In “The Meaning of Your Life,” he no longer trumpets free markets, extolls entrepreneurs, or praises work as “a blessing,” as he did in earlier books. Now he claims that the ambitious professionals he calls “young strivers” lead superficial and unfulfilling lives. What they lack, in his view, is “the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning.”
“Seven and then door-close, door-close, door-close, door-close, door-close, door-close, door-close, door-close, and door-close.”
Cartoon by Paul Noth
There are any number of prospective material explanations for the young strivers’ predicament, and Brooks makes brief note of several, among them the punishing housing market and the imminent collapse of the social safety net. But calcified habits die hard, and rather than seriously entertain any of these explanations, or even clarify why he rejects them, he turns instinctively to what he knows best—dubious social science.
To make sense of the strivers’ malaise, Brooks relies on the work of Jonathan “Happiness Hypothesis” Haidt, whose 2024 best-seller, “The Anxious Generation,” argued that digital natives have been addled by excessive screen time. What he adds to Haidt’s account is a dash of questionable neuroscience: in his telling, “hemispheric lateralization,” the phenomenon whereby cognitive functions are localized in different halves of the brain, “explains the acute crisis of meaning today.” A nebulous alloy of smartphones, social media, and a lust for optimization has thrust society into a “left-brained” orientation, forcing us to adopt a hyper-practical outlook. “The modern world of technology is literally changing the way people use their brains,” Brooks writes, “rendering them less and less capable of finding life’s coherence, purpose, and significance.”
Even though researchers have found no evidence that contemporary populations use one hemisphere of the brain any more than the other, every part of this picture is presented with slick confidence. Appeals to “the science” abound. Brooks is apt to fall back on that old assurance “studies show,” even when studies conflict—or, worse, when the very studies he cites do not show what he says they do. In his book “The Conservative Heart,” from 2015, for instance, he avers that monogamy yields happiness, then adds, “This isn’t my moral opinion; it’s what empirical evidence tells us.” The “empirical evidence” in question is a study showing that subjects with a single sexual partner have an average of 0.077 additional “happiness points.” But it also found that people who have sex four or more times a week, possibly with any number of partners, have 0.12, a fact that Brooks conveniently neglects to mention.
“The Meaning of Your Life” also contains its fair share of misrepresentations, as when Brooks muses that “the idea of opposites attracting might even be biological,” then cites a 1995 study that subsequent researchers have called into question. But no one reading the book will come away with the sense that studies are often contested, or that many of the findings of social psychology and economics remain unsettled, or that results can be interpreted in many ways. Like much popular social science, it makes no effort to prove or even to persuade. It simply asserts and instructs.
Its tone as it does so is distinctly infantilizing. Chapters are subdivided into digestible sections (“Get Bored the Right Way,” “Give More to Transcend Yourself”) and often end with homework, set aside in a little box, as in elementary-school textbooks. When Brooks is not offering “Questions for Reflection and Self-Assessment,” he is laying out “Three Big Things to Remember,” as if he were providing a study guide for the exam of a meaningful life. In his book “Love Your Enemies,” from 2019, he admiringly cites “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”—which he describes, perhaps with a sense of defensive self-awareness, as a “masterpiece” that is not “just cheesy self-help.” Brooks, for his part, rarely imposes on readers by asking them to count as high as seven, perhaps assuming that “three major lessons from the science of morality” and “five simple facts” make more manageable mathematical demands.
Still, Brooks’s turn away from politics and toward a more therapeutic project has not been wholly unhelpful. His practical advice fares better than both his theories and his pallid attempts at profundity. In his columns, he recommends such commonsense remedies as a good night’s sleep and regular exercise. “The Meaning of Your Life,” in particular, contains several promising suggestions. Who would deny that we would all do better to turn off our phones, interact with other human beings, and maybe even go outside for a walk every once in a while? Brooks struggles, however, when he strays from the cozy precincts of self-help and into the rugged realm of philosophy.
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