Why Successful People Feel Like Their Lives Don’t Matter

An excerpt from Arthur Brooks's "The Meaning of Your Life"

Hey there friends!

This Thursday’s interview is with an old friend of mine, Arthur Brooks. He was generous enough to share an excerpt from his new book, The Meaning of Your Life, for all you here on Substack. Enjoy!

The Meaning of Life comes out on March 31, 2026. Click here to preorder.

The Garbage Disposal

Marc, age thirty-two, is exactly what you would conjure up in your mind if I asked you to imagine a textbook striver: He’s college-educated, hardworking, and healthy. He’s a “bootstraps” guy, too. His parents broke up when he was young, and they never had much money, but Marc avoided trouble, went to a small state college (unlike most of the people he grew up with), and landed an excellent job as a data analyst. He is physically healthy, eating right, and exercising a lot. If you were writing an advice column for young men on how to succeed in life, Marc would pretty much be the poster child for what you’d recommend.

But when we spoke recently and he told me all this, something sounded off. As he described his situation—on paper, a list of carefully managed accomplishments—his voice was hollow, as though he were describing a scenario he didn’t really believe. I pressed him to go deeper.

He paused and then said, “My life feels empty.”

I asked him what was missing. He thought for a minute, then told me a story. A year or so ago, he was on a first date with a woman he’d met on one of the dating apps. Over dinner, she mentioned to him in passing that her garbage disposal was clogged, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

He volunteered to help her with it and ended up fixing it for her that very evening. He said that this gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. Later, at his own apartment, he remembered that his own garbage disposal was clogged as well. The fix was easy, but he had just never gotten around to doing anything about it. A year later, he still hasn’t.

Maybe that sounds like a random anecdote, but I understood that he was expressing something profound. He wasn’t saying that he felt some existential need to be a handyman. What he craved was the sense of purpose and significance that came from being needed by someone.

The garbage-disposal date never went anywhere, unfortunately. Nor had any of his dates in years, he told me. The only way to meet women, he felt, was on a dating app; by his own count, he’d gone on fifty first dates. But the connections always felt somehow fake. He never felt any authenticity with people he met that way, so he’d given up on the idea that his soulmate was somewhere online. Maybe, he feared, his soulmate simply didn’t exist.

His friendships haven’t fared much better. During the lonely coronavirus lockdowns, he moved to a new city he’d never been to, hoping to meet new people. He didn’t, at least not real humans in three dimensions. His job went fully remote and never came back in person; his work colleagues were and still are two-dimensional avatars on a Zoom screen. He established only a few social relationships in the new city, and now rarely sees anyone more than once a week. He feels stuck on the outside of life, viewing the world through a double-paned window.

To pass his overabundant free time, Marc, like almost everyone these days, is online a lot: scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, he spends hours listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations, but it leaves him feeling empty. He calls it “social pornography.” But like all digital distraction, it’s hard to avoid without something better to do. And most of the time, there’s nothing better to do. He craves a big, meaningful project—building something, writing something—and dreams of finding that project and immersing himself in it. But he can’t come up with any ideas for what that project might be … so it’s back online.

Occasionally, he panics. Is this it forever? Will I die alone? Will I ever find what I’m looking for? But when the fear inevitably subsides, he falls back into the Zooming, scrolling, and isolation. And the months click by.

Just Stay Busy

Maria’s parents are probably bragging about her to the neighbors right now. Their twenty-seven-year-old daughter has always been a bright light: top grades in school, never in trouble. She was always a leader and ambitious, completing a bachelor’s and a master’s in mechanical engineering, joining the military, and rising fast as an officer in the cyber and information sciences. She holds multiple associations in prestigious academic societies and think tanks.

On the personal side, however, things aren’t going well for Maria. Her extraordinary energy—the envy of others—isn’t her way just to succeed but also to distract herself. The hustle diverts her attention from an intense sense of emptiness that grows every year. She appears hyperfocused, a woman on a mission, but she confesses privately that her life has no coherence: She has no idea where she is going, nor what she even wants. She hopes that through her work, a sense of purpose will emerge, but it never does. She feels no passion for it, no calling, no sense of vocation.

