Arthur Brooks

Anxiety had doubled.

And a lot of universities, including my own, more than 50% of students were getting counseling or actually seeing a mental health professional.

uh the whole there was loneliness there was bitterness all this really crazy angry activism where everybody was a victim it was like the victim olympics on these campuses cancel culture safe spaces microaggressions it was misery it was like a plague had gone through my village while i was while i was gone and and and i thought to myself well

i guess this is my research now i guess figuring this one out is why i'm here when i came back to academia in 2019. the reason it stuck out for me so i read the whole book um

It's the crisis of emptiness that people feel.

It's the meaning crisis, which, by the way, is not just part of the human condition.

People have always struggled with what is the meaning of my life, but it's become a phenomenon in our society, in our world, but particularly in the United States since about 2008.

And it affects everybody, you and me and everybody else, but especially people under 30, and most especially educated people under 30.

As a matter of fact, there's this weird psychogenic epidemic, which is just a fancy way of saying an epidemic of misery that doesn't have a biological origin.

There's no virus that we can find.

but it's really spreading around and you see it explode after 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012.

And so my research is all about why is it that suddenly all of us are struggling to find meaning and young people in particular can't find the meaning of their lives.

What is meaning?

Where do they need to go to find it?

And how do they need to live differently?

That's what this book answers.

When you don't know what you're looking for, you can't actually find it, generally speaking.

So you have to be able to name it.

And that's true in anything, by the way.

If you say you got to go to Tacoma, but you don't know what a Tacoma is, it's not going to be very helpful.