How to Find the Meaning of Your Life in an Age of Emptiness | Arthur Brooks - EP 748

20:19Arthur Brooks:God knows. It's a mystery and a painful one at that a lot of the time. The third way is to actually find transcendence. And you transcend yourself by looking upward to God or looking outward to other people and serving them, as you just say. The fourth way is to find your calling through work, just as Viktor Frankl talks about, which is not what am I good at or what people pay me to do. It's what's in my heart? What's my calling? What am I meant to do? And in this book, I talk about the ways to actually find that. The fifth is finding, is looking for beauty, and moral beauty is one of them, as well as natural beauty and artistic beauty.

20:52Arthur Brooks:And last but not least, it's through suffering and finding meaning in your suffering, by which you have to stop resisting your suffering. And this is one of the biggest mistakes that young people have today. In our technologized culture, there's a belief that suffering means there's a defect, there's a pathology. and therefore you must resist it. You must eliminate it if you possibly can. And that of course is eliminating the meaningful life itself. I think Frankl, when he was talking about suffering, he always referred to it as a suffering you can't avoid. Meaning if you're in a point of suffering and you can find a way out of it, then do.

21:26But if you find yourself with a life-threatening condition or you're going through the death of a loved one or some other type of suffering, suffering it's really seeing a path through that that takes you through it which i think is really

21:40Arthur Brooks:an important clarification it is there's little versions of that there's a lot of literature that suggests bruce feiler's stuff talks about every 18 months you have a transition you that you don't expect and every five years you have a catastrophe that you really hate and one of these things is life-threatening illnesses but we have suffering as small as a flight delay that we can't control and the truth is that the buddhists talk about the fact that suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. You can try to reduce the pain, but a lot of times you can't and you shouldn't. In those cases, you need to reduce the resistance.

22:14Arthur Brooks:And reducing the resistance is really what it's all about. This is one of the reasons that one element of strength and courage is patience. And that's something that we've lost entirely in our technologized left brain culture. We don't have patience when we're on the left is what it comes down to. And so the result is that we're going to have more and more futile resistance and then the suffering is going to be more intense and actually less meaningful than it could be. Arthur, in my first book, I was trying to describe the unconscious state that I think so many people are drifting through life as their approach to life.

22:48And I often hear people use the word, people are living on autopilot. Right. And I always think it's the wrong analogy because when you put the plane on autopilot, it's too many of us are living like we're a pinball in the game instead of playing the game. I don't know if you agree with that analogy, but I think modern life is crowding out meaning in some ways through actively rewarding behaviors that strip significance away. Yeah. And we're like that pinball and it's like micro choice by micro choice. our significance and our meaning happens over time. Do you agree with that? That's a purpose problem, really.

23:34Arthur Brooks:Because one of the things that you find is when somebody feels like their life is we who've suffered through a lot of graduate training and statistics, we call that a random walk. And the random walk is just like what it sounds. It's a random walk. And your life feels like a random walk. That means you don't have purpose. Purpose is goals and direction so that you know you're making progress. And this is one of the key elements of the meaning of life. It's one of the defining elements of the meaning of life. And so when I talk to somebody who feels like a pinball, the ball in the pinball machine, somebody whose life feels like a random walk, the first thing I start talking about is, okay, we got to set some goals.

24:09Arthur Brooks:We got to set some goals here in life. And once they do, boy, oh boy, there's a lot of research on this that shows that students, young adults, their life gets so much better when they're moving towards something as opposed to just avoiding boredom, avoiding discomfort, avoiding suffering. Because here's the thing, the ball and the paintball machine, what's going on is it hits the bumper and the bumper springs it away. And so everything is this avoidance, avoidance. The ball isn't actually going anywhere. It's avoiding things that it's been repelled from. And that's what people's life actually looks like.

24:42Arthur Brooks:Let's get into a different game where there's something better in the future. We can define it and we can start making progress toward it. That's when meaning really start to become quite obvious and manifest. Yeah, I've been working my way through Yuval's most recent book on information networks. And it's been interesting to hear what he's writing about. But where I'm going with this is, I was recently going through this section where he was talking about modern day technologies and the algorithms that are underneath them, and how they're completely disrupting the way that information used to flow because they're manipulating it.

