More and more people feel lonely and depressed - and that's in a time of ever greater (technology fueled) 'connection'.

65% of University students in the US say that they're so anxious that they have trouble functioning. A high percentage suffer from anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. And it's not just students.

Varun Soni is the Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. He believes young people (and I'd say *all people*) need something sacred in their lives; something that lends a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity greater than themselves - much of what religion of old used to do...

Links

• Varun’s website
• Mindfulness, Leadership, Spirituality – Episode 96 of Finding Mastery
• How do we make meaning and beauty? with Casper ter Kuile – Episode 15 of Peripheral Thinking
• The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving, by Lisa Miller

Welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

The series of conversations with academics advisors, entrepreneurs and activists, people all championing those ideas on the margins, the periphery.

Why is this important?

Well, as the systems on which we've depended for the last 50, 60 stroke thousand years, crumble and creek people increasingly looking for new stories, new ideas, new myths, if you like, that might guide and inform how they live and work.

So in these conversations, we take time to speak to those people who are championing the ideas on the margins, championing the ideas on the periphery, those ideas which are gonna shape the mainstream tomorrow.

Uh, and our hope is that you are a little bit inspired, a little bit curious enough to take some of these ideas and bring them back to the day-to-day of your work and your life.

Well, uh, Varun, thank you for joining me on Peripheral Thinking.

Thank you for having me.

Um, now we were just sort of talking a little bit.

We can get into how I, how I came to kind of hear about you.

There was a conversation that you had on another podcast, which I'll link to in the notes and all that good stuff, which is called Finding Mastery, uh, which it was a really super inspiring conversation for me, and, um, it kind of reminded me, I was kind reminded of that conversation when I was in a, another conversation with another podcast, Guest of mine, uh, Casper, uh, ter Kuile, whose conversation people can find on here.

But um, so just before I kinda get into that, it might be kind of useful for people just to give a, a little bit of a kind of overview of what your kind of role is.

Cause I found it super interesting.

But yeah, we kind of maybe, maybe start there.

Sure.

So thank you for having me.

I'm really grateful for this conversation and for your podcast.

I am the Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California.

Historically, that job was called the University chaplain.

I'm basically the university chaplain.

That means I oversee, um, about 80 student religious groups, about 50 chaplains of every faith, uh, from a to Z, atheist to Zoroastrians, we have them all here.

And what it really means is that I get to walk alongside young people during their journey, uh, of triumph and of tragedy.

And, um, in some ways I get to see what I call the soul of the university.

And I'm lucky that I've been doing this for 15 years now.

So I've kind of, I came in with the millennials and now I'm working with post-millennials.

So because I've been doing this work for some time, I'm starting to see generational shifts as well.

Um, and fundamentally I think what my work is about is about trying to help young people find lives of meaning, purpose, uh, and significance, so they feel like they're flourishing and thriving in their life and in their work.

When I was listening to the, the conversation before and I'd actually listened back to, uh, the, the other, the other podcast, the Finding Mastery podcast, in preparation for this cause I was kind of curious about it and I was trying to remind myself what, what in that was kind of particularly resonant for me.

And, uh, one of the, one of the things I was kind of really curious about was you were talking there about your own, kind of, your own upbringing and, uh, I was kind of really interested in, you were talking about your grandfather and the influence that your grandfather had and sort of stories of Gandhi as you were kind of growing up, and the impact that that had on you.

Yeah, I, you know, listen, I, I'm an immigrant to this country.

Uh, Indians couldn't really come to the United States, uh, and naturalize until the 1965 Immigration Naturalization Act.

And so my family, I came at that time.

I'm a child of the Immigration Naturalization Act, and when we came, there weren't any Indians in the public sphere.

We had Deepak Chopra and Apu from The Simpsons, and that was it.

So thank God for Deepak.

I tell him that every time I see him.

Um, and it really meant that we struggled to find a place.

Uh, I, for me, when I was in the US I didn't feel American.

When I went to India, I didn't feel Indian.

And that sort of hyphen between Indian and American was a barrier and not a bridge.

I never felt like I belonged in any place.

And so at a young age, uh, I really struggled, as did my Pearse with this Indian American identity.

Uh, there wasn't, like I said, a template and I was fortunate that my grandparents lived with me and my grandfather's mother, my great-grandmother was very close with Castor Ba Gandhi, who's Moham Gandhi's wife.

