In a recent Big Think interview, Prof. Arthur Brooks, one of the world’s leading experts on the science of human happiness, attributes the rise in depression and anxiety among young adults to a meaning crisis.
Why life feels meaningless
Brooks opens with numbers he says are not in dispute.
- Depression among young adults has roughly tripled over the past 15 years, and anxiety has doubled. He treats the trend as settled and spends his energy on the cause rather than the data.
- He dismisses the usual generational blame from both directions. Boomers did not wreck everything, and young people are not unusually fragile. People have complained about other generations for thousands of years, so neither explanation holds.
- The real driver, he argues, is meaning. Until about 15 years ago almost nobody said their life felt meaningless. Now young people tell him their lives feel fake, like a simulation.
- Drawing on Michael Steger‘s Meaning in Life Questionnaire, he sorts people by two measures: how much meaning they feel, and how hard they are searching. That produces four groups, and the one exploding among young adults is the “stuck,” who have neither. Historically that group is about 5% of the population. It is now several times that and rising every year.
The two sides of the brain
His explanation rests on hemispheric liberalization, the idea that the two halves of the brain do different jobs.
- The right hemisphere handles the “why” questions: mystery, meaning, love, purpose. The left handles “how to” and “what”: engineering, analysis, problems that have solutions. Brooks says a healthy life integrates both, and losing either one is a serious problem.
- Around 20 years ago, and faster in the last 15, culture adopted the belief that every problem has a technological fix. That belief pushed people into the left hemisphere and left the right one idle.
- His central claim is that complicated solutions cannot solve complex problems. Social media was sold as a cure for loneliness, but loneliness is a complex human problem and an algorithm is a complicated technical one. The result is that every additional hour on social media leaves people lonelier.
- The average American checks a phone 205 times a day, roughly every five minutes. Each check shuts down the default mode network, the brain state that switches on during boredom and lets the mind wander toward meaning questions in the first place.
What to do instead
Prof. Brooks describes happiness as having three “macro-nutrients”: enjoyment, satisfaction with your accomplishments, and meaning. Young adults, he says, are not short on the first two, which is how he narrowed the problem to the third.
- Ask questions that have no clean answers. His test is simple. If Google or a chatbot can give you a useful answer, it is not a meaning question. He points to the Greek practice of aporia and to Zen koans as traditions built on this.
- Seek transcendence, either upward through faith, meditation or awe, or outward through serving others. He notes that screens work against this because they turn attention back on the self.
- Build a calling around earned success and being needed, rather than pay or prestige. He found that income and education wash out statistically, and that careers with meaning often spiral rather than climb in a straight line.
- Treat suffering as a feature rather than a bug. His formula is that suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance to pain, so lowering resistance matters more than eliminating the pain.
- Practice before you feel. He compares faith to marriage: you practice daily, believe most of the time, and feel it occasionally. Waiting to feel it first, he says, is the wrong order.
Breaking the device habit
Prof. Brooks says tech addiction is real, involving the same dopamine machinery as other addictions, but easier to break than a chemical one. He offers three protocols.
- Tech-free times: the first hour of the day, mealtimes, and the last hour before sleep. He notes that a phone face down on the dinner table still interrupts the oxytocin exchange that bonds people to each other.
- Tech-free zones: no phones in the bedroom or the classroom. He suggests a five-dollar alarm clock and says the urge fades after six or seven weeks.
- An annual tech fast of about four days, plus notifications switched off and the screen set to grayscale, since color is what hooks the visual brain hardest.
In conclusion, Prof. Brooks presents a thought experiment rather than a prescription. Imagine reaching the end of your life and reflecting honestly on your life. Nobody, he says, wishes they had spent more hours online. They wish for deeper relationships and more time fully awake in the world.
Prof. Brook‘s larger point is that there is no single fix waiting to be found, and that this is good news rather than bad. Meaning is not a problem to solve once and be done with. It is a pilgrimage, something you walk toward for decades, and the walking itself is what makes a life feel worth living.
Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI exploration process. For more information, check out the original article listed below.