How To Find Purpose In An Age Of Emptiness with Arthur Brooks #675

21:44Arthur Brooks:He's a lazy, lazy boy, right? But the truth is, and part of the reason for that is that he doesn't have a complex prefrontal cortex in this way that says moral aspiration, not just that moral aspiration. That's what's going to give you the sense of the divine. And so this gets into the metaphysics more than just the physical aspect of this, doesn't it? Yeah, big style. I mean, when I hear the argument that, you know, you could cheat and get the grades, but you wouldn't build up the macronutrient of satisfaction, right? You wouldn't build up the self-belief. I also think about, in my happiness model, alignment, right?

22:28Which is essentially, you know, when your external actions match up with your inner values. and I think even if you cheat to get those grades or you lie at work to get a promotion, right? Yeah, you got the promotion, but you sort of overplayed what you did and underplayed what your colleague did to get that promotion. You're not acting in alignment with who you are. So in those quiet moments, you can't hide from yourself. Like when you've not behaved in accordance with who you are, I think that erodes away at you internally. So I think it's satisfaction And I think there's also an alignment issue there for people.

23:04Arthur Brooks:For sure. I mean, it largely is saying the same thing. I think it winds up asymptotically becoming the same basic concept. And the metaphysics of it are really, really important. Because who cares about alignment? Well, you do. Because you want that sense of rightness. You want that sense of goodness. Why would you be imbued with a sense of goodness? Now, there are people out there, these so-called dark triad personalities. very high narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathic traits of low empathy, low remorse. That's according to Scott Barry Kaufman, like 7 % of the population, but not the rest of us.

23:38Arthur Brooks:We don't want that. And you would say that's alignment perhaps with the Godhead, perhaps, or maybe that's alignment with some sort of cosmic consciousness, which exists outside of us. But there's this idea that there's an ideal me. And I wanna be, that alignment with the ideal me is the only thing that's going to give me the satisfaction that I deeply, deeply desire. And when I find people who are low in satisfaction, I have to actually work with them on doing just that. A lot of young people today, you know, I mean, people, my friends will, people my age, I'm in my early 60s now, and people say, yeah, my son, he's 28.

24:14Arthur Brooks:You know, he lives in my basement. He's smoking weed. You know, he doesn't have any ambition. And I say, what does he need? What he needs is something hard. That's what he needs. He needs something hard to do. where he can actually start to understand, well, he's witness to the fact that he's not a loser. He's witness to the fact that he's actually somebody who can accomplish something that's worthwhile. It's so interesting that all these kind of different lenses through which we can look at happiness, because of course, I think happiness is something that we all want. Yeah. Right. I know it's maybe a bit more fashionable these days to say it's not about happiness, it's about meaning when it's interesting because your last two books, one was on happiness, This one is on meaning, but I actually very much like your model, which is meaning is one of the macronutrients of happiness.

25:01Right, right. But it's not happiness in and of itself. No, no, no, no.

25:05Arthur Brooks:Any more than protein is food. Yeah. You know, carbohydrates are food. You need a balanced diet that has the macronutrients in it. Yeah. You need all three. How would you sort of give us the top level snapshot of what you mean when you say meaning?

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28:24Arthur Brooks:Meaning is a combination of coherence, purpose why things happen the way they do purpose why i'm doing what i'm doing and significance why my life matters it's the answer to the three big why questions of life now meaning is all about why you know we spend all day long on what and how to i mean that's that's you know the age of technology is being bombarded with how to and what information we didn't even ask for yeah which has all kinds of it's breaking our brains quite frankly it's hugely deleterious and the neuroscience on And this is just completely adding up to the fact that we're doing a lot of things wrong.

28:59Arthur Brooks:This we know for sure. But the meaning per se is these why questions that we've largely neglected. More and more and more that we've neglected. And we crave a sense of coherence. Why are things happening the way that they are in our lives? Now, maybe you answer that in a religious context because of the mind of God. Maybe you and I have a science background. It's because it's the laws of nature, the laws of physics. maybe if you don't believe in science or religion that you rely on conspiracy theories you do your own research on the internet that's a cry for coherence and when people are doing that which means that my life doesn't feel like it has meaning and i'm unhappy as a result of that but but it's important that we actually have some organizing theory of why things happen the way that they do after that we have to figure out why we're doing what we're doing i mean like you and are having a conversation right now.

29:49Arthur Brooks:Why? Why? Why? I mean, it's like, and people come to really interesting hinge points in their lives where they're like, I couldn't answer that question anymore. It's like, I was doing my job, you know, I was a lawyer, went through law school, working really hard. And I got to the point where I was 40 years old and I was like, I don't know why I'm doing this anymore. They'll say, I don't know why I'm married to this woman anymore. These are purpose problems. And so when you see somebody who's like, they can't answer that why question that that that lack of purpose is a lack of meaning which leads to a lack of happiness and that's a big crisis we are made for directionality and goals and progress we're not made to arrive but we're made to make progress toward goals it's a really interesting thing on this on this that that you've seen all those i mean you've probably recommended to 10 000 people that they lose weight right i mean you and i live in the two fattest countries in the world yeah Right.

30:42Arthur Brooks:And, and so one of the interesting things is, is actually really, really easy to lose weight, but almost impossible to keep it off. Yeah. And this is a happiness principle that's actually behind this. So it's, you're willing to forego eating the things that you like because you get the reward every day at the scale. But when you hit your goal weight, your reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. So congratulations. And that's why 80 to 95 % of diets fail, which is to say you gain back all the weight within one year. Because we're not made to arrive. We're made to make progress.

31:18Arthur Brooks:And that's this whole idea of the progress principle of purpose in the meaning of life. I think about this a lot like you, Arthur. And in my own life, I've really been questioning the merit of goals over the last few months. I think different strategies are useful at different times in your life, right? So there was a time in my life where goals, I think, were very helpful for me. I'm not convinced they are anymore unless I use goals simply as a direction. Right. Because let's say, for example, your goal is... In fact, this is a great example because it actually was an example I witnessed at...

32:02there's something in the UK, well, around the world called Park Run. I'm not sure if you've familiar. Parkour? Park Run. Oh. It's a huge global movement and it's massive in the UK, but in various towns and villages, every Saturday morning, hundreds of people congregate together and they do a 5K. But it doesn't have to be a run. It could be a walk. But when I had the CEO of Park Run on many, many years ago, he said, this is basically all about community. It's a community disguised as a running event, essentially. It's not actually about the running. It's about being there with other people, doing something together.

32:40And you see this a lot with athletes. And someone I know at Parkrun literally had a goal to run a 23-minute 5K. Nothing wrong with that. But a year before that, they weren't even running 30 minutes. They weren't particularly fit or well. And then they trained really hard. And they were getting faster. And they were getting leaner. and they were feeling good in their life. You know, he was getting satisfaction because he was training, he was doing something hard. He was getting faster and stronger. And then he couldn't break 23 minutes and he was so pissed off. He was so unhappy. It's like, geez, I just can't do it.

33:18I'm like, hey, mate, listen, right? If you compare it to where you were, you are flying, right? You are one of the fastest runners here. You are faster than you were. You've got fitter. You're happier. You're more content. And so I think that sometimes is a way I think about goals. I think the problem with a goal is, or the way I see it, is the problem if I have a goal is, what happens when I reach the goal? Right. Because then the day after, suddenly that goal is redundant. Hence the Olympic athletes who struggle to get out of bed the following morning.

33:51Arthur Brooks:It's very common to have a clinical depression. So what is your take on goals? I'm not saying they're not useful. No, no, no, for sure. But for me, I think at this point in my life, goals are simply a direction. Well, you just described the arrival fallacy, which is a classic thing in behavioral science. The arrival fallacy is since I get so much satisfaction from progress, therefore, when I actually get to the fruit of my progress, when I get to the goal, then it's going to be unbelievable forever. And that's not the way that your limbic system works. The limbic system of your brain produces emotions which are reactions to current circumstances.

34:27Arthur Brooks:All the joy that you actually get from finishing that race, it's going to wear off really quickly because you've got to be ready for the next set of circumstances. Your limbic system keeps you alert and gives you appropriate emotions so that you can react correctly. It's not there to give you a nice day forever. And that's really disappointing to a lot of people. So the solution to that is to understand what the Buddhists have always called intention without attachment. That's the balance. Intentionality is going in a particular direction with goals, but without a stranglehold on actually where you're going to arrive.

35:05Arthur Brooks:So you don't suffer from the arrival fallacy. Now, for a lot of people, a lot of young people, that's really hard. But now you are at the point in your life where you actually just say, oh, that sounds right. Right? Because by the time you get to about 40, 45, 50, then you realize that your greatest disappointments in life didn't come because you didn't meet your goals, but because you did. because you met your goals and you're like, that's so disappointing. Right? And so therefore you have to stop strangling the goal per se. And so I'm going in this particular direction because it's a good thing to do.

