Arthur Brooks on the Keys to Finding Happiness | How To Own Things

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Author and Professor Arthur Brooks about his new book From Strength to Strength, how to manage your wants to increase your happiness, why good habits and systems are the actual keys to a happy life, and more. Arthur Brooks is the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. Brooks is the author of 12 books, including the national bestsellers “Love Your Enemies” (2019) and “The Conservative Heart” (2015). He is also a columnist for The Atlantic, host of the podcast “How to Build a Happy Life with Arthur Brooks,” and subject of the 2019 documentary film “The Pursuit,” which Variety named as one of the “Best Documentaries on Netflix” in August 2019. He gives more than 100 speeches per year around the U. S., Europe, and Asia. For a limited time, UCAN is offering you 30% off on your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout Just go to UCAN. CO/STOICGo to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now. Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to Babbel.com and use promo code DAILYSTOIC. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn, Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Arthur Brooks: Homepage, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. How to Own Things.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus kept an expensive iron lamp in the front hallway of his home. He was up in his bedroom when he heard some noise downstairs, and when he went down, the lamp was gone. "I reasoned that the thief who took it must have had an impulse he couldn't resist," Epictetus recalled. "So I said to myself, 'You'll go and get a cheaper and less attractive lamp made of clay tomorrow. A man only loses what he has.'" Is the lesson here that we should just let thieves come into our homes and take our stuff, or that we should only possess cheap stuff? Not really. The Stoics would say that we should enjoy what we own, but that our happiness cannot be tied to what we own. "Accept prosperity with appreciation and moderation," Seneca would write, "but persuade

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  yourself that you can live happily without it as well." The comedian and car collector Jerry Seinfeld was asked if he thought about what would happen with all his expensive cars after he dies. "Sure," he said, "my wife's going to liquidate it. That's fine with me. I want people like me to enjoy them. She'd be like blowing on a dandelion." "And this is how we must treat our possessions: enjoy them, but be able to live just as happily without them. Hold them with appreciation and let them go without attachment, like blowing on a dandelion."

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode. I've told you about the event I went to a while back that I met Barry Weiss on. But it was at that same event. I was standing there and I heard someone talking and I recognized who it was. Ah, it was Arthur Brooks, who I'd had on the podcast, who'd had me on his wonderful podcast and whom I am a very big fan of. I was just having lunch with a retired football player the other day, and I was telling him about this very book, which I just finished, his new book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. You may have read Arthur's

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  fantastic article about the professional decline. What happens when you reach the peak of what you do? For an athlete, that's earlier. For a writer, that might be later. For a CEO, that might be in their 50s. For a tech entrepreneur, that might be in your mid-40s. I don't know. It depends. But the idea is that you don't just always get better and better and better, because at some point, your energy levels sag, or your physical fitness declines a little bit, or your taste-making abilities get lessened a little bit with age. That's just one of the themes in the book, but it was a huge article, a great piece, which I really enjoyed. And I read Arthur's pieces in The Atlantic. They are

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  absolutely fantastic. And his podcast, How to Build a Happy Life, is also worth listening to. He was nice enough to have me on. I won't belabor this introduction, because I want you to get into this interview. He and I nerd out about philosophy. He is so rooted in the Stoics. He can cite them from memory almost as quickly as I can, and we really get into some important stuff in this interview. Arthur Brooks is a professor at the Harvard-Kennedy School and a professor of management at the Harvard Business School. He served for 10 years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, and he's just a great guy who I've enjoyed talking to. You can go to his website, arthurbrooks.com. You can

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  follow him on Twitter, @ArthurBrooks. Follow him on Instagram, @ArthurCBrooks. It was wonderful to meet him. I hope I can see him again here in Austin. I hope you enjoy this interview.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure it was more surprising to you, but the note that hit me the hardest in your book was your question about how many Thanksgivings you have left. I mean, that's a powerful question, but then, then you were like, I may only have eight.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm actually not 80.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right. I was like, he can't be, he's young, he's young. But, but I imagine that number, as you get older, hits you harder each time.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And furthermore, there's actually a little bit of research that shows that you tend to kind of measure yourself in terms of the cognitive bias that you have about the number of years you have left, based on your parents. And

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  My dad died at 66, and I'm 59. Or I'm, sorry, I'm 57. How old am I? I'm 59, I'm 57. So I got not, well, I mean, I'm not gonna, I mean, I mean, I'm in good physical shape and all that. But the bottom line is, you don't know. And that's the point of this. Look, if you're gonna, as you'd say, if you're gonna live like a stoic, if you're gonna go from strength to strength, if you're gonna be a happier person, you have to use the time that you have left to the max. You have to live according to nature, to live in a, in a sense of future regret about what actually might happen. And you have to be fully alive right now. And that's kind of the purpose. It's a really good exercise. How many Christmases, how many Thanksgivings, how many New Year's Eves do you probably have left? Act accordingly.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, I think about this when I, when I put my kids to bed. There's this stoic exercise of like, you say they might not survive till the morning. You don't say this to them, that's morbid. But you say it, you say it yourself, right? And, and, and the reminder that, to me, what I take from that, because when people go, oh, eight left, that's not very many, or whatever it is, is, does nothing matter? Is life meaningless? What I take from it is like, slow down. Like, why am I rushing through bedtime? Like, you know, because at some point, it's the last bedtime, either because it's the last time they'll live in your house, or something much, much worse. And I'm rushing through that so I can go check my email? That's insanity.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  It is, and actually what it is, is the distorted view of time. So you can imagine Marcus Aurelius tucking in little Commodus. Saying Commodus, you might not live till the morning. It's like fun dad, for sure.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  If only, that would have been better for history.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  I know, it would have been better, certainly better for the Roman Empire, for sure, but. But, but you know, the key thing is that we don't live, we're not actually alive right now. And you know, the great Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, who, who just recently died. He talked about the fact that we're not actually alive right now. Because to a lot, to be alive requires sentience. And that requires attention to the present moment. And he said, what we're doing is we're living in the future, making plans to, to, to enjoy the past. Now think about that for a second. And this is a perfect example of this is what we do when we're on vacation. So I'm going to take a bunch of pictures so that I can later on enjoy those pictures when the vacation is in the past. What have I missed? I missed my vacation because I wasn't here in the present.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  And the same thing is true when you're rushing through putting your kids in bed. You're trying to get to something that you want to do in the future. And by the time you get to then, to that future, the current present will, will be, you know, some sort of an obscured present that you're looking forward to the next future. And people, it's very funny. I mean, there's a tendency to do what we call, what we call prospection. Marty Seligman, the great social psychologist, he said that we shouldn't be called Homo sapiens. We should be called Homo prospectus. Because we have this tendency to live in the future all the time. And that's a great miracle. That's really amazing. But unmoderated, you can, you can just miss your life.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a, there's an exchange that Seneca tells us, it's with one of the terrible emperors. So it probably has a darker connotation in, in reality, but there was some, some person who'd been sentenced to death. I think they're on a crucifix. And they're, they're traveling by and the, the person is begging to be put to death, like to be put out of their misery. They say, you know, kill, kill me, kill me. And the emperor looks at him and says, oh, you're alive, are you? And I think about that, the idea that a lot of people are afraid of death, or they want to live forever, and their life, you could barely describe that as living, or as being sentient. In fact, they're fleeing from thing to thing, experience to experience,