And she was one of the leaders of the Indian Nationalist Movement, uh, and would go to jail with other women leaders.

And so my grandfather grew up around Gandhi and Naru and these inspiring figures.

And would regal me with stories about, uh, his childhood around them.

And at the time the movie Gandhi came out, and that was really powerful cuz for the first time we saw a story of us, and in my case, my own family story on a big screen being honored and celebrated by people who weren't Indian.

And it made me feel like I had a place.

It made me feel like I belonged.

And in some ways, Gandhi then subconsciously became the template for what it meant to be Indian or what it meant to be Hindu.

And so I think in some ways my life has followed a similar trajectory, even though of course I, you know, I, I, I walk in his footsteps.

I'm not, Trying to be him, but, um, you know, he does, I, I do interfaith work like he did.

I am, you know, a lawyer like he was, um, I spent a lot of time in South Africa like he did.

Um, and, uh, much of my work in terms of my own passion has been Hindu Muslim engagement and India Pakistan work.

And I think that's because that's what he did as well.

And so, Uh, I'm really lucky that I got to have that experience.

And when I went, when I was in college, I got to meet his Holiness the dma, who became my guru, and I've spent a lot of time with him.

My daughter's named after him.

And my wife grew up in South Africa and her family worked with Nelson Mandela as part of the, um, African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement.

And now we're raising our children and we want their idea of our family legacy.

To be that, that you come from a family that you know was, um, on the front lines against apartheid and colonialism.

And you come from a family that was fortunate enough to be around these transformative figures, and we want their legacy to be, to sort of channel that and to embody that.

And so, uh, as you get older, you begin to look back more and where you come from and what your family history is and what your traditions are.

And when you have children, you really have to think about that.

And so, you know, I'm really lucky that.

What was a existential quest for identity that could have broken me turned into, uh, a spiritual journey that saved me.

So Gandy, the Dalai Lama, these kind of hugely inspiring and sort of transcendent characters really.

And I guess what, what, and maybe it's a sort of stupid question, but I'm really kind of curious about it.

What is it about the, kind of the, these characters, the stories, the idea behind them, which is sort of so transcendent, which is kind of so, sort of culturally so, so broadly culturally relevant, do you think?

Well, I think we all need myths to live by, right?

And we all need heroes.

Uh, and um, historically we had rich mythologies that we didn't read as history, but we read as a text for hopes and values.

Many people think of religion as a kind of cultural mythology, so we might not read our wisdom texts as history.

We might not believe literally that the things that are being described actually happen.

But yet they're a roadmap for hope streams, values, aspirations, and what it means to be human.

And now that we don't have these mythological traditions, I think they play out in other ways.

Like, I think that's why the Marvel movie franchise is the most successful storytelling vehicle in the world today, because it's essentially a modern day version of a mythology to live by Hope Streams, values, et cetera.

And so I think these figures represent those mythological arcs that are almost like aspirational north stars.

And so when I was growing up, the reason I loved Gandhi is cuz he seemed superhuman.

Here he was this Indian man Nonviolently, who's sort of, uh, you know, spinning his own clothes, standing up against the might of the British Empire.

So this idea of like, A single figure.

Uh, standing up against the greatest empire in the world was a compelling one.

It was superhuman and it felt like it gave me agency and power also as an Indian.

But as I grew older, what I began to admire more about him was, uh, how human he was, not how superhuman he was.

Uh, he was really flawed in so many ways.

Uh, he wasn't a great.

Father, I don't think he was a great husband.

Um, he had all sorts of views that we would find reprehensible today.

Um, and when I began to realize that these people who I really admired were on my wall, who I idolized, like Martin Luther King or you know, the, um, Gandhi, were also human.

And they had their own struggles.

You know, they're no longer on a pedestal.

It's not like we can't be like them because they're human.

They're more accessible and because they're human it means we can also be great in the way they were great.

Because we were also flawed in the way that they were flawed.

And so I think over time, what I once celebrated was the superhuman, mythological aspects of these larger than life people.

But as I got to know more about myself and their stories, what I began to appreciate was their intimate vulnerabilities, their struggles, their, their, their, their failures, not their successes.

Because I think that's where we really see, uh, our own opportunity to, uh, move towards our own true north and maybe we never get there.

That's what a true north is.

You know, you don't actually ever get there, but it's, it's, it's the aspiration to get there.