35:35Arthur Brooks:And something is going to happen. But that's not the be all and end all of my life. A million dollars is not the be all and end all. The yellow Ferrari, no. So therefore, Arthur, you are a professor at Harvard. You teach happiness to... I'm moving to Vanderbilt, by the way. Okay, so you're moving. but you're teaching probably 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds about happiness and meaning and why these things are so important. Is it possible to really get these lessons at that age, or do you almost have to pursue your animal instincts? Do you have to pursue what society has told you is going to make you happy to realize it's a fallacy, or can you learn it before that?

36:20That's a good question.

36:21Arthur Brooks:And actually, my students at Harvard are 28 on that. We're the graduate students. They're MBA students. So they've gone through a little, they've gone through the wars a little bit, but they've got a lot coming. And so they're quite baffled about things that 20-year-olds aren't yet. I'll be teaching at Vanderbilt, younger people. I'll be teaching undergraduates, a class of about 1 ,000 undergraduates that I'll be teaching in this. And I'm interested to see exactly what the experience level is in life. The truth is I wind up telling them a lot about their futures. It's a little bit of the crystal ball.

36:50Arthur Brooks:These are things that you actually can't avoid. And a lot of it's a really happy story. So for example, one of the things I like to talk an awful lot about are that, you know, the big five personality model. You're familiar with that, right? Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are the three of the five aspects of personality. In almost all cases, people's personalities get better and they get happier, especially after about the age of 50. It's a really interesting phenomenon. And so I talk to my students about the fact that you're going to learn the hard way.

37:19Arthur Brooks:There's going to be a lot of problems. You know, you're going to have your heart broken again and again and again and again. But by the time you're my age, you're going to be happier and your personality is going to be better. Yeah. And so I'm telling them about things that they're going to experience. And then I talk to them a lot about avoidable errors that they can actually make. Because it's true. If you have more information about anything, for example, you can be a better golfer by learning about golf and then practicing and changing your habits in golf. and most importantly the last phase which is most important about learning any skill whether it's golf or happiness is you got to you have to share it with other people yeah you got to teach it one of the things we were discussing when you came to the house this morning is something i learned about you yesterday which is that you i think have moved 20 times yeah right with your lot yeah you've moved a lot i'm not in the witness protection program but okay safe house i'm glad We clarified that.

38:14Aliases. But what's fascinating to me is that that's a complete contrast to me, right? And so apart from when I was at university at Edinburgh, I have lived in the northwest of England. I live in the town where I grew up. I currently live five minutes away from the house in which I was brought up and where my mom still lives. But I actually think more and more that me having this almost container of living in this town, I actually think has been really, really good for me because in a world now of infinite choice where you can always say, well, would it be better to live there? You know, what if I moved?

38:52Oh, wouldn't it be nice to live somewhere sunny? All legitimate questions and legitimate things I've asked myself in the past. Now I'm thinking more and more, hmm, if I think about your happiness model and I think about meaning, for me, and maybe this was because my dad was sick, maybe it's partially to do with my Indian culture and my upbringing. I have always felt that looking after dad and now mum is really, really important to me. And so personally, if I wasn't able to do this, I don't think I'd be living in alignment with who I am. I think I could have more work opportunities and do all kinds of amazing things, but I think that would come at a massive internal cost.

39:36So I guess the point I'm trying to make, Arthur, it is I feel for me at least, you could call that a limitation. Oh, elderly parents, sick. Yeah, you could frame it that way. I can also frame it a different way and go, that has really helped ground me in terms of what's important for me. And I've had to make my work life work around that in inverted commas limitation. Does that make sense?

40:04Arthur Brooks:No, absolutely. And the truth is that people actually find who they are as people on the basis of things that are difficult and the things that look like setbacks. And that's exactly what we were talking about with respect to satisfaction. Satisfaction is accomplishment with struggle. Yeah. You know, and these are the kinds of struggles that ordinary lives have. And if you try to avoid those struggles, well, you're not going to get much satisfaction. Yeah. But the funny thing is in my twenties, I think, although I probably would never have admitted it to myself, but I probably at times did get frustrated.

40:34Not that I had to look after dad because I chose to do that. But I would probably see my friends go off and go to Bali for six weeks and go and do this and go and do that. And again, we all have got a different life journey, right? And that's where I think faith and spirituality comes in. It's like, I think this is my path. Someone might hear that and go, where's the proof? I'm like, I don't need proof because this is a belief system that I've chosen to adopt that makes me happy.

41:04Arthur Brooks:That's a non-testable hypothesis. You can't get any data on that. You know, that's actually what faith is all about, is the idea of living in alignment with an idea that you have with the complete absence of outside data. That's how physical culture and metaphysical culture actually can combine in a life, right? I mean, look, you're a scientist. You have a biological background. You're looking at data, data, data, data all day long. but you actually have to be transcendent to that, to have a complete life as well, to live up to values that you don't have data. I mean, look, I could give you some data that say that people who take better care of their parents are happier than people who don't, but that's not the point.

41:41Arthur Brooks:That's not what we're talking about at all, really. It's what it comes down to. And was it hard? Yes. And that was kind of the point. You showed you, you have evidence. You actually created proof to yourself that you're the kind of person who does that and you'll carry that with you for the rest of your life. And by the way, you also showed that to your kids. That's really important because, you know, you think about it, 10 years from now, you and your wife are going to have, I mean, your kids are going to probably be off the payroll. Yeah. 10 years from now, they're going to be in their 20s. And, you know, I never thought about that at all.

42:12Arthur Brooks:But now my kids are 28, 26, and 23, and they're all working. They're all doing their whole thing. I have four grandsons. I mean, they're all, they have, you know, their whole, their lives, but they want to be around us. And the reason that they want to be around us and live near us is so that we can help. And one of my kids said this, and this will probably resonate with you. He said, you know, you're kind of my safety net, but I'm sort of yours too. I love that. That's beautiful. And that was certainly true with you and your dad. Yeah. You were each other's safety net. And it's like, it's divine.

42:48Arthur Brooks:We're cosmically bound up in these relationships. And, you know, perhaps God actually put us on the planet to take care of each other in this particular way. Well, let's go back to my very opening question to you, Arthur, which is about what taught you the most about happiness, science, religion, or your wife. Perhaps you could give us one thing each of those things taught you about happiness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the relationship between religion and my marriage, for example, that I didn't understand that until relatively recently. Most religions, Hindus believe this very, very strongly, but also Christians and Jews and Muslims, that a marriage, a good marriage, a serious marriage is an antenna to God.

43:35Arthur Brooks:And one of the reasons that most people have a vocation to marriage is because you can't understand God's love for you, but for the earthly model of divine love that you actually have in your marriage. And so it's kind of like the nuclear submarine that has two keys to launch a missile, that you can't really reach God, but with your spouse. Wow. Because that's, and that's sort of, and most people get married for a particular reason. And it's very easy to reduce that to the, you know, well, because you need a sperm and an egg and the biological model of it. But there is something more. There's something more transcendent.

44:13Arthur Brooks:There is something more metaphysical about that particular model. And so the result of it is that love, divine love and earthly love, these are the vernacular of actual happiness. They are. It's really, really important that those are the fundamentals. If I could only have, if I had to get rid of all the science, I would, if I had to choose two of the three, marriage, God, science, I would get rid of science. I absolutely would. What that taught me, what the science actually taught me was why those things are so critically important and how to avoid the mistakes that people typically make and how to actually get better habits.

44:50Arthur Brooks:So it's the kind of thing where you wouldn't want to get rid of a healthy diet. You wouldn't want to get rid of fitness, but you'd also want to have some information about how these things actually work together. And that's the sort of the three legs of the stool. It's the spiritual, it's the emotional, and it's the intellectual parts of what we're trying to do in our lives. And they're reinforcing mechanisms, to be sure. What gave me the most information? Well, I have to say that the love in my life was not on point, which is why I actually needed a better intellectual framework. And it's been enormously helpful to me and productive for me to make sure that it was clear that I was doing things right in my life.

45:36What's really interesting is right at the start of this conversation, when you first brought up your marriage, you said I have a high conflict marriage.

45:43Arthur Brooks:Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's not like we're throwing dishes. No, but it's an interesting thing because there is, again, in terms of these societal belief systems, I think some people are of the belief that if I have a good relationship, that there won't be much conflict. Right, right. And that's incorrect. It is incorrect. That's absolutely incorrect. And that's empirically incorrect. And so I actually just, my lab just fielded a survey to look at the quality of relationships on two dimensions, conflict and honesty. Why? Because what you find is that most people, they put more emphasis on conflict than they do on honesty for the quality of the relationship.

46:20Arthur Brooks:But high conflict is actually not a problem if it's accompanied by high honesty is what you find. And so what you really want is low conflict and high honesty, but that's like Shangri-La. You don't find it that often, right? What some people will do to avoid high conflict is that they'll have low conflict and low honesty, and that's just cancer for a relationship. Now, the worst possible marriage is one that's high conflict and low honesty. And that's just, you know, that's just hell. That's Washington, D.C. That's not where you want to be. But it's very interesting because I looked at that. And what you find is that the most normal marriages that function and last are the ones that have, I mean, depending on the personalities, pretty high conflict, but really, really high honesty.

