The hidden cost of never being bored | Arthur Brooks: Full Interview

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. First, the fact that people have been finding their lives less meaningful. Second, what we should do to live happier lives with more meaning — the strategies we can all undertake. And last but not least, the issue of addiction, especially addiction to devices.

Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, you can join our members community at bigthink.com/membership. Members receive the quarterly print magazine, a collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. And now, back to the interview.

Why Life Feels Meaningless

There are many hypotheses about the explosion of depression and anxiety, especially among young adults under 30, but one thing nobody doubts is that these problems are real. The numbers don't lie: depression has roughly tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled. The question is why.

Some blame a different generation—boomers wrecked everything, making housing expensive and ruining the environment. Many boomers counter that the problem is the attitude and fragility of young people today. Neither explanation holds water; people have been complaining about other generations for thousands of years. The real reason behind the epidemic is the answer to the question: does your life have meaning? For generations, the answer for almost everybody was yes. But then something happened—very recently, really only in the past 15 years. The percentage of the population, especially young adults, saying "my life feels meaningless" started to creep up and then explode. That lack of meaning lies behind the explosion of depression and anxiety.

Some people find meaning more easily than others. The number one predictor of life feeling meaningful is living it in real life—it's relationships, living in the old way. It wasn't that long ago that almost nobody said their life felt meaningless. But having distance between you and other people, or technological mediation—a screen between you and your friends, your loved ones, your family—changes life. It takes it from real life to something more like a simulation of real life, which is exactly what many young people describe today. When I interview them, they say, "My life feels fake. It feels like something's missing. It feels like I'm living in a simulation."

The movie The Matrix was about a machine intelligence keeping people in simulations to take their energy. Well, we're living in the Matrix, in no small part—or at least many people are. Those most living in that technological simulation that pulls them away from other people are the ones lacking meaning, the ones who say their life feels meaningless, the ones suffering the most.

The first thing I ask young people who say their life feels meaningless is, "So, are you looking for it?" Not coincidentally, the people who feel life is meaningless aren't looking for meaning either. As a social scientist, this suggests the problem isn't that meaning is impossible to find—it's that looking for meaning has gotten harder. The mystery is why people wouldn't even look for something so important in their lives. So the problem goes one step further back: not a lack of meaning, but a lack of the ability to look for meaning.

Two social psychologists who specialized in understanding the meaning of meaning are Michael F. Steger and Frank Martela. They define meaning as a combination of three things:

• Coherence — why things happen the way they do
• Purpose — why I do the things that I do
• Significance — why does my life matter?

Those are the three big whys. Furthermore, Steger created a well-validated survey, published widely with it in the academic literature, that shows where people are in their meaning journey—whether they have a good sense of meaning and whether they're searching for it.

This is the Meaning in Life Questionnaire. I've done a lot of research with it and have administered it to my students year after year, watching the results as this problem has gotten worse. The questionnaire measures two dimensions of meaning. The first is presence: how much meaning do you feel in your life, and how close are you to understanding the meaning of your life? The second is search: how hard are you looking?

These two dimensions yield four kinds of people. There are those with a really strong sense of their life's purpose — high presence — and, as a result, they aren't looking. These are happy home bodies; they're really good for who they are. Then there are people who don't have a strong presence — they don't know their meaning — but they're looking hard. These are hopeful wanderers. I have a lot of students like that, and I was like that 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.

The third type has a strong sense of life's purpose, a strong presence of meaning, but keeps looking anyway. These are natural seekers, real strivers — that's kind of me today. I have a strong sense of my life's meaning, but I'm always looking for something better. The most unfortunate people, of course, are those with a very low sense of life's meaning who have given up searching, or never even started in the first place. These people are stuck: they're not looking, they don't have it, and they don't know what to do.

These are the people I'm most worried about today, and the people I'm studying, because I see an explosion in the number who really are stuck — they neither have a sense of presence of meaning nor are they looking for it. I want to know why. Of the four types, the group growing most quickly, especially among young adults, are those who are stuck — what we call "lost in place." That's the number that's actually exploding. Typically you'd find it's about 5% of the population; it's multiples of that, and it's going up every single year.

The people who are "lost in place" are young adults coming of age. It's not that older people are losing their sense of meaning, but they get older and disappear from the population, replaced by younger people. These younger people don't have a strong sense of the presence of meaning in their lives, nor, for whatever reason, are they looking for meaning. That's why this stuck part of the population is exploding in number.

How do you know your right hemisphere is working?

People often ask, "How do I know that the right hemisphere of my brain is working?" The answer is that you feel things and don't know why. There's a bit of mystery in your life: you hear a beautiful song and it chokes you up, and you can't quite explain it. Maybe a memory of something that doesn't seem emotional makes you feel emotional. Maybe a conversation gives you a strong sensation that this is something you need to pay attention to, but you can't articulate what it's about.

When you have strong emotions or reactions you can't explain, the reason is that your language centers are not on the right hemisphere of your brain. You've triggered this sense of mystery—and in fact meaning, coherence, purpose, significance, the things that really matter most to you. You've triggered the why side of your brain, and it affects you in a very deep emotional way. When you have those sensations and can't quite explain them, it means the right side of your brain is very active.

Brains built for small bands

Human brains are more or less the same as they have been for about 250,000 years—the late Pleistocene, when Homo sapiens lived in small bands of 30 to 50 kin-based individuals. They knew each other in real life, saw each other every day, knew they were related, and stuck together. The result is that the human brain since then works the same way: we have to know who our people are, and we have to have relationships in real life.

To be successful in that period, and still today, you needed to do two kinds of things. First, sort out complicated problems of how to and what: how to find a gazelle and kill it near a watering hole—or, for that matter, how to write a piece of software or operate your toaster. Second, you needed the why part of your brain, which sorts out questions like: Why would I want to do anything? Why be in relationship with other people? Why mate and have kids, feed my children, and bring them up?

That second set of questions is not the complicated questions of how to and what. Those are the complex questions of why. They're not hard to understand, but you can't solve them, because they're full of mystery and meaning. Why do I do the things I do? Because I love my family. So what do I do? I go and support them. How do I do it? By figuring out how to get a gazelle. In the modern context it's much the same.

The brain, from 250,000 years ago and still today, is supposed to integrate between these complex and complicated functions: we ask why questions to motivate us, and how-to and what questions so we can actually meet those motivations in ordinary life. You have to have both. If you're missing one side, you're in big trouble—and not just because we still operate like cavemen. It really matters that you have motivations, mystery, and meaning in your life, and that you figure out how to actually do those things. If you can't do the how-to and what, you'll be helpless, a disaster. But if you don't have the why, you'll be rootless, with no idea why you're doing what you're doing, and you'll be depressed, lonely, and anxious.

So one part of the brain is the why side—the meaning side, the happiness and love side. The other is the how-to and what side: the engineering side, the analysis side, the sort-out-the-problem side.

There's a theory behind all of this from neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization—just a fancy way of saying that the right side of the brain and the left side do different things. Not a very surprising idea, of course.

According to fMRI studies and cutting-edge neuroscience, the right hemisphere of the brain is dedicated to the why: the mystery, the meaning, the love and happiness — why would I get out of bed in the morning, why do I love the people I do, why do I worship the divine, what is my purpose in life? The left hemisphere is the engineering side, the complicated-problem side: how do I perform my job, how do I get to work, how do I sort things out, how do I write lines of code? The two work together all the time, unless something interrupts the communication between them — or worse, systematically shuts off one hemisphere, which is in fact what's happening today.

Not long ago, our culture, economy, and way of life were highly integrated between the two hemispheres. But about 20 years ago, accelerating around 15 years ago, we came to the view — philosophically, actually — that every problem in life had a technological solution: that engineers could fix everything, that there's an app for that, that software or something on our phones could solve every problem, whether we're sad, hungry, lonely, or depressed, and that all of these could be solved with proper information and proper technology.

The result is that we dove headlong into an economy largely driven by information, statistics, engineering, technology, apps, and screens, trying to solve all the complex, emotional, mysterious, meaning-based problems of life with the complicated, fact-based, information-designed economy and technology available from the engineering world.

That is an error, because the engineering side of life — which is incredibly important — is the left-hemispheric side for solving left-hemispheric, complicated problems. For right-hemispheric problems, we don't need complicated solutions at all. We need relational solutions, mysterious solutions — we need to solve them the way people did in the old ways, before a hyper-engineered economy began throwing random facts, information, and data at us all day long, shoving us headlong into the left hemispheres of our brains and vacating the right side, where we could actually solve these problems and understand the nature of life itself.

Here's the thing to understand: there's a conceit that there's a complicated solution to life's complex human problems, but it always leads to bigger problems. In the 19th century, philosophers talked about scientific socialism — getting the gears of the machine of society exactly right so everyone would be blissfully happy. We know how that turned out: a bloody 20th century that destroyed hundreds of millions of lives. We also tried scientific public administration; that didn't destroy so many lives, but when we treat people through government like a machine, people become incredibly unhappy — and frankly, it doesn't work.

