The Beguiling Search for Ourselves

Earlier this summer, the government of the United Kingdom made international news. Both Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyger, prominent left-wing influencers, were barred from entry into the country, “on the grounds that their presence … may not be conducive to the public good.” Piker and Uyger were set to make appearances at the Oxford Union, the hallowed speech and debate society at the University of Oxford. As it happens, I was also invited to be among Union chamber speeches during this very same week. My charge wasn’t to speak about political ideology, but instead about why young people today are miserable.     

Ironically, part of the answer is ideological politics and activism—a mission on both the left and right that promises to provide followers with an avenue to find themselves and their meaning in life. Instead, the opposite occurs: it ignites a vicious cycle of self-focus that makes young people anxious and depressed.  

This problem, though culture-wide, is acute among elite universities. I’ve seen this personally: six years ago, I was a graduate student at Oxford; thereafter, I spent several years as a researcher at Harvard; and these days, I am a researcher at Vanderbilt studying human flourishing. Given that I was raised in a lower-middle class Midwestern family, I am grateful and thrilled to have found myself in such places. For me, these universities have helped me to realize the American dream of upward mobility; of moving to strange, unknown places, and charting out on an adventure with a nontrivial chance of failure. But a huge majority of elite university students are neither grateful nor thrilled. They are bitter, resentful, and unhappy. 

So, in my own chamber speech at the Oxford Union, I called attention to what happens when we become fully consumed with the ideas of “safetyism,” online influencers, and campus activism: in our bitterness and resentment, we become fully consumed with ourselves. This stands in stark contrast to the more transcendent habits that traditionally brought about meaning, ones that push us beyond ourselves. 

Let us, then, explore two big questions. Why, in the deepest sense, does self-focus make us miserable? And how can university students unshackle themselves from this tyranny? Two men—Oxford’s C. S. Lewis and Harvard’s William James—illuminated answers to these questions long ago, which we have forgotten. Their ideas, along with modern science, will chart the North Star for elite university students who are suffering today. 

The Mirror’s Tyranny

“Look for yourself,” wrote C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1952), “and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.”

These words were drafted during the Second World War while Lewis taught at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I was a stone’s throw away from Lewis’s old stomping grounds—but I was hardly in the perils of war. The coronavirus epidemic had just set in, and terrible as it was, I can’t say it was akin to war-torn Europe. My bomb shelter, so to speak, was a nice little flat with a view of tulips. 

In those days, I was studying the outgrowths of Enlightenment thought and how those ideas found their way to America. It was my view then that the Enlightenment’s ideals—a focus on progress, tolerance, reason, and the scientific method—led to a great boon of human dignity. It seemed to me that these ideals ignited a more generative (albeit imperfect) “pursuit of happiness” for ordinary people. Those intellectual origins are in no small part why I study human happiness today.

However, C. S. Lewis would have disagreed with my rosy view of the Enlightenment. And as the years have gone on, I have come to think that he may have had a point.

In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis argued that Enlightenment thinking created subjective morality, the too-tolerant idea that no one morality was better than another. He called the people who inherited this tradition “men without chests.” By this, he meant that society was full of individuals with smarts and an appetite to succeed; but since they lacked a moral framework to connect their intelligence with their ambition, this made them vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious actors. In terms we might understand today: talented young people were susceptible to getting conscripted into culture wars—ones that would lower their happiness and boost the power and influence of the folks leading, and profiting from, the charge.

Let’s start with the types of arguments that university students hear every day. Organized religion is but a corrupt fairy-tale, they are told, so it’s best to avoid it. Marriage and child-rearing are old relics that lower one’s individual freedom, so it’s best to never start a family. And as for your current family and friends who hold different political views than you? They threaten your way of life, so it’s best to go “no contact” with them, and to go “full contact” with the ideological influencers who are cashing in on your clicks. Lewis believed victims of manipulation would be easier to control, and in turn, their views would become less heterodox. Small wonder that university life has become an epicenter of ideological orthodoxy.

But the point goes beyond that. The thing to understand is that young people—whether they are forgoing God, marriage, children, or friends and family—are doing so because of an intense focus on themselves. And indeed, as we “look for [ourselves],” we inadvertently throw away the very things that make life meaningful.

This is why some scholars argue that the Enlightenment—despite the extraordinary ways it has protected individual liberties—has done a poor job at creating shared, durable meaning across culture. This is the core hypothesis in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), where he argues that meaning across the West is now fragmented, optional, and individually constructed. The result? Take it from Taylor: “There is a widespread sense of loss [in the West], if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”

But we should not stop with this mere cultural critique; deeper psychological phenomena are at play. This brings us to William James, the great 19^th century psychologist at Harvard. James is often credited as the father of modern psychology. And in his magnum opus The Principles of Psychology (1890), he distinguishes between two conceptions of ourselves: the “I-self” and the “me-self.” The former refers to the mental state in which we look outward and observe the world; the latter refers to the mental state in which we observe ourselves. 

