Introduction — Unheimlich
For Arthur Brooks, home has always meant a college campus. In the fall of 2019, after ten years running a nonprofit in Washington, DC, he came back to campus to teach at Harvard, and he felt unheimlich. It’s a German word for the uneasy feeling you get when something isn’t right at home. The air had darkened. More and more students were depressed and anxious, and his office hours felt like counseling sessions. It wasn’t just campus. From 2005 to 2019, the share of American teens with symptoms of major depression nearly tripled. And the people who should have been doing best, the hardworking strivers, were suffering most. So he started asking people for their stories.
Marc, thirty-two, is a data analyst who worked his way out of a poor, broken home. “My life feels empty,” he said. On a first date, a woman mentioned her garbage disposal was clogged, so he fixed it that night, and it gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. His own was clogged too. A year later, he still hasn’t fixed it. What he craved was being needed. Maria, twenty-seven, is a rising military officer who stays busy every minute so she doesn’t have to face the big questions. “What if I never find the answers?” she asked. Paul, forty-seven, is a professor who learned as a kid that love was earned with gold stars. Now his work feels pointless. Asked what he wanted, he said, “I want to go hiking, for a long time.” Where? “To where I might find what I’m looking for.”
Then one young man put it plainly: “I feel like I’m living in a simulation.” Others agreed. Life felt full of fake rewards and fake experiences. What was missing was the one thing that can’t be simulated: meaning. Happiness has three parts: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. There’s no sign that enjoyment or satisfaction has dropped. Meaning has collapsed. Since 2008, the share of teens who agree that “life often seems meaningless” has roughly doubled, to more than one in five.
Strivers get hit hardest because they’ve been trained to believe hard work and know-how can solve any problem. But meaning isn’t that kind of problem. It has to be lived, not solved with a Google search. Your life does have meaning, and you can find it. First, though, you need to know what you’re looking for.
Chapter 1 — The Meaning of Meaning
At fifty-one, Leo Tolstoy wanted to kill himself. He was the most celebrated writer of his time, lived in luxury, and had thirteen children. He’d searched for life’s meaning in his work and then in science, and found nothing. But things were going to get better for him for one simple reason: he kept looking. The best predictor of finding something is looking for it.
To look, you need to know what you’re after. The psychologists Frank Martela and Michael Steger break meaning into three parts: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the sense that your life fits together and things happen for a reason, even if you only see it afterward. Purpose is having goals and a direction, like a map that shows where you are and where you’re going. Significance means the world would be worse for someone you love if you didn’t exist. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey stands on a bridge believing his family would be better off with his life insurance. Then an angel shows him the world without him, and he sees how much he mattered to the people he loved. He’d been measuring his life by his work. But titles and awards come and go, and the people who love you don’t care about them. Do you really think your grandkids will care that you were a Rhodes Scholar?
Each part comes with a big question you can ask yourself. Why do things happen the way they do in my life? Why am I moving in this direction? Why does my life matter? A test called the Meaning in Life Questionnaire shows where you’re starting. It measures presence, how strongly you already sense your life’s meaning, and search, how hard you’re looking. Many successful people score high on both. They’re Relentless Seekers who can’t stop thinking there’s more to find. The author is one. He says he became a social scientist not to do research but “me-search.”
Tolstoy tried one last thing. He went to live among farmers in a small village. They couldn’t read his books, but they had a peace he didn’t. They wondered about life plenty. They just didn’t demand neat answers. He called what they had “irrational knowledge” and concluded, “Irrational knowledge is faith.” He went back to his old life carrying their simple convictions, and he died a happy man. What happened to him there has a lot to do with how your brain works.
Chapter 2 — The Right Side of Your Brain
In The Matrix, Neo wants to destroy the simulation not because it’s unpleasant but because it isn’t real. Marc, Maria, and Paul feel the same way about their lives. As the critic Ted Gioia has written, people have gone from playing sports outside to gaming, from letters to disappearing texts, from courtship to swiping right. These easy substitutes don’t deliver meaning.
The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist explains why. Each half of your brain handles almost everything, but in different ways. The right side asks big questions like “Why am I alive?” The left side asks practical ones like “How do I get food?” You need both, but the right has to lead. Without a why, there’s no reason to go get the food. The right side is where wonder lives, and love too. The author has been married to Ester for thirty-four years. She might tell him she loves him in the morning and be mad at him by evening. There’s no way to solve a marriage. You can only live it.
