How To Spend More Time In This Time Zone (with Arthur Brooks)

0:00Ryan Holiday: So we live on Halloween Street and we go crazy over Halloween decorations. And we're having to do it twice this year because someone stole a bunch of our Halloween decorations. I don't blame them. We have awesome Halloween decorations. We actually got a bunch of them from Wayfair. Wayfair delivers high quality customer trusted products for your home so you can host and celebrate without the stress. So if you're in an arms race with your neighbor about who can have the scariest, biggest Halloween stuff, coolest, prettiest, most awesome Christmas lights, well, Wayfair is the place for you. Wayfair has thousands of products across every style and budget, whether simply replacing an appliance or transforming your home from top to bottom for the holiday season.

0:45Ryan Holiday: My favorite thing about shopping about Wayfair is the reviews. You know, you buy stuff online sometimes and then you get it and it's way smaller than it looked or it's garbage. You know, you want to see real photos from real people so you know what you're actually buying. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to Wayfair.com to shop all things home. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:24Ryan Holiday: How to spend more time in this time zone. It happens on the commute to work. It happens on walks. It happens when you're with family and friends. Happens when you're pining for that vacation. And then it happens when you're on that vacation. You're physically present, but your mind is traveling elsewhere. You're chewing on something somebody said or something somebody might say. You're replaying a past conversation or rehearsing a future one. At work, you're looking forward to the weekend, and over the weekend, you're dreading going back to work. On a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, the Harvard professor and happiness researcher, and I think I could say my friend, Arthur Brooks, explained how the brain is wired to do this kind of mental time travel, as he called it.

2:16Arthur Brooks: the human brain, the prefrontal cortex, is designed for you to time travel retrospectively, prospectively, and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now.

2:29Ryan Holiday: I mean, clearly Marcus Aurelius knew this struggle well. It's why we see him constantly reminding himself from every possible angle to limit yourself to the present, that the present is all we have to live or to lose. Remind yourself that the past and future have no power over you, he says, only the present. Concentrate on living what can be lived, he says, which means the present. Give yourself the gift, he says, of the present moment. Since we are wired not to receive this gift, we have to do what Marcus did. We have to constantly remind ourselves to stop time traveling, to leave the past and the future, to come back to the present, to concentrate on living in the here and now, because that's all we have.

3:18Ryan Holiday: And by the way, I've loved the conversations I've had with Arthur Brooks. And let's run a chunk of it now. Maybe we'll do that as part two of today's episode. Here's Arthur Brooks and I chatting a little bit.

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6:17Arthur Brooks: Your animal impulse tells you that it's about what you have and having more, which is the Gulf Stream, etc., which leads to ruin, absolute personal ruin. Talking about anything else, just personal ruin, because you can never have enough. It's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want. And the denominator is more important because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this Epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, wanting less and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise or enjoyment in this particular case.

6:49Arthur Brooks: But of course, asymptotically, it doesn't work. Right. You can't go to wanting nothing. Yeah. Because if you want nothing, well, I mean, wanting for nothing, I suppose, that's heaven, I guess. Right. Which is not what he was trying to create.

7:02Ryan Holiday: I just think like I think about his garden and the simplicity and the beauty. Right. And the long evenings. Right.

7:09Arthur Brooks: It's a pretty simple thing. What it is is really in modern thinking and in Buddhist thinking, but really in modern thinking, it's really a lot about mindfulness. Yeah. And that mindfulness is a very hard thing to do because the human brain, the prefrontal cortex is designed for you to time travel. Yeah. Retrospectively, prospectively and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now.

7:33Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

7:34Arthur Brooks: That they don't spend their time mindfully. So Marty Seligman at, you know, my great mentor in the, in the positive psychology business of happiness, he says that we shouldn't be called, we shouldn't be called a homo sapiens. We should be called homo prospectus because we live in the future. 20 to 50 % of your cycles on average are living in the future. If you're an entrepreneur or a striver, like the whole audience for the show, So it's more like 80 % of your time. And you're missing your life. Epicurus's point is don't miss your life.

8:03Ryan Holiday: He's saying actually this is better than the vacation that you are pining for. Yeah. This present moment.

8:10Arthur Brooks: Don't build castles in the sky. Don't do that. And don't be wishing that you could go backwards in time. Don't be enjoying your memories and don't be enjoying your fantasies. Enjoy this now. And that's super hard to do. As a matter of fact, there's all kinds of evidence that our brain isn't even designed to do that very well. You know, when you put people in fMRI machines and you say, think about nothing, then you turn on the default mode network and set up structures in your brain, you'll start thinking about the future automatically.

8:37Ryan Holiday: Well, there's a famous letter that Epicurus writes where he goes like, on this, the happiest day of my life, the day of my death. And that's what the letter opens with. Like he's trying to, he's saying, and again, for people who think that Epicureanism is hedonism, he's trying to say you can be happy on the day that you die. Right. So it's definitely not related to what you have. And it's not because he has some delicious last meal or something. He's just saying this is the day that I have now. So it's the happiest day of my life.

