There are many hypotheses about the explosion of depression and anxiety out there, especially for young adults under 30. Depression has about tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled. The question is why? People have posited that it's a problem of a different generation, that boomers wrecked everything, they made the houses expensive, they ruined the environment. And a lot of boomers will say, 'No, the problem is it's the attitude and it's the fragileness of young people today.' None of those explanations really hold water. People have been complaining about different generations for thousands of years.
The real reason that we actually find behind the epidemic of depression and anxiety is the answer to the question, does your life have meaning? The percentage of the population, especially young adults, saying my life feels meaningless, it started to creep up and then explode. Something happened very recently, really only in the past 15 years, that made life feel meaningless. And meaninglessness, the lack of meaning in life, lies behind the explosion of depression and anxiety. My name is Arthur Brooks. I'm a professor and a writer about the science of human happiness. My latest book is The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
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Why life feels meaningless. So, some people find meaning more easily than other people do. The number one predictor of your life feeling meaningful is living your life in real life. It's relationships. It's living kind of in the old way. As a matter of fact, it wasn't that long ago that almost nobody said, 'My life feels meaningless.' But having distance between you and other people, or having technological mediation between you and other people, for example, having a screen between you and your friends, you and your loved ones, you and your family, well, that changes life. It takes it from in real life to something more like, I don't know, a simulation of real life, which is exactly what a lot of young people say today. When I interview them, they'll say, 'My life feels fake. It feels like something's missing. It feels like I'm living in a simulation.' The old movie The Matrix actually was about a machine intelligence that kept people in simulations to take their energy. Well, we're living in the matrix in no small part, or at least many people are. And the people who are most living in that simulation, that technological simulation that's pulling them away from other people, these are the people who are lacking meaning. These are the people who say, 'My life feels meaningless. These are the people who are suffering the most.'
It's funny because the first thing that I ask young people who say their life feels meaningless is, 'So, are you looking for it?' And not very coincidentally, the people who feel like life is meaningless, they're actually not looking for meaning either. And what this suggests to me as a social scientist is the problem isn't that meaning is impossible to find. It's that looking for meaning has gotten harder. People are not, for some reason, and actually we do know the reason now, but the mystery is why people wouldn't even look for this thing that's actually so important in their lives. So the problem actually goes one step further back. Not a lack of meaning, but a lack of the ability to look for meaning.
There are two very famous psychologists who've specialized in understanding the meaning of meaning. What does it mean to understand the meaning of life? There are Michael F. Steger and Frank Martella, two important social psychologists. And they define meaning as really a combination of three things. Coherence, which is why things happen the way they do. Purpose, which is why I do the things that I do. And significance, which is why does my life matter? Those are the three big whys. Furthermore, Mike Steger, the first of these psychologists, created a survey that's very well validated. He's published a lot with it, and other psychologists have as well in the academic literature, to see where people are in their meaning journey, whether they have a good sense of meaning, whether they're searching for meaning. This is the Meaning in Life Questionnaire. I've done a lot of research with this as well, and I've administered this to my students for year after year after year and seen the results as this problem has gotten worse.
One dimension of meaning that you measure with the Meaning in Life Questionnaire is the presence. How much meaning do you feel in your life? How close are you to the goal of understanding the meaning of your life? The second is search. How hard are you looking? So there's four kinds of people with respect to this Meaning in Life Questionnaire. There are those who have a really strong sense of their life's purpose. Their presence is high and they're not looking as a result of that. These are happy homebodies. They're really good where they are. There are some who don't have a strong presence. They don't have it. They don't know it. But they're looking hard. These are hopeful wanderers. And I have a lot of students like that. And I was a lot like that when I was in my 20s. I didn't know what my meaning in life really was, but I sure thought I could find it. And I was looking hard for it. I was a hopeful wanderer.
