Why life feels empty: Vervaeke, Kelly, Symes and Brooks on the meaning crisis

The Short Version

John Vervaeke, Sean Kelly, Jack Symes and Arthur Brooks agree that many people today feel their lives lack meaning, but they locate the cause in different places: Vervaeke in lost practices for cultivating wisdom and connection to what is real, Kelly in the loss of any fixed ground once "God is dead," Symes in a universe that does not answer our wish for meaning, and Brooks in a screen-driven culture that keeps us busy with "how" questions and away from "why" questions [1][2][3][4]. Their remedies form a range of options: Vervaeke proposes "the religion that's not a religion," a set of practices and communities that do what religion did without requiring theistic belief [1]. Kelly argues for responding to the situation we are thrown into the way Miles Davis made a pianist's wrong chord right, and Symes defends meanings within life that can be ranked by how they bear on happiness and suffering, without any ultimate Meaning imposed from outside [2][3]. Brooks, a committed Catholic, says meaning is still available without religious belief through awe, service and love, and that the first step is getting free of the devices that crowd it out [4].

Table of contents

What They Said

John Vervaeke: a crisis of connection, and a religion that's not a religion

John Vervaeke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto and creator of the 50-part lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, starts with a precise definition [1]. "I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life," he says; meaning in life is made up of "those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure" [1]. Research, he says, shows it is "a sense of connectedness, connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world," and a particular kind: "You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns" [1]. That is why "having a child is considered very meaningful because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value independent of you" [1]. When that connectedness is missing, he says, people fall into depression, addiction and self-destructive behavior [1].

He suggests a simple test: ask what you would want to keep existing if you were gone, how you are connected to it, and how you matter to it [1]. He also offers a telling result from his own classroom: when he asks students in happy relationships whether they would want to know if their partner was cheating, about 95% say yes, because the relationship would not be real otherwise [1]. People want what satisfies them to be real, not just pleasant [1].

Perennial problems meet historical forces

The meaning crisis, in Vervaeke's account, is where perennial threats to meaning (absurdity, existential anxiety, alienation, the despair of Ecclesiastes) meet historical forces that have stripped away the resources people once used to cope with them [1]. The perennial part comes from how minds work. As he puts it, "the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent subject us to perennial problems of self-deception, self-destruction, creating bullshit for ourselves, for other people, all of that" [1].

The historical part shows up in his students. Asked where they go for information, they hold up their phones; asked where they go for knowledge, they say science or the university; asked where they go for wisdom, there is silence [1]. "Wisdom isn't optional," he says, yet there is no respected home for the practices that cultivate it, which is why the fastest-growing group are the "nones" who call themselves spiritual but not religious [1]. In the conversation, the contrast with earlier times is drawn sharply: before the scientific revolution, in the Neoplatonic tradition, spirituality and rationality "are not in opposition, they are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness and grounding in your practices. We don't have that anymore" [1].

Bullshit, relevance and self-deception

At the core of intelligence, Vervaeke argues, is relevance realization: the brain's ability to zero in on what matters out of a combinatorially explosive flood of information, possible actions and possible thoughts [1]. He describes it as working much like evolution, with opposing systems generating variation and applying selection, such as the mind-wandering default mode network pushing against the task-focused network [1]. "Representations presuppose relevance realization," he says, so how we frame the world is an ongoing "salience landscaping" of what stands out to us rather than a set of beliefs [1].

The same machinery is what makes us vulnerable. Drawing on Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit, he argues we do not lie to ourselves, since lying requires knowing the truth; we bullshit ourselves [1]. A liar relies on your commitment to truth, while a bullshit artist tries to make you indifferent to it by making things salient and catchy, like a liquor ad with gorgeous, laughing people that fools no one but still makes the bottle catch your eye in the store [1]. Because attention drives salience and salience grabs attention, we can get caught in loops cut off from reality [1]. His definitions stack from there: intelligence solves problems, rationality uses intelligence to overcome the self-deception that arises while solving them, and "whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness," meaning self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior [1]. In his phrase, "wisdom is rationally self-transcending rationality" [1].

Why "the meaning of life" is the wrong question

Vervaeke calls "the meaning of life" a malformed question, like asking what time it is on the sun, because it assumes meaning is a property of the universe [1]. Meaning, he argues, is "transjective," a relationship between subject and world, like a cup's graspability or a shark's fit to the ocean: it is neither inside you nor out in the universe [1]. Lex Fridman pushes back hard, saying the question reaches for the connection between the Big Bang and the feeling of love and shakes us out of the daily hamster wheel [1]. Vervaeke grants that the question is good insofar as it asks how the whole of your life connects to reality, but warns it can send you looking in the wrong place: "how we really answer this question is we come back to the meaning in life and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to reality. We pursue wisdom" [1].

