How the Meaning of Life Affects Your Brain: Part 2 of 3

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Mental Health Crisis

0:30Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression and anxiety than we've ever seen. This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems including self-harm, addiction, etc, etc. So the question is, why? And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious, the word that comes up again and again and again and again is I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. My life feels empty. My life feels meaningless. I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything.

1:01There's this existential desertedness, hollowness that they're actually talking about in their life. We have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains. That's what it comes down to. And furthermore, there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work and when you do this, you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic.

Introduction to Office Hours

1:34Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show, if you've been watching, you already know that this is a podcast dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. I'm a behavioral scientist and that's my personal mission as well. The reason I do this show is because I need you in the movement. I would like you to live a happier, better life and I would like you to share these ideas to lift other people up as well. And I want to equip you with the knowledge and the ideas and the habits

2:04and the technique to actually make that possible in your life and the lives of other people. Thank you for watching the show and for sharing the ideas in the show. Continuing to watch this show, if it's not your first time, please do recommend this to other people so that we can grow a bigger audience dedicated to these ideas of love and happiness. As always, I would love to hear what you're thinking. Please feed back if you have any questions about what we're talking about here, any criticisms, any pushback, any clarifications. Please write to us here at officehours at arthurbrooks.com or put it in the comments.

2:36We read all the comments on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, any place where you're actually getting this. Also, please do leave a review and don't forget to subscribe.

The Meaning of Life Book

2:45This is the second episode today of a three-part series on the meaning of your life. The meaning of your life is not just the concept of the meaning of your life. It's actually my new book, The Meaning of Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. You can see the handsome cover right behind me here. That book is being released March 31st, 2026. If you're watching this beforehand, it's coming out really, really quickly. And there's a special event I'd like you to be a part of for the launch of this book. It's an interactive event with people from all over the world. Thousands of people will be tuning in

3:16on March 27th. To find out about how you can be part of it on YouTube or on Zoom, there are a lot of different ways to be involved, please go to themeaningofyourlife.com. The website is actually listed here on the screen as I'm talking. themeaningofyourlife, all one word, dot com to learn more. This is going to be your go-to spot, I hope, for this particular topic. I'll be joined by a lot of great friends. I'll be in person with Rainn Wilson, the comedic actor, a great friend of mine, comedic actor from The Office.

3:47We'll be with Chip Conley, who founded the Modern Elder Academy, Hoda Kotb from The Today Show, Chris Williamson, Dan Buettner, all kinds of guest appearances from people who are friends who are really interested in this topic and very enthusiastic about the release of this book. We're going to be exploring life's biggest questions, and we would like you to be there. It's completely free, so go to themeaningofyourlife.com, get a copy of the book in advance. If you want, get copies of the book for all the people that you love, especially if you like the book. That might make a nice

4:18holiday present this coming year. In any case, head on over to the website and learn more about what we're actually doing.

The Meaning Crisis

4:25Today, in the second of three episodes on The Meaning of Life, I want to talk about the meaning crisis and what's actually going wrong in our lives, such that, in the data, it's very clear, that young people, particularly people under 30 years old, are having a harder and harder time. I'll give you the evidence for this in a second, finding what they think the meaning of their life is. What's that all about? Why is that happening? What's different about life today, and how can you actually start to turn the tables on that? How can you flip the switch

4:55and start not just answering what is the meaning of my life, but experiencing the meaning of your life more richly in the way that you live from day to day? That's what we'll be talking about today. I want you to understand the meaning of your life, and today is going to actually give you an idea how to do it. Now, in the last episode I talked about you need to set the stage, which specifically meant you need to actually have more blank space in your life. You need to be bored more. But now I'm going to tell you how to use the time a little bit better. How can you use the blank space in a different way?

5:26So that's what we're talking about. Now, once again, let me talk about the problem that we're experiencing. Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression and anxiety than we've ever seen. You've seen the data yourself and you've experienced it around the people that you know, for sure. If you're my age, it's your adult kids and their friends. If you're that age, it's your friends and maybe you too. Depression since 2008 has increased by about a factor of three, especially for young adults, and generalized anxiety has doubled.

5:57We've never seen anything like this. This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems, including self-harm, addiction, et cetera, et cetera. So the question is, why? And there's lots of explanations for this. There's pop explanations. I've talked about this in the past on the show. You know, different generations always blame each other. You know, young adults will say, it's all you, hey, thanks, boomers, you know, for driving up the price of houses and destroying the, you know, the environment or something. And boomers are like, ah, you're just a bunch of snowflakes.

