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.
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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.
2. The meaning of meaning.
Upon digging into philosophy and psychology, it turns out that the meaning of meaning has three parts:
- Coherence – An answer as to why things happen the way they do. Some people answer this with religion or science. If you know someone going down the rabbit hole on conspiracy theories, that’s a cry for help about meaning and the only way out is giving them a better way to find coherence.
- Purpose – An answer as to why you are doing what you are doing. Everyone needs a sense of direction or goals, otherwise life will feel like going in meaningless circles.
- Significance – An answer as to why your life matters, and to whom. This is really a love question: Who loves me? Does God love me? Does my family love me? Do I have friends? Feeling like your life doesn’t matter to anybody is a problem.
3. Where to go to find meaning.
I remember when I was a young man, just trying to find my way. In my early twenties, I was a pretty serious musician. I practiced a lot, but I was very insecure and didn’t understand the meaning of my life. One day, I asked an older guy, “What do I do to find the meaning of my life?” And he said, “You know what you need to do, man? You need to go live at the beach. Maybe work at a surf shop in San Diego. Then you’ll find the meaning of your life.” In other words, his answer to where I should go to find meaning was the beach.
There’s nothing wrong with the beach, but that’s not the right answer. I like the beach plenty, but the place you actually need to go to for finding meaning is the right side of your brain.
There’s a whole theory in neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization. This is just a fancy way of saying that the right and left sides of your brain do different things. The left side of your brain is where you answer technical questions—the how and what questions. The right side of your brain is the complex side that answers why questions—including the meaning and mystery of your life, love, happiness, and all that you really care about. If you want to find the meaning of your life, you need to exercise the right hemisphere of your brain.
But exercising the right hemisphere of your brain is getting harder. The hustle-and-grind culture is a culture of technical problems. Technology also places us in a left-hemisphere world where we can spend all day typing what and how questions into the Google search bar or ChatGPT. We engage our technical left brain from the moment we wake up to check our phones, and then we continue to use it when we go to work on Zoom, swipe right on a date, scroll through our friends’ posts on social media, or feel the victory of beating a game online. The truth of the matter is that the right brains of modern people have been getting weaker.
We feel like we’re living in a simulation, don’t we? We’re simulating ordinary life, but the one thing that can’t be simulated is the meaning of life. For that, you need to get to the right side of your brain.
4. The first step to finding meaning.
People use devices and technology to self-soothe in our stressful world—but then, they get hooked on them. Do you have a hard time letting go of your phone from time to time? Maybe you feel a little anxious when your phone is not near you? Well, it’s not your fault.
That’s how all addictions work. They affect the dopamine system in the brain. Whether it’s drugs and alcohol or gambling or any sort of behavior that you compulsively repeat and escalate, it activates neurochemistry in your brain that gives you a sense of craving. And that’s exactly what’s happening with your device habits. We’re horribly addicted to technology.
Every time we feed that addiction, we close off the right side of our brain and disconnect from the meaning of our lives. The first step to finding meaning is getting clean of device addictions and technology fixation. Now, I’m not saying to throw your phone into the ocean, but we need to put some fences around it.
For starters, don’t use your phone during the first hour after you wake up because this is when you’re programming your brain for the day. Then set it aside for the last hour of the day when you’re getting ready to rest. Also, don’t pick it up while you eat your meals, and invite human company to share the table with you whenever possible. Just those three things will help you get your life back from technology addiction and make it possible for you to start exploring the right side of your brain. That’s how to get clean.
5. How to live a clean life.
Meaning comes when you’re using your right brain, and doing so means loving people in real life. Happiness is love because love brings meaning, but love can only happen with other people—maybe with God, but certainly not with inanimate objects like money or even online friends. It requires in-real-life experiences.
Now, I’m not saying this as a moralist, but as a behavioral social scientist. We are wired in our evolutionary environment to be together in person. Our brains don’t work very well when we’re interacting virtually. If you want to open the right side of your brain, you need to cultivate relationships in person.
If you don’t know what to do, you need to serve somebody. You need to lift somebody else up. You need to have an experience with somebody that you truly love. And when you do, you’re going to find your life changing. When you do these things in search of meaning, your meaning will find you—and not the other way around. Because when you open the right side of your brain, you’re opening the aperture that contains the ancient wisdom that you need. Your meaning is out there and will find you if you give it the opportunity. When it does, your life will never be the same.
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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.