Below, Arthur Brooks shares five key insights from his new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
Brooks is a social scientist and professor at Harvard University, where he teaches the science of happiness. He is also a columnist at The Free Press, host of the Office Hours podcast, and CBS News contributor.
What’s the big idea?
Life hasn’t become meaningless, but most of us have adopted habits that turn meaning on mute. Reconnecting with a deeper purpose awaits in the right hemisphere of your brain. All it takes is learning how to activate that side of existence.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Brooks himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book.
1. We have a meaning crisis.
In teaching about happiness, a lot of the advice I give is actually about unhappiness. Some years ago, I went searching for reasons behind our unhappiness epidemic: Why are rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness increasing? There are many popular explanations, but none really hold water.
When I started talking to a lot of young people, one word kept showing up: meaning. Young people—especially young people in college—wanted to know what they are meant to do. They would say things like, “My life feels meaningless. Why is that? What is the meaning of my life?” I decided that this is where I needed to look.
Survey data shows that for people younger than 30, the number-one predictor of clinical depression and generalized anxiety is the answer yes to the question: Does your life feel meaningless? We have a meaning crisis in our society that is particularly acute for people younger than 35. We also see it most prevalently in people who would seem to have the least problems; those considered to be highly educated strivers.
