Modern Life Is Designed to Leave You Empty. Here's the Antidote. | Arthur Brooks

Six steps to reclaim your brain, find purpose, and escape the doom loop. Arthur Brooks https://www.arthurbrooks.com/ is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. Brooks is the author of 15 books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, Build the Life You Want https://www.amazon.com/Build-Life-You-Want-Science/dp/0593545400, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life https://www.amazon.com/Strength-Finding-Success-Happiness-Purpose/dp/059319148X. His latest book is The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724315/the-meaning-of-your-life-by-arthur-c-brooks/. In this episode we talk about: The three essential components of a meaningful life Getting comfortable with boredom Why we need to be asking questions that google can't answer The neuroscience behind "authentic love" Strategies for finding meaning in your work What Arthur means when he says "don't waste your suffering" Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Office Hours with Arthur Brooks https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours Join Dan and Emmy Award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert at 92NY on May 17th for a live conversation about how mindfulness can deepen connection and combat loneliness, available in person and via streaming. Register here. https://www.92ny.org/event/dan-harris-with-allison-gilbert Join Dan, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18, 2026. Register here. https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party#9851 This episode is sponsored by: LinkedIn Ads — Reach the right professionals with precision targeting. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit at http://www.linkedin.com/happier BetterHelp — Online therapy, matched to your needs. Get 10% off your first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/happier Quō — The smart business phone system with AI call logging and summaries. Try free + 20% off your first six months at https://www.quo.com/happier Hyperfocus with Rae Jacobson — A podcast exploring ADHD, neurodivergence, and mental health through conversations with scientists, doctors, and researchers. Search for Hyperfocus with Rae Jacobson wherever you get your podcasts. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hey, gang. Back today with another of my favorite frequent flyers on this show, and we're going back to a theme that is incredibly important and highly resonant, and it's this: how modern life often makes you sick. The idea that we have these ancient brains that are ill-equipped for the world that our modern brains have created. Specifically, in this case, we're talking about how a culture of achievement, and productivity, and hustle porn, and clout-seeking, and perpetual distraction can really activate the unhelpful parts of your brain and make life seem empty. My guest is going to talk about six ways to bring meaning back into your life, or if you already have meaning, how to turn the volume up on it. Said guest is Arthur Brooks, a professor at the Harvard

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. Arthur is also the host of the weekly podcast, Office Hours with Arthur Brooks, and he's the author of 15 books, including his latest, which is called The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. In this conversation, we talk about the three essential components of a meaningful life, how to escape what he calls the doom loop, getting comfortable with boredom, why we need to ask questions that Google cannot answer, and the neuroscience behind authentic love, strategies for finding meaning in your work, what Arthur means when he says, "Don't waste your suffering," and much more. As we all know, one great way to generate a sense of meaning is by being

• 1:45Dan Harris?

  part of something, something larger than you, having a sense of purpose, community, and belonging. And that really is the core idea around which my team and I have built our new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got all sorts of stuff that a regular meditation app might have, guided meditations, courses, et cetera. But we also do things like live video meditation sessions where you can get your questions answered from me and many, many amazing meditation teachers. We also have tech that enables you to connect with me, our teachers, our staff, and one another. The evidence really shows that this kind of social support is a great way to build and support a habit. Many of us have tried

• 2:26Dan Harris?

  meditation many, many times and fallen off the wagon. We think that our new product can help you avoid that cycle. So join us at danharris.com. It's free for the first two weeks, so you can try before you buy. And we also give free subscriptions to anybody who cannot afford it, no questions asked. Okay, enough pitching for me. We'll get started with Arthur Brooks right after this.

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• 3:46Dan Harris?

  Arthur Brooks, welcome back to the show.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Thanks, Dan. How wonderful to be with you. Great to see you.

• 3:51Dan Harris?

  Likewise.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  I look older every time, and you look the same. So...

• 3:57Speaker 03

  You got a portrait in your house someplace that's aging.

• 4:01Dan Harris?

  No, I don't have that. There's no Dorian Gray, but I do have extremely generous lighting in my home studio. So that is really what's happening here.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Outstanding genes, a relaxing lifestyle. There's a lot that goes into it.

• 4:15Dan Harris?

  Well, you look great. And right before we started rolling, you said something to me that I thought would be a great place to start this. Is it you said that your new book is the biggest one you've written in a long time?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:26Dan Harris?

  What makes it so?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  This is a book that I started thinking about in 2019, as a matter of fact, because that's when I came back to academia after a long hiatus. I'm an old school college professor and I got my PhD in the 90s and went into academia. But I left for 10 years to run a organization in Washington DC, a big nonprofit in 2008. And when I came back 11 years later, it was a completely different place. Academia, as a matter of fact, youth, young adult culture had changed over that period quite dramatically. We found in around 2008, young people were happier than older people. And by the time I came back in 2019, people under 30 were more likely to be depressed, more likely to be anxious, more likely to be lonely. And it was especially acute on college campuses.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  And as a behavioral scientist, I thought, man, this is like my Sherlock Holmes moment. I got to sort this out. This is why I'm back. This is really why I'm supposed to be here. Was to figure out neurobiologically and behaviorally, what went wrong in that 11 year period? It was a meaning crisis. It was a crisis in the meaning of life, quite frankly, is which I quickly figured out by looking at the data and interviewing hundreds of people. And I've been working since 2019 on the solution to that problem. And this book is my six part plan on how to find meaning in a culture of basic emptiness.

• 5:43Dan Harris?

  And I, just to state the obvious, this is not just for college students.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  It isn't because what I found on campuses actually is every place. It was just most acute there where I saw it. And that was my testing ground. That was my laboratory is where I was doing this. And so I find that the problems of ascertaining meaning in life, these are among people of all different ages, but they're especially acute for people under 35 years old is what I find.

• 6:08Dan Harris?

  When you talked about the data, the shift between 2008 and 2019, the first thing that came into my head was, well, what happened in that period of time was the introduction of social media.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that was the first catalytic event. As a matter of fact, you find that before 2008, the question, which a survey group called Monitoring the Future has been asking for a long time, does your life feel meaningless? It was always about 15% of adults under 30 would say yes, but it bumped along at that level. And then after 2008, it absolutely exploded. And that was the best predictor of saying, I feel anxious and depressed. That's what's driving it. I mean, people have all of these explanations, you know, boomers wrecked America, they drove up housing prices, or that young people are just really entitled flowers. All that stuff's nonsense. There was an actual explanation for this, and it really started with the introduction of small screens in people's pockets. That wasn't the only thing.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  What that was, was the tip of the spear of a culture that had changed away from finding meaning, away from ascertaining mystery and the deeper things in life, and much, much more to the virtual world, toward the technological world, toward the one that's all about efficiency and answers and analytics, and also just distraction and an aversion to boredom. That's where that started around 2008, and it's really ruined the quality of life for people since then.

• 7:29Dan Harris?

  So it's not just social media, it's a bigger picture that includes distraction, intolerance for discomfort, isolation, perfectionism, hyper individualism, that sort of basket of deplorables, to quote Hillary Clinton.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and really what it has in common, and this is what the, probably the most important part of this book, is an explanation of why those things are related to each other. And it really has to do with the functioning of the brain. I mean, I know you're really interested in neuroscience because the work that you've done on meditation, for example, is a highly neuroscientific thing. This is not just... Something that is inexplicable on the contrary. We've been doing research on this for generations. And sure enough, the meaning crisis is a neurobiological phenomenon. The human brain is hemispherically lateralized, which is just a fancy way of saying that the two sides of the brain do different things. The right side of the brain is all about mystery, meaning, love and happiness. All of the complex things that you can never quite apprehend, but give life its meaning

• 8:29Speaker 03

  and give life its depth. The left side of the brain is the how and what questions of life, not the why questions. It's how you do stuff. It's how you solve problems. It's the questions that you actually answer in ordinary life. And that's how you get stuff done. So you can feed yourself and get to work and ask Google questions and all that sort of stuff. The problem is that if we don't have the right side of our brain working properly, we won't find meaning and we won't be happy. That's what it comes down to. And what we find is that the culture, the hustle culture, the achievement culture, the technological culture, but most importantly, that in which we're constantly distracted and constantly online is pushing us only into the what and how to side of our brain.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  And it's locking down the right side, the why part of our brain. Now, this book shows that's what's happening to our brains. But more importantly, it's the six things that we need to do to live differently to get back on the right side of our brain. People say, where do I go to find the meaning of life? The beach, Italy, church? No, the right side of your brain. That's where you go. So how do you get there? This is a handbook on how to get there.

