Something Is Very Wrong With Modern Life – Arthur Brooks (Transcript)

Good luck on the podcast.” I’m sure it’s true. She loves me. Tonight I could call and she might be completely pissed off at me. I don’t know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, but you did decide to date somebody with Latina blood.

ARTHUR BROOKS: That adds a level of complexity, I grant you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. It’s like, yeah, it’s a multiplier.

ARTHUR BROOKS: She’s a big pulsing right hemisphere. Sure enough.

The Simulation of Life

But this is the thing. The reason I love my marriage is because it’s unsolvable. The reason that people want to get a real cat and not a mechanical cat is because it’s alive. And things that are alive are right brain problems and things that are mechanical are left brain problems.

And so what we’ve done is we’ve solved life. We have the engineering, the Silicon Valley set of solutions for everything that we’re trying to do, that pops through the screen at us, that dominates our culture, that increasingly can be simulated and understood through artificial intelligence. All that’s doing is it’s a curve fit through the messy business of life using these left brain algorithms. And that’s not going to get done what we need to get done. It is going to leave us lonelier and more depressed and more anxious.

Here’s the thing. Your brain knows. So for example, this is one of the reasons that the more pornography people look at — largely young men, because more than 85% of pornography is being consumed by men. Now you’re thinking to yourself — I know what you’re thinking. Who are the 15%?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Old men?

ARTHUR BROOKS: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So is it you?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Thank you. Thank you very much. So the more pornography that men look at, the lonelier they get. In the moment, they feel less lonely and more satisfied, but the more unsatisfied and the lonelier they actually get, because it’s a simulation for the experience they’re actually seeking. And it’s unsatisfactory as a result of that. You want actual human connection with another person. That’s what you actually want. And you’re settling for a two-dimensional simulacrum for it.

Counterfeit Sources of Meaning

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are some of the other counterfeit sources of meaning that people mistake for the real thing?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Achievement is a counterfeit source, something that you actually get that doesn’t build anything real of any real consequence in life. The idea of — it’s like you just score in a game. It gives you a real short-term sense of achievement, which is a source of purpose, which is a component of meaning, but it isn’t real. It’s fake. It’s counterfeit. It’s simulated. And that’s one of the reasons that you’ve got to do more and more and more and more to keep up with it.

They used to say, if you really want to have lived a good life, you know what you need to do? You need to have a son, plant a tree, and write a book. I’ve done all those things. I don’t know if I planted a tree.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s what you’re missing.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I don’t have a green thumb. I need to plant more trees. But the whole point is that what those things have in common is that they’re real. They’re in real life. They’re real achievements in real life. They don’t say plant a tree online, pretend you’re planting a tree, get really good at doing it, have a son online. The whole idea of simulating these experiences is unsatisfactory. It simulates the experience in the moment.

That’s another example — having friends. Virtual friends simply don’t meet your needs. And one of the ways that we know this is that the more virtual friends that you have, the less that you’re actually illuminating, in the experience of interacting with them, the right hemisphere of your brain.

One of the reasons that you don’t like to do your show virtually is because you don’t have the same experience. You and I are connecting with our right brains right now. You and I are friends. I mean, we text and talk to each other even when we’re not doing a show, which is great because we’re friends and we have that texting relationship because we’ve actually looked at each other in the eyes and had real, no-fooling conversations with each other. And that’s how you have to link with other human beings. Otherwise it’s a simulated friendship.

Real Connections vs. Virtual Ones

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s one of the biggest realizations I had when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life toward the end of my 20s. I had all of these friends because — shock horror — in the nightlife industry in the northeast of the UK, there weren’t many people that were into the things I was getting into. There weren’t many people that had, maybe they’d heard about Sam Harris and they were thinking about doing meditation, or they’d read a bit of Robert Greene and then got stuck after a couple of pages and then were struggling with that and then felt real bad because they couldn’t sit still.

All of these things that I was going through, I was finding it difficult on the front door of a nightclub to find people to resonate with. So I made friends online that were into the same sort of things that I was. And I found that these friends kind of distilled out into two strata of people. Even if all that I’d done was, as I was going through a city on a train, stopped off for a 30-minute coffee with someone, that person immediately went into a different bracket of “I’ve actually met this person. They’re real in three dimensions. They’re real.”

ARTHUR BROOKS: Because your brain actually apprehended that person in a different way. What you did was you had an imprint of that person in flesh and blood in real life, which is, by the way, how the brain was evolved.

Our brains are more or less the same size and shape — there are slight physiological differences, but trivial for what we’re talking about here — as they were 250,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene. And during that period, all human beings lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals who were kin-based and hierarchically related. And that meant that the relationship they had with each other was absolutely paramount. Our brains are wired for in-person relationships.

That’s one of the reasons that you get oxytocin when you look at somebody in the eyes. You and I have a better conversation when we have this bonding hormone going through our brains when we’re looking at each other in real life. You don’t get it through Zoom screens. There’s a lot of research on this at this point. You get a different kind of experience when you have the in-real-life experience.

And so one of the things that I do when I’m talking to couples — my wife and I, we do these marriage retreats, for example — one of the things that we’ll do with couples is say, “Okay, before you go to sleep, you need to stare into each other’s eyes. You’re lying in the bed, on your sides looking at each other, stare each other in the eyes for 5 minutes.” That’s it. That’s the prescription. Because you want to establish this thing that probably they haven’t had for a really, really long time, and that your brain actually needs, so that your brain registers, “That’s my person.” You can’t get it any other way.

Why Meaning Can’t Be Simulated

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is it that meaning can’t be simulated?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Meaning can’t be simulated because meaning is this fundamentally complex right hemispheric experience. And so the simulation is always in the wrong side of the brain. It’ll look like it’s meaningful, but it isn’t, is what it comes down to. It’ll feel like in the moment like love, but it isn’t. It’ll feel like friendship, but it isn’t.

The Meaning Crisis and Modern Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s so interesting with this conversation because a lot of people, when I think about how this lands on the internet, there is a kind of cohort of people that will say something like, “This is good enough. This is actually as good.” There’s a disbelief that you actually do need to go into 3 dimensions. There is a, “I’m happy to wait for the sex robots to come. I’m happy to have the AI partner.” There’s even a company that makes AI versions of your exes. So if you don’t ever want to leave the relationship with them, you can just keep on texting.

And I think that kind of, when I read those comments, it makes me sad. It makes me sad because I think it sounds like somebody who’s got hurt or is scared that the world isn’t going to be able to give them something that they know that they can get compliantly online, permissionlessly, with lower risk of rejection or zero risk of rejection. And it makes me sad, but yeah, it’s so much of what we’re seeing in the modern world is people getting what they want but not what they need. And this is something that people need but don’t realize that they want.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. Well, they do know that they want it. They just don’t know how to get it. And that is ordinarily what’s actually happening. I mean, I rarely meet somebody who would say, “I actually would prefer not to meet anybody in real life.” I mean, there are people who are agoraphobic, for example. There are people that have particular pathologies along these lines, but the truth is they feel like it’s the best that they can actually get under the circumstances.

Look, when 62% of couples are forming online, then it’s increasingly hard to form a couple offline. And if you’re an exceptionally online person, or you’re living in a remote location, or you came of age during COVID, which means that you don’t have social skills that were wired into you at a tender age, then you’re going to struggle is what it comes down to.

But here’s the thing to keep in mind. The biggest predictor of depression and anxiety is to say, “I don’t know the meaning of my life,” or “My life feels meaningless.” That’s the number one predictor. Why? Well, it all gets down to the fact that these pathologies actually follow from this sense of emptiness.

So people will often say, “Why has depression tripled? Why has anxiety doubled?” Which they literally have clinically since about 2008. Why? And they’ll say, “Well, because of generational difficulties, because boomers wrecked the economy and created income inequality and made houses expensive or something.” They have all of these exogenous economic explanations for this stuff. These are all wrong, is what it comes down to.

Since 2008, when life has become increasingly online and the average American is now checking their phone 205 times a day, what you’ve done is you’ve shoved yourself into the wrong hemisphere of your brain, and in so doing, you haven’t been able to naturally experience meaning. And that’s what leads empirically — that’s what actually leads people to feel empty, to feel depressed, to feel anxious, to actually feel lonely. That’s the big predictor, is what it comes down to. We have a meaning crisis.

Designing a Meaningless Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s say that you’re going to design a life for someone to have as little meaning in it as possible. What would that consist of?

ARTHUR BROOKS: It would start by waking up when the sun is warm, making sure you don’t start your day before dawn. Make sure you start your day when you get up. Make sure that if you have an alarm clock, there’s your phone. Look at your phone before you roll out of bed. Then make sure that the first thing that you do is eat a bunch of highly processed foods, high in sugar. Make sure you get your coffee in the first 5 minutes so you get a big dose of caffeine, and make sure that you’re looking and scrolling on your phone while you’re eating your first meal. That’s a really important thing to do. Make sure that your whole first hour is neurocognitively programmed to be on the screen.

Then make sure that you have a remote job. It’s very important that you go to work back in your bedroom and you look at a screen all day long, so that your colleagues are kind of squares on the Zoom screen and you see them sometimes, and you don’t actually know where anybody lives and you don’t have a relationship with anybody. It’s actually better if you don’t see anybody the whole day.

And if you’re going to date, make sure that it’s swipe right, swipe left, swipe left, so that you’re only getting a two-dimensional understanding of the person that you might want to fall in love with. No multi-dimensional, multi-sensory understanding of who the person is. Make sure you can’t smell that person — that’s really important because the olfactory bulb does all kinds of meaning-related things in the brain. So make sure you rule that out. And make sure that on your own dating profile, you’re lying a lot. That’s important too.

Then let’s make sure that for fun, you’re spending the evening not doing anything of real importance. You’re not working on a big project, you’re not going out and seeing people, you’re kind of staying in and scrolling and watching YouTube Shorts. And if you’re doing something that’s competitive and achievement-oriented, make sure it is gaming. So it’s kind of writing your life in disappearing ink. And then go to bed. Make sure you didn’t do any exercise. Important not to do any exercise at all.

And then repeat, times where n equals any number that you can conceive of, so that you’re never bored. You’re never bored, but your life is grindingly boring. See, here’s the key. If you want your life to have no meaning, make sure that there’s no boredom moment to moment, but that day to day and week to week and month to month, life is boring. That’s what you’re actually going for. As opposed to — if you want your life to be really meaningful, make sure you’ve got plenty of boredom moment to moment, and then your life won’t be boring at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t that a strange paradox?

