tantaman

Materialism Is Killing You

Published 2025-12-18

You pride yourself on not being fooled. You rejected the superstitions your ancestors believed. You follow the evidence. You think in terms of mechanisms, incentives, selection pressures. You are a rationalist.

Good. Let’s be rational.

Let’s examine, with the same skepticism you apply to religion, the framework you’ve adopted in its place. Let’s ask whether materialism—the view that reality is fundamentally physical, that consciousness is a byproduct of computation, that meaning is a useful fiction—actually serves the organism that believes it.

Not whether it’s true. Whether it works.

Because here’s the thing: evolution doesn’t care about truth. It cares about fitness. And a belief system that produces depression, anxiety, declining fertility, and suicidal ideation at unprecedented rates might be worth examining—even if it happens to be metaphysically correct.

Especially if it happens to be metaphysically correct.

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I. The Data You Haven’t Looked At

Here is the materialist prediction, the one we’ve been running for roughly three centuries: As societies become more rational, more scientific, more materially prosperous, and more free from superstition, human wellbeing should increase. We should see happier, healthier, more functional populations.

Here is what we actually observe:

Depression has become epidemic. The WHO estimates depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. A meta-analysis across 30 countries found point prevalence of depression at 12.9%. Cross-cultural studies show a dose-dependent relationship between modernization and depression—the more modern the society, the higher the rates. Chinese born after 1966 were calculated to be 22.4 times more likely to suffer from depression than those born before 1937. Mexican Americans born in the U.S. have higher depression rates than Mexican immigrants. The pattern holds across cultures: adopt the modern Western lifestyle, acquire its pathologies.

Loneliness has reached crisis proportions. The WHO reports that loneliness is linked to an estimated 100 deaths every hour globally—more than 871,000 deaths annually. A meta-analysis of over 3.4 million participants found that social isolation increases mortality risk by 29%, loneliness by 26%—comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. One in three older adults and one in four adolescents report social isolation. This is occurring in societies with more communication technology than any point in human history.

Fertility has collapsed below replacement. Global fertility has halved since 1950, from 5 children per woman to 2.3. By 2050, 76% of countries will be below replacement level. By 2100, 97%. South Korea is at 0.7. China is at 1.0. These are not economic calculations—fertility decline correlates with development even when controlling for cost of living. Something is causing the most prosperous humans in history to stop reproducing.

Trust in institutions has collapsed. In the United States, confidence in institutions has fallen precipitously over 50 years. Americans went from trusting 13 of 16 major institutions “quite a lot” in 1972-1979 to trusting only 5 of 16 by 2010-2021. Only 25% now express confidence in the Supreme Court—the lowest in Gallup’s 50-year trend. This isn’t partisan—trust has declined across the political spectrum, just in different institutions.

The young are in crisis. Anxiety in children and college students has increased almost one standard deviation from the 1950s to the 1990s. Depression and anxiety among adolescents and young adults has increased over 50% from 1990 to 2021. This is the generation raised entirely within the system we built.

These are not minor deviations. This is the model failing.

II. The Standard Explanations Don’t Work

You might try to explain this away. Let’s check those explanations.

“We just measure better now.” This would explain some increase in diagnosed depression. It does not explain why modernization correlates with depression in a dose-dependent manner across cultures. It does not explain why immigrants from traditional societies show lower rates than their assimilated children. Better measurement would find existing pathology; it would not create new pathology that tracks precisely with lifestyle adoption.

“These are problems of inequality and economic stress.” But the loneliness epidemic is worst in the most prosperous societies. Depression rates are highest in upper-middle-income countries, not the poorest. Fertility decline correlates with wealth, not poverty. The populations with the most material security in human history are the ones failing to thrive.

“It’s social media / technology.” Social media arrived in the 2000s. Depression trends were rising before that. Loneliness research goes back decades before smartphones. Technology may be an accelerant, but it is not the root cause. And this explanation begs the question: why did we build technologies that exacerbate loneliness? Why do we keep using them despite knowing this? Something about us—about what we want and why we want it—is already broken.

“These are just transition problems.” We’ve been transitioning for 300 years. How long does a transition take? At what point do we admit that the destination is the problem?

III. The Evolutionary Trap

You understand evolutionary mismatch. Our ancestors evolved for an environment radically different from the one we inhabit. We crave sugar and fat because calories were scarce on the savanna. Now calories are abundant and we’re obese.

Apply the same logic to meaning.

For 99% of human history, meaning was not optional. It was built into the fabric of existence. You were born into a tribe, a lineage, a cosmos structured by sacred narrative. Your identity was given, not chosen. Your purpose was clear: survive, reproduce, serve your people, honor your ancestors, appease the gods.