6:28None of that holds water. There's got to be a better scientific explanation for it. And there is. Turns out when you look at the data on the meaning of life, that that explains this trend, statistically explains this trend. There's a group, I've talked about it before, called Monitoring the Future that asks people, do you feel like your life is meaningless? And the increases in people saying yes, follow the increases in depression and anxiety. It's inescapable. These things actually go together.

6:58When I started seeing that, I started to do interviews with people. One of the things that I like to do as a behavioral scientist is to look at the data and then go behind the data by talking to actual human beings. And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious, the word that comes up again and again and again and again is I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. My life feels empty. My life feels meaningless. I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything. There's this existential desertedness, hollowness that they're actually talking about in their life.

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Zen Buddhism and Archery

7:59I want to talk right now about how different traditions have dealt with this in the past and then I want to relate it to what we can do today. Okay, now this is going to be a pretty scientific episode but I'm going to talk about the neuroscience that I really like, I really love to share with you in the show in as clear a way as I possibly can and when I can, I'm going to, or when I remember to, I'm going to repeat some of the hardest concepts here. But I think that this is going to be pretty clear. Here's the point. We have a big philosophical problem

8:29that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains. That's what it comes down to. And furthermore, there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work and when you do this, you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic. That's what I promise you in this episode today. Okay. Now, when I was a 20-year-old, I remember reading a book that had been recommended to me

9:00by a lot of musicians. Now, I was a musician in those days. Those of you who followed my work for a while, you know that I was a classical musician, professional, full-time, from when I was 19 until I was 31 years old. I didn't go to college until my late 20s. My whole first career was as a classical French horn player. That's what I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life. And I was really interested in all the different ways that I could train not just my chops, but also my mind to be a better musician. A great musician that I knew recommended that I read this one book called Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigal.

9:32Now, he was a German philosophy professor from the mid-century who had done a really weird thing. Instead of just studying all those depressing German philosophers, you know, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Hegel and, you know, fine. Those guys are fine. But he said, you know, I think there's a lot going on in the East that we're not aware of. Now, that might seem pretty obvious to you today, but in, you know, 1930 in Germany, that wasn't well known because this stuff just wasn't in circulation. There was no access to it. So instead of just going to the Internet,

10:02which didn't exist, or even looking at books, which you couldn't find, Eugene Herrigal went to Japan and he decided he was going to study Zen Buddhism. He'd heard about this exotic philosophy or religion, he wasn't quite sure what, called Zen Buddhism. So he went to Japan. Now, he went to a Zen Buddhist master and said, teach me. And the Zen Buddhist master said, I can't teach you Zen. He said, what do you mean? You're a Zen master. He says, no, you don't learn Zen that way. The way that you learn Zen is by doing something

10:33that requires Zen and then when you master that skill, you will know Zen. Like, huh, okay. I mean, I realize this is kind of abstract and that's what Herrigal was thinking. It was recommended to him that he study archery. Archery is an ancient art that is practiced by a lot of Zen masters. He studied archery in Japan for five years to learn Zen. That's what he did. That's a really interesting book and I recommend that you read it. I'll put it in the show notes, Zen and the Art of Archery. One of the things that he found

11:04while he was learning archery is it's full of these kind of mysterious questions that don't have answers. And in point of fact, Zen is taught this way typically. It's taught on the basis of unanswerable questions that explore dark parts of the mind. For example, you probably heard the Zen Buddhist riddle. This is called a koen in Japanese. The most famous Zen Buddhist koen and this actually comes from an 18th century Zen Buddhist master named Hakui Nakaku.

11:34Here it is. What is the sound of one hand clapping? You hear that and you go, right? Like, that doesn't seem like that's what they're talking about. And the truth is there is no sound. So what's the sound of no sound? Right? Now, when you read Zen in the Art of Archery, you'll understand how that unanswerable question explored in the mind actually led to him understanding how to be an archer and thus understand Zen itself. Okay, I'm not trying to be too, you know, esoteric here.

12:05Here's really the point that I'm trying to make. I've contemplated that a lot and many other Zen Buddhist koens. Here's another, for example, a junior monk, a Zen Buddhist monk is walking on a country road by himself and he sees a senior Zen Buddhist monk walking toward him in the other direction. He greets the senior monk and said, where are you going? And he said, I don't know. I said, how do you not know where you're going? Why don't you know where you're going? And he said, because not knowing is the most intimate knowledge.

12:37Contemplate. What that kind of question has in common, like what is the sound of one hand clapping, is to make you think without being able to come up with a coherent answer. And that's actually the point. There's something that that ancient tradition and every other religious tradition has figured out that when we have deep philosophical questions that can lead to understanding beyond articulation, it does something to exercise the brain and mind.

