Arthur Brooks on how to build a meaningful life

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0:56Arthur Brooks:I believe that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle. It's how you live your life because you are the startup. You are the startup. Or as Reid Hoffman would put it, this is about the startup of you. If you're scaling a business right now, that will no doubt ring true. But Arthur Brooks isn't just talking about people literally building a company. He wants all of us to approach our personal lives as seriously as we approach our professional lives. To help us do that, Arthur just published an absolutely unputdownable, that's a word, unputdownable new book called The Meaning of Your Life. While we had him, I couldn't resist digging into some other topics as well, like the state of capitalism in 2026.

1:45Arthur Brooks:I truly believe in capitalism, but I believe we have to have capitalism with a soul. If you elevate it to your religion, look out. Because you're ironically going to stop practicing capitalism, central to which is competition. Competition is what we love. Competition in markets leads to consumers actually benefiting because they have multiple options. Competition in politics leads to democracy and everybody hates uncontested elections except tyrants.

2:19This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host this week on the show, the one and only Arthur Brooks. A bestselling author, Arthur led a prominent conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, for a decade. Now, he's a Harvard professor, best known for his work on the science of happiness. His new book is The Meaning of your life. The book and our conversation are both packed with actionable advice for living with purpose.

2:52Arthur, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thanks. It's great to be with you. It's terrific to be with you. There's so much to discuss with you. I'm not sure how we're going to fit it all in. We've been seeing a lot and talking a lot about a loneliness epidemic in America. I'm curious if you think that there is a meaning or purpose epidemic in America right now as well.

3:11Arthur Brooks:Yeah, I do. And the reason is because I study happiness and unhappiness. That's my stock and trade. I teach classes on the science of happiness at the Harvard Business School. And I came back to academia in 2019 after 11 years away running a company. I came back in 2019. It was like a plague had gone through my village. When I left academia, it was happier than the rest of the world. I mean, people in college were falling in love and making friends and goofing around, partying, and also having their minds blown by big ideas. And in 2019, depression had tripled, anxiety had doubled, the loneliness crisis was upon us.

3:46Arthur Brooks:And this was immediately a Sherlock Holmes problem for me as a behavioral scientist. So I use my skills forensically when I see problems. You're going to look for a blockage to well-being. And there's three channels of well-being that you're going to look at. One is enjoyment, which is not pleasure. It's pleasure plus people plus memory. It's, you know, pleasure doesn't lead you to happiness. The pursuit of pleasure leads you to rehab. But when you actually add people and memory to it, you transfer the experience of the pleasure into the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive centers of the brain where pleasures can be managed and they don't manage you.

4:24Arthur Brooks:The second is satisfaction. And satisfaction is the joy from an accomplishment after struggle. The whole audience to this show is super high in satisfaction. They struggle and struggle and accomplish a lot. And they want to accomplish even more, which is why they're listening to the show, is what it comes down to. And that's really, really important. And I talk about that an awful lot. The last channel is meaning. And meaning is this idea that life has a coherence to it. life, you know, that things happen for a reason, that you do things for a reason, which is your purpose, and that your life is significant, that your life matters.

4:59Arthur Brooks:And so when I see a huge depression, anxiety epidemic, a psychogenic epidemic of misery, basically, psychogenic just means lots of misery, no biological origin, I know one of those channels is blocked. So I go to the research, and I'm doing the research because that's what I do, and I find that enjoyment, as the word's always been. Young people enjoy their lives, everybody as much as people my age. Satisfaction, especially at the Harvard Business School where I teach, is through the roof, man. They're struggling for big things. Tons of satisfaction, but meaning is cratered. Meaning has cratered since about 2008.

5:33Arthur Brooks:As a matter of fact, the best predictor of depression and anxiety for young adults is the answer yes to the question, does your life feel meaningless? That's the best predictor. So now the plot thickens because I have to figure out what's meaning mean, where do you find meaning, and how do you fix the problem? What have you learned about what are the biggest contributing factors to this decline in meaning? There's lots of things that have actually led to a general decline in well-being. I mean, there's kind of these climate problems. I don't mean literally climate problems, the climate of happiness.

6:06Arthur Brooks:And that has to do with faith and family and friendship and work that serves other people. The orientation toward all those things has declined. Then there's these big storms that we see, kind of the weather of happiness, which is, you know, number one, sure. In 2007, the first iPhone was delivered, but it became utterly ubiquitous very quickly. In 2008, 2009, apps started to go on the iPhone. By 2012, people were dating on apps on the iPhone, et cetera, et cetera. It became a central part of our life experience. And we know, by the way, that this has pulled people apart from each other, right?

