Ecology of Practices

Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke argues we are living through a meaning crisis—a widespread loss of the frameworks, practices, and communities that once helped people experience life as meaningful, connected, and worth living.

This crisis stems from the collapse of traditional religious worldviews without adequate replacements. We've lost the psychotechnologies—the practices and tools that cultivate wisdom, transformation, and a sense of the sacred.

Vervaeke's solution involves recovering these psychotechnologies through what he calls an "ecology of practices"—a complementary set of practices that address different cognitive and existential needs, working together like species in an ecosystem.

Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist's work on the divided brain reveals two fundamentally different ways of attending to the world, mediated by the brain's hemispheres.

McGilchrist argues that modern Western culture has become dominated by the left hemisphere's way of seeing—treating the world as a collection of objects to be manipulated rather than a web of relationships to participate in. An ecology of practices restores balance by including practices that engage both modes of attention.

The three orders of meaning are like the three dimensions of a geometric figure—a beautiful image of reality itself. The nomological connects us to what is real, the normative to what is good, and the narrative to our own destiny.

Meaning collapses without any one of these. Without the nomological, the world becomes unintelligible chaos—your mind has nothing to grip. Without the normative, everything goes flat—no higher, no lower, nothing mattering more than anything else. Without the narrative, you drift—no direction, no sense of being part of something moving somewhere.

Crucially, each alone is insufficient. You can have a grand story (narrative) and still feel morally hollow—the revolutionary, the startup founder, the religious convert can all be part of something huge while feeling fragmented and ashamed inside. You can understand how reality works (nomological) but have no sense of where you're going (narrative) or what's worth pursuing (normative).

These are not three separate entities but three axes harmoniously synthesizing the historic, scientific, spiritual, therapeutic, and existential—without conflict or antagonism between the parts. An intelligible world that makes sense. A hierarchy of value that guides self-transcendence. A story you live inside that moves toward something. All three, together.

These trends point to a fundamental mismatch between how we're living and what we need as social, embodied beings. An ecology of practices addresses this by systematically rebuilding connection—to ourselves, to others, to nature, and to meaning.