Over the past year I’ve been part of a monthly gathering with a small group of professionals to talk about meaning and mental health. We meet at an office in Winnipeg’s historic Exchange District, surrounded by early twentieth-century brick and limestone warehouses. Two psychiatrists started the group out of a growing concern that culture was experiencing a deep and widespread crisis of meaning. Evidence was partly anecdotal, a general sense that things were falling apart based on the sort of stuff we all see: polarized politics that seem to signal a loss of shared values; institutions and communities divided by ideology and bruised by sanctimonious tribal outrage; news headlines announcing growing, global existential threats. But they had also noticed troubling trends with patients: a marked increase in feelings of dislocation, alienation, purposelessness, and anomie. And for all the tools at their disposal within the mental health system, they felt like they couldn’t get at the deepest questions of meaning and existence. Diagnoses, therapies, and prescriptions are all fine and necessary, but there was little room for discussion about transcendence or the soul.

The group is made up of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, psych nurses, a Catholic priest, and me. Most meetings start with some discussion about patient cases and situations, but the conversation quickly cascades into music, art, community, family, history, church, poetry, philosophy, and (only very occasionally) politics. It’s great stuff. I’m sure you’d love it. These are intelligent, articulate, well-read, thoughtful men and women, and without fail I come away from the meetings and lie awake late into the night with my heart full, my head buzzing with thoughts and ideas. It is food for the soul, a monthly spiritual and intellectual potluck. I’ve dubbed our little group “The League of Anti-nihilists.”

In August we met for a barbecue in a beautiful home on a late-summer evening. The setting was warm and festal, the food was delicious, the company convivial and friendly, everything I’ve come to expect from this group. But the tone of the conversation, lively as it was, seemed out of line with the setting. It was troubled, worried, pessimistic. If the trajectory of contemporary culture can be read as a story of either progress or decline, the consensus that evening was that we are in serious decline. We revisited some of the recurring themes of previous meetings—generalized loss of collective and personal meaning, individuals’ lack of resilience, increasing anxiety, unbalanced men and women with no sense of purpose, direction, or significance. Near the end of supper, one of the table guests said, “I know it’s not all bad.” Someone else said, “Like what?” There was a chuckle. “Well . . . I don’t know.” And we all chuckled too.

I’m a part-time lay minister at an Anglican church, but I spend most of my time working on people’s homes, fixing and building things for folks who don’t have time or the courage or the know-how to take on small and medium home repair and renovation jobs. I’ve been called to someone’s condo to change a lightbulb (it was an odd lightbulb in an unusually hard-to-reach spot), I’ve gutted and renovated nearly two dozen bathrooms, and I’ve worked on just about everything in between. Fifteen years I’ve been at this. I mostly work in the centre of the city, within a short drive of my house. I have done more than six hundred jobs in hundreds of homes.

An off-the-cuff analysis of my work tells me that my workload is all about the age of the homes. Lots of people in and around my neighbourhood live in houses that are at least a century old and forever in need of repair. Downtown Winnipeg is a fruitful market for a guy like me because there are thousands of these old houses that need ongoing attention and care. As long as my arms and legs hold up, I will never run out of things to do.

Here’s a more pessimistic way I might look at my work: modern urban living is organized in such a way that most people can specialize in their tiny, narrow roles in society and our economy such that being a generalist—that is, knowing how to remedy a sagging backyard fence or swap out a kitchen faucet—is no longer necessary. Maybe it’s a story of loss: I have lots of work not so much because our houses are ageing but because we’re collectively losing our capacity to do the kinds of old-fashioned home repairs our parents or grandparents would have taken for granted.

How about a more optimistic spin: we humans live in a vast and complex web of interconnection and interdependence, and we partake in a broadly dispersed burden of civilization. Centuries of rising tides truly have lifted (nearly) all the boats, at least in this part of the world, and now we are history’s great inheritors, part of a vast economic and cultural system where everyone works together, the great synchronous crest of civilization’s wave.

Or maybe we’re cogs in the economic machine: we’re all so thoroughly chewed up in capitalism’s ravenous, insatiable, planet-destroying maw that each of us is so frantic and busy we barely even notice early warning signs of problems with our houses until, say, the rotting front step finally snaps when the Uber Eats delivery guy brings you yet another takeaway dinner, or that little leak in the upstairs bathroom sink drip, drip, drips and soaks through the floor and one day a thirty-square-foot chunk of plaster finally lets loose and crashes onto the kitchen floor. And then you call me to deal with the mess.

Or maybe it’s technology: I have ongoing work because some folks wind up in a state approaching genuine squalor because they’re so utterly transfixed by screens and Zoom meetings they’ve basically ignored the real-world demands of basic living that they don’t know how to use a hammer skillfully, select the proper screwdriver, or understand the difference between a pipe wrench and a box wrench.

