Making sense of depression as a crisis of meaning

New neuroscientific studies shed light on an often overlooked dimension of depression: it's not just a mood disorder, but a disorder of meaning.

Depression is a strange beast. If it were just sadness, we could call it the flu of emotions—awful, but temporary. But depression is something else entirely, a state where sadness can be just the tip of the iceberg, or sometimes, conspicuously absent. It is as much about what people no longer feel as it is about what they do or have stopped doing. Some patients describe it as a psychic amputation, a severing of the connective tissue between them and the world, making everything feel distant, inert, and gray.

But let’s not put the cart before the horse. First we need to distinguish between endogenous depression (internal or biological factors) and exogenous depression (external stressors). In the exogenous flavor, aka "my life sucks," there are good, in-your-face reasons to be depressed. That's when antidepressants work best.

Recent neuroscientific studies of the cognitive dimension of endogenous depression shed light on an often overlooked dimension of the condition: it's not just a mood disorder, but a disorder of meaning. It represents a collapse in the way people construct and connect with meaning, an existential inertia that derails everything from motivation to perception itself. What happens when the basic mechanisms by which we navigate and care about the world fail? Depression, in this framework, is less like a chemical imbalance and more like a meaning imbalance-a profound dysfunction in how people engage with the world at the deepest cognitive level. It’s the loss of a much-needed compass.

Depression is a profound dysfunction in how people engage with the world.

Depression and loss of affordance

Typically, the mind works in patterns, constantly orienting itself toward goals and affordances—those opportunities for action and transformation that give life a fluid, intuitive quality. You wake up, stretch, smell coffee, and there's an immediate click: this means the day is beginning, this means something comforting is coming. In a healthy mind, these connections happen almost automatically, creating a kind of cognitive grip on reality.

Depression disrupts this. Suddenly, coffee is just dark liquid. A hug from a friend feels lifeless. Things that once meant something lose their emotional charge, flattening out into mere objects or actions without resonance. This is what cognitive scientists call a loss of affordance. The world doesn’t just seem sad—it stops offering ways to engage with it meaningfully.

This is devastating because affordance is at the heart of how we navigate life. In everyday cognition, meaning is not something we actively think about, but something that emerges automatically. When this breaks down, every task becomes herculean and exhausting. This is not just because of fatigue or lack of motivation, but because, cognitively speaking, the person has lost the roadmap and the compass that makes life meaningful.

The Grip Slips

A helpful metaphorical way to think about this is to think that we lose grip—the ability to take an interpretive hold on reality in ways that allow us to move through it without anxiety. Depression, in this view, is what happens when the grip slips. Normally, the brain shifts between ways of seeing things dynamically—at times focusing on details, at times on the big picture, but always retaining the ability to step back and adjust. Depression locks people into one frozen perspective: a distorted, overwhelming sense of powerlessness and futility. Life is no longer a dynamic process but a series of dead ends. The future, instead of an unfolding landscape of possibilities, becomes a closed loop of bleak predictability.

A tragic irony of depression is that smart people with high cognitive abilities—those attuned to patterns and meaning—can be even more vulnerable. They don’t just feel bad; they understand that they feel bad, can analyze it in exhausting detail, and often reach catastrophic conclusions. “If I feel this way, then nothing has meaning”. And that, in turn, further entrenches their sense of despair.

Beyond the Self: The Role of Isolation

Another crucial element in depression is isolation—not just social, but cognitive and existential. Depression alienates people from themselves, trapping them in self-referential loops that cut them off from external sources of connection. Social bonds, rituals, and structures of meaning that usually help regulate emotions—conversations with friends, engagement in purposeful work, even the rhythms of nature—become inaccessible. When you lose not just a sense of meaning, but also the ability to derive it from outside sources, you are left floating, disconnected, with no framework to reconstruct purpose or a sense of direction.

Paths Toward Repair

Despite what many therapists may think, endogenous depression is fundamentally a disorder of meaning, therefore healing cannot be limited to symptom management or correcting faulty cognitive reasoning. True healing must involve restoring a sense of meaningful engagement with life. This is where psychoanalysis, philosophy, mindfulness, and embodied practices can offer more than just momentary relief—they can help recalibrate the cognitive machinery of meaning-making itself. Practices that re-engage people with experience—meditation, storytelling, reconnecting with nature—work not by thinking oneself out of depression, but by reawakening a sense of connection in ways that bypass rigid analytical loops.

Crucially, social connection needs to be reframed not as an obligation (“You should be around people”) but as a cognitive resource. Other people don’t just provide comfort; they actively help shape our reality, grounding us in perspectives outside our own.

Conclusion

The dominant narrative about depression often frames it in purely biological terms—low serotonin, disrupted neurotransmitters, genetics—or viewing it as cognitive dysfunction. And while these are real, they fail capture the full depth of the experience. Depression is a crisis of being, a disruption of the machinery that helps us make sense of the world in the ongoing narrative of our identity, a loss of compass. Understanding it through this lens changes not only how we view treatment, but also how we build societies that foster meaning rather than alienation. Because at its core, depression is not just about what is happening inside a person, but also about what has stopped happening between them and the world. And that is where healing must begin.