The version of the past 15 years — less about armies and government, more about the private sector, the economy, and technology — is something like social media. When social media was invented, the promise was that it would solve loneliness. But social media is a complicated problem of algorithms and technology, while loneliness is a complex human problem. When you try to solve a complex problem with a complicated solution, it gets worse. As a social scientist, it's no surprise to me that every additional hour per day you spend on social media, the lonelier you get.

We have a series of complex holes in our psyche, our minds, and our hearts, and we want to fill them. But we can't fill them with complicated plugs that come from information, engineering, technology, analysis, devices, and screens. It can't be done—and the more we try, the worse the problem gets.

If you ever wonder how often you're turning on the left hemisphere of your brain and turning off the right, just ask yourself how often you look at your phone. If you're like the average American, you're looking at your phone 205 times a day—that's 13 times per hour, every 5 minutes or so. And you know perfectly well there are times when it's a lot more often than that. Look around a supermarket checkout line: everybody, including you, is on a screen. Stuck at a traffic light that's lasting a bit too long? Out comes the phone.

The truth is that any opportunity for the right hemisphere of your brain to turn on—to give you mind-wandering, flights of fancy, and thoughts of meaning—you're going to turn it off by opening your phone and being bombarded with information you didn't ask for.

Our adroitness at switching off the right hemisphere and switching on the left, and our habit of going straight to our screens at the slightest hint of boredom, has made it impossible for us to be bored at all. Nobody likes being bored—boredom is, well, boring—but we are biologically designed to be bored a lot. There's a set of structures in the brain called the default mode network that turns on when you're undistracted and bored. That's what we need for right-hemispheric activity, because it lets our minds wander to questions inside our hearts and minds rather than coming from our phones. This is what gives us the capacity to ask the meaning questions in the first place.

So why would we turn off our ability to be bored and become less and less adept at it? Because we solved the problem of boredom with technology. We didn't like it, so we fixed it. But like so many problems in human life, we fix little problems and create major crises. We have analgesic drugs to wipe out pain, which is great—but we keep making them more and more powerful, and this year 100,000 people will die of opiate painkiller overdoses. We constantly create major crises to solve little problems, and the way we use devices to wipe out boredom is an absolute case in point.

There's wonderful research from my university where people are put into boredom experiments. Undergraduates—who will do anything for 20 bucks—are brought into a lab and seated in a chair with nothing to do for 15 minutes: nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, complete silence. They have one thing they can do besides wait patiently: a little key fob with a button that, if pushed, self-administers a painful electric shock. The researchers want to know what people prefer—boredom or shocks? You can imagine how it turns out; it practically answers itself in modern life. 25% of the women shocked themselves, and two-thirds of the men. Maybe it's more an experiment about the difference between men and women—I don't know—but the bottom line is that a lot of people prefer shocks to being bored. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes and got thrown out of the experiment.

The point is we would prefer pain, and we've figured out how to get it: the supercomputer in your pocket is your shocking device. Open it up, get a bunch of information you didn't ask for, look for notifications on your social media that won't edify you and that you don't care about, maybe find a bit of unexpected conflict. It's just you in the experiment, because you want to keep that default mode network off so you don't experience the slightest amount of boredom. As the years go by, we get worse and worse and escalate more and more on the technology, and the problem gets worse.

There's another problem with boredom, especially when we don't know how to deal with it: it's highly correlated with addictive behaviors.

I study the psychology of addiction to substances and behaviors—drugs, alcohol, gambling—and one of the best predictors is being bored. Another is being anxious. Bored and anxious people are really at risk for drinking too much, using too many drugs, or gambling to excess, because they're actually trying to distract themselves from ordinary life. They don't want to be alone in their heads because it's too anxiety-provoking, or frankly just too boring.

Our inability to face a little bit of boredom—while waiting at a light or in the supermarket checkout line—has made it so that the moment we feel the slightest boredom, we reach for our devices to chase it away. That makes the addiction worse and puts us into a doom loop: a little boredom, the devices go on, the devices make it harder to deal with boredom, so we use them more, and the behavior escalates. Pretty soon that's all we're doing. We're not alive in real life, not seeing the things around us, not noticing anything else—we're simply trying to distract ourselves almost 24 hours a day, or at least every waking hour.

Why it exploded after 2008

The engineering culture of hustle, grind, efficiency, and technology is nothing new; it's been going on a long time, all through the 20th century, really since the Industrial Revolution. So you have to ask: why did it suddenly explode after 2008? It wasn't just this particular device, the small screen in our pockets—it was something bigger.

It's something we see in all sorts of natural and technological phenomena. A virus incubates and grows slowly, then suddenly explodes. A political idea is held by a few people, spreads a little, and then seems to come out of nowhere. The answer is what we might call the Campbell effect, which comes from Mike Campbell, a character in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. He's a drunk and he's bankrupt, and when someone asks him, "How did you go broke?" he says:

"Little by little, and then all of a sudden."

That's how things actually happen in life. Nobody's marriage suddenly just breaks apart. People don't get along, and don't get along, and work through it as best they can, and then suddenly they can't stand it anymore and get a divorce—and people say it came out of nowhere. It doesn't come out of nowhere. Our device addiction and the explosion of meaninglessness didn't come out of nowhere either. It brewed and bubbled and rose little by little, and then we had a few outsized innovations, and boom.

The "just a little more" fallacy

There's a common argument that the way to solve a problem is to do the very thing that appears to be problematic just a little bit more. If spending a lot of government money leads to social problems, the argument goes, we just need a little bit more government money and then we'll be okay. People make this argument in all sorts of ways. People deeply addicted to alcohol believe deep down that there's enough alcohol out there, and at some point they'll have had enough. I've studied people who make vast amounts of money: the first thing a billionaire says after earning her or his first billion is, "It didn't feel the way I thought it was going to. I guess I need another billion." This is also known as the hedonic treadmill.

Run, run, run. But if something is creating a problem, it's very rare that more of it is going to solve that problem. It makes perfect sense, but of course we sort of forget that. There's an expression that's apropos here: if you're in a hole, stop digging. And that's exactly the situation we are in with technology.

Look, there are some utopians—and I'm not anti-technology. On the contrary, I've got every device known to man. But true technology utopians believe we're going to hit some sort of singularity, that there's going to be a killer app that will sort everything out. I get it: too much screen time is making your kids depressed, making you not care about your life, and ruining your marriage because it's pulling you away from your spouse. But sooner or later, they say, the tech will be so unbelievably good that every problem will be solved and we won't be lonely anymore—you'll have the perfect partner in AI.

The promise that AI will give you the perfect partner and the perfect therapist, solving loneliness for you, is wrong — and the reason it's wrong is that the neuroscience is wrong. That's not how the brain works. You can't solve the right brain's problems with more left-brain solutions. The truth is, you can't get to "down" by going further up.

One answer I hear all the time is: throw your phone in the ocean, get rid of it all, go live in the woods. To begin with, that's completely implausible — it's just not going to happen; the ship has sailed. But furthermore, it's a bad idea, because human ingenuity is improving human life all the time. We live longer, we live better, we have greater economic growth, we're meeting our caloric needs. Life is better because of the way we've solved so many complicated problems. The solution is not less technology — it's using technology appropriately.

That means not over-engineering the parts of our lives that don't need to be over-engineered. It means actually attending to the right hemisphere of our brain — the complexity, the mystery, the meaning, the love, and the happiness — by being in relation and love in the ways we actually need, rather than polluting that right hemisphere with more left-hemispheric solutions.

I'm not anti-technology, and I don't think any of us should be. On the contrary, it means we need to understand how technology works, how it should work, and where we should not be using it, as much as where we should be using it.

A lot of what I know about this actually comes from left-brain technology — from the study of neuroscience, which deals in facts, technology, analysis, and science. It's really great, and I love it. But I don't let it turn into a religion, per se — I have a real religion — and I don't turn it into love, per se, because I have...

I have real love in my life, and I need boundaries between these kinds of solutions and the things that are really important to me: my understanding of life and my work, actually living that life, enjoying my work, and having relationships that enrich it and make me want to do it in the first place.

We are meaning-based creatures. By that I mean we evolved to understand the meaning of our lives through living an ordinary life: interacting with other people, falling in love, having conflict, wondering about the great beyond, pondering the essence of our existence. All of these things are central to finding meaning, and that was just normal before we were completely distracted all the time, before we were shoved headlong into the left hemisphere of our brains. The right hemisphere was working normally, and nobody had to think about it.

That's one reason that if I went back 50 years, maybe 30 years, and asked, "Are you having a meaning crisis?" people would say, "What are you, some sort of French intellectual? Of course not. That means nothing to me." It was only Jean-Paul Sartre smoking a filterless cigarette in a Parisian cafe who would ask these deep philosophical questions. They were not relevant to most people's lives.

But here's the thing: things become relevant when they're scarce, even if we never thought about them before. If the air in this room started to dissipate, I would become incredibly conscious of it very quickly, and it would become a big problem. Meaning in ordinary life is like an atmosphere losing its oxygen. That's what's happening in our use of technology and our over-engineered culture — meaning has become incredibly scarce.

So what do we need to do? We could turn back the clock, I suppose; some people have proposed that. I don't believe it's going to happen, and I don't even want it to happen. Instead, we need to live in ways that people used to take for granted. We need to live like my great-grandfather, like my father, like I did before the advent of the way we use technology today — to do the things that came ordinarily to us but are actually quite extraordinary today.

