period in a quarteracre enclosure in which environmental conditions simulated those characterizing this species in its native haunts” (Calhoun, 1963).

 

In their study of ‘Spatial population genomics of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) in New York City’, Combs et al (2017) chose distance classes of 200 metres as rats apparently rarely move beyond this distance within a single generation but travel anything from 30 to 150 metres in a day (in conservative estimates).  What I am doing here is establishing a framing of Calhoun’s work as a study in captivity in which the environment cannot be understood as having the features or scope of their natural habitat.  I suggest that the research he did might have implications for understanding the effect of severe and constricted captivity and chronic stress on the sociology and behaviour of social mammals.

 

Adams & Ramsden (2024) summarise findings of his work across generations of rats subjected to an environment denuded of choice, habitat richness, genetic diversity along with a range of chronic sociological and psychological stressors. Despite describing the spaces provided for his experiments as “universes”, these could be understood as captivity arrangements which constitute cruel and unusual forms of punishment by some measures.

 

By the second and third generations, as the population numbers produced greater crowding, abnormal behaviors began to be observed in the rats. Fertility rates proceded to drop and normal infant nurture behaviours decayed. Social mating interactions started to degenerate into aggressive and hyperactive nonreproductive sexual activity.

 

Violence became more common and more acute. Where rats in the wild merely nip one another, the rats of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) produced more damaging wounds with the progressive increases in violence. Other behaviours such as boundary crossing of burrows and harrassment was observed along with cannibalization of the young.

 

Alongside the impositional aberant behaviours, a section of the population developed self isolatory behaviours. Whilst Calhoun’s work is problematic, it can likely be agreed upon that the devastation of the sociological habitat along with chronic and acute stressors significantly impact on behaviour and wellbeing.

 

 

 

 

Sociological Habitat Mitigates from Problem Drug Use

Further research on the effects of habitat on wellbeing and behaviour are reported by Bruce K. Alexander.  His field was the psychology of addiction and his animal experiments recieved a great deal of attention.  In short, Alexander and colleagues reported how rats housed in socially isolated conditions consumed more morphine than rats housed in physically larger, sociologically enriched environments which they called ‘rat parks’.  This work stands as an exemplar of a rich seam of research studies.

 

Addiction studies deal with dichotomous taboos in human cultures. Alexander and colleagues did research in order to assess the addictive capacities of drugs mixing in attention being paid to sociological variables for rats.  By offering opioid drugs to rats which are housed in social isolation and those which are housed in living conditions where they can socially interact, it was found that different populations chose to self administrate drugs at markedly different rates.  Rats which were socially isolated “consumed nearly 20 times as much morphine as those in Rat Park” (Alexander, 2010).

 

 

 

 

Examining the Importance of an Intact Sociological Habitat

On a sociological basis these hypotheses warrent examination. My particular question orients around the importance of an ‘intact sociological habitat’ with an emphasis on what a sociological environment constitutes which is consonant with articulating in a granular fashion what ‘intact’ means in a given context.  As a technical distillation: My suspicion is that a ‘sociological habitat’ offers all the things of well being that co-constructs the individual in the given environment such that the environmental niche supports the thriving of the organism.

 

A habitat may be distinguished from an environment in that each thing which is articulated in a habitat but not an environment can be understood to be necessary for the well being of the individual. The same cannot be said of each thing in an environment. I am thinking of things which contribute to wellbeing to include those things not of a material nature; for example, privacy is not of a material nature though may be reflected in aspects of materiality when it has been disturbed.

 

Co-construction of Biological Life

The notion of co-construction of biological life comes from the notion that what is available and abundant in our environment informs the successful organism. That, if a particular terrain held an abundance of apple trees, that the human’s biology is effected through having an abundance of a food source is what is meant here. An environment may not contain food sources whereas a habitat will necessarily include them. Collectively, my research interests are focused on what are those material and non-material elements involved in the habitat of homo sapiens.  Understanding why people turn to persistent dissociative drug use is of special interest.

