#802 - Arthur Brooks - How To Stop Feeling Lost & Find Your True Purpose

Chris Williamson
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Arthur Brooks. He's a social scientist, professor at Harvard University and an author. Chasing happiness appears to be the ultimate desire for many people, and yet almost everyone struggles to understand what happiness actually is and how to achieve it.

So today I get to ask a specialist researcher on what science actually says about the best way to cultivate lasting happiness. Expect to learn what most people get wrong about happiness. The tension between a desire for success and a desire to feel like were enough. Whether your drive for happiness is rooted in insecurity, if external accolades actually make us happier, what the macronutrients of happiness are the most common life elements that people believe will make them happy but actually dont, and much more. Arthur is great.

He wrote this book with Oprah Winfrey and it is really tactical. A lot of these things kind of end up being platitudes and a bit of whimsy and some nice mantras, but this is really, really tactical and there is tons to take away from today. An awful lot, probably way more than you're going to have time to apply, even if you split it up across an entire year. So yeah, I love the fact that this is a strategic and practical approach to a problem that everybody feels deep down. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed.

And if you want to support the show, if you want to make me happy, if you like what I am doing here, the only thing I would ask of you is to press subscribe. The follow button in the middle of the page on Spotify or the plus in the top right hand corner on Apple Podcasts helps to support the show and make sure that you do not miss episodes when they go up. And yeah, it gives me a smile. So go and do it, please. I thank you.

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What do most people get wrong when they think about happiness? They think that they can be happy. And happiness is not a destination, it's a direction. One of the most important things that we've lost sight of, particularly in the current generation of young adults, is thinking that if you're unhappy for any particular reason, something's wrong, something's abnormal, and that's completely incorrect. We have negative emotions for a reason.

Arthur Brooks
They make us feel unhappy. The negative emotions are a signal that something's aversive outside of us. That's not going to change. We need sadness and anger and fear and disgust. Furthermore, we actually need negative experiences so that we can learn and grow.

Happiness is a direction, and therefore, we shouldn't be trying to attain happiness. We should be trying to attain happierness, which is obviously a neologism, but that gets the point across. That's mistake number one. What is an analogy that people can use to understand how happiness isn't a destination? We think of happiness as a thing.

Chris Williamson
We think of happiness as a feeling, a state, an affect that we arrive at.

What's another way that you can explain this disquieting of what happiness is? Happiness, as we talk about it, is really a state compared to something else. And it's a long kind of a number line. Getting happier means happier than what is what it comes down to. And it's kind of, it's a status in which we have these macronutrients more or less in equilibrium.

Arthur Brooks
You'll never be perfectly healthy, but you can be healthier. You're never going to eat a perfectly nutritious diet, but it can be more nutritious than yesterday. What's more nutritious than yesterday? Well, you have a good, for example, macronutrient balance to your diet. I'm a health and nutrition nerd, as are you.

And we know that you got to get your macros right. You have to be paying attention to your protein, carbohydrates, and fat, and have them more or less in balance and proportion and relative abundance. The same thing is true for your happiness. So I start happiness discussions by saying, there's three macronutrients for happiness, just like those three macronutrients for food that you have to get right. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

Those are the three things to pursue. And everybody can get better at those three things. That's an analogy that people can actually particularly people that would be wanting to improve themselves. That's why they're listening to modern wisdom, that they would actually help them understand the whole process. What is the truth behind people who try to be happy and make themselves less happy?

What they're trying to do is to feel good all the time. You know, back in the sixties, you don't remember this? I barely remember this. The hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. I remember my dad hearing that and saying, that's the end of America.

He was kind of right. The problem is that people still think that feeling good is, is the happiness state, and they're trying to feel good all the time, as opposed to having a tangible set of goals. Like, I am going to enjoy my life in a better way that's more stable. And it's not just looking for pleasure. I am going to try to achieve things in my life with goals and direction that gives me adequate access to satisfaction, and I am going to do what it takes to find the meaning of my life, even if it hurts.

Those are strategies that actually lead us to live a much better life with actually a lot more happiness. Happiness, right. So what is the relationship between feelings and happiness, then? Because presumably this conglomeration of different contributing macronutrients arrives us at a state of some kind. There is an outcome of some kind.

Chris Williamson
If that isn't happiness, what is it? So feelings are evidence of happiness. Like the smell of your dinner is evidence of dinner. What happens is, if you're achieving these states, adequate states of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning, you will get a better mood balance, such that you're enjoying more joy and interest and a positive surprise. And you're suffering less from avoidable levels of disgust and sadness and anger and fear.

Arthur Brooks
And that mood balance will be evidence that you're actually on the right track with the macronutrients that you're getting. In the same way, by the way, Chris, that you'll have a lot more energy if your macronutrients in your diet are actually on point. Right. So in this way, is it advisable for people to sort of turn the bar stool upside down and think, rather, I'm not happy? That is a problem to my current state is not one I would describe as happiness.

Chris Williamson
That's an indicator that one of the three macronutrients is missing from my life diet. That's right. And every single person I've ever met in my whole life, and perhaps besides the Dalai Lama, has issues in their macronutrient profile that can lead to progress. This is really good news, by the way. One of the most deleterious things that we say to young adults today and our kids is you're perfect just the way you are.

Arthur Brooks
What could be more depressing than that? It's like I feel garbage, and you're telling me I'm perfect just the way I am. That means I can't make progress. The truth is, everybody can make progress, because I've never met a single human being that is perfect in enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. And I have a whole set of protocols that will help people understand where they can make progress and where they need to make progress.

Chris Williamson
What is the current state of modern happiness? What does the research tell us? Because we're hearing stories, feelings of listlessness and hopelessness and disconnection and all the rest of it. What is the weather report for 2024? Happiness.

Arthur Brooks
So, like they always say in the advertisements, your results may vary because you can be doing a lot right when society isn't. Unfortunately, society, as we understand it, particularly in the OECD countries, in the western industrialized countries, happiness is going in the wrong direction, and we actually understand why. But here are the basic data. Most of the western countries, the industrialized nations, have been ticking about a half point down every year in the percentage of the population that says, I am very happy about my life. So typically going back to about 1980s, 1990, in the United States, for example, about 35% of the population said, I'm very happy about my life.

About 15% said, I'm not happy about my life. And the other half was, I'm somewhat happy. That's kind of the general proportion. There's better ways to measure it with greater granularity, but that gives you an idea what's happening. You've been finding that that's ticking down such that for the first time now, not happy is higher than very happy.

And that's consistently happening now over the past few years. So that's been just this gradual decline. Now, some people are getting a lot happier, but society in general, seeing this, and this is largely being pulled down by certain demographics, you find young adults are less, way, way less happy than they used to be, especially young women. Especially young women with very progressive political views. They're really, really declining.

And there's one little subgroup which is men my age. And obviously, this has to do with macroeconomic factors, et cetera, et cetera. These are interesting questions from a kind of a policy perspective, a sociological perspective, but more importantly, from a psychological and personal strategy perspective, such that we can. Live better lives what do you lay the decline of happiness at the feet. Of psychologically, Nate, there's kind of climate factors and weather factors, and I don't mean that literally.

That's a metaphor, too. It's kind of like you and me. Dating is a metaphor. So the climate is the climate of faith, family, friendship, and work in this country. Those are the habits of the happiest people.

There's tons of literature out there that give you 10,000 happiness habits, okay? But they're all trivial compared to the big four, which is your faith or life philosophy, the why of your existence. Metaphysically, that will make you small and the universe large. You must transcend yourself or you'll be stuck in the tedious psychodrama of Christmas. I mean, it's like, it's great for a minute, but 24 hours a day, you're going to lose your mind.

You need to zoom out, is the bottom line. And I've got a bunch of ways that you can do it. I have a folder full of ways that you can actually achieve this, which up to and including the faith of your youth, but not exclusively. Second is family life. Family life is critically important and is woefully neglected.

And it's societally increasingly neglected as well, which accounts for a lot of this decline. Friendship. Friendship is actually getting harder and harder to come by. We find that more people say, nobody knows me well. And last but not least, we have more of a dysfunctional relationship work than we've had in the past.

It's less like a vocation, it's less like a mission. Those are the climate factors. I know you're going to want to talk more about specifics in each one of those silos. Then there's the storms. The storms have been have created downdrafts of happiness from which we have not recovered.

In 2008 to 2010, it was screens, smartphones, social media, especially among young adults. This is, we understand the brain science on how this is incredibly diligent. Second, starting in about 2014, across most OECD countries, but really in the United States and the UK, was the culture war, was the incredibly polarizing ideological conflicts where malignantly narcissistic political and media leaders were conscripting child soldiers into their culture war by saying, if somebody disagrees with you politically, they're denying your right to exist and you must hate them. Unbelievably terrible for happiness. And last but not least, was the loneliness that came from the coronavirus epidemic.

For young adults that were coming of age synaptically in the plasticity of their brains, they literally didn't learn how to make friends and have proper in person love relationships, which is probably the worst thing that's happened to happiness in the last hundred years. Why hasn't happiness been so robust that it's bounced back? What has locked in these losses in the market? Well, if I could do one thing for somebody to make them happier, one thing, its eye contact and touch. Thats the one thing.

Why? Because the neurophysiology is straightforward. Youve talked about this on your show. The neuropeptide of connection is oxytocin. Its intensely pleasurable.

Again, we dont want to be reductive about the brain chemistry, but this is a really important thing for us to understand. Were a kin based species, we know ours and ours know us and we get pleasure from being close to our kin such that we are averse to walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. Okay, that that natural impulse is actually guided in no small part by this neuropeptide that functions as a hormone in the human brain called oxytocin. We don't get it when we don't have eye contact in touch. How do you not get eye contact in touch?

By conducting your friendships through an iPhone with social media. By going to school on Zoom, by never going into an office, man, I mean, it's crazy. Look, if I were in Austin, we'd be doing this in person because it would be better and it would be better because we'd have more eye contact and because we'd be getting more oxytocin. Over the course of this conversation, young people who've never gotten that have wired their brains differently, and the result is it's not clear that they're ever going to be able to recover from what we've done. I don't mean to be catastrophic about it, but im not entirely convinced that were not losing a generation to oxytocin deficit and loneliness.

Chris Williamson
This is bad news. Predictably for the Lone ranger sigma male guys out there who dont need friends and Im going to make it on my own and its too hard to get out there and im just going to retreat myself to my little digital cabin in the woods and not spend any time together. It's one of the reasons why I'm such a critic of cynicism on the Internet that things won't get better and people who say that it can are the problem.