13:08That's a tradition, by the way, among the ancient Greeks called aporia, or depending on how you pronounce it, aporia. I'm going to call it aporia. Hey, I'm an American. Aporia is to sit in a place of puzzlement with unanswerable questions on purpose. Now, this is wacky by today's standards. Why? Because we have a culture, and you see where I'm going with this in a second, we have a culture that if you can't type a question into a Google search bar and get back an answer that makes sense to you,

13:39it's not a real question. I mean, it's weird because, you know, there's a whole generation of people who think that if it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist. And so, therefore, a question that can't be answered by Google search or even by AI, therefore, is a senseless question. And what these ancient traditions have asserted, the ancient Greeks, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, all of the karmic religions, all are based fundamentally on unanswerable questions that would say, no, no, no, no, no.

14:09If you want to understand the deep mysteries of life, you can't feed it into a Google search bar. You can't ask ChatGPT because if ChatGPT can answer it, it's the wrong kind of question to give you the mystical knowledge. Right? Now, we got to figure out if that's true.

Unanswerable Questions

14:28And what I'm going to do today is to try to convince you that it is absolutely true and that you can understand the point that I'm making and you can use the point that I'm making very practically in your life. That's what I'm going to show you in the next half hour. Okay. Now, I have my own kind of co-ins that I assign to my students. I ask my students to just contemplate the following two questions. Why am I alive? Why am I alive? You can answer that, I guess, with respect to, you know,

14:58a sperm and an egg or the role of God in creating you or for what purpose or all of that. But fundamentally, that's a mystical question that requires understanding often beyond words. Here's a second question. For what would I give my life? Really? Now, okay, if you're a parent and grandparent like me, that's super easy. What else? For what else would you give your life? Why do you know that? What that does is that exercises the brain in a very weird way.

15:29These are hard or impossible to answer questions. And here's what the ancient traditions claim. When you contemplate those unanswerable questions, something happens to your understanding of the meaning of your life. It doesn't mean that you suddenly say, oh, the meaning of my life is one, two, three, X, Y, Z. You suddenly gain an understanding of the meaning of your life subsequent to the consideration of mystical questions. And that's what my students find when I pose these questions to them and my adult children

16:00as well. Hmm. Now, this is basically, and this is not just, you know, the mystical traditions or the philosophers either. Many more modern behavioral scientists and even medical professionals have asserted the exact same thing. Perhaps the greatest psychiatrist of the early 20th century, Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst, said more or less the same thing. He said, the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. In other words, a problem is important,

16:31which means that it gives you knowledge of meaning if you can't solve it. Right. Now, that might sound like I'm, you know, proposing the myth of Sisyphus, you know, push the boulder up the hill and trying to figure out the answer to a question, let it roll back down again. It's like his exercise in futility, so just forget it. Go ask Chad GBT and try to distract yourself. No, no, no. He's saying that there is understanding beyond articulation. That's what I want to get at today. And it turns out, my friends,

17:02that we can sort out the mystery of what they're saying in much more, much clearer, more distinct neuroscientific terms based on very recent advances in neuroscience and behavioral science. They're exactly right. And I'm going to tell you why and how you can use that knowledge. The explanation for why unanswerable questions give you special knowledge about the meaning of your life starts with a theory of what neuroscientists call hemispheric lateralization.

17:33Now, it's a fancy way of saying a simple thing. That the two sides of the brain do different things. The right side of the brain does one thing. The left side of the brain does something else. We have to call it something fancy because that's how college professors get tenure is put on fancy words. Hemispheric lateralization. This is based a lot on a number of important neuroscientists working. Now, you might think, oh, yeah, I remember that from if you're my age, you'll say, I remember that from the 70s when people were either artsy or analytical. Right brain artsy types or left brain analytical types. I fought this, by the way. I was raised by a painter

18:03and a mathematician. My father was a mathematician. My mother was an artist. We all said, oh, mom, super right brain. And dad, he's really left brain because he's a mathematician. And I always thought I took after my mom because, you know, all I wanted to do was play the French horn, write music. I painted a lot. I like to write poetry. I mean, I was like the arts guy. And I had no interest in math and science, which might be surprising to you right now because of what I do for a living. Well, it turns out that when I finally went to college in my late 20s, I took a bunch of classes in economics and calculus

18:35and linear algebra and basic statistics and I already said that. Anyway, the whole point is that I started studying math and quantitative methods for the first time and it lit me up like a Christmas tree, man. I'm like, oh, it turns out that I'm left brain like that. No, wrong. The way of thinking about hemispheric lateralization in those days was stupid and wrong because we don't have one side that does the arts and the other side that does the math. But we do have different ways of answering questions and solving problems in the two sides of our brain and that takes me