Of course, we need to spend appropriate time in both the I-self and me-self to survive and succeed in life. Without observing beyond ourselves (via the I-self), we would make no effort to bond with other people, and we might turn a blind eye to threats or predators. On the other hand, without ever observing ourselves (via the me-self), we would have no sense of identity or self-conception. More practically, the me-self is the mental state that encourages you to look sharp for, say, a job interview—and not to show up in pajamas. By healthily observing oneself, one can put their best foot forward in life.

But to flourish, the properly ordered person must find the correct balance between time spent in the I- and me-selves. James himself alluded to this, arguing that we must spend time “contemplating” our dual nature so that the I- and me-selves can “work out their drama together.” But this balancing act is a tall task. As James argued, “for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves.” And to which half was he referring? That’s right: the me-self. 

Put differently, humanity’s natural tendency was, and has always been, to spend disproportionate time in the me-self, wrapped in self-focus. Today, in our era of digital mediation and identity obsession, we are more prone than ever to be lodged into this half of ourselves. 

Modern science demonstrates that we become more miserable because of it. For example, psychologists have long known that constant self-focus is highly predictive of strong negative emotions. In general, these negative feelings arise because thinking about oneself causes life’s worries and troubles to dominate one’s attention, which crowds out feelings of, say, gratitude and generosity. Indeed, long before science demonstrated this empirically, St. Augustine made this point. His concept of homo incurvatus en se refers to the natural human tendency to be “curved in on itself,” making our own desires and self-interest the center of our world. 

Unfortunately, this is the dominant reality for elite university students today.

The Era of Self-Focus

Modern social media and technology have fashioned incurvatus en se into a way of life—every waking minute—for many college students. Welcome, then, to what we might call The Era of Self-Focus.

This era is uniquely spurred by digital mediation—through which we compare our real lives to everyone’s fake lives. For young people searching for a job, every LinkedIn post from one’s network might as well read: “I’m thrilled to announce that I’m better than you.” Worse is the self-focus paradigm generated by the influencer class—all of whom are richer and more beautiful than their followers. And worst of all is the online grievance culture that facilitates people to dwell endlessly on their problems. As bitterness and resentment rise, scholars have shown that the gumption to use one’s agency to solve life’s problems seriously declines. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that chronically online college students are uniquely miserable. 

This data help to explain how social media acts as a mirror to, and facilitates a curvature within, ourselves. For example, in 2010—the year that social media apps became ubiquitous on the smartphone—rates of anxiety, depression, and affirmative responses to the statement “my life feels meaningless” began to rise. This has led scholars such as Arthur Brooks, whose research team I lead, to argue that meaninglessness resides at the core of the so-called unhappiness epidemic. 

The outcomes of intense self-focus are evident, especially at elite places like the University of Oxford. According to recent data from the Oxford Student Union, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates admitted that since entering their degree program, their mental health had “worsened” or “slightly worsened.” And fully 55 percent of students said that their mental health was negatively affected by “family, romantic, or familial relationships.” Some of this might be innocuous—the surveyed students might have been homesick after all, and undergraduates are not known for stable dating lives—but something about university life clearly leads to self-focus. Baked within this dataset are surely students who created family schism based on their newfound political views.

During my own time at Oxford, I saw this among my program-mates. Some were terribly affected by the temporary lockdowns; others used their free time to wade into hot-button activism; hardly any sought romance; precisely zero were religious.

Not all of this can be blamed on Oxford—or, in fact, any other university whose students deal with these problems—but it is no secret that universities have intensified The Era of Self-Focus by centering campus life around self-care and grievance-based ideas. For example, while I was at Oxford during the coronavirus epidemic, we were inundated with self-care messages from the university administration asking about our well-being. Though well-intentioned, I found this mildly baffling. I was fantastic! I was at Oxford having an intellectual adventure! Yet even in my optimism, I noticed that the more messages I received to this effect, the more I began to question my own well-being. Put another way, I became more focused on myself, and less focused on ideas bigger than myself. A more realistic version of the administration’s messages might have been: Are you thinking about yourself enough today? 

Of course, the answer for many students is: Yes, all the time. For instance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “developing a meaningful life philosophy” was the top goal of university students, and “being financially very well-off” was the least important objective. Today, those goals have inverted: finding meaning ranks last, whereas getting rich ranks highest. This is a good proxy measure for the fact that the search for meaning—and thus a focus beyond oneself—has cratered.

Again, during my time at Oxford, I made this inversion myself. My top reason for pursuing the degree was to explore ideas that would help me see the world more clearly. Color me naive, but upon entering my program, I had utterly no plans for what to “do next.” But after a mere six months, my friends in the program—who were frenetically securing their next step in the ladder—made me second guess my aims. In no time, I became a data figure in the study above. Forget developing a meaningful life philosophy, I thought. My main goal became something like: Don’t be the loser without a prestigious job.