And so this kind of idea of the, the kind of imperfection, the imperfections revealing the humanity, the imperfections kind of inviting us in, in a sense.

And I, is it, I guess coming sort of segueing a little bit to the kind of work that you are, that you do now than in a day-to-day sense, is there a sort of a discomfort or the unfamiliarity with our own kind of, our own weaknesses, our own kind of, uh, Is that part of where the kind of mental health kind of crisis or problems that you see coming through in the student population, is that partly where it's kind of originating from?

I, you know, this is what I see and I have a particular point of view here.

So, uh, I see, uh, these are the numbers that.

They keep me up at night, quite frankly.

Uh, 65, 35, 10.

This was, these were pre pandemic numbers.

65% of college students in the United States, young people say that they're so anxious that they have trouble functioning.

35% are wrestling with some kind of mental health can challenge, mostly depression.

And 10% have had thoughts of suicide over the last year.

You know, these numbers are about double what they were 10 years ago in terms of anxiety and self-harm.

And what I think is happening is that students have lost one protective factor and in the, have replaced it with a risk factor.

So what is the protective factor that they've lost?

Young people, they've lost religion.

Uh, when in 1950 2% of Americans were not affiliated with religion.

Today, 22% are not affiliated with religion.

But for Gen Z, my college students, it's 52%.

It's, uh, you know, we're moving to a, a predominantly non-affiliated society and the United States has traditionally been a very religious country.

And so, um, they've, they're, they're not being raised with religion.

5% of their grandparents were not affiliated.

50% of the grandchildren are not affiliated.

This is a massive story that's happened just over two generations.

And so I believe they've lost some of the protective factors that religion provides other people, uh, meaning purpose, an ethical framework, a sense of awe, transcendence, a community of compassion, a story to live by songs, to live by rituals that shape one's life.

These are things that make us human.

And, um, religion has historically provided that to most people who have ever lived.

And what have they replaced that with?

I think with social media, the a risk factor that is designed to make people feel outraged, alienated, anxious, lonely.

Uh, a platform that is constantly broadcasting.

The most terrible stories, uh, and triggering stories of the world today.

And so, uh, I really think that that is a problem in terms of what we're seeing with the mental health crisis.

Um, my friend Lisa Miller, wrote this incredible book called a The Spiritual Child, where she cites a study that says If you have an intergenerational religious or spiritual experience growing up, if you go to church or gu vara or Muji or synagogue with your, um, parents or grandparents Growing up, you were 70% less likely to experience depression as a young adult.

That was a mind blowing stat for me.

But I see it, I see that in the age of the non-affiliated, we have record high levels of depression and anxiety.

Now, does that mean that, um, religion is the only way to, uh, have a life of meaning and purpose?

No, but I think that we're at a point where we haven't replaced it with something else that might provide similar, a similar sense of meaning or purpose or identity.

And so what I encourage young people to do is find something sacred for them, something that gets them up, not just something that keeps them up.

Something that they can, uh, live for, uh, an idea, a per a, a mission that's greater than themselves.

Doesn't have to be religion.

It can be sports, it can be music.

It can be.

Other kinds of community.

It can be anything, honestly.

It can be whatever, star Wars, it can be whatever they really care about, but to honor it as something sacred in their life.

And so going back to your question, you know, comparison is the death of joy, and so because students have been raised in a social media environment, they're constantly comparing the best.

Aspects of everyone else's life to the worst aspects of their own.

They believe that the curated Instagram lives of others are an accurate reflection of other people's lives, and that makes them feel less than.

And so on my campus, I have a lot of students who feel like they're imposters and they don't belong.

They feel like everyone's got friends, everyone's.

Got the grades, everyone's got the job but me, right?

And so this idea of comparison or that, um, I am not good enough or that everyone's figured it out, but me, I think is built into a social media environment that does make people feel anxious and depressed as well.

And so, I'm lucky.

I was raised in an environment where we didn't have social media.

I didn't know every time I wasn't invited to a party.

I didn't know every vacation that my friends were taking.

And every mistake I ever made wasn't documented for everyone to see.

And so we were really lucky to be able to grow, to grow up and make mistakes, and to have some kind of a private life.

Uh, our students aren't as lucky, and I think that's why they feel so lonely.

In the age of connection, they feel disconnected because what has been sold to them as social media, as anti-social, it takes 'em away from each other.

It takes 'em away from in-person experience.

