The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness is the title of the latest book by the well known author Arthur C. Brooks, reviewed this month by James Bradshaw. The title of the book is well chosen, making as it does the connection between meaning and purpose, and emptiness in the lack of both. Ours is an “Age of Emptiness” insofar as our age is devoid of meaning and purpose. And paradoxically mobile phones have produced an age full as no age ever before: full of information, interaction, social connection, and sex. But, as Arthur C. Brooks himself observed from his Harvard students, the young are miserable. What has gone wrong?
Brooks himself resolved (while walking the Camino of Santiago) to work to “lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas.” That may sound utopian, but I think he is spot on to identify “science and ideas” as indispensable for renewing happiness. The current epidemic of sadness requires a certain amount of science – in particular psychology – to be correctly understood. And the science surrounding “dopamine” appears to be key. Dopamine was only discovered as a neurotransmitter in the late 1950s, but now everyone knows its role in getting us addicted to our smart phones. We are also familiar with the left/right brain distinction; the left being concerned with the practical and the right with meaning and purpose. According to Brooks, when we compulsively check our phones or scroll through content, we are locked in left hemisphere activity while freezing out the right hemisphere.
We could be compared to those killer whales who kill huge Great white sharks, strip out their livers, and dump all the rest of the shark. We just strip out the dopamine to be got from an action and dump the rest. We have become something like those 1950s lab rats who discovered “intracranial self-stimulation” (with a little help from the behavioural scientists James Olds and Peter Milner who implanted tiny electrodes in pleasure/motivation centres in their brains). These rats were rewarded with big dopamine hits for the simple act of pressing a lever; and they began pressing those levers with a vengeance: hundreds or even thousands of times per hour, often to exhaustion. The human version of that little lever is called a mobile phone. From both kinds of lever comes the doom loop: instead of being pleasure connected with feeding or reproducing, the rat’s pleasure was “intracranial” – all in their little heads. And the same for us: we get our incranial hits from stimuli which in the last analysis are meaningless and sterile: socio-political “debate” which just reinforces visceral division, social media which produces no genuine socialising, and pornography in which bodies are observed for hours on end and nobody is ever loved.
Todd R. Flanders’ in his “Cultivating Young Minds and Souls in an Agitated Age” also in this month’s issue, makes an important observation about this same problem. Essentially parents and teachers have to keep young people – whose impulse control is drastically weak – out of the “doom loop”: “The brain’s prefrontal cortex, only fully developed by age twenty-five, manages higher-level functions like impulse control. God has put parents and their representatives in Catholic schools in charge of forming minds and souls so that the young have adult influences in making good choices and judgments before they are fully able to do so themselves.” Unwittingly perhaps, parents have been giving powerful dopamine levers to their children for years now and are surprised that their child does little more all day than press that lever, to the exclusion of just about any other rational activity in their lives.
Without a doubt, this is the problem of our age. Thankfully there is by now a huge body of very helpful material to help us navigate our way out of this morass: the work of authors such as Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, Sherry Turkle and now Arthur C. Brooks.