The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness - Hardcover

Brooks, Arthur C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593545427 ISBN 13: 9780593545423

Verlag: Portfolio, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the bestselling author of From Strength to Strength, the definitive account of how the modern world makes meaning so hard to find—and a plan to discover your life’s deepest purpose.

If you struggle to discern life’s meaning, you’re not alone. Millions today describe a growing sense of emptiness, a lack of purpose and significance. And there’s a reason: Rapid cultural, economic, and technological changes have rewired our brains, reducing their ability to perceive depth and purpose. 

In The Meaning of Your Life, social scientist and happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks shows you how to push back against these changes and find the meaning you need to live a happy, fulfilling life. Relying on cutting-edge science, he offers practical, evidence-based strategies for breaking free of the powerful trends and personal habits that dull your focus on the why of your life. Drawing on the great philosophers and the world’s faith traditions, he shows how everyone can—and must—approach life’s most important and mysterious questions and provides a blueprint that will help even the most skeptical person find a life of spiritual transcendence, passionate love, and true calling. 

“What is the meaning of my life?” is not an unanswerable question, but rather the start of a pilgrimage into unexplored corners of your consciousness. The Meaning of Your Life is your handbook for this journey.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arthur C. Brooks, PhD, is a social scientist and one of the world’s leading authorities on human happiness. He is a Vanderbilt professor, Harvard Senior Fellow, columnist with The Free Press, host of the podcast Office Hours, CBS News contributor, and internationally acclaimed public speaker. His previous books have been translated into dozens of languages and include the bestsellers Build the Life You Want (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey), From Strength to Strength, and Love Your Enemies. He lives with his family in Virginia.

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Chapter 1

The Meaning of Meaning

At the age of fifty-one, the novelist Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy wanted to kill himself.

You might think that, because nineteenth-century Russia was a very poor country, and writers are notoriously poorer than average, this self-destructive impulse was caused by hopeless poverty. Or because he felt his genius was unappreciated. Or because he had mental illness, which has afflicted so many great artists and writers.

But none of these was the case. On the contrary, Tolstoy was arguably the most successful and celebrated author of his time. His novel War and Peace was a huge bestseller; he lived in aristocratic luxury; he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times. Nor was his despair the result of a crisis in his personal life: His marriage, though complicated, was stable and enduring and produced thirteen children. He had no addictions or ruinous personal habits.

But all this outward success left him feeling empty.

Tolstoy hoped that his work would fulfill his need for . . . well, he wasn't quite sure what. He focused on his writing obsessively, to the exclusion of everything else, but it never gave him what he craved. So he looked to science, which seemed to many in the late nineteenth century to promise the answer to every question, just as technology does today. As he studied, he expected to find the meaning of life buried in the complicated formulas of chemistry, physics, and biology. For a long time, Tolstoy assumed that not finding it was a function of his ignorance. But as the years passed, he was confronted with the reality that, as he put it, life's why was not to be found in "the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms."

As he exhausted his intellectual options one by one, he sank deeper into despair. By the time he reached his fifties, he feared that "life [was] meaningless. . . . Now this was horrible. And in order to escape this horror I wanted to kill myself."

In so many ways, Tolstoy was way ahead of his time-including in his suffering, which is a lot like that of the people we met in the introduction. His situation sounds grim, and maybe yours feels that way, too, at least on your worst days. But in fact, life was going to get a lot better for Tolstoy, for one simple reason: he was looking hard for his life's meaning. True, he hadn't found it yet. But as desperate as he felt, he did not stop hunting, and the best predictor of finding something-including meaning-is looking for it. In the end, Tolstoy found what he was looking for.

Psychologists would say that Tolstoy was low in the presence of meaning but high in search. In this chapter, we will see where you are on these two dimensions. This is important as you set out on your meaning journey, because it creates a map of your meaning quest so you can find yourself on it. In this chapter, you will take a test of where you are in presence and search, which are your starting coordinates. But before we do that, we need to figure out the destination of the meaning journey as well. That requires defining what meaning, well, means.

The Meaning of the Meaning of Life

If you need to find something important, there are two questions you need to answer. The first is general; the second, specific. For example, if you are keen to find a spouse, the general question to answer is "What are the characteristics of an appropriate mate?" By that I mean figuring out the general features of a person with whom you would, ideally, spend the rest of your life. That means someone with the right basic demographics (who is the gender you seek, for example, and not fifty years older or younger than you), who seems sane, who more or less shares your values-that sort of thing. That's super important so you can start trying to answer the specific question "Who is my mate?" You must have an idea of what you are looking for in general to have any kind of fruitful search for the specific person. Of course, the person you wind up with will differ in many ways from what you had in your mind, but having something in mind makes it possible to start the journey toward your goal.

Similarly, while the main goal of this book is finding the meaning of your life, you first need to know what you are looking for generally-the meaning of life's meaning. If that could be anything, from a feeling to a Ferrari, you will spend your life on a wild-goose chase, going after anything and everything, and probably ending up with something silly or completely trivial.

You might even conclude that it is all some sort of cosmic joke, like in the 1983 Monty Python movie titled, appropriately, The Meaning of Life. The film opens with six fish swimming in a restaurant's tank, greeting one another. When one of them (named Howard) is taken out, cooked, and eaten in front of the others, the shocked fish begin to question the meaning of life. The movie moves through various comedic sketches that show life's absurdity and finishes a couple of hours later with a woman opening an envelope containing the answer to the question. "It's nothing very special, really," she reads blandly. "Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

Deep down, though, none of us believes that the definition of the meaning of life is just a silly joke. We crave it, which indicates to us intuitively both that it exists and that there is a way to define it. Until recently, the definition probably wasn't so important, because of the way people lived, just naturally going about life in ways that delivered meaning every day-more on that later. People today need to be more explicit about what we are looking for before we start out on the journey to find it.

The Three Elements of Meaning

About twenty years ago, I set out to write my first book. It felt like I was standing at the base of Mount Everest, looking straight up. I asked a friend who had written a lot of books how to get such a huge, complicated project done. "Simple," he told me. "Write one paragraph at a time." In other words, don't think about it like one big, unmanageable project-think of it as a bunch of smaller, manageable projects. That really helped me a lot, and I wrote the book over the next year-one paragraph at a time. That's a technique called decomposition, which is a fancy term for taking an enormously complicated endeavor and breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces. This technique is used a lot in computer science, but the concept is as simple as the Chinese proverb "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

Decomposition isn't only about work, though. It can also apply to personal questions such as "How do I improve my marriage?"-a daunting challenge that can seem too complex to even begin. Experienced counselors say that the best approach is to see marriage not as one huge puzzle but as an interlocking set of challenges: how to communicate more clearly; how to be more considerate and thoughtful; how to manage conflict better; and so on. By looking at one challenge at a time, they can imagine making progress, bit by bit.

This is how psychologists tackle the challenge of defining meaning: as a set of interlocking elements. For example, Professor John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto believes that there are an infinite number of potential parts of our lives, and through the process of "relevance realization" we decide which of these parts truly matter. This process of figuring out which ones is what constructs the meaning of our lives.2 Or consider the approach taken by psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger, who sort all these potential parts of life's meaning into three big elements:3

Meaning =...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593545427
• ISBN 13: 9780593545423
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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