This was the actor Rainn Wilson’s response to my question about why he’d always made jokes as a kid. He explains that when you are in a lot of pain but figure out that you are naturally funny, you start making jokes to distract yourself and others from your misery. It’s a kind of “emotional substitution,” he said.

Wilson’s childhood was completely unstable. The family’s economic situation was precarious at best. His mother abandoned the family when Rainn was 2 years old; he didn’t see her again until he was 14. Desperate and despondent, his father quickly entered into a tense, loveless second marriage and converted the family to the Baha’i faith. Wilson’s upbringing was, in his own words, characterized by “confusion, anxiety, and alienation.”

At 18, Wilson escaped to college in New York City and studied acting, resolving to be finished forever with his dysfunctional family and their weird religion. He could not outrun his demons, however. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety hunted him relentlessly. He drank heavily and used drugs throughout his 20s and 30s, a form of self-medication that led, inevitably, to addiction.

At 40, his luck seemed to change when he scored the role of Dwight Schrute in the television comedy The Office. Almost overnight, Wilson became internationally famous. You might think that having people shout “I love you” from passing cars would fix his depression and give him an incentive to kick his habits, right?

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This sounds like a line from the campy 1978 sci-fi horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens from a dying planet that come to Earth and replace humans with clones that are devoid of their old personality.

But it’s not.

It’s actually a quote from a recent study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships about the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges that the governing elite is dominated by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic, deep-state pedophiles. Participants in the study described watching the theory take hold of their friends and family members, transforming them beyond recognition.

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar. You too may know someone who started “doing his own research” on politics, science, or the economy—and then went down an internet rabbit hole of posts claiming that some event or phenomenon was plotted by a clandestine group of powerful people or organizations, usually with sinister or malevolent intentions. Before you know it, he seems like a different person. His new beliefs dominate conversations and ruin relationships.

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It’s the kind of writing that makes you put down your phone and think—which, given how long we all stare at our screens every day, is no small thing. And now Arthur’s taken it a step further: His new book, The Meaning of Your Life, hits shelves on March 31. It doesn’t just explore the modern crisis of unhappiness—it tells us what to do about it.

That begins with identifying who is truly suffering—and why. In the exclusive excerpt below, Brooks turns to an unexpected group: our young strivers, whose lives appear to be going right in every visible way. And yet, they are more depressed, distracted, aimless, and bored than ever before. Why are the future leaders of our society the most unhappy? And what, exactly, will it take to change course? —The Editors

It’s no secret that we are living at a time of profound unhappiness. According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of American adults of all ages who are “not too happy” about their lives more than doubled from 2000 to 2024. Young adults were hit especially hard: The percentage of American adolescents with symptoms of major depression nearly tripled from 2005 to 2019, while anxiety almost doubled.

But here’s the really weird part: The ones suffering most are not just the down-and-out types—the addicts, the impoverished, the failsons. Those for whom there are obvious things gone wrong in their lives. On the contrary, it is also those who seem to have everything going right for them—in other words, our young and most successful strivers.

I’ve spent my life surrounded by that very group. As a longtime college professor, I have been privileged to teach hundreds of wonderful students—ambitious strivers just starting out on what promised to be terrific careers and lives. I have met countless young people who were so inspired by ideas, so purpose-driven, and so enthusiastic.

But in 2009, I left academia to run a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. And when I returned to campus a decade later, the atmosphere was dark. Larger and larger percentages of students were suffering from depression and anxiety. At some schools, more than half of students were receiving mental health treatment. My office hours were more like counseling sessions than tutoring. Hope and optimism had been replaced by anger and sadness.

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What were you reading right before this article? Probably some news, most likely about the war in Iran, which is dominating coverage, and ancillary topics such as the effect on the economy and markets. Along the way, you most likely encountered and felt compelled to consume some political news and opinions. I don’t mean humdrum policy stuff: what Congress voted on today, or the like. Instead, I mean horse-race politics and lightning-rod punditry.

And this lowered your well-being.

My confidence that you read about politics owes to the fact that political dilettantism—closely following who’s up, who’s down, who created the latest outrage—is a national obsession. We can’t get enough of “monitoring the situation.” In a 2023 survey of American adults, about a third said they follow national politics “very closely.” Meanwhile, 62 percent of Americans consume news about politics and government “often” or “extremely often,” which is 30 percentage points above the next highest area of news interest.

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Actually, I am named after both of my grandfathers, Arthur Hansen (a Dane, whom I therefore called “Bedstefar”) and Charles Brooks (a good old-fashioned American “Grandpa”). Bedstefar was a joker; he had a bumper sticker custom-made for his Buick that said, “Be Alert! The World Needs More Lerts!” Grandpa was a serious man: a preacher and an academic.