25:18And you bring this concept of doom loop, where my interpretation of a doom loop is technology is soothing our meaninglessness while deepening it at the same time. Can you go into that a little bit more? Why does that distraction feel like relief, but function like erosion? So humans hate boredom.

25:38Arthur Brooks:We naturally hate boredom. And Mother Nature doesn't care. We've been bored from time immemorial. Our brains are the same as they were 250 ,000 years ago. And I'm telling you, John, life was alternating between boring and scary a lot, 250 ,000 years ago. And it was unpleasant for a lot of that, but that's the way our brains were supposed to work. Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. She wants us to survive and pass on our genes. And we need to actually do nothing and be bored a lot more than we currently are. There's tons of research showing how much people actually don't like it. But here's the way to think about it.

26:12Arthur Brooks:I guarantee you that granddad Miles never once said to grandma Miles, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. No, he did not say that. And that's because his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. He was bored a lot and he wasn't freaking out. He wasn't having panic attacks and depressive episodes, nearly like people actually do today. It was very rare in those days because we're disequilibrated is the way that this works out. It's very important for us to understand that we can't use these algorithms to create this simulation of modern life and think that there are going to be no consequences to this.

26:50Arthur Brooks:So that's what Yuval Harari is actually talking about is these complicated simulacra, these complicated simulations of the way that things are actually supposed to work. We're supposed to actually have real spontaneity in our lives, real sense of boredom and beauty alternating. We're supposed to have mystery and meaning and things that we actually can't understand. And if we don't, if it's all worked out, if we're actually saying, okay, I'm going to work it out in the simulation here, I'm not going to see nature, I'm going to see nature on the screen. I'm not going to have actual dates with people that are really spontaneous.

27:23Arthur Brooks:I'm going to solve for my relationships with my dating app. Well, that's going to have super strong consequences. And among them are a sense of life emptying out and feeling meaningless. It is such an issue. And one of the questions that I get all the time, I've got two kids now who are 21 and 27. I've got another similar to your kids. I have another niece who's in the army right now. And they are constantly asking me, what should we study? What should we focus on? Because they're all so worried about getting replaced by all the technology and everything that's around them. For kids that are facing that, even your own kids, what advice do you give them?

28:04Arthur Brooks:So one of the things I talk about, the biggest questions that I get actually in my work, and I will address this, how do you not be replaced? But the big question I get is how do these new technologies, mostly AI, how do they affect happiness? How does AI affect happiness? And the answer is number one, AI is a great assistant to the left brain, the how to and what, and it's a terrible assistant to the right brain, which is the why part. So if you're using it to answer questions, technological questions, the technical questions, et cetera, and that frees up your time, which you then spend in relationship with others, great, you'll get happier.

28:38Arthur Brooks:However, if you try to use it as your girlfriend or as your buddy or as your therapist, it's going to make you lonely and sad and anxious. I promise everybody listening to us that your brain knows the difference and you're going to feel empty. And you might not be able to describe why, but that's actually the case. Now, how is it actually going to affect us going forward? And what should we actually study? So what we want to do is to stay employed, be able to support ourselves and our families, to be productive. But at the same time, we want to have meaning and happiness in our lives. So how do you do this?

29:12Arthur Brooks:AI will never replace the hands and the heart. It's just not going to. And so when we're actually doing things that are productive, that use our bodies, and we do things that actually use our hearts, or we're connecting with other people, we become unreplaceable. But if you're nothing more than a not very fast computer, that's not great. That's actually not going to be how it works because a bigger left brain than yours is going to replace yours. So in other words, think about what you can do that leverages your right hemisphere, not things that are living. Look, everybody watching this podcast, they're smart.

29:44Arthur Brooks:They're smart. That's why they're listening to this podcast. But being smart just means that you've got a really fast left hemisphere, a really well-developed left hemisphere. Think about stuff that actually leverages your right hemisphere, your EQ, not just your IQ, your social skills, your compassion, your willingness and ability to connect with other people, your true deep creativity, your appreciation for beauty, your ability to connect people with the divine. Those are the things, even if you're in an intellectual profession like me, your comparative advantage is going to be on those social and soft and mystery-based skills that exist on the right side.

