A few years ago I read Rene Guenon - Crisis of the Modern World (which was interestingly written in 1920s).

Its one of those books that you may not agree 100% with every assertion he makes, but in the end the viewpoint he illustrates becomes "impossible to not see"....and it winds up reshaping how you see the world.

A very very summed up version is that: Modern world is a void of meaning. During the "enlightenment", man traded meaning for empty motion....individualism reframed the world and internalized everything to become subjective.

We were able to coast for a few decades because of the incredible inertia of meaning that pre-enlightenment society passed to us....but the meaning keeps collapsing in on itself and we've now reached a sort of black-hole moment where there is no meaning left whatsoever.

Its not simply "God is dead", but "words themselves are dead" (eg. what is a woman?).

After you start to see the world in that lens it reshapes how you see things like the great enlightenment thinkers, for example Descartes "I think therefore I am" - at an initial level that comes across as a completely sensible concept. But the more you ponder it, the crazier it starts to sound...because it reframes your very existence to become an internalized / subjective function.

It becomes easy to see how you get from that, to "every person is allowed to create their own atomized personal reality that need not connect to anything external".