He was hoping that after returning to academic life — he’d accepted a job at Harvard University — things would be better. Instead, he found that the campus was very unheimlich too, full of students struggling with their mental health. It went beyond the campus — almost everywhere he looked, people seemed unsettled, suffering without a physical cause. It is, Brooks writes in “The Meaning of Your Life,” what social scientists call a psychogenic epidemic, and he says it is “real and unprecedented” in our culture.
Brooks believes it’s because there is a crisis of meaning — people lack meaning in their lives, and they’re unsure of how to find it, or what it really is. Despite his professional and personal success, and a deep religious faith, Brooks admits that he’s struggled with meaning himself.
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