Death as a present condition

On mortality, he tells Fridman that "your mortality is not an event in the future. It's a state you're in right now" [1]. He cites research showing that reminding people of death in an abstract, third-person way makes their thinking more rigid, while having them imagine their own death surrounded by loved ones increases openness and flexibility [1]. What matters may be whether a death is meaningful rather than death itself, since people will give their lives for deaths they consider meaningful [1]. Somewhere in your 30s or 40s, he says, "you don't live from your birth, you live towards your death" [1]. He doesn't long to live forever, believes the mind ends at death like a song ending when the last instrument is put down, and now focuses on two meta-desires: that whatever satisfies his desires be real, and that it bring peace of mind rather than inner conflict [1].

What religion did that nobody has replaced

The conversation arrives at what is called there "the golden question": what function religion served that has not been replaced [1]. His answer starts with evidence: studies of people cultivating wisdom find that religious practitioners often score higher than secular ones, but no particular religion does better than another [1]. So the transformation must be happening beneath the level of doctrine [1]. He lays out four kinds of knowing, each with its own memory: propositional (knowing that something is true), procedural (skills, which is why someone with Alzheimer's can still play piano), perspectival (what it is like to be you here now) and participatory (the fit between you and your world, felt most when it is missing, in loneliness or culture shock) [1]. Religions work, on this view, by training the non-propositional kinds [1].

He calls himself a non-theist. Both modern theists and atheists, he argues, wrongly assume the sacred is a supreme personal being to be related to through correct beliefs; "Being is not a being," but the ability of things to be [1]. He reads Nietzsche's madman as warning atheists that rejecting doctrines doesn't replace what religion did [1]. His own proposal: "we can come up with that functionality without having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the legacy religions. That's my proposal. I call that the religion that's not a religion" [1]. It would draw on the best cognitive science and respectfully borrow from traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism [1].

Stoicism is his historical precedent. It arose in the Hellenistic period after Alexander the Great's empire broke up, when people found themselves far from their government and surrounded by others who didn't share their language or religion [1]. "There's the killing of home," he says, and Stoicism "arose specifically to address that. And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming back into prominence right now" [1]. On myth, he says "a myth is like a public dream," and myths are "stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness" [1]. The conversation also raises a gentler possibility: that if things are left alone, the meaning crisis might dissipate because people long to create institutions and collective ideas [1].

Practices: dialogue, mindfulness, flow

Vervaeke treats dialogue as more basic even than myth and ritual [1]. In the Wason selection task, a reasoning test, only about 10% of individuals get it right, while groups of four who talk it through reach about 80% [1]. He describes dialogos, conversations that take on a life of their own and produce insights no one could reach alone, and he takes part in emerging communities, including Rafe Kelly's movement-and-nature retreats, which participants who were not religious agreed had amounted to "a religious act" [1]. He also describes a gathering in Vermont working on ways to vet communities of practice so they don't turn into cults [1].

He rejects the definition of mindfulness as nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment [1]. Using his glasses as a metaphor, meditation is taking your frame off to look at it for distortions, and contemplation is putting it back on to see through it more deeply; mindfulness needs both [1]. Meditation alone risks withdrawal and spiritual bypassing, and contemplation alone risks inflated fantasy [1]. His recommended mix: a meditative practice like Vipassana, a contemplative practice like metta or the Stoic "view from above," and a moving practice that brings on flow, like Tai Chi Chuan [1].

Flow, drawing on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, happens when a task's demands slightly exceed your skills, and requires clear information, tightly coupled feedback and errors that matter [1]. It predicts well-being and meaning, and he proposes it trains good intuition [1]. But it can be hijacked: he says some people flow in video games at the expense of flow in real life, and depression has been called "anti-flow" [1]. When Fridman argues that people who grew up with games may transfer flow better and be more resilient to social media, Vervaeke points to students who couldn't transfer it and to evidence linking social media with depression through constant, illusory social comparison [1].

When ideologies fill the gap

The danger of an unmet meaning crisis, in Vervaeke's account, is that something else fills it. Marxism and Nazism were both driven by a Promethean spirit, the hubris that we can make ourselves godlike, which licenses the idea that the ends justify the means [1]. Nazism emerged from the Weimar Republic's meaning crisis and borrowed twisted Gnostic themes, rituals and myth; "Nosticism tends to come to the fore when people are experiencing, you know, increased meaning crisis," as the transcript renders it [1]. He defines sin not as mere immorality but as a failure to love wisely, putting a lesser good in place of a greater one [1].