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  trip to trip, you know, drug to drug, a drink to drink, anxiety to anxiety, and yet they somehow want to continue this indefinitely.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And most of the people that I know who are not most of the people, but some of the people I know who are in the longevity movement, the one question, they can answer any question about how much protein are you going to get to live to 180? You know, what's your exercise routine to get to 180? How many, how much metformin are you taking to get to 180? But the one question they can't answer is why are you going to live to 180? You know, the why question is really critical. You know, be alive right now. I mean, the Stoic, the great Stoic truth is that you're not going to live forever, and that's not a tragedy. The only tragedy is not being alive in the years and the moments to which you're allotted.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what proof do you have for the years that you end up, you know, logging on paper? What actual evidence do you have that you were alive?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, for sure. And the interesting thing about this is I think that a healthier, it's not exactly a Stoic, effectively is a Stoic way of looking at it, but it's what the Theravada Buddhist monks do. And one of the things that I talk about in my new book is called the Murnasati Meditation, about your success in life. So the Murnasati Meditation among Theravada Buddhist monks is the nine-step meditation on your own death. It's imagining your own death so that it becomes incredibly familiar, such that you will not be chained to it as something you're trying to avoid, and as such, you can be fully alive right now. But one of the things that we do, even if we're not technically afraid of death, is that we're afraid of not being great, of not being admired, of not having prestige,

• 10:28Speaker 01

  which is just another form of death, because your life is your work, or your life is your reputation, or whatever it happens to be. And so contemplating the death of that makes you ironically, kind of, it's counterintuitively makes you fully alive right now.

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you say that in the book, I forget what law it was, but that everything that can end eventually will. So it's not just meditating on the death of yourself, but the death of the miniature deaths of everything, your career, a relationship, the vacation that you're on, the streak of good luck that you're on. Maybe it's just thinking about all that stuff going away. Because that's really death, death itself. Most people aren't scared of dying a painful death. They're really, I think, they're scared of things ending and their career, their life, relationships, all of that gets put on to death itself.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  For sure. And, you know, anybody who says to me, "My work is my life," is somebody who's afraid of death, but the form of their fear of death is the fear of their career ending, the fear of their greatness ending, the fear of their competence ending. And so each of us needs to look at the thing that represents death to us the most. Maybe that's a divorce, maybe that's having to give up alcohol, if alcohol is your special little friend, whatever it happens to be. I mean, addicts actually have a particular form of death that comes from the end of using the substance. But whatever it is, if you want to beat that, if you want to beat that fear, if you want to be fully alive, you need to look full on in the face of that fear by contemplating that eventuality, which, by the way, is not an eventuality, it's an inevitability.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Sooner or later, this thing is going to come. And if you're like, "Yeah, all I can say is, I like life, but bring it on. I like my career, but bring it on. I can face this." Then you are worthy of the mantle of Seneca, or Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, or, you know, fill in the blank, Cicero even. Cicero, by the way, Cicero. You know, this is a guy who, you know, three quarters of the Latin literature from his time was written by him.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  At least that's extant today. And, you know, this guy was, he was the quintessential person of facing this thing down. You know, he's being chased by Roman legionaries to be put to death because of his political opinions. Talk about cancel culture, holy moly. And, you know, he's caught by a centurion, and he says, his final words are, "A centurion, there's nothing proper about what you're about to do." The guy's going to cut his throat. He says, but his last words are, "But try to do it properly."

• 12:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's Cicero I love. I talked about him in my book Lives of the Stoics a bit. Cicero is one of those people that I think he really articulated and understood the philosophy very well, but he didn't actually live it.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Isn't that true for so many of us, Ryan?

• 13:16Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, that's the journey that we're all on.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's kind of an ideal. Stoicism is an ideal. It's not something that you arrive to. It's an orientation. It's something that you're driving toward. I mean, even Marcus Aurelius, very clearly in his meditations, is not attaining these ideals. He writes them down because these are the direction that he wants to drive his own life. And we have to forgive ourselves a little bit for not being perfectly stoic.

• 13:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Cicero is kind of a good example of what you're talking about in the book, or that type of personality, that type of person we all know, or that personality trait we all have inside us, which is like, he knew it all, he thought it all, but he always wanted to be a little bit more famous, or a little bit richer, or a little bit more powerful, more than he wanted to live those ideals. So there was that tension in him between being sort of Cicero the public figure and Cicero the private philosopher.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's actually a reason, in my world, which is the world of happiness science, academic happiness science, that, you know, the people who, everybody who does work in this area that I know is a seeker of happiness. It's all me-search. And, you know, Cicero was doing his own version of me-search, as was Marcus Aurelius. I mean, we're all just, we're just on a path.

• 14:35Ryan Holiday?

  So to go back to Momentum, Rory, walk me through the reverse bucket list, because this wasn't something I'd heard of before.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, one of the interesting things that I find is that I believe one of the stupidest things in modern society is the bucket list. And the reason for this is that we live in an environment of constant dissatisfaction, and we make it worse. And there's a lot of biological reasons for this. So satisfaction is the joy you get for attaining a goal. That's what satisfaction is, and it's jubilant. You know, I teach at Harvard, at the Harvard Business School, and, you know, my students will talk about the day They get their letter, their email saying that they were admitted to the Harvard Business School. It's like, I made it, I'm gonna be happy forever. And then a week later, they're like, oh no, now I have to go to the Harvard Business School and I have to perform. And then it's like, getting out is a big achievement, then getting the job is the big achievement. And the reason that you think that it's gonna bring you constant satisfaction is because you're driven biologically toward attaining goals.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  And the reason that it can't last is because something we call homeostasis, which puts you back into equilibrium with blinding speed. You get a bunch of joy, a bunch of momentary satisfaction, and then you don't have it. So Mick Jagger's saying, I can't get no satisfaction. The real title of the song should be, I, I can't keep no satisfaction. Because that's the essence of the problem that we have. And we make it worse with the bucket list. Now, here's the math of the problem of satisfaction. We think that our satisfaction i- is a function of what we have. It's actually a function of what we have divided by what we want. So our listeners now, or our viewers, if this is on, if we're watching on YouTube, is to take out a little piece of paper and write satisfaction equals haves divided by wants.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And remember your high school fractions. If you increase the denominator of a fraction, the number goes down. The best possible way for you to decrease your satisfaction in life is to, is to, is to let your wants sprawl. And you do that with a bucket list by, by taking a list of all the stuff that you want and, and talking about, I mean, you desire it and you crave it. And it's like sticky stuff all over you. I understand why people do it. Because they wanted to line up their ambitions and they'll know how they're being successful. But that is the secret to dissatisfaction, to lowering your satisfaction in life. What you need to do is put together a wants management strategy where you're chipping away those wants in your denominator. And that's the reverse bucket list.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Where you actually make a list of all your sticky cravings on your birthday and you put your hand into the bucket and say, I detach myself from you and you and you and you and you. And knowledge is power about this. When you say, I don't care if I'm, I've never go on a hot air balloon. I don't care if I don't go bungee jumping in the Mekong Delta or whatever stupid thing floats your boat. Maybe I will and maybe I won't. And that, my friends, is power.

