It’s something to wrestle and live with, says behavioral scientist Arthur Brooks.

• Arthur Brooks, an author and professor at Harvard University, has spent decades studying what makes people happy.
• Brooks has noticed many high-achieving individuals suffering from a profound sense of emptiness, a “crisis of people who have everything and feel nothing.”
• Behavioral scientist Danny Kenny recently spoke with Brooks about why meaning is the “quintessentially complex problem” — something to manage, not solve.

The ball floated toward me, spinning 30 feet above my head. Six months later, I’d be trapped on my couch, unable to move. But in this moment, time seemed to slow as I tracked its arc, allowing the ball to arrive perfectly at my feet. With one touch, I brought it to a stop, and with a strike of my left boot, sent the ball 60 meters to land precisely in front of our right winger making his run.

I felt unstoppable, connected to something bigger than myself — some mystical element of “the game” that I had chosen to love, and that sometimes seemed to love me back.

Part of it was the mastery of self. It took discipline to transform myself into a better player, to overcome limited expectations from coaches, to surpass my own beliefs about what I was capable of. The discipline became its own reward, creating a quiet confidence that extended far beyond the field. I learned that the voice in my head saying “I can’t” is often just the first bid in a negotiation, not the final word.

Another part was what I shared with my teammates and the brotherhood forged through countless predawn practices and the shared sacrifice of sore muscles and rare nights off during the season. Together, we built a cohesive whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, around this beautiful game that had defined my life since childhood. What I didn’t understand then was that this perfect clarity would vanish, and that learning to live without it would become my life’s work.

Fast-forward six months. On my living room couch, I sat. “Get up,” I said to myself. “Get up and go work out.” No movement. “Get up, walk 30 feet across the street, and work out.” Still nothing. The athlete who once ran for hours, trained relentlessly, and played with joyful intensity couldn’t summon the will to walk 10 yards to the gym for even 20 minutes of lifting. I had graduated college, and with that came the abrupt end of my soccer career, the sport I had played since I could walk, following in my dad’s professional footsteps.

For two decades, soccer gave me structure and purpose. The formula was clear: show up to practice, work harder than the person next to you, eat well, sleep enough, study for exams, repeat. Success had metrics. There was a guide for how to succeed. Simple inputs, predictable outputs. 

Losing that clarity hit harder than any physical challenge I’d ever faced. The scaffolding of my life had collapsed, replaced by an overwhelming web of competing priorities with no clear hierarchy, no coach telling me what mattered most, no obvious way to keep score. I felt directionless. Hollow. Lost. 

What I was experiencing was neither unique nor limited to sports. We all face this when we lose our organizing principles. The executive who retires loses the clear hierarchy and defined success metrics. The parent whose children leave home loses the structure of caregiving that organized their days. The student who graduates loses the syllabus that told them exactly what to do and when.

When the thing that once gave our life purpose disappears, how do we rebuild a sense of meaning?

Having everything, feeling nothing

While I could not have known it at the time, the struggle I faced years ago would lead me to a lifelong pursuit of understanding human behavior. It led to my PhD. It led to my current career in leadership development at InspireCorps. It led to my fascination, my obsession, and my need to write about this in my newsletter. 

It also led me to Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, behavioral scientist, and New York Times-bestselling author of books including From Strength to Strength. The former president of the American Enterprise Institute has spent decades studying what makes people truly happy, and he’s noticed a troubling pattern: We’ve lost our connection to meaning, and it’s making us unhappy.

Despite unprecedented material comfort and security, many people are experiencing a profound emptiness in their lives.

“It’s a crisis of people who have everything and feel nothing,” Brooks tells me. He’s currently deep in the writing process on this very subject, his most challenging book yet, and one he describes as “a complete dog’s breakfast at this point.”

The mess is understandable. In my own journey, I’ve struggled to even begin grasping what it feels like to have no sense of “meaning” in life. Brooks is wrestling with that same issue on a far grander scale and for a much larger audience, attempting to articulate why meaning has become the critical missing element in modern happiness, and to chart a path back to it that doesn’t rely on empty self-help.

