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 for The free presshost of office hours podcast and CBS News contributor.
What’s the big idea?
Life has not lost meaning, but most of us have adopted habits that silence meaning. Reconnecting with a deeper purpose awaits in the right hemisphere of your brain. All you need is to learn to activate that side of existence.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite, read by Brooks himself, on the Next Big Idea app or purchase the book.
1. We have a crisis of meaning.
When teaching about happiness, a lot of the advice I give is actually about unhappiness. A few years ago, I began searching for the reasons behind our unhappiness epidemic: why are rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness increasing? There are many popular explanations, but none really hold up.
When I started talking to a lot of young people, one word kept coming up:meaning. Young people, especially young people in college, wanted to know what they were supposed to do. They said things like, “My life seems meaningless. Why? What is the meaning of my life?” I decided this is where I had to look.
Survey data shows that for people under 30, the number one predictor of clinical depression and generalized anxiety is answering yes to the question: Do you feel like your life is meaningless? We have a crisis of meaning in our society that is particularly acute for people under 35. We also see it with greater prevalence in people who seem to have fewer problems; those considered highly educated fighters.
2. The meaning of the meaning.
When digging into philosophy and psychology, it turns out that the meaning of meaning has three parts:
- Coherence– An answer to why things happen the way they do. Some people respond to this with religion or science. If you know someone who is going down the rabbit hole with conspiracy theories, that’s a cry for help about meaning and the only way out is to give them a better way to find coherence.
- Aim– An answer to why you are doing what you are doing. Everyone needs a sense of direction or goals; Otherwise, life will seem to go in meaningless circles.
- Meaning– An answer about why your life is important and to whom. This is truly a question of love: Who loves me? Does God love me? Does my family love me? Do I have friends? Feeling like your life doesn’t matter to anyone is a problem.
3. Where to go to find meaning.
I remember when I was young, trying to find my way. When I was 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 man, “What do I do to find meaning in my life?” And he said, “You know what you need to do, man? You need to go live on the beach. Maybe work in a surf shop in San Diego. Then you’ll find the meaning of your life.” In other words, his answer to where he should go to find meaning was the beach.
There’s nothing wrong with the beach, but that’s not the right answer. I really like the beach, but the place you really need to go to find meaning is the right side of your brain.
There is a whole theory in neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization. This is just a fancy way of saying that the right and left sides of the brain do different things. The left side of your brain is where you answer technical questions: the as and that questions. The right side of your brain is the complex side that responds because questions, including the meaning and mystery of your life, love, happiness and everything that really matters to you. 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 the brain is increasingly difficult. The culture of busyness and routine is a culture of technical problems. Technology also places us in a left-brain world where we can spend all day writing that and as questions in the Google search bar or ChatGPT. We use our technical left brain from the moment we wake up to check our phones, and then continue to use it when we go to work on Zoom, swipe right on an appointment, scroll through our friends’ posts on social media, or feel the victory of winning an online game. The truth of the matter is that the right brain of modern people has been weakening.
We feel like we live in a simulation, don’t we? We are simulating ordinary life, but the only thing that cannot 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 calm themselves in our stressful world, but then they get hooked on them. Do you find it difficult to put down 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.
This is how all addictions work. They affect the dopamine system in the brain. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, gambling, or any type of behavior that you compulsively repeat and increase, it activates the neurochemistry in your brain that gives you a feeling of longing. And that’s exactly what’s happening with your device habits. We are terribly addicted to technology.
Every time we feed that addiction, we shut down the right side of our brain and disconnect from the meaning of our lives. The first step to finding meaning is to break free from device addictions and technological fixation. Now, I’m not saying to throw your phone in the ocean, but we need to put some fences around it.
For starters, don’t use your phone for the first hour after you wake up because that’s 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 and invite human company to share the table with you whenever possible. Just those three things will help you reclaim your life from technology addiction and allow you to start exploring the right side of your brain. This is how to be clean.
5. How to live a clean life.
Meaning comes when you use the right side of your 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. Requires real life experiences.
Now, I don’t say 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 interact virtually. If you want to open the right side of your brain, you need to cultivate in-person relationships.
If you don’t know what to do, you need to serve someone. You need to lift someone else up. You need to have an experience with someone you really love. And when you do, you will discover that your life changes. When you do these things in search of meaning, your meaning will find you, not the other way around. Because when you open the right side of your brain, you are opening the aperture that contains the ancient wisdom you need. Your meaning is out there and it will find you if you give it a chance. When you do, your life will never be the same.
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This article originally appeared in Next big ideas club magazine and is reprinted with permission.