Journalist Jodi Kantor and Harvard happiness expert Arthur Brooks are both out with new books about identifying and cultivating meaning in one’s life. Brooks says he wanted to write
The Meaning of Your Life after observing an explosion in depression and anxiety among young people beginning around 2008. In today’s episode, he chats with
Here & Now’s Indira Lakshmanan about how neglecting right-brain activity has led us astray. Then, Kantor tells NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly about the daunting commencement speech invitation that led to her book
How to Start, which focuses on cultivating one’s life work through ideas like “craft” and “need.”
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