A “blinking pixel”

In his work, Brooks observed a decline in happiness within a specific group: high achievers. After breaking happiness down into three components—enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning—he found his “blinking pixel.” While enjoyment and satisfaction remained stable, meaning was collapsing, particularly among the strivers and achievers.

Drawing on work by psychologists such as Frank Martela and Mike Steger, Brooks broke down meaning into three dimensions: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence asks why things happen the way they do. Purpose asks why you do what you do. Significance asks why your life matters.

Looking back at my soccer days through this framework, I can see what I had and what I lost. I had coherence in cause-and-effect relationships between training and performance, between effort and results. The world made sense. Purpose organized my entire existence, where every workout, meal, and sleep schedule served the larger goal of becoming better. Significance connected me to something bigger than myself, to teammates who depended on me, and a tradition and sport I was a part of.

Six months after graduation, all three had vanished.

Complex vs. complicated

Here’s where I made my crucial mistake, the one that kept me trapped on that couch for months. I tried to solve my meaning crisis like I was putting together an engine. I thought if I could just find the perfect job, the perfect routine, girlfriend, apartment—if I could arrange all the pieces correctly—meaning would automatically emerge.

This approach works for complicated problems. Complicated problems have solutions. You can solve them with enough cognitive horsepower, enough research, enough optimization. Building an app, planning a vacation, even training for soccer—these are complicated but solvable.

Meaning isn’t like that. “Meaning is the quintessential complex problem,” Brooks explains. “It can only be understood and lived with, not solved.” I had been trying to bring meaning into focus like looking through multiple kaleidoscopes at once, turning the dials frantically, hoping the perfect pattern would click into place. 

But meaning is a practice to be lived, not a machine to be perfectly constructed. 

This insight changes everything about how we approach the search for meaning. Instead of looking for the perfect formula, we need to learn how to wrestle with uncertainty. Instead of trying to eliminate complexity, we need to get better at managing it. The wrestling never stops, but it can become a partnership rather than a battle.

How to wrestle with the unsolvable

Brooks offers a practical framework for managing meaning:

Step 1: Stop the emotional spiral

“If you can’t emotionally self-manage, you can’t thrive,” Brooks tells me. “You can’t manage anything if you can’t manage yourself emotionally.”

This is the foundation upon which everything else builds. When I was trapped on my couch, I was drowning in my emotional reaction to that crisis. The panic, the self-blame, and the conviction that I was fundamentally broken all made it impossible to think clearly about what was actually happening.

Brooks taught me that the voice screaming that I was broken — that I’d never figure it out — was just my limbic system alerting me to a threat. The threat was real (loss of meaning, loss of identity), but the solution wasn’t to fix myself. It was to move the experience from my animal brain to my prefrontal cortex, where I could observe it rather than just react to it.

The metacognitive techniques he recommends are surprisingly simple: When you’re having strong feelings, write them down in a journal, which takes your thoughts out of a downward spiral and traps them on a page, giving you time to observe yourself before reacting. Now, whenever I’m feeling lost, I write three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts to move the chaos from my limbic system to my rational mind.

The goal isn’t to think your way out of complexity but to clear the deck so you can engage with it more skillfully. “Live, not just analyze,” Brooks cautions. 

Step 2: Change the question

Only once you can manage your emotional reactions can you make the fundamental shift Brooks advocates: Instead of asking, “How do I find my purpose?” we need to ask, “How do I get better at wrestling with meaning when it inevitably slips away?”

Because meaning will slip away, slowly, subtly, and then all at once. The job that once energized you will become routine. The relationship that once completed you will face challenges. The identity that once defined you will evolve or end. This is the human condition. This is not failure. We’re supposed to lose our sense of meaning periodically because we never permanently solve it. We just get faster at recognizing when we’ve lost it and better at the practices that help us find it again.