People want to find the meaning of their lives because they want to be happy. Meaning and happiness are related, and here's how: happiness is not a feeling. Feelings and happiness are related the way the smell of your turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner. The smell of the turkey is evidence of the dinner; your happy feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something more tangible.

And just like your Thanksgiving dinner, it has three macronutrients. Your dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Your happiness is a combination of:

1. Enjoyment of your life,
2. Satisfaction with your accomplishments and achievements,
3. Meaning of your life.

Those are the things that people who are really happy — who have high levels of well-being — have in common: they're good at those things, they pursue them, they know how to get them. They enjoy their life a lot, they take a lot of satisfaction in what they do every day, and they know the meaning of their lives.

As a happiness scientist, when I see a big change in happiness for the worse, or a big group of people with a low level of happiness, I know one of those macronutrients is missing or not in abundance, so I start looking for it. When I started looking at young adults under 30 and seeing this incredible happiness crisis — obvious in the statistics on depression and anxiety — I asked which macronutrient is blocked. Is it enjoyment? No: there's no evidence that young adults enjoy their lives any less than anybody at any other time. Do they take less satisfaction in their accomplishments? Not my students. Some of my students who are really suffering have the highest level of satisfaction, because they're doing all kinds of cool stuff all the time, way more than most young people did when I was that age. So that's not it either.

It's meaning. When you look at the survey literature, you find that more and more people say, "My life feels meaningless."

People increasingly say, "I don't know what I'm meant to do. My life and my relationships don't have a meaningful feeling to them. I feel like I'm living in a simulation and not really digging into my life" — which is the essence of not finding meaning. Here is how it all hangs together: sadness and anxiety, which are exploding, are a lack of happiness in people's lives. Happiness is enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning, and meaning is falling apart. That's the problem we need to deal with today by living in a different way.

Every philosophical and religious tradition does things differently, of course, but one thing they all have in common is that they're supposed to help us find meaning in our lives. Why would you read Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato if you weren't trying to find the deep meaning of things? That was the gig for philosophers, theologians, and everyone in wisdom traditions throughout time — it's really all about meaning.

Aporia: questions without answers

Where it gets interesting is the similarity between these traditions. Virtually every philosophical and religious tradition of note encourages us to find meaning through what the ancient Greeks called aporia — puzzles, open-ended questions, questions that don't have answers.

Here's how that relates to what we're talking about. People ask questions all day long and put them into Google or ChatGPT, but these are not meaning questions because they're not open-ended. I defy anybody watching to put into ChatGPT, "What would I give my life for?" You'll get back garbage. It will start by kissing up to you — "Well, that's a very intelligent question, the kind philosophers have asked forever" — and give you seven examples of answers people have given before. It will not tell you what you would give your life for, because it can't. It's not a meaning question.

Aporia, starting with the ancient Greeks — probably before them — and in every religious tradition, means asking questions that don't have clear answers. Why would this lead to meaning? You already know why: doing so illuminates activity in the right hemisphere of your brain. The "why" side of your brain, the mystery-and-meaning side, is stimulated by asking the kind of questions that don't have clear, precise answers you can get from Googling something. That's really important.

What the ancient Greeks did, and what virtually every tradition still does today, is ask you to ponder questions, and through the pondering you come to understanding beyond your ability to articulate it.

The Zen koan

Here's an example from another tradition. Zen Buddhists train junior monks using koans, which are riddles. In one koan, a junior monk is walking down a trail in the woods by himself when he sees a senior monk coming toward him. He asks, "Where are you going?" The senior monk says, "I do not know." The junior monk asks, "Well, how will you know when you get there?" The senior monk replies, "I'll know when I get there, because not knowing is the most intimate type of knowledge."

This asks you to understand the nature of not knowing and how it is actually a kind of knowing — which doesn't make sense. It feels like nonsense, and yet the right hemisphere of your brain says there is something in not knowing: it's a deep form of knowing, and purposely not knowing something and sitting in the not knowing is a form of knowing. You feel it, don't you? You can't articulate exactly what that means or why, but that feeling of "I kind of get it" is your right hemisphere working. And that's how these traditions are supposed to work.

Start asking the deep questions

You could go live in a Zen Buddhist monastery, or join some club where aporia is the practice of the day like the ancient Greeks — or you can just start asking these deep questions. Here's what I recommend. If you come over to my house for dinner, there won't be any phones at the table, and I'm going to ask you questions like this: What are you most afraid of? Bring it on. And I want to know — are you afraid you won't be loved? Are you afraid of death? Why?

And you won't be able to articulate your answer exactly, because these are right-hemisphere questions. I'm not asking them just because I'm a professor of this stuff — I'm asking because I want to know the meaning of my life. These types of questions are school.

Here's how you know whether a question belongs to that category: if you can put it into Google, Claude, or Gemini and get meaningful, sensible information back, it's not the right kind of question. The right questions are the kind that relate to the definition of meaning itself.

Meaning comes down to three big why questions:

1. Why do things happen the way they do? That's coherence. You can answer it with respect to the mind of God, or with the workings of science — or, if you reject both, maybe with a conspiracy theory, I don't know.
2. Why am I doing the stuff I'm doing? That's purpose. How do I know I'm making progress in my life? What are my goals and direction?
3. Why does my life matter? That's the love question — significance.

Think about those questions with the people you love. Go deep. Watch meaning appear.

The problem with meaning questions — the big whys of coherence, purpose, and significance, or any of the big meaning questions of life — is that they don't have answers. That's because they're largely mediated by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the side that handles complexity. Complex problems don't have distinct solutions; they simply have an understanding. You live with complex problems.

My car is complicated. I don't know how it works, but I could figure it out — I have the brainpower to get the education to understand once and for all how it works. My marriage is complex; it's a right-hemisphere thing. I've been married 35 years, and I will never solve my marriage. I never will — which is why I love my marriage. I don't know if my wife will be mad at me this afternoon, or whether we'll have a conflict, because I'll never solve it. There's no algorithm. There's no app for that. And that's the thing with these questions.

These big "why" questions of life are complex and mysterious, and that's what makes them meaningful. It also makes them scary and frustrating in a world where you can't neatly tie something up with a bow or come to a solution once and for all. We reject those things—we're averse, even allergic, to the meaning questions of life precisely because we can't answer them the way we would answer how my car works.

One of the most complex phenomena in every person's life, and also one that brings the most meaning—not coincidentally—is falling in love and staying in love. Human romantic love is deeply complex. It's something we write songs about but can't quite completely apprehend. It's nothing that can ever be solved, which is why it feels so incredibly mysterious and meaningful to us, and why almost everybody wants it. When people lose a spouse at 80 years old, they're liable to fall in love with somebody new at 82, because we want that. We get a sense of meaning in life from it. There are other ways as well, but this is one of the most powerful of all. It just turns on the right hemisphere of our brains. It makes us feel meaning when somebody is in love with us and when we're in love with somebody else.

The problem is that in an era of complicated problems with neatly tied-up engineering solutions, we've tried to bring technology to bear on the problem of romantic love—and we've made it harder, even impossible, even invisible and absent in the lives of a lot of young people today. Data from Jean Twenge at San Diego State University and Jonathan Haidt at the Stern School at New York University show that people are falling in love less than they ever have before. People in their 20s today are less likely to be married, less likely to live together, less likely to have sex, less likely to say they're in love than ever before. Why? There's more technology that makes it easier to have contact with and know more people than ever before. It should be easier than it ever was. But it's not. And the reason—you already know it—is that falling in love is right hemisphere, while the technology matching us up with other people is largely left hemisphere. It's a mismatch: taking a complex problem and trying to solve it with a complicated solution.

Dating apps are getting better, and I'm very confident they're going to be excellent compared to what they are today. I'm involved in some of the projects to make dating apps better. But the one way they're not going to get better is if we substitute for the complex experience of knowing each other in real life with an algorithm that tries to match us with respect to demographics, tastes, and opinions.

When people fall in love, they feel like they're possessed, like they're not themselves. And the truth is that they aren't themselves. You can do brain scans on people falling in love and they look remarkably similar to people who are addicted to methamphetamine—their brains are working in a very funny way. There's a neurochemical hurricane going on in the brains of people who are falling in love. There's a reason for that, and it's not because it's something bad like getting addicted to meth. It's because it's something good: it's bonding us to another person—ideally somebody you're completely unrelated to biologically—and making that person your kin extremely fast. You'd better have some serious action going on inside your head so you can do that, and we do.

Here's how it works. Falling in love starts with attraction. Even people who are really sophisticated say, "Look, love is blind, we don't care." Yeah, right. The truth of the matter is that we want to be attracted to each other.

The reason attraction matters is that when someone is a potential mate, they're attractive in how they look, sound, and smell. That stimulates the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. Both men and women have both—men have more testosterone and less estrogen, women the reverse—but we both need both to become attracted. That's the ignition of falling in love.

