The Free Press: Why Your ‘Perfect’ Life Feels So Empty, by Arthur Brooks (Harvard) (Author, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (2026)):
I’ve spent most of my career around some of the most accomplished young people in the world. What I’ve found is that they are undeniably, desperately, incorrigibly unhappy. Why?
It’s no secret that we are living at a time of profound unhappiness. According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of American adults of all ages who are “not too happy” about their lives more than doubled from 2000 to 2024. Young adults were hit especially hard: The percentage of American adolescents with symptoms of major depression nearly tripled from 2005 to 2019, while anxiety almost doubled.
But here’s the really weird part: The ones suffering most are not just the down-and-out types—the addicts, the impoverished, the failsons. Those for whom there are obvious things gone wrong in their lives. On the contrary, it is also those who seem to have everything going right for them—in other words, our young and most successful strivers. …
No doubt you are familiar with the 1999 sci-fi thriller The Matrix. It is set around the year 2199, but the characters think it is 1999 because they are living in a simulation created by sentient machines. While their bodies subsist in pods and their energy is tapped to power the machines, their brains are stimulated to experience a life that is indistinguishable from reality. One man, Neo, learns the truth from a band of people who have freed themselves. He then joins them and becomes determined to destroy the simulation and free humanity—not because it isn’t pleasant, but because it isn’t real. Life is fake. Empty. Meaningless.
Young strivers aren’t living in a pod, of course. But they are living in a simulation of real life. As the cultural critic Ted Gioia has written, we have moved from playing sports outside with friends to computer gaming; from reading newspapers to scrolling clickbait; from watching full stories on film to scanning reels; from writing letters to cranking out disappearing short texts; from sweetly suffering through romantic courtship to swiping right.
We have implemented efficient substitutes for the experiences we crave, but they don’t deliver a sense of life’s meaning.
There’s a scientific explanation for this. Back in the 1970s, when I lived with my parents, we would say with great confidence that my mathematician dad was “left-brained” (analytical and logical) and my artist mom was “right-brained” (artsy and creative). This designation was based on a neuroscientific theory called hemispheric lateralization, which posited that different sides of the brain process different functions, and that some people show a preference or aptitude for using one side over the other.
That old hypothesis turned out to be a clumsy and inaccurate account of neural processing. But in recent years, the concept has come back—in a new and much more precise form, due in no small part to the work of the British neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. In his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, McGilchrist argued that the two halves of the brain do not so much have different functions; each hemisphere deals with just about everything. But they do so in consistently different ways. The right side of the brain is the “master,” which asks big, transcendent questions such as “Why am I alive?” The left side—which he calls the “emissary”—addresses such practical questions as “How do I get food so I can keep being alive?”
In other words, in the right hemisphere we ask the lofty why questions about life. On the left side, we ask, earthbound, what to do now and how to do it.
Hemispheric lateralization explains the acute crisis of meaning today. In our increasingly complicated, technology-dominated, and endlessly distracting world, people are shoved to the left side of their brains. They are stuck in a complicated simulation where there is a lot going on, but which is bereft of mystery and meaning.
This hasn’t affected everyone equally, of course: At least people my age remember the before times, when meeting a potential mate for the first time involved a real-life conversation, and a big question of life’s meaning couldn’t be reduced to a Google search. But most young adults today have never known any domain other than Left Brain Land. And this is especially true for the strivers. They know every complicated nook and cranny of that technical dystopia, but the mysterious realm of meaning seems mythical, like the lost kingdom of Atlantis. …
Not that long ago, no one had a smartphone—the first iPhone was delivered in 2007. Today, five billion people around the world have one in their pocket—most of them all the time. Three minutes until the Uber comes? Your phone is out. Waiting for an elevator or stopped at a red light? Same.
Why? The answer is not “Because they are addictive.” It is that people are bored out of their minds. Boredom is one of the biggest predictors of all types of addiction. Why are we so bored? Because life feels repetitive and meaningless, and even a minute here or there with nothing to do feels like an hour. So out comes the phone, every few minutes, all day long, changing our brain chemistry in dangerous ways.
And what side of our brains are we on as we do all this? The mundane left, of course, not the mysterious right. The remedy we’ve created to avoid the boredom of modern life—this app, that video—reinforces our inability to ponder the abstractions necessary to formulate any concept of our lives’ meaning.
This asymmetry explains why we’re bombarded with ingenious solutions to age-old problems but never seem to make progress toward greater happiness. In fact, it’s the reverse: We are losing our sense of life’s meaning faster and faster.
The Matrix ends with Neo flying into the sky and delivering a speech to the terrible machines, in which he promises a world without their control or boundaries, signifying the beginning of a world where “anything is possible.” Your own future is a little more earthbound than that, I know. But you can declare your independence from the simulation that has increasingly occupied so many lives.
The strategy we all need—especially young adults starting out on their life’s journey—doesn’t involve quitting the modern world. Instead, to escape, we must put the complicated parts of life in their proper place, unlearning a bunch of bad habits that have made the search for meaning frustrating and fruitless. Then we need to give our attention to skills that can develop our capacity to find meaning in the mysterious spaces of life.
These are the spaces full of problems that can’t be solved; only lived and understood, meaning they matter for the right hemisphere. They include the helplessness and vulnerability of falling in love; the search for God; the giving of oneself for another; the pursuit of a calling; abandonment to natural, artistic, and moral beauty. And as much as anything else, nonresistance to life’s inevitable suffering.
These are complex parts of life that were once completely ordinary. I am sure my great-grandfather Leroy Brooks, born in 1862, never gave them a single thought. Which is why, I am also quite sure, he never came home to my great-grandmother Mary Ellen and said he had had a panic attack that day. His brain was working exactly as designed.
Today in our ultra-engineered, technologized world, this is no longer ordinary. We must seek these parts of life on purpose, and there are no shortcuts. You don’t get them by buying a device, taking a supplement, or listening to beta-wave noises while you fall asleep. That won’t work. What will work is making a concerted choice to avoid devices; to see and pursue your relationships and experiences in an old-fashioned way; to force yourself to grapple with the transcendental, philosophical, spiritual parts of life where happiness truly lies.
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