I have positive memories of them, even though, despite both living within three hours of us, I didn’t see either very often: a couple of times a year at most, for maybe a day at a time. If you asked me to tell you the biggest life lesson they gave me, I’d have to think on it. I think one of them taught me the rules of croquet.

Much the same could be said of the relationship between my three kids, who grew up on the East Coast of the U.S., and their grandparents in Seattle and Barcelona. My children’s memories of the old folks are happy, but hazy: Sometimes they saw our parents at Christmas or during a summer trip, but not often enough to establish any sort of intergenerational intimacy.

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Last week, a viral blog post from Citrini Research titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis outlined a scenario in which, two years from now, artificial intelligence has progressed to the point that it eliminates jobs on a mass scale in nearly every industry. In Citrini’s doomsday alternative reality, this leads to a cratering of consumer spending, more AI adoption to cut costs, deeper unemployment, a stock market crash, mortgage defaults, and so on.

This “thought experiment” sounded realistic enough to investors that last Monday, all the major stock indexes opened sharply lower, and fell further over most of the day. Hardest hit were companies specifically mentioned in the memo, such as American Express, which lost nearly 8 percent.

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The column provoked reader feedback not only about screen use, but also about ways to low…

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This was a sign he might be suffering from the “Werther Effect,” so named for the main character in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The story revolves around a romantic youth with signature yellow trousers who, spurned by his true love, takes his own life. Young men in several countries, overcome by amorous fervor after reading the book, would emulate the protagonist in manner and dress, seek out their soulmates, and audaciously declare their love. And when the objects of their affection were women totally out of their league who were unswayed by maudlin displays and yellow trousers, these men would, like Young Werther, do themselves in.

The yellow pants were the uniform of mass despair caused by the novel—a sartorial case of social contagion. When this type of social contagion becomes a mass phenomenon, behavioral scientists have a name for it: a psychogenic epidemic, or one in which mental or physical suffering spreads widely and quickly, especially among adolescents and young adults, despite lacking any obvious biological origin.

Psychogenic epidemics are still common today, although they are not usually as bizarre as the Werther Effect. The 2026 equivalent of yellow pants is, I would argue, the hunched-over posture of a population addicted to the screens in our pockets.

Let me explain.

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My column on Monday focused on the fear that many young adults experience about in-person dating and romantic commitment—particularly an exaggerated concern about “red flags” (reasons to cut and run from a relationship). This anxiety has led to an explosion of pornography use and social-emotional avoidance behaviors. I urged my readers to t…

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It’s a dispiriting statistic, and one that encapsulates so many things going wrong in American society: People are spending more time alone and depressed, and are increasingly addicted to porn. The ubiquity of the internet has exacerbated many of these trends, as young people abandon the ups and downs of real life for the anonymity and instant gratification offered by a screen.

And so, even as artificial intelligence takes over the world, and The New York Times remains the most subscribed-to newspaper in the country, OnlyFans leaves both companies in the dust. As journalist Ed Elson reported, there are 378 million global OnlyFans users, who spent a total of $7.2 billion on the site in 2025. The top OnlyFans creator—usually meaning porn star—makes $43 million a year. Nelson summed it up well: OnlyFans “benefits from the only trend more impactful than AI right now: loneliness.”

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Happy Valentine’s Day for tomorrow to those who celebrate it. Although Mrs. B and I are still in love after lo, these many decades, we don’t much observe the holiday. Being of foreign birth, she always regarded it cynically as an event, like so many of our unofficial holidays, made up by marketers. (Which, you might be thinking, is no worse…

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Except this week! This week, his column is arriving a day early. That’s for a good reason. Tonight, Bad Bunny will be the first Super Bowl halftime performer to deliver a set entirely in Spanish—a choice that has stirred controversy in some circles. Naturally, we thought: Who better to weigh in than a man who’s been married for 34 years to a Spanish woman who spoke no English when they first met? Read on as Arthur reflects on how language—and the barriers it creates—can challenge, enrich, and shape what it means to live a good life.

In addition to his Monday column, Arthur’s free newsletter publishes every Friday. To get both delivered straight to your inbox, sign up here.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday. —The Editors

Super Bowl XXVII in 1993 was a lousy blowout of a game. The Cowboys beat the Bills 52-17, and it was never close. For my wife, however, it was utterly epic. We had just moved to the United States from Spain, where she’d lived her whole life and I’d spent three years as an expat. New friends invited us to a rowdy party to watch the game. We ate and drank and cheered, and at one point, someone accidentally set off the fire alarm. (It was me.) The lavish halftime show featured Michael Jackson.

My wife spoke very limited English at the time and had no idea what the rules of American football were. To her, it looked like complete chaos. But she still talks about the Super Bowl as one of her happiest early memories living in the country that, as a now naturalized citizen, she loves deeply.