It is. So, look, if you have managed to convince yourself that things aren't going to get better and you are robust in your thinking and it's not going to change. All right, whatever. Like, I don't want you to leave society, but so be it. But it's fucking evil for you to convince other people of the same, like, for you to somehow convince other people that, no, it's not.

There's no point in trying to get into a relationship. There's no point in trying to have friends. There's no point in trying to contribute to society. All right, well, I mean, look, all of those things will very reliably make you miserable. And you're basically saying my philosophy is the one to follow despite the fact that we know the direction it's going to take you in.

Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. No, let me, let me. Let me make sure that I'm not actually guilty of that by saying that I'm worried about losing a generation. You can rewire your brain. The question is whether or not that society is giving us adequate opportunities to do so.

And if it isn't, take those opportunities yourself. Nobody is permanently lost if they actually will, will do what actually needs to be done and adopt the attitudes that show that, for example, you're better off when you're around people. You need real friends. You'll be a lot happier. All the young men listening to modern wisdom.

If you fall in love and get married and have children, you'll be happier. You'll be a lot happier. It's not true what the red pill community is telling you, that you'll be subjugated and miserable your whole life. I got the data. Trust me on this.

This is the whole point. I'm worried about losing a generation precisely because the messages are coming out, that these things are stupid and don't make sense. That's the wrong set of messages. I want to be transgressive and countercultural. Against the technology that's saying that you don't need to be in person, and against the culture that's saying that not being around people is better than being with people.

Chris Williamson
Bravo. Okay. Faith, family, friendships, contributing in terms of work. Right. Faith.

I'm a non religious person, non believing person. Many people listening will be. If they don't have a direct route to access faith, what are some of the highest return strategies they can do? So remember, the point isn't faith per se. It's transcendence.

Arthur Brooks
You need to do something that will make you small and the universe big. That's what, that's what the science really says and, you know, and Mother Nature doesn't want you to do that. Mother Nature's like, it's all about you you are the star of your psychodrama. And why? Because you know, that that's, you know, evolutionarily, it sort of makes sense that you'd be focusing on yourself all the time.

But also, it's worth pointing out that Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature only cares that you survive and pass on your genes. And so therefore, happiness, that's. That's your problem and your business. That's the key thing for us to keep in mind.

Chris Williamson
I think that just to interject there, I think that that realization that humans are not designed to achieve happiness, that that's a state which might be, it's neither necessary nor sufficient for you to do what Mother Nature wanted you to do. It was just, it was like a byproduct of it. So realizing, you know, it's not like you're swimming upstream, but that most of the set points and motivations that your system will try and push you toward are not going to be conducive to happiness. So when the question of why is it so hard to be happy? Or why is happiness in a big dearth in the modern world?

It's like, well, it's been in a big dearth for a very long time. There is no reason for your system to try and encourage you to be happy in the first place. That's right. And to speak in terms that you've often used in your show, that is to be managed by your limbic system, as opposed to actually drawing the experiences of your life into your prefrontal cortex, the c suite of your brain, where you're making decisions. That the divine path actually comes from being fully human.

Arthur Brooks
The animal path comes from not being fully human. That leaving these sensations in the emotional centers of the limbic system of your brain, which say, do this because you feel that that's no way to live. That's a really important thing to keep in mind. Mother Nature says, you're the star of your psychodrama. You want to be happy.

You have to leave that behind. And the way to do that is to achieve transcendence from yourself. Here's a really good way to do that. You and I are. One of your neighbor out there in Austin, Texas, is Ryan Holiday, our mutual friend, Ryan Holiday.

He's great. He's the world's leading expert on the modern understanding of the stoic philosophers. He reads Seneca for fun and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And he's talking about, well, Cicero said, it's just amazing how he does that. Why?

Because he actually wants to achieve transcendence by doing the hard things that come from the denial of the visceral pleasures that are embedded in the impulses of the limbic system. That's really what stoicism is all about. That's the divine path of transcendence. Using pure philosophy, many philosophies will do that. I don't recommend Nietzsche.

That's what a lot of the modern crowd is talking about, which leads to some of the problems that we were just discussing a minute ago. There are better paths. Some people will actually get this by getting out of their head in a meditative experience, using nature. So one of the things that I recommend to a lot of young people today, a lot of young guys coming out of college will call me, say, ah, I feel lost. I thought I was going to be so clear about my life when I got out of college.

So what do I do, professor? And one of the things that I often recommend is I'm not going to tell them to go find some specific faith or sit in the mouth of the cave and talk to the guru or learn how to meditate immediately. What I say is, get up an hour and a half before dawn. That's called the Brahma Muhurta in Sanskrit. And that means in Sanskrit, the creator's time.

That is a very special time for the development of your own brain, because what you find is if you get up systematically before sunrise, you're going to be more focused, you'll learn more quickly, and your attention will be better throughout the course of the day. There's a lot of research that shows this get out of the house when it's nice and dark and cool, and walk for an hour, be ambulatory for an hour and such that you're doing it as the sun is coming up by the end of your walk and you can hear the crunch of the gravel on the trail beneath your feet. You don't have your device. You're not. I mean, I strongly recommend listening to modern wisdom.

Not then, that's not when you're listening to your podcast, you're listening to your heartbeat, you're listening to the birds, you're listening to the, the sound of the trail in your feet, et cetera, et cetera. This is a very good way to do it. There's a lot of science to back it up. This is not just romanticism. Another way to do this is to actually stand in awe of great genius.

I recommend learning about the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and listening with utter seriousness. For example, to his cantatas he's got hundreds of them. They fell off his pen. Learn about that. It's just going to blow your mind.

You'll be small, trust me. You could start a vipassana meditation practice. Why not? Or I go to mass every day. You can practice your faith.

And by the way, Chris, I understand that you don't have a faith or a sense of this. You might after 40. And being open to the impulse to actually find the divine in your life, that's a critically important way to actually practice this as well. Just the openness. I went to my first american Bible church service on Easter Sunday this year, and boy, was that.

Chris Williamson
That was an experience. There was a rock band, there was an led wall, there was pyrotechnics. I pulled up behind a, like, super fast american muscle car that had God now as the number plate. So I found that it was very enjoyable and I can totally see why people do it. So I'm absolutely open to, I'm open to the potential of that.

All right, that's faith family. Yeah. So this should be pretty obvious. Not everybody, by the way, has access to functional family relationships. I get it.

Arthur Brooks
And some people actually have to kind of assemble a family. But I'll tell you, it's a kind of a funny thing. I mean, I didn't quite understand this until later in life. And part of the reason is because I had, at best, kind of a cordial relationship with my parents. It was, there's nothing wrong.

They were good parents. But, you know, I was doing my thing. I was living in Europe through my twenties. I was, I was a professional musician. When you were, you know, throwing people out of bars, I was playing in a symphony orchestra, which is a different lifestyle.

But, you know, it bears certain similarities as well. You know, you're out late at night and you're far away from home and you're living your dream and the whole thing. And I can't. I remember thinking in my twenties, I should get to know my parents. My mother was an artist, my father was a mathematician.

They were very interesting and intellectual and cultured people. And then they died. They just died young. Now, my father was pretty close to my age now, and it was too late. And I thought, what does that mean?

Does that set me back? And it turns out that I could fix that, because now I have adult children, I'm a grandfather at this point, and I talk to all of my kids every single day. I see my grandson. I'm moving because my kids are moving and my grandchildren are living in a different place and I'm not going to commute to them is what it comes down to. You must have family relationships or manufacture family relationships in your life.

And you must not have schism for stupidities like differences of political opinion. The narcissists in politics will tell you to stop talking to people in your family because they, I don't know, voted for Trump or didn't vote for Trump or whatever. The thing is, it's so idiotic that you would sacrifice your own happiness for somebody else's political cult. It's completely nutty is the way that that works out. You need to have it, keep it or make it, and make it a part of your life that you exercise every day.

Chris Williamson
All right, friends. Friendship is, should be the easiest because we're all surrounded by people all day long, and it turns out it's the hardest for a lot of people. I'm kind of a striver whisperer in my practice. I specialize in people that really want to make a lot with their lives that are serious about the entrepreneurial venture of their own life. They're the startup entrepreneur of me, Inc.

Arthur Brooks
I really admire that, and it's something that I teach. The problem with that is it's very easy to no longer have real friends. They have deal friends, but not real friends. And real and deal are different deal. Me dealers, they're useful.

They're very useful. Right. And it's good to have people who are useful to you, and it's good to be useful to others, don't get me wrong, but you need useless friends too. People who just love you. You need useless friends.

I dont mean worthless friends. I have those too. You need people who are not useful to you and youre not useful to them. They just love you, Chris. And we have fewer and fewer of that.

Thats the reason that 60% of 60 year old men today say their best friend is their wives and 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. That's a sad story of unrequited love. For men my age, it's really important to keep this in mind. It's also because women seem to be able to hold onto that alloparenting adjacent group of close friends better than men do. I mean, this is one of the reasons why during divorces, men have a worse time of it for many reasons, but one of them being that they often subjugate their friend group for their wife's friend group.

Chris Williamson
And when the wife goes away, the friend group goes away. Yeah. Yeah. So for in traditionally organized families, in pastimes in particular, when dad left and made a living outside the home at work, he would be cheating his family by hanging out with his friends. And so he didn't.

Arthur Brooks
And the result is that he lost his friendship chops over the years and got lonelier and lonelier and lonelier. Now, you think it'd be much better now it's much worse because everybody's doing that now. Everybody. Men are doing that, women are doing that. And you find that women and men under 30 are now the loneliest cohort in our society.

And the more successful they are in their lives, the lonelier they tend to be in their lives. They're more likely to say that nobody knows me. Well, the reason is real and deal, and you got to do the work. I mean, for a lot of people, they haven't had close friendships since college or from high school. And when they're, you know, 28 years old and now 35 years old, they're 45 years old and everybody's in useful to them.

Now, to be sure, the most successful marriages are the ones that are based on deep friendship. We call it companionate love, which sounds distinctly not hot. I get it. But it's important because that's the closest friendship you're going to have. But it's not enough.

You find that the happiest people, they're very close friends with their spouse, but they have one really close friend, at least besides that introverse, usually have one really close friend besides the spouse. Extroverts have more like five. They don't have 20 because you don't have the time to maintain that. But it's really important. How often do we need to see our friends?

