david brooks best essays 2022

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‘coddling of the american mind’ wins david brooks’ ‘sidney award’.

New York Times columnist David Brooks has chosen “ The Coddling of the American Mind ” as a winner of his annual Sidney Awards, honoring the year’s best long-form essays in politics and culture.

The essay, written by FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff and New York University professor and psychologist Jonathan Haidt, graced the cover of September’s issue of The Atlantic . The piece remained among The Atlantic ’s most popular stories for months after it was published, and has been shared more than 500,000 times on Facebook. President Obama even referenced language used in the piece earlier this year, telling a crowd at an education town hall meeting that he disagreed with the idea “that you when you become students at colleges, you have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.”

The winners were announced this morning:

David Brooks' Sidney Awards, Part 1: The year’s best long-form essays https://t.co/wJiKgyOUxt — NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) December 18, 2015

Brooks had high praise for “ The Coddling of the American Mind ”:

This was the most important article this year on student hypersensitivity, the way some students seek safe spaces in case they are assaulted by microaggressions . The authors invent the apt term “vindictive protectiveness” to capture this mind-set and describe how this mental state leads to depression and leaves students unprepared for the real world.

Brooks has been giving Sidney Awards—named after philosopher and political theorist Sidney Hook — since 2004 .

You can read about the other nominees on The New York Times ’ website .

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New Essay: Critique of the Week: David Brooks

In this column I offer constructive critiques of public figures I admire by pointing out how they could benefit from a developmental perspective.

For the past twenty years, political and social commentator David Brooks has been an influential voice in American culture. At times, I’ve found his opinions to be timely and even inspirational. But I also often find myself balking or groaning at his views. The middle-brow accessibility of his writing helps him speak to a wide audience. Yet it’s this same accessibility that prevents him from being taken seriously in many intellectual circles. I do, however, take Brooks seriously and thus offer the following constructive critique.

Brooks occupies a rather unique niche in America’s cultural landscape. He rose to the top of the media’s commentariat in the early 2000s—gaining a high perch at both The New York Times and the PBS Newshour—by articulating a genteel form of moderate conservativism that the liberal clerisy found acceptable. And until 2016, Brooks’ espoused political positions could mostly be classified as “center right.” But since the election of Donald Trump, his views have changed considerably. While he continues to be despised by many on both the left and the right (which is perhaps good sign), I would not label him a centrist by default. This is partially because “centrism” is no longer a coherent position in our contemporary political environment. As the growing power of progressivism has eroded the legitimacy of “viewpoint diversity” at both The Times and the PBS Newshour, Brooks has tried to stakeout a position on what might perhaps be identified as the “right edge of the left.” Yet because this rather tenuous position on liberalism’s right margin continues to move left, Brooks finds himself increasingly constrained in what he is able to say without risking the loss of his lofty position in the prestige economy.

A recent example of how Brooks’ must now walk on eggshells when talking about the culture war was seen in his remarks on the April 22 nd edition of the Newshour. When asked to comment on the state of America’s culture war, Brooks said:

If you look at the World Values Survey, which surveys values all around the world, what you find is that people in the English-speaking world and in Protestant Europe, our values are shifting. … values where people like I live, urban, educated, shifting. A lot of the rest of the country, not shifting. And so we’re just seeing widening chasms on values on a whole range of issues, when to teach sexuality to schoolkids. And, somehow, we have to have that fight without it being dominated by the crazies. … We need to have a discussion about this stuff. And, right now, it’s being submerged, because it’s been hyper-politicized. And when you turn a discussion about difficult issues into partisan politics, you have destroyed it.

Watching the discussion, I was initially excited to hear Brooks cite the World Values Survey and identify shifting values as the underlying cause of the culture war. But while Brooks came tantalizingly close to articulating the heart of the problem—and thus the key to its solution—his analysis stopped short of addressing the larger implications of America’s evolving values. In fact, Brooks’ use of a noncommittal word like “shifting” to describe the cultural transformation of a major portion of American society over the last few years seems to be a dodge.

