Coming up in today's episode: "My best days are frittered away on Instagram," said no one ever. Right? Right. What really—when I'm talking about finding meaning, what I'm really saying is putting yourself into a position where meaning can find you. And that's a leap of faith. That's a real leap of faith. Is it going to find me? Is God going to find me? Yes.
Yes. God will find you. God's better at finding you than you are at finding God. And so, let yourself be found.
Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is Ascension Presents. Today I get to be with Dr. Arthur Brooks once again. Tell us a little bit about this new book that you've written. I got the chance to read a bunch of it. What's the name of the book and what is the meaning of your life?
Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And it's my response over the past five years as a researcher to the crisis of our time, which is a crisis of meaning. You know, when I came back to academia, I was gone for a long time. I mean, I got my PhD a long time ago and taught for a long time, but I left for 10 years in the middle to become a CEO of a big think tank in Washington, D.C. And I wasn't paying that much attention to what was going on on campus. I was busy. I was raising money and, you know, running a company. And when I came back after 11 years, the world had changed on campuses. What I remembered was a happier place.
Yeah. It had completely changed. It was much darker than it had been before. Anxiety was up, depression was up. On many campuses, more than 50% of students were actually seeking mental health treatment. Which I got nothing against mental health treatment, but 55% of the student population—that's a lot. And so, you found this tripling of depression, doubling of anxiety. And I thought, well, I guess I know why I'm here as a specialist in happiness. I need to deal with this unhappiness. Why is this? And so, I started a research project on what actually explained it. And this book actually is my explanation, but more importantly, it's my remedy. It's actually how people who are really suffering today from this epidemic, from this psychogenic epidemic—which is a fancy way of saying an epidemic is something that's affecting a whole lot of people without any biological origin—why is it happening? Where do we go to solve the problem? And what do we have to do differently? That's the book.
So the diagnosis, yeah, is—I mean, even the subtitle, age of emptiness. That's it. That's what—why—
So the number one predictor of depression and anxiety for people under 30 is the inability to define the meaning of life. That's the number one predictor. The number one predictor is saying, "My life feels meaningless." And that seems so big, it seems so broad, but that's what people are coming to my office and telling me. And when I interview young people, when I do this kind of content analysis, I listen to their words. They keep dropping these like, "I don't know what I'm meant to do, Professor. I don't know, you know, it's like, I don't know what this all means." And, you know, these are some of the most talented people you and I are dealing with. These ambitious young people with skills and intelligence and a big future. I'm teaching at the Harvard Business School. I mean, this is no joke.
But they say, "I don't know what I'm meant to do with my career. I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. I don't know what it means. It feels empty," is what they're telling me. "My life feels like I'm kind of going through the motions. I feel like I'm living in a simulation," is what they keep telling me over and over and over again. I finally said, I need to listen to this, right? And so this book asks, okay, what is meaning? What does meaning mean? Where do you need to go to find meaning? And how do you need to live differently to make this not a crisis in your life and help lift other people up as well? This is a how-to manual.
Well, so that's—I think the first chapter is the meaning of meaning. The meaning of meaning. Yeah, that's the first thing. It's like meaning of life is kind of big, right?
Exactly. So, we need to discover the meaning of life, but what is that? What is that even? What is meaning? What does meaning mean when we talk about it? Because everybody says, you know, "What's the meaning of life?" It's like a New Yorker cartoon or something. You're sitting in the mouth of a cave with a guru in it saying, you know, "What's the meaning of it all?" But what is it to have meaning? So meaning for psychologists is really a combination of three phenomena. It's sort of the answer to three big why questions in life. Number one is coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? You need an answer to why things happen the way that they do. And, you know, people answer this in different ways. You and I answer this as Catholics why things happen the way they do—because of the mind of God, right? Other people answer this with respect to science, because of the laws of nature, for example. Some people, they'll answer it with conspiracy theories. You know, it's funny when you know somebody's really, really going down the rabbit hole on conspiracy theories on the internet, that's a cry for help about meaning because they're looking for coherence. They're looking for the answer: why do things happen the way that they do? And the way that you solve this is by giving them a better answer to the why question, a better answer to the coherence question. Don't say, "You're an idiot. You're an idiot. The data show." No, no, no. You say—you offer them an alternative because there's a hole in their soul for the answer to this coherence question. That's number one.
The second is the "why am I doing what I'm doing" question. That's the purpose question. That's the "where am I going? What's my direction in life?" That's really what that's all about. And you need that. You need a direction in life. Now once again, it's just really great for Catholics because we know our direction in life. We have a true north. We know where we're trying to go, which is we're trying to get to heaven.
