The De-Siting of the Soul

There is no longer the sort of fulfilling time that is due to a beautiful structure of past, present and future, that is, to a story, to narrative suspense. Time becomes naked, that is, devoid of narration. A point-like time, or event time, emerges. Because it is poor in horizons, this kind of time is not able to carry much meaning. (Byung-Chul Han)

A time not able to carry much meaning - this is how many people in the West experience the age we inhabit. In the past years there was a lot of discourse about the 'Meaning Crisis' - the collective inability of most people in Western societies to answer the question "Why does any of this matter?"
While the phrase 'Meaning Crisis' started to be used only in the last seven years or so, the idea itself can probably be traced back at least to Nietzsche's 'death of God' and so it's no wonder that Byung-Chul Han, already in 2005, was able to write such a striking analysis of the cultural situation we find ourselves in - a cultural situation which explains the even stronger rise of perceived meaninglessness of people's lives that could be seen in the last decades.
The term that Han used for our cultural situation is "Hyperculture". He defines it as being "based on a dense side by side of different ideas, signs, symbols, images and sounds". What this effectively means is that cultural space is de-distanced first of all by globalization, but maybe even more by the adoption and use of the internet. A few decades ago, one needed to travel far away to experience different cultures - today there is a dense side by side and overlapping of all kinds of different cultures in most places. The cultures are not tied to specific sites any more - they don't really have a center. Even when travelling far away, one is bound to find the same side by side of cultures there too (McDonald's, Hollywood, etc.) Today, more than 20 years after the book was written, social media platforms increase this effect even more: global trends, expressions, memes, and countless similar phenomena.

Han observed and predicted that hyperculture triggers resistance in those for whom this muddling of cultures means the trauma of loss, of the 'pure' cultures they inhabited and that grounded them. Han calls the common reaction to this "fundamentalism of sites", which can include re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization.
An example for the last category can be seen in the well-documented right shift of politics in Europe, especially since 2015. These movements advocate for a return to the 'pure' culture of their nation and inversely for a rejection of any immigration. As Herder shows, European culture itself is "a plant sprung from Roman, Greek and Arabic feed", and Hegel wrote that the ancient Greek culture itself was anything but pure, but owes its existence to a "conflux of the most various nations".
Hegel's insight is as true on a personal level, as it is on a cultural level: "Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another". Psychologically speaking, developing a self-model requires an Other to mirror yourself back at you - we only truly exist in relationship. Han notes that the Chinese sign for 'human being' includes the sign for 'between' - which points at the same fundamental truth: the human being cannot be taken for a substance - but must rather be understood as a relation. Hegel makes the same point in relation to the Greek spirit / culture. According to him it is "a superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood-relationship and friendship."
The point is clear: the presence of the foreign is necessary for the formation of one's own.
An important aspect of this is the concept of 'appropriation'. While this term is mostly used negatively in today's discourse (think 'cultural appropriation') - for Han it is an essential part of education and identity: "Only an idiot or a god could live without appropriation" - and one's identity is, he adds, in a sense nothing more than the result of successful appropriation.

But what happens when the frameworks one appropriates from have themselves lost their footing? The 'Meaning Crisis' can be traced back to a series of historical 'decentering' events: the Copernican revolution removed humans from the center of the cosmos, Darwinian evolution removed our sense of special design, and Nietzsche's "God is dead" declaration signaled the collapse of the transcendent framework that had long supplied people with meaning, morality, and a sense of belonging. The ripples of the last of these events came to be felt more definitively only much more recently with the rise of people identifying as non-religious or atheistic. But even most of such people are still 'site fundamentalists' in the sense that Han defines it. Western culture produced a range of 'surrogate gods' (The Nation, ideological progress, science and reason, consumer capitalism, etc.) that took the place of the old God and performed the same psychological function.
Hyperculture spells out the decentering of these 'surrogate gods'. Being confronted with the side by side of these manifold cultures, it becomes harder and harder not to notice their arbitrariness. The de-siting of the cultures means people are less embedded in them and experience an increasing individualization. There is a new practice of freedom, as people follow their own inclinations and cobble together an identity from the expanding pool of practices and forms of life offered by the hyperculture - but at the same time these practices are not able to provide the same meaning once they are taken out of their cultural and communal context.
The 'Patchwork Religion' people create for themselves is missing the interpretative frame needed to provide actual meaning. One possible step towards a solution for this problem might be found in Bernardo Kastrup's idea of myth as "any interpretive frame used to ascribe meaning to perceptions and sense experiences". In his view, today's dominant myth (scientific materialism) fails to satisfy the deep human need for transcendence that myths have always served and as a solution he proposes a new myth based on his analytical idealism, which I will cover more in-depth in a future text about Kastrup's book 'More Than Allegory'.
My reading of Han tells me that he would critique this approach as a regression - a 're-mythologization' that tries to respond to modernity's groundlessness by imposing a new absolute, by attempting to fill the void instead of learning to inhabit it. Peter Rollins, who has written about this existential void extensively, put it beautifully: "While the yoke of lack might appear too heavy to bear, in truth it is only crushing when we refuse to bear it - when we force others to carry it instead."

What seems to be core to Han's solution for our current predicament is Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit - a different relationship with time, silence and otherness. He does not promise a new horizon, but rather a posture - a way of standing in the open without flinching at the nakedness.