47:01Yeah, it's kind of interesting. As you say that, I reflect naturally on my own marriage. and the two things that came up for me as you were talking there is, I mean, my wife did is absolutely incredible, okay? And one of the things which I think I found hard initially was how honest she was, right? She found it really easy and still does to be completely honest and direct. Was that a source of conflict in the beginning of your marriage? It was like daggers drawn? Well, I heard you say on another podcast this morning that one of the best ways to meet your life partner is on a blind date set up by one of your friends.

47:46Yeah. Well, that's how I met Vid. Beautiful. And it was in 2007. I used to be a massive football fan or what you would call soccer. And I would follow Liverpool Football Club around Europe. So there was a huge Champions League final in 2005, like an iconic one. I flew to Istanbul with my buddy to watch it. And then in 2007, we were in the final again. And I was about to fly to Athens for the final with my buddy. And I got a call from an old friend. I won't get into every detail of the call, but in essence, it was like, Ron, are you still single? I said, well, you know, kind of. Why? And she goes, well, there's someone coming up to Manchester this weekend who is single.

48:28She's a gorgeous barrister. And I think you guys will get on. Do you fancy meeting her? I was like, listen, I'm literally about to fly to Athens with this football game. In principle, yes, kind of cool you want to get back. In essence, we met that weekend. Three months later, I proposed. This was pure whirlwind. How old were you? I was probably 29. She was? 27. And, you know, I was ready. At the time, she lived in London. She was working as a criminal barrister. I lived in the Northwest where I still live, of England. And literally from blind date number one, it was both of ours' first blind date.

49:10And literally from that moment, we didn't know how it would work. You lived there, I live here. A few days later, I was like, hey, I'm actually going to be in London. I've got Dave Matthews man tickets with my mates, but someone's pulled out. We got a spare ticket. Do you want to join us? She came. Before you know it, three months later, Will went. Completely in love. Married after eight months. Okay, so mates of mine who were already engaged, you got engaged, you married before we've even got a marriage.

49:38Arthur Brooks:So less than a year from meeting her to marriage. Less than a year, it was eight months. And so when you ask me, were these qualities causing conflicts at the start? Yeah, absolutely. I would say the first year of our marriage was actually quite hard. Because once the kind of whirlwindness of the first eight months had kind of worn off and reality kicked in, I certainly found that kind of direct honesty difficult because I was a real people pleaser at that time I would say the right things right but actually I've realized that's one of the best things in our marriage is and I've learned through her that actually it's really important to say how you feel don't just keep the peace if you're not happy with it you can say it nicely but you've got to say it it's very important it's very important now for a lot of people they grow up in an environment where honesty is not common.

50:28Arthur Brooks:You know, there's this, I mean, there's, there are certain cultures in the United States, for example, regionally where people just don't say what's on their mind. So there's a, you ever been in Minnesota? You ever been in Minnesota? Once a long, long time again. There's an old joke that there was a man in Minnesota who loved his wife so much that he almost told her.

50:47Arthur Brooks:So you get the idea that for some people, that's actually really, really hard and there are other cultures where it's not. And I married a girl from Barcelona. So they say what they think. And I come from Seattle, Washington, which is kind of a Minnesota-like culture. Right. Which, you know, I didn't hear my parents, you know, talking to each other. I never heard my parents have an argument, not once. I never heard it. I mean, they had a good marriage. And I'm sure that they had arguments, but the whole point was that that was quite foreign to me. But in my marriage, I actually had, I married a Spaniard.

51:14Arthur Brooks:She's going to express herself. There was no way around that. And so it was really tricky from the very beginning. I mean, it's funny because this is the topic that's actually most important to my students at 28 because they find it most baffling is the startup that is your pair bond. That's the ultimate startup of life is falling in love. That's the ultimate. It's the most entrepreneurial thing that you're going to do because what you're doing is you're co-creating a startup enterprise. I mean, you can wait until you're in your 30s and it's more like a merger. Or there are lots of cases where it's more like a hostile takeover or an acquisition.

51:48Arthur Brooks:But that's not the best model for marriage. You can tell I teach at a business school. And what you find is that that startup per se, when you think about it, it has all the rocky parts of it where you have different styles of work and different styles of communication, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, what really, really holds it together, what I'm talking to my students about is not the passion. It's the companionate love of living with your best friend for the rest of your life. It's satisfaction. If you put it into your happiness model, right? Well, it's actually all of it.

52:20Arthur Brooks:It is all of it. It's really enjoyable. It's really enjoyable. It's unbelievably satisfying, which is an accomplishment. But that's the point I'm getting at with satisfaction is that, you know, you have to compromise. Like, you're two individuals. You're not going to see everything eye to eye. But can you still navigate that and figure out a way to walk side by side throughout your life? And by the way, one of the things that brings the most satisfaction is that you're jointly undertaking a hard project together. other. So remember, accomplishment with struggle. In a marriage, that's kids. I mean, that's a joint project, and it's a bunch of work, and it's unbelievably satisfying as a result.

52:59Arthur Brooks:But here's the problem.

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54:40Arthur Brooks:One of the reasons that couples don't stay together when the kids move out is because they've lost their source of satisfaction. They've lost the joint accomplishment with struggle. So one of the things I work with, my wife and I, we do retreats for married couples on how to stay in love. People in their 50s and 60s, how to stay in love. And one of the big things we talk to them about is you need a new project. You need a new hard project together. Our project is teaching people about love and happiness together. We're going on the road. We just got back from New Mexico on Sunday, actually, where we let a couples retreat.

55:12Arthur Brooks:But that's the thing that you'll find in 10 years. when the kids are out of the house, that you need a new thing. Of course, you do have, I mean, this podcast is a joint project, right? It is, but we've been doing it for a while, right? And in terms of, you know, I have taken up paddle over the last 12 months or so. It's a bit like pickleball, but it's, I guess it's doing a similar thing here that pickleball is doing in America. It's a mixture between tennis and squash. You can think of it like that. It's the fastest growing sport in the world. It's literally blowing up. And I think there's multiple reasons for that.

55:46One of the reasons I think for that, and I think this relates to meaning and a lot of the stuff you write about in the new book is because it's played in community. You don't play singles paddle. You play doubles. And often you don't know who you're playing with or against. So you're meeting new people. You're not on your phone. You're present for 60, 90 minutes. And I think in this world where people are glued to their devices and they're feeling more lonely and isolated, I believe that one of the reasons that a sport like Paddle is blowing up is because community sits at the heart of it. Now, you know, I am quite an experienced racket player from tennis and squash, so I play to a reasonably high level.

56:32And then I was looking for a game last weekend, and it was a mixed game. So I text Vid, I said, hey, Paige, do you fancy playing Paddle with me? like and she goes what me and you against someone else said yeah yeah let's do it and she goes are you okay i'm like yeah i'm fine but do you want to play i think it'll be a laugh anyway we went and played and it was a laugh because we haven't done stuff like that was that fun oh my god it was brilliant and you want to do it again now yeah i think that you know we're

57:00Arthur Brooks:still married i think it worked pretty well some couples can't do that yeah i mean look maybe if you were chance of it she might have a different perspective but i was i think i was pretty disciplined with my goals. It was, I think it was really good fun. We left the kids at home. We rarely do stuff like that, right? We went off and played. It was great. And I thought, yeah, maybe this is something we'll do more and more. Now it might be that we're better off choosing something that none of us have ever done before to learn together. I think that might be better. So that's interesting because there's, there, there, there is some literature on this, but it sort of follows common sense.

57:34Arthur Brooks:One of the things that couples who fall deeper and deeper and deeper in love after the kids move out, have in common, is they go deep into spirituality together. They explore religion. So a lot of couples, they're kind of religious, culturally religious, and they raise their kids and they're really distracted. The kids move out and they get super religious. That's this whole concept of the ashramas, which is an Indian notion of the four quarters of an ideal life. The first quarter is brahmacharya, which is the student phase. The second is grihasta, the householder phase. That's you and your wife raising your kids right now.

58:07Arthur Brooks:You go into Vanaprastha at around age 50. That's the idea. Retiring into the forest, typically with your spouse. And what are you going to do there? You're going to learn and learn and learn and learn such that sannyasa, when you're old together, you can sit in the luminescent light of the true God. That's the whole idea from the ancient Vedic scriptures, as a matter of fact. And so what you're finding now is that if you want to do that, if you have this call to actually go deeper, but to go deeper together with the person, you know, that has that vocationally with whom you have that reflection of the divine love, you're right on schedule.

58:42Specifically to what me and Vid could do as we move into this, from your experience as someone who's been married for longer than me, but also your expertise and wisdom. So is there a difference between me and her doing something fresh together as opposed to something like paddle where ultimately I would probably be in inverted commas the better player. One thing I had to try and do on Saturday I think I did it pretty well was try not to coach her during the game. Yeah. I did a couple of times but try not to right. Your intuition is right on that. Yeah. my point is, how would you think about this in terms of moving forward?