• 9:35Dan Harris?

  I want to dive quite deeply into the six parts of your plan. Let me just step back for a second and talk about the word meaning and its opposite, meaninglessness. How are we defining meaning and meaninglessness?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  So that was the first big challenge, of course. You know, people say my life doesn't have meaning. I don't know what I meant to do. Everything feels meaningless. You don't just gloss over that. You got to figure out what they're talking about. And, and it turns out there's a pretty big literature from psychologists about, I guess, the meaning of meaning, as a matter of fact. Meaning has three parts to it. It's kind of the answer to three questions. If you have a deep sense of meaning in your life, and again, this doesn't have to be explicit, your, you know, great granddad Harris, he wasn't asking these questions because my guess is he was plowing a field or working in a factory or just getting through. But the truth is that you have a sense of the answer to three questions. Number one is the coherence question. Why do things happen the way they do? You have to have a sense of that. Some people answer that through religion, some people through science.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Some people, by the way, through conspiracy theories. When somebody's going down the rabbit hole in conspiracy theories, that's a cry for help about meaning. Because that's saying, I need coherence. And the reason I need it, because I don't feel like my life has meaning. So, you know, don't argue with somebody and say they're stupid because they're looking for the answers in conspiracy theories. Treat them with compassion because they have a deep need. That's number one. Number two is purpose. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Where is my life going? Purpose and meaning are not the same thing. Purpose is a component of meaning. Purpose is, I gotta have direction. I gotta have goals so I know why I'm doing what I'm doing. Otherwise, I'm going in circles and that's meaningless. And the third is significance. Why does my life matter? These are these big why questions. To whom does my life matter?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Who loves me? Why does it matter that I'm actually alive? Who would care if I weren't alive? And you have to have these answers to these three questions. Now, these are not the kind of thing where you're walking around with the data right on the tip of your fingers all the time. But you have a sense of these things. And this kind of shows you how the right side of the brain works. I mean, I defy anybody to put those questions into AI. You'll get hilarious nonsense. These are the kinds of things that you live with. So you're a long time meditator. And when you're meditating, the information is apprehended by you in ways that defy your ability to explain them. The life of prayer and meditation actually does that. And the reason for that, Dan, is that your language centers are on the left side of your brain.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  And so if you can explain it really, really, really clearly, it's not as deep as the true answers, which are in the right side of your brain. That's why meditation doesn't make you articulate. It makes you deeper in your understanding because it's working the correct side of your brain. As a matter of fact, meditation is one of the ways to get there.

• 12:22Dan Harris?

  Let me just go back to these three parts and these three questions because actually asking these three questions, that is part of the six-part plan.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Right, asking.

• 12:32Dan Harris?

  Yeah, asking. Let's just stay there for a second. So it's coherence, purpose, and significance. I guess part one for me is, can you just help me disambiguate between purpose and significance?

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. So purpose is the direction that I'm going with my life. Significance is who cares? Who in your life cares about what you're doing and who you are? So for example, I mean, my work is very, very big part of my purpose. But my marriage is a bigger part of my significance. That your relationships in your life, you know, my children, my grandchildren, that's a lot about my sense of significance. It's, you know, why am I alive and who would care if I weren't is what it comes down to. And you know, this is why, for example, you know, I have a lot of purpose in what I'm trying to do with my life. But my relationship with God is really about my sense of significance. So religion has a big, big, big role in the significance part.

• 13:24Dan Harris?

  Got it. Okay. So do you feel like it's appropriate to go through these questions now? Because it is a huge emphasis in the book.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a huge emphasis in the book. And part of this point that I want to make is that we have a tendency in this left hemisphere culture to think that the essence of being a really successful person is answering questions. And part of the reason for that is because the engineering emphasis that we've had and the technological emphasis that we've had in our culture is that if you can answer a lot of questions, you win. The result of that is that we think that being truly alive, that you can make an AI that's actually human is because it can answer any question better than any human actually could. But answering questions is not a uniquely human thing at all. On the contrary. That's actually not it. And one of the things I talk about in the book to illustrate this is that famous, famous case of the gorilla that learned a thousand words.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  When I was a kid, and you're 10 years younger than me, so maybe you'll remember this, was Coco the gorilla.

• 14:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Who is taught by Penny Patterson, a primatologist, to do a thousand words in sign language. And you know, Coco the gorilla was so famous that, you know, when she died at age 46, which is real old for a Ugandan lowland gorilla in captivity. That she got an obituary in the New York Times. I mean, we're not going to get obituaries in the New York Times, man, but Coco the gorilla got an obituary in the New York Times. And the reason was because a lot of people said that she was almost human because she could answer so many questions with sign language. You could ask her a question, "What do you want for lunch?" She answers a question. But the one thing that she never did, ever in her life, that no non-human animal has ever done, and that convincingly neither

• 15:01Speaker 03

  has a machine, is ask a real question. Coco couldn't ask questions because human life is about asking, not about answering, and that's what we forget. You want to be a real human, fully alive, ask more questions. You know, it's funny, because I talk to people my age, I'm 61 years old, and I ask people, "What are your most profound memories from college?" They'll always say, you know, like, 11:00 PM bowl sessions in the dorm with my friends, where we'd have these really, really pretentious conversations. That's not happening with young people today. And the reason is because it's all this stuff, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. It's YouTube Shorts at 11:00 PM. It's social media at 11:00 PM. It's distraction.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  It's all answers, not questions, which is taking the life out of life.

• 15:49Dan Harris?

  I want to say something that I think you'll agree with. There's a way in which sometimes, and I don't think you're doing this, sometimes these discussions lapse into a kind of criticism of the young, but we created this world for young people.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, totally. No, absolutely. This is a long time in the making, by the way. This crisis that we have, you look back at Leo Tolstoy in the 1890s, you know, in writing his autobiography, he talked about wanting to kill himself. And he had everything. He had 13 kids. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. He had a contentious but very successful marriage. He was rich. He was world famous. He had all the stuff that people think that they want, but his life didn't have any meaning. And he couldn't figure it out. He couldn't find it through fame. He couldn't find it through money. He couldn't find it through science. He studied biology and mathematics and actually couldn't figure it out. And finally, he went to a little town of peasants

• 16:47Speaker 03

  hours away from Moscow. Everybody's illiterate. And what they were doing all day long is that they would pray. They would practice their religion. They would go to dances at night. They would have dinner with each other. They had ordinary relationships. And their life had a ton of meaning and he figured it out. We've all become Tolstoy's and the reason for that is because little by little by little, we've stripped out those fundamental skills that used to be normal out of life. And we've turned it into something that's more technologically advanced and yet bereft of the things that we actually want. Absolutely, it is the fault of people my age because what we find in today is that if you can technologize life, you get rich, right? And then who's your consumer? People who don't remember the before times is what it comes down to.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  This is not a criticism of the young. This is a call to to actually serve them the way that we're supposed to.

• 17:38Dan Harris?

  Yes, amen. Let me call an audible here. I was driving you toward these three big questions, each linked to the three dimensions of meaning, which are, again, coherence, purpose, and significance. But we've now started talking about something that actually precedes the three questions in the book. So I want to go there and then we'll get to the three questions. You have a chapter called interrupting the doom loop. What we've been talking about for the last couple of minutes without naming it really is the doom loop. So if modern life is driving us to the wrong side of our brain, if, in other words, modern life is stripping us of meaning and making us sick spiritually and psychologically, how do we counterprogram against that?

