A Japanese professor recently made a stunning discovery. How you handle tough times shapes how meaningful your life feels, and here I was thinking I just needed a solid playlist and strong Wi-Fi. This earth-shattering revelation required a 15-page academic paper with something called a “geographic model of meaning in life.” Professor Masahiro Morioka spent years researching what your grandmother knew instinctively. He calls life’s challenges “solicitations” that invite “phenomenological” dialogue. Normal people call this choosing how to handle problems. But normal language doesn’t pay the mortgage.
Morioka joins academia’s proud tradition of repackaging obvious truths as revolutionary discoveries. The formula is straightforward: mix common sense with a hefty dose of impressive-sounding drivel, publish papers, secure funding. Rinse, then repeat. (RELATED: Why Are People Fleeing Highly Educated States?)
Humanity’s finest minds, it seems, have finally proven that water is wet, only with calculus.
Psychology leads this intellectual fraud. “Positive psychology” researchers spent decades proving that optimistic people feel happier and — brace yourself — tend to function better socially. Millions in research grants confirmed what people with a functioning brain and bumper stickers already knew. “Resilience research” took it a step further, discovering that people who bounce back from adversity... tend to bounce back from adversity.
Educational psychology has turned the obvious into a cottage industry. Academics publish peer-reviewed studies confirming that students learn better when teachers explain things clearly and don’t yell at them. Additional research reveals that kids respond better to encouragement than nonstop criticism, and that engaged students tend to do better than the ones staring at the clock, counting the minutes until lunch. Each “finding” is filled with jargon-heavy abstracts and overly long methodology sections, simply stating what every non-degenerate a...