• 17:16Ryan Holiday?

  When I heard the reverse bucket list, I was actually thinking of another stoic quote that I love. Marx really says, "You're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore." This being, it's sort of fill in the blank. And I thought, I was like, you know what a good reverse bucket list would be? Like, what is, what is stuff you're doing in your life that you're eliminating? That you're just getting like, like, what are the, like, what are the things that make you the most unhappy, that you like doing the least, that you find yourself doing? I also feel like happiness and success should be steadily removing those things, uh, because life is also too short. You know, if you hate meetings,

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  why did you agree to have a job that is nothing but meetings? Right? Or if you hate, if you hate where you live, like, you should move, right? So I also thought maybe reverse bucket list was sort of eliminating some of those thises that we hang on to out of entropy or fear or whatever it is.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's actually a slightly different thing. The reverse bucket list for me is simply, is simply paring down your worldly wants. Now, there are some really, really good things, such as, you know, the, you know, the bucket list of actual satisfaction of actual life, which is your, your faith or, or philosophy, your friendships, your family life, your work that serves other people. Those are really, really good ambitions. But money, power, pleasure, fame, those are the things to start throwing out of your bucket. Doesn't mean they're bad. I mean, money's great if you can use it to, you know, leaven the burdens of life a little bit. But if you're actually going for it as your intrinsic goal, that kind of thing in your bucket list is going to bring you down. And that's going to lower your life satisfaction. Now, this interesting point that you just made, Ryan,

• 18:59Speaker 01

  a really interesting point that, that is a very stoic point that, that I think that we often miss. When I'm talking to people, you know, and all day long, people ask me about happiness in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, because I'm a, you know, a happiness specialist. And God knows people have not been very happy during coronavirus. We're at historic rates of depressive symptoms, anxiety, and low levels of self-evaluated happiness. So the one thing I ask people to do is, you know, they're always talking about the things they miss from before the epidemic. The disappointments, you know, things that they've missed and the things they would like to go back to and the things they hate about the epidemic.

• 19:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  They say, well, you're missing two quadrants. The things that you don't miss from before the epidemic and the things that you like from the epidemic. And everybody's got things in those quadrants, in those boxes.

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And so that, for example, when I dig down to it, I hear a lot of people say, you know, I don't miss my commute. I don't miss going to work in a city I didn't like. I don't miss a bunch of relationships that were toxic, that brought out the worst in me, maybe that belittled me or made me gossipy or maybe the kind of person that I don't like. Make a strategic plan to not go back to them.

• 20:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  That's really, really critical. Your gift of COVID, the gift of the coronavirus epidemic is not going back to things that you didn't like and making permanent some of the things that you did like. And that's a really important kind of other take on this reverse bucket list idea.

• 20:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like when you remove a bunch of stuff from your diet and then, hey, suddenly you don't have headaches anymore. Suddenly, you know, you're losing weight or what, like now you have the opportunity to isolate some of those ingredients or some of those elements of your life that were artificially removed. You don't have to put them back in. I mean, of course, there are some things, you know, hey, you used to be, for a couple of months, you could go to the DMV online and you didn't have to go in person, but maybe that's going to come back. But there are things that were removed that you don't have to let go back to normal if you don't want to.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. And that's the kind of strategic planning that you need. Don't let your life work on its own. Don't let circumstances dictate actually what you're doing in your life. I mean, you, do you want to be a leader to yourself? Do you want to manage your own life or not? And this is one of the key things. When control was taken away from you, you learned a whole lot of things about yourself. And so when control is resumed, when you're actually able to manage these things, manage it wisely. Because, you know, here's the interesting thing about this too, Ryan. The empirical regularity, this is how we talk in social sciences. You know, the things that happen over and over and over again, in other words, every 10 years, there's something as big as the coronavirus epidemic, but we're never ready for it. And we're always caught flat footed because we hate transitions and changes, and so we try to avoid them.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  This is another big stoic idea that change is the essence of life itself and we have to accommodate ourselves to changing circumstances. Ten years ago, it was the financial crisis. Ten years before that, it was 9/11. Ten years before that, it was the, or about a decade before that, it was the meltdown of this whole entire Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War. Ten years from now, it's going to be something as big as the coronavirus epidemic. And we're going to be talking about viruses and financial meltdowns still because we're always stuck in the past. What we need to do is to accommodate ourselves to the truth that change is the state of nature. And to manage ourselves correctly, we should be ready for an ever-changing state.

• 22:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, people go, this isn't normal. And it's like, why don't you talk to a 20-year-old and ask them, you know, what the major events of their life have been over the last two decades? This is the, abnormal is normal. It's always been this way. And it's just, in fact, you've just been blind to how much this has been happening the whole time you've been alive.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. This is the first time we've had a major pandemic since 1918 and 1919. Sure enough, but.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  But not really. I mean, in 1968, we had an influenza epidemic that killed like a half a million people, and there were race riots. That sounds a lot like 2020 to me.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I know. It's amazing. Ken Burns told me this one time. He said, you know, how many, how many violent, politically organized terrorist events occurred? You know, bombings, domestic bombings because of politics in 1968 and 69? I'm like, I don't know. 700, 700. I mean, it's like, when is the last one in the United States? You're thinking, ah, like that thing in New Jersey, I don't think that went off. You know, it's, it's, it's amazing. And, and part of the reason is because we have a really strong status quo bias. And, and not falling prey to that is an important part of having a disciplined mind and a good memory.

• 23:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, no, that's, and this is also one of the things I love in meditations. Marcus Aurelius is just like. Repeating history, he's just like, this is what happened in this court. This is what happened to this emperor. He's just reminding himself that history is basically the same thing happening over and over and over and over again. And it's going to happen to you and it's going to happen after you. And it's going to go on ad infinitum. This is what life is.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I know. It's interesting. And the fact that we distract ourselves from that is both a pity, but it's also intensely human. And trying to get beyond that is important. So that's actually the whole point. It's why I wrote this book, is basically for people to look introspectively at the truth and actually get joy from it as opposed to simply trying as they get older, as their skills change, as certain things get harder to do, to not try to deny the reality, to rage against the dying of the light. On the contrary, you've got to be fully alive, no matter where you are in your life.

• 24:24Ryan Holiday?

  So you open the book with the story of a famous, successful, beloved human being, who you don't name, who I'm fascinated to hear who it actually was.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  I'll take it to my grave, right?