Fast-forward to Super Bowl LX, which takes place Sunday night in Santa Clara, California—and which I, as a Seattle native, very much hope will be a lousy blowout for the Seahawks. The halftime show will feature Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—a.k.a. Bad Bunny—the hugely popular Puerto Rican rapper, who performs exclusively in Spanish. Like everything in life these days, this has turned into a political controversy: Some conservatives have denounced his appearance as a politically motivated diversity sop, because most American football fans don’t speak Spanish.

This is exactly the wrong interpretation of events. In fact, as my patriotic wife would argue, Bad Bunny’s exclusively Spanish performance will be a purely and authentically American phenomenon—and a testament to what most U.S. traditionalists should want: the undimmed power of American culture to bring people together across ethnicities through entertainment. At a time when activists on both sides would prefer we tear one another apart based on grievance and victimization, what could be truer to our national spirit than that?

But there is a deeper question here: Can humans connect with each other across language barriers? And how do these barriers shape the perspectives and relationships that underlie our lives?

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It was the spring of 2020, and I was teaching a Harvard Business School class on the science of happiness for the first time. This went well, but not without missteps on my part. On the very first day, when a student began her question with that statement, I visibly cringed—in much the same way I did several years ago when an elderly relative at the Thanksgiving table regaled us with information about his “devil of a hemorrhoid.” Therapy, like hemorrhoids, seemed to me something best kept private.

I had recently returned to academia after a decade running a think tank in Washington, D.C. Evidently, things had changed on campus if this kind of self-disclosure was normal, and the other students were completely unfazed by her revelation. Therapy is no longer a private matter, and it is utterly ubiquitous, especially among younger, college-educated adults. Fifty-five percent of Gen Zers and millennials have attended at least one therapy session, and 83 percent of them openly tell others that they are in therapy.

I had to get with the times. And since then, you’ll be pleased to learn that I’ve become like a seasoned proctologist when it comes to hearing about my students’ mental-health treatments.

If you’re still reading after that metaphor, here was the student’s full question:

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This very public estrangement has gotten international attention. You might think that’s because it’s so outlandish, like the O.J. Simpson murder case. But that isn’t it at all. Family estrangement is utterly commonplace. In fact, all the Beckham family spectacle shows us is that the rich and famous are as prone to this tragedy as the rest of us. That’s what makes it so compelling.

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In my family, the business is academia. My late father was a lifelong mathematics professor; his father, a college dean and theologian. On paper, it looks like the apples don’t fall far from the tree. But look closer, and big professional differences emerge. My dad and his dad led intensely private, scholarly lives, whereas I, though I teach at a university, also write popular books and columns about happiness for nonacademic audiences and travel weekly for public speaking and media appearances.

I love my life, but my dad would have hated to do what I do. Inexplicably, he didn’t see the charm in spending 150 nights a year in Courtyard Marriotts. Different strokes, I guess. But for me, this kind of “public intellectual” career is wonderful. I see new airports every week, and regularly get recognized as that happiness guy who kind of looks like Stanley Tucci.

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For many, the answer is probably no. Perhaps you are reading this sentence while, filled with self-loathing, you eat something you vowed to forgo in 2026. Or maybe, despite resolving to quit putting things off, you’re reading this article to procrastinate from the task you ought to be tackling. Contrary to what you might have been told—or the thoughts that may be circulating in your head—this is not evidence that you are a pathetic loser. Rather, you just made a lousy New Year’s resolution: one that is doomed to fail.

And you’re not alone. Of about half of all Americans who make New Year’s resolutions on January 1, 22 percent have failed at the end of week one; 50 percent at three months; and 81 percent after two years. Knowing this, you might conclude that New Year’s resolutions are stupid. That would be a mistake. Resolutions are very good, in fact: They are a sign that you want to improve your life in tangible ways, which is healthy and positive. People need something in their lives that’s worth striving for. You just have to be smart about how to make your resolutions.

I would know. When I was in my mid-twenties, I told a friend that I really wanted to quit smoking. I’d picked up a penchant for tobacco at 13. People ask me today why I did so, and all I can say is, “Because it was wonderful.” Well, until it wasn’t. I used to wake up each night around 3 a.m. and light up a coffin nail right there in the bed. (Hey, don’t judge me, smoking for me was a relationship.) But one night at age 26, when I was engaged to be married, I fell back asleep with a lit cigarette, and woke up later with 10 holes burned in the sheets. It occurred to me that it was one thing for the cigs to kill me, but quite another for them to kill the future Mrs. Brooks.

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If you’re new here, a quick primer. Every Monday, I’ll publish a column tackling a subject fundamental to happin…

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