John Vervaeke is an Assistant Professor in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. His work tends to particularly focus on the intersection between psychology, psychedelics, stoicism, buddhism and broad societal analysis, in a similar vein to Jordan Peterson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Peter Limberg.

One of his central hypotheses is that at least western society is currently undergoing a "meaning crisis" in which people feel particularly low trust towards the people around them, feel very little control over their lives, and lack good explanations for many of the experiences they are having, and to what degree religious, and mystical experiences can address those problems.

His work has not received much coverage on LessWrong, only once being mentioned in a shortform post by user Alex Ray, and Anna Salamon mentioned she was somewhat impressed by his work on Twitter. See also this FB thread by someone rationality-adjacent on John Vervaeke and some related thinkers.

In 2021 Vaniver started a thread summarizing each one of the lectures in the "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" lecture series, the first of which can be found here.

External links

Twitter account
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis