A recent interview with Arthur Brooks offered many insights on issues of our time that enrich Creation Spirituality and vice versa.
Brooks identifies as a “writer about the science of human happiness,” but does not restrict his work to the Via Positiva alone. I will attempt to share parts of his 57-page interview in the next few DMs as his thought overlaps richly with the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality.*
Brooks, a college professor at Vanderbilt and lecturer at Harvard, works closely with young people. He ends his extended discourse by asking them, when you near death, “how do you want to look back on your life?” He is sure one thing you wouldn’t say is “I sure wish I’d spent more time online….I could have done even better if I spent even more time on Instagram.”
I like his bringing our mortality in as a setting for asking the bigger questions in life: Why are we here? What can I contribute before I die?
He begins his interview citing current depression statistics. The numbers just don’t lie. Depression has about tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled. The question is why?
He proposes the answer centers on meaning: “Does your life have meaning?” In the past, he proposes, “the answer for almost everybody was yes. People had a strong sense of meaning in their lives. But then something happened.”
An explosion occurred, especially among young people who felt life feels meaningless. The cause, he feels, lies in facing screens with friends and family rather than real life. The average American checks his/her phone 205 times per day and spends 4 to 9 hours on screens small and large. A kind of “simulation of real life” occurs and “a lot of young people say” exactly that: “My life feels fake. It feels like something’s missing. It feels like I’m living in a simulation…’technological simulation.’”
Not only is there a lack of meaning but a “lack of the ability to look for meaning….Why does my life matter?” If you are not looking for meaning, you are “lost in place,” and this trend “is exploding in numbers” today.
Brooks invokes the right/left hemisphere understanding of the brain. That has been a useful metaphor for me also, dating back to my book on Compassion in the 1970s and it lies at the center of my efforts to create a pedagogy for spirituality education. Bringing circle dancing and art as meditation into various graduate programs in spirituality over 28 years, and the YELLAWE project for inner-city teenagers, has been my way of awakening the right intuitive/mystical brain to work alongside the left rational/intellectual brain. And with great results.
In workshops and retreats too, I invariably pulled out crayons and paper for people to draw their experiences of the Four Paths. Many came awake in those exercises, which include sharing one’s drawings with another, with the instruction that the drawer be the last one to talk about his/her drawing. Didn’t Jesus say we have to turn and become like children to experience the kingdom/queendom of God? Crayons do that.
Brooks says the right brain is where “we feel things and don’t know why”; it brings “a little bit of mystery in your life.” Beauty “triggers this sense of mystery and, in fact, meaning, coherence, purpose, significance, the things that really matter most in you.” The right brain is “the meaning side, the happiness and love side.” I cite Einstein, who says the right brain gives us values while the left brain gives us methods.
Brooks believes our ancestors 250,000 years ago established relationships as central to survival within their small band of 30 to 50 kin-based individuals.
To be continued.
* Bigthink/Arthur Brooks, “Full Interview: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks says he knows the real cause,” Bigthink.com,
For Arthur Brooks’ video talks on meaning, phone addiction, and recovery, click HERE.
Banner Image: A toddler and parents go on a hike. Photo by Children Nature Network on Nappy.co.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you think education and academia as currently practiced bring out the mystery side of existence, exercise the right hemisphere of the brain, and teach values? Can technological simulation smother our fuller learning capacities, including love and feeling, meaning and purpose? Does excessive technology have a role in the rising depression among young people?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Time
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic…and Beyond
Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Book
7 thoughts on “Some Wisdom from Arthur Brooks, a “Scientist of Happiness””
Although I fully recognize the value of FAITH for the sense of belonging to a cosmic family it provides, the value of FAMILY (extended to the biosphere) for the sense of belonging to an Earth family it provides, the value of FRIENDSHIP for the sense of belonging to a human family it provides, and the value of WORK for the sense of contributing to the well-being of the above families or, at least, of carrying one’s personal share of responsibility as a member of those families, and although I applaud Arthur Brook’s emphasis on the importance of “becoming small,” I listened to his happiness motivational speech with great uneasiness. When I took some time to identify the source of that discomfort, I realized that the four pillars of happiness he prioritizes while praising capitalism are uncomfortably close to the motto of the discredited French Vichy government and its extreme right Maurassian ideology: “travail, famille, patrie.” My personal distrust of recipes for happiness and of the wizards of Oz that promote them also played a role in my reaction.