30:22Last week, I had the opportunity for the first time to interview Mark Nepo. And he said something that stayed with me. I asked him what he thought was the most fundamental thing that we need to focus on in life. And he said it was love, but he described love not as emotion or romance, but as the act of showing up fully to what's in front of you, holding nothing back. Right. How do you contrast that with the modern love depression that you write about?

30:47Arthur Brooks:In a couple of ways. To begin with, I completely agree with that definition. Thomas Aquinas, you and I are Catholic guys, so we had to read a lot of that stuff in school. But Thomas Aquinas, he defined love. We don't know. He was the 13th century philosopher who defined love as to will the good of the other as other. That's the definition of love. Nothing about feelings or sentiments. It's an act. It's a commitment. It's a decision. Notwithstanding your feelings, you can always choose to love by willing somebody else's good as them. That's the whole idea of showing up for them. So that's a really good definition of love.

31:20Arthur Brooks:Now, the problem that we have today is number one is defined as feelings. And feelings, as we talked about in our last conversation on your show, about the management of emotion, that the idea that you would be relying on your emotions to have a good friendship, to have a good marriage. I've been married 34 years, John. If it were all about emotions, I wouldn't have been married 34 minutes. Because there's quarreling and there's this agreement and emotions clash. But the fact is my marriage is based on actual love where she wills my good as me and I will her good as her. And she'll be the person that I'm looking at as I take my dying breath as a result of that.

31:58Arthur Brooks:That's number one, what the modern, what modern culture is taking away from us. Second, modern culture technologically is trying to solve for this problem. You can't solve love. You can only live love. You can't actually, you have to understand it by living it is the way that this works, which is why love is so awesome. because it's not a problem that you can solve like building a toaster or creating a piece of software that will find you a pizza at 10 p.m. That's not the way it's supposed to work, and that's not the way anything good in life actually works. I want to switch directions just for a second.

32:30Last week, I also did a fun conversation. I had Rick Hansen on with Joshua Green, who you might know from Harvard. Yeah, of course. And we were talking about how do you expand the circle of moral concern. And as you think about meaning and how we're so much today in this us versus them type of mentality, how do the two connect?

32:52Arthur Brooks:The most transgressive teaching in all of humanity is contained in the Gospel of St. Matthew in the Christian Bible, Matthew 5, 44, which for those who are not steeped in this stuff, that's the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus gave this crazy teaching. He said, you have heard that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. But today I give you a new teaching, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Love your enemies. Now remember what love is. Love is to will the good of the other as other. So it doesn't matter how you feel about your enemies, because that's not the point.

33:23Arthur Brooks:Jesus didn't say, go like your enemies, go have warm fuzzies for your enemies. He didn't say that. He said to love your enemies. And he could have said, notwithstanding your feelings, which is what Dr. Martin Luther King actually added in a sermon on that in 1957, a very famous sermon that people can actually listen to on the internet. So the point of all that is that changed society, and that should change our lives today. Even if you're not religious at all, the idea that you could actually not hate and destroy your enemies is the reason for the enlightenment. The enlightenment, this idea that not everything has to be based on force, that we can actually try to persuade each other.

34:01Arthur Brooks:Persuasion is based on this idea that John and I might disagree on something, but Arthur's going to try to persuade John and John's going to try to persuade Arthur. And by the way, if one of us persuades the other, we both win. Because if you persuaded me, I'm like, huh, you're right. That's a better way to think. And that's how modern life is supposed to be built. Unfortunately, that's what we forget all the time. That persuasion is better than coercion. Negotiation is better than coercion. And all of that comes from this idea of love. It comes to the idea of loving in a different way, even if you don't feel it.

34:32Arthur Brooks:And that's incredibly powerful for each one of us. That gets lost in modern life. That gets lost in human life, quite frankly. Yeah. I'm not sure why my mind went to this, but as you were talking about that act of Jesus, I was thinking about when he is with his disciples and he's on his knees washing their feet. Right. And when I think of this us versus them, I often think how many of us would do that same thing to those around us that Jesus did humble yourself in front of those around you. What are your thoughts on that? Well, when you humble yourself or when you serve somebody else from basic goodness, you're actually doing yourself the best possible favor, because that's how you find meaning.