Um, our students don't date as much.

They don't hang out with each other as much because they're texting, they're talking with their thumbs and not with their tongues.

And we've never seen that happen in human history.

This is a test case of digital natives, uh, and we're not sure what the outcomes will be, but, um, right now I don't think they've been good in terms of mental or spiritual health.

So what to do?

How to deal with that?

I mean, you sort of talk about trying.

Into point students to connecting to something bigger, find something, you know, sort of celebrate in the sacredness of something.

But what, what is the process to inviting people back to, I guess I'm really kind of curious to talk about what might be the process to get people to engage more with the idea of religion?

Which I guess is so, you know, uh, it's been sort of so battered as an idea by, by kind of the cultural context, you know, how do we invite, how to invite people back into these spaces?

You know, listen, young people are distrustful of the institutions of religion because they feel like the institutions have failed, uh, in terms of matching rhetoric with action.

For them, the story of religion has been one of violence and terrorism and anti LGBT rhetoric and misogyny and casteism and the cover up of child abuse, uh, in terrorism, right?

So, of course, uh, they're gonna reject those institutions.

But what I find is that, Um, young people don't necessarily reject meaning purpose or even God.

They just reject the institutions that, um, stand for those ideas.

And they don't just reject, by the way, religious institutions, they reject financial institutions.

That's why the cryptocurrency is a trillion dollar entity cuz it's trustless.

They're, they're increasingly less trustful of educational institutions.

Of political institutions, that's why they vote independent.

So it's a general institutional distrust that we're seeing and it plays out in a particular way with religion.

But I think what's happened that's super interesting is that young people who were raised without religion, uh, got religion.

Why?

Because we all went through in a religious event, you know, the pandemic was a global experience of suffering.

It was a shared, um, sort of moment, the likes of which we haven't really had before, uh, in our lifetime.

And so what do our holy or uh, wisdom texts have in within them?

They have stories of floods and plagues and natural disasters and locusts and political unrests.

They have the stories within them, of the experiences we've had over the last two years.

What we've gone through over the last two or three years reads like a wisdom text, you know.

And every time you have a great flood or a great plague, It's humanity's time to pause and reflect and ask itself what really matters and to think about how to act and move in the world.

And so I do feel like, uh, my, our young people who might not have experienced religion growing up or might not have any interest in religion, had an experience of religion.

They ha, they lived through something that was bigger than themselves.

They saw how delicate the ecosystem was.

They realized causality that they could do things to help people that they didn't know, right?

Um, and they came out of it.

Uh, appreciating in-person, uh, experiences.

Uh, they saw the limits of, of their phones.

The reason why 40% of Americans wanna leave their job right now in the great resignation, I don't think is primarily just about, uh, money or status.

I think people for the first time had an opportunity to be at home and realize that maybe their work wasn't aligned with their values.

And maybe what we're seeing now is a spiritual moment of renewal, uh, that's coming out of the great pandemic.

And so I thought dur that the pandemic would, would in some ways break a generation that was already so lonely by taking them apart from each other when they needed to be with each other most.

But what I've seen, at least with the my college students, is a remarkable sense of resiliency and a, a renewed sense of hope and even optimism as they come back to campus and as they think about going out into the world.

And so I've been thinking about this question for a long time and the story's playing out in real time.

But I think that this idea of how to give people what religion has historically given people, I used to think about it as, let me just try to do the things that religion did, um, for our students and think about our university community as a kind of religion, you know.

We have our own myths and traditions and you know, sports histories and mythologies, and we have intergenerational wisdom.

We have all the things that a university that religion has.

So I was kind of covertly trying to build a religion around.

University identity because we're all, we all share that identity at my university.

But I think what really has done it is the pandemic, which is given, like I said, a generation raised without religion.

An experience that reads like it would in a wisdom text,

And, and to what extent do you think that the students are identifying with that, that, that experience in that way?

I don't think they're thinking, Oh, this is what religion feels like.

But I know that they're thinking there must be something more.

There is a reality greater than myself.

I should be in communities that are intimate.

I, I'm not gonna take this moment for granted.

Life is precious.

Our time here is urgent.

Uh, the people I love will die.

All those are the things that religion teaches people, the pandemic taught people that.

So I think they're getting the lessons, the experiences, the stories that are the protective factors of religion without the institution, the dogma, the doctrine, um, but that's what's really important.