 

 

Exploring Addiction Hypotheses

Bozarth, Murray,  & Wise (1989) articulate addiction hypotheses “One view is that such drugs are potentially dangerous for all individuals, but most humans avoid addiction because they are capable of anticipating the adverse consequences of drug-taking behavior” and another “Another view is that the conditions of human society make only some individuals susceptible to drugs and that special conditions of the laboratory account for the high susceptibility of laboratory animals”. There seems to be equivocal evidence in the absence of evidence and this seems to be the major issue at the hinge of drug policies.

 

 

 

 

The Sociological Arrangement and Drug Use

Taking a perspective that the sociological arrangement of a given situation can have a result on whether an individual is more likely or not to take up what would be understood as ‘problem drug use’ may be a fruitful avenue of research. Harry Burns, former Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, professor of global public health at University of Strathclyde with a particular focus to address health inequalities, has turned his interests towards an approach that includes thinking through the aspects of well being which include non-material causes (Burns, 2014).

 

 

 

 

Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Wellbeing

A theoretical framework which I am exploring is the notion that the right set of circumstances and sensory input must stimulate a biological system which is sufficiently resourced with physical resources in order for a generative outcome to come about. Understanding what the non-material conditions for well being are is a project required in order to understand what constitutes well being through contribution. The next question I develop comes through theorising the notion of ‘natural reward’ as associated with general cognition and everyday satiation.

 

The scheme goes something like so: Some interaction comes about in the general millieu of the day-to-day existence. There are certain biofeedback mechanisms which are utilised in order to ascertain biophysical changes in the environment – for example, by hearing we can gain a sense of spacial terrain, and so forth. A part of the information conveyance involves neurotransmittors – chemical mediators – of the environmental information which constitutes so much a part of existence.

 

Some part of the bio-physical feedback of experiencing things involves some sort of biochemical seachange in the body which signifies a response to its sensory environment; for example, someone smells freshly baked bread at a bakery and their physiology changes accordingly. When the person buys the bread and eats it there involves a satiation mechanism – some form of biological feedback mechanism which is employed in order to register if something has taken place, a state which is experienced as ‘satiation’.

 

Natural Reward and Biochemical Responses

The notion of natural reward comes from how some experience ‘pleases’ in its effect and abolishes ‘want’. Biochemistry is one of the languages used in order to map the observations of how the matter of living tissues can be notionalised. Take for example the eating of chocolate.  A complex series of psycho-biochemical-electrical-physical events take part in the sensing of hunger, the seeking out of sustainance, the eating of it, and – at some point, when enough chocolate has been eaten, the saiting of hunger.

 

There are distinct mediators involved in the change of internal environment from ‘I enjoyed that, I want some more’ to ‘I enjoyed that, I dont want any more just now’.  How that instant is notionalised and interrogated surfaces different understandings.  Some researchers in the biomedical sciences have looked at how drugs of abuse can act as biochemical surrogates for aspects of natural reward (Di Chiara, Acquas, Tanda and Cadoni, 1993)

 

 

 

 

Stress and Meaningful Activity as Activating Natural Reward

Di Chiara, Acquas, Tanda and Cadoni, 1993) point out in their work that “natural stimuli such as food, water, sex and mother and newborn interactions are rewarding”. This suggests that all those drugs which cause the release of specific neurochemicals can act as a surrogate to natural reward behaviours providing informational biofeedback where there was none.  For example, in the absence of having sex aspects of the psycho-social-bio feedback are produced through the taking of a drug. This work gives rise to schemes which suggest that the attraction of some drugs is their capacity to evoke feelings of reward, those feelings associated with pleasantness, feelings of abundance, safety, nourishment, positive excitement.

 

The special neuro-psycho-social juncture of pleasure and satiation give rise to the possibility of positive feedback loops where through physical stimulus psychological conditioning can come about. The use of a drug which acts on pleasure and satiation centres is simultaneously involved in reinforcement and the rise of conditioned reflexes.  Logically, this scheme suggests that drugs which release ‘reward signals’ if consumed in association with a noxious stimulus, through persistent forms of reinforcement may create an abberant behaviour.