ARTHUR BROOKS: It is. My great-grandfather, Lee Roy Brooks, he was born in Olathe, Kansas. He married the sheriff’s daughter. John Janes was the sheriff, was strung up by Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War. I kid you not. This is Americana in my family, Chris. And he married Mary Ellen in Olathe, Kansas. And that’s pretty much what I know about him. But I’m going to make a prediction about good old Leroy. He never came home to Mary Ellen and said, “Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today,” because his brain was working the way it was supposed to.

I promise you that his life behind the mule, looking at a mule’s butt, was pretty boring moment to moment, but he was not bored. His life wasn’t boring because he was living a real life. But a lot of people today who have figured out a way — by checking the screen and living online and living the hustle and grind culture that’s been engineered out of Silicon Valley and various other places around the world, Hyderabad and wherever you want — that not being bored from moment to moment gives them the most boring lives possible.

Ambition, Striving, and the Fear of Stillness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is it the case that ambitious people are particularly susceptible, vulnerable to meaninglessness?

ARTHUR BROOKS: So asking for a friend, right? Of course. Me too. I’m like a senior version of you, man. Except you’re not going to be bald.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s true. I’m going to have to lose a lot of hair to turn 70.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You’re going to have to lose a lot of hair.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I know.

ARTHUR BROOKS: If I had your hair, I’d be president of the United States right now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think you would.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yes and no. So one of the problems that really ambitious people have is that they don’t know how to live with themselves. Ambition, striving, busyness is really a way that people anesthetize themselves because they’re very, very uncomfortable.

So I’ll give you an example. One time I was talking to a great friend of mine who traveled constantly for work, and his wife was just in his grill. He had kids and she said, “I miss you. Every year you tell me that this year’s going to be different.” And I realized, getting to know this guy really, really well, the problem wasn’t that his job made him travel too much. The problem was he didn’t want to be home. He wanted to be distracted because his life stressed him out so much.

This is what it’s like to be a striver — it’s like having this unbelievably chaotic life, and you need to distract yourself all the time. And so sometimes your ambition will be distracting you. Sometimes your success will be distracting you. Sometimes just your overriding need to be special or to be applauded by others is your way to distract yourself from all the things that are actually going on, all the storms and things inside your head. And when you have a down moment, then you panic, and that’s when the screen comes out. Or for that matter, that’s when alcohol and drugs come out.

There’s very interesting data from the OECD that show that above average, busier than average people are at above average risk of alcohol abuse. So you don’t think of somebody who’s an alcohol abuser, who’s an alcoholic, as somebody who’s down and out — a bum. No, it’s more likely to be an investment banker. It’s more likely to be a wealthy, successful podcaster. And the reason is because successful strivers anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol, with pornography, with screens, with anything that will actually make you feel like, “Don’t leave me alone in here, man. I don’t want to be alone in there,” which is why they’re strivers in the first place.

The Arrival Fallacy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How often do you think people are pursuing goals because they genuinely want them versus because they want approval?

ARTHUR BROOKS: So everybody pursues goals because human beings — Homo sapiens — only get satisfaction in their life when they’re making progress. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment, of making progress toward an accomplishment with struggle. That’s what satisfaction is all about. That’s why goals are incredibly important, and struggle and pain are incredibly important. That’s what it comes down to.

These are the two things to teach your kids: have goals, accomplish stuff, and struggle, and don’t be afraid of pain. Those are the things that you teach your kids and they’ll get a lot of satisfaction. Satisfaction is one of the macronutrients of happiness, to be sure.

The trouble with that is that if it’s somebody like you — highly intelligent, super hardworking, unbelievably energetic — then you can actually start fooling yourself into thinking it’s not actually about making the progress and the struggle and the hustle and grind of life itself. It’s actually about, “If I finally get that thing, then it’s going to be okay. When I finally get that thing.”

So I’ve worked with Olympic athletes, and it’s funny because they think they’re alone in their struggles, and you’ll say, “Did you, when you won that gold, were you depressed afterward?” And they’d be like, “How’d you know?”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because it’s always true. Every other gold medalist — it’s literally called gold medalist syndrome.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, it’s called gold medalist syndrome. And in my field in behavioral science, it’s also called the arrival fallacy. And the arrival fallacy is just like, “I’ve got to get there, and when I get there, I’m going to feel that thing.” Now, what is the thing I’m going to feel? And this gets back to your question. “I’m going to feel like I’m worthy. I’m going to feel like I’m something. I’m going to feel like I’m special. I’m finally going to feel like I’m special.” And you don’t. And you don’t. And that’s the problem. That’s a big part of the survivor’s curse.

The Arrival Fallacy and Why No One Wants to Hear It

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know what’s fascinating about the arrival fallacy? No one’s ever been able to make it popular.

ARTHUR BROOKS: So the concept. Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Correct. Tell me the most well-known book on the arrival fallacy that points it out exactly.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, I know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing it. So I was on my way out to Australia texting Mark Manson about this, and I was explaining one of the problems I was trying to navigate with the show, this live show that I was doing, that I was putting together. And one of them is that a good bit of it is kind of about the arrival fallacy. It’s a PG version because I’m aware that it’s chronically the most unsexy topic to ever talk about. And his response was, “Good luck. I’ve tried to talk about this publicly and every single time it’s fallen flat.”

I know it’s not just not mimetic that people don’t want to talk about it. It’s not just mimetic neutral that people will accept it and maybe bring it up or maybe not. It’s actively anti-mimetic. People don’t want to hear it and won’t tell their friends about it. It is—

ARTHUR BROOKS: No, I know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I know. It feels, saying to people that are still climbing, which everybody is, “the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it’s going to be,” feels like you’re sucking the gas out of their fuel tank while they’re still on the way up. It’s like you as a fat person saying to someone who’s starving, “Well, food’s not that nice in any case.” And it’s an unteachable lesson. And the only way that you can learn it is by getting there.

And because the alternative to this with the arrival fallacy is that every successful person ever in history has been inducted into some kind of cult that pulls the ladder up after them where everybody gets the same memo, which is, “So I know that you, all of the problems that you had, all of the internal voids, your feeling of insufficiency, the chip on your shoulder from when you were a child, your desperate desire for validation from random humans on the internet. I know that all of that was fixed when you got the 30,000 square foot house, but we need to tell the poors that that’s not the case.” So you now are a part of this elite group of people that are trying to sigh up everybody else into not trying to strive for it.

That’s the alternative, which is, or is it more likely that that’s just the sense that the gold medalists got? And that’s not to say that it’s everyone, but it does seem to be a pretty big cohort, way more than the people that are striving would think it is.

Why Mother Nature Keeps Us Fooled

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. So there’s a reason that it is anti-mimetic. And that’s because it goes against Mother Nature. Mother Nature wants you to be fooled. The reason that the ancient Williamsons, right, from someplace, some Anglo-Saxon tribe of something, something, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Scotland and England.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. The reason they passed on their genes is because they were fooled by Mother Nature, that they actually chased the arrival fallacy again and again and again and again and again. Now, the reason that it can’t be satisfied is because Mother Nature needs you in the hunt. But the only way you’re going to stay in the hunt is with a promise that you’re finally going to get there.

Now, there’s a side note to this. There’s a metaphysical side note to this, by the way. This is a little bit of a side note that kind of takes us in the transcendent dimension. We’ll come back to the arrival fallacy in a second. But there is a philosophical set of arguments for the existence of something, which is that the desire for something is actually proof of the existence of its object. So for example, proof that water exists is that I feel thirst. Proof or evidence that food exists is that I feel hungry. Now I want unremitting happiness. I want it and I feel like I can actually get it somehow, but I can’t.

But that philosophically is a proof that it does exist. Not here. That’s actually proof of a divine afterlife. Actually, it’s evidence of a divine afterlife that you have this hunger for unremitting happiness, which suggests that it actually does exist, but you can’t get it in this life. Maybe you can get it someplace else. That’s what it comes down to. And this is one of the great proofs in most of the both Abrahamic and karmic religions for the existence of nirvana, heaven, whatever it happens to be.

Anyway, back to this, the question at hand. Why would Mother Nature play this trick on us? Because we gotta stay hungry. She wants us to stay hungry. So she’s wired in a mistake. She’s wired in something that is such a deep mistake that we make again and again and again, that even when people speak a manifest truth that people deeply believe, they still will reject it.

I remember when David Brooks, you know, the author David Brooks. We have been, are super old friends. We’re not related. Share a surname. It’s a common surname. And so my Brooks, you know, snuck out of Lancashire in 1630 to Massachusetts, one step ahead of the county sheriff. But his came later. Anyway, David Brooks, he said, I remember years and years and years ago, he said, “You know, being number one in the New York Times bestseller list, it’s really not that great.” We’re having lunch. And I said, “Let me try. Let me see how it feels.” Right. And that was exactly the point that you made.

Now, Ryan Holiday talks about that too. The first time he had a book that was number one in the New York Times bestseller list, he was like, “This is great.” And the next week it was some yo-yo who had a stupid book as number one, and he realized how little it actually meant. But he wanted the next one to be number one too. Actually, it’s more tyrannical than that because if your next one doesn’t make number one, now you used to be great. And there’s almost nothing worse than that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. The only thing worse than never having made it is having fallen off.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. I almost wanted to do a show at one point where I talked to a producer about the idea of a TV show called “I Used to Be Famous,” where, you know, I, as a behavioral scientist, will go talk to people who are living relatively ordinary lives and they used to be famous. Some are happy, some are not, some are addicts, some are crazy, some are like normally married.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fascinating show, wildly unpopular. You know, just automatic. But if you want to have that, it’s the underdog story. Right. It’s from zero to hero, not from hero to zero.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Although it’s pretty interesting when you hear about people who are living much, much, much happier than they were in the limelight. You know, when people are living ordinary lives, and they used to be really famous and people go, “Oh, I remember he was so-and-so in the Partridge Family or something.” And now he’s got a happy marriage and 4 kids and he works for a cardboard box company or something.

The Three Questions That Constitute Meaning

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How can people work out the meaning that they’ve got in their life? What are the big questions that they should ask?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. So there are 3 big why questions that constitute meaning. And this actually comes from the work of Michael Steger, who’s a really good social psychologist in Colorado. And he has the 3 parts, the 3 elements of meaning, which are called coherence, purpose, and significance. And there are 3 why questions.

Number 1 is you have to have an answer to the question, “Why are things happening the way they are in my life?” You know, things are happening all around me all the time. Why? Part of meaning is having an answer to that. Maybe that’s your religious answer, like because of the mind of God. Maybe that’s your scientific answer because these are the laws of the universe. Maybe you’re a conspiracy theorist and say because powerful people are doing these things.

Conspiracy theories are nothing more than crying out for an answer to the coherence question, which is a meaning problem. So if you have a relative who’s going down the rabbit hole on the craziest conspiracy theories, don’t throw data in their face and say, “You moron.” That’s the wrong way to approach it. They’re having a meaning crisis. They’re having a happiness crisis is the reason they’re doing this in the first place. So coherence, number one, why things happen the way they do.

Second, why am I doing what I’m doing? That’s purpose. Purpose and meaning are not the same. Purpose is goals and direction so you can make progress. So why am I doing what I’m doing? If the answer is, “I don’t know,” then you can’t make progress because you’re just going in circles. You’re just a carnival cruise ship just kind of randomly going around and around and around and around. It’s the reason I find cruises unbelievably depressing. They don’t go someplace, right? I’m a teleological individual like you. I want a goal, right? And that’s purpose.

And so in the research, you know, Sonja Lyubomirsky’s stuff, have you had her on the show?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She’s coming on next week or the week after.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Super good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ARTHUR BROOKS: She’s awesome. And she’s at UC Riverside and she does this work on goals, and you’ll give students these just random goals. Like you’re getting a B- in physics, you know, let’s get a B+ this semester. Just that goal, they get happier, they get more directed, life seems better because they have more meaning in their life. That’s what it comes down to. Even arbitrary goals work better to have meaningful goals.

And last but not least is significance. And that’s “my life matters.” You know, my life matters to someone, to my dog, to my wife, to God, to my kids. And so that’s the love question. And all these things are completely missing in modern culture for so many people. You know, why do things happen the way that they do? It’s just random. I don’t know. Why am I doing what I’m doing? I have no idea. I get up and I scroll. I get up and I surf. I get up and I go on a Zoom meeting for a company I don’t really care about. And, you know, what is the significance of my life? Why does my life matter? I don’t think it does. And those are the 3 things to actually keep in mind.

What Happens When Life Feels Random

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What happens psychologically when life feels random?

ARTHUR BROOKS: When life feels random, then it feels like anything could happen at any time and there is no control. There are no levers that you can actually pull. So you’re not an active player in your own life when there is no coherence. When you don’t see a pattern, it’s a big problem. You know, when you first learn to drive, how old do you have to be in the UK? 17. Okay. And when you first, you know, you got a lot of confidence, but when you’re looking at the traffic and all, it’s like chaos, wildly intimidating.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s wild. I learned to drive in a Mini, which is a very British way to do it, but it’s f*ing terrifying. You’re like half the height of everybody else.

The Psychology of Directionless People and the Pursuit of Specialness

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. And any system that you’re in that doesn’t seem to make sense tends to feel really, really meaningless because you don’t know what you can actually do to have some sense of agency. There’s no sense of agency when there is no coherence, is what it comes down to.

So for example, if you believe that things happen the way they do because that’s what God wills, then you’re going to try to work that lever. You’re going to pray, for example, you’re going to have a relationship with God. If you believe it’s because of the laws of science, you’re going to learn more about science and you’re going to actually enter into that particular dimension.

For example, I’m a behavioral scientist. I really believe in science. I believe that it gives you incredible amounts of power. My job is to explain the science and explain how people can interact with the science. It’s a pure coherence play, is what it comes down to. And if it’s all about conspiracy theories, then I’m going to get online and share them with my friends. So that’s why coherence really matters, so that you can have agency over your life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And why are directionless people so psychologically fragile?

ARTHUR BROOKS: They’re fragile because they don’t know actually in which direction that they’re going, which means they can’t make progress. Now remember, this whole idea of happiness comes from making progress toward a goal. And there’s tons of really interesting examples of this.

The weight loss literature is super interesting in this. So diets are all effective and they’re all catastrophic failures, is what it comes down to. Effective insofar as that almost any diet will make you lose weight, but they have between an 80 and 95% failure rate after a year, meaning you gain all the weight back and then some. This is a weird industry. It’s like a $40 billion industry in the United States that fails with—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Ouroboros of nutritional advice.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It’s craziness. 9 out of 10 times they fail. Now, why are they successful? Because economically it’s because temporarily they make you make progress, but they ultimately fail because once you get to your goal weight, the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. And then you get the arrival fallacy, is what it comes down to.

So what you want in life is something where you can just make constant progress. I want to be a better dad. I want to be a better person. I want to create more value with my work. And there’s no end to that. I can’t be like, “Yeah, well, I got to the best dad I can possibly be, so that’s all good.” No, I can always work to be a better husband. I can always work to be a better friend. I can always work to be a better citizen. I can always work to love my country more. I can always work to actually do something more important in my work and reach more people with the moral objectives that I have. And that’s what I need. I need goals I can’t meet.

Specialness vs. Happiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think the confusing thing is, if significance is about being valuable to others and not famous, why is it the case that modern people confuse the two?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Part of the reason is because what strivers get into, there’s actually a pathology that is in the middle of this. Let me back up a little bit. I’m sort of the Striver Whisperer in my work. I specialize in people who do incredible things, right? And not just because that’s fun, although it is, but because that’s the kind of books that I write. People who do amazing things and still don’t have perfect lives. That’s kind of my area of research.

As a matter of fact, they have a common childhood and it kind of looks like this. Super strivers who are never satisfied and struggle — they generally speaking found that they only got attention and affection from their parents when they did something. When they got good grades, when they made pitcher on the baseball team, when they made first chair in the orchestra, when they set up a lemonade stand and made more money than anybody thought possible, whatever it was. And their parents — often their parents are immigrants or came from poverty — will reward their kids when they do a thing, thinking that they’re actually wiring in success and happiness for their kids.

What they’re telling their kids is that love is earned. They’re teaching their kids that love is earned. And when your brain is synaptically plastic, boy, will you ever learn that lesson. And then you will go through life trying to earn love over and over and over and over again.

If you’re a man, you’ll look for women who make you earn their love. And you’ll spend your marriage trying to bring in more and more and more money. Women will try to stay young forever by trying to earn their husband’s love. You’ll find that they will surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men, fake friends who make these people earn their love with gifts and favors and fanciness. You’ll surround yourself with people because you believe that love is actually earned.

Well, the truth is that that’s wrong. Real love isn’t earned. It’s a free gift, freely given. It’s a grace. Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn’t love you. That’s what it comes down to. But they don’t learn that because that’s actually what they’ve evolved over the course of their lives.

And they become success addicts, winning addicts, looking for the specialness. And in the modern economy, when you can metastasize that from your family, to your community, to your church, to your city, to the whole world on the internet, then you’re going to be searching for the adoration of strangers because it’s the best possible dopamine hit that you can get. And life is going to feel gray if you don’t get it. So this is a pathology that actually people have. And the more talented you are, the more danger you’re in.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of my favorite ideas of yours is this difference between specialness and happiness. It’s so good when you see it. It’s something that you kind of can’t unsee anymore.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. And there are people who watch and listen to Modern Wisdom because they want an edge. It’s good entertainment. I’m a fan. Long before I met you. But it’s actionable material for people who want an edge.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I’m actively making less actionable material.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, I know.

Grind Slop and the Fatigue of Optimization

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which is an interesting pivot at the moment, I think. There’s a new term floating around which you might not have seen yet. It’s called grind slop. And grind slop is kind of this “f* your feelings, just work harder” — achievement and progress and optimization at any cost.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I think that people are feeling a lot of fatigue. I’ve felt that for a while. And if I go back and look at what I was talking about 2 years ago, 18 months ago, a lot of that was, “I’m going to try and feel my feelings a little bit more. I’m going to try and see if there’s something a little bit deeper. I’m going to have a little bit more fun. I’m not going to optimize for outcomes at the expense of experience.” And that has really come to a head, I think, for a lot of people.

I think it’s worsened by AI. I think that if you can have an oracle in your pocket — which you always had, but now an oracle that speaks to you personally and knows exactly everything that you need and gives you this very curated, idiosyncratic, customized version of what it is that you want in a chat format — it’s almost as if you’re speaking to your best friend that happens to be God.

People have got information overload. What I don’t think they necessarily need more of is just getting, like how foie gras is made, by just force-feeding that high velocity, high density stuff. And I think that at least for me, what I’m finding myself enjoying is, “I took something away from that and I had a good time.” As opposed to optimizing for — you think about short form or Blinkist or SparkNotes or whatever your favorite summary service of choice was. What is it that you’re doing? You’re trying to get to the outcome.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, you’re trying to get points on the board.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s not possible.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, totally. I can’t remember, that was a digression from something from the original that we—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Me saying, if significance is about being valuable to others and not about being famous, how can people confuse those two?

The Illusion of Earned Love

ARTHUR BROOKS: Oh yeah, specialness and happiness. Correct. Yeah, so specialness and happiness is really, really interesting because — I mean, I will literally hear people say, “Look, any loser can have a family. Any loser can have an ordinary job and provide for his wife and kids, but not everybody can start a company. Not everybody can be CEO. Not everybody can have a famous podcast. Not everybody can do those things.” In other words, they’re saying, “I know what would make me happy and I’m going to forego that happiness for what I think is a happiness beyond it,” which is specialness. And that will always lead to ruin.

It always does. Again and again and again, I talk to people my age, I’ve talked to people who are older than me. I mean, it’s like this classic thing. There’s a friend who is 25 years older than I am, an icon in finance, an absolute icon of finance. And I said, “When did you figure out you were going to be rich?” He said 32. He knew when it was — it was 32 years old. He said, “I left this bank and I went and opened my own firm and it was starting to make money and we weren’t rich yet, but I realized I was going to be rich.” And I said, “You must have thought, what’s it going to be like to be rich? What’s going to happen?” And he said yeah. He’s not a very materialistic guy. He doesn’t have a boat, he doesn’t have 15 houses, he doesn’t have any of this stuff. He’s really, really wealthy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s not Scott Galloway.

ARTHUR BROOKS: My doppelganger. I said to Scott the other day, we were doing a thing together and I said, “You know, we should go on tour together with Stanley Tucci.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I said, no, I’m putting each of you under a big red cup.

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s right. It’s like Three Card Monty or something like that. It’s like, which one do you get?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which one? Three Card Baldy.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And so I said, “When you got rich, how did you really think life was going to be better?” Because this is interesting for me as a behavioral scientist. This is deep. And he thought about it for a while and he said, “I thought that when I got rich, that my wife would love me. Really love me.” And I said, “So what happened?” And he said, “She didn’t.” And he just stared at me. And it was this moment of pathos, right? It was this moment that’s like—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s pathos?

ARTHUR BROOKS: This moment of deep understanding and feeling. And it’s almost as if when he articulated it, he understood it for the very first time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think he’d selected a wife that was the sort of person whose love needed to be won?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Of course. Well, of course, because if you believe that love is earned, then you’re going to surround yourself with people who make you earn their love.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Every single time. You’ve got cause and effect going on here.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Of course.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve got this line from an essay I wrote recently: “What you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private.”