• 24:38Ryan Holiday?

  But basically, you're revealing a thing that I think a lot of people who have had access to power and fame, or fame and powerful people, sort of know, and it's sort of an open secret, which is that if people really knew what these people were like, they would not be nearly so envious of everything that they have.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the other regularity about this, that people don't really realize, is that strivers, and I don't mean people with money, or even people with fame, people who are really trying to do a lot with their lives and living on accordance with their goals, which everybody tells you to do. And, you know, people are, you know, consumers of the daily stoic are self-improvement people.

• 25:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  So I'm talking about-

• 25:23Ryan Holiday?

  That's a form of striving.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Totally. I'm talking about all of us in your community, by the way. These are people who have a tendency to struggle more unless they, as they get older, unless they manage themselves well. So this is a book, basically, that asks, is there something that you can do at 25 or 35 or even 65 that gives you a much better shot at being happier when you're 75? And it gives the strategies, according to the science, that you can do. So a lot of the people listening to you- Every week, as they should, or every day even, are 25-year-olds. And what can you do? What can you put in the bank? So as you get older, you will be happier. What's the true set of investments in you based on the science? So that you don't wind up being, you know, working on yourself your whole life and then being

• 26:06Speaker 01

  really, really disappointed when things aren't going as well as they used to?

• 26:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and the idea that like getting everything you want is actually something you want, I feel like is the biggest myth that there is. You know, there's the Oscar Wilde quote about how the two tragedies in life are getting everything you want and not getting everything you want, or the reverse of that. But it's not the Elysium that you think it's going to be to get everything that you want.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, for sure. I mean, your dreams are liars is the key thing. And part of it is because we have a natural tendency to A, believe that we will finally be satisfied, and that's a lie. That's a biological falsehood. You can't do that. Your brain can't accommodate itself to permanent satisfaction, or you'd die. You know, 500,000 years ago, finally finding the endless supply of tasty berries on a bush that gives you endless satisfaction would distract you from the tiger that's sneaking up behind you. You must be ready for the next set of circumstances. There is no other way. And the same thing is true for us today. So that's a big lie. The second big lie is that your dream, if you get it, is going to be as great as you thought. So it won't last, and although it's not as good.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  That's the reason that everybody who studies the neurobiology of, or the neurobiology and social science of happiness knows that the real secret to happiness is good habits and good processes, not hitting goals. You need goals to put you in the right direction. You need goals for directionality. But you need processes and you need habits, which is to say virtue, eudaimonia. You need to live a good life well-lived from day to day if you actually want to be happy.

• 27:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, well, and think about it from a evolutionary standpoint. If everyone actually understood what we're talking about, progress in many ways would grind to a halt. If Elon Musk could really get that, hey, doing the next thing isn't going to make it any better for him, or if, you know, Tom Brady just retired. But if Tom Brady really grasped that winning won't feel that much better than the winning he's already done, you know, that's the end of it. So there's a certain reason, I think, evolutionarily, we have it. That doesn't mean we have to stick with it, though.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the reason that evolution gives us the hedonic treadmill, which is the metaphor that most of the listeners know about. The hedonic treadmill is that thing you run and run and run and run on, thinking that sooner or later I'm going to get there. But there's a little evil guy in the corner turning up the speed, and it never turns off. And after 10 or 15 years, you realize that you're really running because if you stop, you're going to wipe out.

• 28:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  And so to begin with, you realize you're not getting there. Then you realize that it's going faster. And finally, you start realizing that you're only running because you don't want to wipe out. And that's the tyranny of actually living under the illusion.

• 28:58Ryan Holiday?

  That you haven't traveled anywhere. You haven't gone anywhere.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And that's Marcus Aurelius's point. Again, and again, and again, what you have to do is accommodate yourself to these realities to enjoy your life as you understand it. It's weird, you know? One of the things that people criticize the Stoics for is that they don't quite get enough enjoyment out of life, but that's actually not true. This is not true that you have to read Epicurus to understand enjoyment. On the contrary, there's a certain strength and equanimity. There's a certain joy that comes from actually facing the truth. It's clear that Marcus Aurelius got lots of joy, the love that he had for his kids. Marcus Aurelius loved his kids. And if he were just an ambitious emperor trying to win war after war and never paying attention to his kids, he would not have gotten that intense satisfaction.

• 29:43Ryan Holiday?

  He probably wouldn't have had 12 of them either.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  That's because every time you came home from campaign, anyway.

• 29:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think I think about this, like, I would urge people to think like, what's the biggest accomplishment you've had in your life? Like, what have you done? And like, how did that actually feel? Not like, like, how did you feel when you got the news that you hit the New York Times Bestseller list, or that you you finally got, you know, that the the the exact figure in your bank account that you'd always dreamed of, or, you know, whatever that thing was. And it's like, the truth is, it felt like nothing. That's it feels like nothing, right? Like, even sometimes it does feel overwhelmingly awesome. But most of the time, it just feels like, oh, that's what it feels like. It feels like, oh, and that's a pretty bad feeling to orient your

• 30:32Ryan Holiday?

  entire life and being around that sort of anticlimactic, oh, what next?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  I know, I know. And then, you know, again, you know, somebody's gonna be rolling their eyes out there in in in podcast line going, yeah, it's great, great. Thanks, Ryan. Easy for you to say. You know, it's but but again, let's, you know, I guarantee you, folks, Ryan Holiday said, oh, yeah, but it's not number one on the New York Times Bestseller list, right? It's always something more. And you say, great, great, but there could be something better. And there will be something better. So it's off to the races. Run, run, run, run, run again, unless you manage yourself appropriately.

• 31:10Ryan Holiday?

  No, I remember the first time I hit number one.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I never hit number one. It's not right, man.

• 31:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I hit number. So it took many, many, many times. I hit number one on Wall Street Journal, but not not New York Times. And then I did do New York Times later. But I remember I was mowing my lawn. And then I had to finish mowing my lawn. Like, you know what I mean? Like, life just it's not like, the clouds parted and somebody threw me a parade, and I never felt worry or fear ever again. It was like, yeah, all right, I got to finish this side of the lawn now. You know what I mean? And when you say, oh, it's easy for you to say, and it the there's some there's some truth in that, too, right? It's like, Yes, you can only say it once you've experienced it. It's immediately obvious that it was never going to be what you thought it was going to be.

• 32:00Ryan Holiday?

