When the Work is the Program

Young adulthood is marked by the furious development of the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for higher order thinking and feeling—including lofty existential concepts such as personal meaning.   

For many, this sudden hunger for meaning only highlights its absence. It is not unusual for young people, especially the most sensitive and perceptive among them, to experience this existential appetite as a painful unsatisfied hunger. As lostness. As boredom. As anxiety. As loneliness or, even, depression. It’s what the French existentialists called “ennui”, and the psychologist Viktor Frankl called “man’s search for meaning.”