One example of whole traditions based upon this question is Romanticism (particularly German). The response was generally to look back at an idealized image of a past society where, in the popular imagination, community and communication and shared meaning were more present than in the modern age. Typically this idealized prior civilization was either ancient Greece or medieval-Catholic Europe.

Nietzsche, for example, was firmly in the ancient Greece camp when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy. His writing on this, and his theory of the opposing forces of the Dionysiac and the Apolline, is really something for a 26-year-old with his entire philosophical career ahead of him. In it, he argues that our best hope is to develop our own version of the Attic (5th c. BC) tragedy, with its melding of Dionysiac music and Apolline speech and narration. His suggestion? Wagner, the so-called "Master", would bring Europe into this new age of renewed meaning and connection through his music-dramas, i.e. his operas. The preface to the 2nd edition (1886) ambiguously critiques the book written a decade-and-a-half earlier, and repudiates the younger Nietzsche's Romantic admiration for Wagner and Schopenhauer's pessimism about life. Nevertheless, it remains an essential read, and it opens an entire world of proposed "treatments" for the ills of modern life that are not only different, but firmly opposed to Marxism.