Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.
Brooks walks through the biology of falling in love, the real formula behind human suffering, and why a Harvard study spanning 85 years found deep relationships to be the single strongest predictor of a happy old age.
About the speaker: Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he teaches public and nonprofit leadership and management practice. Before joining Harvard in July 2019, he spent ten years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a well-known public policy think tank in Washington, DC.
Brooks has written 11 books, including the bestsellers “Love Your Enemies” (2019), “The Conservative Heart” (2015), and “The Road to Freedom” (2012). He writes a column for The Atlantic, hosts the podcast “The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks,” and is featured in the 2019 documentary “The Pursuit.” He also serves on the board of the Legatum Institute, a think tank in London.
Timestamps
00:00:31 Chapter 1: Why life feels meaningless
00:07:20 Our 250,000-year-old wiring vs. complicated tech
00:16:17 The meaning recession
00:27:55 Chapter 2: The 5 essential elements of happiness
00:39:32 Love: Your brain on love
00:48:43 Transcendence: The cure for me, me, me
00:55:54 Calling: What am I meant to do?
01:02:29 Beauty: The beauty deficit
01:09:42 Suffering: Suffering is sacred
01:20:25 Chapter 3: How to overcome your addiction to technology
01:31:13 Get mad, detox, live differently
01:38:42 The detox playbook
01:49:48 A boring life vs. a real life
Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:
Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
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.” Today on Big Think, we’re going to talk about three big things. Number one is the fact that people have been finding their lives less meaningful. The second is what should we do to live happier lives with more meaning? What are the strategies that we can all undertake? And last but not least, the issue of addiction, especially addiction to devices.
Chapter 1: Why life feels meaningless
There are many hypotheses about the explosion of depression and anxiety out there, especially for young adults under 30. The one thing that nobody’s in doubt about, however, is that these problems are real. The numbers just don’t lie. 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? For many years, decades, generations, the answer for almost everybody was yes. People had a strong sense of meaning in their lives, but then something happened. The percentage of 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.
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. 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. 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 for that. 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.
Click here to continue reading the video transcript.
Related Video
A negotiation expert on how to navigate emotionally charged conflicts
Heated conflicts pop up everywhere in life, and work is no exception. So how do you work through them in a way that actually benefits everyone without torching your relationships? Professor and negotiation expert Dan Shapiro shares the importance of really listening to the other person, getting honest about what's driving you, dealing with the hurt that's there, and asking questions you genuinely want answers to.
