6 Protocols to Find Meaning and Build a Happier Life

Introduction to Windows 11

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Finding Life Meaning

0:30You figure out the meaning of your life by residing in the right hemisphere of your brain where big why questions are asked. The main problem is that we're not getting to the meaning of our lives because we're doing trivial nonsense and sitting in the wrong part of our brains. Who cares? Why does it matter? Wouldn't it be better just to go through life as Friedrich Nietzsche, Berta suggested, that there is no why to life. There is no essence to all this stuff. So all you've got is existence, so make the most of it. Is this just a dumb conceit, an exercise in futility?

1:03The answer to that is absolutely not. There's a lot that you can simulate. There's a lot that you can fake. There's a lot of experiences that, in the computer world, they say passes the Turing test. You can fool your brain. But the one thing you can't simulate is the meaning of your life.

Welcome to Office Hours

1:17Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. If you're a long-time listener, well, not that long because this is, the show hasn't been around for that long. But if you've been here from the very beginning, you know the mission of this show. This is a behavioral science program dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. That's my mission in life. I want to share it with you, and I want you to share it with others if you find this show useful.

1:49I've been talking over the past couple of weeks about my new book, The Meaning of Your Life. Today, when this show comes out, on the 30th of March, 2026, that's a Monday, if you're listening to it on the first day, the book drops tomorrow, Tuesday, March 31st. Please go to the website, themeaningofyourlife.com. That's right here. It's displayed somewhere on the screen around me right now. You can figure out what's going on in the book, where I'm speaking, how you can get a copy of the book, how you can get involved in the community, all the different ways that you can understand better

2:20the meaning of your life and how you can bring it to other people. It's the book version of the show, you might say. I hope you enjoy it. I wrote it for you. If you do like it, please do share it with others. And share the show with others as well, and give me your thoughts about this show. Go to the website and give us some feedback. Write to us at officehours at arthurbrooks.com or write any place where you're watching or listening to this on YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to put comments. We look at all the comments. We read them all, critical, happy, unhappy,

2:52whatever they happen to be, because we want to know your feedback. That's how we make it better. If you like the show, please do like and subscribe and suggest it to a friend. That's how we get this material to a lot of other people.

Three-Part Series

3:02Now, this is the third show in a three-part series. I want to go back a little bit and talk about the book and what the meaning of life actually means. And then I want to get today to the problem when you can't find the meaning of your life. So that's where we are today. Let me start with two weeks ago, the first in this three-part series in the trilogy of meaning, you might say. And that was a show that I did on boredom. Here's the motivation for that. Human beings are incredible at solving problems.

3:34This is a great thing. This is the Homo sapiens advantage, as a matter of fact, this unbelievable prefrontal cortex that we have 30% of our brain by weight. And it's only been in its extant form for about 250,000 years, since the late Pleistocene period. That's when human beings became capable of solving complex problems by looking into the future, practicing things that hadn't happened, by looking into the past and learning from mistakes. We could really time travel. We have this consciousness of ourselves.

4:05So not only could I look out and observe things around me, I could look inward and see how other people see me. These are unbelievable cognitive abilities beyond any computer, what it could possibly do. And it made it possible for us to be an unbelievably successful species. We're a problem-solving species. And ordinarily, that's great, but not always. Sometimes we solve annoyances and create major crises. A case in point is boredom,

Boredom and Meaning

4:32which I talked about two weeks ago on the show. We solve boredom. We basically did. With our human ingenuity, we figured out a way to not actually be in a state of boredom, which we don't like because, well, it's kind of boring, isn't it? I told you about experiments that show how much we hate boredom. Experiments by my colleague, Dan Gilbert, where people get shocks or they're able to give themselves shocks as opposed to just sitting quietly in a room. Ordinarily, they prefer pain to boredom, as a matter of fact. And so we found the perfect pain device to keep us not bored,

5:02which is also known as the device in your pocket, your phone, your access to the internet and social media and email and texts, which you look at all day long, which the average person looks at 205 times a day so that you won't be bored. What I talked about two weeks ago on the show is that in eliminating boredom, we eliminated a minor annoyance and created a huge crisis. That crisis was avoiding the meaning of our life. Why? Well, as I told you, that shuts off a series of structures in the brain that are on when we're bored