The third type is people who have a strong sense of life's purpose. They have a strong presence of meaning in their lives, but they keep looking. They keep looking because these are natural seekers, real strivers. That's kind of me today. I have a strong sense of my life's meaning, but I'm always looking for something better. But of course, the most unfortunate people are the people who have a very low sense of life's meaning. They have a low presence of meaning in their lives, and they've given up searching or they never even started in the first place. And these people are stuck. They're just stuck. They're not looking. They don't have it. They don't know what to do. And these are the people that I'm most worried about today. These are the people that I'm studying because I see the explosion in the number of people who really are stuck. They neither have a sense of presence of meaning nor are they looking for it. And I want to know why.
Of the four types, the group that's growing most quickly, especially among young adults, are those who are stuck. Those that we call lost in place. That's the number that's actually exploding. Typically, you'd find that it's 5% of the population. Well, it's multiples of that and it's going up every single year. Who are these people? These are young adults who are coming of age. It's not as if older people are losing their sense of meaning, but you know, older people get older and they start to disappear from the population and they're replaced by younger people. And these younger people don't have a strong sense of the presence of meaning in their lives, nor are they, for whatever reason, looking for meaning in their lives. And that's why lost in place, that's why the stuck part of the population is exploding in number.
People often ask, 'How do I know that the right hemisphere of my brain is working?' The answer to that is that you feel things and don't know why. It's a little bit of mystery in your life. As a matter of fact, let's say that you hear a beautiful song and it chokes you up. You can't quite explain it. Maybe you have a memory of something that doesn't seem so emotional, but it makes you feel emotional. Maybe you have a conversation with somebody and it gives you a strong sensation that this is something you need to pay attention to, but you can't quite articulate what it's all about. When you have strong emotions or a strong reaction to something and you can't say exactly why, the reason for that is that your language centers are not in the right hemisphere of your brain. That you've triggered this sense of mystery and in fact meaning, coherence, purpose, significance, the things that really matter most to you. You've triggered the why side of your brain. Well, it'll really affect you in a very, very deep emotional way. When you have those sensations and you can't quite explain them, it means the right side of your brain is very active.
Human beings have brains that are more or less the same as they have been for about 250,000 years. That's the late Pleistocene period in which Homo sapiens were, well, back then, living in small bands of 30 to 50 kin-based individuals. They knew each other in real life. They saw each other every single day. They knew they were related and they stuck together. The result of it is that the human brain since then kind of works the same way. We have to know who our people are. We have to have relationships in real life.
Now, to be successful at that period and still today, you needed to be able to do two kinds of things. You needed to sort out complicated problems of how to and what, how to find a gazelle and kill it somewhere around a watering hole, or for that matter, how to write a piece of software or operate your toaster, just to, you know, the how-to and what of ordinary life. And you also needed the why part of your brain, which would sort out the why would I want to do anything? Why would I want to be in relationship with other people? Why would I want to mate and have kids? Why would I want to actually feed my children and bring them up? Why would I want to do all these things? The second set of questions that I just addressed are not the complicated questions of how-to and what. Those are the complex questions of why. They're not actually hard to understand, but you can't solve them because they're full of mystery and meaning. Why do I do the things that I do? Because I love my family. So, what do I do? I go and I support them. How do I do it? By figuring out how to get a gazelle. And in the modern context, it's sort of the same thing.
And the brain from 250,000 years ago and still today is supposed to integrate between these complex and complicated functions. We're supposed to ask why questions to motivate us and how-to and what questions so that we can actually meet those motivations. In ordinary life, you got to have both. If you didn't have one side or the other, you'd be in big trouble. And this is not just because we operate like cavemen. Still today, it's really important that you have motivations, mystery, and meaning in your life to want to do things that have significance. And you have to figure out how to actually go and do those things. If you don't have one side, if you can't do the how-to and what, you'll be helpless. You'll be a disaster. But if you don't have the why, you'll be rootless and won't have any idea why you're doing what you're doing. And you'll be depressed and lonely and anxious.
