Arthur Brooks, a professor and writer on the science of happiness, says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults has tripled in the past 15 years, with anxiety doubling, and attributes it to a meaning crisis.

He argues that meaning comes from real‑life relationships, not from digital mediation, and that the loss of deep connection makes life feel meaningless, a trend highlighted by a Harvard study that found deep relationships to be the strongest predictor of a happy old age, driving the surge in depression. The numbers just don't lie.

Drawing on psychologists Michael F. Steager and Frank Martella, he defines meaning as coherence, purpose and significance and uses the meaning in life questionnaire to show a rapid rise in the ‘stuck’ group—people with low sense of purpose who have stopped searching for meaning.

Brooks stresses that the problem is not that meaning is impossible to find, but that people have lost the ability to look for it, a deficiency that fuels the growing mental‑health crisis. He warns that without purposeful connection, the mental‑health crisis will continue to worsen.