Meaning & Crisis
A meaning crisis or a life crisis is not a defect to be repaired but a threshold: something old no longer holds, and something new is not yet there. On this page you will find my essays on the meaning crisis, the life crisis and the forms in between: not self-help guides, but ways of thinking it through. Start with the situation closest to yours.
Where are you starting from?
Crises come through different doors: each situation below leads to the essay written for it.
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Something has broken in from outside — a separation, a loss, a diagnosis, losing your job — and the old order no longer holds. Life crisis: what to do →
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On the outside everything is in order, but the sense of what it is all for has gone; nothing carries you from within anymore. Meaning crisis: when nothing works anymore →
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You are asking yourself whether this is still a meaning crisis or already a depression. Meaning crisis or depression? →
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You have reached the middle of life and sense that its second half is asking a question of its own. Midlife crisis as transformation →
How are a meaning crisis, a life crisis and transformation connected?
They are connected as doors into the same room: every one of these crises is a transition. The essays go through the doors one by one, and the overview puts them in order.
- Understanding Life Crises — The Kinds and Their Common Core The overview: which kinds of life crisis there are and what joins them. Each one is a transition, not a defect.
- Meaning Crisis — When Nothing Works Anymore When neither therapy nor coaching reaches what matters: why a meaning crisis needs a space that other formats do not open.
- What to Do in an Existential Crisis — Five Steps Not tips but five concrete steps from philosophical practice, beginning with this: stop treating the crisis as a defect.
- Meaning Crisis or Depression? Telling the Difference The two feel alike yet ask for opposite things: a meaning crisis wants to be thought through, a depression wants to be treated.
- What Is the Meaning of Life? The question that cannot be answered, but can be lived. An approach through wisdom and the order that begins in felt experience.
- Life Crisis — What to Do When Life Falls Out of Joint When a separation, a loss or a diagnosis tears the old order apart: inhabiting the break instead of leaping over it.
- Existential Crisis — at the Ground Conditions of Existence When you suffer not from an event but from death, suffering, guilt and chance: the ground conditions of your existence itself.
- Midlife Crisis — the Middle of Life as Transformation Midlife is treated as a deficit or a hormonal matter. Read philosophically, it is a transformation, especially for women.
- Crisis as Birth The deeper reading: crises feel like dying, and they are births. Why we do not need to be repaired, but born.
- Melancholy — On the Meaning of Heavy-Heartedness From Aristotle to Schelling, the tradition understood heavy-heartedness not as an illness but as an openness to the depth of the world.
Frequently asked questions
Is a life crisis a mental illness?
How can I tell whether I am in a meaning crisis or a depression?
What do all life crises have in common?
What can I do on my own in a meaning crisis?
If you are standing in such a transition and do not want to think it through alone, I accompany you in a philosophical consultation: a conversation that does not try to fix anything, but thinks it through with you.