9:07Arthur Brooks: I'm alive right now. Yes. And being alive right now is awesome. Yeah. That's the whole thing. And good. We should all try to do that more. I'm not very good at that. Are you?

9:16Ryan Holiday: No.

9:16Arthur Brooks: All right.

9:17Ryan Holiday: So you mentioned the Buddhists. Maybe let's... We're going back in time a little bit. Let's go back and... Because Buddha was a contemporary of Socrates.

9:23Arthur Brooks: Yes. So that was about 500 BC. And this is, of course, a notion that this came out of the Vedic and Hindu traditions. And so Gautama, Prince Gautama, Siddhartha, Buddhist prince, Hindu prince, completely sheltered from ordinary life, very, very rich. Wonder what's outside the walls of my castle. He goes outside and he sees all the suffering for the very first time in his life. and questions everything that he's ever been taught. This is, you know, approximately 500 BC. Decides to, you know, figure it out on his own. Becomes a complete ascetic, right? Just like the mendicant ascetics, everything.

10:00Arthur Brooks: It doesn't eat anything, is starving, miserable, the whole thing. And he realizes that that in itself is a form of detachment. That asceticism is a form of attachment. And under the Bodhi tree where he's sitting, which is still, you know, famous, famous, you know, metaphor for all kinds of enlightenment that we would get. He figures out the eightfold path of Buddhism. But fundamentally, that philosophy is based on these four noble truths. The first is that life is, this is dukkha in Sanskrit. Life is suffering. That's actually not a good translation. It should be, and you'll appreciate this as a Stoic, life is dissatisfaction.

10:32Arthur Brooks: That's what it really should be. Because it is, it's not satisfying. It's not the way you want it to be. And there's a reason for that. We're aspirational creatures, which is why we're so unhappy and we're so successful because we're in the hunt. Okay. So this is animal impulse versus moral aspiration. Okay. The second noble truth is that the source of our dissatisfaction is, is, is attachment, attachment to worldly things. The third noble truth is that the secret to actually breaking free from this dissatisfaction is detachment from these things. And the fourth, and you're like, okay, okay, okay, okay.

11:06Arthur Brooks: And then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of Buddhism, wishes the rest of your life and a whole bunch of other lives.

11:11Ryan Holiday: Yeah. It's like, ah!

11:14Arthur Brooks: It's what it comes down to, which is why Buddhism is hard. It's a really, really hard thing. But this sets in motion this whole idea that, and it's a fundamentally non-theistic religion, whereas Hinduism that it sprang from is profoundly theistic. And at its core, what people don't really understand about Hinduism, it's not a thing. it's a family of related religions in the indian subcontinent largely in the indian subcontinent with a few other outposts like bally that where they're related but they're very non-trivial differences between the variants of it fundamentally at its most esoteric forms it's it's profoundly monotheistic and it's very much like christianity insofar as that you have brahman which is the godhead has brahma vishnu and shiva which are the three manifestations three in one kind of a trinity, and then a whole bunch of other avatars and manifestations of God.

12:08Arthur Brooks: The Buddhists are real different than that, really come out of a very different tradition than that. And that's why Christianity is much closer to Hinduism than it is to Buddhism. We think of the karmic religions as kind of all the same. Big differences, as it turns out. And Buddhism took over almost the whole subcontinent for hundreds of years. And then there's a Reconquista where Hinduism came back. And the reason that this India subcontinent is largely Hindu today is because of the claim, the argument based on sort of evangelists that were going through the countryside saying, don't you want God?

12:41Arthur Brooks: Yeah. You want God, don't you? Don't you want to have a relationship with God who loves you, God who created you? And people are like, yeah, I want that.

12:48Ryan Holiday: I want that. Again, that convergent evolution that there is some part of the human condition that wants that,

12:55Arthur Brooks: or needs it. Yeah, and anthropologists have studied this whole, and again, for those who are Hindus who are like, you know, throwing stuff at the laptop right now, sorry, I mean, this is a...

13:04Ryan Holiday: This is the religious studies interpretation.

13:06Arthur Brooks: Yeah, well, this is, you know, this is a Catholic who spent the last 12 years talking and studying with a Dalai Lama, okay? So, which is appropriate humility, you know, on this. But this is a really interesting thing because, you know, today we lump the karmic religions together and the Abrahamic religions together. But in this case, Buddhism is super different than the Abrahamic religions and especially different than Christianity, the goal of which is to live forever. Yeah. The Buddhist goal in its essence is to break out of the cycle of birth and rebirth, which because life is suffering and stay dead, man.

13:42Ryan Holiday: Yeah, to embrace the impermanence of it.

13:44Arthur Brooks: Yeah.

13:44Ryan Holiday: So the Bhagavad Gita is a Hindu text.

