Arthur Brooks on Happiness: Triggernometry Interview (Transcript)

And you can get that in a lot of ways. You can get that when your wife says, “Konstantin, I love you.” Or you can get that from a bump of cocaine. We have very thrifty brains. The pursuit of pleasure is not the right pursuit.

But you add people and memory to that, and then you deliver that experience to the conscious executive centers of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, and then it becomes enjoyment, which truly is part of happiness. Many people don’t know how to pursue that either. They have the old hippie dictum, “If it feels good, do it,” which is problematic and actually disastrous in a lot of people’s lives. Or they just feel bad about enjoying their lives because they feel like they’re going backwards or they’re not putting points on the board. So I have to give a lot of very successful people enjoyment lessons. That’s part one.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So can I dive in there a little bit? So enjoyment is not a bag of cocaine, but it is having a drink with your buddies? Is that what you’re kind of saying?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, so if you’re doing something that gives you pleasure and could be addictive, and you’re doing it alone, you’re probably doing it wrong. That’s what it comes down to. That’s a pretty good rule. If I find you at 4 o’clock in the morning in Vegas pulling the lever on the One-Armed Bandit, we’ll have a conversation. This has become pleasure and not enjoyment. But if you’re at the blackjack table prudently wagering money that you can afford with your best friends, that’s enjoyment. Good for you.

You should be careful with addictive things in general. But this is why the internet is so dangerously addictive, for example. This is why pornography is so bad. I know nobody who looks socially at pornography. It’s like, “Hey, let’s get our friends and—” No. I mean, it’s a solitary, shameful thing to do because it’s pleasure, never enjoyment.

The same thing is true, by the way, even with highly glycemic carbohydrates, which are highly addictive. People tend to snack and eat them alone. And they’re stressed out, they go home and they eat by themselves. And so there should be — it’s a good rule of thumb not to even eat alone, as a matter of fact, such that eating, which should be an inherently social and enjoyable thing to do, leads to happiness.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, so that’s enjoyment. Satisfaction.

# Satisfaction

ARTHUR BROOKS: Satisfaction is a really paradoxical one. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. Only Homo sapiens want pain. Only Homo sapiens want suffering because that’s how you understand what’s proportional to your accomplishment. If you don’t have to give something up for what you’re doing, you will get no sweetness from it. If my students cheat on my exams, they will get no satisfaction from the A. And you look back on your life and you think about the hard things that you’ve done and you ponder the hardness, and that gives you the sweetness. That’s how satisfaction works.

That’s why — your kids are little, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They’re very small. And there’s a lot of—

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. So how old are your children?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Uh, 4 and a few weeks.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Okay. I knew you just had a baby, right? Your wife just had a baby. So 4 is just old enough that you can tell them to wait until dinner. That’s when you start doing it. At 3, if they’re hungry, you take the opportunity and give them some food. By 4, you’re starting to space out their meals a little bit for proper nutrition. And the big lesson from that is that you want them to come to dinner hungry, because they’re learning about life. You’re teaching them that good things come to those who wait. You don’t enjoy your food if you snack all day.

This is actually one of the big reasons that we sacrifice happiness — through snacking. Snacking destroys the satisfaction that we actually get from meals. And putting food in our mouth is one of the great sources of happiness for people. It has the enjoyment part, which is the social part, but there’s the anticipation part, which is the satisfaction part of eating. And so that’s why you say, “No, you can’t have an ice cream at 4:30 in the afternoon.” And what you’re really saying to Junior is, “I want you to suffer.” It just doesn’t sound good. And then their little synaptically plastic brains learn this lesson that they should put off, they should defer their gratifications. That’s part of being a mature person who actually knows how to produce satisfaction and happiness.

Now it gets weirder when you get the thing that you’re deferring your gratification for, because your primeval brain says that then you’ll be super happy, but you’re not. And that’s called the arrival fallacy in behavioral science. The arrival fallacy is that if it was really fun to make progress, it’s going to be bliss when I hit my goal. And it never is, which is why people, when they win an Olympic gold medal, they tend to fall into a clinical depression. Because it doesn’t work that way. Your emotions don’t work to give you a permanently good day because that would put you in danger of the tiger sneaking up behind you. It has to be transitory as a signal that something is either good or bad for you. So when something feels really good, it should be very momentary.

But we don’t figure that out. And the reason we don’t figure that out is because Mother Nature wants us to be fooled again and again and again, so we stay in the hunt. That’s why the Kissens passed on their genes — because they made that mistake over and over again. But that’s maladapted. And so I have to work with a lot of people about how to maintain a higher sense of satisfaction, not by having everything that they want, but by wanting what they have.

In other words, your satisfaction is sort of all your haves divided by your wants. You need to work the denominator more than the numerator, and that goes against your animal impulses. It speaks to your moral aspirations. That’s what every religion teaches. Which is why ultimately people of faith and of serious philosophy can maintain satisfaction better than people who just go from fun thing to fun thing. That’s fascinating.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I really want to dig into that later, but just to lay out the groundwork fully and complete it, the third portion is meaning.

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s the big one.

# Meaning

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s the biggie.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And part of the reason that’s the big one is because that’s the one that’s missing from most young people’s lives today. That’s what we have vacated largely to the way that we’ve used and misused technology. That’s what my new book, “The Meaning of Your Life,” is about. And the reason I wrote that book is because that’s, as a behavioral scientist, what I saw was the most urgent problem facing young people today.

The way that technology has affected our brains is it’s largely vacated important activity in the right hemisphere. You’ve had Iain McGilchrist on the show, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We haven’t. Well, we will at some point.

ARTHUR BROOKS: He’s really a genius on this. He talks about hemispheric lateralization, where the right side of the brain handles all the complex problems of mystery and meaning and love, and the left side of the brain handles the complicated problems of information and things and technology. We check our phones on average 205 times a day, which just shoves us into the left side of our brain where not only do we not know the meaning of our lives, we don’t even ask the questions.

That’s why young people are depressed and anxious today. It has to do with how we’re using our brains. That’s why a lot of young people today will go for every crazy activist scheme, because they’re screaming out for meaning because they don’t naturally experience it. This really is at the doorstep of small screens in our pockets.

Religion, Meaning, and Happiness

FRANCIS FOSTER: And this meaning crisis people frequently tie to religion, particularly on the show. Are religious people therefore happier than non-religious people?

The Four Idols: Money, Power, Pleasure, and Fame

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yes. You know, people— religious people who practice their religion. I mean, we all know a lot of people, of course. You and I are Catholics, right? Actually, you’re not, are you? I was raised Catholic.

FRANCIS FOSTER: You’re a struggling Catholic.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I can help you back. We can get this deal done right now on the show.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m going to take half an hour. You guys crack on.

ARTHUR BROOKS: There’s a brochure under your seat. There are a lot of Catholics who don’t practice. And one of the things that you find is they have no better sense of meaning than people who have no religion at all. But people who believe that they have a concept of the divine, a transcendence, who have not just physical but metaphysical fitness, which requires that you practice something— these people have a much, much deeper sense of the why of their lives.