As the World Values Survey makes clear, the values held by America’s elites are not merely shifting, they are developing . Over the last fifty-years, a new form of culture—“the progressive postmodern worldview”—has gradually emerged in American society. This progressive worldview has continued to gain ground in elite circles to the point where it now supplies the accepted moral norms for most of America’s new “establishment.” Progressivism has effectively won the culture war by championing greater inclusivity, sensitivity, and deep concern for those who have been victimized or marginalized. In the minds of many of our best and brightest citizens, these caring values seem to offer a way to create “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” And even those who can see the abiding threats and downsides of progressivism’s growing power do well to appreciate why this worldview has attracted so many good people, especially the young, into its ranks.

Brooks admits that, along with most of his peers in the mainstream media, his values have shifted in a progressive direction. Yet by characterizing his change of mind, not as form of growth or maturation into something higher, but as merely an adjustment along an implied horizonal continuum, he reveals how he remains conflicted about falling into step with America’s “progressive turn.”

In 2015, prior to his personal progressive turn, Brooks was more comfortable with the idea of a developmental hierarchy of values. Calling for a moral revival, and lamenting relativism and the erosion of social norms, he wrote : “[Our] norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.”

Now , however, he has come to frame the worldview of liberal modernity as a curious global outlier:

We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so. … The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong.

I do agree that “these critiques are not wrong,” but I firmly believe that liberal values will eventually become “universal” over the course of cultural evolution. Brooks, however, now seems less sure about both the superiority and inevitability of liberal modernity. While he continues to champion Western values, he seems increasingly unwilling to characterize these values as “more developed” than the premodern world’s “emphasis on communal cohesion.”

I sympathize with Brooks’ dilemma, but I think he deserves to be criticized for his failure to provide better thought leadership in this turbulent time of hyperpolarization. Brooks’ visibility and influence make him ideally placed to bring greater clarity to both the causes of the culture war, and its potential solutions. And Brooks’ muddled view of our national schism would indeed be clarified were he willing to recognize and affirm a vertical dimension of moral development in which the evolution of values moves in the direction of greater inclusivity.

Adopting such a developmental perspective provides both a validation and critique of progressive values. Progressives have done well to help widen our society’s “circle of care” to better include those who have been left behind. Yet at the same time, by rejecting viewpoint diversity and showing contempt for those who disagree with them, progressives reveal how their own worldview is not inclusive enough to serve as the enlarged cultural container we need to overcome America’s debilitating hyperpolarization. If Brooks were to adopt such a developmental perspective, his commentary could provide the clarity we need by explaining how the “widening chasm on values” he describes is resulting from America’s cultural growth —and thus how our further growth can provide a remedy.

This developmental perspective, which is championed by the think tank I lead, helps explain how progressivism has gained traction by pushing off against the negative externalities of liberal modernity. The emergence of the progressive worldview is thus following a well-established evolutionary process wherein development unfolds through the appearance of internal contradictions within established structures. These internal contradictions can be destabilizing, but they can also stimulate authentic growth—the emergence of a larger, richer whole brought about by the resolution of these oppositions at a higher level. This dialectical process of development is sometimes simplified as thesis-antithesis-synthesis .

Viewing America’s culture war through this kind of developmental lens reveals how progressive postmodernism has gained power by staking out a position of antithesis to America’s previously established culture. And this same developmental perspective also reveals the potential for the next step—a synthesis—which is now appearing on the horizon of history. The logic is simple: progressive postmodernism is not the end of history. In the same way that progressivism comes after modernity, something else in turn will come after progressivism.

This next step in America’s cultural evolution can deliver the synthesis we need by doing what progressivism cannot—by including all Americans of good sense and good faith within a larger “we.” Americans can accordingly begin to create such an expanded cultural container by coming to appreciate how the best aspects of both the left and the right are ultimately interdependent.

In his Newshour comments quoted at the beginning of this column, Brooks urges Americans to meet in the middle and “have a discussion” without the “crazies.” But this seemingly sensible recommendation is ultimately unworkable because it assumes that we can simply glue the thesis and antithesis back together like humpty dumpty. It is, however, too late for that. Instead of seeking increasingly scarce common ground, in order to grow out of the culture war and heal our broken politics, we need to find a new kind of higher ground —a synthetic next step through which the values of America’s competing worldviews can be integrated and harmonized.