19:06to the work of the famous and great neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist. He teaches at Oxford University. He's a medical doctor and neuroscientist. This is one of these guys who spent a lot of time in school. He's an MD-PhD who is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and he looks at the most cutting-edge research and conducts the most cutting-edge research on how the different sides of the brain do different things. Back to the Old Theory of Hemispheric Lateralization. He wrote a very important book I'll put it in the show notes called The Master and His Emissary. And what he says is your brain works like the master

19:36and the emissary where the right side of the brain is the master that asks the big questions. The left side of the brain is the emissary that goes out and actually tries to find the answers analytically. Big philosophical questions, basic analytical and day-to-day tasks. You have two sides of the brain because you've got to do stuff. So he'll give an example like this. On the right side of the brain, I'm like, what's the why of my life? Because I'm made to worship and love. Love who? Love my family.

20:06What does it mean to love my family? Well, to adore them and to take care of them. What does that mean? Well, taking care of them means I've got to support them. How do I do that? Then the left brain kicks in by going to work and going and buying groceries and being a responsible individual and following certain moral laws. See what I mean? You have the big why questions of life and you have the more quotidian and prosaic how to and what questions. Right side, left side. There's another way

20:36of thinking about this that I actually learned when I was studying applied mathematics. I was working for the Rand Corporation, which is a very famous think tank in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, California. And that's where I was actually working on my PhD. And to make a living, I was doing military operations research, which is to say applied mathematics to do modeling for the U.S. Air Force. Now, one of the things that I found was that mathematical models of war situations are notoriously inaccurate. And one time I asked

21:07a really great mathematician, I mean, this guy was a master of these methods, why is it that we can ever model these really highly, highly complex warfighting situations with any sort of accuracy? And he said, oh, because it's the wrong kind of problem. He said that the models that we put together are complicated methods and the problems that we're trying to solve are complex problems, complicated and complex. Now, I'm not splitting hairs. Here's the difference. Complicated problems are,

21:37well, they're really complicated. They're hard to solve. You need computing horsepower and lots of genius. But once you solve them, they're solved. You know, building a jet aircraft is a very complicated problem. There were no jet aircraft 100 years ago. And now there are. And we stamp them out and the planes almost never crash. It's amazing. As a matter of fact, we solved the complicated problem with sufficient genius. Lots of things in life are like that. You know, building an app to figure out where you can find a pizza at 10 p.m., that's a complicated problem.

22:07A toaster is a complicated problem. It might seem kind of simple, but I defy you to build one in your garage. You'll probably burn your house down. And yet, it's been solved. You can go to the Walmart and get one for 15 bucks and it'll be, you know, sitting on your kitchen counter for the next 10 years. It's amazing. Well, they're complicated problems. Life is full of complicated problems. As a matter of fact, the whole engineering culture of Silicon Valley is based on the idea that all of life is complicated problems. We've got to solve these complicated problems. But here's the difficulty with that.

22:38Anytime somebody reduces the richness of human life to complicated problems, bad things happen. That's what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called scientific socialism, that we could come up with the equations of human behavior and then with mathematical exactitude work them out. Fyodor Dostoevsky said that's wrong because that's what he called the palace of crystal. You can't work out the things in life with mathematical exactitude. It's a different kind of problem. Woodrow Wilson,

23:08the former president, he talked about scientific public administration where you could actually figure out government so that people would be like cogs in a machine and that didn't turn out so great, I dare say. No matter what your politics are, we don't want to be treated like cogs in a machine. The problem with all of that is that the things we care about the most are not the complicated problems of the dating app and the widget and the entertainment and the tech and all of that. What we care about is not the complicated problems.

23:38We care about the complex problems. Complex problems are problems that are super easy to understand but they're impossible to solve. You can only live with them and understand them. Case in point, the reason I love NFL football is because it's a complex problem that can't be solved. You can only watch it. You can only watch it and let it unfold. It's unsolvable. I don't care how big a computer that you have, how good the algorithm is, how powerful your AI is, you're not going to be able to predict if in the Super Bowl

24:08the Seahawks are going to beat the Patriots. Now, they did. I kind of predicted that. I'm from Seattle, so, you know, all is right in the universe right now. But the whole point is I watched the whole game and I was like nervous. Why? Because I love it because I care about it and the reason is because it couldn't be simulated because it's not a complicated problem. It's not a tech problem. It's a sports thing. Sports is something that we love because it represents the passion and spontaneity