Book Excerpt: ‘The Meaning of Your Life’ by Arthur C. Brooks
Takeaways:
After a decade away from campus, Brooks returned to teach at Harvard in 2019 expecting to rediscover the optimism and energy that students had always given him — but found the opposite. Depression and anxiety had become pervasive. Office hours felt more like counseling sessions than tutoring, and the hope he remembered in his students had been replaced by fear, anger, and sadness. He wondered at the basis of these dark transitions.
Brooks soon found that the problems existed off campus as well. While rates of depression and anxiety among American adolescents had nearly tripled between 2005 and 2019, while the percentage of adults who self-described as “not too happy” more than doubled from 2000 to 2023.
The data showed what social scientists call a psychogenic epidemic: a phenomenon that causes tremendous suffering but has no organic cause, meaning the onset is social or psychological, not biological. The most puzzling finding of all came soon after: that the hardworking strivers who should be best positioned to thrive were actually suffering the most.
Clarity on why is not to be found in a generational blame game. Young people point to broken systems— unaffordable housing, an unstable safety net, a damaged planet. Older generations push back, citing their own lean early years and this generation’s lack of frugality. Brooks dismisses both sides: blaming a deep philosophical crisis on another generation’s selfishness is nothing new, and neither explanation accounts for something this widespread and unprecedented.Brooks’s research confirms a direct relationship between screen time and emotional suffering — the more time on a phone, the more depressed and anxious a person becomes. But excessive phone use is ultimately a soothing behavior. People reach for it when something more essential is missing from their lives, and the behavior itself makes that missing thing even harder to find.
What people are truly missing is meaning. Interview after interview confirmed it. Beneath the anxiety and the scrolling and the striving is a deeper hunger — not for more, but for purpose.
By Arthur C. Brooks
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