 

Not only this but there is evidence that the biology of trauma and shock as stress converge in this special neuro-psycho-social juncture – which according to the logic scheme suggested above – adds to the possibility of further ‘surrogate’ induced positive feedback loops which mis-map the psychological to the biological or the biological to the psychological. Explicitly where a pain signal gives rise to a reward signal and/or where a reward signal gives rise to a pain associated behaviour (i.e. avoidance learning and inappropriate behaviours for environmental context).

 

Biological responses to stress (Drolet et al., 2001; Valentino & Van Bockstaele, 2015) and experience of pain (Ballantyne, Sullivan, & Mark, 2017; Kapitzke, Vetter & Cabot, 2005) bring about the release of endogenous opioids. This account of how such stimulae may predispose individuals to drug seeking behaviours in response to psychological anguish experienced as pain through exposure to endogenous opiate release.

 

 

 

 

There is evidence to illustrate how social pain and physical pain utilise the same bases in the brain, and are thus analogous (Eisenberger et al, 2003).  This brings to light interesting work which looks at how non-opioid analgesics like acetaminophen can reduce social pain responses (Dewall et al, 2010); speculatively this suggests that the conditioned reflex associating pain with trauma/grief may be utilised to mitigate psycho-social distress by influencing the input associated with the conditioned reflex.

 

 

 

 

Two important neurological signalling systems in this juncture are those of dopamine (a catecholamine) and the opiate system which are key physiological regulators in biological life. As a neurotransmitter, dopamine is well recognized as being involved in reward associated behaviours (mesocorticolimbic circuit) (Wise & Robble, 2020).

 

The opiate system involves various peptides such as endogenous morphine (endorphins) and enkephalins, but more broadly a range of molecules which have opioidal activity – i.e. molecules which may not have the exact peptide conformation of an opiate but nevertheless act on opiate receptors.

 

Beyond the analgesic and addictive properties the opiates have come to be known for, they represent biologically important cellular signalling molecules which are involved in the regulation of many subtle aspects of biological sentience.  As molecules opiates are produced from dopamine and through near homeopathic levels (Stefano et al, 2012) operate in large arrays of cellular signaling involved in producing evolutionary advantages (Stefano et al, 2015). Understanding opiates as functioning in roles different to analgesia has been an area of research which has been overshaddowed by more sensational aspects of these simple proteins such as their association with addiction.

 

 

 

 

The complexity of the situation may arise from how opioids (Kosten & George, 2002) along with a range of other drugs including neuroleptics (Bortolozzi et al, 2010) stimulate dopamine release. There is evidence that dopamine stimulates release of opiates enkephalin (Llorens-Cortes, Zini, Gros & Schwartz, 1991) and dynorphin (Steiner & Gerfen, 1998).

 

Summary:

Opioids can cause release of dopamine.

Dopamine can cause release of opioids.

This forms the basis of a positive feedback loop;

a signal which can perpetuate itself in the absence of an input.

 

 

 

 

The fact that this potential for biochemical positive feedback exists in combination with the fact that the biochemical feedback can function as a surrogate for natural reward offers interesting aspects which may account for some of the anomalous phenomena which are seen relating to addiction, behaviour and altering of mental state.

 

To add to the complexity of this psycho-biochemical-electrical-physical juncture we find that dopamine (Baik, 2020) and endogenous opiates (Bali, Randhawa & Jaggi, 2015) are key mediators of stress at the same time as mediating signals of natural reward.  Understanding how these mixed signals relate into schemes of psychological reinforcement in terms of conditioned reflexes may offer accounts of how habits are formed with negative stimulae altering environment-appropriate behaviours.

 

 

 

 

To conclude this section I have offered some biomedical insights showing how situations of natural reward are in part mediated via dopaminergic and opioidal systems.  These systems are biologically associated with experiences of pleasure and satiation.  In the absence of an environment offering meaningful activities which result in a sense of natural reward, drugs which stimulate release of the dopaminergic and opioidal systems are capable of acting as biochemical surrogates in the absence of a suitably enriched environment.