You didn’t need to find meaning. You couldn’t escape it.

Your brain evolved in that environment. It expects meaning the way it expects social connection, the way it expects periods of movement interspersed with rest, the way it expects seasonal variation in light exposure.

And then, very recently—within the last few hundred years, a blink in evolutionary time—a new idea emerged: that the universe is meaningless, that consciousness is an accident, that values are arbitrary, that you are a temporary configuration of matter that will dissolve into nothing.

This idea might be true. But notice what it does to the organism that believes it.

The evolutionary mismatch literature shows that depression may be triggered when human biology clashes with modern conditions. We evolved for small tribes, face-to-face interaction, physical labor, connection to nature. We now live isolated, sedentary, indoors, staring at screens.

What if the same is true for meaning? What if your brain requires a sense of purpose the way your body requires vitamin D? What if nihilism is, for the human organism, a deficiency disease?

IV. The Self-Exploitation Engine

Here’s where it gets interesting. The framework you’ve adopted doesn’t just make you unhappy. It makes you useful—to systems that don’t care about your wellbeing.

Consider the logic:

If meaning is arbitrary, then the only rational goal is preference satisfaction. If preference satisfaction is the goal, then more is better. If more is better, then you should maximize. If you should maximize, then any failure to maximize is irrational. If failure to maximize is irrational, then you should feel guilty for resting.

This is the achievement trap. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes it precisely:

“The achievement-subject stands free from external instances of domination forcing it to work and exploiting it. It is subject to no one if not to itself. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide.”

You’re not being oppressed by a boss. You’re oppressing yourself. And you’re doing it because you’ve accepted a framework in which self-optimization is the only rational response to meaninglessness.

“Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited.”

This is what makes it a trap. It feels like freedom. It feels like rational choice. You’re not obeying anyone—you’re pursuing your own goals. The fact that your goals happen to align perfectly with what makes you a productive economic unit is just a coincidence.

Right?

Han calls this the “burnout society.” The characteristic pathology is not madness or criminality—those were the diseases of the old disciplinary society, which operated through external prohibition. The achievement society operates through internal compulsion. Its diseases are depression, anxiety, burnout. Illnesses of people who have exhausted themselves trying to be everything.

“The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’”

V. The Worship Problem

David Foster Wallace was not religious. He was a depressive who wrote about addiction, irony, and the difficulty of sincerity in postmodern life. He killed himself in 2008.

Three years before his death, he gave a commencement speech that has become one of the most-read texts in contemporary secular thought. The key passage:

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

This is not a religious claim. It’s a psychological observation. Wallace is pointing out that human beings are worship-shaped. We organize our lives around something. We treat something as ultimately valuable. We sacrifice for something.

The question is not whether you worship. The question is whether your object of worship can bear the weight.

“If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

Wallace is describing a structural problem. Certain objects of worship are self-undermining. They promise satisfaction and deliver endless craving. They’re designed to do this—not by a malevolent deity, but by the same evolutionary pressures that make sugar taste good. You want more because your ancestors who wanted more were more likely to survive.

But survival is not the same as flourishing.

“The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

Wallace is not arguing for God. He’s arguing that you need to choose what you worship, consciously, because the default options will eat you alive.

And then he shot himself.

The speech ends with a line the publisher removed from the book version: “They shoot the terrible master.”

VI. The Game Theory of Meaning

Let’s think about this as a game theorist would.

Imagine two populations: one that believes life is meaningful, one that believes it’s meaningless.

The meaningful-believers will sacrifice for their children, their community, the future. They’ll endure suffering because they believe it has purpose. They’ll reproduce because they believe new life is a gift. They’ll maintain institutions because they believe in something beyond their own lifespans.

The meaningless-believers will optimize for personal preference satisfaction. They’ll avoid suffering when possible. They’ll reproduce only if it serves their preferences (increasingly, it doesn’t). They’ll defect from institutions when defection serves their interests.

Which population wins?

In the short term, the meaningless-believers might do better. They’re not constrained by irrational commitments. They can free-ride on the institutions built by the meaningful-believers while avoiding the costs of maintaining them.

But in the long term, the meaningful-believers will still exist. The meaningless-believers will have selected themselves out of the gene pool.

This is already happening. Fertility rates in secular, developed countries have collapsed below replacement. The most religious populations are the ones still reproducing. Whatever you think about the metaphysics, the demographic math is clear: the future belongs to people who believe in it.

You might say: “So what? I don’t care about the future after I’m dead.”