Chris Williamson
How do we determine whether somebody is real or deal? What's the amount of time that we need to spend with them per week, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, there's lots of rules for that. And again, this falls into the year. Results may vary category, but there's one thing that I do know.

Arthur Brooks
When somebody says, oh, yeah, no, no. I mean, I have some real friends. Let's say think about your most real friend who's not your spouse again. Okay. When's the last time you talked to them?

I don't know. Two months ago. Not a real friend. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I mean, it's like if it's your real friend, you keep up to date with your real friends.

I have two guys that I talk to every week. And one lives in San Francisco and one lives in Atlanta. I live in Boston. I see them in person. I saw one of them for breakfast yesterday in New York City.

We take opportunities with one of them. We go on vacation together with our wives. That's the effort that you make because you want to see the people you love. You want to see them in person. You make the effort, you want to talk to them, you miss them.

You actually miss them. If you don't miss the person, it doesn't kind of hurt your heart because you haven't talked to them in a while, in a week. It's not a real friend. What's the difference between real and deal? How can someone tell?

Chris Williamson
A lot of the time, we feel like real friends are also impressive. If you're on the personal growth journey, it's difficult to distinguish real and deal from real or deal. Yeah. The difference is that with a deal friend, there's something from. There's a transaction that's happening that's more important than the emotion.

Arthur Brooks
Transaction trumps emotion. There's nothing wrong with that with people in your life. By the way. It's not like you should fire all of your transactional friendships. No.

Because you don't wind up without a career. To be sure, it's very good to help each other. But if the emotion that you feel for the person is more important than the transaction you could undertake, okay, that's good. In which case you can actually have deals with your real friends. But that's the key component.

And for all of them, it's like, I care a lot more about how the person is useful to me than the person's life. That's when, you know, got you. Final one. Work. Yeah.

Work is, you know, people listening to us right now, they want an edge in their lives. And I. And I understand that in a way that they measure that edge frequently is in their. Their success. You know, I think probably I first listened to you three years ago, maybe the first time I heard your show, and I think you just passed, I don't know, 100,000 YouTube subscribers or something.

That was a long time ago because you have a lot more than that right now. And I remember you like, I can't believe it, man. And your career was kind of blowing up. I remember thinking that, because I was thinking, yeah, this young guy is doing great. It's very inspirational.

I love people who are in the hunt. I really, really love people who are in the hunt. The problem is that when it comes to work, the hunt itself doesn't give you. Doesn't give you the satisfaction that you're going to desire mother nature lies to you in many ways, and we've talked about it before. But here's one of the biggest lies that mother Nature gives you.

If you're successful in making progress in money and power and the admiration of other people, then you'll be happy. You get happiness for free. Success first, happiness second. So you don't have to worry about happiness. You just have to be successful.

Money, power, admiration, maybe a little pleasure thrown in there along the way. Those are the worldly idols, by the way, St. Thomas Aquinas, in paraphrasing Aristotle and the summa theologia written in 1265, classified those as the world's idols. He was an excellent social scientist, because it turns out that those are the intermediate goods. Nothing wrong with those things, by the way.

I'm not condemning those things. They're just incomplete for your happiness. If you have those as the goals, you're in real trouble. Okay, so what are the right goals from work? It's twofold.

Number one, earn your success. That means create value with your life and work in your life, in the lives of other people. And you have to be rewarded and acknowledged and recognized for the real value that you're creating. Ten years, nonsense. Loyalties, nonsense.

Merit, hard work and personal responsibility, and you're rewarded and recognized for it. And you believe it's that's earned success. That, by the way, that's why I'm a complete advocate for the free enterprise system. Not because it's like rah rah rah capitalism. Adam Smith no, because it makes people happy when they're succeeding in a system that rewards merit and personal responsibility.

It's not perfect, but it's the only system we got that really does that. That's number one, two. Now I'm going to sound like a commie. Service to others. Service to others.

You need to actually believe. Actually, that's not communism. That's capitalism. I take it back. Service to others is incredibly, it's, this will bring you joy to your work.

You have to know that people need you. The essence of human dignity is about being needed is like feeling it like an asset in society. The essence of despair is feeling like a liability to be managed by your family, by the welfare system, by anybody else. Which is why it's so terrible to be in poverty. Because of the way that we treat people in poverty.

We don't look at them as assets to develop, which they should be. Because human beings are human beings with equal dignity. We treat them like, you know, liabilities to manage by the, by whatever system that they're they're talking about to create value in the lives of other people, to, to, to serve others means that they need you. And that is the true secret to everything else. Now you get it like crazy because you know you don't, you don't have gunned anybody's head to listen to modern wisdom.

They're coming to you voluntarily. And that is this affirmation. They need me. They like it. It's in the comments.

Thank you. My guess is you get 20 emails a day from people who say that. That podcast really changed my thinking. They need you. Well, everybody needs that.

Every single person needs that. Whether you're picking apples or trying to running for Congress, you actually need that in your life. Those are the two service to others and earning your success. I had an essay that I wrote probably about a year ago. Now I want to read it to you about the tension between success and happiness.

Chris Williamson
One of the most common tensions I talk about at the moment is between a desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. Success is a strange thing. Presumably we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning and fulfillment. Here's the problem. We sacrifice the thing we want happiness for the thing which is supposed to get it.

Success. Failure can make you miserable, but im not sure that success will make you happy. One of the most common dynamics I see amongst high performers is parents want their child to do well. Parents encourage their child to do well by praising when they succeed and criticizing when they fail. The child learns that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding.

This lesson metastasizes through early adulthood into I am only worthy of love, acceptance, and belonging if I succeed. Now, powered by an internal feeling of insufficiency, this person is driven to achieve many things. They're prepared to outwork, out, hustle, and outsuffer everyone else because they're not just running toward a life that they want, they're running away from a life that they fear. Success and progress ameliorates the feelings of insufficiency. Therefore, success and progress becomes prioritized above everything else.

Now don't get me wrong, many high performers genuinely love the work that they do, and many are driven by a well balanced, simple desire to maximize their time on this planet rather than trying to fill a void inside of themselves. But if I was to place a bet, id guess that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency rather than a holistic desire to be better. I think people who are high achievers on average are more miserable than the average person. So what does it mean that the people we admire most are the ones with the least admirable internal states? If the pursuit of success is in an effort to make us happy and in the pursuit of success, we make ourselves miserable, why not just shortcut the entire process and just be happy?

Is that even possible? Now, external accolades count for a lot, and I don't think that recanting all worldly possessions and retreating to a cave in the woods is an optimal strategy. Some degree of external material success is important to make us feel validated and satiate our desire for status and respect. But external success will not fill an internal void. And insufficiency?

Adaptation is if your drive comes from a fear of insufficiency and you continue to disprove those fears with success in the real world. And yet the feeling of insufficiency persists, what makes you think that the answer to this problem is more success? Nice. Very astute. You're a natural social scientist.

Arthur Brooks
I admire it, and it's all true. Look, everything is like. There's a ton of science that backs all that up, but you don't need it. Everybody knows that. That.

Look, if you go for the success to get the happiness, you're going to get the success, because woe be unto you if you have the wrong dreams. Your dreams are going to come true if you work hard on them, but you're not going to get to the happiness. The right strategy is to shoot for greater happiness, and then you'll have enough success. Now, those words for a guy like you, a striver like you, they give you a little chill, don't they? Because enough success doesn't sound right.

No, no, man, I'm not doing this for enough success. I know tons of guys back in high school who have enough success. I don't want that. I want to be special, Chris. I want to be special.

How many people with a success addiction, which is the fundamental, brain delivered, underlying dopamine moderated or mediated addiction, which lies behind workaholism, by the way, how many of those people have chosen specialness over happiness? That's what you're talking about. Any loser can cultivate all these relationships and all these friendships, but not every loser can work as hard as I do and become a Navy SeAL and do 50 pull ups and have 40 million Instagram followers. I don't know. So that specialness, and by the way, Mother nature is driving you once again.

Mother Nature does not care if you're happy, but mother Nature wants you to be special so that you'll be able to survive more easily by having a higher rank in the kin group and being able to pass on your genes because you'll be the alpha. But that's not what you want. That's actually not even what you want. You're going to get enough food and you don't want 750 kids. What you want is a really, really good life and you're being driven by these ancient impulses.

That's exactly what you're saying. And you've walked into a dopaminergic, moderated, and I don't know why I actually had this thing come up on my screen right now. Fine. It's fine. It's a why we walk into a success addiction that makes your brain look more or less like a methamphetamine addicts brain.

Chris Williamson
How can people learn to unwind and detach themselves from their desire for success? You don't need to unwind your desire for success. You need to understand and manage your desire. That's what we need to do on all these things. You don't need to want different things.

Arthur Brooks
You need to manage your wants for these different things. Look, what does that. I don't drink alcohol. I don't drink alcohol. And the reason I don't drink alcohol is because there's a lot of alcoholism in my family and I drank way too much when I was your age.

I drank a lot when I was your age. And so I stopped. And I stopped a long time ago. I stopped over 20 years ago. I still want alcohol.

I'm not going to stop wanting alcohol. What I do is I manage my desire for alcohol through vis a vis my behavior. That's what we need to do. Look, of course you're ambitious. Of course you're driven for tremendous success.

That's wonderful. But it can't manage you. That drive, that ambition, that, that intense, visceral sense that you'll only be special if you have enough success. You can't let it manage you is what it comes down to. Of course you have these desires, by the way, Chris, you're going to get married at some point, and after you're married, you're going to look at a woman and she's going to be incredibly beautiful and you're going to have a sense of natural human desire for her and you're not going to act on it.

That's the same thing is true when you could work the 14th hour instead of spending the first hour with your kids, you're going to make the decision to sublimate that desire and manage it. Yeah, that's interesting. I remember David bus told me this story that a reader sent into him saying that his book had saved his marriage, because this guy had been married for a while, maybe between five and ten years, something like that, and he'd found himself being attracted to other women, and he took that attraction as some sort of sense that his existing relationship was wrong. If I was fully, totally renaissance period, besotted with my partner, I wouldn't have eyes for any other woman for the rest of time. And David explained that there is a very, very well embedded reward system that men get when they look at even a pair of rocks that slightly resemble boobs.

Chris Williamson
Like, you are driven to just, like, sexualize and look at anything, whether it's, like geological or otherwise. And he said that sort of liberated me from this sense that I can't. The desire itself is wrong and that I must tell myself a story about it. And it feels a little bit to me like this line that we have drawn between, when I get enough success, I will allow myself to be happy, or I will have justified happiness. Happiness will come as a byproduct along for the ride with success that it's kind of the same.