13:48Arthur Brooks: It's one of the Hindu holy books. And that's the epic adventure of Lord Krishna, who's an avatar of Vishnu, the god Vishnu.

13:55Ryan Holiday: What do you think that teaches us?

13:57Arthur Brooks: So a lot, because it's this huge... It's like the Odyssey. It's like the Odyssey, basically. And what it is, is that it's supposed to teach you about life itself. It's the experiences of this guy who's an avatar, who has got the heavenly side. It's sort of kind of a, what is it, the homeostatic union of metaphysical and physical in this guy, this Lord Krishna. And fundamentally, it's about him living this earthly existence, but a heavenly with a heavenly will. And the way I read it, again, with appropriate humility, is that this is an opportunity for everybody to understand that there are spiritual beings living a physical existence that you are too.

14:33Arthur Brooks: You would say in Christianity, there's a Christ likeness to Ryan. And that once you understand the metaphysical essence of who you are, not to be Gnostic, not to say that the body falls away because it's unimportant. On the contrary, it's the fusing of these two things. That's the essence of life itself. And that you can have a profoundly metaphysical, spiritual, transcendent existence in your ordinary life of like going into battle and marrying a girl and having your kids and paying your bills. and all that.

15:01Ryan Holiday: That each one of us is kind of a microcosm of this larger spiritual journey.

15:06Arthur Brooks: Yeah. And so people see themselves in Lord Krishna. Yeah. They kind of see themselves in Ulysses. Yeah, sure. That's the whole point of a lot of these great epic...

15:15Ryan Holiday: It's the hero's journey but from India.

15:18Arthur Brooks: Yeah. It really is. It really is. And that's because there's nothing new under the sun. Sure. Oh, back to the point that you were making a minute ago though that anthropologists have found that there are no civilizations ever found that are not religious. And what that suggests is that humans are built to worship. Humans are built to, it doesn't mean every single person is religious because there's a ton of different experiences and different, I mean, just physical differences between people, to be sure. And the psychology being the biology, you might not have a very, you know, strong religious tendency.

15:50Arthur Brooks: You might or might not. And different people do. But the whole point is, in the main, humans are made to worship. That's a very, very strong hypothesis.

15:58Ryan Holiday: It's interesting how easy it is to do the kind of religious studies interpretation of all the religions but your own. You know, you can be like, this is what they taught. This is where they live. This is how it evolved. This is what it meant. This is the technology in it. Like this is why it worked. But it was fascinating to me in Athens, you're standing at the painted porch of Stoic Pukile where Stoicism comes and you go, wait, wait. So St. Paul came here, met with the Stoics, and then they walked up together next to the Acropolis. and he gave one of the most famous speeches in all of Christianity.

16:29Ryan Holiday: And when you just read the Christian version, you're like, this is the Christian. You're not thinking that all these faiths and ideas are intermixing with each other and walking the earth. Like Jesus and Seneca are alive in the same time in the Roman empire. And they're both teaching philosophical teachings. One, we come to call a religion and the other stays philosophy. But what do you think philosophically the broad strokes Christian tradition can teach us.

16:58Arthur Brooks: And that's harder for me because I'm in the middle of it. That's what I mean. So that's something like I go to mass literally every day. And so, yeah. So that's, and so for me, that's, you're a Stoic. I'm a Catholic.

17:07Ryan Holiday: Yeah. I also grew up Catholic.

17:09Arthur Brooks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got some of that wiring. I think that's why

17:11Ryan Holiday: Stoicism lands with me because they have

17:13Arthur Brooks: the same cardinal virtues. Well, yeah, for sure. But also, it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons, I mean, Catholicism, Christianity is unbelievably imperialistic. Yes. It just, give me that. That's good. I'll take it. Yeah. I like it. I like it. I'll take it.

17:26Ryan Holiday: Oh, you mean imperialistic in that they just take from anything and then absorb it and they go, we invented that.

17:31Arthur Brooks: It's sort of the America of religions. They like the Columbus thing. It's a melting pot, which is not to say that it's not true. On the contrary, I actually believe, I really, really believe it as a person. But I recognize that the best way for you to understand it, even from the inside, is by understanding the influences from the outside.

17:47Ryan Holiday: Yes.

17:48Arthur Brooks: That's a really important thing to do. And even in the ancient world, by the way, there was a lot of Eastern philosophy that was worming its way into it because there were a lot of people coming from all over the place. I mean, you look at what in the Acts of the Apostles, what was going on in early Christianity, and they talk about people meeting from all over the world. And so the idea that somehow because of the internet, we're able to see what's going on. No, no, no. Then too. Yeah.

18:09Ryan Holiday: We think of the Romans as being like blonde with blue eyes or something, you know, and it's like Denmark or something. Yeah. It's like, no, no, no. There's profoundly influenced by Carthage and Turkey and, you know, I mean, the Roman explorers land in China during Marcus Aurelius' reign. And so you're like, they're all intermingling.

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