For two decades Americans have become more unhappy, more discontented, and more depressed than ever before. This is not just empty rhetoric; the research is clear. Suicide has gone up every year in nearly every state for the last two decades (“Suicide Rates on the Rise,” State Health Access Data Assistance, June 2020, www.shadac.org/sites/default/files/publications/2020_STATE-Suicide-brief.pdf). Anxiety is up. Loneliness is up. All around, misery is up.
Without a remedy for this, people are running to anything that will help them cope. In 2023 there were over one hundred thousand deaths due to drug overdoses (“Provisional Drug Overdose Counts,” Centers for Disease Control, accessed January 2, 2025, www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm). This is more than five times the number just twenty years ago (“Drug Overdose Deaths: Facts and Figures,” National Institute on Drug Abuse, accessed January 2, 2025, https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates#Fig1). Half the country says they are lonely (John Wolfson, “Why Are We So Lonely?,” Boston College Magazine, Winter 2024, www.bc.edu/bc-web/sites/bc-magazine/winter-2024-issue/features/why-are-we-so-lonely-.html). One in five young women practice self-harm (Martin Monto, Nick McRee, and Frank Deryck, “Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Among a Representative Sample of US Adolescents, 2015,” Pub Med, August 2018, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2992 7642).
We are overeating, undereating, cutting, drinking, spending, popping, shooting, searching for anything that might help us face the emptiness before us.
Why the Emptiness Crisis Persists Despite Modern Comfort
Now, what is so bizarre about this is that as we become more unhappy and dissatisfied, we simultaneously participate in a greater and greater standard of living. The life we live is more comfortable than most people who have ever walked the earth could ever dream up.
Think about our standard of living for a moment. We walk into a grocery store and see more food in a single instance than many will ever see in their entire life. Think about the climate control we have at our fingertips. While we travel, if we feel the slightest degree of discomfort, we have the ability to fix it. If it gets just a bit too warm, we can flick a button and our car will begin to cool the entire vehicle. If we get too cold, we can heat it up.
And consider this: The water in our toilets is cleaner than the drinking water that millions of people have access to. We live in a comfort that our ancestors never dreamed of. Still, we are not happy. The standard of living goes up, yet our spirits go down.
So even though we experience the many benefits the modern world has afforded us, for many there is something that still does not feel right. Something is lurking deep in our gut. Despite living in the land of milk and honey, we can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong at the center of it all. Like Heisman, we begin to contemplate ultimate things. Is it all meaningless? All without purpose? The possibility that our stories are authorless is frightening.
There are many opinions on the cause of our problem. Some will say it’s social media. Others will point to Hollywood. For some, it’s the breakdown of the family. Still others attribute it to failing schools and public education.
Certainly, these and many other factors are at play, but I’d like to talk about something deeper. Much deeper. So deep that we are nearly at the unconscious level, almost like the operating system of the mind. Because it is there, and precisely there, that something went very wrong.
The Cultural Messages Feeding the Emptiness Crisis
Conflicting Messages
Two messages currently broadcast around the clock in our culture. One message is loud, the other is softer. The loud message says, “You are a wonderful, amazing individual with purpose, meaning, and value. The world is before you, so make the most of every day and be the person you want to be!” This positive, uplifting message sits atop a metaphoric ten-story building. The softer message sits at the base—not as loud but foundational, holding up the entire building. It says, “You are a product of random chance. You are nothing more than neurons, chemicals, hormones, and atoms. You have no soul. There is nothing beyond this life. No heaven. No hell. No loving figure above.”
Despite what is broadcast from the tenth floor, this foundation-level message speaks to the core of our being. It functions as an operating system. Our thoughts, feelings, and decisions are processed through it. Whether we like it or not, we live within the story it tells.
The Deep Roots of the Emptiness Crisis in Modern Thought
An experiment began roughly three hundred years ago in the modern world. The experiment sought to create a world divorced from God, religion, and anything other than the material world. In this endeavor, humans attempted to find ultimate meaning and purpose strictly from the physical world.
How the Emptiness Crisis Shapes Our Inner Lives
Despite the message that we tell ourselves—that we are special, unique, and have purpose—underneath that, at the foundation, at the operating system level, is the message that says we are alone in the universe. Our feet wander aimlessly without meaning on a planet that wanders aimlessly without meaning. We are here for a fleeting moment and then, death.
No matter how much we want to believe the message on the tenth floor, and no matter how much our pop songs, cultural slogans, and uplifting movies affirm that message, it is nonetheless built on a foundation that says otherwise. And we live within the confines of the narrative structure it gives us.
We want to believe in things like love, but however we may conceive of it, the foundational message says it does not exist. Love is just chemicals and hormones firing off in our body to create a social contract between two individuals so that they might propagate the herd. Integrity, honor, virtue . . . those are just terms we use to describe animal-like behaviors that benefit the tribe. We may assign meaning to all sorts of things in our lives, but make no mistake about it: things like integrity, honor, and virtue are not grounded in anything real. This foundational message is all-encompassing and incredibly powerful.
Recognizing the Warning Signs of an Emptiness Crisis
What is the result of this loss? We lack meaning and purpose, and the signs of our sickness are evident. The foundational message cannot bear the weight of the whole building, and it will collapse.
Adapted from When Life Feels Empty by Isaac Serrano. ©2025 by Joseph Isaac Serrano. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Isaac Serrano (ThD, Evangelical Seminary) serves as lead pastor at South Valley Community Church in Gilroy, California. He also serves on the leadership team of the ReGeneration Project and is an adjunct professor teaching theology and ministry at Western Seminary.