His own black burning

The argument is personal for him. After leaving fundamentalist Christianity he went through years he calls the black burning: a taste for the transcendent with no food for it, loneliness, absurdity and self-destructive behavior [1]. Therapy, meditation, Tai Chi and cognitive science helped, and seeing his students recognize the same struggle showed him it wasn't only personal [1]. His advice to young people: "find an ecology of practices and a community that supports them without involving you in believing things that contravene our best understood science," and put relationships first, since those are what matter as you approach death [1]. He closes on love, citing Iris Murdoch's idea that love is the painful realization that something other than yourself is real [1].

Sean Kelly: after nihilism, learn to play what's there

Sean Kelly, a Harvard philosopher who specializes in existentialism and the philosophy of mind and who co-wrote All Things Shining with his late teacher Hubert Dreyfus, frames the whole question through the thinkers he teaches [2]. His central question is how a life can be meaningful once nothing outside us seems to ground it [2].

Nietzsche's diagnosis

Nietzsche popularized the word nihilism as a description of the late-19th-century condition [2]. In 1300, Kelly explains, people understood themselves as created in God's image and fallen through Adam and Eve's sin; by Nietzsche's time, "God is dead" meant God could no longer play the role of grounding our existence [2]. The answer to what grounds us is nothing, hence nihilism [2].

Kelly is careful about what "secular age" means [2]. It does not mean there are no believers. It means that, unlike in 1300 when faith could justify seeing a nonbeliever as less than human, a believer today can't conclude from their faith that others who live differently are wrong [2]. That liberal pluralism is good, he says, but also unsettling, and whether a secular world can still be richly meaningful is the central question of existentialism [2].

Why radical freedom isn't the answer

Sartre's atheistic answer was that, with no God, we must do what God used to do [2]. For humans, "existence precedes essence": nothing is true about who you are until you start living and choosing, so humans are "condemned to be free" [2]. Every choice, down to your posture or whether you hold someone's gaze, is yours alone, and the one failing Sartre allows is bad faith, refusing to take responsibility for your choices [2]. It should be liberating, Kelly says, but it takes a courageous person to experience it that way [2]. And he sees a deeper flaw: Sartre's line that "hell is other people" points to an almost inhuman, God-like ideal of self-generation [2].

Kelly calls Sartre a brilliant French misreading of Heidegger, whose key idea is thrownness: we are thrown into a history, a family and social norms we never chose and could not have chosen [2]. Still, the existentialists matter for what they reject, the idea, found in the myth of gold, silver and bronze souls in Plato's Republic and in modern versions pointing to IQ or genes, that some fixed fact about you sets the limits of who you can become [2].

The Miles Davis answer

Where Sartre stresses radical freedom, Nietzsche says we are artists of life, responding creatively to what we find ourselves in [2]. Kelly's favorite illustration comes from Herbie Hancock, who played piano with Miles Davis in the 1960s. During a show in Stuttgart, Hancock played what he felt was clearly the wrong chord behind Davis's solo, and as Kelly retells it, "Miles paused for a moment. And then all of a sudden, he went on in a way that made my chord right" [2]. Not just anything would have worked, but the constraints weren't fixed in advance; they emerged in the moment [2]. That, Kelly argues, is the right response to nihilism: not creating out of nothing like God, but listening and responding to what is already there to make it right [2].

He traces the tradition back to Pascal, who argued that Christianity is a way of living rather than a set of beliefs to justify, a move developed by Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky [2]. Dostoevsky, in his reading, is the opposite of Sartre: Sartre says there is no God and concludes everything is permitted, while Dostoevsky would run the argument the other way, since when you are involved in something atrocious you feel guilt and there is a price to pay, so not everything is permitted, and God shows up in that experience of responsibility and in whether we can live in the mood of joy [2].

Camus got the phenomenon wrong

Kelly avoided teaching Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus for years because it opens by calling suicide the one truly serious philosophical question, and he worried about raising that with 18-year-olds [2]. When he read it closely, he was relieved that Camus argues against suicide, but he finds the view bleak: life is absurd because it presents itself as meaningful when it isn't, like watching a man through a plate-glass window talking animatedly on the phone with no sound, and our one freedom is to spite the gods by embracing the boulder [2].

His objection is that Camus describes the experience wrongly [2]. A colleague once described a semester as getting on a conveyor belt, and Kelly says that when routine feels deadening, he experiences it as inadequate, as missing something that could be there [2]. That absent something is what we feel in moments of aliveness: Davis answering Hancock's chord, a returned hand on a first date, a peak athletic feat [2]. He reframes Camus's question as asking what makes the lives we are capable of living worth living, and says risk and vulnerability are what allow life to be meaningful at all [2].