They're getting the important stuff, even if they don't know it.

Mm.

Yeah, so it's the, it's the, the questions which the, the situation is kind of inviting them to ask.

Because I guess part of the thing, like if you think just about like the great resignation or the, the ideas around that, which I guess is a different version of this is true for, for students is, you know, these competing narratives, these competing interests, which, you know, in the kind of great resignation sense, people who may be, lots of people at university, they're in really a kind of training or have been in a training to get a certain type of job, which is gonna pay a certain type of money, which is gonna plug you into a certain way of living.

So kind of competing for your attention, competing for your energy to go down a certain road.

Like you say, then the pandemic comes along, people go home, they spend time with kind of family, they're kind of forced, or, you know, they're, they're kind of have the forced invitation to reflect on how they're living and what they're doing.

It then starts to kind of play out into a competition, a competition of interest, a competition of time.

Uh, and to what you are, you are kind of, sort of suggesting is that, that.

That invitation is just kind of starting to kind of push people potentially down a different road too.

I think it will, and you know, we'll, we'll have like a sliding door moment at some point where we'll look back on, well, maybe if there was no pandemic, it would've.

We would've gone this way, but there is one, so we go a different way.

And as we get further from that point, you know, we change course more and more over over time.

And so I do think that we'll see what this looks like over the next 12 years as students who were in high school and elementary school and went through the pandemic.

Slowly come through college.

But for the next 12 years, we're gonna be welcoming students to universities who were deeply shaped by the pandemic in some way or another.

And it may look different for different age groups, but for my college students right now, they're so grateful because they, this is a cohort that started at USC, had to leave for 580 days, and now are coming back to graduate, and they're so grateful for this year to be able to come back.

One of the things which was coming up as you were, you were talking, uh, it was just the kind of anxiety, of course, that lots of people felt around the kind of pandemic and whether that anxiety, that kind of bubbling anxiety is an enemy of the reflection and enemy of the kind of invitation to kind of reflect on the questions that you are sort of talking about.

You know, whether we're, if we're, the kind of lingering anxiety, whether that, just whether that kind of negatively affects people's ability to reflect on the kind of questions that you're talking about.

I think it certainly can.

I think, you know, historically we probably have a reason why we're anxious or stressed in terms of our own survival, you know?

and that probably served as a protective factor when we needed it and when we had to operate with, you know, flight, fight, or freeze.

I still think we are triggered in those ways even though the stimulus is very different.

Um, I do think that anxiety can be paralyzing for young people.

They can feel overwhelmed by it.

A lot of the anxiety comes from things that they cannot control, and that's a force multiplier for their anxiety because they can't control it.

Students have a lot of anxiety about.

Catastrophic climate change, income inequality, of course all the justice issues around race and, um, ethnicity, gender, et cetera.

So students feel as though they're going into a world where they're not gonna make as much as their parents, where they can't afford to buy a house where the economy's been disrupted, where, you know, so there's a lot of things in the world that they're constantly reminded of every morning when they doom scroll through their phones, um, that makes them feel as though this is a really terrible time to live in the world, even though I would argue it's probably the best time for them to live in human history.

Um, and so that anxiety can be crippling.

Um, we live though in the age of anxiety.

I mean, we live in the age of anxiety and outrage, and it's almost like if you're not anxious, then you don't care.

And the way that we care about these issues is through our anxiety.

My hope is that our students realize that they can't control the things, always that cause them anxiety, but they can control the things that mitigate their anxiety.

The most important things in our students' lives and anyone's lives and human in, in every human's life are things that we can actually control.

We can control our thoughts, our values, who we hang out with.

You know how many times we tell people we love them.

We can control, uh, what we read, what we eat, how we sleep, how we commune with nature.

We can control our compassion, our empathy, our gratitude.

We can control, uh, how much time we spend doing the things that.

Means something to us.

Those are ultimately the things that allow us to thrive and flourish.

Those are ultimately the things that we can control, and those are the best remedies for anxiety, to feel as though we have a sense of control over things that are most important to us.

And so what I try to do in my work with young people is to, instead of encouraging them to feel disempowered by the things they can't control in the external world, to instead focus and feel empowered on the things that they can control in their internal world.

Because those are the real things, and those are the things that cause will cause them to feel like they can go out and be the change they wanna see in the world, as Gandhi said.

Or they can go out and live a life of meaning or purpose, or that they can have experiences where they're flourishing or thriving.