6:39Arthur Brooks:The second big storm was this increase in political polarization, which really was coming around by about 2012, 2013, like we see it today. And the last, of course, was the coronavirus epidemic. The problem wasn't the coronavirus. The problem is what we did about the coronavirus, which pulled people apart, left people in a very, very lonely state. It actually reoriented them toward the way that they self-soothe. People really started using their smartphones to self-soothe during the coronavirus epidemic and lost skills, among other things. A mediation of relationships through tech. That's what actually did it.

7:12Arthur Brooks:That led to a sense of meaninglessness. Now, the investigation has to ask why. So what's the why? The why is that we started using our brains differently. I do big survey work. And that was really what tipped me off on the meaning part because people kept saying, you know, I'm doing everything right, but I don't know what I'm meant to do. And, you know, I'm following all the rules, but my life feels empty. It feels meaningless. They kept using the meaning word, which is really how I got hot on that case. But there's a second part to it, which is when I asked people about the way that they live their lives, especially young people, and most especially highly educated young people.

7:46Arthur Brooks:They talk about achievement. They talk about solving problems. Great, right? I ask them how they spend their day. And it's kind of like this, you know, I wake up because my phone wakes me up because it's my alarm clock. I look at my messages and I look at my phone a little bit. Then while I'm looking at my phone, while I'm eating my breakfast and drinking my coffee, and then I go to work, which is a lot of the time it's on the the Zoom screen. And I talk to my friends. Well, I don't talk to my friends. They're on social media. And I date. Well, kind of. I mean, I date on the apps and do game. Yeah, I game a lot.

8:17Arthur Brooks:It's kind of how I have a lot of friends with gaming. And I get a sense of satisfaction from that. And the bottom line is there's nothing wrong with any one of those channels. The problem is that it adds up to 12 hours a day. And this is where it got interesting. I was talking to a young guy about this. And he's kind of flat in his affect because, man, he's been anesthetized by all this. And he said, I feel like I'm living in a simulation because he is, you know, you and I are old enough to remember the matrix, which I'm going to shock you and sadden you. That was 27 years ago. I don't want to hear that.

8:48Arthur Brooks:That movie was super fantastic, far out science fiction about an artificial intelligence, a mechanical artificial intelligence, which was subjugating humanity for an energy source, which was their attention that was sucking out their attention, their energy, keeping them in suspended animation by feeding them up kind of a pleasant simulacrum for real life. Dude, we're in the simulation. We're literally in the plot of that movie is what it comes down to. And the reason that the rebels like fight against the matrix in that movie, Neo Keanu Reeves, the coolest dude ever is because he wanted his life to have meaning.

9:26Arthur Brooks:And the only way he could have meaning is to have a real life, not a simulated life. Now, here's where the plot thickens on all of this. There's a new cutting edge theory in neuroscience called the theory of hemispheric lateralization. When we were kids, we thought that you had analytical people and artsy people. That was largely abandoned. Right. You're a left brain person. You're a right brain person. Right, right, right. But the new research on this, which has largely been spearheaded by Ian McGilchrist, the Oxford neuroscientist, is that there is a hemispheric lateralization that distinguishes, and this is important for everybody listening to us, between complicated problems and complex problems.

10:01Arthur Brooks:The left hemisphere of the brain solves complicated problems, which is problems that are, they're hard to solve, but with how to and what knowledge, you can solve them once and for all. What's an example of a complicated problem? Creating a piece of software that will find the closest pizza to you at 10 p.m., building a toaster, figuring out how to get from the San Fernando Valley to Orange County. These are complicated problems. Especially at the wrong time of day. I know, I know. These are complicated problems. and our life is full of them. And we need to be able to do that. The right side of the brain deals with complex problems.

10:33Arthur Brooks:Complex problems are why questions that don't always have answers. They're easy to understand, unlike complicated problems, and impossible to solve. Such as? Such as my marriage. Such as my cat. Such as a football game. You know, I watch NFL football. I'm a big Seahawks fan. I grew up in Seattle. Oh, we were going to be friends. Look at this. We can still be friends across our differences. All right, fair enough. I love NFL football because I can't simulate it with the most powerful computers in the world, with computing horsepower beyond our wildest imaginations. There are too many permutations.