Step 3: Befriend suffering

Perhaps most counterintuitively, Brooks argues we need to reframe our relationship with difficulty. “I tell my students: you’re going to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘I’m really grateful for all the beautiful things that will happen today, and I’m also really grateful for all the things I’m going to hate. Bring it on.'”

Nobody thinks going to the gym should feel good, he points out, yet we think life should feel good. “If you’re always feeling good in the gym, there’s no muscle protein synthesis.” 

The same principle applies to meaning. Unhappiness is embedded in happiness. The willingness to wrestle with difficulty, whether it’s the physical demands of two-a-day practices or the emotional demands of losing your identity, is what builds your capacity for deeper meaning and reveals the things you truly care about.

When I ask Brooks for his most practical recommendation, he doesn’t hesitate: “Go on a silent retreat armed with the three questions of why. 1. Why do things happen the way they do in my life? 2. Why do I do the things that I do? 3. Why does my life matter and to whom?”

“Go someplace all alone, nothing to do, no devices, maybe a notebook and a pen, and sit with those things for about 48 hours.”

It sounds almost absurdly simple, but Brooks explains the neuroscience behind why it works. Meaning questions live in the right hemisphere of the brain, the side designed for complex problems and a sense of cognitive “wandering.” But our device-saturated, left-brain world rarely gives us access to that space anymore, constantly trying to solve rather than understand.

This is why Brooks’ approach feels so counterintuitive to our optimization-obsessed minds. The three questions aren’t meant to be answered definitively. They are companions for the journey that are meant to be revisited and lived with, not frozen unchanging in amber. 

Why never “finding” your purpose is actually good news

At the beginning of the year, I found myself in a familiar place, not on my couch this time, but staring at my computer screen, paralyzed by the question of whether my work actually matters. The newsletter I was starting to pour hours into, the leadership development programs I design at work, the conversations I have with clients wrestling with their own meaning crises…do any of these create real value?

If this were me a decade ago, this feeling would have sent me spiraling into panic and self-blame. Now, I recognize it as my periodic invitation to wrestle with meaning anew. Instead of trying to solve the question intellectually, I followed Brooks’ advice: I took a notebook to a quiet coffee shop, left my phone in the car, and sat with paper and pen for 90 minutes.

• Why do things happen the way they do in my life? Because I chose work that puts me in direct contact with human complexity. 
• Why do I do what I do? Because helping people navigate uncertainty feels more meaningful than providing easy answers. 
• Why does my life matter? Not because I’m changing the world in some grand way, but because I’m contributing to conversations that help people think more clearly about what they value, which creates empowered choices for a fulfilling life.

The PhD I eventually completed, the career in leadership development I built, the newsletter I now write exploring human behavior—none of these emerged from solving my meaning crisis like an equation. They emerged from learning to dance with uncertainty, to find coherence in complexity, to build purpose from the pieces available to me, to discover significance in service to others grappling with similar questions.

Brooks taught me that meaning isn’t a destination but a way of traveling. The wrestling never gets easier, but we can find joy in the difficulty. We can flip the struggle from adversarial to collaborative, letting each crisis of meaning teach us something new about ourselves and what we value. More importantly, we can get faster at moving from existential paralysis to purposeful action.

For my soccer-playing self, trapped in the belief that meaning should be permanent and given, providing a solid, sensible structure to one’s life, this would have sounded like terrible news. But it’s actually liberating. 

It means we’re never stuck. It means every ending contains the seeds of a new beginning. It means the next time you find yourself questioning everything (and you will), you don’t have to panic. You can grab a notebook, find a quiet space, and ask yourself the three questions that matter most. It means the voice in your head saying “I can’t” is just the first bid in a negotiation, not the final word.

There’s a strange irony in the search for meaning: the harder you chase it, the more elusive it becomes. But learn to wrestle with the question instead of demanding an answer, and meaning stops running. It starts dancing. Just like that perfect touch I used to feel on the field, you can’t force the magic. You can only create the conditions for it to appear. Complex problems, it turns out, prefer partners to pursuers.