Look, your desire to continue to chase this thing may not really cease all that much, but your choice about whether or not you do work the 14th hour today is one of those. And it's not just about, you know, it's kind of further upstream. I'm going to guess what you need to do is go further upstream than this and think about how many hours a day do I want to work, how much work do I need to put on my plate in order for me to need to work those number of hours? Because otherwise, what you're going to end up doing is failing at things that you've intended to do. Like, if you put 14 hours of work on your plate, like, you kind of need to do it until you no longer need to do it.

And that is a more sort of life design position. That's right. The unfortunate fact is that you won't know how to do anything else once you become hopelessly addicted, because these behavioral patterns feed on themselves, notwithstanding the fact that you're getting unhappier and unhappier. And furthermore, there's one other thing that's worth pointing out. If you were an untreated alcoholic, nobody would say, like, dude, last night you put away two bottles of vodka.

Arthur Brooks
That was impressive. I admire you for that. They'd be like, get some help, man. That was pathetic. But if you work 14 hours days, they're going to be like, man, you're going to be the next Elon musk.

What do you admire about Elon Musk? He works all the time. And people will admire the fact that he says, I haven't taken a day off since 2008, or something like that. We love workaholics in our culture. We love success addicts.

We love people who are self objectifiers. But let's just think about that a little bit. I bet when you were a kid, did you have a good relationship with your dad? Yeah, not bad. And I bet that he said that you shouldn't objectify women.

You shouldn't look at them and say that they're nothing more than sex objects or that you should treat them like real people. Right. Why? Because you're a boy, and you have an impulse to not do that for all the reasons that David Bus has made very clear in your show. Okay, well, you shouldn't objectify yourself either, Chris.

And a self objectifier is somebody who looks in the mirror and says, that's a success machine. That's somebody. And these affirmations, it'd be like looking in the mirror and saying, that's somebody who can say, stay stoned all day. You wouldn't do that. That would be pathetic.

It'd be weird. And yet that's the thing that we do with the self objectification, which is downstream from success addiction, which actually is related to workaholism, which all these weird patterns of behavior that we establish often before, even before adolescence. All right, let's get into the macronutrients, the component parts of happiness. We've got three to go through. What are they?

Yeah. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And they seem self evident, but they're not. I'll give you an example. Enjoyment sounds like pleasure, but it's completely different.

For all the reasons that we kind of discussed. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. Pleasure is a set of signals in your limbic system saying that something is either really good for helping you survive to get calories, or really good for getting mates and passing on your genes. That's really the. And we become ingenious in the laboratory, creating new ways to get those sensations.

So, you know, everything from gambling to pornography to methamphetamine to fentanyl to alcohol, all these things do is they mimic different ways that in the pleistocene, before, we had substances and these behaviors that we would get pleasure from something that actually helps us survive and pass on our genes. Unfortunately, all those things that I just mentioned are addictive and bad for you because, you know, what you're doing is you're artificially stimulating something you don't need to do, and in a way that your. Your body and brain are not accustomed to. And so they're incredibly unhealthy. A lot of guys, especially your age, don't realize how dangerous pornography is for the brain, for example.

But what it is is just, it fires up that impulse to pass on your genes in an artificial way. Okay, so why do I bring that up? Because all those limbic searches for pleasure are different than enjoyment, which is fundamentally an experience in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. And you don't have to not have pleasure. By the way, I'm Catholic, I'm not a puritan.

And what you need is the source of pleasure plus people plus memory, thus delivering the experience into your prefrontal cortex, which is part of happiness. I'll give you an example. I was doing work with a big beer company, and we were talking about these ideas, and I said, look, associate your product with enjoyment, not pleasure. I said, what do you mean? Well, don't run a commercial of a dude alone in his apartment pounding a twelve pack.

Why? Because that's the pursuit of pleasure, and everybody knows it's addictive and dangerous and irresponsible and pathetic. Do the ad where the guy is having a beer with his brother or his friends. You've taken beer plus people plus memory, and that equals enjoyment, and that's part of happiness. If you're doing something that's pleasurable and it can be addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.

That's where pornography comes in. That's where gambling by yourself comes in. That's where eating a whole cake by yourself comes in. That's where using what? Drinking alone comes in.

All of these particular behaviors. And so that's an example of how the neuroscience of this can be intensely practical in helping you to lead a better life and change your habits. What else is there to say about the way to use pleasure, people, and memories? Is there something you should do to embed memories more effectively? Are there types of pleasures that seem to be better for happiness or not?

Chris Williamson
Are there types of people? Is there a way that you can reinforce this? Do I need an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, flashcard, anki deck to be able to remember all of the shit that I did? I mean, hey, man, let's make it. Let's make some money.

Arthur Brooks
So, I mean, see, you're such a natural entrepreneur. It's unbelievable. You go right to product. It's great. Yeah.

The people shouldn't be addicts. It's not going to be helpful to you if your community of people who help you enjoy things that are pleasurable are also drunks. So it's obviously the case that you want people who are trying to enjoy each other's company as opposed to simply focusing on the source of the pleasure, the chemical or behavioral source of the pleasure that's really important. And then actually, just to interject that, I wonder whether there's an analogy to be drawn between, let's say that a bunch of people in a crack den, all of whom are just smoking crack, and the only reason that they're there is to be around other people that also do crack. That's just the environment that they exist in.

Chris Williamson
I wonder whether there is kind of an equivalent, if you were to, let's say, be a professional athlete of some kind, training in a facility with a bunch of other individual athletes, but all of whom were only there because they also needed to use the facility individually, that they were there for the personal pursuit. Now, obviously the pursuit of training versus the sort of direct pleasure that you get from taking drugs. But my point being that there's a lack of interaction between each of those individuals. They're very much siloed within their own experience of whatever the pleasure might be. You were at a games place where tons of people can play Call of Duty, but none of you are playing against each other, and none of you are speaking to each other.

Right? Like, you're with people. It's doing it in community, but it's not integrating with the people. Yeah, interaction is critically important. You're not with other people.

Arthur Brooks
You're not actually with other people if you're just in a crowd. I mean, you can feel unbelievably lonely walking down the street in New York City. You're technically all walking down the street in New York City. This is with little kids. You'll see this when you have children, before they learn how to interact with each other, they do something called parallel play, where you'll bring two little kids, two little two year olds together, and they'll be playing with blocks, but not together parallel.

Like, they won't even be looking at each other. The way that that works, that doesn't stimulate oxytocin. And so if you want to get into the neurochemistry of what we're talking about here, you're not going to get the benefit of pleasure. Plus people plus memory. Unless you're doing something that really stimulates oxytocin, which means intense interaction, eye contact, and ideally, human touch as well.

Chris Williamson
Right. Okay, so this is an argument to give your friends a hug when they just win at a board game to reach up and high five. I play a lot of werewolves. Have you played werewolves? No, I haven't.

Okay, so werewolves is like a role playing card game where everybody in a circle is given a particular character. Some are good guys, some are bad guys, and you don't know who's who, and you have to bluff your way through the game and certainly. Oh, I've heard about that. Yeah. There's another game called Mafia, which is basically the same, but with different characters.

And I have observed people that have been married for 15 years with a completely straight face just lie to their partner about what their role is. No, of course not. Honey, I love you. I would like. So we've had to make a rule that, like, what happens during werewolves stays during werewolves, because the potential blast radius of sort of the loss of.

The loss of certainty, loss of trust. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of. I play with a lot of world class pro poker players too, which is just like a kind of, to be honest, an unfair fight. My point being that with that, as soon as the game's finished, everybody gets up, everybody's sort of high five.

There's been a ton of tension for a long time. Some people have been working together, some people have been working against them, but they've been working together too, and everybody's sort of high fiving and all the rest of it. And it's very enjoyable. What is there to say, just to round this out, what is there to say about memories? What can we do to maximize the yield of memories?

When it comes to enjoyment, the key. Thing is actually to do something that's not part of your ordinary routine. The more that you'll actually disequilibrate your experience around, for example, a particular occasion or in a particular place that will add to the memory such that it will be easier to recall, to put together, and to recall, and you'll be able to recreate that enjoyment again and again and again. What you want is to do something where the experience doesn't stop at the end of the action. That's what you really want.

What do you mean when I say disequilibriate? Disequilibrate what your ordinary routine is. So you'll notice that the things that you do every single day, you don't remember them the things you don't do every single day, you remember them, and that's how the recall, so you can have the duration of the experience be richer and longer to do when you're going to hang out with your friends, go someplace with your friends, as opposed to. Is this a degree of novelty? Yeah, and that's one of the reasons that I recommend that couples, for example, leave the house, that they do things together outside of the house so they're not, you know, they don't get into too much of a domestic routine, which is a very sort of uninteresting way to run your marriage, is to do the same thing over and over and over and over again.

Arthur Brooks
You're just not going to get the benefits of enjoyment in the same way. I had Susannah Halinan on the show forever, ever, ever ago. Now, remember, she had this really great book talking about how to make time move more slowly. It was so fascinating, and it seems to me, at least my current sort of conception of it, which may need to be updated now, is novelty and intensity. Those seem to be two of the things that increase the frequency of memory blocks sort of being dropped in that, you know, someone that's listening has driven to work a thousand times.

Chris Williamson
That's a thousand journeys, but it was always the same route. So you have condensed a blocks down into essentially one memory apart from that one time that there was a car crash next to me and it was different because novelty and intensity and. Yeah, I think just trying to keep that in mind, to turn left instead of turning right. When you go to the shops, to go to a different restaurant, to travel to a different hotel, to do the whatever, I think important. It is important, and there's a lot of ways that you can do that.

Arthur Brooks
My wife and I have tried to do that. We've moved 20 times in the 35 years that we've been together. It sounds like we're in the witness protection program, I realize, but part of it is just because when we decide that we want to do a new thing, we do a new thing three times in the past five years because, you know, where do we want to live? Not here. I try that, and it's not a search for novelty.

It can become a pathology, to be sure, you know, you actually can't stop any place. But the whole idea that you can live in a new way, try a new thing and not letting it turn into kind of a groove. One of the reasons that the perception of time speeding up happens as people get older is because their openness to experience starts to decline, particularly after 50. Your openness to experience increases through your teenage years into your early twenties, and it stays relatively constant until your mid fifties. And then it really takes a big dip as a.