When we speak, I ask her what big change she would like to see in her life in a year’s time. She pauses for a long time and fails to come up with a definite answer. Big questions like this make her feel afraid, she says, so she avoids them by staying busy. “What if I never find the answers?” she asks me. “Or if there are no answers?”

What about her relationships? Maria has a boyfriend, but she doesn’t know where that relationship is going. It’s just okay for now. She is an extrovert and has friends but, she says, they are more “deal friends” than “real friends.” She rarely goes deep with anyone in her circle. She is not very close to her parents or siblings. Although she is in theory a religious believer, she doesn’t practice her faith at all. I ask why not. She doesn’t know.

When she’s too tired to work, Maria tells me that she would like to read books or do something productive and creative but somehow doesn’t know how to get started. Instead, she finds herself simply on her phone—scrolling social media and watching YouTube—sometimes for hours at a time. This fills her with guilt for wasting her time, but it keeps her mind off something she knows she’s missing but can’t quite name.

A Long Hike to … Somewhere

Marc and Maria are among the typical young adults I have met in my teaching and travels over the past seven years. Their lives look enviable from the outside, but they feel empty on the inside. They are waiting for their purpose to find them, but it never does. As they wait, they distract themselves with work and soothe themselves with tech.

I feel a paternal concern for Marc and Maria; after all, I am old enough to be their father. Paul, however, is closer to a peer—he could be a younger sibling to me, in fact—and because of that, his story leaves me still more shaken than the others.

At forty-seven, Paul would appear to have everything figured out. He is smart and friendly, is married with three kids, and has a successful career as a social scientist at a top university. Before I met him, I knew about him and admired his work.

But scratch the surface, and a darker narrative emerges.

Paul’s parents divorced when he was very young, and he grew up in poverty, without much adult attention. A clever kid, he quickly figured out that adults gave him the approval he craved when he excelled in school. Love, he figured out, is earned through achievements. So all of his sense of purpose came from getting good grades, good test scores—“the next gold star,” in his words. And to maintain that sense of purpose, he essentially never left school, winding up as a professor.

Ten years ago, Paul was ambitious and full of passion for ideas, writing a series of books in his academic field. They weren’t bestsellers because they were too specialized and academically rigorous to sell by the millions. But he was proud of them and, he told himself, the “right people” were reading them. The recognition he got for these books were his grown-up gold stars. But their luster faded over the following decade as his career progress slowed. Each new book began to feel like the one before, and they all began to seem “pointless” and “rote.” Today, he feels like his research has little impact, that it makes no difference to the world and wins little recognition from other scholars. He is way behind schedule on a major writing project but doesn’t have the motivation to work on it. His sense of purpose and direction are fading away.

It’s not as if Paul has no time to work. The problem is how he spends the time he has. It’s as if something is eating his brain, so that he can’t focus. An hour that he would have once used to read a research paper he now uses to anesthetize himself, looking at social media to block the growing ennui. This distracts him from his melancholy but, like Maria, he feels enormous remorse for wasting the time. With the eloquence of Franz Kafka—he is a thinker and writer, after all—Paul sums up his absurd-feeling predicament: “Life is like a factory churning out days of my existence, indifferently prepackaged for my mandatory consumption.”

“What do you want?” I ask him. He pauses, struggling to find the words. “I want to go hiking,” he says at last, “for a long time.” I ask him where he wants to go hiking. Paul’s answer might be literal, or it might be metaphorical—I can’t tell: “To where I might find what I’m looking for.”

The Penny Drops

Marc, Maria, and Paul are real people, and these are their real stories and words. There are dozens more. On the surface, nothing seems wrong with any of their lives. On the contrary, they haven’t experienced terrible deprivation or grave trauma. Their needs are met, and then some. They are strivers—not necessarily graduates of elite schools or earning a fortune, but taking life seriously—and on paper at least, should be living a good life and looking forward to an excellent future. Many of them actually express a sense of guilt over being miserable, given all they have going for them. As one told me, “I have everything but feel nothing.” They have a sense of deadness about life, as if One Big Thing were missing.

