In his great new book The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, Arthur Brooks tackles a distinctive problem of ambitious strivers. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times best seller list in part because it puts the focus on a widely shared problem of hardworking people. They find enjoyment in sharing delicious and memorable meals with friends. They find satisfaction accomplishing career goals. But many of them also report that they lack meaning. They feel almost as if they are stuck in a hollow, grayscale version of life.
What, exactly, is this meaning that they lack? Brooks defines meaning as coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is a sense that what happens to us is not just random, arbitrary, and capricious. Those lacking coherence “feel powerless and utterly irrelevant in an oppressive universe, thrown about by dumb and blind forces.” Purpose is having a direction for your life, a clear goal that allows you to know whether the journey is heading in the right direction. Significance is mattering, making a positive difference for others in your life.
When we lose a sense of meaning, we become bored. And when we become bored, we can distract ourselves with social media. But this distraction can end up compounding our original problem. Scrolling social media lacks much meaning, and excessive social media use is time diverted from more meaningful activities.
So what is the way out of the doom loop? Brooks doesn’t call us to throw our phones into a lake. But he does think we should use tech in consciously limited ways, rather than having tech overlords use us for their greater profit. Meaning involves a search: “asking questions that can’t be googled, falling in love, seeking the divine, experiencing a sense of calling, immersing yourself in beauty, and embracing inevitable suffering.” In these activities, rather than in technical solving of complicated problems, we find the meaning of our lives.
If we define meaning as coherence, purpose, and significance, the practice of faith helps all three.
Brooks is a social scientist, a professor at Harvard, and also a practicing Catholic. He writes, “My practice of faith has grown over the years alongside my knowledge and appreciation of science. Indeed, the majesty of the world that research reveals to me increases my hunger to know the creator, just as a love for the works of Michelangelo would naturally make me hungry to learn about the artist himself.” Brooks’s faith is the foundation of his life’s meaning.
I wonder whether Brooks could have made the connection between finding meaning and practicing faith even more clear. If we define meaning as coherence, purpose, and significance, the practice of faith helps all three. Rather than random, arbitrary, and chaotic forces ultimately governing everything, the person of faith views the whole universe, even our own daily struggles, as ultimately guided by divine providence. The person of faith always has an ultimate purpose and goal: to love God and to love neighbor. As St. John Henry Newman said, “I have my mission—I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. . . . I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught.” The person of faith has a life of significance by doing even little acts with great love. Even if sick in bed, the person of faith can pray for others and offer up their suffering.
Brooks also writes, “The mystery of faith is that divinity cannot be proven or disproven.” This statement stands in some tension with a Catholic confidence that God can be known not just by faith but by reason. St. Anselm claimed that God’s existence is self-evident. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about five ways to prove God’s existence. Nor is this view that we can know God through our natural reason merely medieval. Both Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church point to the idea that through our natural reason human beings can come to know the Creator. This human knowledge of the divine is imperfect in comparison to the gift of supernatural faith. The Catholic tradition holds both that the existence of God can be proven and also that faith gives us greater understanding of an infinite God who can never be perfectly comprehended by finite minds.
Brooks knows that intellectual arguments about God’s existence will not convince everyone, so he offers a practical solution for those who do not feel the intellectual or emotional tug of faith. He writes:
The foundation is my practice, not my feelings. I start each morning by going to Mass. Many days, frankly, I don’t feel very passionate about it—maybe not even very religious. . . . But I learned long ago that my feelings are liars. If I followed them, at this point I probably would be fired, friendless, and utterly alone.
We cannot become fit if we only exercise when we feel like it. We cannot become excellent in anything if we wait for the emotion of the moment. So too, we grow in having a meaningful life through freely chosen intentional practices, regardless of whatever we happen to feel on a particular day. Brooks writes, “When people ask me how to get started on a religion but don’t feel it or possess belief, I tell them not to worry about that at all. Just go to your house of worship or wherever the faith is practiced. Leave your phone in the car. Sit in silence, in the back. Listen with an open mind and heart. And then, little by little, let your soul do what it is there to do.”
For Brooks, life’s meaning isn’t invented but found. Indeed, at the end of his book, Brooks recounts a long walking pilgrimage he made in Spain called the Camino. He writes:
I was seeking my life’s meaning and found it at the end of the Camino. But in truth, I realized I had been sought all along by my life’s meaning, and the pilgrimage had simply allowed me to see it by stripping away the barriers of my complicated, distracting, messy life, and living in an old-fashioned way: without technology, in nature, with my soulmate, asking big questions. . . . If you want to find the meaning of your life, you must treat life like the Camino—a pilgrimage that opens your mind and heart. When you start living in this way, your life will take on an openness and a vulnerability. That’s when your meaning will find you. Buen camino.
Brooks’s The Meaning of Your Life is a powerful synthesis of social science, historical anecdote, lived experience, Buddhist insight, and Catholic conviction. It makes clear and compelling a topic that can remain as undefined as it is elusive: “the meaning of life.”