• 18:22Speaker 03

  So the doom loop that you talk about is sort of the same doom loop as anything else. I've worked for many, many years in the behavioral science of addiction. And all addiction has in common a doom loop where you're trying to avoid something you don't like and you make it worse. So what you find is, for example, alcoholism is best predicted by two things, anxiety and boredom. You're an anxious person, you're in danger for alcoholism. You're chronically bored, you're in danger for alcoholism. Because it relieves temporarily those two things. But the problem is that the more you drink, the more boring your life gets. The more you drink, the more anxious you get. You get more bored and more anxious and more bored and more anxious. And that's a doom loop all the way down until you cut the doom loop somehow.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  The same thing is true with the way that we use technology and the way that we live our lives today. I don't want to be bored sitting at a traffic light, so I pull out my phone and I scroll social media, look at my notifications, for example. I want to be distracted from a life that is bereft of real relationships because, you know, I get up and look at my phone and go to work on Zoom. And then after I'm done with my work on Zoom, I talk to my social media friends and I date people on the apps. And then I get a sense of accomplishment by video gaming and, and I'm really, really, really lonely. And so I do more of that and I binge that. It's like binging fast food when you're hungry. And you actually get hungry faster while actually becoming unhealthy and obese. It's the same basic idea. It gets worse and worse and worse. And that doom loop is what we have to counteract.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  So the first thing I talk about in this book is how do you clip the doom loop in any sort of addictive behavior, such that you can actually start working on your life and getting better?

• 19:58Dan Harris?

  Just to reset for the listener, we're talking to the great Arthur Brooks about his six-part plan for restoring a sense of meaning in a world that militates against it. The first step is interrupting the doom loop as you just described it, Arthur. What are the steps that you would recommend for this interruption?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  So I relied a lot in this at looking at my background and research on alcoholism and drug abuse, actually. Because the way that we use technology looks an awful lot like that. And it uses the dopaminergic pathways in the brain. It captures the brain in much the same way, et cetera, et cetera. And there's three parts for breaking out of it. To begin with, there's two kinds of addictions out there. There's the addictions that you need abstinence, like alcohol. If you're an alcoholic and you come to me and people, many people have, and I say, number one, you gotta stop drinking. Duh. But if you come to me and say, I'm really, really, really hooked on junk food, highly glycemic carbohydrates, they float my boat, man, I'm not going to say, stop eating.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  That's the reason that the second kind of addiction where you have to manage it is harder than abstinence. Management is harder than abstinence, actually. And social media and the use of devices is in the second category, absolutely. So number one is basically in these kinds of addictions is rebellion. You need the spirit of a rebel where you recognize that this thing is a pirate ship, man, and it's sailed up alongside and there's guys. Swinging across on ropes and it's not going to be good for you with like knives in their teeth. And there's a reason for this. Look, I'm not against social media. I know you aren't either. I'm certainly not against technology. You know, the platform that we're recording on right now is making it possible for Arthur Brooks and Dan Harris. To have a conversation that's going to help people. I love that.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  But when it takes over my life, it has become a barrier to everything and I need the spirit of rebellion. So that's number one. Number two is actual detox. And I've got basically a three-part plan in this book about how to detox from devices in a way where you can continue to use your devices. And it's very well scientifically validated on how to do that about the times of the day where you shouldn't use your devices. There's only three. First hour of the morning, last hour at night and during meals. Those are the three times. And if you start doing that, people are like, ah, easy. It's super hard. But when you do that, your life really changes. Also tech-free zones, classrooms, bedrooms, and last but not least is tech fasts. And I recommend a four-day silent retreat.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Or four-day spiritual retreat, or four-day hike, or four-day walk. Where you don't have devices every year. And if you do these three things, tech-free times, tech-free zones and tech fasts. You'll have this problem cooked. You're going to actually solve this problem. It's just really hard to do. And last but not least, you have to learn how to be alone in your mind. You have to learn how to be bored again, which most people have forgotten or never learned. And so I have a whole bunch of techniques. A lot of it actually comes from Zen and different Buddhist traditions. On how to become bored in a very productive way from a lot of my study with the Tibetans, but also the study of many of the Zen traditions on how to become bored in a productive way. And so these are the three parts rebel, detox.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  And learn how to be bored. Now you're ready because you will have broken the cycle. You've been broken out of the doom loop and you're ready to actually do the the six things that we talk about in this book to rebuild your life. And what I found with my students over the past seven years. Is that within six months, if you put these things into practice, you will no longer be in a meaning crisis.

• 23:26Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, let's go into the list within a list here, the three things you're recommending for interrupting the doom loop.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:32Dan Harris?

  First, just to say on rebellion, I cosign on that heartily, and it puts me in mind of something that happened in the 90s and aughts. There was a very successful advertising campaign on MTV to try to get young kids not to smoke, and instead of lecturing them, it engendered the spirit of rebellion. These guys are lying to you. They're trying to get you sick, these tobacco companies.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  That was the body bag thing, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:00Dan Harris?

  And it was, if memory serves, it was quite successful, and I think what you're calling for is a similar attitude vis a vis tech.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  That's right, and again, I'm not against tech. I have many friends who are working on dating apps that are not trying to maximize time in app, they're trying to maximize time in person, and that's a really, really good thing, and we're gonna get there. We're gonna solve this problem. The trouble is, between now and then, we need people to be a lot more disciplined, and that requires not a rebellion, you know, hating everybody who's in tech and all that. No, no, it means a rebellion against your own tendencies, rebellion against yourself, which is the most amazing thing. You know, it's just so funny, because this whole idea of it feels good, do it, and you should be really authentic, no, you shouldn't. You shouldn't be authentic a lot of the time, because Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. You want to live not in the space of your animal impulses, you want to live in the space

• 24:51Speaker 03

  of your moral aspirations. You, as a meditator, I mean, you've talked about this a lot, of being the person that you want to be, not the person who wants to skip meditating, yell at your wife, and eat a Twinkie, for God's sake, because that's not the person that you actually want to be. And so the first thing is rebelling against your own tendencies and saying, enough, enough, I'm going to be the person that I want to be, not the person I've been in the past, and that's bracing. That's the essence of rugged individualism, not just like not caring about anybody else, it's being the person that you want to be and taking responsibility for your life.

• 25:26Dan Harris?

  Yes, Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher, often talks about switching from follow your heart to train your heart. So I agree with what you're saying. And I do want to slightly push back. I agree with what you're talking about, the spirit of rebellion vis a vis your own impulses. But don't you think we should have some sense of rebellion against the algorithms which run on anger and anxiety and to understand that the world is not what our news feed is trying to convince us it is?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Oh, good Lord, yes. I couldn't agree more. I wrote a whole book in 2019 called Love Your Enemies. That was all about that. And suffice it to say, Dan, I failed in my effort to, you know, to break the spine of the of the culture of contempt. But the culture of contempt is largely fueled by the fact that contempt in our modern life is fueled by addiction to the news cycle, addiction to outrage, addiction to my side bias, and is much, much worse than the technological age. So I couldn't agree more that that stuff is really, really deleterious. Now, how do you break that? It would be great if there were some public policy way to say, sorry, it's no longer possible for you to put out inflammatory, horrible, evil stuff on the internet.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  But really, it's going to be a lot more if we can actually have a culture of people who say enough on the demand side. That's how you break supply is actually is demand.

• 26:50Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 26:52Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Arthur talks about how to get comfortable with boredom, the neuroscience behind authentic love, how to transcend yourself, and much more.

• 27:05Speaker 02

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• 27:37Dan Harris?

  You talked about these three techniques for creating some tech-free zones in your life. So tech-free times, first hour of the day, last hour before you go to bed, and meals, and also taking a silent retreat of some sort for four days. And I can't remember what else you recommended, but I was thinking, as I was listening to you talk, that I have done the vast majority of those things, and yet I still am the asshole at times who's checking his phone at a red light because he can't bear to be bored.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:11Dan Harris?

  Now, hearing you say all of this again is a great reminder for me to sort of reset. But I say all of this not to cast doubt on your suggestions, but just to emphasize that this shit is hard.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. And look, you know, you and I have had all kinds of fun adventures with substances in our lives, and, and a lot of people watching us have struggled with addiction and like, oh yeah, do these three things and you'll never want a little drinky again for the rest of your life. No, that's not how it works. It's always a wolf at the door, which means you gotta keep doing it and keep doing it. And by the way, that's a beautiful thing, that you're doing the work to keep the wolf away from the door because you're responsible for your own life. That's what empowerment is all about. It's not one and done. It's not take a pill and everything is going to be okay. It's that you be in charge of your life in this particular way. This is one of the reasons that people who have struggled with addiction and who have learned how to manage their lives substance-free are happier than people who don't, because

• 29:07Speaker 03

  they learned something about themselves. They won this huge battle, an ongoing battle.

• 29:13Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes. Okay, so then you also referenced some Zen-derived techniques for getting more comfortable with boredom. Can you say a little bit about that?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, boredom is a funny thing. If I went back to great-grandpa Harris, where was great-grandpa Harris? Was he like running from some godforsaken schnitzel or something?

• 29:34Dan Harris?

  Uh, exactly. Arthur LeBau changed his name from LeBowitz to LeBau. I think about this guy all the time. Uh, he escaped the Stedl pre-World War II, so in the early 1900s, and then came here and became a crook. And ultimately got busted. I've seen the articles about him in the 30s. He got busted. He was a crooked bail bondsman, uh, and then took his own life in the family kitchen.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 29:58Dan Harris?

  So I think about this guy a lot.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  That's, uh, that's book worthy, Dan.

• 30:02Dan Harris?

  He is a major character in my next book.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  I love it. Uh, I can't wait to read the next book. Most great granddads today didn't have that exciting a life as great grandfather LeBau. I mean, great granddad Brooks, he pushed a plow, right? But I guarantee you, he never came home and said to his wife, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. And the reason is because his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. Cause that's the way, he was just living his ordinary life. And here's the irony when it comes to boredom. His life, moment to moment, was pretty darn boring. I guarantee you, he never got to the end of his life and said, my life was completely boring. But today, people's lives

• 30:48Speaker 03

  from moment to moment are eradicating boredom, and yet their life overall is unbelievably grindingly boring. That is an incredible irony that we see today. And the only way to fix that problem is to get comfortable with moment to moment boredom, so that your year to year boredom goes away. So that you're really digging in and living a life fully alive. And the way to do that, well, I mean, you can go live in an ashram, you can go, you know, meditate in the Himalayas. I've done it, you've done it, but we're privileged guys. Not everybody's got the time or means to actually go do that. But there are other ways to do that. And I recommend a bunch in this book. For example, work out without headphones. This is a funny thing because it makes your brain work in a different way.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  If you're working out without headphones, you're going to be opening up the right side of your brain. And at first it feels grindingly boring, but then it becomes the equivalent of an hour-long shower where you have your best ideas. People always like, "I come up with my best ideas in the shower." Because your phone isn't in there, man, I hope. Doing that is an important way to do that. Commuting without headphones, like on the train, in the car, making it your decompression zone. Turn off the radio and don't listen to anything. Get lost in your thoughts. That's called using the default mode network, a set of structures in your brain that turns on when you're literally thinking about nothing. Super uncomfortable at first. Have you met Dan Gilbert, my colleague at Harvard? Have you had him on the show, the psychologist?

• 32:15Dan Harris?

  If you see him in the hallways, tell him I'd love to have him on, but I have never had him on.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  He's fantastic. He's the world's leading expert on boredom. And he has these experiments where he puts undergraduates in the lab because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And they have, they have to sit in an empty room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except they have a little key fob. And if they touch the button on the key fob, it'll self-administer a painful electric shock. And he's looking for whether or not people choose boredom or pain. I don't know how he got this through the internal review board for, you know, maybe it was just because it was long enough ago. What he finds is that 25% of the women shock themselves and 2/3 of the guys shock themselves because, you know, dudes.

• 32:55Dan Harris?

  Wow.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Right? One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes, like painful electric shocks. He got thrown out of the experiment for being a sick and twisted freak. Right? But the truth is, if you're not used to boredom, you're gonna hate it because the default mode network is gonna make you go to all sorts of really, really uncomfortable right hemisphere places. But once you start getting used to it, your life is gonna start changing and you have to administer that on purpose because we solved the boredom problem. This solved the boredom problem. And once you solve the boredom problem, you don't want to go back. But then you're hooked, you're in the cycle, you're on the wheel. And that's what you gotta break.

• 33:34Dan Harris?

  Have you seen these social media videos of usually it's young men and the term they use is raw dogging reality where they'll sit on a plane for 18 hours and do nothing?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, raw dogging flights. It's a classic thing and I don't actually use that example in my books. I didn't want to say raw dogging in my book because you know, this is, this is, this is family research, Dan, you know?

• 34:00Speaker 03

  But, but man, it's true and, and it's so funny because you know, I teach for our listeners who don't know, I teach at the Harvard Business School MBAs. These are the most striving, hard charging people I've ever met and they are excellent, man. They're super good at what they do. So I'm talking about boredom. You gotta get bored, gotta get bored. And one guy's like, I want to become truly excellent in boredom. He wants to be better in boredom at anybody else.

• 34:26Dan Harris?

  Well, so the thing I think about when I hear you talk about working out without headphones, commuting out without headphones, or when I see these young men, it is usually mostly young men, raw dogging their flights or any aspect of reality. The thing I think about is, well, why don't you use that time to meditate, to be mindful? You can be mindful while you're lifting weights or commuting or anything.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  That's right. To be mindful. Now, it's actually a little harder when you're doing something really strenuous. And part of the reason is because your blood pressure is going up and down so precipitously. You're also bringing so much blood in and out of your brain that it kind of, that's one of the reasons that when you're meditating, for example, or when you're sitting in prayer, that you want to be in a place where you can get more cognitive and physical equilibrium. So it's a little harder to do that under the circumstances, but dedicating yourself to being undistracted, to being fully present. So it's like, now I'm picking up a 60-pound dumbbell. Now I'm dropping it on my foot or whatever you happen to be doing, that you know, you're fully present for the experience of what you're doing

• 35:32Speaker 03

  and, and you remember it and you're part of what's actually happening. And at first you're like, gosh, this is so boring. But then pretty soon you're going to be like, I feel like I'm involved with my life because you're not missing your life anymore.

• 35:47Dan Harris?

  Okay, so we've talked about interrupting the doom loop. Now let's get to the three big questions. Can you run through them?

• 35:55Speaker 03

  So the questions that we talked about before, this really is any sort of questioning about your life. And one of the things in modern life that we've gotten really, really bad at is asking questions. And the reason is because we reward answers, not questions, as we talked about before. You want to make a billion dollars, create a search engine that answers questions better than any other. But the truth of the matter is that you're not going to illuminate the right side of your brain or find the meaning of your life with any question that you can put in a Google search bar where the answer is anything less than completely meaningless. If you put into Google or ChatGPT, "Hey, what would I die for?", it'll give you a bunch of stupid nonsense.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  It'll give you this pablum, you know, this pat answers that mean nothing to you. And the reason is because those kinds of questions, those "why" questions of life can't be answered. So the whole point is I give these three meaning questions to ask, but that's just a place to start. What I recommend to my students is literally the two questions. I have a two-question exam to see if there's a meaning crisis, but also the two questions to be contemplating as you try to solve the crisis in your life. Why am I alive and for what would I die? Why am I alive and for what would I die? And I find that young people really, really struggle with these questions. I mean, you and I, in the second question, for what would I die? We got like, "Oh, I know that one, my kids." And now I'm a grandfather, my grandkids. But you know, what else? Really, is that it? Is that literally it? What about your country?

