We are not suffering from a lack of information, attention, or intelligence. We are suffering from a failure of shared meaning — not as belief, but as infrastructure.

Meaning is not something we add to reality through stories, values, or explanations. It is the compression that allows reality to be inhabitable together. When it works, it largely disappears from awareness. Life feels oriented. Situations make sense without constant interpretation. We know where we are, and we have a workable sense of where others are too.

When that compression fails, reality arrives unfiltered: too much, too fast, too thin. Individuals are left carrying complexity that used to be held collectively — by culture, institutions, traditions, and shared forms of life. What is often experienced as personal overwhelm is better understood as an ecological failure of meaning.

For most of human history, this work of compression was not carried primarily by individuals. It was distributed across shared structures — religion, education, law, medicine, governance, culture — which did more than organise behaviour. They stabilised reality itself. However flawed or exclusionary, they slowed life down enough for human nervous systems to live inside it. Meaning was ambient. We were born into worlds that already made sense.