5:34that we also need to assess mind-wandering abstract thinking and the concept of meaning. You need to be bored more. That was part one. Part two was where I dug into, what is meaning? What are we looking for when we want the meaning of life? Are we going to solve the problem of getting the meaning of life? We need to define it. That was about sort of the meaning of meaning. And I define meaning in terms of three principles of coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the answer to the why question,

6:05the mysterious why question, why do things happen the way they do? Purpose is the why question, why am I doing what I'm doing? And significance is the why question, why does my life matter? The big three whys. When you answer those questions, you've come to an understanding of the meaning of your life. Now, that requires a special use of your brain, which I suggested a minute ago on boredom. And to be more specific about it, in this last episode, which was last week, I introduced you to the work of the great neuroscientist and philosopher

6:36at Oxford University, Ian McGilchrist, a brilliant man, a scientist of the highest caliber who talks about hemispheric lateralization. The fact that your brain has two hemispheres, has two sides, and they do different things. Specifically, the left side of your brain is technology and engineering and solving problems and how to and what, all the stuff you do all day. Whereas the right hemisphere is the why hemisphere, the mystery and the meaning. You figure out the meaning of your life by residing in the right hemisphere of your brain where big why questions are asked.

7:09Now, you know already the problem, which is that we're foreclosing activity in the right hemisphere of our brains because we're using our brains wrong in the modern world where we've wiped out boredom. And that's how it all comes together. The main problem is that we're not getting to the meaning of our lives because we're doing trivial nonsense and sitting in the wrong part of our brains.

Problem of Meaninglessness

7:31That was episode one and episode two. Now, episode three, right before the book comes out. Who cares? Why does it matter? Wouldn't it be better just to go through life as Friedrich Nietzsche sort of suggested that let's just suck it up, man. There is no why to life. There is no essence to all this stuff. So all you've got is existence. So make the most of it. Have a good laugh and live your life. Stop trying to find meaning in the first place. Is this just a dumb conceit,

8:03an exercise in futility? The answer to that is absolutely not. And what I want to do today is to show you why you should want to find the meaning of your life. Why I wrote this book in the first place. What you can get if you read this book and if you share these ideas with other people. Today, the importance of finding the meaning of your life. Now, let me back up a little bit about how my quest for understanding the answers to these questions started. And it really starts at the big picture level at my natural vocational home.

8:38I'm an academic. In my heart, I'm an academic. I was born to be an academic. I was running around the university campus when I was a baby. My dad was a college professor. That's all he did from the age of 25 when he got his master's degree and started teaching at a college all the way through to his PhD. And his whole life, as a matter of fact, he literally never had any other jobs except during the summers when I was little. College professors didn't make very much money. And so my dad, during those days, you know, he drove a bus for the city to make ends meet.

9:08But he was fundamentally an academic. Now, why was he an academic? Because his dad was an academic. Seeing a pattern here, right? I had told myself I wasn't going to do it. I tried not to do it, but I got sucked in. All the way through my 20s, I was a musician. As a matter of fact, I didn't go to college until my late 20s. Some of you have heard me tell that story. I won't bother you with it. But by the time I went to college and graduated the month before my 30th birthday, yeah, I'm going to do that too. It's the best life. I'm made to be on campuses.

9:39And I finished my PhD at 34 and became a full-time academic myself. When I got my first professorship, it was as good as I thought it was going to be. There aren't that many things that live up to the expectations, are there? The pyramids in Giza lives up to your expectations. The glaciers in Alaska, that lives up to it. Venice, that lives up to your expectations. And academia, the academic life really is great. I mean, not for everybody, obviously, but for me. I mean, the teaching, the students,

10:10the research, the curiosity, it's so great. I've always loved it. And I loved it for the very first time. When I first took my first assistant professorship at Georgia State University after finishing my PhD in 1998, I was cranking out research papers. I was teaching big classes full of students, getting better at my teaching. It was beautiful. And one of the main things I liked about it was the culture among the students. They were happy. I like being around happy people.

10:40And people in college and graduate school were traditionally, according to the data, but according to probably your experience too, if you're anything like my age, that was the happiest time of life. That's when you made your friends. That's when you were falling in love. That's when you were hearing big new ideas that were blowing your mind, and sometimes scary, controversial things and where you could have experiences of those ideas without being all freaked out. Yeah, it was great. That's what it always was. I went from Georgia State to Syracuse University. I loved it at Syracuse.