ARTHUR BROOKS: Nice. Give me an example.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Your psychological resilience — in the boardroom, people call it strength. They call it decisiveness, assertiveness. They call it antifragility.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But around your kitchen table, it makes you put up with a relationship that you should have left long ago.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It makes you impenetrable to the actual psychological and emotional needs that your spouse needs.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and the Culture of Grievance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had a Navy SEAL sat here, Andy Stumpf, and he said, you know, I built myself up, like my entire career was made out of being a person who doesn’t quit. Right. And that caused me to stay in a marriage that was toxic for 10 years longer than I should have done.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Your strengths are your weaknesses, but your weaknesses are your strengths.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s that mean?

ARTHUR BROOKS: You tell me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve uno reverse carded me on a limerick that I don’t understand. But I mean, think about it. The Riddler sat opposite me here.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. I’m a Batman villain. Correct. The bald man, the baldy. Yeah, that’s right. What is your greatest weakness?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Uncertainty.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Uh-huh. How have you turned that into one of your greatest strengths in what you do?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Paying attention to every different permutation of how things could go to ensure that the plan is in place. Hypervigilance, galactically unreasonable attention to detail.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Exactly right. What’s your next biggest weakness?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In this similar sort of circuit, is that overthinking?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Uh-huh. You fear failure, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fear—

ARTHUR BROOKS: You fear shame?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fear shame more than failure.

ARTHUR BROOKS: How does your fear of shame, and look, I’m not divulging anything to our friends out there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No one’s f*ing surprised. No one’s surprised here. It’s nothing that I haven’t said on stage in front of thousands of people with tears in my eyes.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It’s like the shame-faced boy part of the program.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, exactly.

ARTHUR BROOKS: So how does a fear of shame, which by the way is very common for successful people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Working hard enough so that you don’t have to feel it. You know, overachieving, outstripping what anybody thought to the point where nobody could ever think that it would be something shameful.

But it does cause you, again, what you are praised for in public, you pay for in private. It means that opening up about how you feel, especially about weaknesses and vulnerabilities, that’s hard. It’s hard to do because you go, well, I’m supposed to have it all together. The reason that the world gave me the love that it gave me is because of, look at my competence and here it is on display.

And then you go, there’s a hole in this armor and I need to show it to somebody. And the map that I have of reality from the real world gets ported across into the relational world. And that’s very, very difficult to work.

It feels like being Batman and Bruce Wayne for a lot of people. You know, it feels like you have one life out there, right? And then when you come home, you can either choose to keep the mask on, but taking it off means that you have to start living this double life where you need to not feel the things that you do privately when you’re in public, and not use the tactics that you have publicly when you’re in private, right?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Right. And that actually can be really disconcerting, and it can be highly damaging for personal relationships. This is one of the reasons that you find that when people start to get really famous, they’re much more at ease in front of 1,000 people than they are in front of one, because they actually have to use a different set of social skills. They’ve got the theater ability in front of 1,000 people, but when they’re actually talking to mom or an actual no-fooling girlfriend, it gets real dicey real fast.

But what you put your finger on is that, look, you will pay in private for what you’re applauded for in public, but what you’re paying for in private is also the source of your strength in public. And what that means is that you shouldn’t just try to— you shouldn’t just be thankful for what they’re applauding you for in public. On the contrary, you should be down on your knees thankful for the weaknesses that you have as well.

And that’s the pro move. That’s what it comes down to. That’s actually how we ultimately learn to manage ourselves, is that we recognize that we have these frailties, that we have these weaknesses, that we have these feet of clay. And we say, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for that weakness.” Because indeed, that is the source of my strength.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Most of the things that you’re most ashamed of are just the dark side of something light that you’re really proud of. And if you’ve got a sword, most swords are double-edged and sometimes it nicks you on the backswing.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That doesn’t mean that you throw the sword away.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just means that you learn how to hold it properly.

Being Grateful for the Wound

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. And then the ace move is being grateful for the wound, for the wound itself. It’s really interesting because what you find in a lot of Eastern philosophy is that we have a tendency to be very stoic about the way we talk about problems and suffering and weakness in our life, to say, “I will bear up under it. I do accept it.” But it’s not enough to accept it. You need to love it.

That, ultimately, is what makes you fully human — to actually love it and to accept it as the divine will. This is the way it’s going to be. And because it’s happening, that’s what I want. What I want is what is happening, axiomatically. I realize it’s sort of philosophical in this way, but ultimately I think this is where we need to get in our lives — recognizing that we have both strengths and weaknesses, and we should be as grateful for our weaknesses as we are for our strengths.

The Parental Attribution Error

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had this idea, the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error — that we are often prepared to, especially in the modern world, right? Blaming our parents for stuff is basically a rite of passage in modern psychology and modern therapy culture.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But if we’re not prepared to lay our strengths at the feet of our parents, then maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to call them the villains for what’s wrong with us. So, you know, you say that your desire to work hard is because you were never freely given love at home, but isn’t that also the same thing that’s made you so driven and ambitious, right?

You say that your hypervigilance was brought out because people didn’t observe your needs ahead of their own. Isn’t that also the same reason that you’re so concerned to ensure that everybody else’s welfare is put before yours? All of these things are — they’re not even two sides of the same coin. It’s just a single f*ing piece of metal. This thing exists. It’s woven throughout it all.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Right. And what you’re doing right now is being very subversive, because what you’re doing is subverting the culture of grievance, which you’re actually pretty good at at this point. I’ve noticed that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People got really angry when I talked about that. They didn’t like it.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, the whole point is that the unhappiest people are people whose identity revolves around grievance and victimization. And this is, by the way, one of the ways that people in positions of relative cultural authority and power keep you subjugated. The way that I, a baby boomer like me — technically I’m the last year of the baby boom — can conscript culture warriors who are Gen Z into my movement is by convincing them they’re victims and they should be aggrieved. About how the world treats them, about how older people treat them, about how the culture treats them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It was easier before you, so there’s no point in trying now.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, well, or you should be really mad about it. You should be angry about it. You should be carrying a sign in the streets.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Apply your efforts to complaining about the problem as opposed to actually solving it.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, go trash his store box.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah. So it seems like a lot of what you’re laying at the feet here, the issue is largely technology. That that is one of the biggest movers? Is that a fair assessment?

Technology as the Tip of the Spear

ARTHUR BROOKS: It’s the tip of the spear. The technology is a manifestation of the way that the culture of engineering has given us this scientism, this conceit that every problem is a complicated problem that can be solved, as opposed to the most important problems, which can’t be solved. They can only be lived with and understood.

A more human approach to what we’re talking about is that there are plenty of complicated problems that we can solve, but the most important ones are the ones that we can’t solve. And that’s what properly — it’s interesting because that’s what most of the Buddhist teachers will say: that the wrong turn of the West was the scientism that said that everything is a solvable, complicated problem. Whereas what we need is balance between complex and complicated. The complex problems of the right hemisphere and the complicated problems of the left hemisphere, and they exist in a system.

There are many things that we shouldn’t try to solve because we can’t. We should live with them. We should understand them. We should leave them as permanent mysteries that actually give our life flavor.

But the truth is that especially over the past 25 years, in the era of hyperdevelopment of technology, that is an expression of the idea that no, no, we’re going to hit the singularity, man. We’re going to live forever. We’re going to actually be able to figure out how to upload our brains. We’re going to be able to solve any problem with whatever app or doodad or supplement or whatever it happens to be. That we will have the scientific acumen to solve everything that is actually a problem in our lives. And that’s just axiomatically wrong.

And how do I know that? Because we’re solving more and more of these problems and we’re getting less and less happy. It’s the same kind of thing to say, for example, if we had enough therapists, we wouldn’t have any more depression. Well, depression has tripled and the number of therapists has tripled. So what’s going on here? Obviously there’s a cause and effect problem and a glitch in our logic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder if this is part of the reason why people are feeling exhausted. They’ve got personal development fatigue. Permanently asking the why question, permanently trying to optimize everything becomes exhausting. The kind of cost that you pay of trying to optimize everything is worse than being under-optimized.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The process of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections would. And all of this together is like, dude, I got enough on my plate. Do I need more homework? Do I really need more homework right now? As opposed to like, I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying and I’m trying hard and that’s pretty good.

The Doom Loop of Modern Distraction

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with these big why questions. The problem is having these big why questions and believing that if you watch enough internet videos and take enough supplements that you’ll be able to answer these things.

And this is a big generational difference that we actually find. Every philosophical school of note and of merit has something that the ancient Greeks called aporia, which is to sit in a state of puzzlement over questions that can’t be answered. Zen Buddhism is based on koans. Koans are riddles. You know, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” A strange, unanswerable question. You’re supposed to ponder that. And in the pondering, you gain a certain kind of complex knowledge, which we know is dominantly processed in the right hemisphere of the brain.

A big generational difference is that what’s missing for a lot of people’s lives today is that at night with their friends, they’re not having these philosophical conversations about big questions that can’t be answered. That was what you did at 11:30 after you came home from a party with your friends in college in 1985. It’s like, “I don’t know, dude, do you think God exists?” And now it’s like, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz. So we’ve stopped doing that one thing.

There’s nothing wrong with big why questions. The problem is that we either ask questions that can be addressed by Google or ChatGPT, or we believe that if we have enough scientific knowledge that these questions can be answered. Both of those are a big wrong turn. They’re a big wrong turn philosophically, but they’re also a wrong turn neurobiologically.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Weird, isn’t it? Because the promise of modern technology, culture, science, being able to answer a lot of questions and fix a lot of the problems that previously were huge. Infant mortality and f*ing cuts on your— You know how Ignaz Semmelweis died?

ARTHUR BROOKS: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bro, this is f*ing mad. So the guy that discovered the germ theory of disease. He finds that childbed fever is being transmitted from corpses to newborn babies because the doctors weren’t washing their hands in between. Begs his colleagues to adopt handwashing. Gets laughed out of every single institution he’s trying to do it to. He keeps on talking about it for so long that he drives himself insane. Everybody thinks that he’s insane. And his wife helps to commit him to an asylum.

While he’s being removed from his own home by the nurses that are taking him away to the asylum, he gets a cut on his leg. The cut on his leg is treated by a doctor who doesn’t wash his hands after touching a corpse, and he dies due to infection. The most tragically ironic way to die.

But yeah, we’ve got all of these promises being made by the modern world. And the problem is, it’s the first time that we’ve had the oracle, right? It’s the first time that humanity’s gone through the, “Wow, maybe we could answer everything. Maybe all of the problems,” as opposed to, “Some of the problems.”