And it's interesting because the fact that we're so hungry for purpose, we're so hungry for happiness, even though we can't get it—we can only get moments of it—that's actually evidence that what we believe is true, right? You know, like evidence that water exists is that you're thirsty. Evidence that pure joy, unremitting happiness exists is that you want it and think you can get it even though you can't in this life. That's evidence of heaven right there.
It's a hint. It's because it's evidence. It's like a little piece of it that you get at Mass, right, on your knees. That's—but that's purpose. You know, purpose is direction. Why am I doing what I'm doing today? You have to have an answer to that. Otherwise, you're just kind of going in circles.
And last but not least is significance, which is why does my life matter? Why—that's one of the meaning questions—is significance. You know, why, to whom, and why does my life matter? And if you can't answer that question, then life feels meaningless. And so I will dig into those questions when I'm dealing with young people and figure out where they actually need work. Is it a coherence problem, a purpose problem, or a significance problem? That's what we've got. But those three things together are how we define meaning.
And that's what we need to solve.
Yeah. That—sorry, I—okay. Coherence: why do things happen the way they happen? Purpose: why am I doing what I'm doing? And significance—significance is why does my life matter? Why does my life matter? And again, that's why our faith is so good for meaning because it provides an answer to all three questions, right? What would you say would be—here's a simplified, maybe not simplified—coherence and purpose and significance? How would our faith answer those three questions?
So, why do things happen the way they do? Because this is what God wills. What is my personal purpose in life? To get to heaven. Why is my life significant? Because the Lord loves me.
I matter to God. All of us matter to God. Right. So, I mean, simplified, but they're so complex.
It's super complex. And you got to, you know, I've been a Christian my whole life, and I still struggle, right? I still struggle with it, you know? I still struggle with it. I mean, we all have our hang-ups, right? I mean, one of the things that, you know, I ask people a lot: what are you most afraid of? What are you most afraid of? I'm afraid of not being loved. Because I don't really believe that I'm loved. I don't believe it. Right. And that means that you got to earn everything. Earn it, man. Earn it. Right? If you're not earning it, then you're going backwards. You're drifting down the river. But of course, love is a free gift freely given. Love is grace. Love literally can't be earned. I know that intellectually, but I struggle with believing that. So, I struggle with significance.
I really do. And I defy anybody who's watching this, anybody who reads the book or who watches Bible in a Year or, you know, who's following you, to say they don't struggle with one of these questions. And the secret to the beginning of your quest to finding the meaning of life is figuring out where you're weak. Right.
That really makes so much sense.
Yeah. Yeah. You feel purposeless, like you don't have direction. Ah, there it is.
There it is. That reminds me of—we had talked about this—a previous book of yours, From Strength to Strength, where the opening story, man on the plane who had done a lot—he had achieved a lot, he made a significant impact—but was no longer significant in the same ways. And you think, wow, the fuel that got me to this point might not be enough to get me through the finish line. Especially for people who achieve, or people who find, "I find my purpose—my purpose is to do this"—and if it's to do a work, what happens when the work is done or taken away?
Right. It's also a crummy, dirty fuel. And so a lot of achievers, you know, their fuel is the adoration of strangers. You know, and that's in the internet culture, no joke. And you and I could fall prey to this because, you know, we live a lot in front of people who don't know us. And you're doing this big speaking tour all over the country, people like Mike, and it feels great because your evolution is for you to want to rise in these natural hierarchies of the human species. Like that's naturally—your brain is wired. Mother nature wants you to want that. And so that's a fuel, but it's a crummy fuel. It's like these are empty calories. It'll fuel you till noon, but you're going to crash after lunch. And so that's what a lot of really famous people suffer with, especially because when that fuel is no longer working—because you're going to get old, I mean, and people are going to forget you, right?—except the people to whom you're significant and the ultimate source of your significance, which is the Master.
Right? That's so important, that sense of—that we spend so much time trying to be significant to people who we've never met. And instead of caring for, loving people who are right in front of us, right? And then, as you mentioned, the one who will never leave—the Lord Himself.
You'll neglect your faith and neglect your spouse so that, you know, some rando will clap for you. And, you know, people do this all the time, and your brain is wired to do that. Yeah. You know, mother nature is lying to you.
So this is part of the diagnosis, right? Emptiness. So, crisis of meaning. Oh, so actually, I don't think we talked about this here in this particular conversation, but the three macronutrients of happiness. Yeah. One of them is meaning, the other two are enjoyment and satisfaction. So enjoyment and satisfaction are macronutrients of happiness. You can't be a very happy person very long or very reliably unless you enjoy your life and you take satisfaction in your achievements and accomplishments. But the biggie that undergirds all of them is meaning. And that's really what we're finding, especially for young people today, that they're most deficient. It's kind of the protein, right, of happiness is meaning, right? And that's the one thing where if you're deficient, you'll just wither away and—because you can have all the enjoyment, all the satisfaction in the world, but your life is empty.