Misreading nihilism, and the trap of optimization

Kelly thinks people who call themselves nihilists often misread it [2]. Leopold and Loeb, the 1920s students steeped in Nietzsche who murdered a stranger to prove nothing meant anything, rejected all constraints, the opposite of Davis's creative response to the situation [2]. Nor can we escape into apathy: Heidegger says care is the very being of Dasein, and "not caring is a way of caring" [2].

For Heidegger, our age is technological: we understand everything, rivers, circuits and ourselves, as flexible reserves to be optimized [2]. Kelly asks his students whether the goal of their calendar is to cram in as much as possible [2]. The ground of intelligibility, he explains, isn't an entity but the social norms we are given and help update, "the groundless ground," and quoting Hölderlin, "in the supreme danger lies the saving possibility": recognizing optimization as something given rather than chosen lets us relate to it rightly [2]. He sees the dream that pure reason could optimize us as the endpoint of a tradition from Plato through the Enlightenment that has led us astray; Fridman sums it up as missing the music [2].

Many meanings, and moods that belong

In All Things Shining, Kelly and Dreyfus read Moby-Dick as the diametric opposite of The Brothers Karamazov [2]. Ahab wants to strike through the mask to the meaning of the universe, and Melville's answer, Kelly says, is a kind of polytheism: many local meanings rather than one unified one [2]. David Foster Wallace diagnosed the temptation to divert ourselves with entertainment, the flip side of optimization; Kelly finds Wallace's imagined IRS examiner, so blissful in boredom that he levitates, an unlivable ideal, and prefers the Wallace of "Roger Federer as religious experience," a livable peak [2]. When Fridman offers his advice that "the key to life is to be unborable," Kelly respects it but argues grief and other moods belong to a meaningful life too [2].

His closing answer is that we are beings who can feel both the utter groundlessness of what matters and its real significance at once [2]. From the philosopher Albert Borgmann he borrows a test he gives his students: hope for many moments when there is no place you'd rather be, nothing you'd rather be doing, no one you'd rather be with, and that you will remember well [2].

Jack Symes: honest agnosticism, and meaning without capital-M Meaning

Jack Symes, a public philosopher and researcher at Durham University who hosts the Panpsycast podcast, comes at the question from philosophy's oldest job [3]. He quotes Albert Camus: the fundamental question of philosophy is "whether life is or is not worth living" [3]. Philosophy, in Mary Midgley's metaphor that Symes borrows, is like plumbing: when society's conversations clog, the philosopher pulls up the floorboards to find the blockage, and then tries to fit physics, biology and the arts into one picture of the world [3].

Why new atheism didn't fill the gap

Symes argues that the new atheist movement of the early 2000s (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens) did useful work criticizing religion after September 11th but never built the positive project of finding meaning and ethics, which is why it is falling out of fashion [3]. Joe Rogan adds that it became almost as dogmatic as religion, and offers his own rule: "I am not married to my ideas. They're just ideas" [3]. Symes notes Christianity's decline in the UK, from about 70 percent identifying as Christian in 2001 to less than half today, and laments that public debate leaves out the many people who are spiritual but not religious [3].

Agnosticism, honestly held

Symes, himself not religious, thinks the arguments for God are stronger than new atheists admit [3]. The kalam cosmological argument says everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, and so its cause lies outside time and space; the fine-tuning argument draws on Sir Roger Penrose's calculation, as Symes explains it, that the universe's initial low-entropy state had odds of one in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 [3]. On these two questions, he thinks those who posit God have the better hand [3].

The counterweight is what he calls the systemic problem of evil [3]. A perfectly good God could have created life without evolution by natural selection, which requires the suffering of countless creatures over billions of years; if that is how it was done, "God's a psychopath" [3]. Traditional defenses, such as hardship building character, may work for humans but not for the many animals who simply die painfully without developing into anything [3]. He recounts that Jordan Peterson conceded this is a massive problem but insisted we need to keep working on it [3]. Symes's conclusion is that the reasonable response is to suspend belief [3]. He discusses William James's mountaineer, who must believe they can make a jump, but says such beliefs may be psychologically useful without making it any more likely that God exists [3].

The gift of meaninglessness

The feeling that set Symes on his philosophical path comes from Camus: one day the routine of the week collapses and you ask what the point of it all is, a feeling that carries both a loss and a kind of excitement he calls "the gift of meaninglessness" [3]. He rejects the physicist's version of absurdity, that we are tiny in a vast cosmos, since being the size of the universe would not make life more meaningful [3]. The real problem, following Thomas Nagel, is that we want meaning and the universe does not respond [3]. He recommends Camus's The Stranger and The Fall, and notes that for agnostics there is no all-forgiving father figure to take away wrongdoing [3].