• 37:22Speaker 03

  What about your ideals? What about people who are innocent that you don't know? Right? It's so interesting, you know, that people have a big sense of meaning who are veterans. And it's interesting because two of my kids are Marines now. And when I saw that, it was a case study in why that is the case. So I have, my middle son Carlos really, really struggled with a lot of the meaning and, you know, life. What a drag. And then he joined the Marine Corps and became a scout sniper, which is this really dangerous sort of elite job in the Marine Corps. And he had to not only contemplate, "Why am I alive?", he had to sign a contract for what he was willing to give his life for.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  He was willing to give his life for his fellow Marines in the United States of America and our allies. He was literally willing to do that. And he's been a completely different person since he got out of the Marines because he confronted those two questions in a way that... You know, life on the internet would have made it impossible for him to even have time or a lack of distraction to deal with.

• 38:24Dan Harris?

  So just to make sure I fully grasp this, we should take these questions, whether three questions or two, and just make a mental habit of chewing on them, mulling them over as a practice.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. And people can write their own questions, too. But remember, if Google can answer it, it's the wrong question. If Google can answer it, it's a left-hand side question. If Google can't answer it, it's a right-hand side question. That's kind of the acid test on any of these why questions for life. Find the questions that you most want. Why am I spending my time in this job? Why am I spending my time in this relationship? These kinds of things that nobody can answer except you, and you can only come to an understanding of when you deeply examine the meaning of your life. That's what will open up the part of your brain that you actually need. And even if you can't come to exact answers, you will come to a deeper understanding and a sense of calm that you've never had before just by asking the questions.

• 39:23Dan Harris?

  Okay, so we're working our way through your six-part plan here. The next part is to, and these are your words, give your heart away. What do you mean by that?

• 39:32Speaker 03

  One of the most mysterious, meaningful things in people's lives, the kind of complex problem that you'll never solve, is your marriage. You know, you and I have talked about this before. You've been married for a long time, just like me. We've been both married dudes for a long time. I've been married for 34 years. I'm completely in love with my wife. Before I started this podcast, she's upstairs. She told me she loved me. And she does, I believe it. But when I'm done, something might have happened and she might be just pissed off at me. Dan, I don't know. I don't know. I can't solve my marriage. I can only live my marriage. Now, to begin with, it's partly complex because my wife is Spanish. But you know, that adds a layer of complexity to any marriage, I will tell

• 40:14Speaker 03

  you. But, but the truth is that love, especially romantic love, is a right-side

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Complex phenomenon. You'll never solve the problems. All you'll ever do is learn to live with them. And what do we find? Not coincidentally, as we've been pushed to the left side of our brain, people are less likely to fall in love than they ever had before. For people under 30, the likelihood of getting married, falling in love, living together, even having sex, has gone down dramatically every decade since the 1980s. And so we find, for the very first time, more people in their 30s are living alone than people who are in permanent partnerships. The reason is because we're not good at the complex phenomenon of falling in love. And so one of the things I prescribe to my students, I have a whole unit in my class called Falling in Love and Staying in Love, and I walk through

• 41:02Speaker 03

  what's happening in the brain and how the brain reacts in this crazy right hemisphere way when you're falling in love. But that's one thing that you gotta do. And it's super scary. Why? Because we're used to solving complicated problems and not living with complex problems. We're not used to getting on the right-hand side. But the minute that you say, okay, no mas, I'm in love, I'm in love, you've opened up the right side of your brain. Falling in love is the ultimate right hemisphere meaning-filled experience. And by the way, you're gonna get hurt. It's super dangerous. There'd be dragons. But that's kinda how it works. That's how anything full of mystery and meaning works. It's always scary because you don't know what's over there. You don't know what's in there. You can't even articulate these things that are actually happening to you. That's the point.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  That's actually the point.

• 41:49Dan Harris?

  When you assign falling in love to your students, how do they then go about it?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  So here's how I assign it. And I've had a lot of experiences of this over the past five years. I was giving a talk to this big group of 20-somethings in Washington DC, actually, not as part of my class. And I said, you wanna be an entrepreneur in your life, give your heart away. Because that's the ultimate expression of risk in search of explosive returns. And if you're not doing that, you're not an entrepreneur. And afterward, a kid comes up, actually, it wasn't right afterward, it was two weeks later, and he found me on an airplane, just happened to be with me. And he said, I can't get that out of my head. And so I'm on my way right now to confess that I've secretly been in love with a woman for two years and I haven't told her. Because of your speech. And I'm like, dude, it was only a speech. I don't want you to ruin your life.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  And I thought about it. I said a prayer for him, you know, I actually gave him my email address and he didn't respond, which seemed like a bad sign. And I ran into him a few months later in Washington DC. And I said, you remember me? He says, yep. I said, what happened with that woman? And he said, she wasn't in love with me. She shot me down and she introduced me to the guy that she's in love with. And I said, I'm really sorry. I was very contrite. I didn't mean to ruin your life. He says, no, no, no, no. See, the thing is, that's what I was most afraid of. And it happened and I didn't die and I'm not afraid anymore. I'm free. See, that's the thing about it, right? So what I recommend is that, that people actually go for it. They just go for it and get rejected. That's

• 43:19Speaker 03

  how you do anything, right? It's like you take risks in these murky waters. I'm not asking you to go, you know, swim in a shark infested part of the ocean. I'm talking about doing something that's really scary that people don't have very much experience in right now, which is falling in love with somebody and taking the risk of them saying, I don't love you, or having a bad breakup and then learning from it and growing from it and coming back and actually having these experiences more because that's the richness in life. You know, everybody watching us saying, oh, these two old guys. Yeah. Well, guess what? We were rejected a lot before we found our soulmates.

• 43:52Dan Harris?

  Speak for yourself.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just like, you were in third grade with your wife, right?

• 43:59Dan Harris?

  That story you just told, which I love. It reminds me of something that we kind of mentioned earlier, one of us or both of us mentioned earlier, which is that in this chronically online, hyperproductive, hyper individualistic era, we have developed, and this is not a new observation on my part, but we have developed an allergy to discomfort, all sorts of discomfort, because the phone makes it so that we can get dates and food and anything from Amazon and any piece of information we want very, very seamlessly. So life really doesn't have the kind of friction it used to have.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:39Dan Harris?

  And as a result. People are really uncomfortable with what you're describing when it comes to giving your your heart away.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  And it's not just ease, it's also the lack of risk when it comes to romance. So what apps are supposed to do, and some apps are much better than others, because some apps are now, they're looking for not time in app, but time in person, and they're gonna get better, and I'm actually not down on this. Sixty-two percent of permanent relationships start on apps today. The trouble is when people are trying to mitigate all of the risk of rejection by curating their dating profile in such a way they're gonna find somebody who's exactly like themselves. And this has actually led to a much bigger increase in a lack of complementarity. The secret to to happiness and romance is not compatibility.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  You need a very, very tangible but low level of compatibility with somebody you can fall in love with permanently. What you need is complementarity. You need to complete each other. You know, that's the secret to successful romance, and that's less and less and less likely to people who are worried about risk when they're curating their dating profiles. The second part, which is even more dangerous than this, because again, I think that the dating apps are gonna figure this out, and I'm working with some of the app developing companies, and they're getting better and better at this. The problem that we can't get beyond is something that people do when they want love and they strip it down of its components technologically and they get involved with pornography. Pornography is super dangerous and bad for you. Pornography works your brain in a very bad, very addictive way that rules out this

• 46:12Speaker 03

  this search for meaning. It's like the most meaningless thing ever. And what it does is it takes this meaningful experience, you know, sexual intimacy in a monogamous partnership. That's a really, really meaningful thing, and stripping that part out is such a dangerous thing to do for your brain and such a bad thing to do for your happiness.

• 46:33Dan Harris?

  How does it go down with young people when you tell them quit the porn?

• 46:36Speaker 03

  They know it's true. They know it's true, but 80% of men under 30 are using porn regularly. 80%. 30% of women and 80% of men. And so the result of it is that, you know, they're all like, I know, I know, I know. But I mean, it's just, it's hard because the ubiquitousness of the product, how alluring it actually is, it's made to draw you in and capture your brain. It's made to make you addicted. But what it does in your addiction, just like any sort of the technology, is it supercharges the dopamine in your brain to give you this sense of temporary satisfaction, but it leaves you completely bereft of what the sexual experience in an intimate partnership is supposed to do, which is supposed to a mind meld between the right hemispheres of the partner's brains.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  In the biblical language of one flesh, that's not sex, that's the right hemispheres. One flesh is two right hemispheres, which gives you a sense of the divine. Happily married couples, they have a sense of the existence and love of God when they have the love of each other. That's, it doesn't happen all the time and it doesn't happen for everybody. It's hard, but that's what we're really going for. And when you strip that away, boy, it's a big problem. So I've almost never met anybody that's like, no, are you kidding me? Porn is awesome. No. They know that they're actually being managed by pornography as opposed to managing their own use of pornography.

• 47:55Dan Harris?

  Okay, moving down your list, the next suggestion is to transcend yourself. Say more.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Transcendence is something that you've done, I think, a better job than almost anybody over the past 10 years in your work. Where self-transcendence is a meaning-filled experience where you can break out of the psychodrama and you can stand in awe of or stand in the presence of something that's bigger than yourself. The psychodrama psychologically is the story inside your head where you're the star all the time. And it's like the most boring story ever. It's like my waking time, my breakfast, you know, my back hurts, my irritations with my spouse, my commute to work, me, me, me, me. It's so boring. It's like the most boring television show that you're forcing yourself to watch all the time. And to transcend yourself is to stop looking inward and to start looking outward.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  This is what meditation at its best actually does. It puts us in what William James, the great psychologist from the 19th century called the I self. The me self is the mirror. Me, me, me, me, me. And you gotta know where you are and what you're doing, or you know, you won't survive. You won't be able to actually drive in traffic if you don't know what you're doing with your car. But the I self is looking out to the world. Looking out to the world gives you a sense of what the meaning of your life actually is. And meditation is incredibly good for that. It's an incredibly good source of transcendence. Religion, super good. I mean, I'm a more traditionally religious person and I practice my religion every day. It's so, I practice every morning, every morning, every morning because of transcendence. You know, is what it comes down to.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  My friend Ryan Holiday, who is this world's leading expert in Stoicism, you know, he practices Stoic philosophy, same thing. People who practice the Brahman Mahortta of walking before dawn, same thing. People who listen to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and analyze the greatest music that has ever been written, same thing. That's that sense of transcendence that we actually need. And what it does is it delivers to you the way your brain is supposed to work. And you will find the sense of meaning, even if you're not looking for it, you'll find it. That's transcendence. Another way to do this, by the way, is serving others as opposed to yourself. Service to others, which is this moral beauty that you actually get from serving other people as opposed to, you know, me, me, me, me, my stuff, my stuff.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  So look upward or look outward and you'll find what you're looking for on the inside.

• 50:18Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I think service is, I was thinking about it before you said it. If you don't want to meditate and you're not into religion, service is a really great way to get out of your head.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Totally. I've done work on that for years. I would, I wrote my doctoral dissertation years and years and years ago on. Why is it that people get healthier, happier, richer, and better looking when they give time and money to charity? Literally, people will think that you're better looking than you are if they witness you in an act of charity. Wives think their husbands are hotter when their husbands are actually giving money to a beggar. I've got an experiment that shows that. It's amazing. Almost every area of your life becomes deeper, more meaningful, richer, happier, when you're serving other people, especially people who really need you. And by the way, one of the ways to serve other people is to allow yourself to be served. And I had this really interesting experience of this where I was giving a talk, pretty near where you live, as a matter of fact.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  One of the students at his college asked me, you know, I said, you need to be open to other people serving you because that's one of the ultimate forms of service, is allowing people to transcend themselves by helping you. And a lot of people are like, no, I don't take anything from anybody. I don't need any, that's the rugged individualism that will ruin things. And so a guy puts up his hand in this talk and he says, what about somebody who truly doesn't need anything from me? And I said, well, name somebody. He says, a homeless guy on the street. I was sort of speechless for a minute and I went home and I thought about it. I meditated on it, as a matter of fact. And the next day I did an experiment, so I was in New York City and I said, I ran across a homeless guy and he asked me for something and, you know, I was near a CVS and I went in and got him something to eat and I came out. And this is where the experiment came in.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  I said, before I leave, will you do something for me? And he said, what? I said, would you please pray for me and my family? And it's like this look on his face, like, what? But you know, the truth is, in my religion, God hears the cries of the poor. You know, he has special access, man. And I truly, I believe I need his prayers. My family and I need his prayers. I wasn't making it up. I wasn't being like some kind of saint. I realized that's the thing I need from this guy. He needed food, I needed prayers. And he did, he prayed for me. And it was this like transformative experience where we had a deep link to each other as two men. You know, it wasn't a rich guy and a poor guy. It wasn't any of these, all of these distinctions, just temporarily for a few seconds, went away. Why?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Because we had a link in the right hemisphere of our brains, if you want to look at it physiologically, but more importantly, spiritually, we were both able to transcend in that moment. And that's more of what we need to do is a Establish more interconnected need because we're all truly brothers and sisters, not just when we're doing things for each other, but when we need things from each other.

• 53:08Dan Harris?

  A similar story from my side, not as good, but I, for the majority of my life, or at least the plurality of my life, lived in New York City and got into the habit over the years of keeping $1 bills in my pocket because there are so many homeless people. And we lived for the last five years of our time in the city, right next to a soup kitchen on the Upper West Side. So there were a lot of homeless folks around. There was a particularly intimidating gentleman who was very large and was often wearing a hospital gown, like he had just run out of the hospital, who was in my neighborhood a lot. And he never made eye contact or anything like that, but I was consistently giving him money because

• 53:51Dan Harris?

  that was just my practice. And I was not thinking about what I would get in return. It was just, in some ways, selfishly oriented because it was so painful to try to look away all the time. And if it just felt better moving through the world by giving away the money. And over time, I started to notice he was actually subtly running interference for me and my family as we walked through the neighborhood. Like if anybody bothered us or anything like that, he would start to loom into view. It was very moving, actually.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We do all have this interdependent need. It's an artifact of our highly technologized and hierarchical society that we think that we don't actually. And we only become truly human when we obliterate that misunderstanding of what it means to be human together. And again, you know, I know that it's not like I'm going to fix poverty by doing this, but at least I can be fully alive in those moments and help somebody else be fully alive in those moments as well.

• 54:51Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 54:55Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Arthur talks about how to transform any job into a calling, surrounding yourself with the right types of beauty, and what he means when he says, "Don't waste your suffering."

• 55:14Speaker 02

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• 55:46Dan Harris?

  Next item. And this really gets into what a lot of people wonder about when they ever contemplate meaning. The next item is "Look for Your Calling."

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:57Dan Harris?

  What do you mean by that?

• 56:00Speaker 03

  My students are intensely interested in their careers, and young people are as well. This is sort of the MO of a striver. And you know, the meaning crisis is the striver's curse. And again, I'm not saying that if you're not a striver, you don't have this problem. But you know, I sort of special, I'm the striver whisperer. I specialize in people who are, they want to grow up and be Dan Harris. But they don't understand that if they had your level of professional success, that's not the ticket to happiness. It actually isn't. And so I have to talk to them about not what it means to have more money or power or fame, what it means to actually find what you're supposed to do. That's a meaning question. What am I supposed to do? That's the same thing as what am I meant to do? That's a literally a meaning question.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  So I talk an awful lot about seeing work as a vocation as opposed to seeing work as a job. And again, there are lots and lots of days where my job feels like a job. But more than anything else, I try to inject a couple of things. And I identify in this book, the two things to inject into almost any job that can turn it into much more of a calling. Those two things are, and they don't consist of money or power, prestige, or position. The two things are the sense that you're creating value, which is called earned success, and the sense that you're serving other people, which is to say that people need you. Those are the two things to look for. Am I creating value for other people? And actually, do people need me? Does somebody need me?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  And it's funny, because you know, I've advised a lot of people. I was doing a Drew Barrymore show last year and I was talking to the audience, because that's a big part of her show, is interacting with the audience. And the guy's like, you know, how do I find meaning in my job? You know, I'm in a cubicle farm and it's not that great. And I don't feel like anybody needs me and it's just so boring. And I said, okay, I got it. I got it. You need to look for a new job when you can. It might not be possible right now, et cetera. But in the meantime, tomorrow at two, go to the break room, make a fresh pot of coffee and bring it out to the guy in the next cube. And say, you know what? You look like you could use a fresh cup of coffee. And look at the look on his face. And you'll become that guy in the office. You'll want to be that person. Why? Because your big part of your calling is serving other people

• 58:12Speaker 03

  and doing something that people actually need. Whether it's the job per se, or it's whether it's what you're doing while you're doing the job. This can give you a much, much stronger sense of calling. That's a lot like transcendence. But building your professional life around the principles of earned success and service will give you the vocational craving. Will meet the vocational craving that almost everybody has.