35:16Arthur Brooks:That's the idea of transcendence to transcend by looking upward. And you've had Dakar Keltner on your show before, and you've had him on the show, right, John? Oh, yeah, I've had that. And Dacher, he talks about awe, standing in awe of something greater than you. You find meaning when you're outside of yourself, when you're transcending yourself. When you're looking in at yourself, you're not going to find meaning. You're just going to be a tortured soul the more you look in on yourself. But another way to do that is by looking outward to others and willing their good as them. That's a kind of love toward another.

35:46Arthur Brooks:But it's also the ultimate method of self-preservation. That's what William James, the father of modern psychology, called the I-self. The I-self is to look outward. The me-self is to look inward. And you're going to do that because we're self-reflective and we're self-conscious so that we know where our car is in traffic. We're not smashing into other people, for sure. But the I-self is the relief that people actually get when they look to the stars or read philosophy or practice their religion or serve somebody else. And that's what we need a lot more of. washing somebody else's feet, doing something that actually benefits somebody and not just you is the best, fastest way to get happier and find meaning in life.

36:27Arthur, I did a whole series on transcendence a few years ago. I had Dacher, Scott Barry Kaufman, David Yadin, and David Vago, all in succession, and Andrew Newberg. And it was so fascinating how these out-of-body type of experiences that we get into, and you can get into them using psychedelics, what they were saying is you get into them the most by observing acts of kindness that others are doing, really renews faith. But more than that, it reminds you that the world matters, people matter in it, you still matter in the world. Is that what your research has found as well?

37:05Arthur Brooks:Absolutely. And I've been studying other focused behavior for decades. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the topic. I do people give. It's so weird. They're not buying anything at all except the meaning of life it turns out and it's also weird because i find that on college campuses inevitably one of the most popular classes among undergraduates is astronomy 101 and they're not astronomers why is it and the answer is because they'll go into class on thursday morning they just had a argument with their mom and they're afraid they're afraid that their boyfriend is breaking up with them and they got a b and at harvard that's like some big tragedy And they go in and they come out an hour and a half later saying, I'm a speck on a speck.

37:46Arthur Brooks:And it gives them relief because it gives them peace and perspective. And we got to get out of ourselves. We have to get out of the psychodrama of me. If you want to find the meaning of life, you got to start looking outward and stop looking inward. Yeah, I love that. Speaking of that course, when I was at the academy, we had to take celestial navigation. And all of us used to always wonder, in the age of GPS, why are you making us learn to study the stars? I know. My daughter, but our listeners don't, she's at officer training school at Quantico as a Marine Corps officer. And she has to do this night land nav.

38:20Arthur Brooks:You remember night land nav? Oh, yeah. And that's where, with a compass, you have to go out in the dead of night in the forest looking for ammunition dumps, ammunition boxes. And you got to keep taking the test over and over and over again, as if you're qualified now to win the Battle of the Bulge or something like that. But the truth of the matter is that these are basic skills that who knows when navigation gets knocked out because of an electromagnetic pulse or something that you might need these at some point. Well, that's the exact answer we got from our professors. It has come in handy for me one time.

38:51I happened to be on a sailboat at night. We were lost and my training kicked back in.

38:56Arthur Brooks:There you go. That's right. So you finally used that class from the Naval Academy. Great. You conclude that we don't find meaning. Meaning finds us. What do people have to stop proving before that becomes possible? It's a funny thing about all sorts of wisdom that people actually get. You always think that you're looking for something. And then what you find is if it's of sufficient value, sufficient spiritual value, that you have to get yourself into a position where that knowledge, that wisdom can find you. And I found that out in my own life. I started on this project because in point of fact, I'm not immune to these problems of meaning.

39:31Arthur Brooks:And I was having a huge meaning crisis when I was 55 years old, six years ago. I'm 55 years old and I had left a job. I retired as president of a big think tank in Washington. And I felt like I didn't know who I was, which happens a lot, by the way, when you step away from a real vocational thing. And so I went for a very long walk. This is what Catholics do when we don't know what to do. We go for a super long walk. And this was the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. And I walked and walked and I was sore. and I had blisters and I was tired, but I was also without devices and I was praying and I was with my wife and I was doing all of these things that I talk about in this book.