Rogan pushes back hard: the world is not meaningless to a human being [3]. People find meaning in friends, family, work and a hike in the mountains, and meaning is rewarding precisely because it is not everywhere and must be sought and maintained; he suggests some bleak philosophy comes from depressed or isolated writers [3]. Symes's reply is a distinction: capital-M Meaning, a plan imposed from outside, is different from meanings within life [3]. But we still need a way to rank those meanings: helping people as a doctor is more meaningful than counting blades of grass, because it connects to happiness and suffering [3].

Meaning must stay tied to wellbeing

That ranking matters to Symes because meaning without it can turn dangerous [3]. He criticizes a Peterson tweet suggesting purpose matters more than happiness, arguing that meaning cut off from wellbeing is a recipe for atrocity, as the 20th century shows [3]. When Rogan suggests humans may be giving birth to artificial life, perhaps a seed of what God is, Symes warns this risks the is-ought fallacy [3].

Other paths he weighs

Symes also lays out views that would put meaning into the fabric of things [3]. He names pantheism (God and the universe are identical) and panentheism (the universe is in God), and describes his Durham colleague Philip Goff's view that the fundamental nature of reality is consciousness, identical to God, with a cosmic process we can contribute to [3]. But he raises hard problems: how tiny conscious particles combine into one stream of experience, how one cosmic mind splits into individual minds, and the fact that a God who is the evolving universe was not perfect at the beginning [3]. He also explains why a multiverse, if real, would make existence as a whole look neutral at best, since every horrific world would exist alongside the good ones; Rogan dismisses this as unknowable and says it would be a waste of an amazing trip to be unhappy over it [3]. On psychedelics, often offered as a route to meaning, Symes cites work at Durham by Jules Evans surveying about 700 people who experienced lasting negative effects, with roughly a third lasting longer than a year [3].

Arthur Brooks: why young people feel empty, and how to get to the "why" side

Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor who has spent two decades studying and teaching the science of happiness, comes to the question from the data on young people and from his book The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness [4].

What changed

When Brooks left academia in 2008 to run a company, students seemed happier than the general population [4]. When he returned in 2019, he found "triple the rates of depression, double the rates of anxiety," and students telling him their lives felt meaningless [4]. "And saying my life feels meaningless is the best predictor of depression and anxiety for people under 35," he says [4]. Asking how they lived, he found that "life dramatically changed after about 2008," which he ties to devices and screens [4].

Complicated problems and complex ones

His organizing idea is a distinction between two kinds of problems [4]. Complicated problems are the how-to and what questions of a day: how to get across town, how to plan a business [4]. Complex problems, like why you love your spouse, who God is or what your life means, are different: "They're easy to understand. Impossible to solve. You only live with them" [4]. He says the two are processed in different hemispheres, a theory he calls hemispheric lateralization, with the left side handling the complicated and the right side the why questions of mystery and meaning [4]. "And the reason people are depressed today is because they're avoiding the big right side questions," he says, because "the whole culture of technology and hustle and grind and, you know, online presence" keeps people in the left hemisphere [4]. The episode's summary notes that the brain-hemisphere framing and some of the biology are presented as Brooks's own interpretation [4].

He puts the result memorably: "Your great-grandfather never came home and said to great-grandma, I had a panic attack behind the mule today" [4]. His great-grandfather's moment-to-moment existence was dull, but his life was not; many young people now have the reverse, never a bored minute and a life that feels grindingly boring [4].

Solving boredom made life boring

Brooks describes an experiment by his Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert in which students sat alone in a bare, silent room with only a button that delivered a painful electric shock; he reports that more than half overall shocked themselves sooner than sit with nothing to do [4]. "We solved the boredom problem," he says, and the phone is the solution [4]. The cost is that a brain that is never bored does not use its default mode network, which he links to finding meaning [4]. He compares a day lived on screens, from the phone by the bed to dating by swiping, to The Matrix, where in his reading the hero rebels because he wants meaning: "the one thing you can't simulate is the meaning of your life" [4].

Abstinence is not realistic, he says, so the answer is moderation, which is harder: "Tech-free times, tech-free zones, and tech fasts" [4]. The times are the first hour of the morning, meals and the last hour at night; he says a phone on the table at a meal interrupts the oxytocin bonding that comes from eye contact [4]. The zones are the bedroom, with a book and an alarm clock, and every classroom [4]. The fasts are periodic stretches without devices; he does a silent retreat four days a year and says the first day is hard and the fourth is bliss [4].

