What we are trying to understand and address
The present moment is marked by a distinctive rupture: the systems that once reliably organized human life—work, institutions, shared narratives—are visibly failing.
This is the historical condition in which movements, not services, emerge.
The scale and nature of this transition suggest that this is not a skills problem, not a leadership problem, not a wellbeing problem. It is a reorientation problem.
What Research Already Shows
Decades of research in psychology and psychiatry converge on a clear finding: humans require meaning to function sustainably.
Key findings across meaning-in-life research show:
Crucially, meaning here is not reducible to happiness or motivation. It functions as an orienting framework, a justificatory structure for action, and a stabilizer across time. In other words, meaning allows humans to hold themselves together across uncertainty.
Modern institutions have largely outsourced meaning to economic success, individual preference, entertainment, and short-term optimization. The research strongly suggests this is insufficient.
Research on autonomy, self-determination, and action theory converges on a critical insight: agency depends on conditions, not just willpower.
Human agency requires:
Modern systems increasingly constrain these conditions:
As a result, many people experience themselves as busy but not agentic—active without authorship. This is not a failure of motivation. It is a failure of institutional and cultural design.
Narrative and developmental psychology show that humans require a sense of continuity:
Yet contemporary life produces:
Research increasingly documents identity diffusion, narrative incoherence, and difficulty sustaining long-term commitments. The result is not freedom, but fragmentation.
Without coherence, agency weakens. Without agency, meaning collapses. This linkage is structural, not philosophical.
Research on AI and the future of work consistently shows:
More importantly, AI challenges the instrumental justification for human worth: "I am valuable because I produce better outcomes than machines."
As this justification erodes, societies face a deeper question:
Current research largely stops short of answering this, focusing instead on reskilling and economic mitigation. The existential dimension remains under-theorized. That gap is precisely where a new movement becomes necessary.
This emerging crisis falls between domains:
No existing field integrates:
The absence of such integration explains why responses feel fragmented, shallow, or reactive.
Historically, reorientations of this scale have required:
That is the role of a movement: to name what is breaking, to legitimize deeper questions, and to prototype new ways of living and organizing.
See Our Approach