But if yet—that's the age of emptiness.
So if the diagnosis is that's where we're living right now, starting in 2008—just, I mean, not starting, but I mean—
2008 is when we really started to see it. That was with this explosion of, you know, there's a survey group called Monitoring the Future that's been asking for year after year after year, "Does your life feel meaningless?" It's like 15%, 15%.
Yeah. And after 2008, it just ramps up.
Weird. What was the—what's the cause? I know what happened. Run. You know what happened? I know what happened, actually.
Magic rectangles.
Yeah. And there's always been this trouble that people actually have. You look back and you find, you know, famous intellectuals struggling with this. You know, it's interesting if you read the autobiography of Leo Tolstoy, you know, one of the great Christian all-stars. And by the way, there's this intense interest in the Russian existentialists among young people today. They were all reading the Stoics 10 years ago. Now they're reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who are the Russian Christian existentialists at this point. And Tolstoy, in his autobiography, he said he wanted to kill himself when he was 50. He wanted to commit suicide when he was 50. And the reason is because he realized his life had no meaning. Now, he had 13 kids and he'd been married. Now, he had a tough marriage because, you know, it was a stormy marriage, and he was a serious Christian guy, but he just couldn't get in sync. He didn't get it. He didn't understand it, you know. And he tried everything. He tried, you know, writing better. He tried getting more famous. He tried actually learning about biology and mathematics. He tried to go more and more technical until finally he just gave up. And just in desperation, he moved to this little town, this peasant town in the countryside far away from Moscow. And he lived with these people, these illiterate peasants. And all they did was they loved each other and they loved God and they went to liturgy—Eastern Orthodox Christians—and they prayed and they danced and they sang at night. And he realized that that was the thing in his life that he was missing. What he was missing was meaning that actually would come from the non-technologized, not the hustle culture of his time. But he—this is a precursor to that. And what Tolstoy experienced in the 1890s is now what everybody is experiencing today. And that's what really happened after 2008. We all became Leo Tolstoy.
Yeah. It's the achievement culture. It's the hustle culture. It's the engineering culture, the technology culture.
And the tip of that spear is that all the time that we're actually spending online. And so, would that be not only the parasocial relationships, which aren't really relationships—
They're simulated relationships.
Simulated relationships, but also that comparison.
That's rampant, but also that sense of—we're constantly being dissatisfied with our lives because I look at someone else's life or someone else's image, someone else's whatever they're doing.
And all these things combine to create an inability to understand or even to spend any time thinking about life's meaning. And that really gets into the interesting science behind this because it's one thing to say you're spending too much time online, and everybody knows that. I mean, nobody's like, you know, "My best days are frittered away on Instagram," said no one ever, right? I mean, it's like, yeah, I just like spending seven hours looking at YouTube Shorts, right? No, I mean, people don't like that, you know, and they know there's something wrong. But so the real question, to actually dig into that to find solutions, is what scientifically is actually going wrong. And this is where the plot thickens because, you know, when I'm looking at—I'm trained as a behavioral scientist and a lot of my work is actually teaching neuroscience to my students at Harvard. And so I got to know—I have to have a technical explanation for this, and there absolutely is one.
This gets into what we call hemispheric lateralization—fancy way of saying that the brain does different things on different sides. And God gives us—we're wonderfully made, you know, and God gives us fingers for a reason and toes for a reason and our eyes for a reason and two hemispheres for our brain for a reason. They do different things. They do a lot of things the same as well. But the left side of the brain is for solving technical problems, what and how-to questions. The right side of the brain is for the why questions. It's all the mystery and meaning in life is really the right side of the brain. And all the ways that we're living today—that Tolstoy was doing in 1890 because, you know, he was ahead of his time—is what we're all doing today, which is living on the left side of our brains. We're literally not using our brains in full. And the result of that is that we're not residing geographically in the place. People say, "Where do I go to find meaning? The beach? Italy?" No, the right hemisphere of your brain. That's where you need to go. And so the solution to the crisis of meaning is actually opening up and going into the right side of our brains. That's what we need to do. Now, easier said than done—say, "Well, how do we do that?"
Yeah. I was like, "Oh, easy." It's like, you know, turn it on. But I mean, it's so interesting because, you know, people will say, "Well, give me the seven steps," right? The seven steps to actually doing that. But that's actually a left-brain solution, you know. That's the paradox of all this stuff that we actually see is finding the algorithm for turning on the right side of your brain—even articulating it is hard.
Right. You know, the right brain of mystery and meaning—the way to understand this is that you and I have talked about this in a past conversation, on a past podcast, is the complicated versus the complex parts of life, which sounds like I'm splitting hairs. I'm logic-chopping like a Harvard professor. And I apologize for that, but—
Classic Harvard, classic. It's like Harvard professor looking complicated or complex.