11:11And you're thinking, yeah, it's probably because of the weather, right? Yeah, no. It was the people. It was the students. It was my colleagues. It was the happiness. It was the culture. Well, along the way, I decided to make a little career change. I've made a lot of career changes. I went from French horn player to, you know, social scientist. That's a big one. But I made another big one in 2008 when I was 44. I left academia to be a CEO, to be the chief executive of a great big nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. called the American Enterprise Institute.

11:42That was a completely consuming job. That was the hardest job I ever had by far, as a matter of fact. It was exhausting. It had a high learning curve. And I did it for almost 11 years. Now, that was so consuming that I wasn't paying any attention to university life. But I vowed to do it for 10 years. I did it for actually exactly 10 years and six months. I lived up to how long I said I was going to do it. And I got out when I said I was going to leave. Now, I thought about what do I want to do when I'm done with that? And I couldn't get it out of my head.

12:13I had to go back to my home. I had to get back on campus. That's where I'm made to be. And Esther, my wife, she's like, yeah, you got to go back on campus. That's where your heart is. But I did. You know, about six months before I left, I got a few offers. I got offers from about 10 universities to go back and to be a professor. And I took the one that I liked the most, which was at Harvard University and Cambridge, Mass. They offered the ability for me to actually teach more or less what I wanted and a lot of freedom to get back into my research, et cetera. And I thought, yeah, getting back to my happy place.

12:44My happy place. And I went back to academia in 2019. And it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same thing that I had left at the end of 2008. It had darkened. It wasn't just Harvard. It was academia in general. What had been statistically happier, brighter than the rest of the country had become darker, as a matter of fact. You found that students on university campuses, they were more likely to be suffering depression, way more likely than they had in years past.

13:16Since 2008, the rates of clinical depression among college students had tripled to about 2019. Generalized anxiety had almost doubled, as a matter of fact. This was a psychogenic epidemic, which is a fancy way that behavioral scientists like me talk about a source of real misery that doesn't have an apparent biological origin. Psychogenic epidemic. So when I get back to academia in 2019, of course, I see this and I'm shocked. I'm sad.

13:46It wasn't right. But of course, I'm also interested. I'm a social entrepreneur at heart. When I see tragedy and trouble, I also see opportunity. There's an opportunity to do good. I'm, as a behavioral scientist, dedicated to, well, you know, lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. That was the time, I thought. But I got to figure out what's wrong. What's going wrong? You already know, because I hope you've listened to the last two episodes.

14:16What's going wrong is that starting about the time I left academia in 2008, we solved boredom. That's when smartphones started to proliferate. In 2007, it was when the first iPhone was delivered. 2008, it was in almost everybody's pocket. By 2009, 2010, 2011, the apps were on every phone. Dating apps were about 2012. And on and on it went. Life became completely online, is what it came down to. And not just online. Online chased people around. It was sitting in their back pockets all the time.

14:47And that got rid of boredom, which changed our brains. We were not using our brains, the mysterious, the right hemisphere of love and meaning. We weren't in the right space to actually do that. That's the last two episodes that I mentioned before. So who cares? Why does it matter? And the answer is, that's actually why we had the mental health crisis on campuses and not just on campuses. Disproportionately among people under 30 was this meaninglessness.

15:19What I found when I came back to academia in 2019 and started looking at the data is the best predictor I could find of clinical depression and generalized anxiety was the answer yes to the question, does your life feel meaningless? In fact, I'll put the link to this in the note in the show notes. There's data, excellent data that's been collected for a long time by the polling firm Monitoring the Future that asks, does your life feel meaningless? That was an odd question without very interesting answers

15:49for the longest time. It kind of bumped along between, you know, I don't know, five and 15% of the population until 2008, when suddenly it started taking a dog leg upward. Now, I'm not saying that people felt meaningless about their lives because I left academia, obviously. It was because of the proliferation of the anti-boredom devices, of the devices that took meaning away. And when meaning goes, depression comes. Here's the reason we should be thinking

16:20about the meaning of life. You go back to an earlier episode. I'll make sure this is linked to it right here. Happiness, happiness in life equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. If meaning becomes devoid, happiness becomes unavailable. That's why we have the misery crisis. That's why we have the psychogenic epidemic. Like, I've seen the data. There's no problem with enjoyment. Young people, arguably, enjoy life more than any other cohort.

