- Arthur Brooks on meaning and happiness (with my aside about the Ship of Theseus);
- Adam Frank on the poet Gary Snyder and the value of wilderness.
All right, let’s read Arthur Brooks again.
Big Think, interview with Arthur Brooks, today: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks says he knows the real cause, subtitled “Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis. ”
56 screens on my laptop, some 23,000 words. I’m not going to read the whole thing closely, but instead try to find the gist.
This is not a trivial question, but conservatives seem to see this as an excuse to deny or hide reality. Reject science and cling to religious stories because they give your life “meaning.” Isn’t there a better response?
Today on Big Think, we’re going to talk about three big things. Number one is the fact that people have been finding their lives less meaningful. The second is what should we do to live happier lives with more meaning? What are the strategies that we can all undertake? And last but not least, the issue of addiction, especially addiction to devices.
And he’s focusing on young adults under 30.
Why does life feel meaningless? The numbers are there; more people are depressed these days. Moreover, they don’t really know how to look for meaning. He discusses the work of Steager and Martella.
And they define meaning as really a combination of three things.
Coherence, which is why things happen the way they do. Purpose, which is why I do the things that I do. And significance, which is why does my life matter?
I have books by Todd May (about meaning) and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (about mattering) to write up here that addresses some of these issues, along with my notion of how humans ‘flatten’ different layers of reality (as section VI here). All discussions of these themes seem to revolve around how to define a handful of terms.
And the most common answer, aside from “believe!”, is that we create our own meanings.
Some of this sense of lack of meaning, Brooks suggests, comes from how the two sides of the brain interpret reality. (That is, “meaning” is a product of human nature, or the function of the brain, not something that exists objectively in the world.) This sounds right — but you need to recognize those various levels of reality, and how questions that make sense at one level are nonsense at others. This is something Brooks and similar commentators haven’t thought about yet.
(A good example, which I haven’t mentioned yet: the “paradox” of the Ship of Theseus. The answer is: both are right. It boat is and isn’t the same ship, depending on the context, the level of understanding, how the question is asked. The cosmos is not flat; there is no single answer to such a question. And the same “paradox” applies to the human body, in which all component atoms and molecules are replaced every 7 days, or 11 years, or whatever the number is, the point being the same.)
Brooks gets to “the give essential elements of happiness.”
“We are meaning-based creatures.” Right away, he’s implying that “meaning” is something we invent to motivate us to pursue survival strategies. This is the kind of thing that obvious to many, and offense to many others.
And then to “progress.” Psychologists like Brooks have different ideas about meaning, happiness, and progress, than do cosmologists or even science fiction writers and readers. He’s inward looking; the latter are outward looking. What does humanity “mean” in the context of the cosmos? Again just looking up into the sky? (Cue Todd May here.) Answer: nothing. Meaning is found closer to home. As is purpose. Yet there are thoughts about what the meaning and purpose of humanity might be, in a cosmic context. I’ll get to those.
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In many ways, that most people don’t realize, humanity is constricted by its evolutionary past. That’s why we find office buildings so sterile, why we have even fake plants in our homes (and office buildings), and why National Parks and ordinary hiking trails are so popular. We have a deep connection with the natural world.
This is about a poet I know of but am not familiar with. (Kim Stanley Robinson is also a fan, perhaps a friend.)
Adam Frank, Everyman’s Universe, 31 Jul 2026: Why You Need Wildness (and Wilderness), subtitled “What the great American Poet Gary Snyder understood.”
I went hiking in the Finger Lakes with some friends last weekend. On the way back I stopped at a gas station at the edge of a strip mall.
The contrast wasn’t pretty.
The parking lot around the Mall was vast and mostly empty, a few cars, a few haggard looking plants pushing up through the tarmac and of course bits of trash. People spilled into and out of the stores: a Subway; a Starbucks; a supermarket whose name I forget.
As I stood there, I was struck by how we humans are a strange lot, trading prairie, forest, fields and wetlands for these terrains of tar and concrete. It left me with a question. Why exactly is the contrast between these worlds so sad? What, specifically, is it that makes the parking lot seem so lost compared with the forest of trees or the field it used to be?
The question would be: why has humanity done this? I would say: humanity hasn’t done this intentionally. I would say: it’s an effect of the imbalance between human nature in the ancestral world and the modern world we’ve created as the population has grown into an inevitable worldwide culture. We never thought about it. Thinking about it would be our way out of such conundrums. But most people don’t think.
To answer these questions (and more), I went back to Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild. If you don’t know Snyder, it is my great pleasure today to introduce him to you. He is one of America’s greatest poets. He’s also lived a great American story.
In the 1950s, Snyder hung out with Beats serving as inspiration for the main character in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Later in that decade, Snyder made his way to Japan to begin years of Zen training. Still later, he became a founding voice for what’s called “Deep Ecology.” A scholar with a poet’s ear and a poet with a scholar’s curiosity, his whole life has been lived as a search for our roots embodied in the land.
Off-hand, I would suggest that most of those “counter-culture” movements in the 1960s and ’70s were struggles with this same exact problem: the primitive human mentality, with its spiritual intuitions, and the modern world, built by science and technology.
Snyder apparently understood this, in some sense.
[O]ne of Snyder’s most essential insights is that it’s not just “out there” in distant, hard-to-reach corners of the map. Instead, wildness remains right in front of us:
“Shifting scales, [the wild] is everywhere: ineradicable populations of fungi, moss, mold, yeasts, and such that surround and inhabit us. Deer mice on the back porch, deer bounding across the freeway, pigeons in the park, spiders in the corners. There were crickets in the paint locker of the Sappa Creek oil tanker, as I worked as a wiper in the engine room out in mid-Pacific, cleaning brushes. Exquisite complex beings in their energy webs inhabiting the fertile corners of the urban world in accord with the rules of wild systems, the visible hardy stalks and stems of vacant lots and railroads, the persistent raccoon squads, bacteria in the loam and in our yogurt.”
Just as important for Snyder, the wild is in us too. He writes:
“Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting — all universal responses of this mammal body.”
And Frank finishes with this insight:
There are a lot of ways we’ve become alien to the planet that birthed us — but it doesn’t have to stay that way. I like to think that there can be wildness in what we build because we, too, are an expression of the planet.