There is a core emptiness to life as they drift from day to day. What they describe to me is something akin to waiting in an airport terminal for a delayed flight that never leaves; they try to stay occupied to keep themselves from going mad, always in the hope that boarding will finally be called and the flight will take off. That’s where their distraction tactics come in—filling time with social media or streaming video or simply by working grinding hours at their jobs in the hope of the next gold star—which keep them from thinking too much but which make their sense of emptiness worse.

When I do interviews like those with Marc, Maria, and Paul, I just listen. What generally happens is that people say the same things over and over. But then, out of the blue, somebody says one thing that illuminates the real problem. One of the young strivers I talked to—not one of the three above—had a hard time expressing his feelings. Most of his interview isn’t worth recounting. Matter-of-factly, he told me about his virtual job, dating apps, social media friends, and video gaming.

But then, flatly, he said this: “I feel like I’m living in a simulation.”

I asked others if they felt the same way. “Yes, yes—that’s it,” they told me. Life felt unreal: full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible. I drilled down further: What exactly was missing? And this is where the penny finally dropped for me. What was missing was the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning. Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life.

The meaning of life: such a big question that it is the root of a lot of jokes. But it’s no joke in real life, especially when you can’t find it, like millions of people today. To understand why, let’s back up a little to talk more broadly about happiness, which happens to be the subject I study and teach.

Researchers define happiness in a variety of ways, but the clearest characterization for me is one that brings meaning into the happiness equation, literally:

Happiness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning

In other words, the happiest people enjoy their lives, take satisfaction in their activities and accomplishments, and have a sense of the meaning of their existence. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning are like the macronutrients of happiness. I use the metaphor of macronutrients for a reason. If you’re feeling tired and run down, you might go to a nutritionist to ask about your diet, and they will start by trying to figure out if you’re getting your dietary macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) in good balance and sufficient abundance. If you’re found to be underconsuming protein, say, you will get instructed on how to add more of it to your diet so that you feel better.

When I see an explosion in unhappiness, which I do in the United States and so many other places around the world, the first thing I look for as a researcher is a lack of one of the macronutrients above. I have found zero evidence indicating that enjoyment and satisfaction have declined at all. Young people have as much fun as older people—maybe more. And they accomplish a lot—especially the strivers I teach and meet every day.

But meaning has collapsed.

More and more people—especially young adult strivers—have expressed an increasing sense of meaninglessness over recent decades. For example, the research group Monitoring the Future has shown that from 2008 to the present, the percentage of teenagers who agreed with the statement “Life often seems meaningless” approximately doubled, to more than one in five teens, exactly in tandem with the increases in depression and anxiety. Move up to college students and the pattern is the same; indeed, most have given up even looking for life’s meaning. According to data from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the number one goal of American undergraduates in the mid-1960s was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” an aim that was shared by nearly 90 percent of students. Today, fewer than half of undergraduates say this is their goal.

Among my students and their friends—strivers, all—these alarming numbers clearly underestimate the problem. While one in five straight up say their life is “meaningless,” when I ask people if their sense of meaning has risen or fallen over the past five years, I never hear the former.

More than the other elements of happiness, meaning predicts active engagement with life and an ability to cope with suffering. If your life feels meaningless, you will be disengaged and unable to deal effectively with your problems. You will almost certainly be depressed and anxious. Your life will have a void to it, a hollowness. Maybe you will seek the salve of therapy, which might help a bit with the symptoms of unhappiness but which can’t instill the deep meaning you crave. To pass the time and distract yourself, you will probably scroll or watch videos or game. But these self-soothing behaviors are in fact self-defeating, because they are just a simulation of a life with meaning, not the real thing. And thus they will only make your feeling of emptiness grow more acute.

Why? Because meaning cannot be simulated.