16:51They're getting that right in a lot of ways. Satisfaction on my campus is super high. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. That's what they're doing all day long at Harvard University, is accomplishing things with a tremendous struggle because it's a sacrifice what they're doing with this hard education at this fine institution and many other walks of life and schools around the country. The problem is that when you look at the data, it is obvious and clear that meaning has imploded and that's what's leading to the unhappiness epidemic

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17:56I care about love and happiness. I want more human flourishing. So I need more meaning. Okay, so once I find this to my satisfaction, this is before I started this book, by the way, I wasn't quite there yet. I needed to hear the stories that people would tell. Back in the old days, social scientists used to do their research in the following way. Adam Smith, who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, that was this treatise based on data about how market economies worked.

18:27It's kind of the early Bible of capitalism, as a matter of fact. But it wasn't just a bunch of statistical correlations that he was putting together. No. Adam Smith said, you know, when this happens, this happens, et cetera, et cetera. He was collecting data in his way. More importantly, though, he was talking to people because that's what social scientists do. They're supposed to focus on the social part. So he would walk factory floors, talk to workers. He has a long section of The Wealth of Nations on the pin factory, how, you know, you make little pins, like sewing pins, and you roll out the wire

18:59and you cut it, you flatten one side, et cetera. He talked about how workers that were in a pin factory, how they were actually doing their work, and talking to them about how they were living their lives. That's the richness in social science, and that's important that we not get away from that by just doing experiments and regression analyses. So that's what I do, too. Once I see statistical patterns, then I start talking to people to understand in real life what these patterns mean. And when I did, well, then I really started to understand

19:30this psychogenic epidemic, and I realized why I needed to write this book and why I needed to be a warrior in the cause for meaning. I did a whole bunch of case studies. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed

20:01to tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you.

20:32Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life, and you're going to like how it feels. What I want to do now

Stories of Emptiness

20:41is I just want to tell you three stories. Three stories of real people that I talk to, and these are stories in their own words. Now, rather than summarizing these things, I'm just going to read it. This is from the introduction to the book, okay? So I'm going to read a short section of the book. If you've got the audio book, this should be pretty much the same, but only for a couple of minutes. Don't worry. I'm not going to read you the whole book. But these stories are going to sum up why this is a very important issue as far as I'm concerned. Story number one is called The Garbage Disposal.

21:11Mark, age 32, is exactly what you would conjure up in your mind if I asked you to imagine a textbook driver. He's college educated, hardworking, and healthy. He's a bootstraps guy. His parents broke up when he was young, and they never had much money, but Mark avoided trouble, went to college, unlike most of the people he grew up with, and landed an excellent job as a data analyst. Mark is a gym rat and in great physical shape. If you were writing an advice column for men on how to succeed in life,

21:43Mark would pretty much be the poster child for what you would recommend. But when we spoke and he told me all this, something sounded off. As he described the situation on paper, a list of carefully managed accomplishments his voice was hollow, as though he was describing a scenario he didn't really believe. I pressed him to go deeper. He paused, and then he said this, My life feels empty. I asked him what he was missing.

22:15He thought for a minute, and then he told me a story. A year or so ago, he was on a first date with a woman he'd met on one of the dating apps. Over dinner, she mentioned to him in passing that her garbage disposal was clogged, and she didn't know what to do about it. He volunteered to help her with it and ended up fixing it for her that very evening. He said that this gave him a deep sense of satisfaction and purpose. Later, at his own apartment, he remembered that his own garbage disposal was clogged up as well. The fix was easy,

22:46but he had just never got around to doing anything about it. A year later, he still hasn't. Now, maybe that sounds like a random anecdote, but I understood that he was expressing something profound. Mark wasn't saying that he felt some sort of existential need to become a handyman. What he craved was the sense of purpose and significance that came from being needed by someone. The garbage disposal date never went anywhere, unfortunately, nor had any of his dates in years, he told me. The only way to meet women, he felt, was on a dating app.

