Brooks opens his discussion on suffering with the story of actor Rainn Wilson. In an interview, Wilson told the author that he used humor to mask childhood pain. After an unstable upbringing in Seattle—his mother left when he was two, and his father’s remarriage and conversion to the Bahá’í faith made his homelife tense—Wilson struggled as an adult with depression, anxiety, and addiction. Fame from The Office worsened his mental health, leaving him entitled and spiritually empty. With support from his wife, Holiday Reinhorn, a return to the Bahá’í faith, a consoling passage from The Hidden Words, and 12-step recovery, he found peace. He now defines meaning as love, spiritual growth, and service, and he’s grateful for his suffering.

The author notes enduring cross-cultural claims about suffering, such as Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, dukkha and Christianity’s “vale of tears” (218), or suffering as a default for life on earth. Brooks holds that most people spend a significant portion of time in negative or mixed emotions and identifies three scientific explanations for suffering’s persistence: Negative emotions signal threats via the limbic system, evolutionary drives that spread genes (e.g., sexual infidelity) can create misery, and modern life conflicts with ancestral environments. However, suffering, he argues, is a feature that can reveal meaning, as many cancer survivors attest.

Brooks contrasts Aristippus’s Cyrenaicism (or the notion of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain) with the “fear-avoidance model,” which shows that shunning physical pain can worsen it through disuse. The 2000-2010 surge in opioid prescriptions exemplifies the harms of avoiding and numbing physical pain instead of confronting it directly. Avoiding emotional pain likewise worsens depression and correlates with suicidal ideation. Acceptance-based therapies can offer alternatives; for example, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy frames suffering as resistance multiplied by pain, implying nonresistance as a starting point, and acceptance and commitment therapy can help patients acknowledge suffering while pursuing valued life aims.

Brooks identifies major life changes as a particular source of human suffering. In 1924, for example, German philosopher Eugen Herrigel learned kyudo, or “the way of the bow” (226), and after years of frustration with the practice, he discovered the secret of “letting go.” Brooks holds that people resist change to conserve energy and stabilize social living, yet the author of Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, Bruce Feiler, found that major transitions occur an average of every 12-18 months, with three to five large-scale changes per life; according to Feiler’s research, 90% of individuals judged these changes transformative. Research also suggests that unpleasant memories fade over time, meaning that the negative effects of upheaval are temporary. Brooks references his son Carlos by way of example. He suffered through Marine Scout Sniper training, hating the experience, but now finds meaning and pride in having completed the course.

From Herrigel’s “effortless effort,” the author draws three lessons: Focus on processes, not outcomes; practice mindful absorption in present actions; and release the ego by detaching from self-consciousness. Brooks first read Herrigel at age 20 to improve as a musician but didn’t truly grasp it until 55 when he was amid career turmoil; only then could he learn to focus on daily work rather than forcing outcomes.

Brooks also recommends keeping a failure journal, a practice that he has made for himself. When something deeply bothers him, he records it in an encrypted file—writing about how he feels and why he’s upset. Over time, he can see changes in these negative experiences. This is a metacognitive practice that has helped him shift his emotions from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex. Reviewing his past entries in the journal buoys Brooks’s confidence that current suffering will ultimately yield growth.

Brooks closes the chapter with a reference to Dostoyevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”: In a parallel world without suffering, life is meaningless, and Dostoyevsky’s narrator longs for the pain that accompanies love. Therefore, Brooks urges his readers to be grateful for life’s challenges because they reveal life’s deep meaning.

Brooks revisits Tolstoy’s midlife crisis and explores it through the character of Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina. Levin’s seemingly perfect life feels meaningless until he abandons his frantic intellectual search and turns to ordinary daily life—attending to family, caring for workers, focusing on work, and embracing simple transcendent faith. He realizes that life’s meaning is the goodness he can actively put into it.

Brooks offers a series of lessons on meaning and happiness in conclusion. In the first, he discusses ordinary life in the past and the present. In 1878, ordinary life naturally conformed to meaning through love, work, faith, beauty, and suffering. Today’s ordinary life, by contrast, is a tech-laden simulation of distraction and manic achievement that leaves people, like Tolstoy’s Levin, “starving inside a toy store” (240). 

Brooks holds that his book’s aim has been to teach practices that might help readers access the right hemisphere, where meaning resides. Such practices include using technology cautiously when it substitutes for in-person experience, shunning whatever makes you self-focused, taking risks in love, rebalancing toward the supernatural, leaving work that is not a calling, embracing natural beauty, and welcoming daily trials as signs of fully living. Brooks then returns to Marc, Maria, and Paul from the Introduction and discusses the resolutions they’ve made to better pursue meaning: Maria will trust her gut, Marc will practice digital detox and combat loneliness through visits with others, and Paul will schedule daily outdoor time.

In Brooks’s second lesson, he reminds his readers that, like with Levin, meaning finds the individual instead of the individual finding meaning. Brooks uses his own life as an example. In 2019, at 55, he was burned out after resigning from his executive post; to recoup, he and Ester walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. They rose before dawn, walked roughly 20 miles a day on a marked trail, and prayed without devices. At the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Brooks felt new clarity about his life’s calling, realizing that he wanted to “lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas” (244). Shortly thereafter, he accepted a professorship in happiness science and began writing for wider audiences, leading to this book.

Months after walking the Camino, Brooks saw his experience differently: He had not sought his meaning—his meaning had sought him. The pilgrimage stripped away the barriers of a complicated, distracting life, allowing him to live in an old-fashioned way—without technology, in nature, with his soulmate, asking big questions, and enduring physical pain. Like Levin simply living rightly, Brooks’s meaning found him when he was ready.

In closing, Brooks urges his readers to treat life like a pilgrimage with openness and vulnerability; then, your meaning will find you.