The following post originally appeared on the Cross Street Substack (very much worth subscribing to). Reprinted here with permission.
A few weeks ago, I sat in a class with 9 UVA students. I began, as I always do, with a check-in on the highs and lows of their lives. Between public and private conversations, I learned that a third of them had either lost a friend to suicide or had a friend seek treatment for suicidal ideation in the last few days.
I don’t have to tell you how dark and empty some of our homes have recently become, or how desperate our young adults are for a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.
You’ve probably noticed this in your own conversations. The language people reach for when they’re struggling isn’t just “stressed” or “overwhelmed,” but something deeper. I feel useless … worthless … like I don’t matter. Researchers have begun to take this language seriously, noticing how often it shows up among young adults facing depression and suicidal ideation. Jennifer Breheny Wallace calls this the language of “mattering,” of experiencing the presence or the absence of meaning, purpose and affirmation that our lives have true value.
I’m seeing the absence of all these things on the anxious faces and tragic headlines. The question is, why? I can’t think of a more pressing question to ask. It isn’t a question left to the mystics and career counselors alone, it’s something that we all wrestle with, trying to keep our feet above the fires of hopelessness.
Arthur C. Brooks takes a shot at answering it in his important new book entitled The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. The Harvard “professor of happiness” provides story after story of young and middle-aged men and women struggling to make sense of their lives and find the meaning and purpose they need to endure. He combines these reflections with decades of social science research that become digestible observations, like his equation:
Happiness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning
When you break happiness down to this, and you make the concession that enjoyment and satisfaction are not in decline — given that young people are having as much “fun” as their predecessors, and that the type A strivers disproportionally represented in mental health statistics are achieving unparalleled levels of “worldly success” — it becomes clear that the happiness crisis finds its in a lack of meaning. So, what is meaning according to Brooks?
Meaning = Coherence + Purpose + Significance.
Coherence is how the events of your life fit together in a narrative that makes sense, particularly your struggles. You may not understand the reason for the suffering and chaos in your life, but you have hope that in time the reason for these events will be made known.
Significance refers to the positive effect of your presence and actions on the lives of others. Think George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” whose own suicide attempt is thwarted by a guardian angel revealing George’s significance by showing him an alternate reality in which he doesn’t exist and everyone he has ever cared for is either suffering, in danger, or leading entirely worse lives in the absence of his love.
When it comes to purpose, Brooks says that modern life becomes “flat” without a transcendent purpose, when our happiness pursuits mimetically align with societal standards of beauty and wealth. When status and personal gratification become our reason for being, life becomes a predictable and endless search for control and optimization. Control becomes an illusion we chase, a fantasy which if ever attained would come at the cost of amputating the very vulnerabilities that make relationships worth having. And the excellence promised through optimization, sadly produces an unrelatable man who is even a stranger unto himself.
True purpose, according to Brooks, requires goals and direction that lead us out of ourselves. A road map, if you will, with checkpoints of progress along the way. A life void of purpose is akin to a lost child aimlessly, and with great paralyzing fear, endlessly searching for their parent in a large scary forest. The child neither knows where they are nor where to go. Without a clear destination in mind, the Dark Wood remains our beginning, middle and end. But when we have professional, spiritual or personal aspirations to improve our lives, then we have something to look forward to, a goal to pursue, an end to measure ourselves by.
This makes sense. It diagnoses the malaise and meandering at the heart of so much pain and despair. It gives us hope that this darkness will not simply pass, but that we can chart a way out of it ourselves. Most importantly, it hopes to inspire the despondent among us to take action and live lives with energy and optimism.
But…
While Brooks aims to provide a word of hope to the hopeless, I worry that he replaces the burden of meaninglessness with the weight of progress.
When you attach the idea of progress and growth to purpose, you open the door back up to control and optimization. When our destination becomes a measuring stick, it deepens the shame of failure. We turn inward, and human nature takes over — pushing us towards self-preservation or withdrawing into isolation and paralysis. The hope of being pulled out of ourselves is thwarted by the law of progress, continuously reflecting our shortcomings back to us.
Regardless of where you rate on Brooks’ scale of meaning, however well-equipped you are with a coherent understanding of who you and where you’re meant to go, your journey will still be filled with transgressions and tragedies. And when it does, if your north star is the benchmarks of progress, you will find yourself once again in the Dark Wood, right where you started.
The good news of the Cross, of Jesus’ death and resurrection, provides a different road map, one in which your destination comes to you. One in which your purpose to love your neighbor as yourself is simultaneously given to you and fulfilled at the same time, in Jesus’ act of self-sacrifice. God is not waiting for you at the end of your journey; He has come to meet you in the ditch. We don’t progress upwards to meet a God who is statically observing us, we encounter a savior who descends to us in our static state of imperfection.
We find that purpose itself is woven into the reality that we live and move have any being whatsoever. Creation itself involves meaning and purpose, which you are and have been given from beginning to end. We were created in love, the very thing we were created for.
We find significance in losing ourselves for the sake of another. By trading optimization for the contrary act of self-sacrifice. Through the simple act of listening to a friend’s story, and for a brief moment giving up our obsession with our own. We try and we fail at love every day, but we have been mercifully loved and forgiven today, regardless of where our life has taken us … this is our significance in the coherent story of salvation.
In a world so full of pain and isolation, the hope worth leaning into is not that you can progress your own way out, but that the light of grace has found its way in to you.
When our students shared the recent suffering of their friends, I was lost for words. “I’m so sorry” I said repeatedly. What is there to do but pray and offer a little love and solidarity — a shadow of the same love we have been given ourselves? I think this is all we can do. In fact, it might be the very purpose of our lives.
