I still remember my nerve-wracking first week of internship as a budding therapist in graduate school, now almost twenty years ago.

I had spent two years learning counseling theory, and then suddenly I was sitting across from real families at a community mental health agency with real pain, trying to make sense of it all.

After one particularly confusing early session, I went back to my supervisor with a long list of questions. I’ll never forget what she said to me:

“There’s an elegant logic to every issue you’ll see.”

And…

“Every form of addiction, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, or internet, is to fill a void or numb pain.”

These ideas stayed with me for decades.

Human beings are not random. Even behaviors that look irrational on the surface often make sense once you understand the deeper system underneath them.

The Current Crisis

For years now, I’ve been asking myself:

Why does it seem like so many people, especially but not only Gen Z, are in psychological anguish right now?

Not just isolated cases. But an entire culture struggling with anxiety, emptiness, loneliness, depression, overwhelm, and disconnection.

I’ve just had a major aha reading Arthur Brooks’ The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (2026).

He found the elegant logic underlying the low-grade emptiness, anxiety, and depression all around us right now.

He calls it the Emptiness Epidemic.

The Doom Loop

Brooks argues that we are living through a meaning crisis.

And part of the mechanism driving it may be doomscrolling.

Here’s how it works:

• You feel a flicker of boredom, loneliness, uncertainty, or discomfort.
• You reach for your phone to kill the feeling.
• You get pulled into shallow content that distracts you but doesn’t actually nourish you psychologically.
• That becomes your norm. You reach for it first thing in the morning, and then roughly 200 times per day.

Source: electroiq.com

Then one day you wake up and find that life feels meaningless and empty.

What was displaced in all that time in the doom loop? Building a sense of:

• reflection
• meaning
• deep focus
• real-world connection
• community
• purpose

All of that scrolling makes life feel unreal, and it’s especially true for Gen Z and folks who grew up with this dynamic as their norm. See if any of these feel familiar…

10 Signs You May Be Living in the Doom Loop

1. Life feels fake, unreal, or strangely two-dimensional
   What we consume online can start to replace real conversations, real experiences, and genuine connection. Do you find yourself asking, “What exactly is reality?”
2. You’re successful on the outside — but feel empty on the inside
   You’re accomplishing things, but they don’t feel deeply connected to meaning or purpose.
3. You can’t answer “why”
   Not just why things happen, but why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place.
4. You feel disconnected and unsure what you’re working toward
   Many people describe feeling emotionally untethered, even while functioning well externally.
5. You’re caught in the Doom Loop
   You feel bored or uncomfortable, reach for your phone, feel briefly distracted, then blah afterward, needing more.
6. Accomplishments feel hollow faster than they used to
   You hit the goal, finish the project, get the promotion — and the satisfaction fades almost immediately.
7. You’ve stopped asking the big questions
   Technology has nearly eliminated boredom, which used to create space for reflection and meaning-making.
8. You feel anxious or depressed without fully understanding why
   Rates of anxiety and mood disorders have risen dramatically over the last two decades, especially among younger generations.
9. Your relationships feel surface-level or mostly virtual
   You may feel visible online but not deeply known in real life.
10. A quiet sense of emptiness follows you through the day
    Not a full-blown crisis. Just a lingering feeling that something essential is missing.

What Do You Think?

If there’s elegant logic underlying the emptiness epidemic and the anxiety and depression it breeds, then we can make changes to exit the doom loop.

If we can’t build a life of meaning and mattering, then we’ll continue feeling anxious, depressed, and disconnected.

I’m thinking of doing a workshop on how to exit the doom loop and build more meaning in your life. If this resonates, hit reply and let me know.