When most people think of happiness — or the lack thereof — it’s things like relationships, leisure, entertainment and money that occupy their ruminations.
We miss too often some of the deeper drivers of happiness, according to Arthur Brooks, whose new book, “The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness,” was released Tuesday.
More than simply enjoyment and satisfaction, meaning is another key component of happiness, said the Harvard researcher at a book launch on Friday. “What we’re seeing today is that meaning is the part that’s collapsing. That’s the crisis. Meaning is blocked.”
Brooks said he hears more and more people saying, “My life feels empty. I feel disconnected. I don’t know what I’m working toward.” Brooks added, “If you don’t know why you get up in the morning, that’s a problem.”
“In some cases, people aren’t even searching anymore” for meaning, he said. “And that’s when it becomes really dangerous. Because when people stop searching for meaning, they start to lose hope.”
Less faith, less meaning?
It wasn’t until the 19th and 20th centuries that human beings began to talk specifically about the “meaning of life.” Until this time, philosophers and believers taking up related questions spoke of “purpose” and “telos” (What are we for?) or “virtue” and “goodness” (What is the good life?), as well as “salvation” and “obedience” (How should we live?).
As scientific secularism grew in the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche warned that the erosion of shared religious foundations could lead to a crisis of “nihilism” — with many concluding that life had no value or meaning. The philosopher understood this to be a problem, famously saying, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Yet for Nietzsche and others, that meaning was self-created and no longer dependent on faith or spirituality. In 1942, French author Albert Camus cynically defined the human condition as “a clash between our desire for meaning and a silent, indifferent universe.”
Brooks acknowledged that people today are less likely to look toward family, religion, community and work for meaning as they did in past eras — one part of the “crisis” of meaning facing modern society.
‘Rectangles of sadness’
Meaning itself tends to center on three questions, Brooks said: “Why do things happen the way they do? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why does your life matter — and to whom?”
Answers to these questions came more “naturally” and “automatically” in past eras, Brooks argued. But in recent decades, “something has changed,” making meaning harder to find.
What many are not realizing, Brooks continued, is that continual interactions with smartphones and other screens spur real and consequential brain changes in most of us.
When you check your phone first thing in the morning, Brooks said, you probably don’t realize you’re “neurocognitively programming your brain for the whole day.”
Compared with the right side of the brain, centered on deep “why” questions about life, love and happiness, screens tend to shift us into a left-brain focus on “how” and “what” is going on.
This is how Brooks explains why he hears so many young people tell him: “I’m on my phone all day long, and life feels fake. Life feels empty.”
While both sides of the brain are important, we’ve increasingly “stopped using the right hemispheres of our brain,” Brooks claimed. “You’re supposed to spend lots of time in the right hemisphere of your brain — mind wandering, figuring out these questions of meaning.”
“If you keep kicking yourself over to the left side of your brain, you’re stuck. You’re not going to be thinking about meaning. This is the problem of the age.”
Reclaiming our attention
The No. 1 predictor of a child’s relationship with technology, Brooks reminded adults, is their parents’ own relationship with technology: “Remember, you are what your kids are going to become.”
“You need to fight back. You need to get clean,” he encouraged, underscoring the addictive qualities of our relationship with technology. Unlike alcohol, which someone may need to stay away from for good, phones are more like food — we need to learn to use them in healthy ways.
On that note, the researcher promised that your “life is going to start to change” if you can establish tech-free zones and times. This starts with the first hour of the day, which he calls the “most important hour of the day,” because it’s when we prime our brains for the day ahead.
The last hour of the night is another “magic hour,” along with mealtimes. People don’t realize, Brooks said, that “even if you have the phone on your dinner table with you and it is facing down, and you look at it, you’ll think, ‘Is there something on my notifications?’”
That small distraction can measurably disrupt our brain’s ability to connect, he explained, by “cutting your oxytocin flow.”
Deeper purpose at home
Researcher Dan Buettner told a story at the Friday event about a man who traveled extensively in search of a mission before realizing his daughter needed more support. “He went the whole world looking for purpose and found it at home,” Buettner said.
With an estimated 70% of people not finding purpose in their day job, Buettner concluded, “I think for those people who are struggling to find purpose in their cubicle, it might be right at home.”
Maria Shriver, former first lady of California, likewise shared that success for her now means “raising good children and grandchildren.”
“I learned kind of the hard way that the success and the love that I was searching for was actually in my own home,” Shriver said. “It was at my dinner table.”
A ‘relationship with our creator’
Actor Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight in “The Office,” shared with Brooks the struggles of his earlier years, when he felt caught in a cycle of “incessant striving and craving … clutching and grasping” like a “hungry ghost.”
Wilson described years of self-medicating his pain with “drugs and alcohol and porn and whatever else I could find.”
Through therapy, medication and his “prayer practice,” Wilson talked about learning that “anxiety is something to be witnessed and allowed” — which brought him to a new “kind of a peace around it.”
“Only through suffering can one understand joy, right?” he said. “If you didn’t experience suffering, then how would you know what’s beautiful on the other side?”
At times, people would scream at him, as a celebrity, “I love you!” Wilson said those people didn’t mean it because they didn’t know him. But when he felt God whispering, “I love you,” he knew “that was really true.”
The true “why” of everything taking place, Brooks says, is “found in our families, it’s found in our service to others, and it is found, fundamentally, in our relationship with our creator and with the transcendental.”