To me, Antonio Machado’s famous line “Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking” also applies to happiness, because there is no path to happiness except the path one makes by being happy.
I believe that the shockingly wealthy technocrats in our own country who appear to hold all the cards want to limit the cognitive ability of the young because if the young cannot think critically, they cannot oppose them or know why they should. It appears to me that what these technocrats want is a return to a system similar to the feudal system where the wealthy are supported by uneducated peons, dependent on their lords for subsistence. Limiting true education or providing good education for only the few will cause the system we’ve had (for only some two or three hundred years) to collapse; and a system of feudalism can return. Case in point: the following article. Unfortunately, I find the writer’s approach to the subject far too tame. To me, this is a hairs-on-fire piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/us/student-writing-essays-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6FA.4Rg0.1_B3vaHheC7R&smid=url-share
I find it a bit incongruous that Arthur C. Brooks was a past president of the American Enterprise Institute, a Koch Brothers funded right wing think tank… until 2019. Not sure what to make of his recent efforts at benevolent wisdom or his personality.
My brief answers to your three questions: Yes, Yes, Yes.
The statistics reported by Dr. Arthur Brooks are very sad about our adult youth in today’s DM:
“Depression has about tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled.” Some of the causes he explores which seem to be true are feelings of lack of meaning in their lives and through the explosion of media the last few decades, they feel like “something’s missing,” and “feels like I’m living in a simulation… technological simulation.” I’m sure these feelings of loneliness and meaningless in many adults contribute to the many societal problems of addictions, social injustices, and violence… Some of the solutions that Dr. Brooks recommends are increased Faith, family relationships, friendships, and meaningful work and service to others.
I agree that most modern people and societies feel separated from the Living Faith/ Sacredness of Life Present within and around them in Sacred Mother Nature/Her living creatures/Cosmos, healthy meaningful relationships in Our Loving Diverse Oneness, including All physical/non-physical dimensions/Beings (lorian.org), in the Sacred Process of the Eternal Present Moment….
Hmm, this sounds a lot like dancing along the perimeter of the human predicament but stopping short in the name of anthropocentric self-worship – pursuit of human happiness at the expense of the living world and the wonder and awe that are seated at the core of Via Positiva. He applauds being rewarded and acknowledged for merit – no mention of the deep and harmful grooves of meritocracy. He does talk about not leaving people behind, but fails to convince me – fails to connect the dots to interbeing with the living world – no happiness or life support without them. His suggestion that more babies are needed because babies are “awesome,” just stunned me – we live in a time when young adults can’t afford to support themselves without children, while appropriately worrying about the world their children will be living in 30-50 years from now. I’m bearing in mind who his audience is and what they may or may not be willing to listen to, but ugh.
It seems to me that capitalism is the villain here. Education is designed to teach you just enough to get a job. We are intended to live in fabricated scarcity so all our time is spent working, just to survive. There is never “enough” and capitalism conditions us to want more and more. We live to feed the beast.
What’s missing is a structured way to connect with our tribes and the natural world around us. Kids are looking ahead to their futures and thinking, so this is it? I get a job and work until I’m nearly dead? For what? Why? (True of my 19 and 17 year olds).
We stress competition instead of cooperation. Conformity is valued, creativity is not. It’s no wonder there’s more depression.
I disagreed with most of the points in the video. Politics is often a perfectly good reason to abandon your family when those politics result in actual harm to many. The free market creates marginalized people by design, it does not bring them in. I do agree faith is a key to happiness, but religion is not. Work is mostly something we hate but have to do in order to eat. Some lucky folks love their work, most don’t.
The words ofDrArthur Brooks are for me very true. I have been teaching my children for years that their life goals are to love,forgive and serve. My Irish husband always lived in service to faith,family and friends. At his recent memorial, there was lots of storytelling and laughter followed by sharing a meal. These good memories will stay with us always.. our family is everything to us.