The next stage comes relatively quickly, within days or weeks: the feeling of anticipation around a person. You want to be around them—it's the person, not just the looks. This involves two neurotransmitters. One is norepinephrine, actually a stress hormone produced in the adrenal glands. The other is dopamine, which comes up in the study of all addictions, wanting, learning, and liking. Norepinephrine gives you a sense of euphoria when you're exposed to that person, or even when you just think about them. A text comes in—ding—and you ask, "Is it her?" That sense of euphoria over a simple text: you give it enormous significance. Dopamine gives you anticipation of reward—it's going to be great when you see that person. Why? Because you're starting to neurochemically bond to the person who will become your kin, and that bond has to be very intense to form.

The third step comes later, and it's kind of the dark side of falling in love, because it involves a deep dip in serotonin. Neuroscientists disagree about why this happens. It might be stress hormones suppressing serotonin. But another hypothesis I find really plausible and compelling is that serotonin dips because low serotonin makes you ruminate. In depression, sad rumination is one of the key signs of clinical depression, and one of its markers is low serotonin in the synapse—that's one reason people take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: more serotonin in the synapse means less ruminating in sadness ("I'm so stupid, my life is so meaningless"). Well, one characteristic of this third stage of falling in love is ruminating on the other person. "Was that last text she sent me—what did it say? It was only three words: 'Are you up?' But what did it really mean? Did it mean something more significant? Did she really care if I was asleep, or was she hinting it would be nice if I came over?" You're ruminating because you're bonding, neurochemically fusing with the other person. Ideally, if you're both ruminating on each other, this takes you to a very deep level—which is one reason clinical depression and this stage of falling in love are actually quite similar.

What is all this trying to get to? Ultimately you want to bond to each other as a kind of kin, and that's associated with the production of oxytocin, also known as the love molecule—a binding neuropeptide that functions as a hormone. Oxytocin says, "This is my person." It has a cousin, vasopressin, which says, "I will defend this person." That's family—that's what it comes down to. When you have eye contact with your newborn baby, oxytocin flows and bonds you. And when you fall in love, go through the whole cycle, become kin, and want to marry, oxytocin is saying: this is my person now and forever. We're like wood storks or Canada geese—monogamous now and forever. It doesn't always work out that way, but that's what you feel and what you're supposed to feel, which is why you're willing to stand at the altar and say, "Till the day I die, baby." That's what oxytocin is supposed to make you feel, and that's the process we actually go through. We are made neurochemically to love each other romantically and to pair bond, one to one, forever, if we can.

When I first started studying romantic love—it's amazing, it's a miracle, actually—I had one nagging question: what about people who don't have it? Priests and nuns, people who never find the one, people whose spouse dies and who never pair up with someone else. There are a lot of single people out there. Does this just mean they're out of luck?

There is an answer to that, and it comes from a major study by researchers at Harvard University called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It followed people over an 85-year period, looking at how they lived their lives to predict whether they would be healthy and happy in old age — kind of like a crystal ball. Some of the findings are pretty obvious: smoking, drinking, exercise, diet, learning, dealing with your problems. But number one by far was love.

Two types of love gave people deep meaning and mystery in life when they were old. The first was, sure enough, romantic love — ideally in a lifelong marriage, if that was possible. But the other was deep, deep platonic friendship, which gave the same sense of mystery and meaning, and deep happiness as well.

So here's the bottom line: a lifelong marriage is great if you can get it, but if you can't, lifelong friendship — or deep, deep

Beyond marriage, there is also deep friendship — the perfect friendship Aristotle described, where two people share a common love of other things and walk shoulder to shoulder into the future. That kind of "useless but beautiful" friendship is another path to meaning and happiness.

One of the most common ways people have always found meaning is what's called transcendence — transcending yourself. Mother Nature puts you into a psychodrama of your own life where you're the star: my money, my car, my food, my television shows, my me me me. It's completely tedious, and yet we're obsessed with the quotidian details of our lives.

At my university, the most popular undergraduate class is Introduction to Astronomy, with students lining up out the door — and most of them aren't astronomers; they're English and classics majors. When I asked one student why they loved the class so much, she said she didn't really know, but on Thursday mornings she comes in stressed out from arguments with her mom, a possible breakup, and a class she's failing — and an hour and a half later she walks out saying, "I'm a speck on a speck on a speck," and she's at peace, because she can see herself from the vantage point of things bigger than her. That's transcendence.

Why modern tech blocks it

There are many ways to get transcendence, but you don't get it by looking in the mirror — literally, or figuratively by checking your social media notifications. The problem with modern tech is that it's a big mirror on ourselves, which makes transcendence impossible. It drags us down to the base level of our lives — what am I eating, what supplements am I taking, are my biceps big enough? — and makes life profoundly, grindingly boring. It makes it impossible to get the peace and perspective we need to use our brains properly and to understand the meaning of life, or let the meaning of life find us.

Two forms: vertical and horizontal

People with meaningful lives find ways to transcend themselves. One is to look upward at things greater than we are and stand in awe; the other is to look outward to people who are not ourselves.

Vertical transcendence is typically practiced through religious faith. I'm a traditionally religious person — a Catholic who attends mass every day — partly because I need to transcend myself and get away from myself; I need the peace and perspective it gives me. I also happen to believe these ideas are true, but the transcendence itself is central to my pursuit of meaning and happiness. Others get it through Vipassana meditation, studying Bach's fugues, walking for an hour before dawn without devices, or reading the Stoic philosophers. There are lots of ways, but you need something.

The other way is to look outward and serve other people without any self-interest at all. This is well studied: people understand their lives better when serving others and feeling needed, and experience a kind of bliss they can't describe any other way. The social psychologist Brett Diener calls it moral elevation — that warmth in your chest and almost otherworldly feeling when you serve others. That otherworldliness is right-hemispheric activity, and it's the transcendence we need.

So I spend a lot of time with my students on these questions: How do you find your faith? How do you learn to meditate? How do you get into activities that serve other people and aren't just all about you? That's a lot of what I teach.

When people are looking for transcendence, many have a background in a traditional religion, so the faith of their youth is a natural place to look—or maybe they're simply interested in religion. The barrier for many, however, is that they don't feel it: "I don't really feel it, so it would be hypocritical. What am I supposed to go to a house of worship when I don't feel it?" We live in an age of feelings and authenticity, but remember that feelings are just activity of the limbic system—a set of alarms telling you about threats and opportunities. Feelings are liars; they're just the workings of your brain at any given moment. They are not authentic or true to anything metaphysically important, and with respect to how you want to design your life, that's a big misapprehension we've been told and have told ourselves.

So what do I tell students who are actually looking for a way to understand faith, maybe to incorporate it into their lives? Fundamentally, the experience of a religious faith has three parts:

1. The feeling that you have.
2. The beliefs you hold quite consciously.
3. The decisions you make to actually practice that faith.

A faith that's completely unpracticed isn't much of a faith, and one bereft of belief doesn't have much there either—though you do want to feel something, at least sometimes.

Here's the problem: many people think that even if they agree with that, they can't have a religious faith unless they first feel it, then come to believe it, and only then—out of authenticity with themselves—practice it. It turns out that's exactly the wrong order. If you want any sort of religion in your life, it works the same way as staying married. Anyone who has been married for any length of time knows it doesn't run on what you feel at any given moment. I've been married 35 years; if it were just about feelings, I wouldn't have been married 35 minutes—probably when we had our first argument. On the contrary, you don't start with feelings; you start with practicing. I practice my marriage every single day. I don't go home and say, "Honey, I've been loyal to you 99% of the time"—that's also known as failure. I practice it 100% of the time. Most of the time, I believe in my marriage, and some of the time, I feel it.

That's how these relationships actually work if they're to give you a sense of transcendence, and it's true in religion as well. Figure out something you're going to practice—or at least try something and practice it. It's okay. What will happen is that you will come to believe it some of the

...you will come to believe it some of the time, maybe even a lot of the time, and then occasionally you'll feel it. And then it'll be good enough.

One of the things young people say to me a lot, with respect to work and their career, is: "I don't know what I'm meant to do." That's a meaning question, obviously—it has the word "meaning" in it. To a very large extent, that's also the quest for calling. Your calling is what you're meant to do. It feels like this cosmic, mysterious thing—that if you happen across it, the angels will come into your life and there will be the sound of harps and you'll know. It's not like that. But calling is a real thing, and it truly is important with respect to the meaning of life.

When I say that, I don't mean a job, because a calling can be raising your children. A calling can be volunteer work, or something you do with family and friends. It has to be something generative, something beautiful, something that creates value whether they pay you or not. That's the most important thing we need to talk about: how are you supposed to create value that's unique to the way you find meaning in your life? That's what calling is.

What actually predicts calling

I've studied calling for years with respect to professions. Do people find more calling when they make more money or less? It turns out that's irrelevant. Do people feel more calling when they have an education? That's irrelevant too—it washes out in the statistical analysis. What matters is two factors:

1. Earning your success. You feel like you're creating value with your life and in the lives of other people, and you're recognized and acknowledged for the value you create.
2. Serving somebody who actually needs you. You're needed.

That's what it comes down to. I know people who have jobs they don't particularly like, but they feel that they have a calling because they're creating value and they're needed. Ideally, you like it too. I do a whole lot of work on enjoyment, because meaning and enjoyment are different macronutrients of happiness—ideally you get lots of both from your work. But those are different problems, and I work on those two dimensions separately. For the meaning part, it's all about earned success and serving other people.