59:27So it sort of depends on

59:28Arthur Brooks:how much enjoyment and satisfaction you actually get from a particular thing. So have you ever read a book by Josef Pieper, the German philosopher, called Leisure, the Basis of Culture? No, but I ordered it yesterday because I've heard you talk about it and it's going to be one of my summer reads. Oh, it's great. And this really, and this is his most, it's his magnum opus, really. I mean, he also wrote The Four Cardinal Virtues, which is a really, really good book about, you know, fortitude and prudence, et cetera. But this whole idea of leisure is the basis of culture is the concept that there's something that you need to do outside of your work, but that is hugely generative.

1:00:03Arthur Brooks:It's not just chilling on a beach. It's what you do that creates tons of value that they don't pay you for. And it comes in three categories. There's deepening relationships, there's deepening spirituality or religion, and there's learning something new. Now, the best possible thing is leisure together, generative leisure together, which is able to cement your marriage in those three areas, deepening your marriage, getting closer to God and learning something new together. So that's the thing. So what are you studying together? What skill are you actually trying to get? What are you trying to do to grow your business, for example?

1:00:38Arthur Brooks:Those are possibilities. Are you trying to learn how to do triathlon? I know a couple that they, after their kid moved out, they started training for a triathlon together. It might sound trivial to somebody else, but the whole point is that it has to be something really generative where you see yourselves getting better together as a unit and that will bond you. Interestingly, it probably shouldn't be about work. Yeah. I sort of reread your leisure section in your latest book, The Meaning of Your Life. And the bit I underlined, which I just absolutely love, was this bit here, which is leisure is a serious business in life that if done right, can save you from workaholism and serve as a calling itself.

1:01:25I thought it was absolutely beautiful. And if you really reflect on society, we have become a leisure deficient society.

1:01:31Arthur Brooks:Yeah, totally, totally, absolutely. And the people who are most rewarded, the people that we admire the most, are hopelessly success addicted and workaholic. But that is the irony that a lot of the people we look up to or we see prominently online are leisure deficient because they're workaholics. Yeah, they're hopelessly unhappy. They're horribly, horribly unhappy. And this goes back to what we said before. I mean, this is my last podcast recording before my summer break. Like the point is, it's going to be leisure, right? It's going to be, like I intentionally shut the show down for SitSuites, right?

1:02:09Even though all the advice would be, you can't do that, right? I'm like, I am not playing that game because that game, there's only one end result to that game. It's burnout, it's overwork, it's the decimation of relationships. My dad never did this. He couldn't do this, right? So in some way, I feel it's honoring my father and honoring the sacrifice that he made for me and my brother.

1:02:32Arthur Brooks:And by the way, he could have taken more leisure, no doubt. He probably was driven. I mean, he's an immigrant. I mean, he was probably coming from Calcutta, right? Yeah. And probably it was about poverty back there and to be the person who alleviated some of that, right? Yeah, exactly. And if we could just briefly just look at dad's life through your model, I think it'd be quite interesting. So I would say, I used to say that my dad got success and happiness mixed up. But this is classic, by the way. Aquinas talks about this. Aristotle talks about this, that we have idols that we chase. And we believe, I tell my students on the first day, You think that money, power, fame, that those will give you happiness automatically.

1:03:18Arthur Brooks:No, no, no. You need to go directly for happiness and then you will be successful enough. And that makes them panic because of the word enough, which is ironic. And that gives me the rest of the semester to try to drill into their brains, this whole point. And a lot of people don't get that because they've been trained to this idea. If I'm successful enough, then everything will fall into place. And then they chase, chase, chase, chase for the rest of their life. And maybe, I mean, a lot of things that you honor your father for, but one of the things that we can actually honor our parents most with is by reacting to the mistakes that they made.

1:03:49Yeah.

1:03:49Arthur Brooks:So a lot of people listening to us, their dads were maybe good men, but drank too much. Honor your father by not drinking too much, right? If your parents didn't have a good marriage and they were good people, they didn't have a good marriage, honor your parents by learning what went wrong and have a good marriage. That's beautiful, Arthur. It's such a beautiful way to look at things, to reframe things, to move on and make your life better, which is fundamentally what I think all parents want, is they want their children's lives to be better than theirs. I've reframed how I view my dad's life.

1:04:24He worked ridiculously hard. And when I say ridiculously hard, for 30 years, he only slept three nights a week. I know that is the main reason why my dad's not alive today. Yeah. I know that. Okay. If I could ask my dad one more question, I would ask him, hey, dad, was it worth it? And the reason I'd ask him that is because it's very easy for me to say or think that he made a mistake.

1:04:57But if my dad's sole goal in life, what gave him meaning, right, was to look after his family, was to earn enough to look after his mom in India, his brothers, his sisters, and to give me and my brother a fantastic education to start life. And his patience, no doubt. And his patience. He did that, right? Now, how much did he enjoy life? I don't know. I've got memories of dad, you know, even when he was knackered, He would still teach me how to play snooker in a garage. We'd still play snooker. He'd still play table tennis with me and teach me how to do a forehand smash, right? So I think there were elements of his life.

1:05:40And I also think to the fact that, damn, my dad was on dialysis for 15 years. He lost a sight in one of his eyes and he never complained once. I bet you my dad just reflected on his life and what got him to that point. So if I put him through your model, Arthur, I think he had bits of enjoyment. but I think a lot of his day-to-day life was a struggle. Right. I think there was satisfaction there. Because there was serious accomplishment. Yeah. And it was hard. Yeah. So I just, more as I get older, I, you know. And meaning. And meaning. So I think he had these things. So I'm reading The Meaning of Your Life, your latest book.

1:06:17And I'm like, I think dad had meaning.

1:06:21Arthur Brooks:Well done, dad. Well done. I don't know if he had happiness, but he had meaning. But I don't know. Well, see, this is the thing. You don't try to get happiness. Exactly. You know, if you try to get happiness, you're going to be in trouble. You do the things that you need such that happiness happens to you. And the things that you need to do are work to enjoy your life, try to get more satisfaction, and search for the why of your existence. That's actually the same thing that you do. You don't say, I just want to be healthier. No, no, no, no. Tell me what to do to get healthier such that health will find me.

1:06:55Yeah.

1:06:55Arthur Brooks:It's the same thing with anything in life. I mean, these big, diffuse concepts of the things that we want in life. So your dad, looking at it from the outside, he probably could have had more enjoyment. But, and it's the same for a lot of men of that generation, by the way. I mean, my dad too. I mean, my dad, I mean, he could have enjoyed his life a lot more. But that was not thought of in those days in the same way that it is. I don't think they thought about, is this going to make me happy? Yeah. I think it was more, I've just got to do what I've got to do. There was this, the strong sense of duty would sometimes be, sort of militate against enjoyment.

1:07:31Arthur Brooks:And for a lot of guys of that generation, they'd feel sort of guilty if they were doing something really, really enjoyable when they could be working. Right. Now, is that the right approach? You have to decide. But probably you and I, I mean, I'm a little older than you, but I think, you know, I think I have a more balanced perspective on that. And I know that my kids have a more balanced perspective on that than I do. But that's perhaps a luxury that we have because of the generation that came before us. Here's the interesting thing about that, though, which is really funny. Because you find that people of very moderate means have higher levels of enjoyment than people who are rich.

1:08:07Arthur Brooks:Rich people have lower enjoyment than people of moderate means. Now, one of the reasons for that is because they're rich because they sacrifice their enjoyment for more and more and more work. So that's one of the things. And again, this is probably one of the great things about living in an advanced capitalist economy is that we can make those decisions. I mean, if you're living back in 1959 in Calcutta, there weren't that many degrees of freedom. But if we live in the UK or the United States, then we can actually decide whether or not we're going to work really, really hard. And middle class people, people of moderate means, they can't afford to go to the park with their kids.

1:08:44Arthur Brooks:They can't afford to be, you know, hanging out with their spouse. They can do these really enjoyable things that a lot of workaholics and a lot of success-addicted people just don't do. I wind up with some of the most successful people in the world that I'm talking to, that I'm working with day in and day out, giving them enjoyment lessons. This is where they're weak. Well, that's the irony, isn't it? That is the irony that in order for many people to be as successful as they think they need to be, they give up. They sacrifice one of the great record insurance. Yeah. And actually, I had a friend who used to live in Denmark.

1:09:22And of course, what our culture values massively also influences our happiness because it influences what we do. And he said in Denmark, in many offices, the norm is to stop at 4 p.m. If you're still there working at 4.15, your manager's like, hey, is everything okay? What's wrong? because I believe, and again, I'm not Danish, but from what I've heard, they value leisure. It's like, no, no, 4 p.m., you're done because now it's time to maybe go and hang out with your kids, you know, enjoy leisure. You shouldn't be here at the office, whereas I contrast that to the country you're born in. It's like, what, you're leaving at 4 p.m.?

