WASHINGTON — Arthur Brooks, author, popular speaker, podcast host and Harvard professor, who is also a devout Catholic, has built a successful career on what he calls the “science of happiness.”
He writes in his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, that in 2019, at the age of 55, feeling “completely burned out” after a decade spent at the helm of the think tank the American Enterprise Institute, he made a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago seeking the meaning of his own life.
“As I finished my pilgrimage, I truly felt I had found what I was seeking,” Brooks writes. His mission would henceforward be to “lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas.” Brooks would go on to accept a job teaching the science of happiness at Harvard, write several bestselling books on finding happiness, and travel the country speaking on the subject.
In his new book, Brooks argues that what worked for him will work for others: The secret of happiness, he argues, is finding meaning in one’s life. Presented as a self-help guide, the book includes concrete suggestions on how to find “the meaning of your life.”
Brooks paints a less-than-happy picture of the mental health of Americans, particularly of adolescents and young adults: Unprecedented numbers are experiencing anxiety and depression.
Those who are suffering most, Brooks writes, are the “strivers” he frequently encounters in his work. These are high achievers who — at least on paper — seem to have it all. What they have in common, he writes, is a sense that their lives lack meaning, what he argues is the most important determinant of happiness.
“If your life feels meaningless, you will be disengaged and unable to deal effectively with your problems. You will almost certainly be depressed and anxious. Your life will have a void to it, a hollowness,” Brooks writes.
Today that void, he explains, tends to be filled with “self-soothing” behaviors like doomscrolling, playing video games and binge-watching that distract the sufferer from the root of the problem.
According to Brooks, only by weaning ourselves from technology will we begin to ask the big “why” questions that touch on the deep mysteries of life and give our lives meaning (and happiness): “Why do things happen the way they do in my life? Why am I moving in this direction, and why does my life matter?”
The Register sat down with Brooks to talk about his recent book and about how the Catholic Church can reach strivers in their search for meaning and happiness. This interview has been edited for length.
At the risk of oversimplifying your book, you say that the solution to this unhappiness epidemic might be thinking more — engaging in self-reflection or what you call “right-brain thinking.” Is that right?
That’s right. Deep questions about the why of life illuminate the part of your brain that you need to find meaning.
Why do you think these young “strivers” aren’t self-reflective?
It’s because they’re being bombarded with answers to questions they haven’t even asked so the result is that it is crowding out the questions. If you have a lot of time without a lot of information bombarding you, you will start asking questions naturally, but if you never have a single second with that information flooding into your brain, there are no questions that will even occur to you.
What distraction does is it keeps you from using the right side of your brain. It keeps you from feeling bored, and it keeps you from using the default mode network of your brain. There’s a reason that’s boring to people and kind of uncomfortable: being lost in your thoughts. “Does God exist? Does God love me? Am I a loveable person? What would I die for?” These are uncomfortable things. These are meaningful questions that will occur to you if you’re undistracted.
Would you say that unhappiness could be a grace? If you are not unhappy, then you’re not going to go deep into these questions, right?
Of course, it’s a stimulus. It almost always is. That’s why people learn and grow during periods of suffering. They don’t grow very much in their most blissful periods. How much do you learn from ice cream? You learn a lot from getting sick or from a rejection. You learn from those things, but you can waste it too by actually trying to eliminate it. One of the most pernicious movements we’ve had in our society today is the eliminationist view of pain. Don’t try to eliminate pain. Manage pain and learn, grow from it, which is a Christian idea, of course.
What is the psychological approach to suffering?
In Jungian therapy in particular, it’s really all about learning from your experiences. It’s not about eliminating your pain. It’s about learning from your pain. It’s learning [from] the experience that you’re actually having and learning the extent to which it’s lying to you. The problem is that most psychology is actually not going in that direction. Clinical psychology is going in a different direction: in trying to eliminate suffering. And the truth is that older forms [like Jungian] are really good. Much of it is very good.
Psychiatrists are largely prescription dispensers, not because they want to be, but because they don’t have time to actually listen to patients. And it’s a very medicalized, a very pharmaceuticalized profession at this particular point. Now, the belief that any sort of mental discomfort is evidence of a chemical imbalance, that’s becoming an anachronistic view. And I think that in 20 years, we’ll be seeing it entirely differently than we do today.
Is there any way parents can save their kids from having to go through this? You just want them to be happy and not have to go through this pain, or do you?
Of course you do. You want them to go through pain, but you want them to experience it and learn and grow from it. The No. 1 thing is: It doesn’t matter what you say; it matters what they see. And that means that we shouldn’t be anesthetizing ourselves. We should not be addicted to our devices. We should be fully engaged in life, and they should see it. The No. 1 predictor of your kids looking at their phones all the way through dinner is you looking at your phone all the way through dinner. That’s really where the problem starts. Only when you’ve actually corrected your own behavior, then can you actually set up limits around, for example, device use.
Is there hope for these unhappy young people?
The young people in the case studies at the beginning of the book are the people I talk to every single day. And they need to live in a different way. Part of it is they need to start by getting clean from what technology has done to their brains. Then they need to live in a different way, in a more old-fashioned way, which is why I’ll prescribe things like: Go risk your heart in real life; meet people in real life. I’ll recommend that you go sit in the back of a house of worship that you grew up in but haven’t been to in 20 years. These are the kinds of experiences that I recommend that will open up the aperture for meaning — using their brains appropriately.
We’ve been covering the apparent uptick in young people seeking out the Catholic Church for meaning in their lives. Do you think the kind of self-reflection you recommend will, in most cases, inevitably lead to a religious quest?
It almost always does. If you start to self-reflect seriously, you’ll start to turn to the transcendent. “Transcendent” means something bigger than yourself, and what the devices do, what the technology does, what the culture does effectively — because the devices are a product of the culture, not vice versa — what they do is they keep you focused on little things. And when that’s taken away for any particular reason or you rebel against it or you realize that it’s insufficient … you’re ready to talk about God.
What do you make of the dramatic increase in young adults filling up the pews of Catholic churches in Manhattan?
They’re green shoots. When you have green shoots coming up in your garden, that’s the critical moment to take care of your garden. If you don’t water it when they’re green shoots, they are going to die. That’s when the plants are most vulnerable. But if you cultivate them, if you fertilize them, if you care for them, they turn into something really good, and you get more green shoots — and, suddenly, you can have something that’s really flourishing.
You need to make it really inviting, and you need to make it really holy, is what it comes down to. What happened to the Church in the ’60s and ’70s is still upon us. There’s still a lot of that going on, and it’s not great. I mean, by the way, this is evidence that it is truly the one and true Church — which is that it’s still alive.
What can lay Catholics do?
They should be talking more about the source of meaning in their life. Talking more about big things, talking more about fundamental things. That’s really important to show this. If you have joy in your life, show the source of your joy and talk about the source of your joy. Don’t force it on anybody. Don’t shove a crucifix in somebody’s face. We’re not fundamentalist-snake-handling Protestants in the mountains of Tennessee. We’re Catholics. We’re old-school. And that means just show the joy that it brings into your life and the meaning it brings into your life, and let your happiness be the talk.