Intrinsic versus extrinsic satisfaction

The careers that tend to have a lot of meaning tend to be intrinsic in their satisfaction, as opposed to extrinsic. It sounds like splitting hairs, but it really isn't. Intrinsic means the sense of meaning comes from what you're doing inherently, completely apart from what they do to compensate you. Extrinsic means the motivation comes from pay, benefits, prestige, or the power it brings.

Most careers have both to a certain extent, and that's great. But intrinsic motivation is way more important than extrinsic. If you don't feel like you're creating value inherently, but you're getting paid lots of money, you're not going to feel like you have a calling. You just aren't. It won't give you a sense of meaning in your life.

Callings are careers full of intrinsic motivation and intrinsic value, and they're subjective, because they can come in almost anything. You might be putting roofs on houses, and it might be teaching classes for me. There's nothing people can say from the outside. The extrinsic stuff—pay, benefits, power, fame—is objective because people can measure it from the outside. What you want is intrinsic satisfaction from a subjective career.

That also means a career path, which is really important. A lot of what we teach in our society today—in our economy and our culture—is that a good career is highly linear: one thing after another, jumping from one thing to another because it's fancier, pays better, or has more power.

But the truth is that an intrinsically motivated, subjective career is largely a spiral for many people, shaped by your own imagination. That might mean working for four or five years after college, then taking seven or eight years to work part-time while raising children, then going back to full-time work doing something different — and it all coheres inside your head because it's all part of your calling. So what I'm saying is that we need to pay attention to earning success and to serving other people, and build our careers our own way, because ultimately a sense of meaning is a very personal thing. If you're taking cues from this book or that class or this school or that counselor, it's not likely to fit the career with the most meaning — the one that truly is a calling for each of us.

Young people get a lot of bad career advice, and much of the worst comes at graduation. I've given a lot of graduation speeches and heard a lot of them too, and it's usually one of two pieces of advice. The first is: "You're all going out into the world — go do something that's really fun and you'll never work a day in your life." That speaker is probably a billionaire cardboard-box magnate so severely workaholic that he's had three heart attacks and two divorces before the age of 40, so be careful who you're taking advice from. It's also bad advice on its face, because it has no depth to it. The second comes from someone, usually a politician, who says, "My generation screwed up the whole world, so it's all up to you guys. Go save the world. No pressure." That's bad advice too, because it's basically saying sacrifice yourself, be a martyr for the whole world — and neither one actually gives you a sense of meaning through earning your success and serving other people.

In my research, I've found that the best predictor of earning your success and serving others — something that gives long-term longevity to what you're trying to do in your spiral career — is looking for the thing that grips you the most, the thing that's actually most interesting to you. You will create the most value when it's most interesting. Now, there are a lot of cases where people aren't super interested in their jobs, and I don't give people advice to quit

I don't advise people to quit on the first day a job is boring—on the contrary, because everything is boring from time to time. But the truth of the matter is, and this has been shown in a lot of studies, that when you're serving other people as much as you possibly can, when you're transcending yourself laterally toward other people, weirdly and mysteriously, your job almost always gets more interesting.

Beauty as a right-hemispheric experience

One of the most efficacious ways to illuminate the right-hand side of your brain, such that you can experience meaning, is by exposing yourself to beauty. Beauty is a largely right hemispheric experience. This is one of the reasons people will hear a beautiful melody and cry. If you really like poetry, you can't quite describe it, but the way the poet puts things together chokes you up—it gives you an emotional response to something. The fact that it's ineffable, beyond your ability to describe what has happened to you, means it's a right hemispheric experience. It's deep and mysterious. Beauty is critically important for understanding meaning in life.

The modern world is not beautiful

But there's a problem, and it compounds the problem of shoving ourselves into the left hemispheres of our brain: the technologically mediated world is not beautiful. It just isn't. There are some pretty objective and persuasive studies, in my opinion, showing that as we become more technologically adroit and our world has become more engineered, music has actually gotten less beautiful. We know for sure that natural beauty is rarer. If the average 12-year-old spends 4 to 7 minutes outside—which according to John Haidt is the case—then they're largely going to be experiencing the great outdoors through a screen.

You don't go to Yosemite and see El Capitan; you see it on your screensaver. And I'm sorry, your brain knows the difference. That's not passing the Turing test of actual beauty that will illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain. On the contrary, you know perfectly well that it's just a representation of something beautiful—which is also not beautiful. The truth of the matter is that you need to experience something in real life to capture it in all of its magnitude.

Moral beauty: the scarcest kind

Then we come to the scarcest area of beauty of all in our modern culture, which I believe is moral beauty. There's a lot of literature showing that when people are exposed to acts of moral beauty—when they witness people giving of themselves in magnificent and heroic ways—it's an ineffable, deep experience that gives them a sense of meaning in their lives. When people learned about Mother Teresa, for example—she was an unknown nun working in the slums of Calcutta, but the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge inadvertently made her famous—why did people get so interested in this nun in Calcutta? Because understanding something about her life made their own life feel meaningful. People would read a book about Mother Teresa or see her in a documentary and burst into tears at the beauty of what she was doing. Why? Because they were finding meaning in their own lives.

Well, you're not going to find that on social media, or not very easily. What do you find in online forums? You're going to find conflict, psychopathic behavior, predation—people treating each other horribly. One of the things we know very clearly from research on modern internet activity is that the more time you spend online, the less empathetic you are, the less remorseful you actually are, the more narcissistic and the more Machiavellian you are. If you want to torque your personality toward what psychologists call the dark triad, which is characteristic of predators, it's a good idea to spend as much time online as possible, because you'll lose the art of being human. And that's probably the greatest cost in beauty of all.

The "nine beautiful things" study

One of my favorite studies on beauty is called "Nine Beautiful Things." Participants were asked to write down nine beautiful things over a 7-day period and contemplate them: three were natural beauty, three were moral beauty—the beauty of other people—and three were beauty in general. The researchers wanted to know how this affected the people contemplating those nine beautiful things. Sure enough, when people were contemplating these nine beautiful things, their life just felt deeper.

Their life felt richer, with more purpose and significance. They understood their lives better — contemplating beauty helped them grasp the meaning of their own lives.

There's a mystery in my field about why people are so drawn toward moral ugliness, though in a way it isn't much of a mystery. We have a negativity bias built into us by evolution. We notice negative things more than positive ones, and many neuroscientists believe we have more brain tissue dedicated to negative emotions than to positive ones. Why? Because negative things need to get our attention faster. Positive things are nice to have; negative things can take your life if you're not careful. So we evolved to pay attention to what makes us fearful, angry, disgusted, and sad — those things literally grab our attention.

That's why we're so fascinated by negative things today. They stimulate us, and rather than turning away, we may actually turn toward them because of this negativity bias. But that's a bad habit. Plenty of bad things deserve our attention because they matter for our safety and security, but we turn a lot of it into a form of perverse entertainment — a use of our brains that Mother Nature, I dare say, never anticipated. On the internet, and in the modern entertainment economy, you can find all kinds of ugliness.

We find some pretty alarming trends. The main consumers of true crime drama are women under 30. A huge majority of the people watching the slash-'em and murder-'em mystery documentaries proliferating across the streamers are young women who have never experienced these things but treat them as entertainment. Not coincidentally, these are the same people most likely to be sad, anxious, lonely, and depressed. On the male side, the attraction is to internet trolling — insulting people and getting into conflict, especially on social media sites after news articles. This aggressive trollery predominates there.

These things are not innocuous. On the contrary, you're being polluted by them. Whether you're involved in trollery or just sitting on the sidelines eating popcorn, it's bad for you. The research is very clear: you will be more anxious, more angry, and more depressed, because it's affecting your brain. Similarly, if every night you settle down after a long day at work with a pint of Häagen-Dazs and watch murderers on

Netflix, well, that's bad for you as well. This is neurocognitive programming. You need something that's actually more transcendent, something that will elevate you. I realize this is not something people always want to hear, because they want escapism and relief—but your brain is tricking you, and technology is fooling you as well.

The first noble truth of Buddhism, called Dukkha in Sanskrit, is that life is suffering. It's a characteristic of life. Most people treat that as a bug, not a feature, and think, "Wouldn't it be great if I could set my life up in just the right way to get rid of my suffering?" Well, you can't. And if you could, you shouldn't, because you'd be in danger.

Negative emotions are part of your alarm system. They tell you there are threats in the world around you, and they're supposed to be aversive. Painful emotions exist to keep you alive: without fear, you wouldn't jump out of the way of an oncoming car, and you'd probably be dead within a week. Bad feelings are an alarm system to keep you alive.

Negative experiences are even more important, because they are the source of learning and growth. For years I've asked people, "How did you come to understand the meaning of your life, your resilience, what made you who you are?" They don't talk about that week at the beach in Ibiza or going to Disneyland with their parents as children. They talk about when their mother passed away and they didn't know what to do, when they fell in love and were left, when their business went bankrupt, when they got tossed out of school. They tell me about hard things—difficult experiences as the source of their learning and growth as people.