1:10:02Arthur Brooks:Get back in here. What's wrong with you? Exactly. Interesting. My grandfather was Danish. Right. And what you find is that this is probably how we sort. So there's a reason that my grandparents, my great-grandparents immigrated from Denmark. The reason was because they were ambitious. And so what they wanted in their lives was excitement. And this is a really interesting thing in the research on immigrants. Immigrants don't want contentment. Immigrants want excitement. They want an adventure. And if you're living in a country like Denmark, which has got, you know, the whole jantala and the whole concept of hygge.

1:10:39Arthur Brooks:Do you ever heard of that word? Yeah, yeah, yeah. H-Y-G-G-E. It's the, it can't even, in English, it doesn't really have a translation. It's the comfortable conviviality of friends on a cozy couch or something like that. Cozy rugs and candles and just chilling together. You know, it's like, I don't really want that. I want an exciting life. I want to be up and here with you doing this. This is what I want, man, because I'm my grandfather. I'm named after him, Arthur, actually. And he wanted an exciting life. And so he, you know, he had his own business and they started a farm and their kids went to college.

1:11:15Arthur Brooks:And, you know, it was just this different strokes is what it comes down to. No doubt that was your dad. Your dad was like, I want to buy down life. I'm going to go do this thing. Yeah, the more I think about these things, the more I think about that we can have models, right? Different models to help us realize what are the key ingredients of something like happiness. but actually how we apply that model is going to be individual it's going to depend on who you are how you were brought up what is important to you so you know it's now what 12 13 years since dad died and I reflect now and I go actually you know what I actually don't know you know maybe my dad made the right choices for him did your parents have a good marriage?

1:12:05it depends what your definition of good is In that generation.

1:12:08Arthur Brooks:Right? Yeah. My parents had an arranged marriage. Yeah. Right? And that was totally fine with them. Yeah. No. And by the way, arranged marriages tend to be pretty successful. I think it was successful. We had a good, stable atmosphere at home. We did fun stuff together. I always knew that they were there for me. They sort of, I don't know. Did they like each other? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, they like each other. Because somebody who was really smart and who loved both of them put them together as probably a good match. And interestingly, arranged marriages tend to be successful because we're better at, people who know us and love us are better at knowing us and figuring out who's right for us.

1:12:47Arthur Brooks:They're better at that than we are. Which is why you believe or you have data to support your friends putting you on a blind date as a good way to meet your life partner. And one of the best ways that you can use an app, a dating app, by the way, is by introducing human friction into the algorithm. We think that we're going to take the algorithms and take human friction out of life. Now, the way that the technology is going to work so it makes our life better and not worse is we're going to be adding more and more and more right hemispheric friction into the left hemispheric algorithms that are in our lives.

1:13:16Arthur Brooks:So, for example, let your friends see the matches that you're getting on the dating app and decide which one you're going to go out with. That's one of the ways that you can actually use it, for example. So the reason I asked about your parents, about whether or not they had a good marriage, is that this is one of the great gifts that they give us. You know, people often ask, what's the one thing I can do to make sure I have a good son? So your father would have been super proud of you. I mean, you have not just a great career, but you have an aspiration to be a good man. And that's all a dad wants, his son to be a good man.

1:13:52Arthur Brooks:You know the number one predictor of your son being a good man? Whether your dad was. Loving his mom. You got basically, Rangan, you have one job. Love your kids, mom. If you can only do one thing, and this is getting us back to the original question, what really, really is most important for what we're doing? Is this the knowledge, the intellectual part of what we're doing? Is it the spiritual part? Or is it the love that people actually see? Your son will be a good man if you love his mom. I love that. It's weirdly simple.

1:14:32Because he will see that in terms of modeling. He'll go, okay, this is, you know, my father respects this lady. He's treating her with love, with kindness, with respect. He talks her with affection. Is that purely it? It's just the modeling that he then sees and then he takes out with him into the world? Certainly those things are true.

1:14:55Arthur Brooks:But beyond that, that's how you will be happy. That's how you will be a happy man, by loving the woman who's on earth to make you complete. And to love is the will of the good of the other. To love is not a feeling at all. I mean, to love is a commitment. It's an actual decision, notwithstanding your feelings. And when he sees you doing the one thing that will actually make you the man that you want to be, then he will see that modeled. And when he does that, he will be the man that you want him to be as well. That's the best gift you can give your son is loving his mom. Yeah. Well, I hope I do that.

1:15:32But this is a nice reminder to really go deeper and really show that more and more.

1:15:38Arthur Brooks:Yeah, that's right. We were talking a lot about relationships and you spoke beautifully before about how your marriage plays into your religion. Yeah. Right? there will be people listening of course Arthur who are either no longer in a marriage or long-term partnership or have no desire to right for a person who's listening who is single can they still be happy yeah for sure and you know that's a there's a couple of different ways to cut that but you know you've heard about the Harvard study of adult development yeah yeah famous study that Bob Waldinger has he been on your show he's been here in this in this room yeah I love him.

1:16:18Arthur Brooks:I mean, he's actually guest lectured for me at my colleague at Harvard. And that study, which is a crystal ball on being happy when you're old, what do you do when you're young so you'll be happy when you're old? And it comes down to like seven things that people who are healthy and happy when they're old, they have in common when they're young, which is really, really helpful. The first four are pretty obvious. Smoking, drinking, diet, and exercise. You know, don't misuse substances. You know, don't eat like a nine-year-old. um, you know, exercise, you know, like walking around. I mean, it's just, it's pretty, it's pretty obvious stuff.

1:16:54Arthur Brooks:And, you know, don't smoke cigarettes, you moron. I mean, it's like, you know, obvious things that, that you, because, and part of the reason is because for happiness is if you have tuberculosis, you're not going to be happy. That's a really, really unhappy life. And so having some of these avoidable things that actually come from addictive behaviors, it's really important to keep in mind. But the last three of the seven are number one is that be really good at dealing with your problems. You need skills at dealing with your own problems, and that requires reps and information. Some people are good at using therapy.

1:17:24Arthur Brooks:Some people are good at Vipassana meditation. Some people are really good at prayer. Some people are outstanding in journaling. You need a way. The next thing is learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, being a learning machine so that you can continue to have an interesting life. But last, and which washes everything else out, is either a happy marriage or close friendships relationships or both. That's it. So the answer to the question is, do you need a happy marriage? No, but you can't be alone. You can't make it through. I mean, life is not meant to be lived alone. We're profoundly social animals.

1:17:59Arthur Brooks:And that doesn't mean you need 50 friends. I'm like, you and I are like these big extroverts, but some people aren't. You know, one of my kids is a, my daughter is an introvert. She needs two close friends. there will there will absolutely be because you will have seen this before but when this episode airs in the youtube comments somebody will at this moment be saying i prefer to be by myself i'm not that person arthur but solitude and isolation are different things yeah we do we i mean i need to be by myself sometimes too but i need people in my life now the very very happiest people, they tend to have a best friend who they're also married to.

1:18:43Arthur Brooks:And that's the key. That's the ideal of companion and love. But it's not, being married is neither necessary nor sufficient, actually. You find the happiest people, they have more than one friend who's their spouse is what you find. And the people who like a lot of solitude, that's great, but they need somebody who loves them and that they can love. And by the way, I've met a hermit before. When I was in Dharamsala last time, I went up the mountain and found a hermit who'd lived alone for 27 years. And I interviewed him. He's not like us. He's not like most people. This is not typically the case.

1:19:17So I guess what we're saying is that generally speaking, for most people, these relationships are really, really important. Super important. Of course, like anything, there are exceptions. Maybe that person leaving the comment is that exception.

1:19:30Arthur Brooks:Maybe they're not. Our friend the hermit has just written in in the YouTube comments. Yeah, exactly. He's like, you're wrong, you're wrong. You count me by yourself. But these are the exceptions that actually prove the rule. Yeah. We need love. And it's interesting. Somebody asked me at a media thing the other day. They said, we ask every, at the end of a lot of shows, they say, here's the question we ask everybody, right? I said, okay, what is it? He said, what is life? It's like, holy cow, what is life? And I said, well, life, you know, why are we alive? You know, the why of being alive is to love and be loved.

1:20:07Arthur Brooks:That's what human beings are made for is to love and be loved. Therefore, life is love. Now, we need other people. There's all kinds of love. There's divine love. There's friendship. There's marriage. There's love for your children. But the whole point is this is how we're created. Human beings are created to love and be loved. That's the beautiful thing. And so, yeah, some people, it doesn't work out. Marriage doesn't work out. Yeah, your friend Sonia was here last week. And, you know, the thesis of her latest book is about, you know, how to be loved. Yeah, it's how to feel love. How to feel love.

1:20:41It's not only to be loved, you have to feel loved as well, which I thought was a really interesting set. You said something before, I think it was really interesting because this actually came up at a conference I was speaking at a few days ago. What was the difference between solitude and loneliness? Robert Lustig, who posed that question, I was on a panel and Robert Lustig, who a lot of people know, he talks about sugar and all that kind of stuff. And he answered that question through the lens of chemicals. He said the difference is serotonin, right? And he gave his rationale behind that. But as he posed that question to the audience, I was thinking, well, how do I think of it?