40:10Arthur Brooks:I talk about the six ways to find meaning, which are really the six ways to open the aperture in your soul and mind so that meaning will find you. And sure enough, on my last day of this long pilgrimage, I felt like I was gifted with the information that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together and bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas, which is what I dedicated the rest of my life to doing. That's what I get to do right now on your show, as a matter of fact. That's why I write my books is what it comes down to. And that's how meaning found me, but I had to be tired and I had to be open and I had to really open my heart and open my soul to it.

40:48Arthur Brooks:So these are the means, this is a guidebook on how to open your soul, really is this book. I love that analogy. And it leads me to a philosophical question as I was thinking about, as you were saying that, is it possible for life to be deeply meaningful if no one ever witnesses it? Meaning, if your significance is never mirrored back to you, or does meaning require some form of being seen by others? That's a good question. With a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Is it meaningful, I guess, is the whole question. And the answer is almost certainly yes, provided that you believe that you truly aren't the only intelligence, You aren't the only being that exists out there.

41:30Arthur Brooks:And so what you find, for example, is you can find documentaries about Carthusian monks who live in relative isolation, an exploited monastery, praying in small acts of service and praying, but not being ever regarded for it by the world, but have deeply meaningful lives. And that's one of the reasons that what's more important than, certainly more important than the applause of the world, is believing like you're doing something good because this is what you're made to do. that this is what your real moral goal is to do in life, because this is why you've been put on earth. Right now, a lot of people are talking about the loneliness epidemic, which is real.

42:07But I'm wondering if we should be talking more about how rarely we're talking about people being needed. Do you think that's necessary now and that we should be doing that more?

42:20Arthur Brooks:For sure. Now, to begin with, the loneliness epidemic has everything to do with the fact that the brain does not consider you to be with others when you're online. It's as simple as that. It's the abuse of technology where we substitute electronically mediated relationships for real relationships. That's the matrix. That's the simulation of real life. You can't simulate meaning. You can't simulate love. It can't be done. And that's the reason that the more you date online, the more troubling it becomes. And this is one of the most terrible scourges in our society today is that of internet pornography, for example.

42:54Arthur Brooks:Not as a moral concern. People can figure that out for themselves, but because it makes them feel intensely lonely. When they feel like they're virtually with somebody else, but they're not with that other person, that makes them feel intensely alone, depressed, anxious, sad, even self-harming as a result of this. And so that's incredibly important is that you need other people in real life. Then what do you need to do? You need to be needed by them. You need to be needed by those people, which is one of the best ways to be less lonely is to have a child. And again, it's not because the child is going to be saying, I love you, I love you.

43:28Arthur Brooks:On the contrary, you know perfectly you've got kids, so do I. They don't tell you that much. It's because they actually need you. And it's the intense practice of being in person with somebody who needs you. That's the end of loneliness for most people. One more just philosophical question for you. One thing that worries me today is how good people have become at enduring lives that quietly drain them. At what point does endurance stop being resilience and start becoming some kind of disappearance for people? And is that part of why meaning is disappearing? Yeah, for sure. It's actually the great trick, which is that we believe that we're being refreshed and in our distraction when we spend a whole lot of time on devices.

44:07Arthur Brooks:but what it really does is it's draining us of attention and distracting us by actually stressing us out. That's what's actually happening. We're being fooled all the time by the way that we use YouTube reels and scrolling social media. It's actually stressing you out and making you feel and making you less refreshed, even though you think it's making you more refreshed. And so this is an accelerant to all the things that we're actually doing. People often will make the same kind of mistake in their ordinary lives. At my university, for example, they'll say, if you're all stressed out, you need more self-care, more self-care.

44:42Arthur Brooks:And then there's this new thing called radical self-care where you marginalize other people in favor of yourself. That's exactly wrong. Exactly wrong. If you're lonely, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you need other care. You need to serve other people. Now, there are people who give so much of themselves that they completely forget themselves and wipe themselves out. We're not very much in danger of that right now i think we're much too much in danger of frittering away our time online and thinking about ourselves 24 7 and that's what we need to get away from get off the devices get toward people that you love and who love you and that you need and you need them because because you're needed by them this is the solution it's love so last question for you author, you've been spending years thinking and writing about happiness and meaning.