Now, of course, what I'm talking about here is that one side of the brain, one part of the brain, is the why side, is the meaning side. It's the happiness and love side. The other side is the how-to and what side, the engineering side, the analysis side, the sort-out-the-problem side. Now, there's a theory behind all this that comes from neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization. That's just a fancy way of saying that the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain do different things. Not a very surprising idea, of course. Now, what do we know? Based on fMRI studies and the most cutting-edge neuroscience, it's the right side of the brain that's dedicated to the why, to the mystery, the meaning, the love, and the happiness, the why would I get out of bed in the morning, and why do I love the people that I do? Why do I worship the divine? What is my purpose in life? The other side of the brain, the left hemisphere of the brain, is the engineering side. It's the complicated problem side. It's the how do I perform my job? How do I get to work? How do I sort things out? How do I write lines of code side of my brain? And they're working together all the time.
Unless something interrupts the communication between the two hemispheres, or even worse, if something systematically shuts off one of those hemispheres, which in point of fact is what's happening today. It wasn't that long ago that our culture and our economy and the way that we lived was highly integrated between right and left hemispheres. But something happened about 20 years ago and even more accelerating about 15 years ago where we came to the view, philosophically actually, that every problem in life had a technological solution. That engineers could fix everything. That there's an app for that. That there's software that can solve these things. That there's something that we can get on our phones that will solve every problem, whether we're sad, whether we're hungry, whether we're lonely, whether we're depressed, that all of these problems can be solved with proper information and proper technology.
The result of it is that we dove headlong into an economy largely driven by information, statistics, engineering, technology, apps, screens, because we tried to solve all the problems in life, all the complex, emotional, mysterious, meaning-based problems in life, with the complicated, fact-based, information economy and technology that we could actually get from the engineering world. Now, that of course is an error because in truth the engineering side of life, which is incredibly important, is a left hemispheric side for solving left hemispheric problems, complicated problems. For problems in the right hemisphere of the brain, we don't need complicated solutions. We don't need these things at all. We need relational solutions. We need mysterious solutions. We need to solve them in the ways that people did in the old ways, before we had a hyper-engineered economy that was throwing random facts and information and data at us all day long, shoving us headlong into the left hemispheres of our brain, vacating the right side where we could actually solve these problems, where we could understand the nature of life itself.
Here's the thing to understand. There's kind of a conceit that there's a complicated solution to life's complex human problems, but it always leads to bigger problems. In the 19th century, philosophers talked about scientific socialism, where we could get exactly the gears of the machine of society just right so that everybody would be blissfully happy. Well, we know how that turned out. It turned into a bloody 20th century that destroyed hundreds of millions of lives. We talk about scientific public administration, where that didn't destroy so many lives, but we know that that's not how things work. When we treat people through our government like a machine, people become incredibly unhappy. And frankly, it doesn't work.
The version that we have over the past 15 years that's less about armies and less about government and more about the private sector and the economy and technology is something like, I don't know, social media. When social media was invented, the promise was this: it's going to solve loneliness. Well, here's the thing. Social media is a complicated problem of algorithms and technology. Loneliness is a complex human problem. When you try to solve a complex problem with a complicated solution, it gets worse. It's no surprise to me as a social scientist that every additional hour per day that you spend on social media, the lonelier you get. We have a series of complex holes in our psyche and our minds, in our hearts. We want to fill them, but we can't fill them with these complicated plugs that come from information, engineering, technology, analysis, devices, and screens. It can't be done. And the more we try, the worse the problem gets.
If you ever wonder, how often am I turning on the left hemisphere of my brain and turning off the right? Well, just ask yourself, how often do you look at your phone? If you're like the average American, you're looking at your phone 205 times a day. That's 13 times per hour. That's every five minutes or so. And you know perfectly that there are times when it's a lot more often than that. If you're in a supermarket checkout line, look at everybody around you and yourself. Everybody's on a screen. Are you behind a traffic light that's lasting a little bit too long? Out comes the phone. The truth of the matter is that any opportunity for the right hemisphere of your brain to turn on, to give you mind wandering and flights of fancy and thoughts of meaning, you're going to turn it off. You're going to go right to the left hemisphere of your brain by opening up your phone and being bombarded by information that you did not ask for.
