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What is the sound of one hand clapping?

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

You don’t have to be training to become a Buddhist monk to realize the value of hard questions without clear answers. Wrestling with a koan of your own—such as Why am I alive? or For what would I give my life?—can be a way to improve your emotional health and grow as a person. You might resist doing so because life’s fundamental riddles are uncomfortable to contemplate, and the world gives you every opportunity to avoid them. But when you enter the mysterious world of unanswerable questions, you will surely grow as a person and change for the better.

[Read: Why so many Americans are turning to Buddhism]

The questions that matter most to us are typically those least likely to have clear answers. If you ask me, “Why do you love your wife?” I will struggle to answer convincingly. I know I do, but the reasons seem impossible to articulate. Anything I say (“Because she is good to me”) will utterly miss the point and trivialize the relationship. Indeed, the fact that fairly trivial questions are easy to answer with clarity is no coincidence. (“How do I get to the supermarket?” Two right turns, then a left.) The celebrated psychotherapist Carl Jung considered this ease-of-answering test a way of understanding what matters most. “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble,” he wrote in 1931.

We might call life’s unanswerable riddles “right-brain questions.” Neuroscientists interested in the hemispheric lateralization of the brain—how each side undertakes different functions—have shown that when people use deep understanding and intuition, as opposed to analytical method, to gain insight into problems, a burst of high-frequency, or gamma-band, activity appears in the right temporal lobe, corresponding with a change of blood flow in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis of the British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, who has argued that people primarily use the right side of the brain when they ponder questions about life’s meaning.

We generally resist the work involved with this kind of right-brain insight because confronting big problems that are difficult to resolve is uncomfortable. As some research shows, knotty life questions without clear answers can evoke a dark mood without any clear biological explanation. This can be particularly difficult for adolescents, pondering for the first time big questions about fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and condemnation.

You might conclude that, for the sake of your well-being, you should steer clear of such contemplation. But you’d be mistaken, in much the same way as you’d be mistaken in avoiding exercise because working out involves bodily discomfort. To begin with, sitting with issues of life, death, and love requires us to admit the limits of our understanding—to say “I don’t know.” Researchers have demonstrated in experiments that people are highly averse to giving this response, but doing so is a sign of cognitive health. It seems reasonable to extrapolate that learning to make this admission more easily could be a good way to improve your cognitive health.

Even an “I don’t know” response can lead to a deeper, if unstated, understanding—with important benefits. In 2012, for example, two psychologists asked a sample of young adults how often they considered questions such as “Do you ever reflect on your purpose in life?” and “Do you ever think about the human spirit or what happens to life after death?” They found that the people who spent more time on these questions tended to score higher than their peers on a variety of measures defined as spiritual intelligence, critical existential thinking, sense of life’s meaning, curiosity, and well-being. That certainly sounds like cognitive health to me.

[From the June 1963 issue: “The Riddle,” by Albert Camus]

Taking the evidence all together, I’d propose a hypothesis that, as a society, we have become spiritually flabby and psychically out of shape because we haven’t been getting in the reps on challenging existential questions. As much research has documented, anxiety and depression have been exploding in the United States, especially among young adults. I believe that this is not because we’re thinking too much about the hard questions of life, but too little. As I’ve discussed previously, we pass our hours and days hypnotized by the trivia injected into our lives via our tech devices, and are less willing to delve into deeper matters. The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, I believe, at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle. Like the benefits of hard exercise, the short-term discomfort of big questions is necessary to avoid the long-term ill-health that comes from avoiding these questions.

To address this problem, I’d like to see a revolution in existential thinking, a craze for pondering life’s mysteries. Social entrepreneurs could establish reading rooms and debating clubs in every city. Philosophers could become as popular as the hottest fitness influencers. That’s my fantasy, anyway. But short of its becoming a reality, I can suggest a routine you can follow.

1. Schedule your mental workout.
If you go to the gym, you probably do so at a planned time, involving particular exercises. And there are certain things you don’t do while working out—eating pizza, taking a nap. You can use similar principles for your mental fitness. Choose a period of time each day—say, 30 minutes—that you can dedicate to weighing tough questions of real importance. First, ban all devices and allow no distractions; then figure out in advance what existential or spiritual challenges you plan to consider. You can use a paragraph or two of philosophy or scripture to focus your mind on a specific question, break it down, and improve your understanding.

In Tibetan Buddhism, this method is called analytical meditation, and similar practices exist in other traditions. As you may find in your initial weeks at the gym, the exercise is hard at first and tempting to abandon. But with discipline, the habit becomes easier, then pleasant, then indispensable. For many years, I have actually combined the two practices: Right after my morning hour in the gym, I’ll spend the next half-hour (usually 6:30–7 a.m.) in meditation. At this point, I can’t imagine starting my day any other way.

2. Go for a long walk.
For some people, a good alternative is a long walk alone, without devices, as a way to give room to your right-brain questions. Philosophers have long advocated this technique—Immanuel Kant was reputedly such a regular walker, to aid his deep thinking, that neighbors set their watches by his passing. Research has shown that walking naturally stimulates creative thinking and facilitates the ability to focus without being distracted. I like to prescribe this practice—again, ideally in the early morning—to my students, especially if they have been feeling a sense of meaninglessness.

3. Invite boredom.
One effect of our screen-centered culture is that we’re never truly bored. This might sound great, like a quality-of-life enhancement. But it isn’t. Experiencing boredom is crucial for abstract reasoning and insight, because it helps stimulate the brain’s default-mode network, the set of brain regions that becomes active when the outside world does not impinge on our mind’s attention. Neuroscientists have shown that such activity is vital for accessing high-level meaning. For this reason, building periods of boredom into our life really matters, because they no longer occur spontaneously. A good way to do this is to run errands and make short trips without taking your phone. At first, you will still feel the reflex to reach for it every few seconds. But fairly quickly, you will start to experience your default-mode network sparking up again, perhaps for the first time in a long time. In a deep cognitive sense, boredom is productive.

[Arthur C. Brooks: To get out of your head, get out of your house]

A decade ago, after a lengthy trip to India, I took a series of long walks to ponder unanswerable questions. Among other ones, I considered the question posed by the koan that opened this essay: What is the sound of one hand clapping? I aimed not to find an answer, but to gain a greater understanding of the question—which I hoped might help explain other mysteries of my life.

Over a few weeks, I came to comprehend that the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. The hand’s movement mimics clapping, but the only way to make the illusion a reality is to add a second hand. The sound of one hand clapping can be imagined, but the clap doesn’t exist until another hand is present. With that realization, I recognized the koan’s question as a way to understand the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (śūnyavāda in Sanskrit), which says that no individual thing or person has any intrinsic existence, but exists only relationally, dependent on everything else. The concept of an individual nature is, like one hand clapping, an illusion.

On further reflection, this illuminated for me another ineffable mystery, one that I mentioned earlier: why I love my wife. By myself, I am the one hand clapping, an illusion of a human. I come fully into personhood only when I am completed by the presence of my mate. She is for me the other hand, creating the sound that is our life.

A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

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