Now, the why part is important. Meaning is really the answer to the questions of why things happen the way they do, which is coherence; why I’m doing what I’m doing, which is purpose; and why my life matters, which is significance. The three big whys of life. And religion’s really good for answering that. Why do things happen the way they do? Mind of God. Why am I doing what I’m doing? Because I’m trying to live up to God’s will. Why does my life matter? Because I’m a child of God. I mean, this perfectly answers the three why questions of meaning if you take it seriously.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Is that the reason, do you think, why we’re seeing a resurgence, particularly of Catholicism, amongst young people? It’s actually happening in the UK, but very much so in the United States.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, so I’m super interested in these data, as you can imagine. And there’s a problem with these data, which is it tends to be quite anecdotal. So you go out to a lot of dioceses and parishes and say, oh, bigger class at the returning order of Catholics coming in ever that we’ve seen in 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. And I want that to be true. I mean, I deeply want that to be true.

But I also look at the Pew data that say that 840 Catholics leave the church each year for every 100 who come in. That’s not good. Now, an explanation might be that the 100 who come in are on fire and the 840 who leave are boomers like me who were signing up in parishes and they chose not to attend in the first place. They’re just disaffiliating, but they were lukewarm to begin with at best. That’s a possible explanation, but we need to know more.

Now, young men, particularly under 30, for the first time in the past 2 years have upticked in their designation as “none,” N-O-N-E. So this idea that you would be— what’s your religion? Whole bunch of categories, or none. Nobody ever said none. When I was born in the mid-’60s, 1% of Americans said none. And now it’s about 32% of young adults say none. And for the first time, young males have started to say none less. They started to come back just for the past year. There’s a little fish hook on the bottom of that line. And I’m hoping for the best and fostering it as well as I can. Pardon the pun.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because to me, when I see this uptick in religion, it makes perfect sense. If you look at what society values, if you look at what our society says will make you happy, invariably these things won’t make you happy, right? Look, career is important, money is important, no one’s disputing that. But the idea that this is going to give you ultimate fulfillment is a lie, surely.

ARTHUR BROOKS: For sure. Now, that’s as old as Aristotle, who talked about the things that we think will make us happy that don’t. And really through the lens of Aquinas, who in the 13th century was an unbelievably astute social scientist.

Aquinas talked about in his Summa Theologiae in 1265, he wrote about the idols that beguile us. And it was ever thus. The four idols that beguile us, he said, and each one of us has a particular idol. If we know what it is, we have power. But if we don’t know what it is, we’ll always in retrospect be the cause of our regret. The four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame.

They’re all nice. They’re all great. And I teach MBA students at Harvard, and I have a game called “What’s My Idol?” They don’t know, right? They don’t know. But if you know, you have unbelievable power. Why? Because you know it will beguile you. And it will distract you from what you truly want— faith, family, friendship, satisfying, meaningful work, which are the four virtuous parts of the Happiness 401 plan, if you want.

But if you know, it’s really important. So I play this game so that we can uncover their own idol. And they’re usually wrong. They think it’s one thing and it isn’t. And I have a series of questions that I go through to figure out which it is. You want to play?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Yeah, let’s play. I’d love to.

What’s My Idol? The Game

ARTHUR BROOKS: Which one wants to play first? Francis. Me. Okay, okay. Let’s hear it for our first contestant. So here’s how “What’s My Idol?” works. In social science, I never give you a survey and say, pick one. I eliminate the things that it’s not. It’s a much, much more accurate way of getting at the whole idea.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I’ve just realized this is going out on the internet.

ARTHUR BROOKS: This is going out on the internet. Be loud, be proud, mate. Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll do it too if you want. I’ll tell you what my idol is at the end of the day.

So of the 4, and I’ll repeat them— I want you to tell me the one that you’re least beguiled by, that you’re least attracted to. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have it at all. So for example, if you say, “I don’t care about money,” that doesn’t mean you have no money, you’re not in poverty. What that means is that you go to the population average, and if it’s your idol, that’s torture. Being normal is the worst if it’s your idol.

Okay, so here are the 4: money, wealth, resources; power, which is influence over other people— it’s not evil, it’s not Hugo Chavez, it can be very, very good, but people are beguiled by it; pleasure, which either means feeling good or comfort or security— so if you check your stock portfolio every day, you’ve got a pleasure idol, or if you have a hard time getting out of bed; and last is fame. And fame doesn’t necessarily mean internet fame. It might be prestige. It might be just status, well regarded by the right people.

For professors, most professors don’t want to be Taylor Swift. What most professors want is to walk into the room at that conference and everybody says, “That’s Professor Kisin. He wrote that paper on the 7-dimensional disappearing manifold.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I definitely don’t want that academic recognition.

ARTHUR BROOKS: But you do want prestige in your field. Right. Okay. So that’s— fame can mean all sorts of things. Now you’re thinking about these things, Francis, you’ve got to get rid of one. Which one do you get rid of first?

FRANCIS FOSTER: So we’ve got money, power, pleasure, and fame— or honor.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Honor— that’s the old word. That’s the word that Aquinas uses, honor instead of fame. But that has kind of a connotation. I have two of my kids who are Marines. They serve with honor. That’s not what I mean.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, I’d say power. Power.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Tell me why. And by the way, I believe you, but tell me why.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, I kind of see it through an addict’s lens, and I’ll tell you why. Whenever I’ve been gambling with friends, I’m like, this does nothing for me. That little thing in my brain where I’m like, “Yeah, more, more, more”— I get nothing from it. So power— I don’t. What’s important to me is that I am satisfied with what I’m doing. That’s what matters to me. Have I done my best? Have I produced work that I’m genuinely proud of? At the end of the day, do I look back and go, “That was a good day?” It matters to me what my friends and family think, but everybody else, I don’t really care that much.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You don’t want to order people around? You don’t want to snap your fingers and have people do what you want? You don’t want to be a CEO? So let me make a supposition about you. Do you have libertarian political tendencies?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, I kind of want to be left alone. Yeah.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Do you hate it when people tell you what to do?

FRANCIS FOSTER: I f*ing hate it.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yep. There you go. And people who hate having other people have power over them don’t like power. Here’s the thing— when you see somebody who has a particular idol, they admire somebody who has the same idol, but more of it. So if you see a politician who admires dictators, look out. That person wants to be a dictator. Look at who you admire. If you admire rich people, if you admire famous people, that’s your idol.

Almost certainly you despise powerful people who wield it arbitrarily. From Venezuela, for Pete’s sake— you’ve actually seen the fruits of that. So I totally believe you.