I think the greatest injustice we have perpetrated on young adults today is telling them that when they feel sad and anxious, there's something wrong with them. On the contrary, I tell my students, "You're getting a master's degree. If you're not feeling sad, lonely, and anxious sometimes, you need therapy—because you're doing a hard thing, and you're doing it on purpose." Now, I get it: it can be too much. It can be exaggerated and rise to the level of a psychiatric disorder, and thank God for treatment, analysis, and medication, which has saved the lives of people in my family. But the idea that being sad and anxious is evidence of pathology, of being broken? No. It's evidence of being alive. Only when we understand, through real aversive experiences, will we truly tap into one of the greatest sources of meaning in life itself. Suffering is sacred, and we need to start treating it as such.

People have argued about the persistence of pain and suffering in life for a long time. One idea is that we're mismatched to the current environment—that we're meant to be noble savages of some type, that we should go back 250,000 years and live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, running naked and free, and everything would be great. That's nonsense. If you want to find people really stressed out, go back 250,000 years, because life was nasty, brutish, and short.

The other idea—that we need negative emotions as an alarm system—has a lot of credence and neuroscientific backing. Your negative emotions are an alarm system, and they're supposed to be uncomfortable, even terrible, so that you pay attention to something threatening your well-being or safety and can avoid it. That's a really good thing. Your four negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, and all of them have evolved neurophysiologically in different parts of your limbic system to produce those emotions on purpose, as a way to keep you alive. So that is a very plausible hypothesis.

I think it's actually unimpeachable as a matter of fact. And the last reason is that you need suffering, because suffering is part of what makes life meaningful and good and makes you effective as a person. It gives you learning and growth.

Some of this literature is pretty interesting. It comes, for example, from the work on great artists. We all know that artists tend to be temperamental, and many are depressive as a matter of fact. One way to link the sadness and anxiety of artists with productive output is by looking at what they write and what they're doing while they're writing. Take Ludwig van Beethoven, maybe the greatest classical composer who ever lived. He was a prolific letter writer, and he suffered a lot. He was going deaf when he was a pretty young man. He lived to 56 years old, and near the end of his life he was profoundly deaf—so deaf that he could only imagine what his music sounded like. He would hold a pencil in his teeth and connect it to the soundboard on his piano so that the vibrations would enter his cranium and he would get an idea. His friends thought he was going to commit suicide. It was horrible. He was writing letters to everybody about how sad he was, how afraid he was about his future. What social scientists have found is that in his depths is when his greatest compositions appeared. He was turning his pain into beauty, turning his pain into meaning in a very profound way.

Now, I'm not Beethoven. But I do know that creative activity is correlated with a lot of activity in something called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is also correlated with ruminative sadness. You can't pull these things apart—that's what it comes down to. A meaningful life is one that actually has suffering.

The literature on pain

There's another area of the literature really worth paying attention to: the literature on pain, straight-up pain. People who specialize in treating back pain—and I know this firsthand because my back hurts—will tell you that if you baby it, it will get worse. In other words, the best approach to back pain has three parts: treat it logically without medication that's going to hurt you, exercise a lot, and accept the fact that your back hurts. The same thing is true with the pain in your life. It's a normal functioning of your limbic system, and you don't try to avoid it.

Here's the formula for turning pain into meaning, and it relates pain to suffering:

Suffering = pain × resistance to pain.

That's either physical pain or psychological, emotional pain. Suffering is your pain multiplied by your resistance to it. When you feel pain—which you will, because you're a human being walking on the earth and you're supposed to, and that's evidence that you're alive, congratulations—you have two choices. You can try to eliminate the pain, or you can lower your resistance to it. Every major religion and most philosophies teach non-resistance. Why? Because they know that eliminating pain only goes so far, and once you push it too far, it becomes a bad thing. It makes it harder for you to understand the meaning of your life.

Here's how you know if you're in the right zone—what you find from the great and enlightened. Here's what I saw in the life of my beloved mother-in-law when she was bedridden near the end of her life, in tremendous pain: her pain was high, but her suffering was low, because her resistance was low. That's how to think about it. Something happens to you and it's tremendously painful. You can try to eliminate it, ignore it, mute it, numb it—or you can say, "Bring it on. Bring it on." Watch your suffering fall and your meaning rise, even if your pain is high. That's the mark of an elite athlete of meaning.

In ordinary life today, we're used to one-and-done solutions to our problems. This is one of the reasons internet influencers are so unbelievably popular: they're telling you that if you take this pill or this potion or do this exercise or do this one thing in your relationship, it's going to change everything. It's also why the most popular form of internet teasing is "the one weird trick that will lower your blood pressure." Because we want a one-and-done.

The biggest problem facing our happiness today is the lack of meaning. It's what lies behind the epidemic of depression and anxiety. We want that meaning, so we want something that will give it to us in one shot — but that doesn't work. The truth is that most of those quick fixes don't work for your blood pressure, your relationships, or your biceps, either. Those are lies; you're being tricked.

The good news is that we know the way to find the meaning of your life. And here's even better news: it's a really fun project that you get to work on for the rest of your life — an assignment to live a meaningful life, step by step. This is a pilgrimage. You're walking toward a goal, and as you walk, you make progress. You feel more alive, and life feels more meaningful. And you get 70, 80, 90 years to do it — how wonderful is that? The best news of the day is that there's no quick fix for this. The best news of the day is that there is a fix, and it's a life worth living.

The way we do that is by digging into the parts of our lives that are real — motivated by love, seeking not just the physical things but the metaphysical things as well. We have a guidebook for this. I've tried to make my book one, but all the great ancient texts are guidebooks for it. What we have to do is divorce ourselves from the illusion, the false lure, that there's a way to distract ourselves and that at some point there'll be a flash of lightning and we'll all feel better. Wrong.

We need to put down the devices most of the time — the ones leading us into this false way of thinking — and take up an old-style way of life instead.

This is not a one-and-done solution. Other people will notice the change in you, too. They'll ask, "What are you doing that's different?" And you'll say, "I'm on a pilgrimage toward finding the meaning of my life. Every day it becomes more apparent to me, and every day I have more happiness and more joy—and I want to share it with you."

One of the most interesting areas of the social sciences is human addiction, and it's fascinating because it's based entirely on a genuinely great part of human life: our ability to learn and make progress. Our brains are designed to learn new things that make it easier for us to survive and pass on our genes, and we have neurochemicals that make this possible. When we learn something with an adaptive advantage, we want to remember it, bank it, and build on it. This is what makes us fit—better able to find mates and to eat—and it's one of the reasons Homo sapiens is so unbelievably successful.

A key part of this is dopamine, a neuromodulator most people are familiar with. Dopamine is often mischaracterized as a pleasure hormone; it's not. What it does is give you the anticipation of reward. Here's how it works: you come across something you like, you encode it, and the next time you think about it you get a little spritz of dopamine that makes you anticipate the reward of getting it again—so you go in search of it. If you find even more of it the second time, you get more dopamine, which reinforces the cycle. That's why you'd remember there were gazelles around a watering hole or berries on a bush, and look forward to going back. The same thing happens today in as innocent a way as crossing a deli with a great roast beef sandwich and, the next morning, thinking about it the first time your stomach growls around 11:00.

The problem is that we've found ways to juice that dopamine system, getting more anticipation of reward and more of the reward itself. Sometimes this is done artificially through drugs and alcohol: cocaine or even cigarettes neurochemically increase the dopamine in your brain, and methamphetamine gives you about ten times what you could get naturally. But all sorts of other things do it too—a slot machine will do it, and so will your iPhone. It's designed to give you the anticipation of reward: "I want to see what's on my notifications, I want to see if somebody actually texted me." Your brain is working the way it was supposed to, but it's been hijacked by modern technology into doing that natural thing in an unnatural way.

It's entirely legitimate to say that the way we interact with technology today is a lot like any other addiction, involving the same neurochemistry in more or less the same ways. We are, in point of fact, addicted to tech.

Many people don't believe they're addicted to their devices, largely because almost everyone is. In societies where an addiction is ubiquitous, it becomes invisible. In the Soviet Union before the fall of the Iron Curtain, drinking was so common that people hopelessly addicted to alcohol had no idea they were alcoholics. Ask a fish how the water is and he'll say, "What water?" You notice when somebody is addicted to heroin because it's not common among ordinary people; you don't notice phone addiction because literally everybody is addicted to their phones.

So how do you know whether it has captured your brain? Check whether it does what addictive things do: Does it produce withdrawal? Do you use it compulsively? If someone takes it away—or you think you can't access it—do you think about it again and again? Here's a simple test: put your phone away for an hour, then write down how many times you think about it, reflexively reach for it, or wonder if something is on it. If it's more than once every five minutes, you're an addict. That's just dopamine spritzing into your brain—anticipation of reward, saying there's something there, go check it.

This doesn't mean you need the Betty Ford Clinic or an intensive detox at some faraway site in the desert. It just means your brain has habituated itself, and that's something you need to deal with—which you can.

Negative emotions are normal

People often wonder whether something is wrong with them because they have negative emotions. The answer is no—quite the contrary. If you didn't have negative emotions, something would be wrong with you. We evolved for bad feelings, and for good feelings too, but negative emotions are more intense than positive ones because they keep you alive. There are four negative emotions: anger, disgust, sadness, and fear. They exist because different subparts of the brain's limbic system evolved to produce them. Feeling them means your brain is working properly.