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And the whole idea is that if we dig a little deeper, we’ll find it. We dig a little deeper, we find it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But you’re saying that there’s a particular category of challenge which is simply unsolvable.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You’re digging, like when you’re in a hole.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like saying, “What’s the final dig? When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Or something.

The Limits of Social Engineering

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. Now this is important because this is a classic mistake that people make. This is a conceit that people have. I talked to a guy one time who was a big part of the War on Poverty in America, which was this idea that we’re going to be able to wipe out poverty with social programs, with social welfare service. And it did a lot. I mean, social welfare programs did a lot to lower caloric needs and make sure there’s more public access to education and all kinds of good stuff.

But the truth of the matter is that after a certain point, it starts to wire in pathologies. Actually, it makes it harder for people to actually become independent, et cetera.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because they become reliant on the money.

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s the idea. Yeah. And it’s certainly not true for everybody, but it’s certainly true for other people. And I asked him, who was one of the architects of this War on Poverty, what would have made it truly win? What would have truly wiped out poverty once and for all? And he said, “Just a little more money.” But that’s what a lot of people in the Valley think today — that we’re going to get enough, that these are solvable problems. We just need to go deeper. We need to go deeper.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, you saw the experiments with UBI from a couple of years ago? Yeah, they failed. Both of them failed. They failed massively.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. Why? Now tell me — let’s say why. What did they do?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You remember? Not fully. I mean, I know that they looked at the discretionary spend. They looked at where people were putting money away. They looked at how much of it was being spent on things that people said they needed to prioritize, stuff like healthcare.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It wasn’t going on healthcare. The quality of the food wasn’t increasing.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It wasn’t going to education. Yes. I mean, the whole point is that if it went toward human capital development, if it went toward what my parents would have put it into, it would have been great. It would have been this fabulous thing.

And the whole thing is based on this idea that everybody has the same values, that everybody has the same priorities, which they don’t. And it wasn’t a question of money. Furthermore, when you actually give people something for nothing, you strip away their sense of earned success. And earned success is part of this idea of satisfaction. It gets into this idea of progress. It gets into the wiring of Homo sapiens. That’s what it comes down to. It denies the primacy and respect due to human evolutionary biology, which I know is something you love. Me too. Because it explains so much of the odd behavior that people have.

And so every time that we try to reorder the way that human beings are wired evolutionarily with some utopian idea — that we’ve got this technology, we’ve got this economic policy, I’ve got this new idea for how the genders are going to behave toward each other, from now on we’re no longer going to be like people were 50,000 years ago — it’s going to fail. And you need to swim with the current, or you’re ultimately going to fail. That’s what it turns out.

Breaking the Doom Loop

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Getting back to the technology thing, how do you interrupt this doom loop that everyone’s on?

ARTHUR BROOKS: So the doom loop is that I don’t want to be bored, because boredom is boring. And so I distract myself. And when I distract myself, what I do is I become less tolerant of boredom. My life feels less meaningful because I’m not actually illuminating the parts of the brain that are necessary for that. And so I’m more at loose ends. And so I spend more time online, more time scrolling, more time doing what people do when they’re really bored, and that makes the problem worse.

Much the same way with drugs and alcohol — that’s how escalation and dependence actually works. The two biggest predictors of alcoholism are anxiety and boredom. And so when I’m anxious and bored, I drink. Well, that makes boredom and anxiety worse the next day, and so I drink some more, and then down and down and down it goes. Any addictive process is a doom loop. The same thing is true with the way that we use technology. The same is true of anything, any—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which is completely hidden under the radar, by the way. Completely. Most people, despite the fact that alcohol’s having a resurgence only after it was recently sort of stripped away, most people understand, “I’m doing this and I didn’t used to do this. And when I do this, it seems to be ratcheting up. I’m drinking more than I used to. That’s probably not good.”

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, it depends on how much you drink. It might be good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean, if you’re getting to 5, 6, 7 drinks a night, I don’t think that’s good. But how many times does that entropy start to build? Because your tolerance — you’re chasing — you’re not chasing having the drink, you’re chasing the sensation of the drink.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And your tolerance—

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ll drink—

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s a doom loop.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ll drink 10, 20 times a year maybe at most now. And that means half a Corona in, I’m like, it’s nice. It’s like being 14 again. That’s cool.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I can say a half rack at 14. I don’t know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah. The problem with using your phone in this way is it’s completely socially acceptable, under the radar. Nobody is ever going to say — no one’s ever going to come up. How many times will someone make a joke about, “Dude, you’re on your phone a lot tonight.” It’s very different to, “Dude, you’re pissed again and it’s 5 nights in a row.”

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like, that’s different. It’s much more obvious. The gambling thing, the porn thing — these kinds of compulsions, these kinds of habits are significantly more obviously destructive than using your phone is. And then while I’m doing it, I can feel myself internally f*ing rolling my own eyes at, “Yes, okay, too much time on the phone is too much.” You know what I mean?

Hidden Addictions and Social Reward

ARTHUR BROOKS: I know. And there are other, by the way, there’s a whole spectrum of these things, of these dependencies that are all involving the dopamine cycle in your brain, some of which are not just sort of neutral and hidden like the phone, some of which are applauded.

If you’re a workaholic, nobody will say — I mean, if you’re a pathetic alcoholic, nobody will say, “Chris, you drank 750 milliliters of gin last night. Congratulations, you’re excellent.” They’re going to say, “You got some problems. I think you got to get that looked at.” But if you work 16 hours a day and neglect your family, you’re going to get a promotion and a raise. You’re going to get rewarded for that.

So there are some addictions that people actually love because it works in their favor. It enriches them, and it actually leads to the world’s rewards, which people admire. So the point is that we have a responsibility to look after ourselves, look after the pathologies that are actually inherent in our behavior, and to see — is it actually making my life better or is it making my life worse? Notwithstanding the reaction of the rest of the world.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does fixing the doom loop look like?

Breaking Free From Digital Addiction

ARTHUR BROOKS: What does fixing it mean? Clipping it. It means cutting it at a particular place.

All addictions — getting out of addictions — they have sort of 3 steps in common. It’s really behaviorally, they have 3 steps in common. Now I’m not talking medically, I’m not talking about the medical interventions because that’s different for different things with gambling and drinking and methamphetamine and whatever.

But the 3 behavioral steps in getting out of an addiction are:

Number 1, you gotta get pissed. You gotta get pissed. It’s like, this is subjugating me. I’m in a cage and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of actually being a wholly owned subsidiary of that company or this behavior or this culture. I’m tired of it. I’m not going to put up with it. You need to fight back by rebelling. That’s number one. You need the spirit of rebellion. If you’re not ready to rebel, you’re not going to get out.

Number two is you need to figure out how to stop. You need to actually have an algorithm, and that’s dependent on what the substance or behavior actually is. There are different ways to do it, but there’s tons of science in every area. If you can get addicted to it, there’s science that tells you how to stop.

And then the third is you have to learn how to live with yourself again. Because you’ve been distracting yourself from yourself. If you’re addicted to something, it means you didn’t like being home in your head. That’s what it comes down to.

I haven’t had a drink since I was 38 years old. And I remember in my 30s, I didn’t like being home in my head. Didn’t like it. Didn’t want to be there. And so I left. I got a little relief. I got a little vacation in the bottle. And it just, it was going nowhere good. And it was really clear. And then my dad died. And a couple of people I cared about said, “This is your future. You just saw your future.” And so I stopped.

But the hard part was step 3. The hard part was actually being alone with myself, being awake with myself, being alive with myself is what it comes down to. And that’s probably even more extreme for people who are very, very online because you’re trying to break the doom loop of how technology is breaking your brain. Not letting you find the meaning of your life, making you angry and depressed and anxious and lonely. You’re addicted, which is why you keep doing these self-destructive things to yourself.

You first get pissed, and second, you gotta quit. And look, I got the algorithms to help you do that. But then, man, you need new friends. You need to live in a society. You need to live with people who are alive in real life. And you have to be able to sit behind the wheel of your car at a red light with nothing to do in your thoughts. Be in a supermarket checkout line without your phone. Walk before dawn without a device and hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet and say, “That’s the sound of my feet on the path.” And that takes work.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How easy is it to recover from this? I think a lot of people feel like they’re lost and totally unrecoverable.

Recovery Is Possible

ARTHUR BROOKS: It’s absolutely possible. I’ve seen it again and again and again and again. I mean, this is not heroin that we’re talking about here. The process of detox, for example — you don’t even have to give up your phone. You just have to put it in proper boundaries and have some rules in your life. And actually have some proper habits.

If you have a fairly functional life, you’ve got good habits already. I mean, you get up at a certain time, you work out every day, you eat something — you don’t eat like an 11-year-old. You have good habits, and then you just put protocols around it. Huberman talks about protocols, which has kind of infected the culture. It’s a culture of protocols. And I’m an absolute believer in that when it comes to your phone.

You wake up in the morning — if you can, don’t look at it at all for the first hour, for neurocognitive programming. If you’re a journalist or you have a job where you gotta look at it, make sure nothing’s on fire, put it down. That’s it for the hour.

Neurocognitive programming while you eat is critically important. It’s best not to eat alone, and never eat with your device. Why? The neuropeptides in your brain, most notably oxytocin, they flow very liberally when you’re eating with somebody. This is how Homo sapiens would establish and foster kin bonds — by sitting around a campfire, putting pieces of yak meat into their mouths, discussing their day and looking into each other’s eyes. That’s how we’re wired. If you have a phone on the table while you eat, or God forbid you’re looking at it, none of this neurochemistry happens.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What if you’re on your own?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Then you might read a book, you might listen to music, but don’t look at your phone.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s a meme online of a guy who starves to death even though he had food because he couldn’t watch YouTube — because his phone had run out of battery.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Or it’s like he died of sepsis because he didn’t go to the bathroom.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because he couldn’t take his phone in there. Yeah.

Phone-Free Zones and Technology Fasts

ARTHUR BROOKS: And last but not least, the last hour of the day. Now part of that is sleep architecture and blue light, the pineal gland, melatonin — we all know the physiology of that. But part of that is just the way that you actually understand yourself at the end of your day and get ready to rest. If you’re living with your partner, that’s critically important to your relationship — not to be looking at your device in the last hour, so you can be fully present as you drift off to sleep together. That’s super, super important for your relationship.

But just those 3 things. Then there’s phone-free zones. You shouldn’t have your phone in the bedroom — ever, ever, ever, ever. Because God forbid you get up to pee at 3 o’clock in the morning and look at your phone. That’s a big mistake. Game over. Your pineal gland shuts off — no more melatonin for you. And you spike your cortisol. Bad stuff happens to you.