Now you’ve just gotten rid of an idol that’s not an idol, so there’s no virtue. Okay, you’ve got 3 left: money, pleasure, and fame. You’ve got to get rid of one more, and this is going to get harder now because these are all kind of nice, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Fame. No, I’ll tell you why— I know enough about myself that I know pleasure.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You know where you’re driving with this, right? Now, the reason I say this is because it might perfectly well be the case that it doesn’t matter to you at all when people recognize you in the airport, which I’m sure they do, because you’ve got millions and millions of viewers. And they go, “Oh, I love Triggernometry,” and it feels kind of good. But you don’t care?

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s not that I don’t care. I’m glad that it provides them with value, and I’m glad that I’m doing something that makes people feel good and it teaches them and it educates them, all the rest of it. But it’s third in that list. I wouldn’t pretend it doesn’t matter, because it does. But if I’m being honest, it’s third.

ARTHUR BROOKS: What you’re saying is that the other two are more important to you. And I know what you’re going to get rid of next, which is money. And because what’s left is pleasure. Tell me about the pleasure idol.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I could have told you this from the moment we started. Francis, are you a porn addict?

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s right. The last episode of Triggernometry. I just— I have—

FRANCIS FOSTER: There is a family history in, obviously, my family with alcoholism. I know that I have those tendencies, which is why I don’t drink. It’s why I have to be very regimented with my life. I meditate every morning. I plan and I structure my day because I know that if I don’t have those guardrails, I can easily veer off. I have depressive tendencies, and when I do, and when I indulge those depressive tendencies, it can go very quickly down a dark path.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And you try to alleviate those tendencies with immediate pleasures, which ultimately make the problem worse.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Like every comedian, I got diagnosed with ADHD. And I know that I have those trying to ameliorate those bad set of behaviors, whatever you want to call them. And ameliorate it with substances and various different behaviors that I know are deeply destructive.

How Humor Works in the Brain

ARTHUR BROOKS: I completely believe that. And it’s interesting because I’ve actually studied how humor works. Humor is all based on surprise. And so you’re usually really good at being surprised, or you’re good at surprising people. Humor works on a part of the limbic system called the parahippocampal gyrus, and you flick it and it creates surprise, which you resolve by laughing.

Any stupid dad joke does this. And the reason that little kids laugh — your 4-year-old laughs, or when your 4-year-old was 2 and you did this — it flicked the parahippocampal gyrus of your baby. And so they laugh like crazy.

And now, even now I’ll tell you a stupid joke. “I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.”

FRANCIS FOSTER: That’s an Emo Philips. That’s dumb.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, for sure. That’s my father’s favorite joke. But here’s the interesting thing. Most people are either good at flicking that thing to change the mood because they’re depressed, which is most comedians, or they’re really good at having it flicked by somebody else, which means they actually enjoy humor. Those are the two aspects of humor.

You’re unusual because you laugh a lot. Most comedians don’t laugh that much because they’re only good at one part of that. They’re really good at changing the tenor. It’s called emotional substitution. And so you find out when you’re a depressed kid that you’re funny and you say a funny thing and everybody laughs and it makes things better inside your brain. But you actually enjoy jokes too.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I love jokes.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Good jokes, not the one I just said.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I like Emo Philips.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. Anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean to take us off that path. What were we talking about?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: His pleasure is his idol.

Pleasure as an Idol

ARTHUR BROOKS: Pleasure is your idol. And I actually believe that. And so you have to be very, very careful about the fact that you’ll self-administer pleasure for mood management because it’s an ineffective mood management technique.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, it’s why one of the things that I spend my money on is personal training, because I know that I’m physically lazy, and if I go to the gym, I’m just going to mess about. Which is why I need a very angry South African man to basically shout at me and get me to lift heavy things 3 to 4 times a week. Lift, lift, lift, lift!

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, I like it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I just know that if I do that — again, I see my life essentially, and my behavior, and the way I plan my life, as a series of guardrails. If I don’t have the guardrails in place, we go somewhere very dark very quickly.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Right, right, right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right, so it’s going to be difficult. I can’t eliminate any of them.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, having a balanced portfolio of idols is actually pretty healthy insofar as that you’re probably not managed by any of them really vigorously.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But give them to me again: money, power, pleasure, and fame.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You’ve got to get rid of one of them first, and that means going to the population mean. Which one do you get rid of first?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Going to the population mean — if I eliminate money, I make what an average person makes?

ARTHUR BROOKS: You’re the most average Brit ever, which by the way is getting worse.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, tell me about it. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but power and fame I definitely eliminate.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You would. You know, you’re pretty libertarian too.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m very libertarian. I f*ing hate people telling me what to do. But I am CEO of Triggernometry and I do run it, right?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Because it must be done.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because it must be done.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I’d rather not do it. But if people start calling you boss, it’s going to make you uncomfortable.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell everyone to stop it.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. So you’re a hierarchical organization that is flatter than it could be because you don’t like it when people call you by your last name. That stuff really bums you out. And fame — it doesn’t draw you in at all. If literally nobody recognized you on the street—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’d prefer that.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You would prefer that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: To me, fame is an unpleasant byproduct of what we do. Really? Yeah. Like when people come up to me in the street and they want to chat, I sort of want to chat to them to give them what they want, but for me it’s awkward and a bit of a distraction.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It’s not oxygen for you?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, not at all. Having said that, I don’t want people to walk away from this thinking I’m being superior in some way or whatever. I enjoy having that conversation, but if I could just walk around and people didn’t recognize me, that would definitely be my preference.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Introvert.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You are an introvert, which means that when you do something big like ARK, you’re drained of energy after that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, absolutely. I need to rest for a week.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. So an extrovert would be wired after that. That’s really how you find out, because introverts can be very public, but they don’t get energy from being public.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I get tired from being with lots of other people.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Okay, so you like solitude?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I love solitude. Massively.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That’s a really good thing.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Interesting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve got two young kids, you can tell.

Money vs. Pleasure

ARTHUR BROOKS: And so there were just two left, which is money and pleasure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I really value comfort. And the thing with money is, I’m not someone who wants to make lots of money for the sake of making money, but I do need a lot of money to do the things in my life that I want. That maybe doesn’t make any sense.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It makes a lot of sense because you just said it’s pleasure, not money. You need the money to give you the comfort that you want. That’s really what it comes from.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And for me, comfort is peace, is what I mean. Like, I want to be left alone in a comfortable space. That’s kind of what—

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, you want to eliminate sources of discomfort. Yes, that’s what it comes down to.

And that’s actually one of the things we find a lot of people want — they don’t want noisy neighbors, for example. They don’t want to wait in a queue to go to the doctor. They don’t want to be in traffic. Those things cost money, right? And so that’s a pleasure idol.

And what that means is that it’s very, very easy to fall into patterns. And again, there’s nothing wrong with these things. These things are not evil. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure. It’s just the misuse of pleasure. It’s just the elevation of pleasure. When you’re doing this at the expense of your family — when it’s like, “I want peace, get the kids out of here” — then you’ll actually sacrifice your relationships. You’ll do things that you’ll ultimately regret as a result of that. And so knowing that is super important.