1:21:19The difference between solitude and loneliness. And the word that came up for me was belonging. so if you're in a crowded room you can still feel lonely if you don't feel that you belong but I I I passionately believe that solitude is the most important thing that we all need in the modern world and I think that's something that you make abundantly clear also in your book and I feel that if you can be in solitude and be content with that that is also belonging you feel that, you know, I belong in this body. I don't need to distract myself from my present moment experience. I, for me, it just came up in the moment.

1:21:58I thought, you know, so how do you think about the difference between solitude and loneliness?

1:22:04Arthur Brooks:Loneliness comes from isolation. Loneliness does not come from solitude. Solitude is to be alone and well. Isolation is to be involuntarily alone. That's what it comes down to, which is another way of talking about belonging. You know, you don't belong. You're involuntarily alone. And that's what leads to the sense of isolation. And that's what leads to loneliness, which is endemic. It's unbelievably pervasive in our society today. That's not because people are alone too much. It's because they are isolated. They're isolated from other people. And that has a lot to do with the way that we use technology.

1:22:37Arthur Brooks:It has a lot to do with the nature of our culture. It has a lot to do with the legacy of COVID. I mean, there's a lot of things that actually have gone into it, right? So I love being alone. I love being alone. But fundamentally, I do not want to be isolated. I do not want isolation. I simply want solitude in concert with the relationships that I actually have. And I spend time alone in my thoughts every single day. And when I wake up in the morning, I spend time alone every single day, seven days a week. And it's a very, very important part of my life. One thing I do when I'm at home is I have one less coffee at home because I've realized that if I go to the local coffee shop and have one there and sort of have a chit-chat with the baristas, it just enhances my life.

1:23:23Yeah, yeah. Yesterday morning, I was there going through your book and I think right at the start, there's a chat, there's the meaning of meaning and there is a questionnaire, right? The meaning in life questionnaire, which tells you where you stand at the present and what you need to be thinking about and working on as you continue reading this book. Right. Now, you've also got the questionnaire for people. It says in the book at themeaningofyourlife.com. Right. Right? Is that there for people that want to take it, right? But I would just say, get the book and you can actually do it. I went through the questions.

1:23:55Right. How'd your score? Well, so I did them without seeing what the questionnaire meant. And then on presents, I scored 34. Good. Nice and high. And on search, I scored 17.

1:24:09Arthur Brooks:Moderate. Yeah. You are a happy. You're happy at home. I am. You're happy at home. And by the way, that's classic for somebody who doesn't move 20 times. Yeah. Right? That's interesting. You're happy at home. You're fundamentally a guy who's, now you're going to travel. You travel the world because you give all these lectures and you do all this media, et cetera, et cetera. But you want to come back here. You want to come back home. Yeah. And the thing that I do, I've realized more than anything, is I orientate my life around my relationships. So whenever I get asked to do something, my first thought is, how does this impact the kids?

1:24:54You know, my ability to look after mom. That's my first thought, right? And I've just learned over the years that actually your to-do list is never done. There's always something else you could be doing. If you wait until your to-do list is done, In order to do the important things in life, you're going to find very quickly that the important things in life never happen. So I've flipped it intentionally over the last few years where everything is about the relationship first and I fit my work life around that. Now, some people are going to say, Ronan, I don't have the autonomy you do. I don't have that possibility.

1:25:27I have to do something like my dad, perhaps. I get it. But I can only live life honestly as I find myself in it.

1:25:34Arthur Brooks:Right, right. Do you know what I mean? I do. And what I would, if I make a prediction, right, because I'm 14 years older than you, but also because you're going through the ashramas just like me. My prediction is you're going to start to revolve more around spiritual depth. My guess is that you and Vid are going to start looking, looking, looking. I think you're going to retire into the forest a little bit. Well, literally this past weekend, we have been talking about, well, we're both very spiritual anyway. Right. Okay. I think that's clear if people listen to the podcast. Yeah, we both meditate.

1:26:10Every day. I fell out of the habit sort of last month, but I'm back on the horse at the moment. But I really enjoy meditation. Right. And again, what has changed for me is that I no longer meditate for an outcome. I don't meditate to improve my mood, to be happier, to be more present, whatever it might be, like I used to. That's when I used to struggle with the practice.

1:26:34Arthur Brooks:Well, by the way, that's when the Dalai Lama said to me one time, he said, the problem with Westerners and meditation, number one is they want to be spaced out, which is the problem in and of itself. He said, but the other reason is that they meditate so they feel better. I said, well, what are you supposed to do? He said, you should meditate so the whole world feels better. That's the point. I mean, you should meditate so that the world is lifted up. And I realize that that's a very abstract concept for a lot of people. But as we get older, we start to understand it. Totally. And I would say we are becoming more and more spiritual.

1:27:06And the thing we've been talking about is, shall we set up a foundation and donate money into the foundation and have it do good? And then I take where I get to, Arthur, and one of the things I love most about your latest book is this idea about why questions. And actually, it very much resonates with how I think, which is, I've always felt this as a doctor, is that it's not about me telling you what to do. I can guide you, but at some point you have to ask yourself, is this the right approach for me? And only you can do that. I can't do that for you. Like I really feel the job of a good doctor or a good healer is to help that person find what is right for them.

1:27:50That's certainly how I've gone about my career. And then the clash I have in my head is, it's easy to think that a foundation will do more good for the world. and I think it could do. And at the same time, I think the way you change the world is to change yourself. So the best way to actually, I believe, change the world is to show up and be that present, kind, compassionate human. If I can do that, then in my circle, and we've all got our circle of influence, if you are compassionate there, that's the way you make change. So then I have this clash in my head the king what if the foundation makes me more and more busy so I'm less able to be the change do you know what I mean I do I do absolutely I'm not expecting an answer necessarily

1:28:40Arthur Brooks:but these are the thoughts I'm currently going through a foundation like that is a great project for the two of you a great project it's an accomplishment with struggle it's something that's really worth collaborating on for sure that's a really good idea I really like that idea but the truth of the matter is that the internal revolution that you're talking about the continuous struggle that you have as a person, that's going to always have a lot more influence on the world. So for example, one of the things I talk about with married couples is if you don't, you read the newspaper and the world's on fire, you don't know what to do.

1:29:09Arthur Brooks:Go home and love your wife. That's really, I mean, you want to change the world? Let's have more couples who love each other. That will change the world. You want to have, you want to lift people up, have more families, people having babies and joyfully creating families. I mean, how many people, because the world seems so crummy and no good, I'm not going to get married and have kids. Are you kidding me? You have just basically, you're bashing your own head into a brick wall. You want to make the world happier, fall in love, stay in love, have children. And so you, because you have a big profile, you're in the public eye, so am I.

1:29:50Arthur Brooks:The best thing that we can possibly do is love our wives and love our kids. Love your wife, right? Do you do that? So it's kind of interesting you were saying that. Again, a football analogy. I thought back to when I was a teenager growing up in the northwest of England. Now, my older brother was a big Manchester United fan. He still got a season ticket at Old Trafford. And I was a big Liverpool fan. And I went to school in Manchester. And so, you know, it was always about what football team did you support? That was kind of your identity at my school, basically. and at that time there was a you know someone who's regarded as one of the most successful football managers of all time sir alex ferguson famous guy famous guy but what it's interesting now as i get older i reflect on some of the things i used to hear as a teenager so you know footballers back then as they are now were paid a lot of money so you're literally getting kids at 18, 19, back then were getting 40, 50 ,000 pounds a week.

1:30:51But one thing he always would try and do is get his young footballers to find someone to settle down with. He actively encouraged it. And a lot of those footballers at 21, 22 would suddenly find themselves married with a child. Now, I can't remember how we did that, but I actually think what he was trying to do is almost ground them and go, listen, all that money, right? Because these guys are in hotels every weekend. They're going to have, you know, all kinds of opportunity to follow their animalistic instincts. He's right. Right? He is this older manager, I think, was trying to insulate against that.

1:31:33Because, hey, listen, if I can get you married, it doesn't mean they're all in the right marriages. But it's kind of interesting, isn't it? They'll be way happier.

1:31:39Arthur Brooks:And this is a really interesting thing. Our animal impulses will push us, will push us. But here's the mistake that we make. We think that Mother Nature cares that we're happy. Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. Mother Nature wants us to pass on our genes and survive the winter. That's what Mother Nature wants for us. And that's the reason that we have these animal impulses. But we have this repertoire, this possibility of doing something so much better. We can choose our own happiness, but it means we must be at war with ourselves. We must understand that these animal impulses are going to lead us to do things that we don't want to do, ultimately.

1:32:13Arthur Brooks:and the long-term goal, the life that we actually want. Now, we know that less when we're 18 and 19. That's why we need older people. That's why you needed your dad, who actually could say, don't do that, do this. He'd say, well, I want to do this. Sorry, you're going to do this, not that. And what he was trying to do was to help you understand that this particular decision, which feels good, is actually not the right decision for your life. And that's exactly why we have parents. It's exactly why we have mentors. It's exactly why we have teachers, to actually push us into the right space of moral aspiration.