I am not a relativist. I’m not saying it’s all a matter of perspective. But whether it’s a home-repair problem or broader, cultural existential issues, the problems and especially their deeper causes will look different depending on your set of lenses and what you go looking for.

I thoroughly enjoy being part of the monthly gatherings on meaning and mental health. The meetings are invigorating, inspiring, entertaining, thought-provoking, and unfailingly friendly. I have known the participants long enough to become very fond of each of them. But I’m not sure I share their perspective on the general cultural state of affairs. That each of these folks reports seeing more patients than they can handle, and that they are noticing patterns in their diagnoses, may well be true. But it’s not obvious to me that these are signs that we are, generally, on the trajectory of cultural disintegration and decline that we laughed uncomfortably about at that barbecue.

Perhaps what they’re all experiencing as an overwhelming workload is in fact a sign of a positive cultural and social trend. Rather than simply living with the sort of brain-based maladies everyone had to suffer through since time immemorial, people are increasingly, thank God, reaching out and seeking qualified professional help. Instead of punching their spouses or beating their kids or drinking themselves into a stupor on a nightly basis, more and more people are scheduling appointments with these mental health experts. Maybe the fact that most of these professionals seem to have more work than they know what to do with is a sign of good news. Or maybe the sense they all have that something is slipping away is the perennial experience of thoughtful folks in their middle years. Or maybe it’s a sign of an overlapping batch of personality traits that makes our little anomalous anti-nihilist league skew a bit conservative—that is, all of us, myself included, are a reasonably conscientious bunch, and we’ve each landed in people-oriented work because we’re above the median level of neuroticism, a little or a lot. Personality, luck, circumstance, genetics, history, disposition, family, brain chemistry, and God only knows what else have landed all of us in caring roles, and the longer we work, the more we see deep suffering and wounds because we’re all decent at our jobs and, well, duh, we are all doctors and ministers, in one way or another working in various wings of the existential crisis ward.

How can we know if we are living in a story of decline? There’s plenty of evidence that things are bad and getting worse: the Middle East furiously boiling over the sides of the pot in increasingly unsettling ways, and Russia still hammering away at Ukraine, menacingly waving its finger above the nuke button every time the West talks about getting more involved. Our federal and provincial politicians are getting screamed at and spit on. Our adult kids are afraid to leave home, and they’re cutting themselves way more than they used to. University students are belligerent and sanctimonious; general neighbourliness is in decline. As singer Bill Mallonee says, “Carnage continues unabated / According to recent bulletins.” Shit is bad, no question, and anyone who says otherwise is outright lying or trying to sell you something. Probably both.

The philosopher René Girard suggests it may actually be a positive and hopeful sign that things seem to be getting worse. The fact that we can even recognize the maladies and ailments of our world is a sign that culture has been profoundly, joyfully infected by the good news of Christ. No longer can we observe the catastrophes around us with a shrug: “I guess this is just the way the world is.” We are properly offended and outraged by the problems around and within us precisely because of the good news. The gospel reveals suffering and transgressions for what they really are.

Maybe, too, it’s a problem of attention. Yes, the litany of very real suffering is long and getting longer: addiction, violence, endless cycles of poverty, families in shambles, racism. From one perspective, it’s not hard to conclude that everything’s falling apart, that the world is just awful and everything keeps getting worse.

But as a friend of mine likes to point out, it’s not even close. Not. Even. Close. There’s so much goodness the bad is hardly even a blip. We’re just not seeing it. Look outside: the sun came up this morning and the sky is blue. Do you see how beautiful it is? Why is there blue, and why do we get to enjoy it? And there it is, yet again. I ate more than enough breakfast today, and so did my kids and my wife, and we did yesterday and the day before. There’s fresh water from the tap—from the tap! It’s a miracle. We’re all here, and we’re all still breathing. There’s bluegrass and blueberries and Bach and oxygen and orcas and orgasms and the Big Dipper and Narnia and baseball and sushi and oak trees and my furnace still works and gravity still holds everything together. There are all these problems, yes, of course. I know them too. But if you compare the good with the bad, there’s so much more good you can’t even measure it. It’s not even close!

At the League of Anti-nihilists barbecue, one of the dinner guests asked what we should tell the kids about the big problems. Someone said, “Nothing. Tell them there’s nothing they can do about them.” I’d give his comment a “yes-and,” the kind of basic response they teach you on day one of improv theatre training. Yes: you can’t stop the big catastrophes, and neither can I. Nor can our kids or our favourite public intellectuals, authors, priests, doctors, political pundits, or elected officials. And: that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do.