23:17By his own count, he'd gone on 50 first dates. But the connections always felt fake. He never felt any authenticity with people he met that way, so he'd given up on the idea that his soulmate was somewhere online. Maybe, he feared, his soulmate simply doesn't exist. His friendships haven't fared much better. During the lonely coronavirus lockdowns, he moved to a new city he'd never been to, hoping to meet new people. He didn't, at least not real humans in three dimensions. His job went

23:48fully remote and never came back in person. His work colleagues were and still are two-dimensional avatars on a Zoom screen. He only established a few social relationships in the new city and now rarely sees anyone more than once a week. He feels stuck on the outside of life, viewing the world through a double-pane window. To pass his overabundant free time, Mark, like almost everyone these days, is online a lot, scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, he spends hours

24:19listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations, but it leaves him feeling empty. He calls it social pornography. But like all digital distraction, it's hard to avoid without something better to do. And most of the time, there's nothing better to do. He craves a big, meaningful project, building something, writing something, and dreams of finding that project and immersing himself in it. But he can't come up with any ideas for what that project might be,

24:49so it's back online. Occasionally, he panics. Is this it forever? Will I die alone? Will I ever find what I'm looking for? But then the fear subsides, and he falls back into the zooming, scrolling, and isolation, and the months click by. Story number two. Just stay busy. Maria's parents are probably bragging about her to the neighbors right now. Their 27-year-old daughter

25:19has always been a bright light, top grades in school, never in trouble. She was always a leader and ambitious, completing a bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering, joining the military, and rising fast as an officer in the cyber and information sciences. She holds multiple associations in prestigious academic societies and think tanks. On the personal side, however, things aren't going well for Maria. Her extraordinary energy, the envy of others, isn't just her way to succeed, but also to distract herself.

25:51The hustle diverts her attention from an intense sense of emptiness that grows every year. She appears hyper-focused, a woman on a mission, but she confesses privately that her life has no coherence. She has no idea where she's going, nor what she even wants. She hopes that through her work, a sense of purpose will emerge, but it never does. She feels no passion for it, no calling, no sense of vocation. When we speak, I ask her

26:21what big change she would like to see in her life in a year's time. She pauses for a long time and fails to come up with a definite answer. Big questions like this make her feel afraid, she says, so she avoids them by staying busy. What if I never find the answers, she asks me, or if there are no answers? What about her relationships? Maria has a boyfriend, but she doesn't know where that relationship is going. It's just okay, for now.

26:51She's an extrovert and has friends, but she says they're more deal friends than real friends. She rarely goes deep with anyone in her circle. She's not very close to her parents or siblings. Although she, in theory, is a religious believer, she doesn't practice her faith at all. I ask why not? She doesn't know. When she's too tired to work, Maria tells me that she would like to read books or do something productive and creative, but somehow doesn't know how to get started. Instead, she finds herself simply on her phone,

27:23scrolling social media and watching YouTube, sometimes for hours at a time. This fills her with guilt for wasting time, but it keeps her mind off something she knows she's missing, but can't quite name. And finally, story number three, a long hike to somewhere.

27:43Mark and Maria are among the typical high-performing adults I've met in my teaching and travels over the past seven years. Their lives look enviable from the outside, but they feel empty on the inside. They're waiting for their purpose to find them, but it never does. As they wait, they distract themselves with work and soothe themselves with tech. I feel a paternal concern for Mark and Maria. After all, I'm old enough to be their father. Paul, however, is closer to a peer. He could be a younger sibling

28:14to me, in fact, and because of that, his story leaves me more shaken than the others. At 47, Paul would appear to have everything figured out. He's smart and friendly. He's married with three kids and has a successful career as a social scientist at a top university. Before I met him, I knew about him. I admired his work. But scratch the surface and a darker narrative emerges. Paul's parents divorced when he was very young and he grew up in poverty without much adult attention.

28:44A clever kid, he quickly figured out that adults gave him the approval he craved when he excelled in school. Love, he figured out, is earned through achievements. So, all of his sense of purpose came from getting good grades, good test scores, the next gold star, in his words. And to maintain that sense of purpose, he essentially never left school, winding up as a professor. Ten years ago, Paul was ambitious and full of passion for ideas, writing a series of books in his academic field. They weren't bestsellers.

29:15They were too specialized and academically rigorous. But he was proud of them and he told himself, the right people were reading them. The recognition he got for these books was his grown-up gold stars. But their luster faded over the decade as his career progress slowed.