So rather than calling for a cultural retreat to a mostly nonexistent common ground, if David Brooks were to begin using a developmental perspective to advocate growth toward the synthetic higher ground we need, he could provide the courageous thought leadership called for by our perilous moment in history.

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American politics are badly broken.

Yet to solve the seemingly intractable problem of hyperpolarization, we need to look beyond the gridlocked politics of Washington D.C.

David Brooks: The best long-form journalism of…

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David brooks: the best long-form journalism of 2021 explored deep human realities| guest commentary.

One of them is Robert McIlvaine Sr. He is a character in Jennifer Senior’s brilliant essay “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” in The Atlantic. His son, Bobby McIlvaine, died on 9/11, at 26, just outside the twin towers. The essay is about the way grief hits his parents, his girlfriend and others.

Nothing about grief is predictable. Bob Sr. comes to believe his son was killed by elements within the U.S. government who set off bombs in the towers to cover up an investigation. In his theory, shadowy forces requisitioned gold from the Japanese during World War II and then used it to bankrupt the Soviet Union. The FBI investigation into this was happening on the 23rd floor of one of the towers, so the buildings had to be destroyed. The planes hitting the towers were for show.

In other words, the tragedy took Bob Sr., an unremarkable, soft-spoken suburban man, and turned him into an obsessive man, who for 20 years refuses to move on and who talks relentlessly of his theory, becoming a truther celebrity. “The only thing I do is 9/11 stuff,” he told Ms. Senior. “My whole basis of everything revolves around the day.”

His wife has her own journey of grief. Bobby’s girlfriend, who lived with Bobby’s parents after 9/11 but no longer speaks to them, has another. All the people in this essay have their own desperate survival strategy, and they behave in ways that are astoundingly surprising.

In “A Series of Rooms Occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell,” in Granta, Chris Dennis traces the life of Jeffrey Epstein’s enabler. The power of the essay comes from how Mr. Dennis’ own experiences illuminate the Epstein horror show. He’s served time in a facility like the one where Maxwell is now imprisoned. He was the victim of sexual abuse, having had multiple sexual relationships with adults by the time he was 14.

He writes that he saw his “sexualization by strange adults as a kind of love.” He adds: “I was sought out by deviant adults who pretended they wanted to care for me, while also assuring me that I was mature, that I was like them, even when I was not. This lie about maturity is something young people crave, that place between autonomy and validation.”

Sara Gruen is a writer best known for her novel “Water for Elephants.” In 2015 she received a fan letter from Charles Murdoch, who was serving life in prison for murder. Abbott Kahler describes what happened next in an essay called “A Best-Selling Author Became Obsessed With Freeing a Man From Prison. It Nearly Ruined Her Life,” for The Marshall Project.

Ms. Gruen became consumed with Mr. Murdoch’s case and hellbent on proving his innocence. She pored over every detail of his life and spent over a quarter of a million dollars hiring lawyers to overturn the conviction. Her personality began to deteriorate. Mr. Kahler, watching Ms. Gruen cast aside her writing for the case, grew alarmed: “As Sara’s friend of nearly 20 years, I worried that she might die — or that if she lived, it would be as an incomplete, foreign version of herself, one incapable of coherent conversation, let alone writing books.”

I think I was drawn to these essays because we’re living through traumatic times, and I wanted to understand the bizarre effects stress can have on the psyche. To get at some of the factors causing that stress, I relied on “Everything Is Broken,” by Alana Newhouse in Tablet. Shortly after Ms. Newhouse gave birth to her son, she sensed that something was profoundly wrong with him. Doctors assured her he was healthy, and it took her years to figure out that she had been right all along. She consulted the brain specialist Norman Doidge, who told her that while there are good people in medicine, the whole system is profoundly broken. Medical error is one of the leading causes of death in America.

Then Mr. Doidge turned to Ms. Newhouse and her husband, who is also a journalist, and asked her a question: “How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?” She and her husband looked at each other and had a simultaneous realization: “If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was … was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken? Everything is broken.” The essay then asks how this came to be.

Speaking of broken, Chris Hayes’ essay “On the Internet, We’re Always Famous,” in The New Yorker, has really lingered in my mind. Mr. Hayes points out that one big thing about the internet is not who gets to speak but what we can hear. “A not particularly industrious 14-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of KGB agents could have done 60 years ago,” Hayes writes. Never before, he continues, “have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers.”