So the phone should be on a different floor, in a closet, plugged in someplace, from the hour before you go to bed until an hour after you get up. That’s number one — it’s a phone-free zone.

Second, this is just basic public policy — there shouldn’t be a phone in any classroom in any school in the world between kindergarten and PhD. It is complete insanity because it interrupts everything that we’re actually trying to do. And it’s child abuse that there are phones in classrooms. And the most important hour they shouldn’t have phones is during lunch, by the way, because they need to —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s even worse. You shouldn’t be in a classroom, and definitely you shouldn’t be in a cafeteria.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I mean, most of what’s going on in the classroom is not that interesting to begin with. I don’t think I ever learned anything in public school — I think it was mostly babysitting. But at least I had friends, and they don’t have friends.

And then people need phone fasts. They need technology fasts. I recommend 96 hours a year. There’s a little bit of research on this that shows it can actually break the relationship that you have with your device. You prove to yourself that you actually don’t need it, and you’re kind of in a state of bliss by the fourth day.

I go on a spiritual retreat every year for 4 days — no phone. It’s great. First day is like children screaming in my head. Second day I’m calming down. Third day I like it. The fourth day I wish it were the whole year. That’s what it comes down to.

But just those things — phone-free times, phone-free zones, phone fasts — can do this part 2. This does not give you part 1, which is rebellion, or part 3, which is getting comfortable back with yourself. Different processes.

Romantic Love and the Meaning of Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How important is romantic love to meaning?

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s one of the best ways you can turn on the right hemisphere of your brain. Because that’s something you will never solve. How do I know that? Because if we could have solved romantic love algorithmically, we wouldn’t still have app developers trying to make the ultimate dating app.

The dating apps are fundamentally a left-brain solution to a right-brain problem. Right now they’re getting better, but the way that they’re getting better is by figuring out ways to add more human friction into the algorithm as opposed to taking human friction out of the algorithm.

For example, you’re finding early experiments which suggest that a good way for you to find your matches on an app is to have some of your app matches go to your best friend and have your friend decide which ones you’re going to go out with — because you’re adding a right brain into the mix. You’re adding your friend’s right brain into the mix. Or having a whole bunch of potential people in a group that you will actually meet in person — that’s a good way to do it too. And then pair up if it’s meant to be, or make friends if it’s not.

The point of the matter is that the human brain is highly attuned to this incredibly complex, indescribable experience of falling in love. That’s one of the reasons that all country and western songs are about romantic love. That’s the reason that the greatest poetry is about romantic love — because it’s not described scientifically. It’s described artistically, because it’s a right hemispheric experience.

So if you want to turn on the meaning in your life, go get your heart broken. Go take a risk. That’s when you find the meaning of your life. When you’ve had your heart broken, that’s horrible and that’s hard, but that’s meaning-rich. That’s when you ask all those big questions.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re definitely alive.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You’ll learn a lot about yourself. Unless you stay in your drunk.

The Ladder of Love

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the ladder of love?

ARTHUR BROOKS: So Diotima of Mantinea was this prophetess that Socrates sought out. She described to him that the way to find the meaning of life starts with this ladder, and each rung of the ladder gets you closer to the meaning of life. And the first rung of the ladder is falling in love. The first rung of the ladder is actually attraction toward the beautiful other. Romantic attraction — not just like, “Chris is awesome. He’s so smart. He’s got such a great show. Such a great conversation. Such a good friend.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Thank you. But it’s that spark that you can’t quite understand. Now, actually, we do understand neurochemically what’s happening when you’re falling in love. We know how the sex hormones start, and then we get the catecholamines involved along the way. And then we get a really dramatic drop in serotonin, and then we get the neuropeptides — and the sequence. We know when the sequence is off between two people is why they don’t actually succeed in a relationship. There’s all kinds of really fascinating neuroscience of falling in love, but it’s still a mystery.

The neuroscientists who are doing this cutting-edge research — they can fall hard in love just like anybody else. They can say, “I don’t know what happened.” Yes, you do. You wrote that paper. But still, I teach this stuff to my students at the Harvard Business School — about the neuroscience of falling in love — but I don’t understand this relationship with my wife. I just love her. It’s like, okay, yeah, a lot of oxytocin and vasopressin, and there’s some amount of dopamine and norepinephrine involved, and there are drops in serotonin when you’re fighting — but that’s not it. Because it’s this deep metaphysical experience.

Most religions believe, as Diotima — Socrates’ prophetess — suggested, that romantic love is the beginning of an antenna to the divine. And most religions believe that if you’re in a serious marriage and you deny your spouse love, you’re denying your spouse God’s love. That’s how right-brained and complex this actually is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, just because you can explain how gravity works doesn’t mean that you’re not going to hit the ground if you jump out of a skyscraper.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You can understand it plenty well. Yeah.

Transcendence and the Me-Self vs. I-Self

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Still at the mercy of these things. There’s that interview that Sam did with Daniel Kahneman, Mr. Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner. After many, many decades of studying the fallacies of the human mind and mental models and all of the different ways that our rationality goes awry, has it made you any more rational? It’s not really.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Not really. I know. No, it’s interesting too, and Sam and I, I’ve had one conversation more or less along these lines. He’s the most soulful atheist I’ve ever met.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ARTHUR BROOKS: He really is. He’s a soulful guy. I really have.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’d be a great believer apart from the lack of belief.

ARTHUR BROOKS: But that’s the point because his soulfulness would seem, might seem on the outside to contradict his uber rationality as an atheist, but it doesn’t because these things coexist. These things can reside next to each other. And because Sam’s brain has two hemispheres to it, so does mine, so does all of ours.

The Importance of Transcendence

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think people think enough about transcendence?

ARTHUR BROOKS: No, I don’t. And transcendence is important because it, once again, it contradicts Mother Nature’s tyranny. So Mother Nature wants you in the psychodrama of your utter stultifying christness. From moment to moment to moment. My job, my flights are late, my podcast guest might be good. I got to prepare for that thing and my stomach is rumbling. I forgot to eat lunch and oh yeah, the payment didn’t come in for that thing. It’s so boring. But Mother Nature wants you to be the star of that psychodrama all day long in your head.

That’s what William James called the me-self. The me-self, it’s looking at yourself and thinking about yourself all day long. And you need that for self-reference to make your way in the world. If you don’t understand what you’re doing, you’re going to be a pretty bad driver. You’re going to be in a traffic accident pretty quickly.

But there’s also the I-self, which is looking out at the world, which is transcending yourself by looking out at the world in which you’re one player, but you’re only one player in it. And it’s interesting because transcendent experiences are those where the me-self disappears and the I-self becomes dominant. There are times actually when they become confused. And that’s kind of what a fugue state is psychologically, where you become disassociated with yourself in this weird way.

And all of us have experienced this. I remember one time I had a lot on my mind and I was putting gas in my car and I was just really worried about something. It’s back when I was a CEO and my life was like a living, like dystopian hellhole, right? And everything was a problem every single day. And I was putting gas in my car and it was like 8 o’clock at night, and I finished. And I got back in my car and I was driving. My daughter was with me in the car and she was a little girl then. And there’s this weird clanking sound behind me. Like somebody had a muffler down right behind me and like they were following me. And I said, “Honey, what is that sound?” She said, “I don’t know.” It’s like clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity. “Is they following me? What’s going on?” Until people started pointing to me at my car and I realized that I had driven away with the hose in my gas tank and I pulled it out of the gas pump and I was dragging it behind me, the whole mechanism behind me. Clankity clankity clank.

And so I thought somebody else was doing a thing that I had actually done. I’d confused the me-self and the I-self. I was in this weird fugue state. It got real, real fast when I took it back to the gas station and these 4 Iranian dudes were standing around the gas pump really mad. Like, “Who destroyed our pump?” I also found out how much it costs to fix a gas pump. It’s expensive.

But the whole point is that what we want is not to get into a fugue state. We want to have these experiences where we can be in the I-self, where we can stand in awe, where we can get outside ourselves, which is religious experiences. And that’s spiritual experiences and philosophical experiences and experiences of service and love toward other people, unbidden by any self-interest. And that’s where life gets really interesting and beautiful.

And when you do that, when you truly are in a transcendent state, that’s when you’re in the right hemisphere of your brain and you don’t find meaning. Meaning finds you, which is why I’ll often recommend to people, “I don’t know, how do I find the meaning of life? Go volunteer. Go volunteer. Go pray.” “I’m not religious.” I don’t care. That’s not what I said. Go pray. Why? Because when you do that, you’ll induce a state in your brain and you’ll want to do it more.

The Modern World as a Mirror

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What is it that people are missing? Why is transcendence so rare without engineering it in that way, at least in the modern world?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, it’s especially true in the modern world that it’s rare because the modern world is a big mirror. It’s a big me-self. That’s especially true online. Online, you’re looking in the mirror constantly. Because you’re looking not at the dialogue you’re having with other people, looking at them. What you’re doing is — think about it as the Zoom problem. The problem with Zoom when you’re in a Zoom meeting is you’re always looking at yourself in the Zoom meeting. It’s really hard. It’s a really good idea to turn off your own camera or at least your own view of your own camera so you can focus on the other people. But one of the ways that Zoom has made communication a lot harder for people is because you’re always in the me-self, even when you’re trying to be in the I-self.

And this is true certainly with social media as well. You’re looking at your likes and your mentions and how did people interact with what I was doing? And it’s this one big virtual mirror of everything that we’re doing. It’s become very — it’s induced narcissism where it wouldn’t have existed otherwise, which is incredibly misery-provoking because it kills meaning in the crib. From the very beginning. You can’t get out of yourself. You can’t get out of your head. And that is increasingly true.

Now, it’s interesting because people who have experimented with trying to stay in the I-self, in literature, but also just in real life, have had these incredible results. I had this PT, this guy worked on my back. My back hurts. And so you get to my age, your back hurts, right? And he always worked on my back every week. Great guy. Unbelievably believable. I mean, just talented, full of love. And I said, “How did you get these skills? Did you, were you always a physical therapist, acupuncture?” He said, “No, no, no. I used to be a fitness influencer.” I’m like, “Dude, tell me more. I gotta know. Tell me more.” Said, “Yeah, I basically took off my shirt on Instagram and was kind of sold supplements and it was all about the abs.”

And I said, “How was that?” He said, “It was the worst. It was the worst. I didn’t eat what I wanted for 10 years. I was so miserable. I didn’t have any normal relationships at all. I couldn’t have any functional relationships with women because they’d be so jealous about the fact that I’m showing my body off for other people. I’d be looking at my — I gotta get a photographer because this guy doesn’t understand the shadows.” And he said it was horrible and it was miserable and I was sad and I didn’t know what to do.