They can be exaggerated—psychiatric conditions and life events can overemphasize them—but for most of us they're everyday experiences. The average American spends 16% of the day in predominantly intense negative emotions. Results may vary, but if you're bummed out 16% of the day, you're normal. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with you; it means your alarm system for things you should avoid is working.

Why we feel sadness

Different parts of the limbic system create these aversive emotions for specific reasons. One example: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is dedicated to the sadness of social exclusion. It lights up like a Christmas tree when you lose somebody you love, when somebody leaves you at the altar, or when you're grieving a death—it goes on full blast.

Why would we evolve to feel grief, or any sadness? People say, "I want to live without sadness." No, you don't. If sadness didn't bother you—if it weren't incredibly uncomfortable—you wouldn't do what you need to do to avoid it. You'd say everything on your mind and do all kinds of things that would get you thrown out of the tribe. 250,000 years ago, that meant walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. Today, it means being fired, friendless, and divorced within about two weeks. Thank goodness for the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the sadness you hate and try to avoid.

How do we avoid it? The normal way is through good relationships: apologizing when we hurt somebody's feelings and going out of our way to help people feel good around us. Here's another way: distracting ourselves with drugs and alcohol, with workaholism, with technology.

We distract ourselves from our negative emotions—which are completely normal and very healthy—by opening up the screen and scrolling through something we're not really interested in, because it captures so much of our brain activity. Neurocognitively, we're drawn in by designs that are built to draw us in, and in doing so we numb ourselves emotionally. It's a numbing device, much as a bottle of whiskey is a numbing device, much as staying 14 hours at the office because you're not very happy with your marriage is a numbing device. But the most ubiquitous of all is the device in our pockets—and that is not just unhealthy, it's actively making us sicker.

Often people tell me—and not just young people, people my age as well—"Look, I get it. I shouldn't be 12 hours a day on my screens. But there are times when I just want to veg out. I want to lie in my bed or sit in my comfy chair and just doom scroll for 45 minutes, for an hour. I want to detach from the world." That sounds good, but it's very problematic for a couple of reasons.

1. When you're highly engaged in information being thrown at you—especially social media, which is conflictive or exposes you to social comparison—you're actually unbelievably stressed out. It's raising your anxiety, not lowering it. What it's doing is detaching you, so you are in fact vegging, but in a very anxious, stressed-out way. You're not designed to relax with something that stresses you out; it's an unnatural way to do it.
2. You're fueling the dopamine cycle. When you fuel it unnaturally again and again, you get something that feels like short-term relief but turns into long-term problems, as sure as I'm sitting here.

A parallel I make a lot is with alcohol. What alcohol does very effectively is cut the connection between the part of your limbic system that makes you feel anger and fear—the amygdala—and your prefrontal cortex, your executive center, in which you consciously understand that you're feeling fear and anger. You are feeling fear and anger, but you just don't know it when you drink. That's a very short-term solution, because when you come down from the inebriation—the next day, for example—you feel more fear and anger than you felt before.

The rebound effect brings more fear and anger than you felt the day before, which leads to escalation and addiction. It also leaves your brain unable to work the way it's supposed to naturally when there are actual threats, and it impairs your ability to feel pleasure the way you should. The same thing is happening with our devices: we don't feel pleasure the way we should, and we cut off our ability to feel the emotions we're designed to feel. It's bad for you.

There's a huge literature on how people recover from long-term addictions, so we've had plenty of time to figure out how to cope. One thing we know is that it's not easy. It's not as simple as snapping your fingers and saying, "Oh, yeah, I shouldn't drink a fifth of whiskey a day. Silly me," and just stopping. It's harder than that because your brain is captured—your dopaminergic cycle is impaired in a way that makes you dependent on it. But behavioral science shows that breaking free is absolutely possible, and it requires three basic parts.

1. Get mad. You have to get tired of this thing, become resentful that something has captured your brain and taken over your life, and have the spirit of the rebel. That's why the drug and alcohol literature talks about hitting rock bottom. Hitting rock bottom doesn't necessarily mean sleeping in the gutter, getting in car crashes or bar fights. It means you've had it, and you're not going to take it anymore.
2. Detox. Understand that there are brain processes involved—that this is a biological phenomenon—and deal with it as such. Change your behavior in a way that interrupts the cycles of activity in your brain that are keeping you addicted.
3. Live differently. This is the hard part. If you're hanging out with a bunch of drunks, you've got to get new friends. If your job keeps you chained to your desk 16 hours a day, you have to go on the job market and do something else for a living. You have to change your circumstances, and in doing so, become comfortable with the thing that was making you most uncomfortable—and I'll tell you right now what it was: it was you. The problem was that you were trying to go someplace else, trying to escape from inside your own head. You need to become comfortable with boredom.

I teach the science of happiness, and it might sound like I'm just going to say "study shows, study shows." But that's not it at all. When you're studying human happiness, you have to start with the best questions, and the best questions never come from behavioral scientists like me. They come from philosophers, theologians, and the wisdom tradition—the big questions of life. So I read philosophers all the time, and I ask my students to read philosophers to get the right questions before we go to the neuroscience and behavioral science.

A lot of my students ask, "Professor, who's your favorite philosopher?" Maybe Aristotle is so great, maybe throw in a little Thomas Aquinas—I love all that stuff. But my favorite philosopher, hands down, is an American from the 1840s: Ralph Waldo Emerson, really the most American philosopher. He wrote about the spirit of self-reliance—what it actually means to rebel against the things that are holding you down. As far as I'm concerned, it's like a tall glass of cold water on a hot summer's day, because we all need to rebel against a lot of things, and especially against ourselves when we're chained by our technology.

In 1841, in his most famous essay, Self-Reliance, Emerson described exactly how to do it. Even though there wasn't even the shadow of an iPhone in his pocket, he had a philosophy we can all still use today.

Emerson's Three Steps to Freedom

Emerson's philosophy has many parts, and I write about it extensively, but it really comes down to this: if we want to be free, we need to be honest. That doesn't mean telling your mom everything you did as a kid that you're ashamed of—do that if you want, fine. It means being honest with yourself.

To get off the sauce if you're drinking too much alcohol, you need to get honest with yourself that you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, that you're ashamed of it, that you don't like it and want to stop. You've been lying to yourself all this time, thinking it's going to be okay, that if you finally drink enough you'll just lose the urge. You know that's a lie. You know you're doing something you shouldn't be doing and you feel rotten about yourself. Admit it. Be honest with yourself.

Emerson says everybody needs radical honesty in all parts of their lives. It's hard to do. There's a ton of behavioral science literature—including research I participated in myself—showing that we don't know ourselves very well, and the main reason is that we lie to ourselves all day long. We have biases that make us feel better about ourselves. I think to myself, "Arthur Brooks, he's a guy with good hair"—I'm bald. It's time to suck it up and be honest with myself. That's an easy one. What's not easy is my personal faults, my foibles, the ways I'm actually insincere, the ways my personality isn't what I want it to be.

Three steps: honesty, independent thinking, going your own way

Emerson says: be honest with yourself, because when you do that, you're actually able to think for yourself. You're able to go against the crowd. The crowd will tell you anything you want to hear—you'll surround yourself with yes-men and sycophants who tell you all is well. "You're not drinking too much, you drink like everybody else." That's because your friends are drunks.

After being honest with ourselves, we need to really think as individuals. That's hard, because once you start forming your own opinions—maybe you're on a college campus where everybody is protesting against one thing and you think, "I don't want to do that, I disagree"—you're going to lose friends. One of the places you lose friends the most is on the internet, on social media. Have a weird contrarian opinion online and watch how many friends you actually lose. So it's critically important that you actually think for yourself.

Step three: go your own way. Once you're thinking for yourself, walk by yourself if you need to. Walk away.

In the context of addiction to tech, I've talked to students in my own classes and asked, "What would happen if you just got rid of your social media accounts—became invisible on social media?" It makes them panic, because that would mean they couldn't distract themselves. It would mean having to be honest with themselves and confront their own lives, having to think for themselves instead of living in an echo chamber. And most subversive and countercultural of all: they'd have to be alone. In the global internet commons, nobody's alone.

When people break away from the digital commons, they describe it as freedom: "I feel like I've taken out my horse and ridden into the western frontier." Is it lonely? Yes, it is lonely. It's hard, in fact, but there's a bracing quality to it, a goodness to it — and that, as far as I'm concerned, is the essence of the philosophy of what we actually need to rebel against today.

The good news about tech addiction is that it's actually easier to break than many chemical addictions. Many people have done it, and so can you. It's harder if you don't remember the before times: it's much easier for people my age to break tech addictions because my brain was almost completely formed before there were devices in my life. There are a lot of things people find ultra-addictive that I don't find especially attractive — it would be very hard for me to spend an hour on Instagram, because it just wouldn't be as interesting to me as it would be to somebody whose brain was formed in the era of Instagram. But everybody, including people born after 2008, can absolutely do this. It comes down to a set of protocols in three categories: tech-free times, tech-free zones, and tech fasts. With these basic protocols — not that hard, though not simple — you can reorient yourself toward technology and have a different relationship with your devices. I promise you, your life is really going to change.