The Honor Idol and Earning Love

For most of my students, they think they have a money idol. I mean, they’re MBA students at the Harvard Business School. But it’s not that they actually have a money idol — they have an honor idol. It’s not even a fame idol. It’s a desire to be beloved. They want to be adored.

And the reason is because my students — and by the way, me too, it’s my problem too — they’re really, really good at something when they’re kids. And they learn that they only get love and attention from their parents when they do that thing. And their little synaptically plastic brains — this is really important as a dad. I’m a dad. I’m a grandfather. My grandkids are the same age as your kids — they conclude in their synaptic plasticity that love is earned.

And then they go through life trying to get that feeling. They want that feeling by doing the thing. And they become sort of human doings as opposed to human beings. What they want is adoration, and they want to earn it. They’ll earn their spouse’s love, they’ll earn their friend’s love, they’ll try to earn God’s love. They’ll go through their lives trying to earn love.

And that’s really an honor idol. That’s an idol of the adoration that you’re trying to earn. And love can’t be earned. Love is a free gift, freely given. It’s a grace. And so this is one of the most important things we have to get strivers — super successful accomplishment people — off of that idol, because they’ll never be happy. They’ll never have a happy marriage. They’ll never have true friendships. They’ll never have an ordered relationship with the divine as long as they’re trying to earn love.

FRANCIS FOSTER: A lot of comedians have that. The moment you started talking about that, I was like, yeah, that’s a bit of you, mate.

Comedians and the Need to Be Loved

ARTHUR BROOKS: I know a lot of comedians. I work with a lot of comedians, partly because I learn from them. I think I’m the only social scientist who’s ever done Mike Birbiglia’s show.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Oh, really?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah. Working It Out. That’s a great show.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, I listen to that show sometimes.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I went on to talk about how I work out my material on a comedian podcast. But it’s true — they want to be loved. “Laugh at my joke. I just want you to laugh at my joke.” That’s points on the board. It makes me feel like I’m worth something, for Pete’s sake. And deep in my heart, I don’t feel like I’m worth anything. And I feel worthless until somebody’s loving me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s really interesting. You call it joke coke, don’t you?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, yeah. Joke coke. Totally.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s interesting. It’s why I never really enjoyed being a comedian. I like making jokes as part of my speeches or doing this, but the life of a comedian — it’s a hard life. The travel, all of it. And I was very happy to not do it anymore when COVID came along and everything shifted.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Really?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I hated being taken off the road. I hated it. Really? I love being on tour. I started going on tour when I was 19, because I was a professional classical musician all the way through my 20s. And I started going on chamber music tours. I toured for a couple of years with Charlie Byrd, who was a bossa nova guitar player. And I love tour. I love the touring life. It’s just the best.

And it’s not a well-balanced, healthy life. Which means that married life and family life actually saved me. But left to my own devices, I would be out 7 days a week.

The Drive for Meaning and Activism

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right, right, right. I want to come back to something you said, and obviously the meaning issue is something we’ve talked about a lot, and the activism issue is something we’ve talked about a lot.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I know, on this show, really well too.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, thank you, because we’re really trying to get to the bottom of it. I think it’s very easy and tempting for people who’ve maybe got their life together a little bit and they’re successful in some ways to just look at people who are, you know, throwing soup on paintings to save the planet or whatever. And it’s kind of silly and you make fun of it. But I think I’ve always seen that within that is the drive to have meaning. And it’s the drive to be significant as well. And it’s the drive to live in a significant time.

I think there’s a huge appeal to the idea that we are living in some kind of time that is immediately before an imminent catastrophe. And if I just go out and I have the right placard at the right protest, then we’ll save the planet. Otherwise, you know, everything’s going to go haywire.

And what I wanted to ask you is, why is it that people pursue forms of activism that are not actually effective? Because if you wanted meaning, like I get a lot of meaning from doing Triggernometry because I feel like we’re contributing to the cultural discussions and shaping them in a way that we think is true and matters a lot. And from the feedback we get from people, I hear that it makes a meaningful impact on their lives. And that to me is meaning. That’s real meaning.

But if I was engaged in something that was not producing any outcome and was in fact not geared to producing any outcome, was simply attending protests for the sake of feeling like I am with other people who are achieving effectively nothing, I wouldn’t find that meaningful. Why do people pursue forms of activism that don’t actually achieve anything at all?

Performative Activism and Victim Identity

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, one answer, which is an incomplete answer, is that it’s performative. And it’s not performative to others, it’s performative to yourself. That the meaning comes from showing that you care about something enough to be angry about it, to put yourself into a hot hedonic state, to feel intense levels of negative emotionality. It just shows that you can actually feel something, for Pete’s sake.

You know, look, you’re doing the show really, really good, but you’re not in a hot hedonic state. On the contrary, it’d be terrible if you’re just yelling the whole time. I mean, there are people who try to do that in media, but they would be a less effective medium if you were doing that. But there are a lot of people who just can’t feel anything. They’re not feeling anything. They’re completely numb.

And so what they get involved in are forms of very, very performative activism because it makes them feel alive, maybe for the first time in a long time. It’s a really extraordinary thing. I mean, they’re spending their time scrolling and dating online, and it’s just incredibly numbing behaviors. They kind of wiped out all sense of boredom, but their lives are grindingly boring. And so the result of it is they want to feel something, maybe for the first time in a long time, is what it comes down to.

The second problem is that a lot of young people today have been effectively conscripted into a culture war by baby boomers, and they’ve been made to understand that their identity is in a form of grievance. And this is very common. This is the best way to manipulate people, is to create a victim identity. That’s identity politics. But the most single toxic kind of identity that you can have is that I’m a victim.

Why is it toxic? It’s toxic because you’re looking in the mirror and saying, “I’m aggrieved. I don’t know who I am if I’m not feeling bad.” And this is the exact antithesis of Christianity or any good, serious, nutritious religion, which is to look in the mirror and say, “I’m a beloved child of God.” What’s my identity? Child of God. It’s profoundly positive.

But if you look in the mirror and you say, “I’m the victim of discrimination, I’m somebody who’s actually suffered marginalization, I’m somebody who’s on the short end of the stick,” that’s terrible as an identity. That’s the recipe for anxiety and depression, which of course it has produced.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what would you say to people who will say to you, “Well, I have been a victim of this, or my people have been a victim of this for a long time,” or now, you get the same on other parts of the political spectrum — “We have been a victim of DEI or whatever.” And these are all things that are historically—

ARTHUR BROOKS: I mean, the woke right is doing exactly the same thing today. I don’t know, on Triggernometry, do we use this term of art?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I was one of the people that pioneered it. You coined this, didn’t you? Yeah, yeah, it’s got me lots of love and gratitude on the internet.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, he’s come for a drink now. Means you’re on to something, Konstantin, you’re on to something.