But that response is the problem. That’s the voice of the meaningless-believer, the one who has optimized himself out of existence.

VII. The Mismatch You Can’t Solve

Here’s the deepest problem. Evolutionary mismatch with diet can be solved by changing your diet. Mismatch with light exposure can be solved by getting outside. Mismatch with social structure can be solved (in theory) by building better communities.

But the mismatch with meaning can’t be solved by information. You can’t learn your way to meaning. You can’t optimize your way there. The very frameworks you’re using—rationalism, empiricism, utility maximization—are part of the trap.

Because meaning is not a conclusion you reach. It’s a relationship you participate in. It’s not something you have. It’s something you do.

And you can’t do it while standing outside, analyzing.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described this 170 years ago. He called it “despair”—not the ordinary sadness of difficult circumstances, but the structural condition of having a self you cannot bear to be, yet cannot escape.

“The greatest danger, that of losing one’s own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, is sure to be noticed.”

You can lose your self without noticing. You can become an optimization machine, a preference-satisfier, a utility-maximizer, and never realize that the thing being optimized has disappeared.

“When the ambitious man whose slogan is ‘Either Caesar or nothing’ does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.”

This is the modern condition. We’re all trained to be Caesar—to achieve, to optimize, to maximize. And when we inevitably fall short, we don’t just feel disappointed. We feel that our very selves are inadequate. Because we have no identity apart from achievement.

Kierkegaard’s answer was faith. But you don’t have to accept his metaphysics to notice that he’s describing something real. He’s describing you.

VIII. The Selection Pressure You’re Ignoring

Let’s go back to the argument from the previous essays. Materialism was selected—not for truth, but for utility to power.

A population that believes in transcendent meaning is hard to govern. Its members answer to something beyond the state. They might disobey laws they consider unjust. They might sacrifice themselves for causes that don’t serve the system. They’re illegible, unpredictable, uncontrollable.

A population that believes meaning is arbitrary is easy to govern. Its members can be satisfied with bread and circuses. They won’t die for abstractions. They’ll optimize for comfort and convenience. They’re legible, predictable, controllable.

From the perspective of systems that want compliant populations, materialism is a feature, not a bug. It produces people who work hard (because achievement is all there is), consume eagerly (because pleasure is all there is), and don’t ask too many questions (because questions about meaning are unanswerable anyway).

You adopted this framework because you thought it was true. But what if it was marketed to you? What if the educational system, the media environment, the incentive structures you grew up in were all shaped by institutions that benefit from your believing it?

You’re skeptical of organized religion because you know it can be used to control people. Apply the same skepticism to organized irreligion.

IX. The Experiment You’re Running

Here’s the thing about your worldview: it’s an experiment.

Humans have lived in small tribes with shared sacred narratives for 99% of their history. Large-scale materialist societies—societies where a significant portion of the population genuinely believes that existence is meaningless—have existed for maybe 200 years.

We don’t know what happens when you run this experiment for multiple generations. We’re finding out.

So far, the results are not encouraging. Depression. Anxiety. Loneliness. Declining fertility. Institutional collapse. Rising suicide rates among the young—the demographic that should be most optimistic.

Maybe these are problems that can be solved with better policy, better therapy, better medication. Maybe meaning is a luxury good that we can do without once we solve the material problems.

Or maybe meaning is not a luxury good. Maybe it’s more like oxygen. Maybe you can convince yourself you don’t need it, but eventually the lack catches up with you.

The honest answer is: we don’t know. The experiment is still running.

But if you’re a rationalist, you should at least consider the possibility that you’re the control group. You’re the one testing whether human beings can flourish without the framework that sustained them for 300,000 years.

And the early results suggest you can’t.

X. What Would Change Your Mind?

You’re an empiricist. What evidence would cause you to update?

Would it matter if depression rates continued to rise even as material conditions improved?

Would it matter if the most secular societies had the lowest fertility and the highest rates of meaninglessness-related pathology?

Would it matter if the people who reported the highest levels of meaning consistently came from frameworks you’ve dismissed as superstition?

Would it matter if you looked at your own life and noticed that your happiest moments were the ones where you forgot about optimization?

Would it matter if the framework that was supposed to liberate you had instead trapped you in an endless cycle of self-improvement that improved nothing?

If none of this would change your mind, ask yourself why. What is your commitment to materialism actually based on? Is it evidence? Or is it identity?

Because if it’s identity—if you’re a materialist because that’s what smart people believe, because you’d be embarrassed to believe anything else, because your social circle would mock you—then you’re not a rationalist. You’re a conformist who has mistaken one set of social pressures for truth.

