Why You Feel Stuck (And What Nobody's Telling You About It)

I've been thinking a lot lately about how many women I talk to who are doing everything right and still feel like something is off.

They're exercising, they're showing up at work, they're maintaining their relationships, managing their households, taking care of everyone around them. And underneath all of it is this quiet hum of something missing that they can't quite name.

I used to think that feeling was personal and like it meant something was wrong with me specifically. It took me a long time to realize it's one of the most universal experiences of our time, and that it has a name.

Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and one of the world's leading researchers on happiness, calls it a meaning crisis. And his research suggests it's the number one driver of depression and anxiety right now, more than circumstance, more than stress, more than the state of the world. The inability to answer, why am I here?

That hit me hard when he said it. Because I can think of a dozen women in my life who are high-functioning, accomplished, loved, and still feel a little lost.

Here's what I think is actually happening:

We were handed a very specific definition of a successful life. Hit the milestones, build the career, check the boxes, and for a long time, that felt like enough direction to keep moving. But at some point, usually somewhere in midlife, the boxes run out. The kids are older, the career is established, the relationship is settled, and suddenly there's this open space where the next instruction was supposed to be. And nobody prepared us for it.

Arthur talks about how our grandparents didn't experience this the same way. They lived in smaller communities with more face-to-face connection, more shared purpose, more of what he calls right brain living. The part of the brain that handles love, mystery, awe, the big why questions, was being fed constantly just by the texture of daily life. We've quietly replaced most of that with screens, productivity, and optimization, and we wonder why we feel empty.

The fix, according to his research, starts with sitting in questions that don't have answers. 

Why are you alive? What would you give your life for? Why do you love the people you love? 

The discomfort those questions create is a sign you're finally using the part of your brain that actually generates meaning. It continues with falling in love, not just romantically, but with ideas, with community, with work that feels like it matters. With letting yourself be moved by things. With eye contact and touch and presence and all the things that sound simple until you realize how rarely most of us actually do them.

And it includes letting suffering be a teacher instead of a problem to solve. This one is hard. We live in a culture that treats any discomfort as a malfunction, but some of the most meaningful growth I've experienced personally came from the seasons that felt like they were breaking me. My divorce, leaving television, menopause arriving with no warning or roadmap. None of those were things I would have chosen, but all of them changed me in ways I'm still grateful for.

If you're in one of those seasons right now, the in-between time, the "now what" time, I want you to know that what you're feeling isn't failure. Arthur calls it liminal space. The “molting-lobster phase,” when you're soft and precarious and it feels like everything is uncertain. That's the middle of something, and it matters.

I talked with Arthur Brooks about all of this, and a lot more, in a recent episode of The Tamsen Show. We got into the six pillars of a meaningful life, why modern life is quietly starving the part of your brain that needs it most, what the science actually says about love and connection and calling, and what it looks like to build a life that feels like yours on purpose.

If any of this resonates, I think the conversation will too.

Watch How to Find the Meaning of Your Life (From Harvard's #1 Happiness Expert) here.