Arthur Brooks told a packed chapel in Salt Lake City on Thursday that the surge in depression and anxiety among people under 30 is not just a mental health emergency. It is, he said, a meaning crisis.
The Harvard Business School professor, University of Utah impact scholar and New York Times bestselling author said depression rates among people under 30 have tripled, anxiety has doubled, and loneliness and addiction are also rising. He said 55% of students at Harvard University were seeking psychiatric care, and he pointed to a simple measure as the strongest predictor of distress in that age group: saying, “My life feels meaningless.”
Brooks spoke at 8 a.m. on Thursday, April 30, at an interfaith event hosted by the Murray Utah YSA Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dozens of young adults and community leaders filled the chapel and spilled into an overflow area, with University of Utah President Taylor Randall, the Rev. Anthony Savas of St. Anna Greek Orthodox Church in Sandy, Utah, and Murray YSA Stake President Clark Ivory among those in attendance. Brooks was scheduled to deliver a commencement speech later that day at the University of Utah.
He linked the crisis to the years around 2008, when the technology boom and widespread cellphone use made constant access to information feel normal. Brooks said the problem was not the phone itself but the culture built around it. “You’re not carrying around your phone for any other reason except that you want information at any second that it might cross your mind,” he said, adding, “That’s a culture problem, not a technology problem. … And quite frankly, it broke our brains.”
Brooks said that nonstop access to information has effectively eliminated boredom, even though boredom is necessary for a meaningful life. “You literally need to be bored to find the meaning of your life,” he said. He drew a line between complicated problems, which can be solved, and complex ones, which must be lived through, saying technology and choosing a college major fall in the first category while relationships, faith and meaning belong in the second.
The message put Brooks in direct conversation with the students and leaders gathered in Salt Lake City: if the crisis is rooted in meaning, then the answer is not more information, but habits that make room for reflection, discomfort and purpose. Randall echoed that idea, saying Brooks had “given us a recipe today to try to take some interventions to find meaning in our lives,” and urging people to ask the question, “What is our meaning?” before life forces it on them.
That is the point Brooks was making. For young adults, the central crisis is not simply that they are anxious or depressed. It is that too many of them no longer know what their lives are for.