The fact that we've become so adroit at turning off the right hemisphere of the brain, turning on the left, the fact that in any given moment when we experience the slightest amount of boredom that we go right to our screens, it's had the net effect of making it impossible for us to be bored at all. I mean, nobody likes to be bored. Boredom is, well, it's boring. People don't like it. But the truth of the matter is that we are designed biologically to be bored a lot. There's a set of structures in our brains called the default mode network. It turns on when you're undistracted. When you're bored, that's the set of structures that we need for right hemispheric activity because it leads to our minds wandering, to asking questions that are inside our hearts and inside our minds and not just coming from our phones. This is what gives us the capacity to ask the meaning questions in the first place.
Now you got to ask yourself, why would I do this? Why would I turn off my ability to be bored and therefore become less and less and less adept at being bored in the first place? And the answer is because we solved the problem of boredom with technology. We didn't like it and so we fixed it. But like so many problems in human life, we fix little problems and create major crises. We have analgesic drugs to wipe out pain, and that's great. But of course, we make them more and more and more powerful. And this year, 100,000 people will die of opiate painkiller overdoses. We create major crises constantly to solve little problems. The way that we use devices to wipe out boredom is an absolute case in point.
There's wonderful research that actually comes from my university where people are put into boredom experiments. You bring undergraduates into a lab. They'll do anything for 20 bucks. And you set them in a chair where they have nothing to do for 15 minutes. I mean, nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, just 15 minutes, complete silence. They have one thing that they can do besides wait there patiently. They have a little key fob with a button on it. And if they push the button, they self-administer a painful electric shock. What the researchers want to know is what do people prefer? Boredom or shocks? Now you can imagine how this turns out. It's a question that practically answers itself in modern life. 25% of the women actually shock themselves. Two-thirds of the guys shock themselves. Maybe this is more of an experiment of the difference between men and women. I don't know. But the bottom line is that a lot of people prefer shocks to being bored. In the experiment, by the way, one guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. He got thrown out of the experiment. The point is, we would prefer pain.
And we figured out how to get that pain. It's the supercomputer in your pocket. That's your shocking device. Open it up. Get a bunch of information you didn't ask for. Look for notifications on your social media that will not edify you, you don't care about. Maybe look for a little bit of conflict that you weren't expecting. This is just you in the experiment because you want to keep that default mode network off so you don't experience the slightest amount of boredom. And as the years go by, we get worse and worse and worse and we escalate more and more on the technology. The problem gets worse.
Now, there's another problem with boredom, especially when we actually don't know how to deal with boredom. It's highly correlated with addictive behaviors. I look a lot at the psychology of the addiction to substances and behaviors, drugs and alcohol and gambling. And one of the best predictors is being bored. Another is being anxious. Anxious people. Bored people. Bored and anxious people. These are people who are really at risk for drinking too much, for using too much drugs, for gambling to excess, because they're actually trying to distract themselves from ordinary life. They don't want to be alone in their heads because it's too anxiety-provoking or it's just frankly too boring.
Well, what's happened is our inability to actually face up to a little bit of boredom while waiting at a light or in the supermarket checkout line or anything else has made it such that when we have the slightest amount, we have to actually use our devices to chase away that boredom, which makes the addiction worse. And this puts us into kind of a doom loop. A doom loop in which a little bit of boredom, the devices go on. The devices make it harder for us to deal with boredom. So, we use our devices more and that escalates the behavior and pretty soon before we know it, that's all we're doing. We're not alive in real life. We're not seeing the things around us. We don't notice anything else. We're simply trying to distract ourselves almost 24 hours a day or at least every waking hour.
You know, the engineering culture, the culture of hustle and grind and efficiency and technology, this is nothing new. I mean, this has been going on for a long time all the way through the 20th century, really since the advent of the Industrial Revolution as a matter of fact. And so you got to ask, why did it suddenly explode after 2008? It wasn't just this particular device, the small screen in our pockets. It was something bigger than that. And what it really was was something that we actually see in all sorts of natural and technological symptoms. You know, if you're looking at the spread of a virus, well, it'll kind of incubate and incubate and grow slowly and suddenly it'll explode, right? And there's an idea, a political idea, and a few people will have it and then it'll spread a little bit and it'll feel like it just comes out of nowhere. Now, why is that? And the answer is what we might call the Campbell effect.
