Psychedelics and Meaning in Life- A Cross-Sectional Survey Study
Abstract
Meaning in life is defined as the degree to which people comprehend and perceive significance in their lives, as well as the extent to which they perceive themselves to have a purpose in life. In his seminal work, Viktor Frankl pointed to the crucial nature of the experience of meaning in life for well-being, and in support of this notion, numerous studies indicate that meaning in life is correlated with various aspects of psychological health. For instance, it has been demonstrated that meaning in life is positively associated with satisfaction with life, happiness, and longevity. The experience of meaning is also negatively correlated with depression, anxiety, substance use, and overall negative affect. By and large, individuals who perceive their lives to be meaningful tend to report better psychological health than those who report their lives to be meaningless. From a broader historical and societal perspective, expanding data on the rising prevalence of psychopathologies can be partially seen as a consequence of a meaning crisis. Modern life in industrialized, atomized, and burned-out societies encumber meaning making, a struggle exacerbated by the disappearing role of religion as a system of meaning. Past research and anecdotal evidence are suggestive of the ability of psychedelics to enhance meaning-making processes, both during the acute and post-acute stages of the psychedelic experience. However, considering the centrality of meaning in our lives, and the powerful properties of psychedelics as amplifiers of meaning-making, this account has not yet received the attention it so clearly deserves. Could psychedelics be used as instruments to confront the meaning crisis? Accordingly, inspired by John Vervaeke’s work on meaning in life, meaning crisis, and relevance realization, and the broader frameworks of 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition and complex dynamic systems theory, I will present a potential theoretical account of meaning-making in the psychedelic state, how psychedelics deeply transform our meaning-making processes, and the implications of this account on research, psychotherapy, and society.
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