• 58:35Dan Harris?

  I think about this a lot. The world is filled with problems, but as a result, it is a target-rich environment for being useful, for being helpful, for being compassionate. And that, by the way, is a great way to make yourself happier.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and the point that you're making is that every entrepreneur sees opportunities for everybody else sees problems. We should be entrepreneurs in the business of our lives and the business of our careers and the business of our love lives. There's a problem. Oh, that's an opportunity. That's an opportunity to help somebody. That's so beautiful. And to say, you know, there's a homeless guy in the street. Oh, thank you. Thank you, God. You gave me an opportunity to help somebody, to transcend, to do something beautiful. That's an entrepreneurial approach to life. And the reason that it's so satisfying is because, not coincidentally, it's what leads to a much, much stronger sense of meaning and what we actually have.

• 59:27Dan Harris?

  Okay, so but very specifically, when people are trying to figure out what they should do with their lives, and once you've convinced them that they may be aiming for the wrong stuff in terms of

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:39Dan Harris?

  just trying to make a lot of money, etc., etc., or be famous, how then to think about what their calling might be?

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I go into great specifics about that in my class and to some extent in this book as well. And one of the things that I talk about is finding calling. First, there's this one really interesting question to ask that's based on the work of psychologists who worked on the patterns of different kinds of careers. It turns out that there are four kinds of careers when it comes to finding meaning. Number one is what everybody thinks they are when they're at a fancy university or they're really ambitious drivers. That's the linear career path. That's where you do something that pays you, has the best benefits and the best money and the best prospect for success, and you only change when you get something better in line with that. And so usually that's every three to five years you change jobs and you climb this ladder.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  But that's only one career path. It turns out there's three others, depending on the psychology of the person. And that's not even the majority. Two others are the expert career path where people actually take jobs that don't have huge upsides in terms of money or fame. But what they do is they provide the ability for people to live the life that they actually want to live. That was my dad. You know, my dad was a college professor, just like me. But, you know, he never changed from the same institution. And he got a 2% raise every year, and he got his tenure in the mail without applying for it. And he had a nice life. He didn't work that many hours. He did all the kinds of things that he wanted to do. And you need to know that about yourself. If you're not living to work, you're working to live.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  The third pattern is called the transitory pattern, and this is more common with young people today. Everybody's kind of freaked out about this with their teenage kids. That's people who are like, no, man, I am going to work in all sorts of different things because it actually makes it possible for me to live my life like an adventure. So I'm going to drive a moving van to Tucson for a while, then I'm going to go be a barista in Portland, Maine, because I fell in love with a girl there. I'm gonna go learn how to surf, so I better go to San Diego. And they're living like that at least for a period of their life. But for strivers, the number four pattern is the predominant pattern for finding meaning. And that's called the spiral career. I wind up showing a lot of my students for the first time who they really are to find meaning.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  And it starts with this idea that every five to 12 years, you change a big thing about your career. Maybe you come out of business school and you go work for a company. And then you step back and raise kids for the next five or 10 years. Then after that, you go and work for a nonprofit. And later in your life, you become a teacher. Or let's just say hypothetically that you're a great big famous guy on TV. And then you step back and develop a meditation practice, an app and podcast. And let's just hypothetically. And somebody says, what do those things have in common? And you're like, it's the thing I'm building. I'm building my life. And that's because you're actually willing to fudge, to port over the things that you've learned in one part of your life

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  into a big, beautiful, new thing that you're gonna do. And those people, they tend to have four very distinctly phases in their lives. And they're not afraid to stop doing the old thing and start doing the new thing. That's the thing to keep in mind. Sure, do what you're studying because you think it's really interesting and do that. But don't be afraid to quit. Quit your job, quit your job, walk away.

• 1:02:59Dan Harris?

  I love it. You used the word beautiful there. I only have a couple of questions left, but that word leads me to my next question, which is you have a whole chapter called Surround Yourself with Beauty, which I'm interested to hear how exactly that leads to a refreshing of meaning.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so beauty, the experience of beauty, that is a directly illuminating phenomenon in the right hemisphere of the brain. This is just, there's tons of research that shows that when you encounter beauty, your right hemisphere is the thing that actually makes you cry and you don't know why. It's like, wait a second. And there's certain things, by the way, almost everybody will get choked up over like two things about life and they can't quite explain. It'll be like something about music or something about their religion and they can't quite. Explain it's something about their childhood that I want, I wanted, I wanted, it's like an echo from the past. These are all right brain experiences. When you feel emotional and you don't actually know why about something,

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  it means that the right hemisphere is being illuminated and you're having a meaning experience, a powerful meaning experience. And beauty is a really good way to invoke that. There's three kinds of beauty that do that. Now here's the kind of beauty that doesn't do that. Physical beauty from the gender you're attracted to. That doesn't do it. It's like going to the beach and, and looking at that person on the beach going, ah, yeah, wow. No, sorry. That's not doing it. That's a different part of the brain. That's a different part of the body. That's a different thing. That's stimulating sex hormones and et cetera. There's three kinds of beauty I'm talking about. There's artistic beauty. There's natural beauty and there's moral beauty. Those are the three kinds of beauty that will really illuminate the part of your brain that you need, that will give you these deep,

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  ineffable meaning based experiences. Ineffable means it's real, but you can't explain it. You can't put words to it. And if it's real, but you can't put words to it, it's because the language centers of your brain are on the left hemisphere. But the meaning parts are in the right hemisphere. It's like, this is huge. I can't tell you why that you just know you're in the right place when that kind of thing is happening. And so look for the beauty, the artistic beauty that really floats your boat. And there's a really interesting body of literature that suggests, not coincidentally, that popular music since about 2008 is objectively melodically less beautiful than time before that. Why? Because we're a left hemisphere culture, that we're a technological culture. And again, I don't want to be an old fogey who's like criticizing young people's music.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  I'm just looking at the research on that. But you gotta find the music that most moves you. For me, that's the work of Bach. I'm a Bach fanatic and I was a trained classical musician all the way through my twenties and did it for a living until I was 31. So that's my background, but everybody's got to find their thing. The second is natural beauty. The average child under 12 spends between four and seven minutes a day in nature and between four and seven hours a day behind the screen. That's a big problem because nature is a Great way to do this. So you know how the kids these days, like my 20 something kids, they talk about touching grass. Do your kids talk about touching grass? Have you ever heard that expression?

• 1:06:05Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  What that means is, I feel like I'm getting out of touch with reality here, and so I need to go outside. That's literally what's happening. I'm out of touch with reality, meaning I'm living in a simulation. The simulation is in the left hemisphere of my brain. I need to get back to reality, which is the right hemisphere of my brain, so I'm going to go outside and be in nature. That's what they're saying in not so many words. And that's what we all need to do. We need to touch grass.

• 1:06:29Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Last but not least is to witness beautiful acts of kindness and goodness and generosity and moral beauty from others. And when you do that, it's one of the reasons that everybody was so taken worldwide with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Teresa of Calcutta. She's already been canonized by the Catholic Church. She lived this life among the most, the world's most abject poor, and people were just, I mean, she's a, an old Albanian nun, serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, and she's like this worldwide celebrity. And people were, they didn't know why it was, but when they looked at her life, they were deeply, deeply, deeply moved. And the reason is because just looking at her moral beauty showed them the meaning of their own lives.

