Meaning Maintenance Model, and the idea is this: Being lost, confused, or disoriented creates a feeling of distress. To relieve that distress, the brain kicks into high gear, trying to find or make meaning, looking for patterns, some way out of its bind—some path back to the campsite. “We have a need for structure, for things to make sense, and when they don’t, we’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that our response can be generative,” Travis Proulx, a psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, told me. “We begin to hunger for meaningful patterns, and that can help with
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