  Because no external thing has the ability to change who you are inside or how you feel. And yet, no amount of witness testimony can get us to accept that it's not going to do it for us.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's part of the trick, the biological trick of the wiring, you know, inside us that gives us this phony math. That success means having more, failure means having less. Success means continuously having more than others because of this tyranny of social comparison and all that. And that's basically all the different elements in the book. This is a, interestingly, you know, the book was something that I wrote for myself. It was kind of my own meditations to improve my life, you know, using the science of satisfaction that I've studied as a social scientist. Over the past two and a half decades, I put together a strategic plan for myself to move through my 40s, 50s and 60s such that when, if I get the years 70s and 80s often in the future, I can actually be happy and enjoy them.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  That was my objective. And once I wrote it, I thought, well, you know, I'm not going to wait until I'm dead. I might as well publish this now and see if it actually helps somebody else's life. And the truth is that, you know, as I write about it in my column in The Atlantic, little by little by little, I'm getting boatloads of feedback who are saying, oh, that is a myth. Oh, it's true. You know, a lot of it's timeless wisdom that the Stoics gave us or that, you know, that, you know, Lord Buddha gave us or that Jesus Christ gave us or whatever it happens to be. But putting it in these scientific terms, it turns out it can be quite consumable.

• 33:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and in a way, I was thinking about it almost as a more impressive mountain, right? So it's like, there's almost, whatever it is that you're trying to do, the chances that you will be the most successful ever in the world at that thing is very unlikely. If you're a playwright, you're not going to be better than Shakespeare, right? If you're, if you get drafted into the NFL, you're probably not going to be better than Tom Brady. You're not going to be better than Michael Jordan. You're not going to make more money than Jeff Bezos, right? Chances are, uh, very good that you're not going to surpass those achievements. Of course, inevitably, someone will, but it's probably not going to be you. And it's probably not going to be anytime soon.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And even if you did.

• 34:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, of course.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And even if you did, no, it's interesting because a friend of mine. He really honestly believe, and this is one of the other fallacies that I talk about in the book, but everybody knows is true. One of the great fallacies that people think is that they become worldly successful, beyond a certain point, I mean, an impressive point, it will solve all their real problems.

• 34:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  The problem is that they're not thinking about it. So a friend of mine, he, he, he became very rich in private equity. And he's like, you get super rich, like hundreds of millions of dollars, and your wife still doesn't love you.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And for some reason, you thought that if I get, you know, eight hundred million dollars or something, that my wife is gonna be like, wow, I really do love you and honestly love you. And your kids are really gonna respect you and wanna hang out with you. You know, it doesn't actually solve any of the things that really trouble you.

• 35:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And, and so the way I've started to think about it is like, okay, so that race is probably unwinnable. But there are lots of happy people who are also pretty successful, right? Like, there are plenty of people who played in the NFL, and they have a loving family, and they've been good in their community, and they die happily in bed at a reasonable age, or, you know, whatever it is, right? And so I've started to think about it as like, hey, trying to be the most at this thing, the most, and the unbalance that's required to get there, is not only probably impossible, it's, it's also a bad bargain. I'm gonna try to do this other thing that's, as the Stoics say, much more in my control,

• 35:45Ryan Holiday?

  which is I'm gonna try to be decent and balanced and happy and good at what I do. But that, that's gonna be a, not a tension, that's gonna be a more holistic thing that I'm trying to do, as opposed to just loading up in one domain, and as you said, expecting it to magically address all the other domains.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the big lie that your brain tells you, and again, this is one of the- Big punchlines from the book is that your brain is telling you that you'll be happy if you get money, power, pleasure, and prestige. Those are the worldly idols that attract you, and that's a lie. You have to migrate from the four idols to the truly, the four goals that really are the investments, the deposits in which you have to put into your account of your happiness, which is your faith, and your family, and your friendships, and work that serves other people. When I say faith, I don't mean religious faith necessarily. I mean, it's basically a sense of the transcendent. You're doing something that is a sense of the transcendent, which is to say, it's transcendent to your ordinary workaday life, and it puts your life into perspective. You know, studying the Stoics will absolutely do that.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  So think about life and faith and philosophy, friendship, real friends, not deal friends.

• 36:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, as you say in the book, I love that.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and family life, and work where you earn your success and serve other people. Those are the four big ambitions. If you continue following the false idols of money, power, pleasure, and prestige, or fame, or admiration, or whatever it happens to be, you will wind up less satisfied than you started.

• 37:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and at the end, you can't, you can't take those things with you when you die, so you might as well enjoy. I think part of what's so interesting about the conditional happiness that we chase is the unhappiness that we're willing to bear to get it, right? And so, so why not just, why not just focus on those things now? The good things now? The things that are intrinsic, like family, for instance. Obviously, at the end of your life, you'll be glad that you had a family or whatever. But they also bring you pleasure now, right?

• 38:01Ryan Holiday?

  They also bring you pleasure now, as opposed to, you know, I starved myself for 15 years to make it as, you know, America's top supermodel, right? You were deeply unhappy while you had it, and you're not going to be that proud of it. It's not going to bring you that much joy or satisfaction when you're looking back on it at the end of your life.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's, you know, your, your, your, your brain basically lies to you about these things and mastering that is really critically important. You know, that's the service that you're trying to bring by, by having, by having, helping people to learn the Stoics, for example, because the Stoics are the masters of making sure that the, the homeostatic lies of our brains and our culture and our entertainment industry and, and, and the media that says, "Do this and you'll be happy. Do this and you'll be fulfilled. Get this and everything will be all right." And it actually won't be all right. But there's another thing too. It's interesting. I interviewed a lot of people for this book who were making a lot of wrong decisions with their ambition and with their work. And there's one lady I interviewed for this work who's just a titan of Wall Street. I mean, she's just wealthy and she's

• 39:06Speaker 01

  pretty famous and she's really well-respected. And she was telling me about her life because, you know, I write about this stuff so people will reach out to me and, and talk to me as if I'm her psychiatrist, at which I'm definitely, most definitely not, you know? It's like, "Don't hire me." But, and, and she said, "I'm unhappy, you know, I don't have a good relationship with my adult kids. My marriage is not that great. I drink a little bit too much. And I'm starting to miss a beat in my work as I'm getting older and it's freaking me out." And I said, "It's kind of simple." You know, it said, "You just told me the solution to your problems, you know, actually get some treatment for your drinking and reestablish your relationship with your husband and your kids and start working less and do all the things that like you, make you happy. Why don't you do

• 39:47Speaker 01

  that?" And she's got really quiet. She said, "You know, I think I'd prefer to be special than happy." And I thought to myself, "Holy..."

• 39:55Ryan Holiday?

  That's so sad.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  ...mackerel, except that that's so common, Ryan. This is how addiction works. You know, I had a, I had a roommate, a guy who was just all, he was just hopelessly addicted to alcohol and drugs. And, and I said, "You know, you gotta stop sooner or later. Sooner or later, you're gonna have to stop." And he said, "Yeah, I know." I said, "Why isn't it today?" He said, "Because today I would prefer to be high than happy." And this is what a lot of people are doing, administering themselves the drug of success, the drug of, you know, outward prestige. And in so doing, they prefer to be special than happy. They have a success addiction is what it comes down to.

