Let’s be clear about the stakes. We stand at the precipice of an unprecedented catastrophe. Not climate collapse, though that’s coming too. Not nuclear annihilation, though the Doomsday Clock ticks closer to midnight. I’m talking about the quiet extinction of human meaning itself—the subtle, inexorable replacement of our meaning-making capacity with systems that neither know nor care about what gives life its significance.

The techno-optimists and the Silicon Valley prophets would have you believe this is progress. That the seamless integration of human and machine, the frictionless optimization of every aspect of existence, the reduction of consciousness to computation—that all of this represents some grand evolutionary leap. What they won’t tell you—what they perhaps cannot even comprehend—is that this “progress” comes at the cost of the very thing that makes us human in the first place.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is.

This phrase—this recognition of both the fragility and the necessity of human meaning—contains within it a philosophical revolution. It acknowledges what the postmodernists got right: meaning isn’t discovered like some buried treasure, isn’t inscribed in the fabric of reality waiting for us to uncover it. Meaning is made, through the messy, collaborative, endlessly contested process of human interaction.