11:09Arthur Brooks:The complexity of it defies that. That's why I feel like I'm on the field. That's why I'm excited when I'm watching. My marriage will never be solved. I've been married 34 years and it's still as complex as it ever was. I'll have an argument with my wife today because we always do. you know and i can't solve it i couldn't you know put into chat gpt how do i never have an argument with my wife again i would get garbage back you'd end up with more arguments with your wife i would it would screw up my marriage even worse because it's a complex problem see the thing is we have a lot of complicated solutions in the technologized world and especially that in which we inhabit a simulation in which we're living in tech all the time but the things we care about are complex which are the love problems, the mystery problems.

11:54Arthur Brooks:And there's one thing you can't actually simulate, and that's the meaning of your life. What's happening in modern life with the hustle culture, the engineered culture that we live in, where the tip of the spear is the way and amount that we're using tech in our lives, is pushing us to the left hemispheres of our brain, where we don't deal with, we can't even conceive of right hemispheric questions. Not only do we not know the meaning of our lives, we're not even asking the questions. So two questions from that. One, what are the right questions? And two, is the meaning of your life, the name of the book, a complicated question, a complex question?

12:35Arthur Brooks:The meaning of your life is a complex question. And I'm trying to avoid in the book coming up with a complicated answer to it. And the answer to it basically is using your brain the way it was supposed to be used. And there's a lot of examples in here about to convince people that their brains are being used in the wrong way. I talk an awful lot about boredom, for example, and the fact that boredom is incredibly important for the human brain. Today, people who have eradicated boredom largely through their use of technology, they're never bored minute to minute, but their life is unbelievably boring.

13:07Arthur Brooks:That is an example of our brains working in an inadequate way to meet our needs. and that's because we're sitting on the left side where we're eradicated moment to moment boredom, but we've never illuminated the right side, which is actually what cosmically, what metaphysically makes our life feel interesting to us. So what does boredom do for us? What boredom does is literally when we're not doing anything, our brain will start working on cycles, on complex questions that don't have easy answers, that don't have obvious answers, that don't have answers that we can state. What happens is when you're being distracted, you're being distracted by complicated things.

13:47Arthur Brooks:When you're not being distracted, your mind ranges to complex things. I'm curious if it's actually boredom or if it is blank space. It is the latter. The boredom is what people experience typically. That's a negative experience largely. And we know this as a negative experience because people, when they have blank space, then they feel bored and then they try to eradicate it. I mean, Dan Gilbert, my colleague at Harvard, who's a visionary social psychologist, he's done boredom experiments where he puts people in a room in a chair for 15 minutes with nothing to do and nothing to look at, nothing to listen to.

14:22Arthur Brooks:And the only choice they have besides sitting there quietly is pushing a key fob with a button that will shock them. Self-administrate painful electric shocks. In 15 minutes, a quarter of the women shock themselves and two-thirds of the dudes, which is all you need to know about dudes, right? And the way that we use technology to distract ourselves such that we don't experience boredom in response to the natural parts of life where there's nothing else has led to a catastrophic lack of meaning because of the way it makes our brains work. If you were counseling a group of entrepreneurs, of aspiring business leaders, what would you be saying to them about how to use boredom, downtime, blank space to grow in their professional lives?

15:05For them, don't let tech steal your boredom.

15:09Arthur Brooks:Don't let tech steal your blank space. And that means you have to do it on purpose. And so one of the things that I strongly recommend, remember that your best ideas come in the shower. That's because your phone isn't in there. So I have a set of protocols of tech-free times and zones that I recommend, especially to entrepreneurs that need the default mode network more than they understand. I recommend the Brahma Mahurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time. I recommend a walk before dawn. And I do this a lot. Get up at least a half an hour before dawn and an hour-long walk without devices.

15:39Arthur Brooks:It's a good protocol to reprogram your brain for 30 days. It's a really good thing to do. And for entrepreneurs, if you're finding that your creativity is taking a nosedive and you don't know why, this is your reboot. That's where the reboot starts. That's important. Still ahead, Arthur Brooks on why it's hard for CEOs to make friends.

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17:22No bandwidth limits, no data leaving your machine, just the freedom to generate high-fidelity video with synchronized audio at roughly one-eighth the cost and one-seventh the rendering time of comparable tools. Start creating at ltx.io slash model. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel. And be sure to check out the link in our show notes to subscribe to our newsletter. Arthur says a lack of meaning can fester when your life doesn't involve taking risks. and the most important risk to take, falling in love.