A complicated problem is hard to understand but can be solved for good. A complex one is easy to understand but can’t be solved, only lived. The things you care about most are complex. Modern life pushes people onto the left side, where you can get great at a video game without ever asking what you want from life.
Stuck there, life gets boring, and people hate boredom so much they’ll choose pain instead. In one study, people left alone in a room could give themselves an electric shock to pass the time. Two-thirds of men and a quarter of women did. One man shocked himself 190 times in fifteen minutes. So people built antiboredom machines. Now the average American looks at their phone 205 times a day, and boredom is one of the biggest predictors of addiction.
This is the doom loop. Technical work and constant distraction keep you on the left side. Meaning fades, depression and anxiety rise, and you numb yourself with more screen time. The answer isn’t to get rid of technology. It’s to put it in its place. One night in Seattle, a cab driver pulled over so he and the author could admire a new 787 jet lit up in a hangar. The driver had read that one day people could upload their brains to the cloud and live forever. How did he feel about that? “It wouldn’t be me at all,” he said, “because no one can upload my soul.” Getting your soul back starts with breaking the loop.
Chapter 3 — Interrupt the Doom Loop
In 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had thirty days to finish a novel about a gambling addict to pay off his gambling debts. He hadn’t started, because he’d been gambling. He hired a young stenographer named Anna, dictated The Gambler to her, finished with four days to spare, and fell in love. His recovery began with a thought about the people around him. The fancy crowd at the casino was just as miserable as he was. “Hang them all!” he declared. “There are still the makings of a man in me.” He learned that his life’s meaning was in the ordinary things that had once bored him next to roulette.
Every escape like his has three steps: rebel against what trapped you, break the addiction, and learn to love the life that once seemed boring. Start with a little righteous anger. The average person checks their phone a couple hundred times a day and picks it up within ten minutes of waking. Quitting is hard because everyone around you is still hooked. For courage, read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance.” Guard your privacy: “My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.” Stop copying the crowd, drop what’s trivial, and tell the truth, even if it means changing your mind. Going your own way feels scary because your brain evolved in small bands where getting kicked out could kill you.
Next, detox. Your brain learns through dopamine, in a loop of wanting, liking, and learning. Chocolate raises dopamine about 50 percent above normal, alcohol 150 percent, and meth 1,000 percent. Social media is built to tap the same system. So keep devices away from meals and the bedroom. Take a device-free week each year. After a few hard days, food tastes better and conversations get interesting. Turn off every notification, except maybe the ringer for when your mother calls. And keep your phone out of reach, like the writer Cal Newport, who leaves his by the front door.
Finally, get bored on purpose. The psychologist Ellen Langer calls mindfulness “simply noticing new things.” On the train, put your phone away and look out the window. Work out without headphones. Treat boredom like the gym. At first it’s uncomfortable, and then you start to like it. You notice small things, like a spider crossing the floor. That quiet space is where meaning can grow. The rare strivers who resist the meaning crisis do six things: they ask big questions, risk love, look beyond themselves, find a calling, seek beauty, and learn from suffering. What your grandparents did as part of ordinary life, you’ll need to do on purpose. It starts with questions.
Chapter 4 — Three Big Questions You Must Ask
Koko the gorilla learned more than one thousand words in sign language. But Koko never asked a single question about life’s meaning. What sets people apart isn’t solving hard problems. It’s wondering. The Greeks had a word for the puzzled feeling deep questions leave you with: aporia, meaning “no path.” It’s what used to fill late-night dorm conversations, before forty funny YouTube shorts crowded them out.
The questions need to go past what you do. “I’m a university professor” works at a party. But if that’s how you know yourself, you’re in for a crisis the day the job goes away. How you spend your time says more. A man who calls himself a family man but golfs every weekend is showing what really comes first. To get to the person underneath, you have to ask why.
The first why is about coherence: why do things happen the way they do in my life? Rank five possible reasons: your own choices, other people’s choices, the laws of nature, the will of a higher power, and pure chance. The author’s father, a statistician, would have put God first and chance second. He believed miracles were real, just way out on the tails of the distribution. Then check your habits against your list. If you rank God first but never pray, that gap is costing you coherence.
The second is about purpose: why am I moving in this direction? Strivers assume the next goal will make them happy for good. It won’t, because no strong feeling lasts. You can get satisfaction. You just can’t keep it. The night the author got tenure, he and his wife went out to celebrate and spent dinner fretting because one of their kids had bitten a classmate at preschool. The more strivers achieve, the emptier they feel. Call it the Striver’s Curse. The goals that bring meaning come from inside, and for almost everyone, that means loving and being loved. Your spouse will never love what you achieve, only who you are. He admits this is the hardest one for him, after years of trying to earn his wife’s love through accomplishments.