 

Compounding the issue, the same neurochemical systems involved in reward are also activated by stress producing mixed messages in relation to adverse stimulae feasibly setting up the behavioural outcomes of what B. F. Skinner described as ‘Variable-Ratio Schedules of Reinforcement’ which he called ‘gambling behaviour’ (Knapp, 1997).  This theory of drug usage maps to many of the sociological understandings of problem drug use and the link to denudation of environment, impoverishment of opportunity and systemic experience of trauma.

 

 

 

 

The Social Dimension of Meaningful Activity

In terms of meaningful activity, it is important to contextualise that social mammals have evolved with the enrichment of other social beings and have as a requirement the company of others. There is even recognised a socio-psycho-physiological need for the presence of other species (Clark, 2017) in a range of species beyond the human which I argue we also see evidence for in humans (Kevorkian, 2019).

 

They/we/I as consciousnesses have requirements which need to be met through and with a sociological habitat; the more replete in generative experiences, the better the well-being outcomes. There is a significant body of literature examining the social determinants of health (Bonner, 2020; Fiorillo & De Giorgi, 2024; Marmot & Wilkinson, 2005).

 

 

 

 

The work of Robert Sapolsky in part examines the relationships going on between environment, health and well-being, identifies how social grouping (culture – Holliday, Hyde & Kullman, 2004) and social status (inclusion – Bourdieu, 1984) determine the capacities of social mammals to withstand the detrimental effects of chronic and acute stressors. Key physiological measurements are the examination of levels of stress hormones – the glucocorticoids – over time and the correlation of these with levels of various illnesses (Sapolsky, 2004).

 

 

 

 

To recap, this general framework: A social sentient being has requirements for health and wellbeing met through their material, non-material and sociological habitat. A habitat here is constituted of all the things the being has co-evolved with which contribute to maintaining sufficiency and well-being in the environment.

 

 

The Concept of Meaningful Activity

‘Meaningful activity’ (Wemelsfelder, 1998) is a term used in the study of animal welfare, a field which has advanced by necessity through Zoological studies. The debated, and for some controversial, institution of zoo’s has evolved over time with varying intentions brought to the ‘keeping’ of other living species in conditions prepared, and controlled, by humans. What has come to light in the past decades are clear evidence bases that living, sentient beings need meaningful activity as a part of their habitat if they are to function and be healthy.

 

As modern cultural consciousness has developed newer understandings of ethics and morality, laws in various places have been put in place to ensure for the correct provision of the elements of well-being if species are to be taken away from its wild natural habitat to live its life out in an artificial habitat of captivity. These evolved cultural perspectives have been driven by necessity because interred species have often developed diseases of stress and/or died for non-material factors (Marino et al, 2019; Rubio, 2013).  Chronic acute stress in humans has been well studied in some settings illustrating how psychology and behaviour are disrupted (Segal, Hunter, & Segal, 1976) in aversive sociologically denuded environments.

 

 

 

 

The Importance of an Enriched Environment

Fuller and more detailed understandings of well-being as related to the non-material conditions are still emerging as what I see as a cultural theory of mind dawns on human beings to reconfigure how humans relate to and behave towards the rest of the natural world, and each other. This is particularly driven by the deficits of the reduction of well-being to purely material determinants.

 

It is from this emerging perspective which I argue certain analogous realities can inform sociological perspectives on how and why human beings are healthy and functional in a given habitat which they significantly effect through behaviour. Behaviours in this sense can be understood in two broad categories; the sustainable/sustaining, and the unsustainable/degenerative.

 

The internal environment of humans has as a requirement the encounter of meaningful activity. People require to be agents in their own lives to meet their material and non-material needs. Both these aspects play a critical role in constituting what an ‘Enriched Environment’ is. Marian Cleeves Diamond (2001) details in her work how an enriched environment correlates with neural and physiological development in various species including humans. In short, the complexity of the external world and the lived interactions is reflected in the complexity of the neuronal networks which are formed (Kempermann, 2019).

 

 

 

 

An enriched environment offers a host of things beyond a diversity of food sources and aids to maintaining physical integrity; it also offers opportunities for the sentient being to observe, contextualise, decide and act in the environment. This I suggest is a rudimentary scheme of some key elements for constituting what we can reason by the term ‘meaningful activity’ necessary for non-material well-being.

 

I relate this to the impetus which stimulates neurological development through the mechanism of neuroplasticity (Xu, Chen, Xing & Yao, 2025;  Mandolesi et al, 2017; Diamond, 1976) and which creates meaningfulness necessary for mitigating stress and its physiological impacts. Such psychological/sociological behaviours physically exercise the neurological tissue preventing the pruning and ultimate breaking down of neural connections previously formed from instigating activity. Thus like physical exercise builds and maintains muscle and vascular health, psycho-social based exercise of capacities builds and maintains neural and psychological health.

 

As we and other living beings experience a diversity of features in our/their environment decisions must be made which accord to the appropriateness of responses relevant to the context. This requires the employment of a range of sensory, affective, cognitive and physical processes – all of which coalesce to form new between neurons and strengthen or alter neural pathways built in response to challenges elicited by the environment.

 

It is through these modalities that a pattern of experience builds up on which meaning can be based. Seen in this way, ‘choice’ (i.e. variety/environmental richness) can be understood not just as an existential richness which offers some satisfaction in the enactment of life but also as an essential physiological exercising of the material apparatus of consciousness developing and maintaining the nervous system.

 

 

 

 

The Manifest Presence of Absence in Life

Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher is reported to have said “the unobserved life is not worth living”. If we explore this as a premise we might ask if the unobserved life is lived at all. As only absence is experienced it could be framed that the absence of observation is the absence of experience, and the absence of experience is something which approximates ‘anti-life’ if it is embodied as a lack of things necessary for basic well-being. We can thus imagine a paucity of the non-material means for subsistence as damaging the existential and spiritual constitution of the sentient being. In this scheme, it remains then to notionalise what constitute ideas of necessity and sufficiency in relation to this.

 

Drawing on the framework of meaningful activity and enriched environment, and recognising how a sociological habitat is vital for the realisation of an existential and spiritual life, many questions can be formed to expand our understandings of what non-material considerations are essential for health and well-being. Here I use existential as to refer to the milieu of self awareness which conscious beings have (which is nevertheless bound up with the environment) and the spiritual I use to refer to the transcendent aspects of the non-material which play roles as motive factors in the lives of sentient beings.

 

 

 

 

Coalescent Behaviour as part of the Human Habitat

The transcendent as ‘those things larger than the individual’ allows for many interpretations. One of the most practical terms is understanding the Gestalt (Wiese, 2018) – the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This principle I shall use to give conceptual form to what the individual gains, and by extension becomes, through the companionship of society and coalescent modalities of social existence.

 

This I argue is what has served human beings most in its rise to sufficiency and then dominance as a species on the planet – the powers which come through coalescence have conferred exponential advantage. The capacity to work and live together has thus provided an extension to the physical and individual psychological environment with which human beings have co-evolved. This is not unique to humans as sentient beings; we can see many examples of how cooperative development has benefited and subsequently evolved in accord with the Gestalt which gets made available through synergistic existence.

 

So beneficial are these aspects of collective existence that behaviours form to foster them as public goods – activities which don’t just have intrinsic value but which also have positive externalities; education being one example. The behaviours that constitute learning and education constitute social coalescences which meet evolutionary imperatives at a larger scale; something which collectively humans must draw on and refine in the face of scale problems we have brought into existence such as environmental breakdown.

 

This view is explored by some thinkers in the rehearsing of culture as evolution (Richerson and Boyd, 2005) that identifies the production of informational interplay as constituting knowledge functioning as a means of collective consciousness. This store of knowledge and representation of the community of peers confers particular advantages when meeting with the unpredictable environment.