18:04Arthur Brooks:Your life is an adventure. Your life should be exciting. And there's more excitement and there's more reward when you learn how to manage risk and you take it. And that really leads into one of the great truths about how to find the meaning of your life, which is to calculate and take more risk. And the most important risk that you can actually take is by falling in love. It's actually falling in love with a real person and having the real risk of having your heart broken. And that's what it comes down to because a life where you understand and you're willing to take risk is an exciting and a wonderful life.

18:35Arthur Brooks:And some people are, they have more tolerance for it. Some people have less, but everybody can have a greater entrepreneurial orientation toward life. And a lot of what I teach my students is how to treat their life more effectively like a startup. It's funny because a lot of people don't think of themselves as business entrepreneurs, but then you teach them how to manage risk and how to be better at it and how to look at it, how to reframe it, not as danger, but as excitement. And they start doing it. They're like, oh, why has this been my whole life? So my goal in life is actually to help them live that way as opposed to just starting businesses.

19:09Arthur Brooks:And so, you know, when, when we think about it, the algebra of meaning really is about understanding so you can have control. It's about having purpose so you can make progress and it's about significance so that you can love and be loved. And that really kind of sums up the meaning of life. you've referenced friendship a couple of times here and one of the things you talk about are these three different classes and it's not going to be perfect but of friends there are friends who are utilitarian friends who bring you joy and then there are like the real friends could you just share a little bit about that framework this is important for people listen to this show so this is aristotelian aristotle was everything you want to know about friendship aristotle wrote about this because he felt that friendship was deeply divine.

19:54Arthur Brooks:You know, these are not kin-based relationships. They might be in your kin group and the, you know, your Pleistocene band of 30 to 50 individuals. But, you know, by the time ancient Greece was rolling around, I mean, it was people that you just connect to in a particular way. And he noted that true love is actually going to come from a particular type of friendship, but that these aren't the only friendships that we have at the lowest level. And he doesn't mean this, he's not casting aspersions. He's just talking about the farthest away from these real friendships are the fringe of the transactional friendships.

20:26Arthur Brooks:These are useful people to you. And everybody listening to us has lots of useful friends. You know, they help you with your business. You know, they're your distributors. They're, you know, the people that have the office next door, et cetera, et cetera. You don't know their kids' birthdays, maybe not even their kids' names, right? And once you stop doing business with each other, you're not friends anymore. I mean, you don't get anything against them, but you just don't pursue it. Slightly higher is friendships of beauty. And these are friendships based on admiration. There's something you admire about a person.

20:56Arthur Brooks:They're funny, they're beautiful. But if that characteristic were to disappear, so would the friendship. At the highest level are those in which we have a mutual love. Mutual love, usually for a third thing. That's called a virtuous friendship. The virtuous friendship is that in which we're looking at something that really care about. Maybe it's, you know, NFL football, maybe it's faith. You know, the strongest marriages are virtuous friendships around a love of the children, right? Which is a beautiful thing. We have this mutual love of the children, which cements us together. There should be more to a good marriage than that, but that's the basis of it.

21:34Arthur Brooks:And it's really important to keep in mind that in life, if you want to achieve a sense of meaning through love, you got You got to have more than deal friends. Yeah. You got to have real friends. Yeah. And a lot of people, you know, the loneliest people I ever meet are CEOs. The loneliest people I meet. And the reason is because it's all deal, no real. Why? Because real friends take time and you're not compensated for it. But most of these CEOs didn't start as CEOs. If you've been 20 years into your career before you're a CEO, is it cause and effect? Like you think people are in the CEO chair because they've been so driven and they haven't invested in these real friendships?

22:11Arthur Brooks:Or what happens is the cost benefit analysis of time leads people away from relationships that are not compensatory in any sort of worldly form. So executive CEOs, entrepreneurs are the busiest people in the world. They're just super busy is what it comes down to. And who's got an hour for an idle conversation about the old days. So most CEOs I know, they had real friends in college, real friends in their 20s, and they had less and less and less and less. I gotta tell you, this sounds like an excuse to me. This sounds like BS to me. It's a little bit of put your own oxygen mask on first. And if you are uncomfortable with intimacy, if it is hard to maintain friendships over time and distance and having kids and the complications of sandwich generationing and all of that.

23:04Okay, but, and I'll speak from my personal, I mean, my real friendships, my third, that third category of friendships, they fill my bucket. I mean, I'm overflowing with joy and love when I spend time with, you know, Andrew or Cass or Adam or, you know, like these are my people. And so it strikes me that it's actually counterproductive for both meaning and how I think you and I would define success, maybe not how, you know, the resume success to not invest that time that way. I completely agree with you, but that's a common mistake that people make.