• 1:07:11Dan Harris?

  Just a quick note on music. I listen to a lot of young people's music.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Dan Harris?

  I'm less a Bach guy and more a punk guy, so most of the best punk music is made by young people.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Dan Harris?

  But I was watching recently, I was unable to sleep. I was physically restless, feeling like shit, and I, for some reason or another, I put on The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's documentary about The Band, one of the best bands of all time, The Band, and in the first five minutes, they played Don't Do It, which is just, in my opinion, a song of transcendent beauty, and watching them play and the magic of their interactions and the beauty of the sound, I got full body chills.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Dan Harris?

  And was able to go to sleep.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  It's beautiful. It's beautiful. I mean, what you did is, you know, when you were fully experiencing the meaning of your life, because your brain was working the way it was supposed to, it wasn't cranking through analytic problems on the left. It was actually living on the complex right. You could drift off to sleep. Yeah, exactly. And that's one of the reasons that some people will put on their favorite music to go to sleep every night. That's what they're doing, is their brain is working the way it's supposed to. And when your brain works the way it's supposed to, you'll be able to rest.

• 1:08:23Dan Harris?

  Last thing to ask you about, you have a chapter that, coincidence or not, this is also an expression that the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein uses a lot, "Don't waste your suffering." What do you mean by that?

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Suffering is a sacred, sacred phenomenon, and one of the biggest mistakes that young people make today, they're kind of like the hippies, who said, "If it feels good, do it," but they do the opposite, which is if it feels bad, make it stop. We pathologize suffering. This is an important lesson. I've been working, as you know, for the past 12 years with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, very closely, and I've learned a lot from him. He's made me a better person in every way. And one of the things that he's taught me that the Tibetan Buddhists teach, is that suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. And that's important, because a lot of what we're doing today with young people, we say, "If you're feeling sad and anxious, you need to go to campus counseling, and you need

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  to get that treated." What's that trying to do is to lower mental pain. And the truth is, I get it. I mean, I'm all about mental health treatment, and psychiatric care has saved the lives of people in my family, to be sure. But the truth is that suffering isn't necessarily terrible, nor should it be treated by lowering pain, but rather by lowering resistance to pain. Why is it that people who are in great pain can have relatively little suffering? It's because they've lowered their resistance to it, and in so doing, they've understood the meaning of it. If you eradicate your suffering, you've eradicated your ability to ascertain meaning in your life, and that's a longstanding finding from psychologists

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  for the longest time. If you try to avoid unhappiness by avoiding your pain, you will avoid the meaning of your life, and that means your happiness is going to go down. I tell my students, "Look, you're studying at Harvard. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy." The truth is, you're doing a hard thing, and you're doing it on purpose. My kids who were Marines, they did it because it was gonna hurt. That's why they did it. And the reason that they did it is because they wanted to understand how you could have high pain and low suffering, and when you actually lower your resistance and use the formula in the right way, you find meaning. That's what it comes down to. And again, I could talk about the neurophysiology of it, but we don't need to. The whole point is for us to become a lot more comfortable with the fact that life has a ton of suffering

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  in it. Your learning and growth, your learning and growth about the meaning of your life is gonna come from your understanding of and your non-resistance to that suffering.

• 1:10:53Dan Harris?

  In this regard, do you agree with the arguments made by Viktor Frankl? You know, Man's Search for Meaning, going through the Holocaust and being able to find meaning in those horrific circumstances?

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's really what he said. He, you know, it's funny, he talked about meaning and suffering all the time because he was in Auschwitz. It was, you know, the first Man's Search for Meaning, which everybody should read is a classic. The first half is his chronicle of his experience in the concentration camps where his wife was euthanized within the first hour, but he didn't know that until after he was liberated. And he spent his time thinking about living on purpose because of his wife, which gave him a sense of meaning. But it also put into context, it put into perspective, the suffering, the pain that he was undergoing. And that gave him the will to live, is how that came about. His book, Man's Search for Meaning, is a case study. And the second to last chapter of my book, Never Waste Your Suffering, is really what

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  that's all about and how people can do it in modern life. You know, the suffering that people actually go through, how to think about it, how to be more non-resistant when it comes to the pain, such that the suffering means something. I have even tangible exercises. I keep my, I have my students keep a failure journal, not where they're trying to get rid of their failure, forget it, or their disappointments, but they write it down, you know, and they keep a pen and pencil journal where something happens they don't like that makes them feel crummy about themselves. Three weeks later, they come back and say, what did I learn from that? And then two months later, they come back and say, what was something beneficial that came to me from that? And in so doing, they become way, way, way less resistant to these things that are aversive in their life. They become more comfortable with the fact that this is how life actually works.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  I'm not telling people to get off their meds at all, because that's management. Management is fine. Elimination is a real problem, because then you'll be unsuccessful, but you'll never get any learning or growth from it. And this is how most people actually figure it out. You know, it's funny, I talked about how Veterans, they have a great sense of meaning in their lives. So do cancer survivors. So do former addicts. They have so much strong sense of meaning in their lives, right? And you go back and you say, what taught you the meaning of their life? And they tell you terrible stories. They tell you terrible things that happened. You know, it's like, nobody ever said, you know why I'm so happy? Cause I never got cancer. Nobody says that, right?

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  But a lot of people say, I'm a cancer survivor and man, my life is rich. And there's a reason for that. There's a connection between those two things.

• 1:13:26Dan Harris?

  I always ask two final questions. The first is, was there something you were hoping we would get to that we failed to get to?

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  No, I mean, cause this is thorough, cause you're thorough. I mean, we went, we literally marched through this book, chapter by chapter. And so I'm really deeply grateful for that. The key thing for a lot of people to keep in mind is with any problem, like the meaning problem, the first thing to tackle is the barrier, right? Is the barrier to it. And so I would like everybody to, all of us, to examine our tech use. Because this is the first thing for us to do. So going back to the beginning of the conversation, once we can actually examine that critically, then we'll be open to doing all these more important things down the line that will rebuild our lives.

• 1:14:09Dan Harris?

  I'm just such a huge fan. Very few people have written such a successful series of really smart, helpful books. So congratulations. Can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book? And maybe throw in a few of the others while we're at it and also mention your podcast.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Appreciate that, Dan. It's The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, available everywhere at the end of March, March 31st, as a matter of fact. And this follows on the last two books that I wrote, Build a Life You Want with Oprah Winfrey. And then right before that, From Strength to Strength. And you and I met because you read From Strength to Strength, which is a book about designing the second half of your life. This is more a first half of life or all of us book is the meaning of your life. And you know, the successor from Strength to Strength, where a lot of people said, yeah, this was really helpful to me. What can I give to my 28-year-old kid? And you know, that was one of the reasons that I, you know, I finally took the plunge of, you know, writing up these things that I had found about the meaning crisis along the way. I'm talking about a lot of these things and what I talk about in my classes. I have a really oversubscribed class at the Harvard Business School and I try to bring

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  that information to people with my podcast, which is called Office Hours. And it's mostly me talking about the science of happiness, most importantly, how people can use it. And I have a column at the Free Press. I'm a happiness contributor at CBS News. And so there's a lot of places that I'm doing that people can find out, you know, all the things that I'm writing and doing, but just go onto my website, arthurbrooks.com.

• 1:15:34Dan Harris?

  Arthur, such a pleasure to talk to you every time. Thank you for making time to come back on.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Thank you, Dan. Absolutely. Yeah, it's great. It's great to see you and great to continue to watch as you go from strength to strength in your own career. The strengths that you bring are those that you're actually bringing to other people. You've dedicated yourself to lifting other people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. And I'm really, really, really appreciative and admiring of you for that.

• 1:15:59Dan Harris?

  Very kind. Thank you.

• 1:16:04Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Arthur. Always love having him on the show. Don't forget to check out his new book. Also, don't forget to check out my new-ish app. You can get it at danharris.com. As mentioned earlier, there's a 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you so much to all the people who work so incredibly hard to make this show. Our producers are Tyra Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.