Every problem, H.L. Mencken wrote, has a solution that is simple and quick. And wrong.

Mencken was mostly right, but sometimes it seems he was more wrong than right. Known as the Sage of Baltimore, Mencken (1880-1956) was an editor at the Baltimore Sun. He wrote “The American Language,” maybe the first book to distinguish our language from the King’s English.

On Sunday, two presentations came at me, one right after the other. Driving home from church, I heard Shankar Vedantam’s “Hidden Brain” program, on NPR, about purpose. Then I read in the Sun Journal: “Why are fewer Maine students playing high school sports?”

The sports-purpose connection seemed obvious to me. Let me explain. Non-sports fans — my family abounds with them, and I long ago gave up trying to change their minds — have a hard time understanding why our culture so emphasizes sports.

That answer, to me, is simple. Young people are in the time of life when emotions are most extreme and their place in the scheme of things is least sure. “What is my purpose?” Joining sports teams can give them purpose.

Even players on bad teams — the St. Joseph’s College women’s basketball team in Standish played a team this month that scored but five points, and St. Joe’s had to hold back to score “only” 80 — show up every day for practice. They might see their purpose as fitting into the larger school culture, being part of a team no matter how bad or developing a circle of friends.

But athletics gives them purpose. After school, the vast majority find other purposes. But at that volatile time in their lives, the game gives them purpose.

A couple of distinctions. Anthony Burrow, a psychologist at Cornell University and a guest on the Hidden Brain program, cautions us to separate meaning from purpose. Meaning is looking backward while purpose is looking ahead. He also says we should separate goals from purpose. A goal can be measured when we seek meaning. (“Did we win the title?”) Purpose is intending to accomplish something still ahead of us, such as being a good father, that can’t be measured.

Looking for meaning helps us understand how our actions are or are not important. Looking for purpose helps us understand how we can fit into the world (and how we can’t).

I suspect that one reason fewer kids are playing sports in school, not to mention acting in school plays or joining the math or robotics team or the French club, is because their exercise is mostly thumbs on smartphone screens.

As Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist I read regularly and disagree with often, wrote in The New York Times, “The smartphone revolution asked people … to enter and forge a new social world.” The result: “the online world … with its pinball motion between extremes of toxic narcissism and the solidarity of the mob, its therapy-speak unmoored from real community, its conspiracism (sic) and ideological crazes, its mimetic misery and despairing catastrophism.”

Strong words, those. But if you are looking for a major cause of kids failing to find purpose, you might find it in their constantly scrolling smartphones on anti-social media. When I used to walk for exercise at the UMF Rec Center, students entered the building, backpacks heavy with books, sat on the floor to study. Not. They gazed at their screens, thumbs flying until the prof came.

A person glued to a screen cannot interact with other people, cannot pursue a purpose larger than herself, cannot engage with other real people. She can only stare and marvel at those cute kitties or cluck at Tucker Carlson’s latest inanity. Which, I read this week, is that the toxic train crash in Ohio is part of an anti-white conspiracy.

Enter a third element. The U.S. Supreme Court heard a case on Tuesday challenging the online platforms’ immunity from responsibility for what is posted on their sites. Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act exempts them from liability, unlike newspapers and over-the-air broadcasters. An American family who lost a daughter to Islamic State terrorism in Paris has sued Google for using algorithms to direct viewers to ISIS videos, thus inspiring more terrorism.

I don’t expect the court to end Section 230. Too many conservative politicians are convinced that the anti-social-media platforms are also anti-conservative. And this court, judging from the Dobbs abortion decision, seems committed to its conservative base.

In the reports I saw Tuesday, the justices didn’t even ask the right question. They asked whether the government should decide what is allowable speech. It’s not about setting up government censorship. It’s about whether posted speech should be actionable, whether people can sue over the consequences of online postings.

Now, lest I seem to be picking on young people, it isn’t only the young who flail about without purpose. Vedantam said, yes, young people are confused and uncertain, but working-age people are often bored, finding no purpose in their job, only drudgery and routine.

Note to management: Build an idiot-proof system, and only idiots will work for you. And, older people lose purpose in their isolation and loneliness.

That may help explain why I write a column, follow women’s basketball teams, try to be active in church, and regularly eat out and often with friends.

While writing this column, Bob Neal wondered repeatedly how to define his purpose. It seems always to come back around to being a good father to his adult sons and to being a good citizen. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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