• 40:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, work addiction is, is in, in some ways, and it's something I struggle with a bit myself. It's so insidious because it's one of the few socially acceptable, if not socially rewarded addictions.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, workaholism is actually a derivative addiction of success addiction, which is a form of sort of self-objectification, where you see yourself as not entirely human. You know, so, so, you know, fitness influencers on Instagram sort of see themselves as bodies. And people who work really hard and are rewarded for it with a lot of money or prestige, like you, could be easily turned into a self-objectifier. So Ryan Holiday homo economicus, or homo estoicus, or something like that. That, that's, by the way, that's not a word. So, but you get the idea of how we actually can do it. We can strip away our own humanity because of our addiction. And this is what all addicts do.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  You mean a drug addict, you mean an alcoholic, it substitutes for all of their key relationships. That last drink is more important than the first few minutes with their kids. And for the workaholic, the 14th hour of work provides more reward in the short term than the first hour with their children. And all that's doing is that work is taking the place of fatherhood or motherhood.

• 41:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what I find is that, you know, people are frustrating, life is complicated, things are unpredictable, but work, because I'm good at it, I control. Do you know what I mean? It's, I am, I am able to make it do what I want to do in a way that nobody has control over the rest of their life. And that's the same, you know, look, it doesn't matter what's happening in the world. It doesn't matter that you're living under a bridge. Heroin feels good when it goes in your body, right? And that's, that's what addiction is really about. It's about control and, uh, yeah, it's about control.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a, it's substituting for the relationships that give you less satisfaction in the moment and that you don't actually understand and can't manage very well. It's the one relationship that you can manage really, really well and you're good at it. So you actually manage your own pleasure from that activity very narrowly. And this is important for all us, another thing for, you know, listeners and viewers of this to understand, because strivers suffer from this an awful lot. All addicts, one of the things they have in common is they're self administering a substance or a behavior with response to a perceived remediation need. So for example, one of the things that we find is that people getting addicted to cigarettes really early, I started smoking when I was 13 years old, I started using nicotine administering it to myself when I was 13 years old.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Almost everybody who does that, you know, tries it, it's like, I need this, I don't know why. Probably you have a lack of dopamine in your prefrontal cortex because you have attention issues. And what happens is you get more, I mean, niconoids, particularly in the form of nicotine, when you administer dopamine to the prefrontal cortex, you can focus for the first time, you feel actually normal. People who have a lot of anxiety problems, just naturally or because of their circumstances, alcohol turns anxiety off like a switch, but very temporarily. And so people who administer themselves disordered amounts of alcohol, typically they have something that they're trying to remedy. And those who are success addicts and alcoholics, they're self-objectifiers who measure their

• 43:53Speaker 01

  own self-worth with respect to their achievements. That's why they become success addicts. It's the same thing as any other addiction. You need something, you've got to solve your problem, and this isn't going to do it.

• 44:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and stillness is the key. I was writing a little bit about Philip Roth, who turned out to be a complete monster, obviously. But there was this quote he gave in an interview. He was saying that the reason he lives by himself, why he's not in relationships anymore, he said that it meant that he could always be on call for his work. He never had to wait on anyone or anything but himself. He said, "I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency room and I'm the emergency." And I remember just thinking, that's about the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And he understands it and articulates it. You know, it's the most amazing thing. And yet, there have been times in all of us, you know, you work really hard, I work really hard. I don't think I've ever worked less than a 60-hour week in my whole career. You know, I was, I was a college professor. I was like 60 hour a week and I was a CEO, it was 60 hour a week. You know, now it's like, it's awesome because I get to write and speak and teach and I do all this stuff and that gives me an excuse to work really, really hard.

• 45:03Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  But you have to moderate the things that you're doing to blot out the mundanity, the outside world. I mean, it's not right to do that because that means that the problem's not the world, the problem's inside.

• 45:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the problem is who does, if you want to be the emergent, if you want to treat yourself like the emergency room, I guess it's your life, you can do what you want. But the problem is also when you have made other commitments or if you believe that a human being has obligations to society, to, you know, their community, to their children, et cetera. And so, yeah, as you are making yourself the center of the universe, I guess that's well and good, except for you also brought other people into this universe, your children, or you have a spouse, or you know, you have a community that's falling to pieces, but you're good because you're really good at whatever your work is.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And you know, the world does valorize that. You know, it's interesting. I can't, I can't remember who it was. Well, I can't remember exactly what this site was. You're gonna, you'll remember this, I think, but you know, who was it who said, nobody is going to ask about, you know, Rousseau's children? You know, 200 years from now, people are not going to be like,

• 46:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, the stuff he wrote was really awesome, but what about his kids?

• 46:21Ryan Holiday?

  But we should ask that because he was a monster.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I think he was terrible. He was a terrible family man. He abandoned his family.

• 46:27Ryan Holiday?

  Didn't he put all his children in an orphanage?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's, and it was another tough time, Ryan.

• 46:35Ryan Holiday?

  And then he wrote a book about childhood education, right?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  No, no, it's that, you know, the cojones that guy had, for sure. Like church bells, unbelievable. But you know, this is, but this is endemic amongst strivers. This is endemic among people that will, that will say, you know, what, what really matters is how people remember me. You know, is what the legacy actually says. They will forget the, the, the non-special things that bring happiness. They'll remember the special things, even if I'm miserable. And it's just almost this cognitiveness, almost as if I'll remember, you know, Epicurus actually has the greatest maxim on this. We're not Epicurians, we're more stoic than Epicurians, but Epicurus said basically, remember. When I am alive, death is not here. And when death is here, I'm not here.

• 47:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So this was his way of saying that you shouldn't be afraid of death, right? When death is here, I am not. When I am here, death is not. Okay, that's a good reason to not, that's a philosophical reason to not fear death. But it's also a reason to remember that you need to be alive right now for the sake of the happiness that you can bring to yourself and others.

• 47:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and again, to go to the point about like, what's the more impressive mountain? I'd like to be a great writer who also, you know, was a good father. You know, like I, to me, one of the things that I always, you say, who remembers Rousseau's children? Whenever I read about one of these authors or athletes or someone that I admire, and then I go, oh, and they were also a super absent father, or they were also a wife beater, or they were also, you know, a closet Nazi, or you know, whatever it is. I go, oh, this changes everything for me. You know what I mean? And, and I would, I would rather them have been less good at what they did and a little bit more decent as a human being. To me, it's more impressive.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, excellence, excellence really starts at home, doesn't it, Ryan? Excellence starts with who you are as a person, moral excellence. And this is one of the reasons that, you know, I often say, I realize that I'm a real square for it, but I'm not going to vote for somebody who's disloyal to his wife. I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to vote for somebody for president who has betrayed his spouse or her spouse. I'm not going to do it. And maybe I don't know, I mean, maybe, and they say all politicians do it. No, they don't. I know George W. Bush personally. Zero percent chance he's a, like him or hate him, he's a person of decency and honor, and he wouldn't do that. And, you know, I just can't respect anybody or trust anybody who violates the most personal relationships that they have, because that's the essence of integrity. You know, being good at your job is not the essence of integrity.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  And we've gotten to this culture where it's like, yeah, it doesn't, virtue doesn't matter. All, you know, what matters is how good you are at your job. You know, how well are you going to be able to negotiate with the Russians? How well are you going to be able to get, you know, inflation in hand? Well, we're people. We're people with actual integrity. And that's, you know, maybe I'm just like crazy and square, but I'm telling you, that really matters to me a lot.