Look out, not in

Left alone, Brooks says, each of us stars in a private psychodrama about my job, my money, my car [4]. The research finding he stresses is that people find meaning when they stand in awe of something larger or serve others [4]. He suggests walking in nature before dawn without devices, meditating, or listening to Bach, and borrows William James's observation that the more time spent contemplating yourself, the less happy you will be [4]. He tells of his physical therapist, a former fitness influencer miserable selling images of his body, who deleted his social media, removed every mirror from his house and showered in the dark for a year [4]. Brooks's lesson: "Stop looking at yourself" [4].

Lewis Howes relates this to his own life: around 30, with his first million dollars and a growing profile, he was the most miserable he had been, and he later turned to service, building schools [4].

The four idols, and special versus happy

Brooks tells his Harvard Business School students on the first day to "go for the happiness and i'm going to teach you how and then you'll be successful enough and the rest doesn't matter," and the word that makes them panic is enough, because "At the Harvard Business School, there's no such thing as enough" [4]. He explains the trap with Thomas Aquinas's idea of idols, traced to Aristotle: "Money, power, pleasure, or honor" [4]. Each feels like it leads to what you want and works like salt water, leaving you thirstier [4]. To find yours, eliminate the ones you care about least [4].

His own is honor, the admiration of others, which he traces to adults praising him for playing the French horn [4]. He calls himself a success addict: "I wanted to be special more than I wanted to be happy" [4]. He describes a wealthy woman in finance who knew exactly what was wrong in her life and what would fix it, but didn't act "because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy" [4]. His evolutionary explanation is that humans evolved in small kin groups where rising in the hierarchy brought food and mates, and the drive now shows up as a hunger for followers and status; knowing that frees you from being its prisoner [4]. What delivers lasting happiness, in his formula, is "Faith, family, friends, and work that serves" [4].

Faith, and meaning without it

Brooks is a devout Catholic who attends Mass daily, and yet close to the Dalai Lama and teachers of other faiths [4]. Thinking you are right, he says, is different from thinking someone else is wrong; wanting to settle the matter is the left-brain impulse [4]. He rejects a reading in which non-Catholics are excluded from heaven, and says meaning is available without religious belief, through transcendence [4]. His own "three truths" are explicitly religious: "number one your life has meaning that meaning you have purpose in your life and god created you for a reason," the world has a coherence to it, and "happiness is love" [4].

Love, now

Love is where Brooks lands [4]. "Your marriage is not a left brain complicated problem," he says; it can only be lived in, and couples who expect a solution conclude something is broken [4]. For a relationship that has cooled, not one with abuse or infidelity, he offers four habits: eye contact, "Always be touching," more fun together, and praying or meditating together [4]. His deepest regret is neglecting his parents in his twenties and losing them before he knew them as he wished; now his family lives together, because "You don't visit your grandkids. You live with them" [4]. Asked what his older self tells him, he says "I'm missing opportunities to love more," and cites C. S. Lewis: "You can't love in the future. You can only love now" [4]. His definition of greatness is "heroically to love and be loved" [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Where they agree

The emptiness is real, and it hurts. Vervaeke links missing connectedness to depression, addiction and self-destructive behavior [1]. Brooks calls saying "my life feels meaningless" the best predictor of depression and anxiety for people under 35 [4]. Kelly takes Camus's question about whether life is worth living seriously enough that he hesitated to teach it to 18-year-olds, and Symes makes the same Camus question the fundamental one of philosophy [2][3].

Meaning is not something you solve or deduce. Vervaeke says the meaning-of-life question sends you looking in the wrong place and that you answer it by pursuing wisdom in the meaning you already have [1]. Brooks says the why questions are "Impossible to solve. You only live with them" [4]. Kelly's Miles Davis story says meaning is made in responding to the situation, not created from nothing [2]. Symes distinguishes meanings within life from a capital-M Meaning imposed from outside [3].

Look outward, beyond yourself. Vervaeke wants connection to things whose value doesn't depend on your egocentric preferences [1]. Brooks says "Stop looking at yourself" and points to awe and service [4]. Kelly's examples of aliveness, a chord made right or a hand returned, all happen between people or in response to something beyond the self [2].

Relationships come first. Vervaeke tells young people to put relationships first, since those matter most as you approach death [1]. Brooks says happiness is love and that he is "missing opportunities to love more" [4]. Rogan, in Symes's conversation, says people find meaning in friends and family [3].

Technology plays a part. Brooks blames screens for keeping people on the "how" side [4]. Vervaeke links social media to depression through illusory social comparison and warns that video games can hijack flow [1]. Kelly points to Heidegger's age of optimization and Wallace's diagnosis of entertainment as diversion [2]. None is against technology outright: Brooks argues for moderation over abstinence, and Kelly insists he is not a Luddite [2][4].

