To be "ruined" is a direct meaning of Latin "ruina," "a rushing down."
Imho, the unexamined (or happy, ignorance is bliss type, sometimes parodied as the "Valley Girl") lifer is innocent, naive. Such have been particularly susceptible to the rather negative or nihilistic dogmatic atheism of e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre.
The general Rx for such "loss of innocence" is a third awareness, arising from the awareness that one, as a human animal, does not often encounter the God-awareness of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. This religious "anime" (from Latin "anima," "life-giving inspiration," from Proto-Indoeuropean "ane-," "to breathe") is clearly see in contradistinction to French existentialism, e.g. in Godard's movie "Breathless," which played with jump cuts (inducing a kind of Humean lack of causality perspective among some viewers), and shows the anomie (Durkheim's coinage; he majored in philosophy, but moved toward a more math/fact-based analysis of "self in society") so prominent in 20th century French leftist thinking. (Godard, an influential film director, is analyzed by Deleuze in "Cinema 1: The Movement Image").
As such, Durkheim prefigured (with his analysis of anomie) much of French "existence-ism," which anomie he early on understood to be a transitional phase between one set of societal norms and the next (also) "calmer" normalcy. Nietzsche's strong doubts re God (and hence the "old order" of European Christendom) moved him to an overcoming-by-merit dynamic/resolution (his "overmen" are individuals like da Vinci and Goethe, those who meritoriously rise above the herd norm). Kierkegaard's faith in God, as "Knight of Faith," moved beyond the "churchianity" of his day ("herd mentality" which, as innocence "unexamined life" or herd of faithful guarded by fallen angles in the Church, Kierkegaard moved past).
Thus, in one's own "herd mentality," if one (particularly as a "Valley Girl" or happy, innocent, childlike American) encounters neither a Kierkegaardian existentialist nor a Nietzschean existentialist emphasis, such an one is likely to encounter the French variety, which fits most closely the French-Jewish Durkheim's anomie, as France transited from a European power through a WWII despair unto the more and various atheistic, reductive, and materialistic perspectives of Baudrillard, Derrida, Fanon, Camus (although he did begin to appreciate Christianity), Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, Lacan, Lyotard, Kojeve, Badiou, Zizek, Latour, et al. Imho, most of these thinkers' work is without God, Good, as either a foundation, a process, or a conclusion. Thus, if one has been "dis-illusioned" by (French, especially) "existentialism" (and the many similar French philosophies of recent decades, which philosophies generally feature the assumption of "no God," typically based upon lack of interest in same), a general "way up" is to encounter such writers as Kierkegaard ("Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing") or, in a more humanist yet constructivist mode, Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and Maslow's more clearly science-based work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs . Additional, more positive, upbeat American thinking includes "Understanding Yourself" by Mark Prophet, "Runaway Realization," "Flow" by Mihaly C., "The Kindness Challenge," and "Autobiography of a Yogi" (written by a Hindu for Americans :-) This kind of awareness generally asks for/promotes some personal development of the soul-field, aka the individual human's God-given ability to "come up higher."