The complicated problems in your life are the ones that are super hard to solve, but once you solve them, they're solved.
Right. I mean, so it's like writing code for an app that'll find you a pizza at 10 p.m. That's a complicated problem, right? Nobody had done it. Probably it's been done 100 times in the past year, but it hadn't been done until recently. Building a car, a jet engine, solving a math problem—those are complicated problems. And that's what the world values today is the solution to complicated problems. Everything that you're doing online is solving a bunch of mental complicated problems. The simulated life is all a complicated version of real life is what it comes down to.
But the other side of the brain, on the right side of the brain, is complex problems, complex questions. Those are easy to understand and impossible to solve. Impossible to solve. You just live with them. You don't solve mysteries. You live with mysteries. If it's a real mystery, you're not going to solve it. I mean, solutions to mysteries—I'm sorry, that's just like a mystery novel or, you know, it's a crime drama or, you know, something like that. But real mysteries in life are the ones that we actually live with. I defy anybody watching us to truly solve the mystery of the Trinity.
Right. Solve that. It's like, as a matter of fact, when people do—and they do it with apologetics, you know, apologetics—people go, "Oh, that's a great argument. That's a great argument. It makes me feel empty, right?"
You know, it's a funny thing about apologetics. People often say this to me. It's like they're so convincing and yet so hollow, right? They make me feel spiritually hollow.
That's why—because it's a right-brain question with a left-brain answer. And left-brain answers won't solve your right-brain problems. Your right-brain problems are love, right? I mean, I'm completely in love with my wife. I'm completely in love. 34 years, I'm completely in love. But if you say, "Hey, Brooks, tell me why you're in love with your wife," anything I say will trivialize it. The reason is because the language centers—it's like, "Because she's so good to me. She's the mother of my children and she's nice to me." So was my third-grade teacher. Actually, she wasn't. But anyway, it's—and the reason is because my language centers—the Broca's area and Wernicke's area of my brain—are in the left part of the cortex. They're over here in the vast majority of people. There's some cases where they're not. And that's why even the greatest love poet doesn't give you the goods, right? Because it's just a bunch of words. It's a simulacrum. It's a curve fit to the true mystery is the way that this works. And when you're in love with somebody, you're just like, "I'm just in love." Yeah. And when you love God and when you're having the experience of the divine and when you have those moments—which sometimes you get dryness, or St. Ignatius of Loyola called it desolation—those are those times without, right? But then you get those moments of consolation. You're like—and it catches in your throat, right? You go to benediction or something like that, right? What that is, these are right-brain moments of deep understanding. That's why your right brain exists. And those are those moments of deep meaning. And if you're doing something that's systematically shutting off your access to the right part of your brain, boy oh boy, are you going to suffer. And that's exactly what we've got.
That's how—where we live.
That's where we're living. That's where our society is living. It's not just sometimes when I go on my phone I do that. It is we—that is our culture right now.
Yeah. I mean, to put on the timer on your phone and it's going to come back full of recrimination and reproach once a week to say, "You spent five hours a day on your phone, you loser."
But that's five hours where that right brain was turned off. And it's not just the phone. It's not just technology. This is not just a broadside against social media. I love social media for what it can actually do to bring ideas to people. The problem is that when that's all there is, because that's the simulated life. That's life in the Matrix. That's not actually you. You have to get ideas, but then you got to go live them, right? You have to have a concept of relationships, but then you got to go experience them is how that works.
We had talked about the Camino. Like, I don't know, a couple months ago. And the Camino—and not everyone can do the Camino. Not everyone has to do the Camino, right? But what is it about something like walking across northern Spain that helps people break out of the Matrix, helps people get into mystery?
It's boring. Okay. And that's what we need. I mean, it's like we solved the problem of boredom. Yeah. And you and I have talked about this before, but not in this particular episode. These boredom experiments that my colleague at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, ran, where people in a laboratory, they're put in there for 15 minutes with nothing to do in an empty room of average light and temperature and nothing on the walls, and the only thing they can do is sit there quietly, silently, or press a button on a little key fob that self-administers a painful electric shock. And more than half of the people choose to shock themselves. It's a quarter of the women and two-thirds of the dudes.
That's crazy. Shocking themselves. Painful. I mean, it's painful. I don't know how we got through this—the internal review board to actually conduct this experiment.
But this is better than boredom because we don't want it. But the truth of the matter is that it's scary. It's hard to turn on the right hemisphere of your brain because there be dragons, man.
And so it's like, no, just distract me. Just distract me. I mean, it's like a funny reel. It's, you know, an idle text message. It's a dumb notification. It's a little scandal on X. It's a tiny bit of outrage. All that is is keeping your right brain off because you know it's uncomfortable.