The Dark Triad and the Culture War

ARTHUR BROOKS: But the truth is that you will find — again, this is not the exclusive ecosystem of the left. The left got really, really good at this, of conscripting people into the culture war with victim identity. But the right has picked this up like crazy because it’s incredibly powerful.

And why should — I mean, you should acknowledge the fact that there are injustices in the world. That’s the right thing to do. But you don’t identify yourself with injustice per se. That’s the perfect recipe for misery. On the contrary, you should be joyful there’s something that you can actually do.

I mean, the message of most religions is, notwithstanding all the hard things in your life, you’re beloved. Notwithstanding that, you can have a good life. You know, that’s the whole idea, that the good life is open to absolutely everybody. As opposed to — “I know you grew up in a first world country with all kinds of prosperity, but you’re still a victim.” I mean, that’s a hell of a way to live.

But of course, that makes you really putty in the hands of the dark triad activist boomer — the person who’s a narcissist, the person who’s Machiavellian, the person who has psychopathic tendencies, which, by the way, the research is very clear, describes most real activist leaders today in the political environment. They have these tendencies. That’s 7% of the population is dark triad, but they’re disproportionately represented in the activist community, and they want soldiers.

How do you get that? By freaking them out, by making them think that the world is actually against them, as opposed to helping them understand how they can take control, how they can have agency, how life can be joyful, how life can be good, which is the responsible thing for all of us to do with young people today.

Social Media, Comparison, and the Broken Brain

FRANCIS FOSTER: Do you think part of the problem as well, Arthur, is they say comparison is a thief of joy, and with social media we live in a perpetual state of comparison?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely the case. And that quote is frequently attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt, of all people. And whether he said it — he said it on the internet, so it may or may not be his, but it’s certainly manifestly true. And I’ve got data and all kinds of experiments from the literature that show that’s exactly the case.

As much as if you take photographs on your vacation, you will enjoy the vacation 16% less. And about 25% less if you post them to the internet. That’s just empirical verification of the fact that when you’re doing something and you’re living for other people, when you’re trying to hold yourself up to the standards of others, when you’re not fully present in the joy that is your life, you’re not going to enjoy your life, is what it comes down to.

But fundamentally, the problem isn’t social comparison. Fundamentally, the problem is that our brains are broken. We’re being shoved 205 times a day on average — which is the number of times that the average American looks at her or his phone — into the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere is mystery and meaning and significance and purpose and love and hope. It’s the right side of the brain.

But no, you’re over there in the world of information you didn’t ask for, for things that actually promise you everything and deliver nothing. And it’s the complicated problems of engineering and analysis as opposed to the complex issues of meaning and mystery. And if you’re just never there, well, guess what? You’re going to be sad and angry.

Young Men, Mental Health, and Extremism

FRANCIS FOSTER: And that sadness and anger, particularly when you’ve got young men who are more prone to extremes of emotion, that tends to lead towards extremism, doesn’t it?

ARTHUR BROOKS: It can, absolutely. Although I would contest that it’s mostly men. On the contrary, what we find is — and this comes from the work of John Haidt, who’s just the best on this, and Jean Twenge and a lot of other people, Brad Wilcox down at the University of Virginia — they show that there are incredible problems of depression and anxiety, of mood disorders, of diagnosed mental illness, particularly for progressive women under 30. Progressive women under 30 have a 56% chance of having been formally diagnosed with at least one mental illness.

Why? Well, because of this. Because this is how it’s manifest. And depression is largely shown among women with sadness and men with anger. That’s how you see it. A lot of women don’t understand that about their husbands. Like, “My husband’s so grumpy all of a sudden.” He’s depressed. Well, he’s not crying. Of course not. That’s not how men do it. Men do it in a different way.

So you’re going to see this manifest in different ways — in classic mood disorders with sadness, especially depression and rumination with women, and with unhealthy, disordered forms of anger for men.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And the worrying thing is the way we’re going in society, where if you look at it, men are less and less likely to get married, less and less likely to be in relationships, less and less likely to have deep friendships, which are incredibly important for men. You do worry where this is going to go. Because we’re less and less happy. And as a result, young men and young women, they’re veering away from each other as well, right?

The Mystery of Love and the Dangers of Simulation

ARTHUR BROOKS: No, that’s right. And effectively what the Great Awakening has done— but what that really is, is the manifestation of modern technology has done— is it’s driven us away from the thing that’s best for us in the right hemispheres of our brain, which is romantic love. This is the ultimate mystery of life. It’s a problem that can’t be solved.

So are you married, Francis? No. You’re not married. So I’ll talk to you as a married man. I’ve been married 35 years. There’s lots of complicated left hemispheric problems in my life, like my car. My car is the classic left hemisphere problem, complicated problem. I can solve it, but I don’t— I haven’t— I don’t have the slightest idea how it works. I’m incompetent, but I could solve it, right?

My marriage is a complex problem in the right hemisphere of my brain. I will never solve my marriage. It’s so complex, right? I mean, that’s because it’s dynamic. You want a cat because you have right hemispheric needs. You don’t want a mechanical cat, which would be a left hemispheric simulation for it. We’re living in the world of simulations which don’t satisfy us, is what it comes about.

Furthermore, when we’re living over there, we’re going to drive people apart from even being able to comprehend that mystery. I talk to men in their 20s all the time who’ve never been on a date. I mean, in my 20s, that was the point. That was the point. I mean, I wanted a career and I wanted to make money. I wanted to be successful. I wanted love. I wanted to find the love of my life when I was 23 years old. It’s like, yep, I’m looking for my wife. I was like that as well. And you’re 20 years younger than me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve been married 23 years. Got married at 20, met at 18, married at 20. Nice. I admire that a lot.

ARTHUR BROOKS: I met my wife when I was 24 and I couldn’t close the deal for 2 years because she didn’t believe in marriage. She’s from Barcelona. Like Denmark on the Mediterranean. And they’re all very modern, hard red, atheists, et cetera, et cetera. But I had to set about— this was a big, big, big project. Now, of course, she leads me in paths of righteousness. I mean, she’s a true believer in all these things. And she leads me.

But the whole point is that this is the mystery of life. And if we’ve eradicated that, we’ve broken the brains of young people because of how technology has changed our lives, how culture— the culture that everything has a complicated solution, the culture of technology and engineering, or “there’s an app for that”— all that does is it ruins mystery. And the ultimate mystery, of course, is love.

And so if you’re freaking people out in activism, turning the genders against each other systematically, if you’re making it harder for people to meet, if you’re taking out all the joy from the way that they meet because they’re meeting on apps, for example, if you’re making it such that they don’t even know how to date in real life, guess what you’re going to get? A baby bust. You’re going to get a love depression, which is exactly what we have.

Technology, Social Media, and the Happiness Downturn

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, technology seems like such a huge part of it. And I think because people feel that they can’t control that part, we focus so much on culture and politics and all this other stuff where it seems to me quite obvious that, for example, the pill and other elements of the sexual revolution drive so much of the stuff that people think is cultural. And likewise, I think Francis was saying before we started, happiness peaked in 1992. Yeah. Well, the internet comes along, right? Is that fair?