The third is about significance: why does my life matter? Aristotle described three kinds of friendship. Friendships of utility are useful, like work friends. A quick test: do you know their kids’ names? Friendships of pleasure run on fun. Both end when the doing stops. Virtuous friendships rest on character, and they can last a lifetime. Strivers tend to have a lot of deal friends and no real friends. So list the ten people you spend the most time with, mark each one, and choose which friendships to deepen. The deepest answer to why your life matters is the people you give your heart to.
Chapter 5 — Give Your Heart Away
In the summer of 1988, a jet-lagged twenty-four-year-old Arthur Brooks was playing a concert in France when he spotted a beautiful woman smiling at him from the audience. He made a beeline to meet her and found out they had no language in common. Her name was Ester, and she was Catalan. He went home to New York but couldn’t get her out of his mind. Months later, she sold her few things and flew to see him. Soon he took an orchestra job in Barcelona, learned Spanish and Catalan, and proposed. Early on, Ester read him Pablo Neruda’s love poems in Spanish. She might as well have been reading to a golden retriever. But they understood each other on a level deeper than words. Thirty-four years later, they have three grown kids and four grandkids.
In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima describes a Ladder of Love. It starts with attraction to one beautiful person, then grows into a love of beauty, then of beautiful souls, then of ideas, and finally of what matters most in life. Meaning is too complex to grab directly, so romantic love is the way in.
Fewer people are finding that way in. In 1949, 79 percent of American households had a married couple. By 2022, it was 47 percent. Call it a love depression. Technology can’t fix it, because love is complex, not complicated. Apps match you with people like you, but the happiest couples often balance each other out. So let friends set you up, go where people share your values, like a church or a running club, and meet in person early. Pornography moves you the other way. It doesn’t just keep you off the first rung of the ladder. It chops up the ladder and burns it.
What stops most people is fear of rejection. Some of his students will risk millions on a startup but are terrified to talk to someone they like. Avoiding that pain works like babying a hurt back. It only gets weaker. So stay open. If your heart breaks, the pain fades on a schedule. The average person feels about half as bad six months later. Just don’t follow your ex online. That’s a near-perfect way to block your recovery.
Romance doesn’t come to everyone, and close friendship starts you up the same ladder. The Harvard Study of Adult Development found that where there’s no lifelong partner, happiness and meaning come from very close friends. If you’re lonely, reach out to an old friend for no reason. Send a text like, “So, how was your son’s Little League tournament?” It won’t be useful to you in any worldly way. That’s the point. Love like that pulls your attention off yourself, which is the next practice.
Chapter 6 — Transcend Yourself
In April 2013, Brooks rode for hours through Indian villages to meet the Dalai Lama. He’d rehearsed an introduction, but the Dalai Lama walked straight up and looked into his eyes like an old friend. Over the years that followed, the Dalai Lama taught him that you can’t just shut off the noise in your head. You have to rise above it. And since the noise comes from inside you, that means rising above yourself. There are two ways: lift your attention to the divine, and look outward to serve others.
You don’t have to be religious to try the first. No one is trying to convert you. Just stay open to the idea that there’s more to life than you can see. If you want to explore faith but feel nothing, start with practice. Belief and feeling tend to follow it, not lead it. Brooks, a lifelong Catholic, goes to Mass every morning, often feeling nothing at all. “My feelings are liars,” he says. So go to a house of worship. Leave your phone in the car, sit in the back, and listen with an open mind. His father, a mathematician who prayed every day, had the best answer to the Soviet cosmonaut who said he looked around space and saw no God: “It’s like saying Picasso doesn’t exist because he can’t be found inside Picasso’s paintings.”
The second way is to look outward. The psychologist William James said you have two selves: one that notices the world and one that watches you. Meaning comes when you’re noticing the world, but you spend almost all your time watching yourself. You watch a sunset and feel part of something bigger, until you think about posting it. Serving others is the best way back. A psychologist friend once told Brooks that giving a lot to one person does more than giving a little to many.