Thankfully, at that time, university life in the UK wasn’t filled with vitriolic levels of grievance. But the same cannot be said for many American universities. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explore the 2010s rise of universities marrying a “safetyist” campus culture with one of grievance. Across scores of American data and case studies, they argue that American universities—in spotlighting so-called “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” in the name of students’ well-being—inadvertently educated young people to equate emotional discomfort with physical harm. This was especially true at elite universities, in which students were highly attuned to the politics of the day. 

For the last five or so years, a degree of backlash has been underway within academia. But the point to underscore is that universities—like social media—have metastasized The Era of Self-Focus. They have curved students further inward, within the tyranny of the me-self. 

 But there is good news. The solution is not to dismantle university life, a place in which I have spent one-third of my life, and one that I believe in. Instead, universities should work on returning to their founding principles, which were once avenues to push students beyond themselves. For ideas on how this can be achieved, we must first unpack the paradox of self-focus—and finally return to our friends William James and C. S. Lewis.

Escaping Oneself, to Know Oneself

Self-focus is a strange phenomenon. We are naturally drawn to it, and in modern life, we have become quite good at it. But here’s the paradox: if we do, indeed, spend all day focused on ourselves, shouldn’t we know ourselves better? 

 Researchers have answered this in many clever ways. Consider one novel experiment, in which participants first had a photo taken of their face. In a separate room, the researchers made many several photoshopped copies of the original—a 10 percent more attractive copy, a 20 percent more attractive copy, and so on; and likewise for unattractive copies. When the participants were asked to select the photo of their real face from the dozen or so existing images, they were most likely to choose the 20 percent more beautified image—believing that was their real face.

In other words, despite our rampant self-focus, we don’t really know ourselves. There is a reason why we can’t pick our own face out of a lineup, why we can’t accurately assess our own personality, and why self-focus makes us a stranger to ourselves. What university students need today—across the US and the UK—is to be persuaded of a basic metaphysical truth, one that has unfortunately been waylaid by the spoils of Enlightenment thinking. The mysterious truth is that the only way to truly know yourself is by escaping yourself, in deep communion with big ideas, other people, and the divine.

But in The Era of Self-Focus, young adults do just the opposite. By naval gazing all day long, college students are crowding out these pursuits. They date less, have fewer friends, fear big ideas, are less spiritual or religious, and ignite more schism with their families because of partisan politics. 

Instead of contributing to this problem, universities can play a role in fixing it. They need only listen to great ideas of the past. 

Let’s begin with William James. In an 1899 essay, James recounted his weeklong stint at Chautauqua Assembly, an adult-education meeting venue in upstate New York. There he experienced “security, intelligence, humanity, and order,” a utopian-like venue without conflict—much like what modern universities hope (but struggle) to emulate. Yet James found himself inexplicably dissatisfied. Here’s what he observed:

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear.

What James longed for was a window into his own I-self, to become a “looker-on at life.” And what exactly did James wish to see? He desired to bask in awe of the greatest things that had ever been said and done, while also being challenged—even thrilled—by a sense of danger. That, in essence, is the classic role of great universities. Great universities once gave students an unfiltered prism into their I-selves, in which they could study and relive the greatest achievements of human beings, while also being challenged by ideas that didn’t match their worldview. Today’s universities must first return to that forgotten mission. 

Second, universities ought to learn from C. S. Lewis to help students transcend their self-focus. Lewis correctly noted that “look[ing] for yourself” will lead to “hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.” But he followed up that sentiment with this: “Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

And indeed, looking for God was classically part and parcel with the intellectual venture at great universities—until recently, at least. For example, Oxford’s founding motto (“The Lord is my light”) and Harvard’s original mission (“Let every student be instructed…to know God”) each expressed a fundamental conviction: intellectual illumination and divine light were the same thing. Although neither university has been strictly tied to a religious sect for several hundred years—and while neither will (or should) return to a dogmatically religious approach—each would do well to require its students to reckon with theological arguments, perhaps through required coursework, taught by the best faculty each university has to offer. All students must confront the basic idea that underpins the West’s entire university project: the creator must not be separated in our scientific understanding and investigation of nature.

These two rules, from these two great men, are exactly the path toward a more vibrant university life today—as institutions, yes, but also as individuals. In short: these days university students neither stand in awe of great ideas nor worship the divine. But in returning to both pursuits, students will find what they seek, and they will be happy.

In the end, these strategies will unshackle today’s students from the tyranny of self-focus and open new avenues toward meaning. The alternative, which universities are haplessly pursuing today, will pull students further into a blackhole of themselves, despite all the empty promises to the contrary.