• 49:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, it's tricky, right? Because when you look at history, there have been good leaders who were not the most loyal of husbands. It's mostly husbands, of course. But I think, you know, and then, of course, sometimes it's a cultural issue more than a personal character issue, as it would be today. But I do think we, sports are a great example of this. Teams, Antonio Brown being a great example. A team goes, ah, he might be this, this or that, but he can really catch a football. It's worth the risk. It's almost never worth the risk. Because as the ancients say, character is fate. You know,

• 50:15Ryan Holiday?

  who we are is who we are. And when someone shows you who they are, you should probably believe them.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, this is when people ask me, when my students ask me, where does excellence start? What they're asking is, how do I be really excellent at what I do? The answer is, your excellence starts with your character, with the person that you want to be, with the way that you treat other people, the way that you actually treat yourself. There is no victimless crime. And integrity actually starts with what you're doing when nobody is looking, which is, by the way, a pure, full-on Stoic principle, is, you know, that kind of integrity, you know, living according to your own integrity with zero excuses and no loopholes. And then, then, then we'll talk about how good you are with your job. Only then.

• 50:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And look, no one's saying that it can't work for a time, right? It probably, it probably will work, especially if the person is super talented and good at their job. But on a long enough timeline, it tends to not work out.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, that's a biblical principle. That somebody who's rotten in little things tends to be rotten in big things. Somebody who's dishonest in little things tends to be dishonest in big things, too. And so that's, you know, there's a little bit of smoke here, there's a little bit of fire elsewhere, is kind of what it comes down to. And, you know, we like to separate, we like to put things in boxes, but the good Stoic says there are no boxes when it comes to integrity.

• 51:37Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you talked about sort of one of the things being critical to happiness is some sort of a spouse or relationships or whatever. That, I do feel like, generationally, like I've been with, my wife pointed out to me this morning, it's not technically our anniversary, but that we basically, because we don't know exactly when it was, but we've been together for 15 years.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:55Ryan Holiday?

  So almost half my life. At this point, and that is way more the exception than the norm in my generation. Like, a lot of my friends are just now starting to get serious about relationships. And I just wonder what the cost of all of that will be. I'm not saying everyone should get married and have kids because obviously there's a certain oppressiveness in that expectation or societal norm as well. But it does seem like there is a lot lost in this sort of transactional, ephemeral set of unending relationships that dating apps and sort of hookup culture and all these things have have made possible for for people, especially my age.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And and look, this this is an absolute pattern that we see in the happiness data is that happiness is love, full stop. And that's not necessarily romantic love. You can get that with deep and intimate friendships. You can get that with family relationships that go on and on and on. But the point is, if you're not taking your love relationships seriously, you're simply not going to be a happy person. That's the truth. And for most people, it's a good marriage. For most people, it's a good romantic partnership that can, you know, survive through thick and thin, where you have the discipline to actually live with another person and to not give up. The main thing that I actually see, because I study this a lot in, you know, people, millennials and Gen Z, and I'm older, you know, I'm sort of on the cusp of the baby boomers and Gen X.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  There's about a 30 percentage point difference in the likelihood of saying you're in love in your 20s now compared to when I was in my 20s in the 1980s. And and then the real question is not because they're kind of going from, you know, relationship to relationship with the apps. A much better explanation for that is that there's a lot of fear in, you know, the truly entrepreneurial act of of giving your heart away. The people are willing to raise to, you know, risk $10 million on a startup, but they're not willing to risk their own heart on a relationship and get it stomped on because you, I mean, you go, you have a lot of emotional bankruptcies when you're in the marriage market is kind of what it comes down to. And so that fear, that fear of social rejection, which has a huge neurological basis to it.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  We know that social rejection stimulates the same regions of the brain, the anterior cingulate and the anterior insula, as physical pain. And when we're not used to it, we're really afraid of that pain. And so doing it, it, it, it makes us resistant to these types of relationships. But one of the key things that I tell is one of the key things I've talked about with my own kids, based on my research, is that it's very, very important that they take lots of risks in their relationships. I don't mean like unprotected sex. I'm talking about emotional risk and, and it, it's paid off. My, my, my oldest son is 23 and he's engaged. He's getting, you know, he's getting married in, in July. And so he's like, yeah, I took your advice, Dad. I'm like, wow.

• 54:49Ryan Holiday?

  But this is, this is the son who's a Marine?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  No, my son is a Marine. He's now, it's, but he's taking risks in other ways. He's, you know, shooting borders and he's a machine gunner. He's a forward deployed combat Marine. So suffice it to say that I have, I have risk-taking kids and my little baby, my little baby girl. She, you know, after COVID, she made a run for the border and she went to college in Spain.

• 55:09Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  You know, and where she's living, I mean, she's half, my wife's Spanish, so she's half Spanish and speaks Spanish, but she moved to Spain alone at age 18. And part of the reason is because I say, look, you're not fully alive unless your life is your startup and you're taking risks that, that, that show that you believe it as such.

• 55:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think it's the emotional risk. I think people are also afraid to sacrifice or give up things, right? So in my, in my twenties, I was, uh, you know, I, I've worked at cool companies. I was doing cool stuff. But by having someone to come home to, there was definitely stuff I was not participating in, right? That I was not experiencing. And there was a certain amount of, you know, sort of FOMO in that. But I was willing to give it up for the relationship and as a result, get the relationship. I think I find a lot of people are afraid, they, they like their life. They like the control they have over their life. They like that they get to do whatever they want, whenever they want to do it.

• 56:09Ryan Holiday?

  And so they're afraid to risk that and as a result, get nothing but sort of superficial or, uh, you know, ex, relationships with expiration dates on them.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And that's, uh, obviously that has a lot of diminishing marginal returns emotionally. The other thing that's pretty interesting to me in the current environment where people are kind of jumping around from thing to thing is that we have an over-reliance on technology that matches us like, like, basically like siblings.

• 56:37Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  And what people want, what people think they want in a romantic partner is somebody who's just like them. But they don't want somebody who's just like them. It's not attractive. It's like, you know, it's, you know what I want? I want a 57-year-old bald guy with a beard. Actually, that's not what I want. I don't want somebody who thinks like I do. I actually need complementarity. And so the key thing that we miss in the way that we match up. The big mistake that we've made in, in using technology and the way that we match people up is we need way, way, way more blind dates that are set up by people who know us and think that we're going to be a complement to somebody else. As opposed to making, this is very interesting, this research on perfumes, for example. Never choose your own fragrance.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Because what you do is you like, that something that you like will smell like your beloved sister. You know, that, and, and which is really, really gross because of the way that we, we match up. And, and there's a whole lot of biological research on this, but suffice it to say that we need, um, to have other people find our mates for us a lot more so that we can be complimentary and not just clones.