As a matter of, this is the way that we typically measured it and what we see. Your love of new things starts to decline. You. You got to fight against that if you want. If you don't want time to go terrifyingly fast and suddenly life is over.

One of the best ways to do it is, you correctly point out, is to inject more newness of the ways that you do things in your life and to do that with your partner as well. All right. Satisfaction. Yeah, satisfaction is a weird one. So satisfaction is, we talk about it all the time, but we don't really define it.

Satisfaction is the joy that you get after struggle. And this is the weird human mystery. Only humans want pain. Only humans want to sacrifice and struggle, because then the rewards are sweeter. The more he has struggled before, the more.

And everybody kind of knows that's true. And yet we don't follow through on that very often. We're always looking for the easy way out. That's the reason that there's this kind of. This call of the wild that people have when they listen to people like David Goggins or Jocko Willink, because their whole or rich role.

These are all mutual friends of ours, obviously. And it's like the thing that's kind of calling from nature to people when they hear this and they find it so attractive. It's like, yeah, yeah, man, I need more pain. I need more pain in my life, because then my life will be sweeter. And yet they're going through life trying to find the easiest way out.

This is a real mystery, actually. It's not. You know, the divine path requires struggle, and the animal path wants convenience and ease and a complete lack of pain. It wants sort of an analgesic existence. So one of the things that we do is we try to teach our kids this.

You know, when your kids are little, you say, don't eat before dinner. All parents say this, and the kid is always like, why? And you make up a bogus excuse like, it's bad for you. You know, you're not going to get your proper nutrients. It's all nonsense.

You don't want your kid to eat before dinner because you want your kid to be suffering a little bit of hunger before dinner. So they'll enjoy their dinner and be happier. That's what you actually want. But you can't quite articulate it. And you don't want to tell the kid, it's because I want you to suffer.

You want the kid to suffer. And so that's an important thing to keep in mind, and that's a real conundrum. And the more that we can understand that, the more that we can expose ourselves to suffering for the right reasons. You really should get up before you're ready. And while it's still dark, it's best for you to do that.

You should work out in the morning. It's a good thing to do. I mean, I get it. Not everybody can do that. You should do these things that actually hurt, and your day will be better, and your life will be happier.

That's the first mystery is, you know, trying to sort that. The second mystery, however, is bigger in satisfaction, which is that Mother Nature tells us that if we get that thing, like that millionth YouTube subscriber, you're gonna love that forever. How long did you enjoy that? Like half an hour? Five minutes?

Yeah, that's pretty good. All right. Five minutes, right? But your brain told you the whole way that when you got that, it was going to be awesome. So Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction, that's wrong.

You wouldn't try and try and try and try. If you couldn't get no satisfaction, you can't keep no satisfaction. That's the real problem. And you try and you try and you try. And that's what, the reason for that is what neuroscientists call homeostasis, which, of course, you know about.

And homeostasis is the tendency of any physiological system to go back to its baseline so you're ready for the next set of circumstances. It's true for your emotions. It's awesome. It's awesome. Forget it.

I got to go back so that I'm not distracted from then so I can stay in the hunt, is what it comes down to. Otherwise, I'd starve to death after I got food. You know, be like, that was good enough, and then you die, and you don't want that. So that's the key thing. And we.

The mystery is that really smart, sophisticated people never figure that out, and they conclude that they just didn't have enough. And this gets back to your success problem. This gets back to the success conundrum. It's like, yeah, I got that thing, but I'm still not satisfied. So I guess I needed 5 million.

I guess I needed 50 million. The first thing that a billionaire concludes is that he needed another billion. Have you seen that study, when pretty much anybody is asked, what level of wealth would you be satisfied with? It doesn't matter what level of wealth you're at, it tends to be almost exactly three times your current income. It's like at about three times where I'm at now.

Chris Williamson
That's my sort of settling point. But it scales all the way up to a billion. Yeah, yeah. There are different studies that. One of the studies, I mean, some studies say it's 40%, some studies say it's 300%.

Arthur Brooks
The bottom line is more, because that's what you're brain is telling you, that the secret to satisfaction that endures is more. More what? More money? More power, more pleasure, more honor, more instagram followers, more sexual partners, more. More.

And the problem with that is that it doesn't recognize that there's a divine version of that that actually works. There's a way. I did it again. I keep getting these weird effects on my camera, that there is a way to hack this, this neurophysiological matrix, this evolutionary matrix. And the way to think about this, so that you're not subject to this, you can be free forever, by the way, is by remembering that satisfaction that endures is actually a function of all the things you have divided by the things that you want.

Haves divided by wants is the right mental model for you to pursue. And that means, of course, you have a have more strategy. Of course you do. You also need a want less strategy. You need to manage your wants just as much as you need to manage your habs.

I realize that's very buddhist, but it's actually in every spiritual and philosophical tradition. And so the way that I do that, there's a couple of ways to do that. One way to think about that is to think about the metaphor. The metaphor of success for entrepreneurs is kind of like you're an artist and you're putting brushstrokes on a canvas of your life. The right metaphor is at some point in your life at least, is actually the sculptor, where you're chipping away the jade or the marble to find the true work of art within.

And that means getting rid of the detritus, the part of the block of marble that's not the horse or the rider, so that you can find the horse and rider inside. And one way to do that, that I often do, is I used to have a bucket list. Everybody who listens to this podcast, those are bucket lists. I have a reverse bucket list now where I take my worldly cravings and desires and ambitions, which I still have. I'm turning 60 in two weeks and I still have these dumb, you know, at this craven, trivial desires.

I'm a weak, weak man, but I actually will write them down on my birthday and I will cross them out, not because I'm not going to get them, but because I want the management of those cravings and desires to be in my prefrontal cortex and not in my limbic system. Can you give us some examples of what you cross out? Yeah. So one of the things will be, for example, these worldly metrics of success in my particular industry that are trivial. So for you it would be a certain number of YouTube subscribers.

For me it would be a certain number of sales of my latest book or prestige inside the university or whatever it happens to be. And I realize, I know, I authentically know, as do you, that these things are trivial, and yet we look at them as a marker of our own specialness and our own sense of accomplishment. When I write them down, I acknowledge that I have the desire. When I cross it out, I say I have the desire, but I will not be attached to this goal. That you're physically negating the attachment from the goal.

I mean, of course, the attachment. Understanding dukkha is that concept, the first noble truth of Buddhism, that life is suffering because of dukkha, because of this sticky craving for the inadequate things. But it is not saying I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to get that. It's saying that I'm not going to be attached to that. And it's incredible.

This year on my birthday, by the way, I got a big one coming. Man with a zero. My attachment that's bothering me right now, I'm going to admit it, I have too many political opinions. I really do. They're weighing me down.

They're making it harder to have friends than they should be. So I'm going to write down my ten strongest political opinions and I'm going to cross them out. Not that I'm saying that I don't believe these things, but I'm not going to be attached to my rightness. That humility is going to set me free. And that's kind of a metaphor.

Thich nhat Hanh, the great vietnamese buddhist monk, he wrote that our greatest attachments are to our opinions. And that's triply true for me right now. So, man, I need freedom and I'm going to get it by talking about the wants, not just the hash that. Practice the exercise of writing down the things that you want and then crossing them out sounds great. Symbolically lovely, the writing, the physical writing of something lovely.

Chris Williamson
Presumably that's not just a master key, that downstream from that. And, yes, I'm still going to have it. But where are you going in your mind? Is there a practice which is more repeatable and robust, that when your desire to correct somebody about their view on abortion arises, that where are you going to there to permanently be crossing it out? What it does is it makes you remember the attachment in the moment of behavior.

Arthur Brooks
That's what that thing does. That's what the important thing is, because when it's in your prefrontal cortex, then it's not. Then it's a behavior that is manageable in the executive centers of your brain. And so what will you do instead? When somebody sits down next to me and says something that I really just.

I don't believe about abortion, and I think that. I think now I have my opportunity because my prefrontal cortex is managing. And I say, tell me why you think that. Would you please tell me why you think that? And you listen to learn.

It's an extraordinary thing. And by the way, you get smarter and you're wrong less often, and you get less embarrassed and you lose fewer friends. And when you do that, the other person that you're talking to. I just gave a long lecture on the neuroscience of the absorption of messages in political communications today. I just gave that lecture today.

And one of the things that you find is the more that you do that, the more people think that you're. That you're a very smart person who makes very good points, and that your point of view is actually quite persuasive. It's a shocker how that happens. Can you. You mentioned earlier on something I've heard you talk about before to do with the common idols that people kind of get waylaid by.

Chris Williamson
Can you just go through those? Yeah, that was. We mentioned that just a minute ago. That was the Aquinas four idols. Money, power, pleasure, fame.

Arthur Brooks
Money, power, pleasure, fame. Now, Aquinas asserted, this is in 1265. He didn't have data, but, man, he was the best. And Aquinas said that everybody falls prey to one of these things more than anything else, that this is an exhaustive list of the things we care about the most. Now, money is pretty obvious.

Money or wealth or financial resources, anything that actually allows you to buy stuff and shows that you're a very important person. These markers, these medium of exchange and store value. The second is pleasure. We've talked about power. Power is the ability to control the behavior of others.

And the last is actually a really kind of. A lot of people listening to us are like, I don't care about fame. I don't want to be Instagram famous. But that's not it. It's really the prestige and the admiration of the right people.

I mean, if you can be completely screwed up if you were on the Disney channel as a kid, and what you want is the admiration of strangers, and they're literally people's brains who are wired like that because they got famous before they were while their brain was still in formation. And they'll be like somebody who got addicted to methamphetamine as a 14 year old. They'll never be normal is what we actually know, but most aren't like that, but they still want to be considered somebody for the people whose opinions actually matter. Those are the four idols. And I play a game with my students.

What's my idol? Because once you know your idol, you can actually control your behavior and manage yourself in a much more effective way. You have to know your weakness is the way that this works out, and a lot of people actually don't. So do you want to play the game, chris? Hit me.

You want to play what's my idol? Okay. The way to play what's my idol is not for me to say which of the four really controls you is to say, which of the four do you not care about and start eliminating them, because then we're going to wind up on the one that's really harder for you. Money, power, pleasure, honor. You got to give away one.

Which one are you going to give away? Power. How come I don't notice in myself a desire to really accumulate power of any kind. Okay, so I'm going to make a prediction about you. You hate it when people have power over you.

Oh, yeah, that's it. People who hate having people having power over them are averse to having power over other people as well. You're a non hierarchical person. You're a non hierarchical guy. Right.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. The structure of the business would suggest that, as well. Yeah. Yeah. And that's almost always the case.