Is there a meaning crisis? I don’t think there’s any real doubt. I think there always has been. “The good times, and the heroic people, are all gone,” writes Annie Dillard. “Everyone knows this. Everyone always has. Formerly, there were giants in the earth. The Adam and Eve of legend had every reason to think that they lost innocence, botched paradise, and erred their way into a time of suffering and evil. The men of the fifth century BCE who wrote out the stories of Moses, of Abraham, and even of Noah, depicted them already pleading with God to save their visibly corrupt generations. The mournings of the wise,” she says, “recur as a comic refrain down the vaults of recorded time.”We are pathologically encouraged to drown in up-to-the-minute information, knowing all the while it is impossible to meaningfully take in that relentless flood of breaking news that demands our attention and affection. News and opinions pour in from around the globe with frictionless ease and a relentless, screaming urgency. It is everything, everywhere, all at once, more and more by the day. I wind up knowing more about the latest from Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon than I do about the day-to-day at the youth drop-in a block from my house. I am absolutely hosed with information loaded with implicit moral urgency: Know more! Care more! Respond more!

Obviously, there are all kinds of great big awful problems. But I am increasingly persuaded that it is mostly sentimental distraction to get way more wound up about some global, international catastrophe than to pay attention to what’s going on in my neighbourhood. Sanctimonious posturing on this side or that of an issue makes me less kind to my ideological opponents and less available to the people I see in my day-to-day. Too much knowing and opining makes me less neighbourly. In the digital deluge of information, knowledge is not power; knowledge is a firehose of captivating spectacle that distracts me from real, meaningful engagement. The small places where I can be genuinely involved are rarely as dramatic as what I can find online. But unlike the online hullabaloo, which offers all kinds of tremendous feelings but demands very little of me, real-life, loving, neighbourly engagement costs a great deal and only very occasionally feels good.

Thirty years ago Wendell Berry said, “Get out of your spaceship, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground.” Today we could update that to: Get out of your social networks, away from your screens, out of your online so-called community, and into your body, your family, your neighbourhood, your life, and find the astonishing miracles all about you. Are the things we love vulnerable and threatened? Absolutely. And carefully taking stock of what is is prudent because it will guide our efforts to take care of things we love. These threats are real. Okay, well, then, let’s get to work. Because it probably is true that there is nothing we can do about the big, looming threats, except to find the work of day-to-day fidelity to our varied callings, the small tasks of our small jobs in our relatively small lives. “How you spend your days is how you spend your life,” says Dillard. So little of the direction of culture depends on any one person doing or saying something, and even long-standing institutions are eventually and inevitably subject to social changes that no one can stop. Nothing lasts forever. But that doesn’t make the quotidian work of a small life unimportant. Some from this League of Anti-nihilists really do have enormous tasks and tremendous responsibilities, much, much larger than what I do in my small life. But most of the work for most of us is so small, part of what Eugene Peterson described as a long obedience in the same direction.

I’m a non-ordained pastoral presence in the parish, a kind of unofficial deacon. I try to bring the world’s questions to church, and I try to bring the presence of the church to the neighbourhood. When I go out into the world, I look for signs of the active, loving presence of God. Where is he at work? Everywhere. Always. Anxiously fretting as though God has fled the scene, or that we’ve so royally flubbed things down here that he’s hamstrung and his hands are tied—this is not true. Ours is not a position of fear and combativeness; it is one of gratitude and service. Bidden or unbidden, God is present.

Our anxious hand-wringing over “the decline of all things good” is not a virtue, nor is our doomscrolling, searching for evidence to bolster our opinion, the frenetic posting and sharing, exaggerating for the satisfaction of being on the right side of history, whatever you think that might be. Are we in a story of decline or a story of progress? Girard said it’s both simultaneously. The world is amazing: we’ve got it so good. Not everyone, I know, and not equally, of course. But the world is so unbelievably good, it’s not even close. And: some things are truly awful, disastrous, cataclysmic, and thank God we’ve even got the capacity to see that, to know that so many things are not as they ought to be.

Berry commends his readers to “be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” If we’re not going to solve the big problems, we can stop telling the kids or anyone else that things are going to be okay, that we can fix things if we just put our minds to it. Nope. Not going to happen. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. It’s not our task to maintain a broad cultural appreciation of traditional Christian beliefs and practices. We have grown comfortable in socially accepted cultural expressions of our faith and respect for our beliefs, but that luxury is a historical anomaly. Culture doesn’t owe us its admiration, appreciation, respect, or gratitude.

But we are called to be and to do certain things, and we should not be surprised when we aren’t loved or admired for our efforts. When it looks like the end of the world, we might be looking at things the wrong way, and even when it truly is the end of the world, it’s not our job to fret and fight to make sure things go our way. We are, instead, called to maintain a faithful presence. We are called to joy.