ARTHUR BROOKS: That’s fair. But really the biggest— that is true that there’s been a kind of a climatic change in happiness since about 1990. But then you have the storms, the hurricanes, the weather of happiness has been a lot more severe. And that’s been since 2008, largely. Social media. Yeah.

And at the beginning of that, when I saw the biggest downdraft in happiness in my data, I thought it was the financial crisis. Nuh-uh. That was the introduction of the smartphone is what that was. And then the introduction of apps on the smartphone and then the introduction of dating apps.

Now I’m not against dating apps. That’s the way that the world is going to work. I do scientific advice to dating apps. As a matter of fact, I want them to be better because they’re not going to go away. And the way that you do that is by adding the human element into the algorithm, adding the right hemisphere into the left hemisphere, and then you can actually make them productive. We learn how to use the machines.

By the way, we’re going to figure this out. People are really ingenious and we’re going to figure this out. I know the end of the story. We’re fine. The problem is we lose a lot of people in the meantime, and that’s what I want to avoid.

The Short Clip Problem and the Long Game of Truth

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And the other thing I have noticed in the time that we’ve been doing the show— I think we started “Triggernometry” in 2018. By this point, Joe Rogan and other people were already really big. But there was, it felt like a bit of a renaissance. Because for the first time you were hearing long-form conversations often about difficult issues. They were conducted with mutual respect and all the rest of it. And I very naively thought, this is it now. We found the magic formula for discussion.

And now I see that that very thing is becoming what we saw in the mainstream media, which is typically for a podcast, the thing that will be most consumed is a short clip that totally misrepresents the conversation that goes viral because somebody said something out of context that can be made to look offensive and triggering and whatever. So we keep reverting to this very bad meme.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Why is that? Well, because people want the immediate emotional hit. Because something that actually gets you into this hedonic state, it gives you a lot of dopamine. The idea that somebody said something that triggers you, something that offends you, that actually gives you the sense that you’re right and they’re wrong. And that’s really, really satisfying.

Yeah, it feels good to be right and to hear somebody that you don’t like saying something you think is wrong. That’s why you’ll pass it on. That’s why you kind of know it’s out of context, but that’s no fun. You’ll actually pass that on. It’s satisfying, right? That’s why it’s more satisfying than putting something into context and getting the nuances. That’s the least satisfying thing ever, right? Yeah, that’s a drag, man.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, what do we do about that?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, what we do about that is adhering to truth, is being serious about truth. And there’s always been this problem. There’s nothing new under the sun. I mean, people have misrepresented each other and lied about each other. Calumny is nothing new.

I mean, if you go back to the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, there are pamphlets that were coming out from John Adams that were defaming Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson was sniping at John Adams, and they were telling lies about each other. And people that were lying about— we look back in the glory days, everybody loved George Washington. No. I mean, if you look at the second term of George Washington, he literally wouldn’t read the newspapers because they were so calumnious about him. They were lying about him and saying terrible things about him. The newspapers in those days were all completely aligned with one particular political party.

So there’s nothing new under the sun. This is the way that this works. And what we’re dedicated to is the long game of truth and love and beauty and all of these good things. But that’s always the long game. You’ll always lose the short game to the quick hit and to the negative emotion. But the long game has got to belong to us ultimately, because if it doesn’t, then there is no hope.

Does Taking Risk Make Us Happier?

FRANCIS FOSTER: This is a question I really wanted to ask, which is, does taking risk make us happier?

ARTHUR BROOKS: The answer is maybe.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it depends what happens, I imagine.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, no, it doesn’t actually depend on the outcome so much as the nature of the risk. So entrepreneurs take a lot of risk, but so do compulsive gamblers, right? And so risk per se isn’t good, but risk in search of an explosive reward, and done prudently and managed in the right way, can be the most rewarding thing possible.

Now we could go and talk about Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, who took incredible risks in search of these entrepreneurial results that were outsized and the wonderful things they were able to do. But that’s actually not the best example. The best example of the biggest entrepreneurial risk that leads to the biggest rewards is falling in love. That is the ultimate enterprise. A family, a marriage, babies. That’s an enterprise. That’s a way bigger deal than Apple Computer. That’s a way bigger deal. And it’s a little explosion, boom, boom, boom, boom, happening all over the place. Less than it was, which is problematic, but that’s risk in the enterprise of life.

And I talk to my students about this all the time. I say, “You want to be an entrepreneur?” They all go, “Yeah, good. Go raise $25 million in venture and throw it behind your crazy scheme on the internet. I don’t care. You want to be a real entrepreneur? Give your heart away. Go give your heart away. Tell that girl that you’re secretly in love with her and let her stomp all over it. Maybe, or maybe she’ll say, ‘I like you too.'”

That’s risk that really, really matters. And when you take risk with a sense of prudential judgment— and by the way, prudence in the classical sense is not not taking risk, it’s taking the right amount of risk. Sometimes risking your life is the prudent thing to do, right? That’s what Josef Pieper talks about, that in the Four Cardinal Virtues, he writes about prudence in the best way. So taking prudent risk in search of explosive returns for things that really matter, then risk is the best thing ever.

Comfort as the Enemy of Happiness

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because the enemy, I think, of happiness— and correct me if I’m wrong— is a desire to seek comfort.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, an enemy of happiness is actually never living in an entrepreneurial way. Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the biggest problems. You could live in this kind of cocoon, and really what the cocoon is, is The Matrix, that movie that came out 27 years ago. Isn’t that shocking?

But what that is, is that people lived in a pleasant simulation because they were being controlled by an artificial intelligence that fed off human energy. Francis, we’re literally in the Matrix. This is actually happening to us right now. And the way that you keep people pacified is by the pleasant simulation, the kind of curve fit of a right hemispheric life that’s actually a left hemispheric experience. And in so doing, that comfort— it’s a comfortable thing that’s actually awful. That’s a dystopian nightmare is the way that that works out. And the way that you break out is by taking all kinds of IRL risks, especially with your heart.

The Matrix, Suffering, and the Meaning of Life

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And metaphorically speaking, I think that The Matrix was a very formative film in my life as I was probably 18, 19 at the time, something like that. I think metaphorically it’s interesting because when Neo leaves the Matrix, life is shitty. Yeah. And I think that’s life. But it’s life. And I think there’s so much to that because it’s only when you abandon these superficial comforts and actually take the risk — like, it’s not that pleasant all the time. No, but it’s meaningful.