Arthur Brooks
Okay, good. So now we've got money, pleasure and fame, or honor or prestige, admiration. You got to give another one away, and it's harder now. What are you going to give away next? Um, money.

Money. How come? One of the. Of all of the different mental pathologies that I have, materialism, a desire for sort of flashness in terms of possessions, is just not something that I have. I have a degree of scarcity mindset, which an abundance kind of ameliorates.

Chris Williamson
But for me, it's just, it's. It's not something that I really think about very much. Did you grow up with nice things? We were like, lower working class, I think. Okay, lower middle class.

Arthur Brooks
Kind of like, I. Lower working class. Oh, lower working class. Okay. Like, my wife grew up in Barcelona, so it was, you know, sometimes you paid the light bill and some.

You didn't pay the light bill. Okay. You didn't grow up with nice things. This might be the case now when it comes to this very interesting set of sociological theories that you can never be actually comfortable more than one and a half classes above that in which you were a child. So if you were kind of lower working class, that means that the tastes above upper middle class are going to be like, that stuff is boring, man.

It's like, you want me to collect art. Why would I spend my time collecting art? I want to talk about stuff and ideas and things that actually excite me. And so that might be part of it. But also, you've had a pretty.

I mean, at age 36, you've had economic success beyond your wildest dreams, right? And you probably figured out that there's not that much stuff that you can buy that's really that fun, right?

Chris Williamson
As soon as you can fly business class and not have to think about the cost of a coffee. Most stuff downstream from that, I mean, you know, there'll be some things, once they get a family, they'll be. I think that you kind of transcend your own desires in that way. And it's more to do with providing for the kids and so on and so forth. But, yeah, you know, I'm very, very glad of that.

And I think lots of people don't realize that they're kind of blessed by having no. Or a limited materialism set point that, like, if you look at how much money you need in order to be happy with the worldly possessions that you have, with the degree of keeping up with the Joneses that you're motivated by with these shows of affection and love and gifting that you need to do to other people, or that you need from other people in order to feel loved, if you don't have that, that's basically like you needing you being a much more efficient system financially. Like, there is somebody else out there who needs ten times your salary to get the same level of satisfaction out of life. So I reframed that probably about five years ago. And just, it's one of the things that I genuinely feel blessed about, whether that's from genes or environment, I'm like, I don't need it.

Arthur Brooks
And by the way, it's great, but it's not a super virtue because we haven't gotten to your idol yet. We're getting that. Don't worry. Don't worry. And what you find is that there are certain guys who are way, I mean, they objectify themselves with their relationship to money in the same way that women often do for the same reasons evolutionarily in their physical appearance.

Why? Because this is going to predict your sort of, as a predictor of your success in mating markets despite the fact that you're not even in mating markets. So a lot of that's primordial and has to do with what the idol is for all kinds of reasons that we could talk about. Okay, now it's getting uncomfortable because there's two left and you've already, through process of elimination, told me that these are the things that you care about. Okay, so number one, let's put these in order because you got to get rid of one of these.

Pleasure and honor. You got to get one. You gotta get rid of one. Pleasure can go. You like pleasure, don't you?

But. But now I know what you really like. I found out what you really want, Chris. It's not a surprise to anybody. My desire for prestige, to be recognized and validated by the world.

Yeah, no, I know. Because you're doing this. You're doing. You're doing something. You're performing in public.

And most people who are, you're in a strong extrovert. Clearly you have openness to experience. You have an agreeable nature. You're probably not highly neurotic. You've got all the things that actually go into somebody.

Chris Williamson
I'm surprised if you do a big five on me. I come in, neuroticism is moderate. Get most of my energy from being on my own. I'm an only child. I choose to work on my own.

So that turn it on, turn it off thing is definitely there. But, yeah, I'm glad that I've managed to laugh as an extroverted, low neuroticism person. But I fear that the source code maybe slightly different. It might be. It might be.

Arthur Brooks
And you don't know until you know. And you know, there are people who present in a particular way and have a habitat that's quite different because they've been able to. They're so good at getting along in society. But what we do know now is what your weakness is going to be. So five years from now, I predict you're going to be married, and the argument you're going to be having with your wife is because you're going to be doing something that is going to bring you new heights of success, and your wife is.

And then you're going to have this argument with your wife, who's going to say, I don't want you to. I want you to be around more, Chris. And you're going to say, yeah, but you love all the great things that this lifestyle brings, and then you're mad at me for doing the things that it takes. And she said, I'll take you. I mean, I'm going to accept those things that don't have you, but I'd prefer to have you.

That's what I predict is the argument that you're going to actually have with your wife because you love success. You love success. It feels good. That's the thing that actually. And what do I mean by it feels good?

That means it gives. There's a lot of dopamine that comes from success, which gives you anticipation of reward. And when you get the success, it taps the ventral tegmental area of the crisp brain, which gives you this little burst of joy. That's what's happening when this. When these weird things, these markers of success actually happen.

And those things happen to be that centering around the admiration of other people that you got to keep your eye on, because all the mistakes you make in your life that you look back on with regret are going to be because you followed that particular idol. Meaning final horseman of the apocalypse. Yeah. So this is the most important meaning I can go because I'm very disciplined. I can go a long time without enjoyment, and I can go a long time without satisfaction.

But I can't go ten minutes without meaning and be a happy person. And this is the biggest problem that we have among young adults today. I have all kinds of tests that I give people to see whether or not they have a proper sense of meaning in their life. And I'm not judgmental about what that meaning is going to be, but I do know I can tell people when they have a crisis of meaning. And this is the biggest predictor of unhappiness for people in their twenties today.

Now, most people in their twenties are actually not in the active pursuit of meaning, whereas in about 1960, most people were in an active pursuit of meaning. That's a big set of generational differences that we have. And it's one of the big. The biggest explanations for the things that we talked about earlier, which is the degradation of general societal happiness, particularly among the young. So meaning is actually kind of a combination of three things.

It's coherence, why things happen the way they do. You have to have a theory of the case about why things happen. It doesn't mean it has to be right or it has to be mine. You have to, like, this is why things happen. Yours tends to be very scientific about why things happen.

Second, you have to have a sense of purpose. Purpose and meaning are not synonymous. Purpose is a subset of meaning. That is, direction and goals. Purpose is, I'm going in a particular direction towards specific things.

That's what it comes down to. And significance is the belief that your life matters. So it's coherence, purpose, and significance. Now, there's a test that I give my students, and by the way, that I give my children. My kids are younger than you, my kids are in, all three of my kids are in their twenties.

And all three of my kids had to answer these questions. I made them write a business plan when they were coming out of high school, which is like a business plan for the enterprise of their lives for the next five years. I'm a B school professor. I can do this. And I'm the venture capitalist, so I deserve a business plan.

And the point was, what are you going to do to find the answers to two questions? The two meaning questions, why are you alive? And for what are you willing to give your life joyfully at this hour? You need answers to those questions. You need to be alive for a reason, and you need to be willing to stop being alive for a reason.

Those are the meaning questions. So what are your answers? Why do you believe you're alive? Why are you on earth? A sperm and an egg is not the right answer, and a stork isn't either.

Chris Williamson
I think the thing that I often come back to when I ask myself this question is to understand myself and the world around me. I get so much joy. I'm at my best when I'm learning about things and engaging with ideas downstream from that. I can teach it to other people and do all of the rest of the stuff, but maybe I'm revealing my sort of only child bona fides here, but so much of it is just me understanding myself and the world around me. Like that's, it's been the single lineage trajectory throughout all of the good things that I've done.

Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, and you just told me what you want to do with this life that you have, what you enjoy the most, where you find the greatest productivity, but this is a little bit different. Why do you think that you were placed on this earth? What is the purpose for which you were placed on this earth? Now, if you're a radical materialist, you might say it's just all random, man. I wasn't all the way down.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. But my guess is you don't believe that. Why did the universe create Chris Williamson? I think to find and talk about good ideas. That seems to be the thing that comes to me.

You want to serve others. You just told me why. Why do you want to talk about things? Otherwise you wouldn't bother. We wouldn't be having.

We're having a conversation in public because we want people to listen to it. And it might just be completely venal on your and my part, because, by the way, my idols map exactly onto yours. I'm the 60 year old version of you. Sorry. I know, I know.

It's like, maybe you'll still have hair if you're lucky, but. But okay, if it's purely venal, that's just not good, and that's a bad answer to the question. But if it really is, I want to serve the world by uncovering its mysteries. And in so doing, people will be able to lead better informed, better lives. In other words, you were created to serve in a certain way, solid.

Now it gets harder. For what would you give your life joyfully in this. At this hour?

Chris Williamson
Mum, dad, and, like, perhaps a golden retriever that's younger than five years old? Would you really give your life for your mom and dad? Yeah. You would die for them despite the fact that they're significantly older? Yeah.

I mean, I would be in a lot of trouble, but it's something that I would be prepared to do. There would. Absolutely, as with almost anything I've ever had to do with them, there would be a very long, protracted negotiation, which would. All of us would be dead before that was finished. So it might be a moot question.

Arthur Brooks
It's a hard one, and it's an especially hard question for young adults who don't have children yet. It's a really hard one. Right. Where are we getting that deepest sense of meaning from? What is that we transcended ourselves with, like, exactly.

Chris Williamson
You know, from the utilitarian perspective, when you think, how much longer have mum and dad got left? And what do they really want to do? You know, look at what you can give the world. You haven't even passed on their jeans yet, like, even from their perspective, they would probably say even fuck you. Like, just don't let.

Especially because I'm an only child, like, don't let the bloodline end here. Like, God damn it. Like, at least, you know, like, come into a cup before you do this so that we can, you know, some, some lady in a turkey base to somewhere can actually keep this guy. I don't know, but, yeah, it's a, it's a difficult one. It's difficult one man, like, to think about, for sure.

It wouldn't be my country of birth and it wouldn't be my new country of adoption. It wouldn't be the faith that I don't have. It wouldn't be the sports team that I barely keep up to date with. What's your sports team, by the way? Texas Rangers.

Arthur Brooks
Really? Oh, yeah. I'm a Barca man.

Chris Williamson
Well, look, we both swapped sports. I've followed an MLB team and you've followed a, like, spanish football team. I married a Catalan. There's no other way. There's no other way to keep family harmony.

Arthur Brooks
Do you have a best friend? Yeah. Would you. Would you. Would you die for him?