A kind of fame is now ubiquitous, and the line between private life and public life, which took centuries to build, is being erased at record speed. Millions of people are thus in the business of trying to impress strangers. The problem is that we can’t get genuine care from the strangers who surveil us online; we can only get attention. We become attention addicts, in, as Mr. Hayes puts it, “pursuit through fame of a thing that fame cannot provide”— genuine human connection.

OK. Enough grimness. Let’s find some hope. We’ve all read a zillion pieces on political polarization, but April Lawson’s essay “Building Trust Across the Political Divide,” in Comment, is like none other. The secret is that Ms. Lawson has actually been working in the field of political bridge-building, and she deftly dissects why so many of those well-intentioned efforts go wrong.

Most bridge-building efforts are funded by and staffed by people on the Blue (left) side of the political spectrum, and many of these people are unaware of how their unconscious assumptions come across to Reds. For example, many Blues assume that the way to bring people together is to have conversations that stress our common humanity, that celebrate tolerance, empathy and diversity.

Reds hear: You’re going to empathize with my feelings, but you’re not going to engage with my substantive points. You value ethnic, racial and gender diversity, but you won’t value viewpoint diversity, especially when it is outside your moral framework. You want to converse, but you come into the room assuming that if I could be taught what is true, I’d be educated into Blueness.

Ms/ Lawson argues that the ethic of tolerance, “which goes in the guise of a neutral standard, denudes public argument of its profound spiritual dimensions and thereby guts the richness of pluralism.”

The solution is not sameness and tolerance, it’s argument and debate. People respect each other when they argue their differences well. Ms. Lawson’s program, at the organization Braver Angels, has hosted over 200 Red-Blue debates, mostly on college campuses. One key rule is that everybody must address the person running the debate, not each other. This turns down the heat and puts the focus on the substance.

Ms Lawson has put her long experience with Reds to good use and persuaded me that better conflict is the answer, not no conflict. (I should add a heap of disclosures to this Sidney: Ms. Lawson was formerly my colleague at The Times who used to help me, among other things, put together the Sidneys. The editor of Comment, where the essay appeared, is my wife.)

Let’s end with a quirky journey of faith. Paul Kingsnorth was a normal urban cosmopolitan who had fairly common prejudices against Christianity — that it was repressive rubbish believed by those who were not particularly clever. He went through a militant atheist phase, and worked for years as an environmental activist. His spiritual journey took him through Buddhism and into the forests with the Wiccans.

None of it answered the void he felt inside or the spiritual and cultural crises he saw around him. Eventually the thing he once detested broke through. As he writes in his essay “The Cross and the Machine” in First Things:

“I saw that if we were to follow the teachings we were given at such great cost — the radical humility, the blessings upon the meek, the love of neighbor and enemy, the woe unto those who are rich, the last who will be first — above all, if we were to stumble toward the Creator with love and awe, then creation itself would not now be groaning under our weight. I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history, and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them.”

If you like these pieces, there are two fantastic aggregator sites that bring terrific essays to my email inbox every week. The first is The Browser, founded by Robert Cottrell, which links to quirky, profound, philosophical, literary and just plain fascinating pieces of writing. The second is Recommended Reading by Conor Friedersdorf, which lands every Sunday morning with links to essays that range from the latest advances in science to the deeper problems in our public sphere. I’m grateful to Robert and Conor for helping me find Sidney nominees and for generally raising the quality of the stuff that goes in our brains.

David Brooks (Twitter: @nytdavidbrooks) is a columnist for The New York Times , where this piece originally appeared.

