CONCEPT
How people reconstruct meaning after a worldview collapses.
Rebuilding a worldview is the work that follows a collapse, and it goes wrong when people treat it as shopping for a replacement set of beliefs. The old frame was not only a set of claims. It was doing five or six separate jobs at once, so seamlessly that nobody itemized them until they were gone. Reconstruction means identifying those jobs and staffing them individually. Nothing that comes next will do all of them, and expecting it to is the main cause of the long flailing middle period.
A functioning worldview usually supplies:
Collapse is disorienting out of proportion to its intellectual content because all six vacate simultaneously. Most people diagnose only the first, argue about explanation for two years, and cannot work out why settling it did not help. The losses that actually hurt are belonging and ritual, and neither is repaired by getting the metaphysics right.
Practices are more tractable than beliefs and they stabilize faster. A weekly table with the same people does the belonging job whether or not anyone at it agrees about anything. A fixed shape to the week does the ritual job. Physical work, service, craft, anything with a real object and a real standard, does more for the telos job than any amount of reading.
Hold the explanatory layer loosely and let it stay partial. You are allowed to have no settled position on consciousness or cosmology and still know what you owe your friends. A worldview built for load rather than for completeness will have holes in it. That is a property of the honest ones.
Ethics can be rebuilt from ground you can inspect: obligations you took on, people who depend on you, harms you are in a position to cause or prevent. That floor is narrower than the old frame's and it is more secure, because it does not rest on a claim that might fail.
Two failure modes. The first is the drop-in replacement, swapping one total system for another that answers everything immediately with the same confidence. It is fast, it is comfortable, and it reproduces the exact vulnerability that just cost you years. If the new frame also explains away every anomaly, it will also collapse.
The second is stalling in demolition. Critique becomes the identity. Everything is a construct, commitment is naive, irony is permanent. This looks like rigor, but it is mostly a refusal to be wrong in public again. It is stable, it is defensible, and it builds nothing.
The end state is not certainty regained. It is a small set of commitments you are willing to be judged by, held with the understanding that some of them are mistaken and you do not yet know which.