Chris Williamson
I'd definitely consider it. I bet you would. He's younger than me. The utilitarian in you again. Yeah.

I can just can't get out the front of my brain. Yeah, but this is the point. This is that. This is the introspection that's required to actually find a full sense of meaning. This is worth going away for five days on a silent retreat and thinking about these questions.

Arthur Brooks
And it's funny because, you know, my adult kids have come to very different revelations about this because I push and push and push and push them. I have a. I have a son who's a sniper. I have a son who's a marine sniper. And he just got out of the Marine Corps.

And now he's, he's. He's in the reserves, but he was active duty for four years as a Marine sniper. This is a. This is a scary job, man, for me as his father. And he went in as a knucklehead, and he came out at 23, married.

He's now five months out. His wife is pregnant. And here's his answers. Because he found his answers by actually putting his life in danger and doing all these really wicked things.

I was created because God made me to serve other people. He believes that these are not the right answers. These are his answers. I would joyfully die for my faith and for my family and for my fellow marines and for the United States of America and our allies. Chris.

So this is, this is solid stuff. And he's, I'm telling you, he actually has called me. I screened his call because he called while we were talking. Sorry, sniper. Don't shoot me through the window.

It's Carlos. He's the best, and he's six foot five, and he's covered in tats, and he's happy because he has these answers to these questions, but he did the work, is really what it comes down to. And this is what I recommend to a lot of people who feel that little bit of hollowness, that slight bit of deadness within where things that I'm doing every day. It's like, I don't know. I don't want to stand in this line.

What's the meaning of me actually sitting in traffic and doing this? When you have the answers to those questions, there's a why for even the most trivial things that you're doing in your life. And that's a really, really beautiful thing. If I can do one thing for people, it's actually to encourage them to look for the answers to those questions. How can we improve our coherence?

So our coherence is why things happen the way that they do. And that theory of the case is really tricky, but it gets back to the sense of transcendence. If you pursue a strategy of transcendence, coherence comes in its wake. Even if you can't quite articulate why things happen the way they do, you have a sense of why things happen the way that they do do. If you study the stoic philosophers with the utmost seriousness, the understanding of why things happen the way they do, even if they're random and even if they're unfair, becomes acceptable to you.

And that acceptance of that is a sense of coherence on his face. Maybe you're a complete, radically physicalist atheist who denies the utter existence of free will. If you study the science with enough seriousness of that, you can make your peace with a coherence that actually comes from the randomness of the universe. My father was a PhD biostatistician. He was the smartest guy I ever met.

And he said when he was dying of cancer, when he was just a little bit older than me, and I said, it's just sucks. It's not fair. And he said, somebody's going to be on the left side of the distribution.

Chris Williamson
Spoken like a man that looked at a lot of graphs throughout his career. It's coherence, baby. But you can get coherence in a lot of different ways. You just have to do the work to figure out what you believe. Purpose.

Arthur Brooks
Purpose. To create the goals and the directionality of your life. Now, this is not a sense of attachment. A lot of people will say, well, I'm going to make my bucket list, and I'm going to earn this, and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to meet this person, and I'm going to shake hands with the president. I don't know, whatever the dumb thing is that people are really into.

That's not it. The Buddhists talk about intentionality without attachment. Now, the way to think about purpose. You speak Spanish, right, Chris? Okay.

There's a word in Spanish, it's a very evocative word, rumbo, which in English is not common. It's called rum line. R h u m. Rum line. It's a navigational term.

That's the straight line that goes from where you are to where you want to wind up. To do navigation properly, you need a rum line. Rumbo is actually used in Spanish, in the vernacular, to say, this is your directionality. This is to figure out your purpose in life. What you need to figure out is where you think it would be good to end up.

To have a straight line, to get there and then have a complete, utter lack of attachment on whether or not you're sitting on that rumb line, that turns out to be the way to understand purpose. That's intention without attachment. Of course I'm going to lay out the things that I want to do. Of course I'm going to, and I'm completely flexible. If life takes me in another direction for something that actually meets my moral, metaphysical, my love goals in a better way, that's the way to actually be thinking about purpose.

Chris Williamson
If suffering and difficulty are so important to meaning, how do you advise new parents who are successful because of the challenges in their past, but now have more resources to make life easier for their kids than their parents did when they were growing up, that by using the things that they've worked for, they may rob their children of the very challenges that would make them happy? Yeah. Guilty, by the way. Guilty. Guilty is charged.

Arthur Brooks
You know, it's a. It's a. The greatest privilege is feeling like you've had a lot of success and you earned it. That's an incredible privilege. The greatest.

I mean, the. The worst thing you can do for your children is making them wonder whether or not they earned their success. I did. I did it. Was it me or is it my dad?

You know, was somebody kicking down the door for me? Am I a baby, Nepo? I mean, what, what. That's a real problem. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're simply trying to make it so that the difficulties are cleared away.

Exactly as you say. This leads to a lot of problems that we see today. Safety ism, the fact that we're completely freaked out about a lot of difficulties that don't exist, and we're inured to the problems that really do exist. So we don't let our kids walk to the store, but we give them as unlimited access to smartphones and social media at age 13, and, like, predators and creeps and, God forbid, politicians and, you know, dickers on TikTok. Yeah.

Are climbing out of the screen and into their brains and, you know, and destroying their sense of self worth and creating social comparison, all these deleterious things. What we need to do is to set our kids up to do really hard things, and it's telling them that it's okay if they fail, because what we tell them when we're protecting them from everything is that it's not okay to fail. And we create a pathological fear of failure, which is a death fear. We're giving our kids a death fear. Death.

All death is. Is the death of who you are to you. There's an essence to you. So Aquinas would say that your soul is your Christmas, that a dog soul is this dogginess. Each one of us has an essence to us.

Now, we define that essence on the basis of who we see ourselves. And if you are never allowed to fail, you become the person who doesn't fail, and failure becomes a death fear for you. Why would you install a death fear on your kids? Well, because you want to keep them safe, and that's a terrible thing to do. So the way to get beyond that, even if you're blessed with tremendous financial resources, so they don't have to worry about making rent when they're kids, they don't have to worry about getting their caloric needs, is, you have to say, I expect you to be doing difficult things, and I don't expect you to succeed all the time.

If you're not failing enough, you're not doing it right. Okay, now you're going to say, how do I do that? Okay, here's how you do it. Do it yourself. It does not matter what you tell your kids.

All that matters is what they see. If you want your kids to grow up in the catholic faith, make sure that they see you on your knees on Sunday. That's all that matters. If you want your kids to do hard things, do hard things. If you want your kids to deal with failure, fail and have them see how you fail.

And that's why these lessons in modern wisdom are important for 60 year olds and 20 year olds and kids. Talk to me about the difference between happiness and unhappiness. Is unhappiness simply the absence of happiness? Are they different networks? Are there ways to avoid them separately?

Happiness is not the opposite of unhappiness. On the contrary. So the experience of happiness has a lot to do with positive emotion, and the experience of unhappiness has a lot to do with negative emotion. We go through life with different kinds of positive and negative moods, and they're largely produced in different, with different structures of the limbic system of the brain, because we're reacting to different outside circumstances, some of which are opportunities and some of which are threats. So it makes perfect sense that that unhappiness is not the absence of happiness.

These are different sensations. Largely, unhappiness is experienced on the right side of the brain and unhappiness on the left side of the brain. And we know this because of the musculature of the face. When people are experiencing a lot of negative emotion, the left side of the face is more active. And you can tell, you know, when somebody's about to cry, the left side of their face is more active.

It twitches a little bit. You get, when you're married, you'll see this, and you're like, uh oh, uh oh. And you get, like, a five second warning. It's just amazing if you. It's what it's like if your husband studies neuroscience.

So it's important that we understand that, because then we can manage both our happiness and our unhappiness, and we can see which is a greater, which is a greater challenge, happiness or unhappiness in our lives. For me, happiness is not the greater challenge. For me, unhappiness is a greater challenge. I have very high negative affect. I'm a normal, I'm a naturally negative affect person because I fall in this personality characteristic called the mad scientist, which is unusually high positive mood and unusually high negative mood.

That's important thing for us to understand that, that, you know, which is your challenge. And so I'm spending a lot of my effort managing my unhappiness as opposed to trying to boost my happiness. And there are lots of terrible ways to do that, like drinking alcohol, looking at pornography, gambling, workaholism. The best way to do that, by the way, is vigorous physical exercise seven days a week. And so that's what I do to start my day the first hour of the morning, not because I'm some sort of, you know, look, vanity doesn't favor me.

The reason that I do that is because I want to feel less unhappy. So there are different pathways for making people more happy versus making people less unhappy. Correct. And all of the stuff that we've gone through so far, although fantastic and maybe great for refining your happiness level, you can still be pressing the accelerator harder whilst youve still got the brake pushdown if you dont look at these things which cause unhappiness. So what are the other biggest strategies beyond high intensity training that you do seven days a week?

Chris Williamson
What are the highest return tactics that you use? Clear away the barriers to your happiness. Because one of the sources of unhappiness is not having access to the sources of happiness in your life. Thats a source of aggravation and frustration. So clear away the barriers by getting rid of your prejudices against trying to develop your faith or spiritual life.

Arthur Brooks
Clear away the barriers to the prejudices that you have and the difficulties that you have toward family life, friendship, the behavior and attitudes that you have toward work, et cetera. That's really important. Third, and probably for many people, the most important is taking seriously the mood disorders that are so common in our society today. Understanding the essence of what chronic and generalized anxiety is all about in people's lives, what clinical depression actually means and how to treat it. Because the greatest source of unhappiness and misery for a lot of people is just straight on common mood disorders.

And they can't actually even get to the better things in their lives because of these barriers that are actually coming. In terms of these sources of unhappiness. That's the big ones that I'm talking about. Generally, high levels of negative affect that do not go into mood disorder. I strongly recommend physical diet and exercise, the kinds of self care that have a lot of discomfort attached to them.

Always be thinking about the hygiene of removing barriers to your happiness and taking care of your mental health. Those are the best ways to think about it. Why do you think it is in the modern world that anxiety appears to be the most prevalent emotional state that people are in? Why has that one emotion grabbed a hold of the 21st century so much? Anxiety is unfocused.