Where they don't

Is the crisis new? Brooks dates a sharp change to about 2008 and the spread of devices [4]. Vervaeke says the crisis is both perennial and historical: the threats to meaning are as old as Ecclesiastes, but the resources to meet them have been stripped away, and Stoicism arose in a similar crisis after Alexander's empire broke up [1]. Kelly traces it to Nietzsche's late-19th-century diagnosis that God could no longer ground our existence [2]. Symes points to the decline of Christianity in the UK and to new atheism's failure to build anything positive [3]. Each starts from different evidence: Brooks from his students' rates of depression and anxiety, Vervaeke from the history of ideas and practices, Kelly from the history of how people understand themselves and God [1][2][4].

What to do about religion. Brooks holds a committed Catholic faith and says God created each person for a reason, while also saying meaning is available without belief [4]. Vervaeke is a non-theist who wants to rebuild religion's function without its propositions [1]. Symes is an agnostic who thinks the arguments for God are better than new atheists admit but that the suffering built into evolution weighs heavily against a perfectly good God, so he suspends belief [3]. Kelly describes a secular age in which believers remain, but cannot conclude from their faith that others are wrong, and his reading of Dostoevsky finds God in the experience of responsibility rather than in proof [2]. Brooks's line that thinking you are right is different from thinking someone else is wrong is close to Kelly's account of the secular age [2][4].

Camus. Symes takes his starting point from Camus, calls the collapse of routine "the gift of meaninglessness," and recommends The Stranger and The Fall [3]. Kelly thinks Camus got the experience itself wrong: a deadening routine feels inadequate because we know moments of aliveness, not because life only pretends to mean something [2]. Their disagreement turns on whether the universe's silence is the core fact (Symes, following Nagel) or whether the felt lack points to something real that can be there (Kelly) [2][3].

Is life meaningless at all? Symes holds that we want meaning and the universe does not respond [3]. Rogan pushes back that the world is not meaningless to a human being, and suggests some bleak philosophy comes from depressed or isolated writers [3]. Vervaeke rejects both pictures, arguing that meaning is a relationship between subject and world, neither in you nor in the universe [1]. Brooks, from faith, says plainly that your life has meaning [4].

Meaning versus happiness. Symes insists meaning must stay tied to wellbeing and criticizes the idea that purpose matters more than happiness, calling meaning cut off from wellbeing a recipe for atrocity [3]. Brooks tells his students to "go for the happiness," and warns against choosing to be special over being happy [4]. Kelly adds a qualification: grief and other moods belong to a meaningful life, which is why he resists Fridman's advice to be "unborable" [2]. Vervaeke's version is that whatever satisfies your desires should be real and bring peace of mind [1].

Boredom. Brooks argues that eliminating boredom has made life feel boring, because a never-bored brain skips the default mode network [4]. Kelly is wary of the opposite ideal, Wallace's examiner so blissful in boredom that he levitates, which he finds unlivable [2]. Fridman's "the key to life is to be unborable" sits somewhere else again [2].

How to rebuild. Vervaeke's answer is collective and practical: communities of practice, dialogue, meditation, contemplation and flow [1]. Brooks's is personal and disciplined: device rules, finding your idol, awe, service and love [4]. Kelly's is a way of attending to whatever situation you are in [2]. Symes's is philosophical: ranking meanings by happiness and suffering and holding beliefs honestly [3].

Why It Works

Connection to what is independent of you. Vervaeke's account rests on research showing meaning in life is connectedness to yourself, others and the world, specifically to things whose value doesn't depend on your preferences [1]. That explains why children are so meaningful and why people want to know the truth about a partner even when the illusion feels good [1].

The machinery of intelligence breeds self-deception. Relevance realization lets us zero in on what matters, but because attention drives salience and salience grabs attention, we can loop into self-made bullshit cut off from reality [1]. Wisdom is the practice of overcoming that foolishness, which is why Vervaeke says it isn't optional [1].

Practices train knowing below belief. Wisdom studies find religious practitioners often ahead of secular ones, with no religion ahead of another, which Vervaeke reads as evidence that procedural, perspectival and participatory knowing are what change people [1]. Groups solving the Wason task at about 80% against about 10% for individuals show why dialogue builds understanding no one could reach alone [1]. Flow's conditions (clear information, tight feedback, errors that matter) are the same ones that make experiments reliable, so flow shapes intuitions that fit real patterns [1].

