As "the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities", former Director of the London School of Economics and leading Britisn public intellectual, Anthony Giddens is well suited to represent the field of sociology for us.

“The threat of personal meaninglessness is ordinarily held at bay because routinised activities, in combination with basic trust, sustain ontological security. Potentially disturbing existential questions are defused by the controlled nature of day-to-day activities within internally referential systems.
    Mastery, in other words, substitutes for morality; to be able to control one’s life circumstances, colonise the future with some degree of success and live within the parameters of internally referential systems can, in many circumstances, allow the social and natural framework of things to seem a secure grounding for life activities.”
   (Anthony Giddens: Modernity and Self-Identity)