Fear. Fear is a natural physiological phenomenon that comes from a stimulus that then lights up the amygdala in the brain, passing a signal through the hypothalamus into the pituitary glands, thus leading to the adrenal glands putting out epinephrine and later on, cortisol, stress hormones in response to some sort of a threat. That should be intense and episodic. The problem in modern life is that we don't have these intense episodic episodes of fear. On the contrary, we have minor threats that are very diffuse but chronic, and that leads to an unfocused fear, aka anxiety, which is a very slight drip of cortisol going into your brain again and again and again and again.

And how do you get it by opening up twitter? How do you get it by being on an overly long zoom call when you need to pee? How do you get it by actually being in a work relationship that's ridiculously tense? That you're not doing anything about modern life is all about not having your life threatened, but feeling constantly under a little bit of threat, which gives you unfocused fear that leads to a stress response that comes from your adrenal glands, and that gives you a tremendous amount of agony that's just spread out and constant.

Chris Williamson
One of the things that you've mentioned there, you said that you have a disposition towards negative emotional states. How much have you found in your practice and also with yourself, that people can rewrite their childhood and their past history? Because I think a lot of people feel trapped by their past and that they're stuck in their patterns and that. This all sounds well and good, Arthur, but really what you're talking about is sort of putting a little bit of icing and some sprinkles on the top of a dog shit cake. You can rewrite your past.

Arthur Brooks
You can't actually make a different past. What you can do is understand your memories in different ways. And this starts with an understanding of how memory actually works. In the brain. Memories are not extant.

They're reassembled from all different kinds of parts. That's the reason that memory is so unreliable. You can remember with incredible vividness what happened on 911. I was in New York on 911. I saw the first plane hit the first tower.

I mean, it was. I remember it vividly, but. But the data show that what I remember vividly is probably not completely accurate because I'm reassembling that memory so frequently from different. Literally. I mean, the different parts of the memory are stored in different locations in the brain, and those will get corrupted, just like files will get corrupted in a computer from time to time.

And one of the ways that they'll get corrupted is because of the biases that I have in my ordinary life. This is the reason that you and your sister. I realize you don't have a sister, but if you had a sister, you and your sister could be looking back to a Thanksgiving 15 years ago, which I realize you didn't have because you're british, but. And one of you could say, oh, that thanksgiving with Uncle Mark and Aunt Betty, it was so great. And your sister's like, wasn't that the.

Wasn't that the one where Uncle Mark got blind drunk and then beat up the neighbor and passed out in the front yard? That was terrible that year. You're both right. But you're assembling the memories from different places with biases and emphases placed in different parts of the memory with different corruptions that have happened across the decades. That's a really important thing, because you can reassemble your memories in different ways by helping people to emphasize the parts of the experiences in your past that were positive and not just negative.

Some people are retrospectively, unbelievably negative, and that has everything to do with the way that they've stored and are reassembling their memories. And you don't have to do that. You can actually choose to look back on the parts of your childhood that actually were sweet. And the more that you do that, the better you'll get at doing that, and the more that you'll naturally reassemble those memories in ways that favor you more. And you're not wrong.

You're just looking at different parts of the experience and repairing the memory assembly process. Yeah, I love that. What about the role of envy, another emotion that's very prevalent in the modern world. What is that to say about envy? It's evolved, and the reason is because we live in a hierarchical, kin based species.

Actually, we're a tropical species, evolved to live in kin groups that are hierarchical. Now, some of that we can get beyond, like, you know, we invented coats so we don't have to live in really hot places anymore. But some of it, we haven't gotten beyond. We're still kin based, and we are still very hierarchical. And the way that you.

You tend to see your likelihood of survival and gene propagation is rising in the hierarchy, and the way that you know that you're rising in the hierarchy is paying attention to people who have more than you and wanting what people have who have more than you. Aka NBC. Now, that's a big. I mean, that's a survival tendency. In the pleistocene, but it's maladapted to the modern world, and it's exacerbated by the technological innovations that we've had, such that we're aware of the hierarchy of the entire human race all the time on social media.

The biggest problem that we have is you don't feel envious of the loser down the street from you, who has a slightly different rv up on blocks in his yard compared to yours. You envy the Kardashians, which is completely absurd. You envy somebody who's got all the wealth in the world. You envy a billionaire, despite the fact that you've never met one in person. So that's the biggest problem, that we've taken an evolutionary tendency and we've blown it up with our technological means and turn it into an actual form of mental illness.

That means that we have to take it on, on his face and use our prefrontal cortex to combat these limbic tendencies that are ruining our lives. That's a lot of what I talk about. I mean, making sure that you're consciously not comparing yourself to people outside your group. If you need to get rid of the apps and stop paying attention to these rich people only because you enjoy watching the lifestyles of these rich and famous folks, that's an unhealthy thing for you to do. A lot of the things that I often talk about, to get rid of this as well, is to separate your envy from benign, from the malicious, malicious envy, is that you feel envious of people who have something that you don't feel that they've earned.

Ignore that and pay attention to where you have benign envy, where you think that they've done something that's really virtuous and turn your envy into admiration, and then you've actually made it into something that's really beneficial, that will benefit you and won't make the world worse. Yeah. It's so interesting to think about how that very adaptive impulse that we had, I need to track my place within the hierarchy. But, you know, that was 150 people, if that. It was probably actually 70 people.

Probably 30, 70, yeah. Just speaking of what we were talking about earlier on, when we were discussing the slot that your intimate partner takes up, I had Robin Dunbar. He's been on the show twice now, maybe three times. He's so fantastic. First time I ever recorded with him, it was, I think, 08:00 p.m.

Chris Williamson
on a Friday evening in the UK. 02:00 p.m. here in Austin. And he just had a big glass of wine that he slowly worked his way through as he was just unloading evolutionary psychology, social psychology insights. One of the, you know, you've got this sort of small group within maybe a slightly larger tribe, and you can track your place within that hierarchy relatively easily.

But if envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good, which is kind of an interesting insight. Not even fun. Not even fun. Not even fun to do it. You have essentially an unlimited way that an envious mind can find to subjugate you below someone else.

Well, yeah, sure, I've got more money than them, but they seem to be a little bit better educated than me or their wife, slightly hotter, or they drive a faster car or, you know, they seem to be a bit more muscular or whatever. Like, you know, there's a million different ways that you can do this with now essentially an unlimited global marketplace hierarchy within which you can compare yourself. Yeah, this is one of the reasons that men have now become orthorexic. You know, that men, men are now weirdly comparing their biceps. Men my age are paying attention to, you know, the, you know, their physical prowess by looking at, you know, these YouTube channels in ways that we wouldn't have any concept of.

Arthur Brooks
They would live happily, but instead they're like, I don't know, man, I think I need to go on TRT. Why? Because, I don't know. I mean, I'm looking at all these other guys. They look great.

You wouldn't even have a. You wouldn't be conscious of this. You'd be, you know, happily living your life in your own silo. But this exposure that we have to this massive comparison group is unbelievably unhealthy because you're always doing this hierarchically evolved thing, this tendency, this habit that we actually have, and you have to combat it on purpose. There's no way that you're just going to make it go away by changing your environment.

This brings up one key point, by the way, because of all these things that we're talking about, it's very efficient, inefficient to try to improve your life by changing the whole outside world. It's very inefficient to curate the entire outside world. It's efficient to work on it yourself by moving your experiences from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex, aka to be metacognitive. That's why. That's what I talk about all the time.

Chris Williamson
We've gone through a lot of the big sexy things. I think, from your recent thesis is there anything from your book or from your work and from this kind of domain of work in general that people you wish people paid more attention to. Is there something that is seemingly unpopular or unsexy, but has more bang for its buck that you wish you could bestow more people to remember it when you, when they read stuff that you've put out? Yeah, I mean, there's a concept that people don't pay attention to very much. Because our world is largely been organized over the past 30 years by technicians, engineers and bureaucrats.

Arthur Brooks
We've actually handed the keys in our culture over to people that say that if we can solve a series of complicated problems, we'll live in peace and happiness forever. That's a completely misguided understanding of the human experience. There's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems that engineers solve. These are problems that are ferociously hard to solve, but once you solve them, you can replicate them with effortless ease.

That's like making a toaster or a jet engine. Those are complicated problems. All the problems that we really care about in life are complex problems, which is to say that they're very easy to understand the solution and completely impossible to solve because they're dynamic in nature. Your toaster is complicated. Your cat is complicated.

Is complex. It's, you know what it wants. It's warmth and scratches and a litter box and food. But you never know what it's going to do. That's why it's interesting.

Your. Your marriage is complex, right? It's very complex. You know what it means to be happy in your marriage, but you can't get there with any amount of stuff and any amount of money and any amount of technology. A war is complex.

I win, they lose. That's the solution. How do you get there? I don't know. A football game.

Look, you like sports? I like sports. I love Barca. I love watching soccer. I love watching Spanish Premier League soccer.

You know, the best days, Barca wins. But I don't know. That's why I watch because it's a complex thing. The biggest mistake that we make is thinking. And a lot of what we've talked about in this episode comes down to this is thinking that my complex human problems are going to be solved by external, complicated solutions.

And that's what the world keeps trying to tell me. The world says, if you take this and you try that and you buy this and you adopt that, then you're finally going to be happy. And it's not true. It isn't true. Here's the thing about life.

Life comes down to the complex problems of the heart, which are all about love, and you can't solve that with a product. You can only live that in real time. You want a better life? Live it in real time. Be fully alive right now.

Suffer with it. Experience it. That's what you have to do. That's what we had to do 2 million years ago, and that's what we still have to do today. Hell, yeah.

Chris Williamson
Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen. Arthur has been really great. I adore this sort of blend that you have of eastern and western, of sort of neuroscience with the mindful. It's really, really great. I'm very, very glad that we stopped circling each other and finally managed to sit down.

I look forward to speaking to you again soon as well. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. Where do you want to send them? Arthurbrooks.com dot that gives you links.

Arthur Brooks
I write a column every week in the Atlantic on the science of happiness every Thursday morning. And it has the books and has the videos and the workshops, a lot of free stuff and surveys and clips to my favorite podcast, like modern wisdom. Well, that is the way that I wanted to hear you finish out, dude. I really appreciate you. It's been really, really great to catch up.

Thanks. Thanks for what you're doing. You've made my life better, and you're making millions of people live more mindfully and better in their lives with more love. Thank you for doing it. I appreciate you.

Chris Williamson
Thank you, man. Thanks.

Arthur Brooks
Get all this close.

#802 - Arthur Brooks - How To Stop Feeling Lost & Find Your True Purpose

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1: Introduction

2: The Macronutrients of Happiness

3: Misconceptions and Strategies

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