Tech-free times

The tech-free times are really only threefold.

The first hour of the day. That's when your neurocognitive programming is most important — you set the tone for the day. There's all kinds of literature showing that if you have a bad habit or a tick, and you can control it in the first hour, you'll probably have control over it for the rest of the day; but if you give in to it in the first hour, that's it for the day. The same is true of how you use your devices. Some people have to check — if you're a doctor or a journalist, you've got to make sure nothing's on fire — so open up your phone when you need to, check your email and texts, then put it down for the rest of the hour. Just that first hour: no scrolling, no reading the news, no social media, because your neurocognitive programming should be real life. Go for a walk outside, watch the sun come up, work out without devices — something I do regularly. There's a reason for that: it ignites the default mode network in your brain, kind of like taking a shower, which is when you get your best ideas — because the phone isn't in there. Use that first hour to actually come alive.

Meal time. Homo sapiens are designed to get a neuropeptide called oxytocin when we have eye contact with our kin while putting pieces of yak meat in our mouths around a campfire. That's how ancient humans were designed — that's how we knew where our kin was; this was the bonding neurochemistry. There are even studies showing that if you have your phone face down on the table during a meal, you'll look at it, and every time you notice it you'll wonder whether there are notifications. That interrupts the neuropeptide exchange and cuts off your oxytocin flow, which makes it harder to bond with other people.

The last hour of the day. Most people watching this already know that screens aren't good before bed. What does the blue light do? It interferes with the proper functioning of your pineal gland, so you don't get the proper level of natural melatonin, which wrecks your sleep architecture. Everybody knows that. You can get fancy blue-blocking glasses and keep looking at your phone — better yet, don't look at your phone, because you get a side benefit: if you don't live alone, you'll be focused on the people around you. What we're supposed to do as we get ready to sleep is be with the people we actually love, giving us a sense of connection and harmony.

Tech-Free Zones and Tech Fasts

These are the three times: the first hour of the day, mealtime, and the last hour of the day. Watch your life change. Second is tech-free zones—literal places where you don't have devices. You'll get used to this really, really fast.

The first is the bedroom. If you're not looking at your phone for the last hour of the day or the first hour of the day, you shouldn't look at it between those times either, so don't have your phone in the bedroom. That's hard for a lot of people. I have students who say, "Professor, that's how I wake up is with my phone." And I say, "I have this newfangled invention. It's called the alarm clock. You can get one for five bucks on Amazon." Your phone should not be next to your bed. I recommend having it in a different room, locked up in a closet, plugged in someplace else, so you simply don't see it. Here's the good news: after 6 or 7 weeks, you won't even want to look at it if you do have it at your bedside. If I'm traveling and don't have my alarm clock, I can have my phone there and I won't look at it at night, because I'm out of the habit.

The second tech-free zone is the classroom. There shouldn't be a school from kindergarten through PhD that allows phones at any time during the school day, especially during lunch. It's crazy that more than half the states in the United States still allow unfettered access to phones—that's simply a lack of courage and knowledge at this point. It's insanity. I understand how it happens: students hate it at the beginning, their parents freak out, they convince themselves it's a security risk, and they call the principal, who calls the superintendent, who calls the governor. The bottom line is a lack of political and moral will. This should get done now—we have the technology to get all phones out of all schools at all levels.

Last but not least is tech fasts. I recommend 96 hours a year—just 4 days. I take a spiritual retreat: I go away and pray and meditate for 4 days in complete silence with no devices, and it's a miracle. The first day, you're screaming in your head, "Where's my phone?" The second day, you're calming down. The third day, you're saying, "I understand this tranquility." The fourth day, you say, "I wish it were all year round." If you're not religious, find a secular way to do it. The bottom line is that you need a 4-day tech fast per year if you can possibly manage it—and you probably can.

Reducing the Devices' Grip on Your Attention

There are a few other ways to change the odds in our favor with respect to technology and dopamine. One of the biggest problems is that the design of portable devices is that they're bugging us, trying to get our attention. When they get our attention, that stimulates dopamine to give us the anticipation reward, which fuels the wanting–learning–liking–craving–addiction cycles in our brains.

You can interrupt that by getting rid of things that touch you. It's bad enough that you think of the phone on your own; it's even worse when the phone is thinking of you, trying to remind you of itself. The best way to stop that is to turn off your notifications. There's one notification that should be on your phone—when your mother is calling, or that person, whoever it happens to be. Everything else, you don't need notifications for. I know it's convenient, I really do get it, but the truth is that mostly what it's doing is stimulating your dopamine.

Another way devices capture your brain in full is by combining audio and visual stimulation in the most intense way possible—color, really high definition, and sounds designed to hook your brain maximally across the different cortices for the different senses. If they could make you smell it, they would. So turn down the fidelity of the sensory experience, and the best way to do that is with your strongest sense: your sight.

The occipital lobe, at the back of your head, is dedicated to sight, and we are highly attuned to color. Color is unbelievably important for homo sapiens: it's how we decide between all kinds of things. We can tell if somebody likes us because they flush a little bit, whether a piece of fruit is ripe and ready to eat, and whether something is probably going to poison us—often by color, as well as by smell.

One way to get less hooked by social media, or any screen-based technology, is to turn off the color and switch the screen to black and white. It sounds like such a little thing, but you'll be amazed: when your screen is black and white, you will care less about it and look at it less.

There's a wonderful body of social psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the great social psychologist who invented the idea of the flow state. Most people have experienced it: when you're immersed in something, hours turn to minutes, you lose track of time, and it's intensely pleasurable. You enter an almost hypnotic state in which you can do things that are hard, but not too hard, and not boring—it's almost like a state of Buddhist meditation.

People want this, and it's one of the great sources of happiness. When you have your sense of calling, you get it as a matter of fact. The trouble is that it's getting harder. One reason happiness has been in decline, especially for young adults, is that they're less likely to attain a flow state. To get into flow, you need to be fully immersed and concentrated on something—but not just anything. You can't focus on something you hate; that won't work unless you're really adept, a yogi maybe. For the rest of us, it has to be something you're truly interested in.

The problem is what technology has created—staying in the category of Buddhist thinking—the monkey mind. The monkey mind is a mind like a monkey jumping from tree to tree, unable to stay in one place, always jumping around. Everybody watching knows how that feels: I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I'm distracted.

When you're addicted to tech, it's not just that you had a flow state and were knocked into the monkey mind by some evil exterior force. You're doing it to yourself. You're turning on five things at once, constantly multitasking, because you have a hard time distinguishing between immersion and the dreaded boredom to which you've become completely averse.

Here's the thing about immersion and flow: you have to get a little bored before you get into it. But if you can't tolerate even a little boredom—because you've lost the fortitude for it, having not felt that way in days, months, or years—you can't get there.

You'll never get into that state. The moment you start to feel a little bored — the kind of boredom that could lead to something blissful, even a divine experience — that's when you turn on the podcast, scroll social media, and read or do something else. And you know where that goes: you're a monkey jumping around from tree to tree.

I don't know much about my great-grandparents, only some of their names. My paternal great-grandfather was Leroy Brooks, born in 1862 in Olathe, Kansas. Leroy married the sheriff's daughter, Mary Ellen, and he was a farmer, like a lot of people in those days. I don't know much more about him than that, but I'm going to make a supposition: I imagine Leroy never came home from work and said, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." There's a reason for that — Leroy's brain was working the way it was designed to work.

Here's the contrast between Leroy's brain and ours today. Leroy's life behind that mule was pretty boring moment to moment — hours a day looking at a mule's butt, how great is that? But I promise you, at the end of his life, taking his dying breath, he wasn't saying, "What a boring life that was." Because it wasn't a boring life. It was a real life.

Now think about us. We're not bored moment to moment — on the contrary, we've wiped out boredom moment to moment. We cracked the case: we look at the phone, scroll social media, listen to podcasts, and eliminate every moment of boredom. But when you do that all day, be honest with yourself — how interesting is your life? I bet it's grindingly boring. If you're spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind a screen and checking your phone 205 times a day, you're in danger of reaching the end of your life saying, "Well, that was pretty boring, because I was never bored."

If you want to know the stakes, think about your eulogy and what you want people to say about you. Think about what you want to think about yourself at the end of your days — how do you want to look back on your life? Now compare that to how you're spending your life right now. I dare say that if you're like the average American, checking your phone 205 times a day and spending somewhere between 4 and 9 hours on screens, small and large, then if you were honest at the end of your life right now, you'd say, "I spent a lot of time online." But one thing you wouldn't say is, "I sure wish I'd spent more time online."

You'd say, "I wish I'd spent more time with my loved ones, with my friends, with my family, getting to know people, having real-life experiences." That's what you'd say, right? Well, that's what to go do. That's the argument for this. I know breaking a tech addiction is hard — I get it, it's hard for me too, and the younger you are, the harder it is. But those are the stakes. What are you going to say at the end of your days — that it was really boring because you wiped out boredom, or that you could have done even better if you'd spent even more time on Instagram? I don't think so. I think you're going to want to have had deeper relationships and love, and been fully and passionately alive in the world. So you've got to get after it now.