And so he said, “I finally gave up. I deleted all my accounts. I enrolled in acupuncture school.” But here’s the most important part. He said, “I got rid of all of the mirrors in my apartment, every single one of them. And I showered in the dark for a year so I couldn’t see my abs. And then I finally was free.” And he’s happy.

Finding Your Calling

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Most people, I think, look to their work for something that’s supposed to be transcendent. Calling. What do you think people think they’re talking about when they talk about finding your calling?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, they think it’s going to be the thing that — well, I mean, there’s kind of two versions of it. They’re the two graduation speeches. Graduation speech number one is, “Go find a job that you love and that’s fun and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Now that speech is being given by a cardboard box magnate who’s so severely workaholic that he’s had 3 heart attacks and 2 divorces by the age of 40, right? So don’t believe it, right? Or the second speech is, “Go save the world. No pressure.” It’s like, well, my generation wrecked the world. Go save the world. That’s the second speech. Both of those are wrong.

Fundamentally, your calling, generally speaking, finds you as the thing that you can’t stop thinking about. It’s the most interesting thing, right? It’s not the thing that you think, “I’m going to be the savior. I’m going to be the great Messiah.” And it’s not the most fun thing necessarily. The thing that’s most interesting to you is often not that fun. Actually, a lot of the time it’s actually not that fun. It’s just something you can’t get out of your head. It’s something you feel you really need to do.

Second, the goal is creating value with your life, is earning your success, is being rewarded for something that you do well, where you create real value with your hard work and personal motivation. And more importantly, where you’re serving somebody, where somebody needs you. That’s what it comes down to. Are you earning your success? Not only really earning — are you recognized and acknowledged for real value that you’re creating? Not kissing up to the boss and not because somebody’s trying to be nice to you. No, no, no, no. You’re really creating value. And does somebody actually need you? That’s what it comes down to. That’s your calling.

Chasing Status vs. Meaning

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you know, or how does somebody know when they’re chasing status instead of their calling, instead of meaning?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Mostly people deep down know. Because what it comes down to is when you’re creating true value and people need you, then you can — I mean, you can sort of imperfectly measure that with respect to status, but you actually know when there’s true value behind it. Most people have an innate sense of that, a strong innate sense of that.

And I’ve interviewed a lot of people about this. I talked to a guy who builds homes, a home builder, right? He had a, he got his master’s degree in biochemistry from MIT and he was going on to get his PhD and his parents really, really wanted him to be a scientist. But he recognized that he only felt truly alive, he was only truly interested when he was building stuff. That’s what it came down to. And he became a home builder as a result of that.

So it’s really, really important to listen to what your heart is telling you about this. Status is a very, very bad barometer. A lot of people are using status, or using fame or power or money because they don’t want to look at the truth. It’s like looking into the sun of something. And a lot of people make big mistakes for a long time as a result of that. Like they’re doing something that’s not their calling and that burns them out. “I don’t like it, but they should like it. It’s paying so much. They should like it. They got so many followers for Pete’s sake, but they’re unhappy.” That’s what people need to be paying attention to. Look, if you’re doing something that’s highly rewarding, but you’re unhappy, it’s not your calling.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Hmm. I wonder how many people sit in that bucket. What proportion of people?

The Spiral Career Pattern and Finding Your Calling

ARTHUR BROOKS: I meet a lot of people who honestly think that they go into business school thinking, “I will find my calling, because it’s going to be something that’s going to pay me so well, which means I’m so good at this thing that it’s got to be my calling.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. On the contrary.

Look, I walked away from a career in classical music when I was 31 years old. I could have done it for the rest of my life, right? It wasn’t my calling. I’d done it since I was 8. I’d been doing it since I was a little boy, right? But it wasn’t my calling. And I made a living, and I made some records, and I was so unhappy. It wasn’t my calling. I’d spent many years on it. I’d spent decades on it, as a matter of fact, but there was no choice but to walk away because it wasn’t my calling.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about the fear that comes up when someone is faced with that realization? They’ve got the inertia, the momentum, the sunk cost fallacy.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. No, it’s no joke. It actually requires an unbelievable amount of personal entrepreneurship. And look, entrepreneurship is not about building a business, it’s about building your life, right? Great entrepreneurs, they change all the time. They make all kinds of changes.

You know what crummy entrepreneurs have in common? They have a bad business idea and they chase it until they’re broke. That’s what bad entrepreneurs have in common, right? Good entrepreneurs, they try this and it’s not quite right and they change and they go from this thing to that thing and they sell when it’s time and start a new venture. That’s what great entrepreneurs have in common. If you want to be an entrepreneur in the business of your life, you cannot afford the sunk cost fallacy with your own career or your own relationships or your own interests.

You have to change, is what it comes down to. Now, there’s a very interesting theory about people who need to change the most. These are called spirals. This is a spiral career pattern. There are 4 career patterns psychologically.

There are linears who just kind of go up and up and up in their careers, and they only change when something is better. There are transitories who kind of just skip around all over the place. They don’t live to work, they work to live. “I’m going to be a barista, then I’m going to run it and drive a moving van, and I fell in love with a girl in San Diego,” right? There are what’s called expert, which is like slow and steady. It’s lifestyle, right? My dad had the same job for 42 years, for example. And the reason is because it was secure and because it was low stress, right? And that’s what he wanted. The post office is an expert career path.

But a lot of people, probably disproportionately a lot of the people who are watching this show, are spirals. For every 7 to 12 years, what they need is to take their career down to the studs and start again. Take everything they learned in the last one and fold it into something that’s meaningful in the next one, but have a new adventure.

The first turn is hardest. For me, leaving the French horn and becoming a scientist — that was brutal. Brutal. Going back and getting a PhD when I didn’t know what I was doing, it was really, really, really hard, right? Second turn, easier. Third turn, easier. I’m on my fourth turn right now. Who knows, maybe in 10 years I’ll be a circus clown or a firefighter or something.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I could see you doing that.

ARTHUR BROOKS: But the whole point is that that’s what it means to live an entrepreneurial life where you’re pursuing your calling, because you have the agility and the courage to be an entrepreneur in the enterprise and the business of life.

The Role of Beauty in a Technocratic World

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about the role of beauty?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Beauty is a transcendent experience. One of the things that a lot of people have observed about the modern technocratic life is it’s not beautiful. It’s bereft of beauty. Now, why is that? Because stuff that goes on in the left hemisphere of the brain never prioritizes beauty. Beauty is a right hemispheric experience.

When people see a beautiful sunset, sometimes they’ll cry. When people hear a work of music — people listen to Bach’s B minor Mass and they weep. Why? And they can’t explain it. As a matter of fact, anytime that you become emotional and you can’t quite explain it, it means you’re having a right hemispheric experience. Something that moves you weirdly, right? When some people talk about religion, they get really choked up. Some people, when they listen to music, they get really choked up. Those are right hemispheric experiences, and disproportionately that’s when it comes to beauty.

So if we have a society that’s entirely left hemispheric, that’s technocratic, that’s complicated and not complex, it’s not going to be beautiful. And that’s exactly what we find. There’s compelling evidence that music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past. Newer music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past. That moral beauty is harder and harder to find. Moral beauty is just kindness toward others for no apparent reason. You find very little of that on X. You find very little of that online, right?

Natural beauty is harder to find when you’re never in nature, which is sort of axiomatic. But a lot of people will say, “I got this incredible screensaver of El Capitan in Yosemite.” It’s like — there’s the real thing. It’s going to blow your mind. And the reason is because it is an entirely different neurobiological experience for people when they’re actually out in nature. If you’re behind a screen, you’re not getting beauty, is what it comes down to.

So artistic beauty is absent. Moral beauty is absent. Natural beauty is absent. And the reason is because we’re trying to filter everything through the left hemisphere. The simulation isn’t beautiful. If you want to know if you’re too much in the left hemisphere of your brain, it’s whether you ask yourself, “Is there enough beauty in my life?” And if the answer is no, it probably means that you’re too far to the left.

Suffering as the Ultimate Meaning-Making Experience

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about if there’s not enough suffering?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, that’s the hard one. I actually wrote about that in this book, and I left it to the last chapter because I was putting it off.

Suffering is the ultimate meaning-making experience. And we’ve talked about that — we’ve talked about heartbreak, we’ve talked about loss, we’ve talked about grief. There’s a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that is really, really active when you experience social exclusion, when you experience loss. It was evolved so that you would be averse to sadness. Sadness is supposed to be really, really painful and you don’t want it. So people actually don’t suffer so much from sadness. They suffer a lot from fear of sadness. You’re trying to avoid sadness, which is what motivates a lot of our behaviors. Most of the reasons we do what we do is because we’re afraid of bad, we’re afraid of negative emotions.

But at the same time, most people will talk about how the most meaningful periods of their lives were times of the greatest negative emotion in their lives. Negative emotion brings meaning — unless we try to eliminate it. And this is another wrong turn that we’ve taken, because once again, in our left hemispheric conceit of the complicated world, the singularity is one in which we will have eliminated pain, eliminated sadness, eliminated negative emotionality, eliminated negative experiences. That’s not only impossible, it’s actually suboptimal. It’s death for what it means to be fully alive. We don’t want to suffer, but we must suffer.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Strange, the things that people want and what they need.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, I know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the fact that those two don’t cross over all that much.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And Mother Nature is a wicked tyrant. She’s kept us alive for generation after generation, but animal impulses are not the same thing as moral aspirations.

The Collapse of Meaning

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Seems like you’re saying that enjoyment and satisfaction haven’t collapsed in the same way that meaning has.

ARTHUR BROOKS: No, that’s right. That’s right. It’s really interesting. When I see a big happiness problem, when I look at the depression explosion, the anxiety explosion, I know that one of the channels of happiness is blocked. This is as a diagnostic matter. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. These are the three macronutrients of happiness.

You want to be a happy person, you need to enjoy your life — which, back to an early part of the conversation, one of the reasons that you’re moving from a pure achievement orientation in the show toward one where you’re having more fun is because you want to increase enjoyment, which many strivers struggle with. They don’t enjoy their lives very much and they want to enjoy their lives more and they don’t know how, because they’re always trying to put points on the board. So that’s a different subject. I’m going to write a book about how to enjoy your life because I want to figure it out, because I need to figure it out before I die.