When he mentioned that as a research idea, Ester said she’d been dreaming about a little girl abandoned in a park. “Let’s adopt a baby who needs a family,” she said. Eighteen months later, he flew alone to an orphanage in Jinjiang, China, to bring home a toddler who’d been abandoned at less than a day old, in a park. When the staff tried to take her back so he could sign papers, she screamed and held on tighter. She had adopted him. Today she’s a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. The Dalai Lama puts it simply: “I am one of eight billion people.” Serving just one other person is a way of loving all the billions who aren’t you. And for most people, the place they spend the most hours serving others is at work.
Chapter 7 — Look for Your Calling
A young monk is told on his first day, “Before you reach enlightenment, you will chop wood and carry water.” For twenty years he does, dreaming of the easier job he’ll get once he’s a master. Finally he becomes one and asks what his job will be now. The head monk smiles. “Chop wood, carry water.” The work was the path all along. Work takes up at least half your waking hours, so it has to be part of your search for meaning.
Reasons for working stack up like a ladder. From the bottom up: necessary evil, duty, craft, service to others, and at the top, calling. A calling doesn’t need a vision from heaven. It needs purpose, and it can show up in unglamorous work. When Brooks was a struggling new CEO himself, a friend who ran one of the world’s biggest companies told him, “Eighty percent of being a CEO is taking out the trash. But even that is important to do with excellence.”
What makes work feel like a calling is being needed. Almost nothing is more crushing than feeling useless. Near the end of his life, in and out of the hospital, the author’s father kept saying, “I can’t cancel another class. My students need me.” Choosing work for fun doesn’t make people more passionate. Choosing work that serves your values does.
Not everyone gets to choose. A young man on live TV said he entered data in a cubicle farm all day and doubted anyone would notice if it never got done. The advice he got was simple. Tomorrow, pour a cup of coffee, bring it to the person in the next cubicle, and say, “You can probably use a fresh cup of coffee.” Then watch their face. Serving others doesn’t have to be heroic. But if your job is neither fun nor tied to your values, start planning your exit.
Work shouldn’t swallow everything else, though. A woman who’d gotten rich on Wall Street said her husband was a “roommate” and her friendships were all deal, no real. A hundred hours a week for forty years. Why? She thought for a long time, then said quietly, “I guess I chose to be special, rather than happy.” That line hit the author hard. When his kids were little, he worked at least eighty hours a week. The fix is real leisure, the kind the philosopher Josef Pieper described: reflection, art, learning, nature, and people, not scrolling. For the author, part of that turned out to be music. As a young man, he believed his calling was to be the world’s best French horn player. He left music for a PhD at thirty-one and stopped listening for years. Slowly, he let it back in, not as lost glory but as beauty. To find his calling, he had to leave a career of great beauty. To find deeper meaning, he had to bring that beauty back.
Chapter 8 — Surround Yourself with Beauty
In 1941, the French composer Olivier Messiaen was locked in a Nazi prison camp where some twelve thousand Allied soldiers died. He talked a guard into smuggling him paper and pencils. For the camp’s broken-down piano, beat-up violin and cello, and old clarinet, he wrote the Quartet for the End of Time, built on birdsongs and a passage of hope from the Bible. Today it’s a masterpiece. Even there, Messiaen chose beauty. Beauty can show you what your life means, too, and it comes in three kinds: artistic, natural, and moral.
Years ago, when the author played horn in Barcelona’s city orchestra, the same elegant old gentleman sat just above the stage every Saturday night, perfectly still, eyes closed, with a small half smile. It took him years to realize he’d been helping that man understand the meaning of his life. His own mother, a painter, lived with severe depression. Many mornings she woke in torment, went up to her studio, turned on the music she loved, and painted. It was her lifeline to meaning. Even the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who called life a farce, played his flute for an hour every day. When he talked about Rossini’s music, he’d go silent and roll his eyes toward heaven. So find the art and music you love, and dive in.
Nature does the same work. In 1883, a young Theodore Roosevelt fell for the North Dakota Badlands and their “desolate, grim beauty.” The next winter, his mother and his wife died within hours of each other. His journal that day read, “The light has gone out of my life.” He went back to the Badlands, ranched there for large parts of four years, and found a reason to go on. “It was here,” he later wrote, “that the romance of my life began.” Most people have lost that contact. The share of Americans working outdoors fell from 90 percent in Thoreau’s day to under 20 percent in 2000. So walk outside every day, even in a city park. You’ll probably enjoy it more than you expect.
