What I really think is that most humans have never had meaning. They’ve just been too busy surviving to stop and think about it. When societies get rich enough to afford time to think and universal literacy to discuss then we start noticing that life is “meaningless” and discussing the metaphysical emptiness that was always there below the surface.
Huxley’s brave new world is accurate but is neither brave nor new.
You always get a faction that thinks the absence of such discourse in the past meant we had meaning back then. They’re wrong.
Going back in time to when we were still deeply embedded in the “power process” or whatever you call it is no different from drowning yourself in TikTok or MMORPGs. It’s just another way to stop thinking about big deep questions that in fact have never been solved.
We do not truly know what we are, where we came from, if we truly have any “purpose” beyond just catalyzing the dissipation of energy, whether consciousness ends at death or has some eternal component, etc. We can have various religious and spiritual faiths but these do not come with proof. The honest ones tell you that up front.
Becoming too busy to care, whether in the old traditional way or some new way, does not change this.
If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many).
So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.