• 57:39Ryan Holiday?

  No, people sometimes go, is your wife a writer? And I go, I don't want to be with a writer. I'm horrible. Like, you know, I wouldn't want to be with me, uh, uh, you know, and I think there is something about what you think you want and what you actually need, uh, maybe you're the, the worst person to ask for that.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, there's a reason that there's a lot of success in arranged marriages. And I'm not advocating for that, but I do think that we need people who make suggestions for us and, and stop trying to choose, um, perfectly curated mates on the basis of, of, of, you know, overlapping similarity.

• 58:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and, and perhaps what's working in the arranged marriage is, is what I was talking about also where it's like. Once you're in it, you're in it, right? And you're having to commit to it. I think, I think the big thing I see in young people and relationships is that it's the fear of committing, right? Because of the opportunity costs of committing, because as you said, the risk or the vulnerability inherently in committing, the lack, the lack of options you get when you commit. But, but at the core of it, a relationship that lasts is about committing, about going, I'm not going anywhere. And so because I'm not going anywhere and you're not going anywhere, we have to fix whatever it is that's causing the unhappiness or the difficulty that we're currently experiencing.

• 59:00Ryan Holiday?

  We can't, just like, you know, if you think, oh, I'm unhappy even though I just won an Olympic gold medal, I'm just gonna go get another gold medal and then I'll be happy. Imagine if the gold medal said, no, no, no, no, no, we're gonna get to the bottom of this and figure out why you bought this lie.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's right. And it's the same thing over and over again. If you're looking for your satisfaction in new achievements, even if those new achievements are new relationships, their new sexual partners, whatever it happens to be, is an interesting study, Ryan, that you've probably seen before, that actually looks, based on survey data, at the greatest amount of satisfaction with respect to the number of sexual partners that people have. And the number is one. It turns out to be the number one. And I know people are going like, no way! The data don't lie when it comes to this. Now, that's one per year, by the way, because that's actually the, the only unit that they had available to measure. So I can't tell you how many in a lifetime, but I can tell you that, that actually committing to one particular person winds up for most people being more satisfactory because they

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  actually, they explore the nature of their own commitment, which is an expression of virtue.

• 1:00:10Ryan Holiday?

  So the last question I had for you, someone I know who knows you was, was, was pointing out that even as you're talking about professional decline, which I think is probably one of your most read articles, and, and I just love that piece so much in it, it's in the new book, um, it's in the new book.

• 1:00:27Ryan Holiday?

  They said, one of the things that I noticed about Arthur, though, is that as he's gotten older, he's gotten in better and better shape. So how did you pull that off?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Exercising more and not trying not to eat, trying to get 200 grams of protein and keeping my calories under 2,500 a day while lifting four times a week is basically what it comes down to. It's not rocket science, but you know, it's interesting that You have, there's a lot of things that are under your control that you can actually make better. The problem is that people actually do in fitness is thinking that they're going to get to one particular state and finally be happy. So if I get to 7% body fat, then all will be well.

• 1:01:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  And this is the key thing is remembering that fitness or eating right or doing your work or whatever happens to be. This is all about habits. It's all about processes. And you have to love the process. You actually have to enjoy the process per se. And I got to the point in my life where I said, you know, I actually like lifting. I like, I like, it took a long time for me to get to that particular point, but yeah. And maybe there's a little bit of insecurity in it too. I mean, as your hair starts falling out, which yours probably never will. I mean, it's like, may the Lord bless you and being hairy your whole life, hair suit your whole life. You gotta make it up in some other area. So maybe, maybe I've tried to do that in muscle mass.

• 1:01:44Ryan Holiday?

  No, but I mean,

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  I'm still weak.

• 1:01:46Ryan Holiday?

  That is one thing you do control though, like, right? We don't control what we look like. We don't control how tall we are. We don't control, you know, a bunch of stuff. But you do more or less control whether you're in shape or not, right? If in a pretty, you control whether you're morbidly obese or not, right? You control whether you're, you're, you know, you can run a mile or not. You control whether you're, you're going to be in reasonable shape. And that has a huge impact on whether you're happy and also whether you can do a lot of the other stuff that we're talking about.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, the key thing is also, why are you taking care of your body? Are you taking care of your body so you can live to 180? Then the question is, why do you want to live to 180? It gets back to our earlier. But, but if you're actually taking care of your body because you want to be well, right now. You want to be well on Wednesday because Wednesday you're going to be with your family. And it's a lot better to be able to, you know, pick up your kid than, and without worrying about throwing at your back. For example, I can't pick up my kids because they're bigger than I am. But you get my point that, that you have to be, you're taking care of yourself. You're trying to be strong and well and healthy because you want to be fully alive right now. That's very different than, you know, trying to get into a natural bodybuilding contest for the, you know, the, you know, the, the over 50 crowd or something like that, which.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Doesn't seem to me like the most meritorious of goals.

• 1:03:04Ryan Holiday?

  But it's also a way to have a win every day, I think about too, right? It's like, hey, uh, the world can be falling apart. You can be in the middle of a pandemic. The book you're working on could be kicking your ass. But if I decide to go for a run, I'm going to come back from the run, you know? And I'm going to feel good that I did it afterwards. And so to me, it's also just a nice way to rack it up, ratchet up a win every single day.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the key thing also about your spiritual practice. If you're a meditator or if you have a life of prayer, I mean, I pray every day. I'm a, I'm a practicing Roman Catholic and I don't, people often think that, that people who have a serious meditation practice, religious practice is because they want to get to a particular state. I want to get to the point of final enlightenment. No, no, no, that's not the point. My life is actually better. I'm fully alive right now because of the spiritual life, which is my spiritual workout for all intents and purposes.

• 1:03:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right, it's the ongoing spiritual state that is the heaven or the hell, not the.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all now. It's all about now. It's all about now, the continuous experience of the ongoing now.

• 1:04:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, uh, I love that and I love, I love the new book and I love all your writing and, uh, it's a complete honor as always to talk with you.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ryan. It's so good to talk to you. I mean, me and half the country were your fans. So, and you know, you're the guy who resurrected the Stoics. You know, they're saying, look, we're going to be dead. Everybody's going to forget us. Turns out Ryan Holiday is going to bring you back 2,000 years later. So we can all hope that somebody does that to the rest of us.

• 1:04:37Ryan Holiday?

  But we won't be alive to enjoy it. So it's a somewhat muted, muted accomplishment as the Stoics point out.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  That's right. It's a, it's a Pyrrhic victory for sure. Yeah.

• 1:04:46Ryan Holiday?

  All right, you're the best. I appreciate it. Let's do this again.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Right on, man. Thank you.

• 1:04:53Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the stoia, the stoia po kiloe, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stoia. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best Of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 1:05:37Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.