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The Best American Essays

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Sunday, June 14, 2020

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David Brooks Announces the Sidney Awards for Best Essays

The Best American Essays 2023

Description.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays , guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

About the Author

VIVIAN GORNICK is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments —ranked the best memoir of the last fifty years by the New York Times — The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader , as well as the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

Praise for The Best American Essays 2023

“[A] thoughtful entry in the long-running series...The works in this year’s collection are a mix of the disconcerting, the probing, and the self-reflective, and well-suited to challenging times.” — Publishers Weekly

“An eclectic, accomplished collection rich in variety and talent.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

“These essays challenge personal and political assumptions and show us life in all its complexities and contradictions. Which in this American moment, and in every other, matters.” — USA Today

“ New Yorker  writer Schulz ( Being Wrong ) collects essays that skillfully combine journalistic and literary sensibilities in this powerful addition to the annual anthology series… This is a moving retrospective of a singular year.” — Publishers Weekly on The Best American Essays 2021

Other Books in Series

The Best American Short Stories 2023

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023

The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

The Best American Poetry 2023 (The Best American Poetry series)

The Best American Food Writing 2023

The Best American Poetry 2022 (The Best American Poetry series)

The Best American Short Stories 2022

The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2022

The Best American Essays 2022

The Best American Food Writing 2022

The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2022

The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022: A Collection

The Best American Short Stories 2021

The Best American Mystery And Suspense 2021: A Collection

The Best American Poetry 2021 (The Best American Poetry series)

The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2021

The Best American Essays 2021

100 Years Of The Best American Short Stories

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David Brooks’ List of “Really Good Books”

in Books | June 9th, 2014 7 Comments

In the pages of The New York Times , David Brooks reeled off a list of Real­ly Good Books. He pref­aces the list with this: “Peo­ple are always ask­ing me what my favorite books are. I’ve held off list­ing them because it seems self-indul­gent. But, with sum­mer almost here, I thought I might spend a cou­ple columns rec­om­mend­ing eight books that have been piv­otal in my life.” [He actu­al­ly rec­om­mends more than 8 in the end.] Some of the books will help you think about liv­ing a life of “civ­i­lized ambi­tion.” Oth­ers will nur­ture your inner spir­it. And still oth­ers will help you think more intel­li­gent­ly about writ­ing and pol­i­tics. Along the way, he adds a quick caveat about what these books “can’t do.” “They can’t carve your con­vic­tions about the world. Only life can do that — only rela­tion­ships, strug­gle, love, play and work. Books can give you vocab­u­lar­ies and frame­works to help you under­stand and decide, but life pro­vides exact­ly the edu­ca­tion you need.”

The list was pub­lished in two parts:  Part 1  and Part 2 . In each install­ment, Brooks explains why he select­ed each work. Where pos­si­ble, we have pro­vid­ed links to texts avail­able online. You can also find them list­ed in our col­lec­tion,  800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices .

1.  A Col­lec­tion of Essays  by George Orwell

2.  Anna Karen­i­na by Leo Tol­stoy

3.  “Ratio­nal­ism in Pol­i­tics” by Michael Oakeshott

4.  All the King’s Men  by Robert Penn War­ren

5.  The Pelo­pon­nesian War by Thucy­dides

6. The Con­fes­sions   by St. Augus­tine

7. The Lone­ly Man of Faith by Joseph Soloveitchik

8. Man’s Search for Mean­ing by Vik­tor Fran­kl (see Fran­kl talk about that great search here .)

9. Mid­dle­march by George Eliot

10. End­less Love by Scott Spencer

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

by OC | Permalink | Comments (7) |

Related posts:

Comments (7), 7 comments so far.

“End­less Love??”

This is the right-wing nut that rec­om­mend­ed The Bell Curve. Why would any­one care what he thinks? He’s a tool of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. Get real.

“Why would any­one care what he thinks?”

Because liv­ing life inside an echo cham­ber is gen­er­al­ly detri­men­tal to one’s intel­lec­tu­al devel­op­ment.

Since when does being right wing and repub­li­can negate the val­ue of works by the likes of Tol­stoy, Thucy­dides and Augus­tine? Clas­sics are clas­sics no mat­ter who the endors­er is

And not a one in the top 8 writ­ten by a woman. Sigh…

FYI, George Eliot is actu­al­ly a woman. Real name was Mary Ann Evans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot

david brooks read­ing list part 1

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The Best Therapy for Our Anxiety Epidemic

Solutions to the mental-health crisis striking young people in particular are within reach.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

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T o note that a mental-health crisis is hitting American adolescents and young adults is hardly news—data to that effect emerge almost every day. The latest confirmation, in April, comes from a survey that I was grateful to help develop: This major survey, sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation and fielded by Gallup , revealed that some 38 percent of respondents aged 12 to 26 had received a formal diagnosis of anxiety or depression. That finding broke down by gender as 29 percent of young men and 45 percent of young women. Even among those who have not received a diagnosis, about half say they often feel anxious; a quarter say they often feel depressed.