So enjoyment — which is not pleasure, it’s pleasure plus people plus memory, it’s a conscious phenomenon — is actually pretty high for most young people. Satisfaction, which is the achievement of worthwhile goals with struggle, that’s pretty high, especially for strivers. My MBA students at Harvard, they’re real high in satisfaction because they’re accomplishing a lot and they’re struggling a lot. It’s meaning that’s collapsed. And that’s the reason that we have this unbelievable unhappiness crisis in our society today.

Frankl’s Inverse Law

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have I ever told you my idea about Frankl’s inverse law?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Oh no, tell me. Viktor Frankl?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So there’s that famous quote: “When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” Right? He’s arguing lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing some broader problem.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And this is before scrolling existed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. Frankl’s inverse law: “When a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.”

If ease, grace, joy, and playfulness don’t come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment-to-moment happiness entirely and always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. The TL;DR is you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn’t come easily to you.

ARTHUR BROOKS: But it’s absolutely the encapsulation of the striver’s lament. It’s like, everybody else is having a great time and I can’t feel it. They’re out dancing and they’re at a club. Think about it — you’re a club promoter in your heart. I’m a French horn player in my heart. You’re a club promoter in your heart, right? And everybody’s having a great old time and you’re like, “No, no, this is my business.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Go and enjoy yourself. I’m going to suffer over here.

The Art of Leisure and Finding Meaning

ARTHUR BROOKS: I think in a real way, and the meaning part is quite right, but I think ordinarily strivers are addicts for satisfaction from achievement. And so they will put points on the board when they can’t feel enjoyment. And so they put points on the board. And part of the reason is because they’ve actually never learned how to do it appropriately. They’ve actually never learned how to do that.

So enjoyment, once again, at its root, has things that actually make you feel good. But that’s not the right goal. Just pleasure is a terrible goal. The end of the road for pleasure is not happiness. It’s detox, right? Because that’s just addiction is what it comes down to. “If it feels good, do it” was the hippie motto and it didn’t end well.

So that’s important, that you add people and memory to it. So it’s a conscious experience. It’s in the prefrontal cortex, not just in the limbic system. But it’s not apparent for everybody how to do that, especially if you’re brought up in this way where “I gotta do more, I gotta do more, I gotta do more.” Because what happens is that this idea that you’re stopping and smelling the roses feels like a waste of time. Maybe you have parents who say that. Are you practicing? I remember that. They would yell through the door, “Practice.” I was practicing 5 hours a day when I was in 5th grade. And so then the whole idea of stopping and going and having fun feels like you feel kind of guilty about it. And so you’re frankly just bad at it. And you don’t like to do things you’re bad at. You don’t learn how to.

My wife is really good at enjoyment. Really. She just really enjoys life. She’s Spanish. I mean, that’s like a whole country of people who enjoy life. And in the States, we’re a little bit less good at it. And I’m especially bad at it. So part of that, actually one of the protocols for helping people like you and me is understanding leisure and actually having a structured, disciplined approach to leisure. If you don’t know how to do it, take it seriously.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You need to work hard at not working so hard.

ARTHUR BROOKS: But it turns out there’s a philosopher who specializes in understanding leisure and that’s Josef Pieper who wrote Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Oh, it’s great. It’s a little thin book that he wrote. He’s one of the greatest 20th century German philosophers, untainted by Nazism, thank God. And he wrote The Four Cardinal Virtues. He wrote these really beautiful books, but his probably most influential book was Leisure: The Basis of Culture, where he defined culture as a serious business. It’s not chilling on a beach, which is called acedia, also known as laziness or torpor. I can do that for like an hour, and then I want to run away screaming. It’s the worst.

He says that leisure is something that you’re not being compensated for by the outside world, but that’s creating value. That’s leisure, and that’s what will bring you enjoyment. He talks about it in terms of deepening your spiritual or philosophical life, deepening your relationships, and learning things you don’t need to learn. Just learning things you don’t need to learn. So when you think about what you’re doing with the podcast, right, you’re deepening relationships. You’re talking about things you don’t need to talk about. People would say, “I’m not sure I fit into this table,” but that’s leisure because you want enjoyment.

The Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Goals

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I have a friend who was given an exercise by a coach. He was told that he needed to start doing a hobby, but that he wasn’t allowed to try and get better at it. And he decided to take up watercolor painting, and did the first few classes or sessions or whatever, and immediately found himself going to YouTube to find out what exactly the best kind of paintbrush was to do the thing. And “I’m going to find actually what’s the best class in Austin that can do it because I can get better if I can do this. And what’s the cadence? Do I need to be doing it 3 times a week in order to maximize my—” I am going to be struggling. It’s going to be difficult to put 3 times a week in because I got the knee.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It turned into a job.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Coach Sharon came in and said, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, no. You’re not allowed to try and become better at this thing.” Doing it telically. Not atelically. It should be atelically. Atelically.

ARTHUR BROOKS: So that’s interesting because Aristotle talks about that with people, that real friendship is atelic. If you have friends because it’s a telic relationship, it has a telos — if they’re useful — it’s kind of deal friends, but real friends are atelic. They’re actually useless. It’s the same thing with your activities, the relationship that you have with the activities in your life. If it has a really strong telos — “I’m going to get better at it because, you know what, I bet I could sell that” — they’ll strip the love out of it.

My brother and I were both very talented classical musicians. He’s 3 years older than me. He’s a bass player, string bass, classical string bass. I was French horn. I was super telic. He was atelic. And he still plays in community orchestras. He’s an extremely skilled amateur. He loves playing the bass. He loves music. He loves it so much. He doesn’t earn a dime from it. That’s why he loves it.

Where to Start When You Feel Empty

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s say that someone feels completely empty right now. Where should they start? What are the most important habits in order to increase the meaning in your life?

ARTHUR BROOKS: So the things to be thinking about are along the lines of the sustaining activities that will actually use your brain the way it’s supposed to be used.

Number one is understanding that your emptiness is not some sort of psychological weakness. Notwithstanding what anybody’s going to tell you, there’s not something wrong with you. On the contrary, your brain is working the way your brain works and you’re living in the world, and the malfunctions are not your fault. The malfunctions are you going with kind of the slipstream of the culture. The culture is being driven by the technology. It’s making you work in a way that’s completely contrary to your ancestral habitat, and that’s what’s making you feel like garbage. That’s what it comes down to. It’s kind of like you’re eating meal after meal of Twinkies and wondering why your digestion is wonky and weird.

What we need to understand then is you need to become aligned. You need to have a brain that’s properly balanced between the hemispheres of what you’re doing, which means you need to change your behavior.

Number one is getting right with technology. That’s the number one thing that almost everybody today needs to do. Almost everybody’s addicted. Almost everybody has a dysfunctional relationship with it. Some more, some less. Me, less because I’m older. I remember the before times. I mean, you could throw Instagram up in front of me and I’m like, “Okay. This is really good for my business. This is good. I get wildly interesting opportunities for sharing my ideas with other people. Clips of you and me talking, people really like them and that’s great. Makes me feel great.” But I’m not going to scroll for an hour. But many people do, and the younger you are, the more prone you are because you don’t remember the before times. So actually changing your behavior with respect to it — and there’s ways to do it, that’s what I write about.

Then you gotta live in a new way. The first thing I recommend to almost everybody is go get bored. Go get bored. Get good at it. I don’t mean like this whole thing where you stare at the seat in front of you for a 9-hour flight on the way to Greece. Raw-dogging. Raw-dogging a flight. Yeah. That’s a great expression, isn’t it? It’s disturbing, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about actually living moment to moment, putting your hands in your lap when you’re on the train, looking out the window and saying, “Huh, it’s a tree,” being fully alive and saying, “I’m fully alive right now.”

One of the ways to do that is to become more comfortable with repetitive prayer or meditative ideas that you would actually bring into your life. So you can be more mindful, just bring in some of those ideas so you can become more comfortable with your brain working the way it’s supposed to, which by the way ignites the default mode network in your brain — the set of structures that allow you to mind wander. Mind wandering leads to meaning. It’s just as predictably as night turns to day.

The third thing is actually having the experiences that naturally open up the right hemisphere of your brain. That means allowing yourself to actually fall in love and make friends and doing things in real life with other people, in relation to other people, and taking risks in your relationships. It means actually entertaining the idea of something metaphysical beyond yourself. The left hemisphere is profoundly physical. The right hemisphere is metaphysical. It says there is something more.

And again, you don’t have to do it my way. I’m a Catholic. I go to Mass every day. You don’t have to do it that way. You can do it like Sam Harris. He’s a super right-hemispheric guy, right? Because he has a sense of soulfulness. He has a sense of things beyond what we can actually see and touch. He believes there are things that we can’t see and touch that exist. He doesn’t think it’s God. So you do transcendence your own way.

Looking for calling. How? By serving other people and being needed, by doing something, by allowing yourself to be served and loved. This is actually how you can find these things.

Looking for beauty. Actually experiencing more beauty, real beauty, not behind the screen. It’s not there. It ain’t there, man. I don’t care how long you look at it. It’s not going to be there. That means going someplace in nature, listening to music that really sends you. Read a poem, go to a museum, witness somebody helping other people just for no reason.

And last but not least, lean into your suffering. Bring it on. I make my students say, “My suffering is sacred.” Do you remember Norman Vincent Peale? He had a very famous self-help book in the ’60s called The Power of Positive Thinking. He was a minister at a Protestant church in New York City. And he would say every single day when he started the day, the Psalm: “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.” He was like the gratitude list originator and the whole thing. List all the good things that happen in your life. List the bad things and say, “I’m grateful for that too. Bring it on.”

As you wake up in the morning, say, “I’m really grateful for the beautiful things that are going to happen this day. I woke up today and I get to see Chris. It’s going to be great. I’m really grateful for that. But something’s going to happen today. I’m going to get a phone call or a text or an email that I’m not going to like. Bring it on. I’m grateful for that too, because when I lean into that, then I’m going to be fully alive. That’s the moment that I’m going to be fully alive.” And that attitude of non-resistance to pain will actually lower the suffering paradoxically as it raises the meaning in life.

Closing Thoughts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Heck yeah. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen. Arthur, you’re awesome. I appreciate the heck out of you, man. Thank you. Where should people go? New book?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. So I’m all about looking for the sources of meaning in life. And so my website, ArthurBrooks.com, actually has all kinds of ways people can interact. We have the Meaning Experience, which is a collaboration of people from all over the world on the internet that meet once a month and talk about different ways to find the meaning in life. And I give an academic lecture and then we have this great discussion. So we have all kinds of stuff. And many ways to survey and measure where we are in our meaning journey, many ways to interact with each other. It’s all at the website, ArthurBrooks.com.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Heck yeah. Alrighty. See you next time, everyone.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Dude. Thank you. Thank you. You’re great. I mean, you’re the best.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Arthur. Thank you very much for tuning in.

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