At the end of the day, anxiety causes stress.

Stress causes anxiety.

Uh, inflammation.

Inflammation causes disease, like literally making us sick.

Uh, it has a physical health impact on it, not just a mental, spiritual and emotional health impact on us.

And so we gotta find another story to tell, uh, that moves past our anxiety.

The thing that was coming up as you were talking about this, this relationship with our mind essentially being, being the, the work in, in this regard.

And I was sort of thinking a lot about, if you think about things like, whether it's ecological collapse, like financial, political, social, economic, these things all feel a lot about the kind of relationship to our mind.

And as you talk about there being in this sort of, in this time of, uh, this era of era of anxiety, of course, what in many instances, and this may be not immediately so in, in the kind of student context, but as people kind of come out this, the kind of movement towards, uh, kind of consumerism to a materialism, these kind of feel like sort of responses we've been conditioned to, to help us kind of manage the fact that we don't really have a relationship with our mind.

We don't really have, you know, we haven't really got that sort of dialogue going.

I'm kind of curious what is, you know, so you've spoken a little bit about some of the questions that you might pose to students to help them kind of reflect on this.

But if, it sounds a lot that this is about a practice too, and I'm curious what sort of practices you point students to, to help them.

Kind of have a better relationship with their mind?

To have the space to be able to ask and reflect on the questions, which are more wholesome and more wholesome for them to be asking and reflecting on?

Well, I think fundamentally the, the idea that, uh, I.

I try to get across to students as they are not their thoughts and they're not their emotions.

They may be experiencing their thoughts and their emotions in any given moment, but they are not those thoughts and emotions in a day.

Those thoughts will be different, those emotions will be different.

Um, but I think in some ways English language amplifies this When you say, I am sad, or I am angry, or I am anxious, that becomes who you are.

That becomes your root identity.

And um, I want students to know that there's something beyond those things that they're feeling or thinking in any particular moment.

That they can experience them and be like, okay, this is what anger feels like or anxiety feels like, but not I am anger or I am anxiety, fundamentally.

Uh, there are practices now to help people get.

Past this idea that they're, their thoughts and emotions.

Meditation practices, communing with nature, gratitude practices, journaling.

You know, everyone has a different way to do that.

But I think the idea that you can experience something without being it, you know, um, is liberating.

And, um, even for students who are going through college, which is a transition time, uh, transition is really hard.

Change is really hard.

And yet it's who we are as humans.

We're constantly in a process of change.

And so having them, uh, embrace this opportunity for change to let go of the person they once were.

Sometimes when peop kids come to school, it's almost like a.

Cocoon moment, they, they become something else.

You know, they shed their skin.

Um, and they should feel like their whole life is a process of shedding their skin.

Um, but it's hard because we get rooted in I am this and I am gonna do this.

And I am at, I am at the university to be this.

And so in some ways, I think when people come to university, they learn, uh, by unlearning the things they've been taught.

And part of learning is a process of unlearning too.

Uh, unlearning that you are your thoughts and emotions.

Unlearning that you are only defined by your work or your job unlearning, that you are only defined by what you consume, by, et cetera.

Um, unlearning that you are powerless to your own wellbeing.

Um, and so that I think is, is part of the challenge, the deconditioning of what students have been conditioned for over the course of their life.

Mm.

Yeah.

I mean this, this kind of invitation to unlearning, uh, obviously you are, you are doing the work in a university context.

But it kind of, it feels to me that many, and if I even think about my own experience, there's many, many people who have got far, far into their kind of working or adult lives, uh, where this kind of unlearning is, is still, is not, you know, is not gonna happened, still very much.

You know, meaning being wrapped up with the role, the identity being wrapped up, you know, your own identity, one's own identity, being kind of wrapped up with the role, and that, you know, over time kind of fragmenting and kind of losing it, it's kind of resonance, but people not having the, the sort of skills, the resources, the questions, I guess to ask to, to be able to kind of reflect their way through that.

I think that's right, and I think part of it, at least for students is they always have been conditioned to have the right answers.

You know, the reason that students are at a, at any university is cuz they've always had the right answers.

They've had the right answers to every test, they've had the right answers to every question, they've had the right answers to every interview, right?

So they're so focused on getting the answer right.

But no one's ever asked them what are the right questions?

Like what are the questions that are important?

And what we find is that the questions are actually the things that endure over time where the answers change.