In a search for answers and solutions, Jonathan Haidt’s recent best-selling book, The Anxious Generation , ascribed blame to the overuse of screens and social media. The Gallup/Walton data support his argument: Among adolescents and young adults who spent more than 20 hours a week on social media, 65 percent said they felt anxiety “a lot of the day yesterday” (as opposed to 49 percent of those who spent 20 hours or less so engaged); 49 percent of the heavy social-media users felt sadness for a lot of the day before (versus 26 percent of non-heavy users); and 80 percent of them felt a lot of stress (against 59 percent of those other users).

But I believe a deeper philosophical problem affects the lives of young people today as well, and of many people who are no longer young. Folks lack a sense of meaning; they don’t feel they know the “why” of their lives. Worse, evidence suggests that they’re not even looking for it, nor are we encouraging them to do so. This creates a feeling of hollowness and futility, especially when times are inevitably rough, and that encourages a culture that strives to provide a sense of security that is doomed to prove false and can only make the problem worse. If you see this syndrome taking effect in your life or in the life of someone you love, here is how to apprehend and address it.

Arthur C. Brooks: The meaning of life is surprisingly simple

I have written about the meaning of life, including the way to understand and define it, in a past column . In my research, I often refer to the work of the psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger, who have defined meaning in life as a combination of three elements: coherence (how events fit together), purpose (having goals and direction), and significance (a sense of the inherent value of one’s existence). I find this conception helpful because it takes a huge, amorphous problem ( What is the meaning of life? ) and breaks it down into three categories that, though they still require a lot of work, are more manageable. The big question thus becomes three smaller, more specific ones: Why do things happen the way they do? What are my goals in life? Why does it matter that I am alive?

A quite similar version of these questions appears in the Gallup survey, and the answers map powerfully onto the findings about unhappiness, depression, and anxiety. After my team and I investigated the survey’s microdata concerning the 18-to-26-year-olds, we found that 20 percent of them rarely or never felt that “things in my life happen for a reason” (the coherence measure). These young adults were 16 percentage points less likely to say they were “very happy” than their peers who often or always felt things happened for a reason (7 percent versus 23 percent); they were also 11 percentage points more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression (48 percent versus 37 percent). Similar patterns applied among the young adults who answered “rarely” or “never” on the purpose and significance questions.

One explanation for this pattern might be that, for some reason, depressed and anxious young people simply can’t come up with answers for these questions. But it’s also possible that these are the ones who simply aren’t looking. Consider the longitudinal survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA showing that, over a 40-year period starting in the mid-1960s and ending in 2006, the percentage of American undergraduate freshmen students that reported that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” is a “very important” or “essential” personal goal fell from 86 percent to less than 50 percent, where it has remained to this day .

Haidt’s work on the dramatic rise in people’s screen time and internet use shows that the problems began in the mid-2000s, almost certainly making any quest for meaning cognitively harder. Notably, neuroscientists have found that the default-mode network—the set of brain regions that become active when we are mentally at rest—is crucial for finding high-level meaning, memory, future contemplation, and daydreaming. Other studies have demonstrated that this neuro-network exhibits disrupted or abnormal functioning during tasks that require external focused attention, which would surely include heavy internet usage.

Arthur C. Brooks: Three paths toward the meaning of life

O ne very obvious implication from all of this is that to seek meaning in life in order to lower symptoms of depression and anxiety, we should stop spending so many hours online. But that still leaves unresolved the issue for those who have forgotten how to find meaning—or never learned in the first place—of getting started. How do you search for meaning? Where should you look?

Reframing the problem is a helpful way to begin: Try putting yourself not in the position of the asker but of the asked. This was the technique proposed by the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who wrote the influential Man’s Search for Meaning and created “logotherapy,” a clinical method based on identifying a personal sense of meaning. Frankl’s approach starts by inverting the original question: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” In other words, put aside your need to find a formula for your own gratification and instead see the world’s need for you to find meaning—so that you can do more with your life and benefit the world.