ARTHUR BROOKS: And it’s not just the risk, it’s actually saying, I want the suffering. Yeah, I want it, bring it on. The glory of God is a man fully alive. That’s Saint Irenaeus in the 2nd century. The glory of God is a person fully alive. What’s a person fully alive? That’s a person in pain. You know that, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You sell it, you sell it well. You tell—

FRANCIS FOSTER: You can tell he’s a Catholic.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, I know, but you go into a Catholic church, you’re literally worshiping a guy represented in the front of the church who’s being tortured to death. Yeah, that’s — I don’t want that, but I need that. I need that. I need that suffering. I need that full experience. I want to bite out of life. I want to be fully alive.

And this is one of the reasons that suffering, which is a largely right-hemispheric experience, makes people understand the meaning of their lives. If I go back through your life, if we went back, if I were your therapist — which I don’t do clinical work — if we went back, year after year after year, and I would say, tell me the formative moments, you wouldn’t say, “Oh yeah, that beach vacation in Ibiza.” No, you’d tell me about when that person passed away, when that woman that you loved wasn’t there, when something that you wanted didn’t happen, and then you understood who you were because you survived and you understood something through your suffering. That’s critically, critically important. And there’s no suffering in the Matrix.

I make my students say, “My suffering is sacred.” And they have this little mantra that I give them to wake up each morning, whether they’re on their knees or not, and to say, “I’m truly grateful for the things that are going to happen this day.” You know the psalm, “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.” But I will also rejoice and be glad in the suffering I’m going to face this day and the setbacks I’m going to face this day. Bring it on.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That’s a life fully alive. Yeah, it’s what I love, what the French call heartbreak. They call it le douleur exquisit, which means the exquisite pain.

Pain vs. Resistance: The Formula for Suffering

ARTHUR BROOKS: And there’s something to that, isn’t there? There’s something to that. People are not afraid of breaking up because of the pain it’s going to bring, but because they’re afraid of the pain per se. Pain isn’t a problem. Our fear of pain is the problem. And by the way, we’re evolved for that.

Social pain and rejection actually implicates a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, about the size of the end of your index finger. And we have it so that we’re averse to losing something or someone that we love. Because if we didn’t, 250,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, you’d wind up walking the savanna and dying alone because you’d be rejected from your tribe — because you wouldn’t be afraid of rejection, you wouldn’t be afraid of loss.

It’s maladapted today to a certain extent, but also when you learn to live with the hyperactivation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, then you get that meaning. You say, “Okay, this is why I’m still alive. This is how I’m actually surviving.” That’s, by the way, why you listen to sad music when you’re heartbroken, because it puts into perspective that aliveness that’s in you right now. It helps you understand the emotions that you’re actually feeling. You’re saying, “I want to understand this emotion. I want meaning.” That’s the reason you’re listening to Taylor Swift over and over and over again, right? Right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: That’s what you do, Francis? Only when I work out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s interesting you say that, particularly about suffering, because I think as Buddhists you say life is suffering.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, that’s the first noble truth of Buddhism.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And also in The Matrix, interestingly — I don’t know if you remember the scene where Agent Smith is talking about the history of The Matrix to Morpheus when he’s got him captured and in handcuffs. And he says, “We made a bunch of versions of The Matrix and they all failed because there was not enough suffering.” And what you just did is you explained how suffering is part of what makes life meaningful. And that’s a very powerful framing of it because I think it’s fair to say suffering’s inevitable.

ARTHUR BROOKS: It is. Well, what’s actually inevitable is pain. So suffering equals pain times resistance to pain. That’s sort of the right formula. Mental suffering equals pain, which has both sensory and affective components. The sensory pain has to do with inflammation and nerve endings and it’s processed in one part of the cortex. Affective pain is part of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that I just talked about a minute ago — that’s the “I hate it” part. You get affective pain after you touch a hot stove and you feel the sensory part, and then you feel the affective part: “I don’t want to do that anymore. I hate that.”

When you have mental pain, it’s only the affective portion, which is, by the way, the reason that acetaminophen — you call it paracetamol over here, Tylenol — it affects the affective pain. It doesn’t make you feel less pain, it makes you care less. That’s how Tylenol works. That’s why a blend, when you have physical pain, of both Advil and Tylenol works so well together, because you’re working on both sides of the pain mechanism.

So pain is super important. It’s how you learn not to do things. And it’s inevitable. But when you multiply it by resistance, then you understand that suffering is not inevitable. And that’s how meaning comes into the picture. If you have high, high, high pain, but low, low, low resistance, you can actually have very manageable suffering. And that’s how, in non-resistance, the Buddhists understand suffering versus pain itself.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s so interesting. I had an experience where the place I was living, there was a lot of noise coming in and I was really angry about it the whole time.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Your resistance was sky high.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: My resistance was sky high. And the moment I just accepted that it’s happening and started just managing around it — doing what I could, and I couldn’t eliminate the problem, but what I could do is just accept it — my level of suffering went way down. Not to zero, but close. Way down.

Buddhism, Catholicism, and the Art of Non-Resistance

ARTHUR BROOKS: Almost to zero, I would say. That is Catholicism. It’s like, “Not my will be done, but thine,” said the master in the Garden of Gethsemane. Yeah, that’s what he said, right? And that was to say, “This is going to hurt.” Our Lord did not say “this is going to suck,” but he was thinking that. And he said, “But thy will be done, not mine” — that is the act of nonresistance, which is the lesson for us.

The first noble truth of Buddhism is dukkha, which technically means the sticky craving from inadequate things. It’s sort of dissatisfaction — that is really the first noble truth of Buddhism. It comes from attachment. Attachment is a form of resistance to not getting what you want. The second noble truth of Buddhism is that attachment per se is that explanation. The third noble truth of Buddhism is that the solution is detachment, non-resistance. And the way to get that is the Fourth Noble Truth of Buddhism, which is where it gets complicated — the Eightfold Path. So it’s like, yes, yes, yes, and you get the Eightfold Path and you’re like, “That’s a lot of work.”

I’ve worked a lot with the Dalai Lama over the past 13 years. I go to Dharamsala every year to do conferences and projects with His Holiness. It’s been very helpful to me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What is that?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Well, the Eightfold Path is the way that the Buddhists teach you to live such that you can live in non-resistance — non-resistance to ego, non-resistance to pain — such that you can be integrated into a life that has inevitable pain but not inevitable suffering.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What seemed to me like a contradiction that I’ve always wanted to ask someone who’s as smart and knowledgeable as you about it — I just gave you the example where my suffering went to zero because I let go. But then also, isn’t having ambition to do things and create things and to build things and have conversations — isn’t there ego in that?

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yes. And so here’s the thing. This is the balance. If I were a Buddhist, which I’m not, I might say you should always have complete non-resistance and disregard pain. I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a capitalist. I’m an American. I think there are lots of cases when you should actually try to lower the pain.

I mean, I take a Tylenol if I wake up and my back hurts a lot. I’ve got back issues. And I take Advil because I want an anti-inflammatory. By the way, I’m also very familiar with the clinical research on back pain, which shows that you should alleviate the pain, manage it a little bit, but you shouldn’t take a narcotic analgesic because that’s eliminating the pain. I should manage the pain and then have non-resistance to the fundamental presence of it in my life, which will actually co-occur with my life every day for the rest of my life. It’s okay. It’s okay to say, “I’m a guy with back pain. I can manage it a little bit because Advil’s pretty good, but I can also live a really, really good life and I can focus on the things that I like.”