The questions I want our students to wrestle with are questions of who am I?

What does my life mean?

What is my role in life?

How do I find meaning and purpose?

What matters to me?

Why does it matter to me?

How do I translate my values into action?

How do I have a role in this world, not just a job?

Now those questions can remain across your life, who am I is a question that we all ask ourselves in some way every day across our life is a question that makes us human.

The answer will change.

So fact that those answers aren't constant gives them anxiety.

Where I want them to find refuges in the questions themselves.

The questions remain.

The questions are what's permanent?

Who am I?

Is a question across your life.

The answer changes every year.

It should change.

You shouldn't be the same person at 40, that you were at 20, that you were at 10.

That's not evolution, growth or transformation.

And so, um, I want students to feel comfortable with questions, not just answers.

Because when students feel like there's always a right answer to everything, it's disempowering.

If I don't go to the right school, I'm not gonna have the right life.

If I don't have the right job, I'm not gonna have the right life.

I don't buy the right stuff.

I'm not gonna have, if I don't make the right money.

When in fact the real power we have is not in getting the answer right, it's in making every answer the right answer.

I tell students it's not that you made the right decision to come to usc, that's not inherently a right or wrong decision.

You have to make it the right decision.

That's where you have power.

You could go to any university and make it the right decision.

You go to any university and make it the wrong decision.

You're the one that has the power.

You, you are the constant In any life choice that you make, you are the constant.

And so if students feel like they have no power to make decisions right then, um, it's gonna be really difficult for them to thrive and flourish.

But you and I know that no decision is inherently right unless you do the work of making it right.

You have to do the work in marriage.

You have to do the work at your job.

You have to do the work in school to make it right, and that's where we have some kind of power that's empowering.

Is the point at which you are meeting students, I guess literally kind of metaphorically, is it about a point of crisis often?

Or is, you know, how and where do they kind of, sort of come to this dialogue to come to this exploration?

Well, when I started with millennials, it was a point of inspiration.

Students came to me cuz they wanted to talk about hopes and dreams and aspirations.

And they were so optimistic and they wanted to go change the world and how do I change the world and.

How do I live?

Those were the questions that really animated the first part of my career.

How do I live?

And then we went into this dark period for a number of years where instead of asking me how do I live, students started asking me, why do I live?

Why should I live at all?

Why does it matter?

You know, there's no hope.

There's no, you know, no one cares about me.

No one I don't feel seen and heard, right?

And um, this was around the time that the millennials were leaving college and their younger brothers and sisters post-millennials, the first digital natives were coming to campus.

And um, that's when I started saying and talking about, uh, what I then called a mental health crisis, but what I now call a spiritual health crisis among young people.

And now we're in the post pandemic period, and of course it's just a small window here.

But I'm having these conversations again, like I used to be having.

How can I live?

How can I be part of the change?

These are my dreams.

How do I live my dreams?

I had a student come up, uh, come to my office last week and wanted to have a conversation about reincarnation.

I was like, thank you.

I've been waiting years to have this conversation.

I used to have reincarnation conversations all the time, and I haven't in maybe a decade.

And so.

In some ways that conversation, um, desire, uh, to talk about reincarnation was, uh, to me, uh, a significant moment in a shift in the kinds of conversations I'm having with students again.

So I am much more hopeful than I was.

Um, like I said, what surprised me is that the post pandemic might have been something that saves the generation, not breaks the generation, but we'll just see as we, uh, as we get, you know, deeper into the story.

I'm kind of curious in your work, do you have much engagement with the technology companies?

Which, cuz I sort of, what we're sort of talking about here is, is the, is the kind of impact that technology has had on how we function?

Do you have much engagement with

I do, I do.

And they tell me things, you know, um, behind the scenes that they probably wouldn't tell people, um, when the cameras are rolling.

Um, many of the people who build the platforms that our children use, uh, take what they call an Internet Sabbath.

They don't get on their own devices on the weekends.

Many of them send their own kids to schools that are device free, like Waldorf schools until eight years old.

So they won't let their own children use the platforms that they've made money on.

Um, they all know the data that we know that, um, since the release of the iPhone, we've seen, uh, an exponential rise in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation amongst young people.

And I think they're all concerned about it in their own way.

And yet, and yet, you know, I was with.

Deepak Chopra last weekend, and he was telling me that he built an AI chatbot to intervene in suicidality for young people.