Then there’s moral beauty. Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, hid thousands of Jews in his monastery and became prisoner 16670 at Auschwitz. After three prisoners escaped, the guards picked ten men to be starved to death as a warning. Kolbe hadn’t been picked. He offered to take one man’s place. Seeing goodness like that brings what psychologists call moral elevation: “pleasant feelings of warmth in the chest, feeling uplifted, moved.” It makes people want to be better. So spend time with generous people, make serving others a hobby, and practice gratitude. Notice something, though. Messiaen, Roosevelt, and Kolbe all found beauty in the middle of terrible suffering. That’s no accident.
Chapter 9 — Don’t Waste Your Suffering
“I was such an insecure, warped creature that I needed that laughter to feel good about myself.” That’s the actor Rainn Wilson, explaining why he made jokes as a kid. His mother left when he was two, and through his twenties and thirties he drank heavily and used drugs. At forty he landed The Office, and fame only made things worse. He became what Buddhists call a “hungry ghost,” always craving more. Two things saved him: his wife, Holiday, and the faith he thought he’d left behind. Would he rather have skipped all that pain? No. “I’m grateful for every anguish,” he says.
Suffering isn’t a bug in life. It’s a feature, and one of the ways you find meaning. When people explain how they learned what their life means, they usually point to a painful time. So don’t go looking for suffering. It will find you. The mistake is trying to get rid of it. Baby a hurt back and it weakens and hurts more. Mental pain works the same way. People with depression do well to treat their symptoms, but they usually get worse when they try to erase them completely. As the Stoic Epictetus wrote, “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”
Change is the kind of suffering people fight hardest. In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel went to Japan to study Zen and was told to learn archery instead. It took him five years to hit the mark. Then he understood: “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.” The writer Bruce Feiler found that a major life change comes every twelve to eighteen months, and 90 percent of the time, people later see it as a success. Brooks’s son Carlos hated every minute of Marine sniper training, whose motto is “Suffer patiently, patiently suffer.” Now he talks about it with pride, because he knows he can get through hard things. The lesson is to focus on the process, not the outcome. Recovering alcoholics say “One day at a time.” In boot camp, Carlos told himself, “Chow to chow.”
One more tool: keep a journal of failure and disappointment. When something really bothers you, write it down in a few words. Just naming it moves the feeling out of the emotional part of your brain and into the thinking part, where it stops haunting you. A month later, write what you learned. A month after that, write one good thing that came from it. After a few months, every new problem shows up next to proof that past pain helped you grow. So tomorrow morning, be grateful for the good things you’ll meet and for the trouble too, because the trouble will help you see what your life means.
Conclusion — Your New, Old-Fashioned Life
While Tolstoy worked through his own crisis, he was writing it into a character. Konstantin Levin, in Anna Karenina, has a family, money, and everyone’s respect, and none of it answers the why of his life. As Tolstoy put it, “He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops.” Finally, Levin gave up the frantic search and simply lived. He loved his family, cared for his workers, did his work, and let his doubts rest in a simple faith. And meaning came. The novel’s last line is his realization that his life has “the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
In 1878, an ordinary life of love, work, faith, beauty, and suffering could give you meaning. Ordinary life today is a bundle of screens, busywork, and comparing yourself with the whole world. That’s why the six practices matter: ask questions you can’t google, fall in love, seek the divine, find a calling, surround yourself with beauty, and learn from suffering. They don’t invent meaning. They keep you on the right side of your brain long enough to find it. What used to happen on its own now takes a choice. If you’re afraid of love, risk more of your heart. If your work isn’t a calling, start planning your exit. If beauty is missing, go outside now, without your phone.
Marc, Maria, and Paul read these chapters before the book came out, and each is making changes. Maria now listens to her gut about what matters. Marc saw that avoiding discomfort had only hurt him, so he set up device-free habits and spends his free time with friends and family. Paul realized he was starving for natural beauty, so he now gets outside every day.
In 2019, at fifty-five, Brooks left a job that had consumed him for eleven years. Burned out and searching for his calling, he and Ester walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage across northern Spain. Each day they walked about twenty miles, thought, and prayed, with no devices. Pilgrims greeted each other with “Buen camino,” which means, more or less, may you have a fruitful pilgrimage. At the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, he wrote a mission statement: I will lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. He thought he’d found his meaning at the end of the walk. Later, he saw he had it backward. His meaning had been looking for him all along. The pilgrimage just cleared the way: no technology, out in nature, beside the woman he loved, asking big questions. Like Levin, he didn’t find meaning. It found him once he was in the right place to be found. So treat your life like the Camino, a pilgrimage that opens your mind and heart. Live that way, and your meaning will find you. Buen camino.