1:32:44Would you say from your research that there's a unique role for fathers when it comes to bringing up young men?

1:32:54Arthur Brooks:Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. And that's one of the reasons that fatherless families are so hard on kids. It's so hard on kids. Different impacts on boys to girls? Yeah, for sure. And that's an interesting thing. There's a research that shows that one of the worst things that can happen to a boy who's adolescent or just pre-adolescent is his dad takes off with another woman. It's one of the worst things that can happen to a boy because that actually torques his understanding of what it means to be a man. That's a really, really big problem. It's literally better for your son that you die than that you leave his mother.

1:33:27Arthur Brooks:Because if you die, your son will be like, yeah, my dad worked hard. My dad was a good man. My dad had bad health. But if he takes off with another woman, he doesn't understand who he's supposed to be. he doesn't understand the space of moral aspiration. Now, that doesn't mean that if your dad bailed, that you're going to be all screwed up. That's not what that means. I mean, but it means there's work to do under the circumstances that affects women less. And it's interesting because my, my father-in-law bailed when my wife was six with another woman, took off, didn't pay child support. Right.

1:33:58Arthur Brooks:And, and when I met her, she was in her early, we were in our early twenties. She didn't trust men. Men are no good. Men are weasels. Understandably. Yeah. I mean, men are just, they lie. Men want one thing and the whole thing. It took two years for me to close the deal. Two years. Why? I grew up in a home where my dad loved my mom. He died young, died at 66, you know, and didn't have good health. And it was a huge problem. Yeah. And my mother was ailing. She was profoundly demented by the time she was my age, but my dad loved her. My dad took care of her. And that's the model that I saw. And so the result was that I had to make my marriage into something more like my family.

1:34:38Arthur Brooks:But the fact is, if we had to choose one dad that was going to take off, it's better that it was hers. Because I needed that model. If there's a guy who just heard what you said there, Arthur, and perhaps they left their partner, their female my partner a year ago because they felt actually, you know what, we should never have got married. It was the wrong relationship. We were constantly fighting in front of the kids. How can they make sense of what you just said and not feel guilty? Yeah, no, I mean, and they do feel guilty. That's for sure. The question is how do you make it as good as it can be?

1:35:21Arthur Brooks:I mean, nobody doesn't feel guilty when things don't work out. That's the normal. If you never feel guilty about anything, something's wrong. I feel guilty about things. I mean, we all feel guilty about mistakes that we've made along the way. But the whole point is to continue to love your children and to help them understand exactly what happened such that it doesn't look like this is a natural form of behavior. That is better to say, my marriage didn't work out, but I want your marriage to work out. You know, the right way to go through life is not to run off with your secretary. the right way to go through life is to is to love the mother of your kids and just because my marriage didn't work out that way doesn't it mean doesn't mean that yours can't is to own it is what it comes down because that's what we said before when i was talking about vid and honesty right it's about being honest and maybe depending on the age if your son saying that just saying hey i really want it to work out there's a couple of reasons why it didn't but or if you made mistakes You can say, hey, listen, I really screwed up.

1:36:25Arthur Brooks:I'll give you an example of this. So I wrote a book called From Strength to Strength in 2022. I learned a lot. And it was based, it was a very personal book because, you know, my life was changing a lot. And I wanted to understand how the back half of my life, the second half of my life was going to be really meaningful and successful in its own way. And I was interviewing a lot of people. And I was interviewing this woman, this icon of Wall Street, incredibly rich, incredibly successful. one of the most famous women in the world in finance. And she was my age at the time. I was in my late 50s at the time.

1:36:58Arthur Brooks:And she was going through her achievements, which I asked her about. And then she said, and I'm so unhappy. I said, well, talk to me, sister. What's the problem? And she said, my husband and I are just roommates. I have, I guess, a cordial relationship with my adult kids. I think my employees are afraid of me. All I know how to do is work. I don't really have any friends. I was religious when I was a kid and I always loved it, but I haven't gone to church in decades and I don't know why. I'm drinking too much. I need to go to the gym. I'm getting bad. I have a bad lipid panel. I mean, what do I do?

1:37:37Arthur Brooks:And I said, you don't need a professor to tell you what to do. I mean, you just wrote your own prescription. I mean, go away with your husband, take a souvenir in your firm, get to know your kids, get into AA, go back to church. I mean, obviously. She says, I know, I know, I know. I said, so why didn't you do it? And she thought about it. She was quiet. And she said, because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy. And it was like a knife to my heart because me too, me too. I mean, when I was a CEO, I worked 80 hours a week. I was on the road all the time. I missed a lot of my kids growing up.

1:38:10Arthur Brooks:I made mistakes and I felt bad about it. And so I thought to myself, okay, so what am I going to do with that? I can pretend that it wasn't a mistake, but I've talked to my kids in a different way. And I said, I did that and that wasn't the right thing. Furthermore, I get a do-over. You know, we set it up with our family so that we all live in the same place. We're making your life now. We live in a place and we have one down the street and the other down the street. Might have one child still in the military. And when she comes back, she'll be around us as well. I hope that happens to my kids.

1:38:48I see my grandchildren.

1:38:49Arthur Brooks:I have four grandsons. I see them and they're proliferating. I mean, it's like the Brooks girls, they know how to have babies. And we're all in the same place because I get a do-over. But what I'm conscious of it. Yeah, and that's it, isn't it? You've made the unconscious conscious. You've owned what happened, right? The honesty is that, yeah, you know what? I probably overworked and I didn't see you guys as much as I could have done. And I can't change that. But what I can change is how I go forward. Exactly right. And I can admit that that was suboptimal, that I'm not perfect. Which is also a powerful thing for our kids to realize that we're not perfect, that we do make mistakes.

1:39:27Of course, that's honesty. And again, that's something I would say I've learned from my wife is that you don't have to put on this illusion of perfection in front of your kids. Right?

1:39:40Arthur Brooks:It won't work anyway. Yeah. It won't work. I mean, after about nine years old, they know you're hopelessly imperfect. And if you basically say, yeah, you know, I snapped at you. I'm sorry. I'm like, hmm. You know, I mean, if you're apologizing every single second, that's problematic. That just means that you're not learning and you're not getting better. But the truth is you're going to make mistakes. And I said to my kids, look, you know, I want you guys. I want you guys to have families that are stable and good. And I want to help. I want to be helpful. and I want to babysit your children and make your life better.

1:40:15Arthur Brooks:And it's important that you be present in your own families and it's important that I be present in your own families and I get a do-over. It's the best thing ever. And that's how you do it. Look, if something has happened in your marriage and it failed, for example, you have to talk openly with your kids, especially as they're coming of age, about exactly what happened and how it could have been better and how they don't have to fall prey to the same fate. Yeah, because it helps them as well. Totally. Helps them realize. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Arthur, I followed your work for years. I think you're a brilliant communicator.

1:40:45I think your books are so wonderfully written and you have such a wonderful grasp of all these different fields, right? Science, faith, relationships. It's wonderful talking to you and listening to you speak. There's so many other areas we could have gone into today about the meaning of your life. But the one area I wanted to touch on at the end of this conversation is about self-transcendence. Towards the end of this book, you write about Maslow's hierarchy and this idea that once your basic needs are met, you know, food and shelter, you can then move on to self-transcendence. But you challenge that and you kind of disagree, I think with the order.

1:41:39This is, I think, very provocative, but very, very interesting. Help us all understand where you view self-transcendence, what it is, and why it shouldn't be left until the very end.

1:41:54Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you refer to Maslow's hierarchy. Everybody watching your show is going to know Maslow's hierarchy. Abraham Maslow in the 40s, he writes this thing where he says, first you have food and shelter, and then you have security, and after that you have to have a self-esteem and community. And then at the very top of his hierarchy is self-actualization. Later in life, he said, that's actually not the highest one. The highest one is transcendence. The highest thing is that we can actually understand who we are deeply with respect to perhaps even our creator. So, you know, people get old.

1:42:27They start to get, you know, sort of, they get kind of mystical.

1:42:31Arthur Brooks:And the problem with that is this, is I've gone through my work and I've gone through my life, I found that some of the most profoundly spiritual and enlightened people I've ever met are poor. It's funny, isn't it? It's like they still have more to have adequate housing and meeting their caloric needs, but they love God a lot. They have an intense love for God. You're Indian. I go to India a lot. I go to India every year. And at one point I was making a documentary in Dharavi. Have you ever been to Dharavi? No. That was the world's largest slum. It's in Mumbai. it's like 750 ,000 people living on an amount of land that's smaller than Central Park.

1:43:11Arthur Brooks:It would be like 40 people living in your house. That's this population density. I mean, I've been to some of the Calcutta slums and it is humbling. It's unbelievable. But what you find is all kinds of different sorts of people, very, very entrepreneurial people. You hear a lot of laughter and you see a lot of families and you see an intense love for God. An intense love for God. And the idea that I'm going to wait. Why would I wait until I have everything else in order to do the most important thing? And, you know, Mother Teresa in Calcutta herself, she talked about the intense love of God that she and her sisters and the people that she served should have.