How death is framed changes thinking. In the research Vervaeke cites, abstract reminders of death make thinking more rigid, while imagining one's own death among loved ones increases openness [1].

Boredom and the default mode network. Brooks's mechanism is that a brain never left bored doesn't use its default mode network, which he links to finding meaning, and the Gilbert shock experiment shows how hard people work to avoid boredom [4]. Phones at meals, he says, interrupt the oxytocin bonding that comes from eye contact [4]. He presents the hemisphere framing as his interpretation of the science [4].

Idols as salt water. Money, power, pleasure and honor each feel like they lead somewhere and leave you thirstier, and Brooks's evolutionary account explains the pull of status as an old drive from small kin groups [4].

Thrownness and care. Kelly's mechanism is philosophical: we never start from nothing but from a history and norms we didn't choose, and since care is the very being of a person, "not caring is a way of caring," so meaning comes from responding well rather than from choosing everything or nothing [2].

Ranking by happiness and suffering. Symes's reason for keeping meaning tied to wellbeing is that it gives a principled way to rank meanings, and that cutting the tie has led to atrocities [3].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

For people without a traditional faith. Vervaeke's "religion that's not a religion," Kelly's existentialist responses to nihilism and Symes's honest agnosticism all speak most directly to people who have lost or never had a faith [1][2][3]. Brooks says meaning is available through transcendence without religious belief [4].

For believers too. Brooks's own path runs through daily Mass and the conviction that God created each person for a reason [4]. Kelly's secular age includes believers, and his reading of Pascal and Dostoevsky treats faith as a way of living rather than a set of beliefs to prove [2].

For young people especially. Brooks's data concern students and people under 35, and Vervaeke's classroom observations come from his own students [1][4]. Vervaeke notes that the temporal horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s, so the shape of the question changes with age [1].

Not every practice suits everyone. Vervaeke warns that meditation alone risks withdrawal and spiritual bypassing, and that communities need vetting so they don't turn into cults [1]. On psychedelics, Vervaeke adds a "sacred" framework to set and setting, and Symes cites lasting negative effects for some users [1][3].

Brooks's marriage advice has limits. He offers his four habits for a relationship that has cooled, not one with abuse or infidelity [4].

Some claims are interpretations. Brooks's brain-hemisphere framing is presented as his interpretation [4]. Symes describes the multiverse argument as a possibility that, as Rogan points out, cannot be known [3]. Fridman's pushback on games and social media shows that Vervaeke's claims there are contested in the conversation itself [1].

Emptiness can be depression. Fridman contrasts his own natural joy in mundane things with clinical depression, and Brooks ties meaninglessness to depression and anxiety [2][4]. If emptiness comes with lasting depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide, it is worth talking to a doctor or mental health professional rather than relying on philosophy alone.

What To Do With It

1. Ask Vervaeke's question. List what you would want to keep existing if you were gone, how you are connected to it, and how you matter to it [1].

2. Set device boundaries. Follow Brooks's "Tech-free times, tech-free zones, and tech fasts": no phone in the first hour of the morning, at meals or in the last hour at night, none in the bedroom, and periodic stretches without devices [4].

3. Combine three practices. Pair a meditative practice like Vipassana, a contemplative one like metta or the Stoic view from above, and a moving practice that brings on flow, like Tai Chi [1].

4. Find your idol. Of money, power, pleasure and honor, cross off the ones you care about least until you see which one has its hook in you [4].

5. Look out, not in. Walk in nature before dawn without devices, listen to music like Bach, or serve others, as Brooks suggests [4].

6. Respond to the chord you're given. Treat your situation as Davis treated Hancock's wrong chord, and use Borgmann's test: aim for moments when there is no place you'd rather be, nothing you'd rather be doing and no one you'd rather be with [2].

7. Rank your meanings. Use Symes's measure: prefer pursuits that bear on people's happiness and suffering, and be wary of any purpose that asks you to set wellbeing aside [3].

8. Join a community of practice and dialogue. Look for one that supports wisdom without asking you to believe things that contradict science, and check that it isn't turning into a cult [1].

9. Love now. Put relationships first, live close to family if you can, and remember Brooks's borrowed line: "You can't love in the future. You can only love now" [1][4].

Sources

1. John Vervaeke on the Meaning Crisis, Relevance Realization, Religion and the Search for Wisdom · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. Sean Kelly on Existentialism, Nihilism, and Finding Meaning in a Secular Age · Lex Fridman Podcast
3. Jack Symes on God, Agnosticism, Animal Ethics and the Search for Meaning · The Joe Rogan Experience
4. Arthur Brooks on Finding Meaning: Screens, the Four Idols and Choosing Happy over Special · The School of Greatness