So what I’m doing is combining the lowering of pain with non-resistance in a way where the suffering is where I need it to be in my life. If I’m running a company and I see some problem that I can avoid — I have a problematic loudmouth employee who’s lighting me up on the Slack channel — I’ll fire him. I’m getting rid of pain. I’m not going to have non-resistance to that, because it’s not right for me to practice non-resistance in the lives of other people. There are all kinds of cases where judgment requires that you understand which lever you’re going to try to work.

Pain Is Not Evidence You’re Broken

But if you only think there’s one lever — which is what we are telling young people, that pain, that depression, that sadness, that melancholy, that anxiety, that loneliness is evidence that you’re broken — no, it’s evidence you’re alive. I tell my students, “Look, you’re studying at Harvard University. If you’re not sad and anxious, you need therapy.” The truth is, that’s a really good and normal thing. So don’t go to somebody who says, “Oh, you’re sad and anxious, we’ve got to fix that.” No, you’ve got to manage that. You’ve got to live with that. You have to understand the balance between pain and non-resistance to pain, such that the suffering is what it’s supposed to be.

The Role of Gratitude in Grief

FRANCIS FOSTER: And how much does gratitude play into this? I saw this amazing interview with a football manager called Luis Enrique, and he was talking about his 12-year-old daughter who died. And they were saying to him, how do you cope? And he said, the only way I learned how to cope was to be grateful that I had 12 years with this person. And just saying it, and I’ve never had kids and all that, I’m welling up and I’m thinking that is the ultimate way to cope with probably the most tragic loss a human being can suffer.

Healing Through Helping Others

ARTHUR BROOKS: Yeah, for sure. That is the hardest thing, by the way. That is the hardest thing. And people do deal with it with gratitude. The ultimate long-term way to deal with that grief— grief is the unremitting sadness. Unremitting sadness. It’s remitting. Ultimately, the way that people will accelerate their healing is by helping people who are fresher in their grief.

So the best way, if you lose a child, for you to heal faster and better is for you to find somebody else who’s more recently lost a child. Help that person, which is one of the laws of love, that you will actually heal more when you give more, that your injury actually has a purpose because you can share what has happened in your life with somebody else and help that person heal in their fresher wounds.

It sounds like a karmic truth, but I think it’s a fundamental truth, a beautiful truth about humanity, is the way that this works.

Negativity Bias and the Power of Gratitude

Now, as a way to deal with the fact that we have this horrible tragedy, gratitude is great, and there’s a reason for that. We have a negativity bias. Homo sapiens have a negativity bias. You don’t want to be focusing on how grateful you are to find those berries on that bush 250,000 years ago while there’s a saber-toothed tiger sneaking up behind you. You need to be focused on the saber-toothed tiger, not on the good things.

If you’re sitting at a party and somebody’s smiling sweetly at you from across the room, that’s nice. But if somebody’s frowning angrily at you, take note. That might be a big problem once you get outside on the street. And so we notice all the terrible things that are happening to us, and that’s amplified in the environment of grief.

So what do we do? We have to manually turn up the part that’s less natural, which is positive affect about naturally good things. And it’s funny how we do this, and religious people sort of do this naturally.

A Personal Story of Near-Loss

We almost lost one of our children many years ago in 1999. Our oldest was 1, and he fell out of a third-story window, and it was horrible. It was horrible. And he was going to die. He was going to die. And so we’re at the hospital, my wife and I, and we start praying. We’re praying, we’re praying. What do we pray? Keep him alive, obviously. But then we were praying, “Thank you for giving us our son.” That’s what we pray naturally, not on purpose. Why? Because that’s what we’ve been trained as Christian people, is to thank God for the good things and not just curse God.

The Book of Job

See, this is funny. This is the Book of Job. See how illiterate I am in that — Job’s all, God and Satan are throwing dice. And Satan says, “You know your boy Job? I bet I can get him.” And God says, “No, you can’t.” He said, “Watch.” And so he goes and kills all Job’s kids, and he takes all his animals, and he takes everything away from Job.

You know what Job says before the whole story starts? He said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” But then the real part comes that nobody remembers: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That’s the end of that scripture. That’s what a supernatural view of life can bring you. That’s why it’s so critically important.

Now it goes on — 3 of Job’s buddies show up, and the entire book of Job, which is tiresome, they’re trying to tell him, “Here’s all what happened. You must have done a bad thing. You probably sinned a lot.” And it’s just sort of rabbinical exegesis on why — it’s sort of like Kushner’s Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, but boring.

Then in the 38th chapter of Job, Job gets to talk to God about suffering because God comes in a whirlwind. It’s one of the times in the Old Testament where somebody actually talks to God. God comes in the whirlwind, and Job puts God in the dock. He’s like, “I’m your boy. You said I was a righteous man. And you did all this stuff to me. Explain yourself, sir.”

And God said — here’s the funniest part of the Old Testament of the Bible. It’s actually genius comedy. God says, “Oh yeah, I’ll tell you. You’re so smart, you deserve it. You deserve an explanation, of course. But since you’re so smart, first you tell me, why did I create the heaven and the earth? You’re so smart, tell me. And then I’ll tell you why you suffer. You’re so smart. Tell me why I put the stars in the sky and the fishes in the ocean. You’re so smart. I’m sure you know, but tell me why, and then I’ll tell you why you suffer.”

Here’s the point. It’s a mystery. It’s part of the mystery of life itself, and life itself is a miracle. And if we want — do we want part of the miracle, or do you want the whole miracle? That requires that we embrace the mystery. That we love the mystery itself. And there are the bad parts. And that’s the struggle. You get about 90 years to figure that one out.

Closing Remarks

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Arthur, what a pleasure. I feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface, so perhaps we’ll carry on the conversation another time.

ARTHUR BROOKS: End it after Job. Yeah, well, we depress people.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That’s what we do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Not this one, actually. I thought it was a very unusual and special episode of our show. So thank you. Thank you for making it.

ARTHUR BROOKS: Thank you for what you’re doing. You’ve really enriched my life a lot.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this was amazing for us. Thank you. The last question, as you know, it’s always the same. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?

The Crisis of Romantic Love

ARTHUR BROOKS: We touched on it here, but I think that the story of our civilization today is the lack of romantic love. I think that the lack of relationships — this is not a sentimental issue, this is an existential issue that we’re actually getting into here. And I think that we need to have a better scientific understanding of what exactly is happening and what’s going to happen.

This is not just demography. This is the question of whether life is actually worth living going forward, not whether life is going to continue going forward. So that’s what I think we should talk about more, which is the deep physics of romantic love.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Arthur Brooks, thank you for being here. Thank you, guys.

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