1:43:52Arthur Brooks:Because that's the most important thing. That's not the last thing. That's the first thing, actually. And that's open to absolutely every single one of us. Yes, we should wipe out poverty. Absolutely, we need more security. We all know these things. But the one thing that is truly democratic is our spiritual heritage that we can actually have for ourselves. It's just so beautiful. And I know that one of the reasons I hold the views I hold about even the relationship between money and happiness is because every other summer growing up in our six-week summer holidays, we would go to India for the entire six weeks.

1:44:30My mom, me and my brother, my dad had come for like three weeks and he'd have to fly back home and work. What time of year?

1:44:38Arthur Brooks:In June, July? July, August. It was pretty monsoon. July, August, yeah. Monsoon season. It was raining like crazy. And they were some of the funnest times of my life. And you live inside a different culture. And you will see people with not very much with the biggest smiles on their face. And one story I told once on the podcast a few years ago is when I went to see my auntie about three years ago in Calcutta and the block of flats where she lives, the gateman, the porter who lets the cars in and out, like I would chat with him every day. I'd sit and chat and, you know, that guy was happy, right?

1:45:14He did his job, like it provided enough, right? He wasn't wealthy. and I always remember about 3pm every day, he would just walk off and he'd sit with two or three others. They'd just squat around with his little clay pots of tea and they'd be, in Bangla, we would say, right? It would just, just in English, we'd say chewing the fat, right? Just sipping tea with his buddies and then, you know, under a bit of shade, like laughing. The good life. And I tell you, there's so many successful achievers in the West who don't even have time to do that, right? Something I thought about a few years ago was this idea that takeaway coffee.

1:45:58Wouldn't it be beautiful if we could live where you never needed to have a takeaway? You had five minutes to sit and enjoy your coffee. With somebody.

1:46:07Arthur Brooks:Yeah, with someone. Whereas the fact that we even need a takeaway, it's like, yeah, because we're so busy rushing around that, yeah, I need my caffeine here, but I can't even enjoy it. So I need to, you know, I think that tells us something about culture. Yeah. There's no enjoyment actually is coming from the consumption of the caffeine. We're using it instrumentally. Yeah. That guy didn't ever take a takeaway tea. He wouldn't drink tea by himself. He drinks it with his buddies at 3 p.m. Yeah. So the big point that you're making is about coffee specifically. Coffee should be the objective. It shouldn't be instrumental.

1:46:39Arthur Brooks:The reason you're drinking coffee is not so you can do something else. The point should be the coffee. That's it. I mean, if you're drinking coffee, to drink the coffee. Now, that's the whole concept. I mean, Thich Nhat Hanh. He came to mind straight away. Yeah, right. I mean, it's like when you're washing the dishes, you should be fully present while you're washing the dishes. Because if you're not fully present, then you're actually not washing the dishes in that moment, which means you're missing your life. Yeah, and he would probably argue if you're not present for washing your dishes, you ain't going to be present for anything else.

1:47:11Arthur Brooks:No, no, no. Look, here's, I think, the broader point, because it gets back to the whole point of why we're alive, which is the love and be loved. The amazing human brain, the most amazing thing that it does, arguably, is it gives us the ability to time travel. I can be prospective. I can be in the future. I can be retrospective. I can think of the past. And that's what makes us so competitive, because I can learn from the past. I can practice the future. I don't make mistakes. It's unbelievable. Where we're not ever is now. It's actually hard to be mindful. It's why you have all these sort of spaced out Western practices of mindfulness meditation.

1:47:49Arthur Brooks:Because they know that if you're 80 % of your time in the future, average person is 30 % to 50 % of their time thinking about the future. Entrepreneurs, people who are watching this show, are 80 % of the time in the future. They're in the future all the time. But here's the problem. You can't love in the future. You can only love now. If you're in the future all the time, you're missing love, which is to say that you're missing life. When you're having that coffee with your friend, you can love in that moment. That's the reason that the coffee anchors you in these five minutes that we're taking it and laughing with our friends in those moments.

1:48:25Arthur Brooks:That's the reason that it brings you such great joy. It's because you're made to love and you're being anchored in the now. Timeless wisdom. timeless wisdom Arthur Arthur yeah such a wonderful way with words my final question for you is to do with what you just spoke about when it comes to transcendence you were talking about India you were talking about how we all have access to that right now I want us to think about that person who's been listening to this conversation who is not present, is always rushing around, who feels that they overwork and that they can't see a way out. They certainly don't have time for spirituality or faith because they've got things to do.

1:49:20If they were to say to you, Arthur, I want to be happier. I want more meaning in my life. What can I do? What would you say to them?

1:49:31Arthur Brooks:So I would actually take a pretty technical approach to doing something that you can only do now in your life. And this is how I've tried to change my life. In the years that I was missing my life, I'm running a company, big, important guy, right? What I did was when I realized that this was a mistake, I did this profoundly present thing. I quit my job and I went for a long walk. I went on a pilgrimage. You know, it just says when you're in India and you see people walking to Mathura and Uttar Pradesh, you know, they're walking to the city of holy temples. I mean, it's just mendicants and people and normal people walking, walking.

1:50:15Arthur Brooks:I walk the community of Santiago across Northern Spain with my wife. You just walk and walk and walk. You're fully present because you have one job, which is walking and you're praying and I was holding my wife's hand and et cetera. And I realized that what I needed to do was that protocol. I needed a pilgrimage in my life every single day. And this is what I recommend to people, whether it's religious or not. Now what I do is I wake up every morning. I practice the Brahma Mahurta, which in Sanskrit is the creator's time. It's an ancient idea of an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. A Mahurta is 48 minutes.

1:50:50Arthur Brooks:The Brahma Mahurta is two of them. The science, the neuroscience behind that says that getting up before dawn is really good for you, especially if you witness the sunrise and our friend Andrew Huberman talks about that, et cetera. So there's very solid. All that Vedic wisdom always has tons of Western science that came much later that actually showed that it was good. I get up before dawn, I exercise every day, but my exercise is almost sacramental. I generally speaking, don't listen to things because I want to experience that. And then I get cleaned up and I go to Catholic mass every day. Esther and I go to mass together every day.

1:51:26When I'm home, when I'm on the road, I do it by myself, either in solitude or in partnership.

1:51:32Arthur Brooks:And you're fully present. You're not looking at your phone. It's not long. It's 25 minutes. It's half an hour. But you're there. You're fully present. You're experiencing that. And then at the end of the day, we pray our rosary together, which is a form of ancient Catholic meditation. And we do it together. And you can't check your phone. You have to be here now. Here's the point. if we have a habit of being not present, we need a habit of being present. You need a countervailing habit. What are people actually doing that they have to be present for and wire that into their day? Wire that into their lives.

1:52:06Arthur Brooks:That's what I recommend. I love it. Ancient wisdom for modern times, but we've come full circle, haven't we? Because in that answer, right at the end there, my opening question fed right back in. There was the science, there was the faith, and there was the relationships. all three in one. Arthur, some people will have come to you for the first time through this show because you've surprisingly not been on over the last years. And this show, by the way, is touching so many people, including me, all these years. Yeah, well, I'm very lucky. I get to do something from my garden that goes to so many people.

1:52:48The latest book, of course, is The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. I know you've written many books, but the one just before this was on happiness. And then of course you mentioned the one before that I think was Strength to Strength. If someone says, Arthur, listen, I don't know which of those three to choose for my first Arthur Brooks book, how would you articulate the differences between them? And where would you point them?

1:53:15Arthur Brooks:Yeah, this new book, well, the book that I wrote before, I co-authored it with Oprah Winfrey. And it was about, is a primer on the science of happiness, about enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. It's kind of a, it's like a small version of my college course on happiness. And so it's the basics on the science of happiness. It's based on a lot of science, et cetera, but it gives people practices that they can actually use in their life. A deeper dive on meaning, this new book, it's really behind the biggest crisis that we face. The problem with depression and anxiety for people under 30 is really a meaning crisis.

1:53:47Arthur Brooks:and this is a book about how modern life has broken our brains. So this is a book about the biggest problem in our life. If you want to learn more about the science of happiness, that's the last one. If you want to learn about the biggest problem that we're facing today and how people can actually not fall prey to that, actually can repair themselves, how it can fix their brains and their hearts along the way, then that's actually what this is for. They accompany each other in a way as it happens. And so for me right now, Now, this is the book that's really on my mind, I have to say. This is the one that's actually making me remember the reason I do the work that I do, for sure.

1:54:24Yeah. Well, it's a wonderful book, The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Arthur, thank you for everything you do. Thank you for all the wisdom you share. And thank you so much for coming onto the show.

1:54:35Arthur Brooks:I'm delighted to be with you. It's such an important thing that you're doing. And it's, as they say in the world of talk radio in America, long-time listener, first-time guest. and I really, really appreciate what you're doing, you having me here today.

1:54:52Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. now before you go just wanted to let you know about Friday 5 it's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness in that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else including health advice how to manage your time better interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.

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1:56:53And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.