 

 

 

 

The Occupation of the Lives of People

The occupation of the environment and habitat may be interpreted a number of ways. Occupation can speak of a militated action of force whereby an area is annexed. This makes reference to the loss of freedom of a party to a military force in war situations; situations which are usually associated with degenerative ideas such as greed for resources, power over others, and disregard for the sentience of others.

 

It is worthy of note that in the UK the national security strategy considers that almost any area of social, political and economic life could give rise to security threats (UK Gov, 2010). In these terms expropriative and exploitative economies/cultures can be understood in terms of a war waged on the lives of people making incursions on those things which are needed to maintain a state of well being as behaviours like these bring about instability in the lives of people causing unnecessary illness, misery and suffering.

 

Expropriative economies are systems which can be known by their instrumental relationship with the people who function in the system roles, how they exploit and relocate value from the lives of people; they can be understood as an occupying force in the time, consciousnesses, physicality and resources of individuals.

 

We can use this structuring of macro meaning (i.e. UK policy) to draw down frameworks of understanding to inform how we might interpret meaning in the meso and micro environmental context. Using this we could read how the deliberate impinging on those things necessary for the health and well-being of individuals and/or communities may constitute a war on their consciousnesses which ultimately makes its realities known through the damaged behaviour and health of the targets.

 

 

 

 

Anomie and the Breaking down of Meaning

When we consider how the means for self sufficiency have been impinged upon and withdrawn from historical communities through tactics of colonisation and authoritarian rule, we can use this as a prism for reading the anomie that individuals experience in the environs where they are kept. The use of the term anomie may work in at least two ways; that proposed by Emile Durkheim referring to the chaotic and fractured breaking down of the experience of an individual to an entropic environment – the experience of ‘normlessness’ by the individual through the loss of social relations (Marks, 1974).

 

 

 

 

There is also the articulation of anomie proposed by Norbert Elias referring to the disruption of the environment caused by structures of dominance which produce anomie in the individual (Elias & Scotson, 1994). It is this exclusionary loss of meaning, pattern and norm which can speak to how we account in part for the consistent and progressive increases in suicide and mental illness in otherwise apparently resource rich nations (Spaulding, Simpson & Durkheim, 2005; Bertuccio et al, 2024; WHO, 2019)

 

 

 

 

A major theme is that of meaning and how the resting of meaning from the lives of people may be understood in terms of a non-material condition (or resource) for life and well-being. The destruction of meaning in the lives of people can be understood and measured as a harm which affects the psychology and behaviour of individuals in ways that ultimately show up as physical illnesses of stress (Rice, 2012) related to the mental anomie.

 

This idea of the detrimental nature of meaninglessness is not a new theme and has been explored in the past by thinkers including William Morris who championed the Arts and Crafts movement. He wrote the essay “Useful work versus Useless Toil” (Morris, 1891) in which importance was connected to the need for individuals to develop and exercise skills and mastery in their own lives and environs. Morris’s critique of an expropriative and exploitative economy identifies how all things become degenerated as people become diminished by a culture configured to keep the few in excessive privilege.

 

 

 

 

Madness from the Loss of Meaning

Establishing what a sentient being experiences when they persistently face chaotic/entropic circumstances is important to establish a baseline consideration for analysis of the artificial living environments created through modernity driven by the industrial revolution. This baseline can be sketched out by drawing on the paradigm shifts which have gone on in the human understandings of the welfare of other species as well as tracking understandings which have moved from a mechanical and dualistic notionalising of the mind and body to a necessitated integrated understanding of living and tangled systems that are non-binary/dichotomous.

 

A starting point in all this can be pivoting around the question ‘what happens when the meaning is taken away from the lives of people ?’. At a fundamental level of perception, when there is no internal structure to experience it creates anomalous effects in the nervous system and psychology of the individual.  Ultimately life must be meaningful in order to be worthwhile and if people’s lives become pre-occupied with banality, it shows up as harms both mental and physical.

 

Returning to the beginning of this article, as Victor Frankl suggests, meaning making processes in the face of alienation and anomie may offer therapeutic avenues.

 

 

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