David Wells writes of the loss of God and his truth as our center:

Perhaps the most startling consequence of all this is that our self begins to disintegrate. When the universe loses its center or, to be more precise, when the center is lost to us as something outside us that has the authority to reach into our lives, we ourselves begin to disintegrate. The self that has been made to bear the weight of being the center of all reality, the source of all our meaning, mystery, and morality, finds that it has become empty and fragile. When God dies to us, we die in ourselves. That is the connection we need to see, and it has become especially aggravated in the context of our (post)modern world.
   Many modern writers have pondered the emptying out of the (post)modern self, this was certainly evident in the 1960s, and it has continued down to this present time. Their language is sometimes different, but what they have in mind is much the same. [Various writers have written] of the “minimal self,” . . . “decentered self,” . . . “an enfeebled self,” . . . “the empty self, . . . “the depleted self.” Their analyses came at it from different angles, but all saw a constant erosion of out internal substance in the modern world. And whatever else we wish to say about it, it does seem clear that this is related to our experience of being uprooted, of not belonging, of drifting, of being homeless. It is also related to our being constantly bombarded with images, ideas, demands, products, and options that wear down our inward substance. But, most importantly I believe, it is related to the fact that there is no one before whom we are summoned, no one outside our experience before whom we are accountable, none on whose light we measure who we are and where we are heading. It is this last point that many (post)modern writers do not understand.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 111–112.