The Campbell effect actually comes from this character in The Sun Also Rises, the great novel by Ernest Hemingway, Mike Campbell. He's a drunk and he's broke. He's bankrupt and he's asked by somebody else, it's like, 'How'd you go broke?' And he says, 'Little by little and then all of a sudden.' That's how things actually happen. That's how things happen in life. You know, nobody's marriage suddenly just breaks apart. Most people, this is one of the things that I study, they don't get along and they don't get along and they kind of work on it as best that they can and then suddenly they can't stand it anymore and they get a divorce and people say it came out of nowhere. It doesn't come out of nowhere. Our device addiction and the explosion of meaninglessness didn't come out of nowhere. It brewed and it bubbled and it cooked and it rose little by little and then we had a few outsized innovations and boom.
There's a common argument when there's a problem that the way to solve the problem is by doing the thing that appears to be problematic just a little bit more until it solves the problem. I hear this a lot. You know, if you find that spending a lot of government money leads to social problems, you just need a little bit more government money. Just a little bit more and then we'll be okay. That's the kind of argument that people will make. But they make it in all sorts of ways. You know, people who are deeply, deeply addicted to alcohol, deep down they think there's enough alcohol out there and at some point I will have had enough. I've studied people who make vast amounts of money. The first thing that a billionaire says after earning her or his first billion is, 'It didn't feel the way I thought it was going to. I guess I need another billion.' This is also known as the hedonic treadmill. Run, run, run, run, run. But if it turns out that something is creating a problem, it's very rare that more of it is going to solve that problem. It makes perfect sense. But of course, we sort of forget that.
There's an expression that's apropos in this situation. It's if you're in a hole, stop digging. And that's exactly the situation we are in with technology. Look, there are some utopians, and I'm not anti-technology, on the contrary. I've got every device known to man. But technology, true utopians believe that we're going to hit some sort of a singularity, that there's going to be the killer app that's going to sort everything out. I get it. I get it. Yeah, too much screen time and it's making your kids depressed and it's making you not care about your life and it's ruining your marriage because it's pulling you away from your spouse. But sooner or later, the tech is going to be so unbelievably good that every problem is going to be solved and we won't be lonely anymore. You're going to have the perfect partner in AI. You're going to have the perfect therapist in the app that's going to solve this for you. That's wrong. And the reason it's wrong is because the neuroscience is wrong. That's not the way that the brain works. You can't solve the right brain's problems by getting more left-brain solutions. You can't get there. The truth is, you actually can't get down by going further up.
Now, one solution to this problem that I hear all the time is throw your phone in the ocean. Get rid of it all, man. I mean, go live in the woods. Now, to begin with, that's completely implausible. That's just not going to happen. The ship has sailed. But furthermore, it's a bad idea because the truth of the matter is that human ingenuity is improving human life all the time. We live longer. We live better. We have greater economic growth. We're meeting our caloric needs. Life is better because of the way that we've solved so many complicated problems. The solution is not less technology. It's using technology appropriately. It's not over-engineering the parts of our lives that don't need to be over-engineered. It means actually attending to the right hemisphere of our brain, the complexity, the mystery, the meaning, the love and the happiness by actually being in relation, in love, in the ways that we actually need and not polluting that right hemisphere of our brain with more of these left hemispheric solutions.
I'm not anti-technology. I don't think any of us should be anti-technology. On the contrary, it just means that we need to understand how technology works, how it should work, and where we should not be using it as much as where we should be using it. Now, a lot of what I know about this actually comes from left-brain technology. It actually comes from the study of neuroscience in which we're dealing in facts and technology and analysis and science. It's really great. I love that for sure. But I don't let it turn into a religion, per se. I have a real religion. I don't turn it into love, per se, because I have real love in my life and I have to have boundaries between these kinds of solutions to inform me of the things that are really important to me for my understanding of life and my work and actually being part of that life and living that life and enjoying my work and having relationships that will enrich it and make me want to do it in the first place.
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