Against digital serfdom

Many Americans are experiencing a crisis in which everything seems meaningless. Arthur Brooks, behavioral scientist at Harvard University and columnist for The Free Press, thinks the path to ­recovering the reason for why we’re here is more straightforward than many are willing to entertain.

As he suggests in The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in An Age of Emptiness (Portfolio, 304 pp.), our co­­dependence on smartphones and the endless enslavement to the internet produce “a simulation of life” propelled by “the mismatch between our right-brain need for meaning and the left-brain bias of the world we’ve made.” This dissonance encourages us to seek technological solutions to practically everything. If we are to restore a sense of divine direction, we must return our humanity to its rightful place in every aspect of our ­routines and actively resist the digitally overoptimized alternative progressively forced upon us.

At the heart of our collective discontent are smartphones, what Brooks labels “anti-boredom machines.” Their seemingly infinite provision of content perpetually keeps the deeper aspects of our spiritual selves at bay. Rather than calling us to set fire to our devices, Brooks proposes we should intentionally “embrace the discipline of boredom” by laying them aside whenever we can to free our minds to adequately recall our need for meaning.

Meaning is something that is objectively knowable, but it requires giving ourselves space to contemplate it above the fleeting distractions of social media and streamed entertainment. Loving relationships, service toward others, careers calibrated toward calling, beauty around us and in others, along with the suffering we face, provide chances to grasp the essence of what we’re meant to be.

For Brooks, the effect of this is not that someone will “invent” the meaning of life for the rest of us to behold; it is so we can allow ourselves to be in our “brain’s right hemisphere long enough” for meaning to reveal itself.

Brooks is Catholic, but he avoids proselytizing by taking an eclectic approach that includes insights from the Dalai Lama, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and evolutionary psychology. Even so, Brooks is writing for people open to theism and supernatural reality, or in Brooks’ words “the idea that there just might be a metaphysical dimension” to ourselves and the world around us.

The Meaning of Your Life is the kind of book that uses common grace and general revelation to promote human flourishing. But it also might pique its readers’ interest in the supernatural to the point that they seek the ultimate meaning of life in the reality of Christianity.