And they've already had thousands of interventions.

And what he, he told me is the reason the chatbot is so successful is because young people trust the chatbot more than they trust a human, because the chatbot doesn't judge them, and the chatbot checks in on them and asks them, Hey, I haven't heard from you.

How are you doing?

How was your test?

How are you sleeping?

The bot checks in on them in a way that humans don't check in on them.

And so I think for a generation that trusts chat bots, and the, and you know, we're gonna see a lot more in the age of AI that trusts Bitcoin as opposed to banks, I think that we're coming into a generation now where the tech relationship might be more human or intimate.

And so it might not be the same as what we saw with millennials.

Maybe there's.

Some healing aspects to where we're going with AI and tech.

I mean, you know, that's a, it could be an inspiring story, it could be a terrifying story.

We just don't know right now.

But I, I do think that, um, tech is here to stay.

It's a tool.

But maybe we're gonna evolve from this point of constantly comparing our lives on Instagram to building interventions that, uh, people trust and that in some ways, It can do things that humans can't do for each other.

And, but then, you know, you're chasing your tail.

Like the, we're, we're solving the loneliness in alienation caused by tech, by creating more tech, you know?

Yeah.

Which sounds like a weird sort of, uh, weird sort of fairytale type type story.

Yeah.

Or dystopian you know, miller, we'll see her.

Yeah.

And so I'm kind of curious though then just if you think about your, the institution that you work with, presumably then the kind of, the role and function of that institution needs to change somewhat.

Because the kind of big, you know, big elite universities have, you know, in many respects been a, a kind of feeding ground for a certain type of work, certain type of employer, certain type of, kind of tract of life.

Is the role, are you feeling a kind of change in terms of what the institution understands that it is and the role that it needs to play more broadly?

I think, you know, at the end of the day, most of our institutions are degree granting, research focused, places that prepare people for professional lives and careers.

And increasingly because tuition is so high, it's gonna cost $90,000 to come to USC next year with room and board.

Because tuition is so high, students ha, are really focused on what kind of job can I get to pay down my debt?

And so universities have become more pre-professional, less focused on the liberal arts.

That being said, I think universities are also fully aware that one of their top crises, uh, is the mental health of their students right now.

Every university president will tell you that it's a top three crisis may be number one.

I think it's number one.

Um, and so, every university now is thinking about wellness.

Every university now is thinking about mindfulness.

And increasingly, I think universities are thinking about joy.

How do we come to a place of joy?

And so, uh, I don't think the or pre-professional orientation of universities will shift, but I think within that framework, they're trying to imagine something bigger than just a credential.

It's not just how do you make a living, but how do you make a life and how do you make a life is also about transformation, community building, meaning making empathy, and a North Star.

And so I, I, I do feel universities are more open to that and those kinds of, um, resources, conversations, and, and employees.

This thing around this, the point around joy, the kind of invitation to joy.

How, how do we point people to joy?

Once again, let's go back to Dip Chopra.

I was with him last week.

He says there's five crises in the world today.

The four that many people are working on and we all know about of war, sustainability, uh, justice and, uh, health, right?

Physical, mental health.

Uh, The fifth one is the one that we can all work on, and is the most important one, the least understood one, and the one that will make all the other ones possible to solve.

Uh, and that's the crisis of joy.

And so he puts that right there, that we are living through this age where we have a crisis of joy.

The Dalai Lama says, joy is the reward we get for giving joy to others.

And so what I want my students to do is think about how they can be sort of evangelists of joy, how they can try to sort of give joy to others and in a way, generate joy for themselves.

If we all do that, we can all solve the crisis together.

No one can solve the crisis of joy alone.

It has to be what Gandhi said, an inner transformation of everyone.

If everyone changes, the world changes.

And so the real work is to change yourself.

That's how you change the world.

Um, so we have to be unapologetic of over-indexing joy.

We should just fully embrace the things that bring us joy, and we should model joy for each other.

We should cultivate joy in our lives when we recount, that doesn't mean that we always live there or that we're always joyful.

That's not possible, but we should really celebrate those moments.

And create those moments to the extent that we can and realize that those moments are force multipliers across the communities and people we love.

Brilliant.

Well, that is a fantastic invitation on which to en varn this, uh, this call to joy that is, uh, a good inspiring endpoint.

Thanks so much, Ben.

I'm so grateful this conversation brought me joy,

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