People Get More Religious With Age — and What That Suggests About Meaning

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Brooks cites sociologist James Fowler's research finding that people tend to become more religious as they age, particularly in their 40s and beyond. The pattern holds, Brooks argues, because by midlife most people have accumulated enough experience to recognize that life does not yield closed-form solutions — the calculus-style certainty that younger people often expect. This leads to greater comfort with unanswerable questions and a turn toward transcendent sources of meaning. Brooks draws on the Indian concept of the four ashramas (life quarters): student, household, forest retirement (vanaprastha, beginning around 50 and involving gradual withdrawal from worldly scorekeeping), and finally sitting in the presence of the divine. He frames the period after 50 as preparation for the final quarter, one that requires deliberate practice — prayer, philosophy, community — rather than passive waiting.