XI. The Capitalism Objection

At this point, someone will object: “The problem isn’t materialism—it’s capitalism. Replace the economic system and the pathologies disappear.”

This is a common deflection. It’s also wrong. Here’s why:

Capitalism is an expression of materialism, not an independent variable. Capitalism requires certain philosophical premises to function:

These premises are materialism applied to economic and social organization. You cannot have capitalism without first accepting the materialist account of human nature. The economic system is downstream of the metaphysics.

Pre-capitalist societies had markets. Medieval Europe had trade, banking, and commerce. But these activities were embedded in moral and religious frameworks that limited them. There were prohibitions on usury, requirements for just prices, guild regulations, Sabbaths and feast days that interrupted commerce. The economy served ends beyond itself.

What changed wasn’t the invention of markets—it was the disembedding of economic activity from moral constraint. And that disembedding required the prior philosophical move: the rejection of transcendent sources of value that might judge or limit economic activity. First came the materialism; then came the capitalism.

Socialist alternatives accept the same premises. Marxism is explicitly materialist—it’s right there in “dialectical materialism.” The Marxist critique of capitalism doesn’t question whether material prosperity is the ultimate aim; it questions who controls the means of production. It accepts the materialist anthropology and merely proposes a different distribution scheme.

The Soviet Union was thoroughly materialist: atheist state ideology, focus on industrial production, humans treated as inputs to the economic machine. It produced many of the same pathologies we observe in capitalist societies—depression, alcoholism, alienation, and eventually collapsing fertility. The USSR’s total fertility rate fell below replacement by the 1960s.

China offers a natural experiment. Nominally communist, functionally capitalist, thoroughly materialist in either mode. China has pursued material development with extraordinary success. GDP has increased roughly 40-fold since 1980. And China now has a fertility rate of 1.0—among the lowest in human history—along with rising rates of depression and what the Chinese call “lying flat” (躺平): young people opting out of the achievement treadmill entirely.

If capitalism were the root cause and socialism the solution, China’s hybrid system should show mixed results. Instead, it shows the same terminal symptoms as the capitalist West, just compressed into fewer decades.

The Scandinavian social democracies test this further. These countries have strong welfare states, high redistribution, excellent public services, low inequality—everything the anti-capitalist critique demands. They are among the least “capitalist” societies in the developed world.

They also have below-replacement fertility (Sweden: 1.7, Denmark: 1.7, Norway: 1.5). They have rising rates of antidepressant use—Iceland and Sweden rank among the highest in the world. They report high life satisfaction on surveys, yet still show the demographic signatures of civilizational exhaustion.

The variable that Scandinavia shares with the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union is not capitalism. It’s materialism—the philosophical framework that all these systems take for granted.

The pattern suggests a deeper diagnosis. Wherever materialist anthropology takes hold—regardless of economic system—the same symptoms eventually appear:

Capitalism may be the most efficient delivery mechanism for materialist assumptions, because it aligns incentives so precisely with the materialist account of human nature. But replacing capitalism with socialism while retaining materialism is like treating lung cancer by switching cigarette brands.

The disease is the anthropology. The economy is just where the symptoms show up.

XII. The Door That’s Still Open

I’m not going to tell you what to believe. The point of this essay is not to convert you. It’s to introduce doubt. To create a crack in the certainty.

Because here’s what you need to understand: the question is not settled.

Materialism is a philosophical position, not a scientific finding. Science tells us about the behavior of matter and energy. It does not tell us whether consciousness is reducible to matter, whether meaning is an illusion, whether values are arbitrary. Those are philosophical claims that go beyond the data.

And the people who made those claims—the ones who told you the universe is meaningless—were not neutral observers. They had agendas. They benefited from a population that believed them. Their ideas were selected, propagated, institutionalized, not because they were demonstrated true, but because they were useful.

You can still think. You can still choose. You can still update based on evidence.

And the evidence suggests that your current framework is not serving you.

The mismatch literature says that human beings evolved for meaning. The epidemiological data says that meaninglessness correlates with pathology. The game theory says that populations without meaning select themselves out of existence. The phenomenology of your own life says that your happiest moments were not the optimized ones.

All of this is data. What will you do with it?

Coda: The Test

Here is a test: If materialism is correct and meaning is merely a subjective illusion with no functional importance, then populations that fully internalize this view should do at least as well as populations that don’t.

If, on the other hand, meaning is functional—if it performs work that nothing else can perform—then populations that lose access to meaning should show signs of systemic failure: rising mental illness, declining social cohesion, falling reproduction, collapsing trust.

Look around. Which outcome do you observe?

The evidence is in. The question is whether you’re willing to see it.