How many people think life is meaningless?
Freddie Sayers at UnHerd cited an interesting OECD study of 15 year-olds across 79 countries:
UK young people placed second-to-last in the world in what they call the ‘meaning in life index’.
Looking down the ‘meaning in life’ rankings, once you get past the predominantly Catholic and Muslim-majority countries at the top of the list, you soon arrive at Switzerland and Austria. These are both European countries comparable to ours, which are only slightly more religious, and yet 71% of their 15-year-olds say they have discovered a satisfactory meaning in life, compared with just 52% of ours. It seems fair to speculate that their famously strong national, regional and local cultures play a part in giving their children a strong sense of place as they grow into adulthood.
It would be interesting to delve deeper into these results – what do people think the meaning of life is, and is that related to how they find meaning in life? There are some possibilites alluded to in the piece:
Sayers mentions the Extinction Rebellion, which is an interesting case. The adherents here think they want to solve environmental problems, yet I suspect if you showed them a quick and easy solution, they would not be very happy. They want the problem to be hard, because the struggle gives their lives meaning. This is not true for all of them, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true for many of them.
Furthermore, “the family is still the primary provider of meaning in life, and Britain has a high level of family breakdown: 28.5% of British 12-17 year olds live with only one parent, the third highest in Europe and nearly twice that of Switzerland.”
I discuss the general question of meaning, and ways to give people meaning, in Chapter 11.