In that spirit of service, Frankl put forward three practical ways of discovering meaning. First, create something or accomplish a significant task—you will make meaning simply in the process of striving for an accomplishment. Second, experience something fully or love someone deeply, which is to say: Stop thinking about yourself and dive into an external experience or a relationship with another person. Third, adopt an attitude of strength and courage toward unavoidable suffering, and resolve to learn from your pain.

An alternative approach involves breaking down the quest for meaning into the components identified by Martela and Steger. Enquiring into coherence, purpose, and significance naturally elicits serious reflection on life and death—why your limited time on Earth matters and what you’re supposed to do with it. In my own work, I’ve found that this centers on trying to answer these two big questions: Why am I alive? And for what would I give my life? A sustained effort to find answers to those will reveal your life’s coherence, purpose, and significance.

Your search might also illuminate just why you feel so hollow. For example, if your best answer to the first question is “a sperm found an egg,” and to the second you say “nothing,” that could explain why life seems random and trivial to you. If you find yourself in that position, the right strategy might be to decide to live in a way that provides more existentially substantive answers. That, in turn, may well lead you to purposely adopt a set of beliefs to live by. You might, say, decide to live with the conviction that you have the gift of life in order to serve others, and you might also decide that a cause you would die for is your family’s safety and survival.

Of course, these issues are intensely personal and individual, which is why you’ll find no substitute for the deep introspective work you’ll need to do to arrive at your own right answers. And there’s no substitute for using screens and social media responsibly so that you can do that work. But as Frankl taught us, the work itself is an exciting, productive adventure.

Jonathan Haidt: End the phone-based childhood now

O ne last point I’d make is that having meaning in life can protect you to a degree when suffering inevitably comes your way. A theme that emerges throughout Haidt’s work is a critique of “safetyism,” the belief that safety is a sacred value, and of the trend among parents and schools to elevate this value above others. Safetyism, in his analysis, is a direct consequence of a decline in people’s sense of life’s meaning, because meaning makes sense of suffering—so if you lack meaning to help you cope with suffering, then safetyism is the reflexive response, to try to provide a shield against suffering.

In other words, when pain has no seeming purpose, the only logical course of action is to fight against it. In a doomed effort to forestall suffering, we protect our kids from conflict, danger, and anything that might offend or alarm them. This strategy has proved catastrophic for happiness: It leaves young people ill-prepared for the inevitable threats and challenges that everyone has to face, and for the suffering that is impossible to avoid in our highly complex world. The only reliable way to travel through that world with courage and hope is to do the work to find meaning, and encourage those we love to do so as well.

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The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop

How the author of “The Right Stuff,” “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” and other classics turned sociology into art.

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By David Brooks

David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new edition of “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” to be published by Picador this month.

There are certain writers you should never read before you yourself sit down to write, like P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Wolfe. For if you do, you will not be able to get their voices and rhythms out of your head, and you will have to confront the absolute certainty that you can’t pull off what they did. In Wolfe’s case you’ll find that you can’t quite replicate the raw energy of his prose: the fun; the snap, crackle, pop; the fuzzy effusions of new sociological categories — masters of the universe, social X-rays.

And then there’s his sheer audacity. His essay “Radical Chic” — about a cocktail party the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw for the Black Panthers in 1970 — begins with Bernstein waking up in the middle of the night in a state of wild alarm. He had mentioned having a bad dream in an interview somewhere, and Wolfe took that little autobiographical morsel and spun it into a grand tour through the inside of Bernstein’s brain. Any responsible journalist can report, “Bernstein had a nightmare,” but Wolfe has the guts to take a flight of fancy and describe the nightmare from the inside, with its moments of narcissistic grandiosity and its descent into degrading humiliation.

Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked : Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.

He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting. His book “The Right Stuff,” about the U.S. space program, takes place at such a moment. Before, the combat pilots were the tippy-top alpha males in the world of flight, but then along came the astronauts to knock them off their perch. In “Radical Chic,” you can catch glimpses of the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers. But this is 1970. A new crowd is beginning to displace them: the Bernsteins, Barbara Walters. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include the formerly unthinkables — Catholics, Jews, Black people.

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple. All you had to do was live like an English earl and collect European culture by the boatload, and you could cruise through Manhattan amid the sound of others bowing and scraping.

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