45:31What part of the human ache do you still feel you don't quite have language for yet?

45:37Arthur Brooks:That's an interesting question because it turns out that the more I learn, the less language I actually do have for the following reason. And this is a technical reason, so bear with me. The language centers of the human brain sit in the left cortex. They sit over here. So in my brain, I don't think we're doing mirrors here. This is for people watching us. The left hemisphere includes two areas called Broca's area and Wernicke's area. One is for understanding language and the other is for pronouncing language. It's for speaking. And it's really important because what it means is that the words that you have for something are in this technical left hemisphere, but the things that you understand that have the deepest meaning are ineffable, which means that they're beyond language.

46:20Arthur Brooks:And the more that I actually work in the realm of love and happiness, the more that I write books about it and I do my best, but the more that I realize that life is really all about experience and not about language. And that's certainly true in my own life as well. I've stopped trying to analyze many important things. I've just tried to just live things in ways that I haven't before. I try to live in my relationship with God, with my wife, with my kids, with my grandchildren, with my friends, and stop trying to say, I got to get the words because the words are on the other side. Arthur, I love the book.

46:56I love this discussion. And what I really took away from this is both sobering and hopeful. Meaning hasn't disappeared, but our ways of living have made it much harder to see. But with intention, courage, and devotion, it can return. And I think it's such a powerful message. For people who you're very discoverable, but for people who want to learn more, where's the best place for them to go?

47:20Arthur Brooks:Arthurbrooks.com. That's my website. It's got all my columns. It's got my television appearances. It has links to the book. But also for people who get the book, The Meaning of Your Life, it also has a lot of extra resources. So you can do a reading group. It gives you points to think about, even some PowerPoints so that you can share it with your friends, whatever it happens to be. So you can go deeper on anything that I write, speak, or teach by going to Arthurbrooks.com. I love that because to me, it's kind of like a podcast episode. I always do a companion workbook and I'll do one for this episode because it's one thing to hear information.

47:52It's another thing to apply it in your life. And that's what I'm trying to get people to do because if not, what's the point?

47:58Arthur Brooks:Exactly right, John. Exactly right. And that's what your work is doing. It's enriched me and millions of other people so very much because you're going deep on the things that actually matter. And I'm super appreciative and grateful to you for that. Well, Arthur, always such an honor to have you on the show. And I'm happy to welcome you back for number four when the next book comes out. Thank you, John. And thanks to all of your audience for staying with it. And most importantly, not just from learning from you, but for sharing these ideas with other people who need them. That's what it's all about.

48:26Right on. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Arthur Brooks. What stood out most to me is this. Meaning hasn't disappeared, but our way of living has made it harder to access. We've built lives around productivity, around efficiency, around constant stimulation, but in doing so, we've drifted away from the very things that create meaning, such as love, service, connection, and transcendence. Arthur reminds us that a meaningful life isn't found in what you accumulate. It's found in how you relate to others, to your work, and to something greater than yourself. And that insight leads directly into our next conversation.

49:01On Thursday, I'm joined by Corinne Lowe. While today's episode explored meaning at a deeper personal level, Corinne examines how the systems around us, such as work, incentives, and economic structures shape the choices we make and the lives we build. Because purpose isn't formed in isolation, it's influenced by the environments we operate within. It's a powerful continuation of purpose by design, moving from inner meaning to the external structures that shape it.

49:27Arthur Brooks:For parents, we want to endlessly pour energy into our kids and we do let ourselves become depleted. We skip the gym or we skip the things that we need to take care of ourselves. I think the piece that we miss is that when we're not getting that energy in, the energy that's flowing out becomes degraded also. So what we're putting into our kids actually isn't as high quality when we are not getting that energy flow in that we need. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it. Leave a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and explore more reflections from this series at TheIgnitedLife.net.

50:07Until next time, remember, a meaningful life isn't something you find once, it's something you build through what you choose to value, how you choose to serve, and who you choose to become. I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck.