The Science Of Building The Life You Want | Arthur Brooks

Plus: the benefits of a "reverse bucket list"; clear formulas for happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose; and how to engage in the world's problems without being miserable. Professor and writer Arthur Brooks on his recent book (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey): Build The Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier https://bookshop.org/p/books/build-the-life-you-want-the-art-and-science-of-getting-happier-arthur-c-brooks-oprah-winfrey/20032551?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwwr6wBhBcEiwAfMEQsygtMeYJ5u56NEDT-5mQIaGillN2CLSj922Tt4ezY9i8fBUVZONsNxoCjzcQAvD_BwE. Arthur has seen the themes of this book play out in his own life. He started his career as a classical French horn player, then got his PhD in public policy analysis, and went on to run a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute https://www.aei.org/. He is currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School https://www.hks.harvard.edu/ and Harvard Business School https://www.hbs.edu/Pages/default.aspx. He also does work with The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/, where he writes a column https://www.theatlantic.com/author/arthur-c-brooks/ and hosts a podcast called How to Build a Happy Life https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/how-to-build-a-happy-life/. Arthur was formerly on Ten Percent Happier to discuss his book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life https://arthurbrooks.com/book/from-strength-to-strength/. In this episode we talk about: Myth busting about happiness The three macronutrients of happiness The perils of pursuing pleasure How to be effectively and wisely ambitious How to ascertain if you have meaning in your life How to manage your emotions The difference between healthy and unhealthy envy 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 This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp: Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/HAPPIER http://betterhelp.com/HAPPIER. Fitnexa: You can learn more about Fitnexa SomniPods 3 at go.fitnexa.com/n6PD9i https://go.fitnexa.com/n6PD9i, and use code HAPPIER10 for $10 off your order. Master Class: Get 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/happier http://masterclass.com/happier. Northwest Registered Agent: Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/happierfree http://northwestregisteredagent.com/happierfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. 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.

• 0:00Dan Harris?

  Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible, or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year. I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory, and it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone,

• 0:44Dan Harris?

  and about how small, everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago. What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain, or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.

• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 1:45Speaker 01

  Still haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

• 1:54Dan Harris?

  Hello, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. All of us, every living being, is trying to get happier. But often, we go about it in the wrong way. We look for happiness in the wrong places. My guest today is here to talk about a book he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey about, as he says, how to build the life you want right now without waiting for the world to change first. Arthur Brooks is a great guest, fascinating guy. We like him so much. He's been on the show several times, most recently in April of this year. This particular conversation, the one you're about to hear, first aired back in 2024 when his book with Oprah was released. Just a little bit more about Arthur before we dive in here. He's a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School.

• 2:40Dan Harris?

  In this interview, he does a lot of myth busting around happiness. He talks about what he says are the three macronutrients of happiness. We talk about the perils of pursuing pleasure, how to be effectively and wisely ambitious, how to ascertain if you have meaning in your life, how to manage your emotions, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy envy. Again, Arthur's book, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, is called Build the Life You Want. We'll be talking to Arthur Brooks coming up after this. Arthur Brooks, welcome back to the show.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Hi, Dan. Nice to see you and talk to you. It's been, I don't know, a few months?

• 3:16Dan Harris?

  Let's just say too long.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it. I agree with that. I agree with that. And but I'm obviously up to date with all the great stuff you're doing with your enterprise. Congratulations. You're bringing a lot of people to a lot more happiness. I love to see it.

• 3:30Dan Harris?

  Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations to you on this not so new, but new-ish book. It seems to be doing really well, and I'm very excited to kind of dive into it today.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Thanks. Yeah, I know. It's been a thrill. It's been an interesting experience. The first book I've co-authored in decades, as a matter of fact.

• 3:47Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and you had an obscure co-author that you're really, you know, kind of giving her a shot at the limelight. I don't know how you found it in your heart to have the generosity to bring Oprah on board.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's, Dan, that's how I was raised. You know, it's

• 4:09Dan Harris?

  Was she, how was she as a co-author? Was she sort of like picking apart your sentences? Or was she pretty relaxed?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  She's pretty relaxed. I mean, the way that the co-authorship worked is, I mean, the book was her idea. The book wasn't my idea at all. She read my last book that you and I talked about on your show, called From Strength to Strength, and she also reads my call in the Atlantic. And she called me, and she said, hey, this is Oprah. And I'm like, yeah, this is Batman. But it was Oprah. I mean, it was the voice, right? And I didn't know her at all. But as you know, when you're doing something that has a public audience, who knows who's listening or reading? And she said, you know, just read From Strength to Strength. Why don't you come on my show? I went on her podcast. We were like a house on fire. Exactly the same basic mission, lift people up and bring them together using ideas. But we have different ways of doing it.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  You know, she introduces ideas and people to her public, whereas I am the ideas, or at least I'm the guy who's supposed to be processing the ideas. I was trained as a scientist to do exactly that. And she said, you know, if I still had my show, she says, you know, I used to have a show, right? I said, yes, I'm aware.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  She's lovely because, you know, she doesn't assume anything. And she says, if I had my show, I'd have you on as an expert on the science of happiness 30 times, and then you'd have your own following, she said. But, you know, I don't have the show anymore. I'm just doing different things and sort of in the same vein. What if we did a book that I kind of hosted? And I said, interesting idea. And so that's kind of how the book works, where she weaves in and out of the chapters and the science, and she puts in her own stories and says things about her own life, just like she would have hosted me had I been on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

• 5:52Dan Harris?

  And when she said, let's do this book, what was her idea? What did she want to communicate?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  She wanted these ideas to get to a much wider audience. The whole point that she felt that she learned from my work is that happiness is not a goal at all. It's not a destination. It's a direction, by the way, something you, Dan, have been talking about for a long time. Why? Because the ultimate state of bliss is not attainable nor even desirable. It's also not a feeling. Getting happier is not just trying to maintain happy feelings. On the contrary, it has a lot to do with your knowledge and your practice. I mean, I've talked about this with you, and I've heard you talk about it so eloquently. If you want to get happier, you actually need to dedicate yourself to living in a different way. You also have to have knowledge about what's going on. And that really spoke to her, that I was using this particular approach.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  And she wanted to get that out to millions more people than it was currently reaching, because a lot of people could be a lot happier than they are, and Oprah Winfrey wants a happier world, and so do I.

• 6:56Dan Harris?

  But what's interesting there is that you and Oprah want a happier world, and it seems like you're telling people happiness is not the goal. So how do you unpack that?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Well, she, I mean, she's good with words, and she invented a new word that squares that circle, which is that the goal is not happiness. The goal is happier-ness. That's the goal. And I realize it's a neologism, but it kind of gets the point across. The point is not that you're trying to get into this ultimate state of happiness, which would mean obliterating negative emotions, which is bad. We have negative emotions to keep us alive. Fear and anger and sadness and disgust, they can be maladapted. They can be overwhelming. They can even become a medical problem. But the truth of the matter is that we have evolved these emotions because we need them to understand threats in our environment and to learn and conform and grow. You and I both have had negative experiences in our lives and plenty of unhappy feelings,

• 7:52Speaker 02

  and we're better men for it, is the truth of the matter. So that's not the goal, is to get rid of all of that. And we should stop trying to get rid of all these things. We should be learning to manage and learn and grow from those things, which is the process of happier-ness.

• 8:08Dan Harris?

  I wonder if this is a little bit of a definitional debate? Meaning, because I don't necessarily argue to people that happiness is not the goal. What I argue is that happiness is a skill.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:24Dan Harris?

  But it really depends on how you define happier. If you're defining, oh, sorry, it depends on how you define happiness. If you're defining happiness as no negative emotions, well, then, yes, I would say that's impossible and unwise. If you're defining happiness as my friend, Dr. Mark Epstein, does, which is more of the good stuff and less of the bad?

• 8:47Dan Harris?

  Then, then, and that's the best definition. And even if it's unsatisfying to the listener, it's the best definition of happiness I've ever heard, the more I think about it, which is it's just the ability to have more positive emotions than negative emotions more of the time.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's a comparative idea, you know, more and lesser comparisons, and so is happier. So that's the reason that the happier-ness is a, is a good way to think about it as opposed to thinking this is something I have to achieve. And as long as I have these, you know, I have the, the so-called bad in my life, then therefore something's wrong. Another problem that we face today is that we have a culture that says that if you're experiencing negative emotions, something's wrong with you. And, and that, you know, my students, for example, I mean, the university culture in the United States today is very much of a therapeutic culture that says that you're broken, or there's something distorted about your emotions when you're feeling negative emotions. And, and I'll say to my students on the first day of class, look, you're, you're Harvard students. If you're not depressed and anxious, then you need therapy. I mean, come on, man.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  It is a, it is a hard environment is how this works out. So we're basically saying the same thing. But I take the definition a little bit in a different direction as a social scientist that can, that can give us something to grab on to that are specific sub-goals. So it's not just go get happier. That's too general. I talk about the sub-parts, the macronutrients of happiness, and those are the things that we pursue with different agendas and different strategies. And that's when it gets kind of interesting. That's where I can kind of, when I meet somebody, I can, I can, I can figure out pretty quickly where their, where their diet is, is, is not up to snuff, where they're lacking in their macronutrients of happiness, and we can work on the sub-dimensions. And that turns out to be a pretty good way to start.

• 10:33Dan Harris?

  Well, okay, so let's dive into the, the macronutrients. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Can you walk us through these?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. And the first, well, and to think about it, if I said, what is your Thanksgiving dinner? The one thing you wouldn't tell me is the smell of the turkey. That's that, and that's the, that's the, the relationship between feelings and actual happiness. Feelings are evidence of happiness. They're not the happiness itself, which is a very good piece of news for everybody. Because people who, who, who mistake the feeling of happiness for happiness itself, they're going for the vapor of feelings all the time. And you, as a skilled meditator, you know perfectly that feelings come and go, that, and you don't want to be controlled by your feelings. On the contrary, you want to manage your feelings so that they don't manage you, which is one of the great skills that you get from a serious meditational practice. So that's the first thing to keep in mind.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  The second is that, that you can see the parts of the happiest people, that they fall into these three categories. These are the people who enjoy their lives, they get a lot of satisfaction in their activities, and they have a sense of meaning about why they're alive. These are the three big dimensions that we find. So these are the macronutritively, we would say that these are the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness. Now, the first is enjoyment. And, and a lot of people think enjoyment is pretty self-explanatory, but it isn't. You know, back in the, in the 60s, you and I don't remember the 60s exactly. I mean, I, I remember Woodstock happening because I was a little kid. And I remember my dad seeing a hippie on TV saying, if it feels good, do it.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  And my dad saying, that's the end of America. He, he was kind of right. But anyway, the, the, the point of that was to mistake enjoyment with pleasure. And that's what a lot of people get wrong in their lives. They think that the pursuit of pleasure is a good goal, and it's a, it's a life-ruining goal. I mean, there's all kinds of neuroscience that shows us that if we, if we live our life like, you know, squirrels, simply trying to, you know, get the thing that gives us the most calories and mates, that is a terrible way to live a fulfilling life. What we need to do, by the way, is not to get rid of the sources of pleasure, but to add to things that will make them more human. Pleasure is a phenomenon that emanates from the limbic system of the brain, an ancient

• 12:51Speaker 02

  console of tissue that produces cravings and desires and emotions. But what you want is to experience the source of, you know, this impulse in the, in the prefrontal cortex, in the human part of your brain, in the C-suite of your brain. And the way that you do that is by taking a source of pleasure and adding two uniquely human things. Number one is people, relationships, and number two is memory. And, and here's the way to think about it, Dan. I mean, a lot of things that we do in our lives are frankly, pleasurable and addictive. Not everything pleasurable is addictive. I mean, you know, walking in nature while meditating is very pleasurable, but not addictive. But a lot of things that people do, everything from drugs and alcohol to gambling to pornography

• 13:36Speaker 02

  to a lot of things, they capture activity in the brain. They, they actually establish pathways in the brain that make you very good at doing them over and over and over again in search of that particular pleasure. That's a brain capture phenomenon, and it's animal. It's not certainly, it's not very human, and certainly not divine. But if you take that source of pleasure and you add people and memory, in other words, if you're doing something that's pleasurable and can be addictive, you don't do it alone, then you can get enjoyment, which is a source of actual authentic and enduring happiness. Now, I'll give you an example, you know, beer companies, they never feature in their beer commercial, a dude pounding a 12-pack in his apartment alone.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Never. That's how tons of people use their product. Now, the reason they don't do that is because that's an irresponsible use of the product, and it's actually dangerous. It's, you know, it's, it's, it, it doesn't mean you're ruining your life, but everybody who ruins their life with alcohol kind of does that. So what do they show? They show the same guy clinking the necks of the bottles together with his brother or his friends, because he's taking the source of the pleasure, which is the beer, and adding people and adding memories, which equals enjoyment, which is part of happiness. So that's how we should be thinking about all of these pleasures in our lives to turn it into an enduring source of happiness.

• 14:57Dan Harris?

  But does it require other people? I mean, for example, I can enjoy, we use the meditating in the woods thing, right? That, that's a solo activity.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:08Dan Harris?

  If I'm not doing it with other people, am I, am I, am I on the wrong side of the pleasure enjoyment?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  No, I mean, that's just a rule of thumb with things that can be addictive. And so there are a lot of things that, that give you a really, really a lot of enjoyment and, and even pleasure, listening to music, reading a book, reading holy scriptures, indeed, meditating or praying. These things are very pleasurable, but they're pleasurable in a different way and the way that it affects your brain. So if, the, the, the rule of thumb that I give my young adult students, and my young adult children for that matter, is if it brings pleasure and you could be addicted to it, and we know what those things are, and you're doing it alone, you're doing it wrong.

• 15:45Dan Harris?

  Got it. So that being said, there's a huge swath of activities that one can enjoy on one's own that are not addictive. So, you know, I sometimes sit and stare at my son, if, even if he's playing a video game or reading a book, and I enjoy that immensely, and that I don't need anybody else

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:07Dan Harris?

  sharing the gaze.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's no, there's no brain capture that's going on there. There's no brain capture that's happening. But, you know, a lot of cellphone use, and by the way, your son, who might be playing a video game or scrolling Instagram, that could be capturing his brain. And that's one of the big problems that we have with screens today, is they're inherently isolated activities, therefore kind of falling into the wrong camp from getting, they can be pleasurable, but they can't be enjoyable.

• 16:32Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  A lot of people will say, look, I really, you know, I, I just fritter my time away scrolling, you know, reels on TikTok, but then I always feel crummy about it. And the reason is because you were seeking the pleasure, but it never got to enjoyment, so therefore you didn't get happier. And you felt disappointed about not using your, your time in a way that it, it made you happier.

• 16:52Dan Harris?

  That's really, that's really interesting. So if I'm scrolling right now, I'm looking for happiness, looking for pleasure in the wrong places. We're not saying you should never scroll, but if you're, if you've got the goal of, of being deeply satisfied, you're unlikely to reach it, because in order to be truly enjoying something like this, you need to be doing it with somebody else.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And so one of the things that I do, for example, is that my daughter, and my, my youngest child is 20, and when she's home from college, which she was, she'll, she likes to look at hilarious reels on, on social media, and we'll do it together. She'll say, look at this daddy, look at this. And we're just kind of scrolling it together, and it's actually so much better. Because when you're laughing with someone, it's more fun than laughing by yourself. And the reason is, of course, you're taking the pleasure. Laughing is incredibly pleasurable, it's extremely good for your brain, but you're adding these two magic ingredients, which is somebody that you love and a memory of doing it, and turns into enjoyment. And it's, it's a, it's a, it's magical, actually, how you can take that, that source of pleasure

• 17:59Speaker 02

  and turn it actually into a, a meaningful part of your happiness.

• 18:03Dan Harris?

  A quick note before we hear from our sponsors, who for the record, I actually like. We are very diligent, to the point of being quite annoying to some of our business partners, very, very diligent and picky when it comes to picking our sponsors. That said, I get it, not everybody loves listening to ads, and that's why I want to tell you about a way to get this show ad-free. It's called 10% Happier Plus. It's a subscription, right inside Apple Podcasts, doesn't matter what app you're on right now, you can find it right there. Every episode ad-free, plus a bonus guided meditation every Sunday from teachers like Joseph Goldstein, Sebene Selassie, and Vinnie Ferraro. It's $4.99 a month, or $49.99 a year. Quick note, if you already have my app, 10% with Dan Harris, you're covered. You don't need this as well.

• 18:48Dan Harris?

  It's really for people who just want this podcast ad-free. And the money does not just fund the show, it also helps us give free app memberships to people who can't afford it. Look for 10% Happier Plus in Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. We'll be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If I could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, it would be having a calmer, less anxious nervous system so that I could enjoy my life more. I have made massive amounts of progress in this regard in the past 20 years as a result of meditation and therapy and getting better at tending to my interpersonal relationships.

• 19:30Dan Harris?

  But it's really a never-ending process, hence the name of the show, 10% Happier. As I often argue, the 10% compounds annually. Better is a feeling defined by you, and for BetterHelp, it's a BetterHelp therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional well-being with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries. It's progress, and it's also getting better at regulating your nervous system or whatever's important to you. And I know that having a therapist has been very helpful to me in this regard. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/happier. That's better H E L P dot com slash happier. Like many of you, I have some pretty serious anxiety and misgivings about artificial intelligence.

• 20:14Dan Harris?

  However, given that this appears to be a wave that is heading toward us, whether we like it or not, I have decided personally that information is power. I want to learn as much as I can so that I can respond as effectively to whatever comes next, which is why I was very intrigued when I saw that MasterClass has some really compelling content and programming around artificial intelligence. I'm looking at their very sleek app right now. They have a ton of other classes. They've got a lot of folks who've been on this show, Dr. Alison Wood Brooks, talking about the art and science of conversation, Amanda Ripley, who talks about the difference between healthy conflict and high conflict. It's a really compelling offering. Unlike other learning platforms,

• 20:59Dan Harris?

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• 21:32Dan Harris?

  Okay, so satisfaction is the second of the macro nutrients. And I just used the word, perhaps inappropriately, in one of my most recent utterances. So please tell me what you mean by it and what maybe where I went, ran afoul.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Well, tell me what you said.

• 21:48Dan Harris?

  I said something like, if you're scrolling through media, social media, and you're looking for satisfaction, you may get pleasure, but you're not going to get a deep satisfaction because you're doing it by yourself.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and that was enjoyment. But you were also right about the satisfaction part. And here's why. Satisfaction is the joy, the reward that you get after you struggle for something. Humans are really funny. I mean, you know, my dog, Choo Choo, doesn't like to struggle for his rewards. You know, if you could just have him lay around all day and occasionally flop his head over in the bowl and eat, that would be the blissful existence for my dog, Choo Choo. But because he can't follow the divine path, I don't think. We, as humans, we need to struggle. We need to strive. We need to sacrifice. We even need pain in our lives because that's actually how we earn something. And this concept of earning a particular reward

• 22:44Speaker 02

  makes that reward that much sweeter. It's a very funny thing about human beings that we don't see in other animals. But it's true in every culture, and it's true for everybody of every age, no matter how impulsive they are. That's one of the reasons when your kids were little, you said, you know, you gotta work for things. You told them, you know, it wasn't just for their health that you said, "Don't snack all afternoon." You actually wanted them to enjoy their dinner. My father-in-law, who lived through the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, he was born in 1929. He just died a couple of years ago at a really old age. And, you know, he saw terrible things. He spent a bunch of time in a refugee camp because he was on the wrong side of that struggle. And he told me one time that, based on that, he had learned an important secret of happiness.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  I'm like, well, I'm all ears, you know? He's, "Lay it on me." He'd lived a long time. And he said, "The reason people aren't as happy as they should be is because they don't enjoy their dinner." I said, "Huh." And why don't they enjoy their dinner? He said, "In modern life, they don't enjoy their dinner." I said, "Why not?" He says, "Because they're never hungry." And you get the point, right? I mean, I don't want people to starve. But the truth is, when you're actually on a diet or you're trying to, you know, tune up your nutrition and you're propulsively fasting a little bit, food is a lot better and brings you a lot more enjoyment, pleasure, but if you're eating with people and making a memory, that much better. And that's what people used to get from these, you know,

• 24:12Speaker 02

  big festivals and, you know, the Thanksgiving feast, when people were just, they were always a little bit hungry. And then they got that Thanksgiving dinner, and it was so wonderful. It was satisfying. And if you're not hungry, it's not satisfying. Now, that's the same thing with anything else. My students, if they cheat on my exam and get an A, there's no satisfaction in that. If they work really hard, even stay up all night studying for my exam and they get an A, it's enormously satisfying. That's what we want. We want to defer our gratification for real rewards. And that's important because that talk, that helps us understand that that struggle and sacrifice are not necessary evils. They're built into the process of satisfaction. There's another problem behind it, though, that's going to get more into your world

• 24:57Speaker 02

  as a practicing, you know, a practitioner of Buddhist meditation that we all need to understand. Mother Nature tells us that if we get that satisfaction and that reward, we'll keep it, that we'll just get to enjoy it forever and ever and ever. That watch, that car, that house, that relationship, that millionth Instagram follower, whatever your thing is, that once you get it, it's going to be so wonderful. But it isn't. It just, it's evanescent. It just wears off. That new car smell goes away. You know, you move to a really sunny place. Six months later, you've accustomed yourself. You've habituated yourself to it because the brain experiences what's called homeostasis. It goes back to its baseline so your emotions are ready for the next set of circumstances. It has to, or you'd die.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  It'd be actually dangerous if it didn't happen. But we never learn. And the only way for that not to wreck our satisfaction and lead us to frustration and disappointment is for us to fight against Mother Nature's little trick, which you do really well, and you talk about it an awful lot. So I'm in Dan Harris territory now, so I say this with appropriate humility. You don't need to have more. You need to want less if you want stable and lasting satisfaction. Your satisfaction is actually all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want. Most people have a numerator-increasing strategy. More. What's your goal? More? More of what? All of it? Money, power, pleasure, fame? Lay it on me.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  You need to be working on the denominator of your satisfaction equation, which is to want less, to think seriously, not about your bucket list, but about your reverse bucket list, crossing things out on that list. That's the secret. And only being very present, thinking very carefully about these things, interrogating your wants on a regular basis. This is why meditation is so critically important. It gives you the space to actually interrogate your wants, some people for the very first time in their lives.

• 26:57Dan Harris?

  If you are wanting less, are you less ambitious, less effective, less impactful in the world?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  So theoretically, yes, but I've never seen it. I've never seen it in the wild. You know, my students will ask me that. But, you know, my students are MBA students at the Harvard Business School. These are some of the most ambitious people walking the earth. And I say, "I'm not worried about you guys. I'm not worried about you." You know? And anybody who's listening to 10% Happier is a striver. They're working on the enterprise of their own lives. They're ambitious about getting better off in life. If you're actually working on your wants as opposed to just your haves as a striver, you're just simply going to get closer into balance than you were before. Think about it this way. Stop thinking about building your perfect life like putting brushstrokes on a canvas.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  If you're doing well, that canvas is probably full, and a brushstroke will be indistinguishable from what's already on the canvas. It might even get worse because it'll just get darker and denser and uglier. Think about your life as a sculpture that you're chipping away. And you need to chip away the detritus of all the things that are distracting you from the true you, all of the obsessions and desires and toxic relationships and the search for money and status. Think about how those things really do affect you and start chipping them away. Make a, that's why I have a reverse bucket list. I write down my worldly desires, the money, power, pleasure, fame matrix, and I start crossing those things out, not because I won't get them, but because when I'm fully conscious of these desires,

• 28:35Speaker 02

  I'm less attached to these things. By naming these things, I'm less likely to chase them subconsciously. It's less likely to affect my unconscious behavior. And boy, oh, boy, it just, it gives me a tool of management over my life that I never would have imagined 10 years ago.

• 28:53Dan Harris?

  So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that if we approach our goals, not as a painting where we're adding more and more paint, but as a sculpture where we're taking away clay or stone, or whatever the material is, that actually we can be more effectively and wisely ambitious because we're getting down to the nub of what actually matters.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if you're doing the work to think of what you want that sculpture to be, it's very unlikely to have a dollar figure attached to it. It's very unlikely to have an Instagram follower number attached to it. What it's going to have is something to do with your faith or life philosophy, something to do with your family relationships, something to do with the depth of your friendships, something to do with how you're actually creating a mark on the world that's lifting people up and bringing them together. These are the things that really matter. And so deeply considering what you want that sculpture to be will give you the right ambition, and then you can shed the last meritorious ambitions and the ones that actually lead you onto this hedonic treadmill, this homeostasis,

• 29:58Speaker 02

  this more, more, more, more, that never leads to real satisfaction that lasts.

• 30:04Dan Harris?

  Can one really shed the less meritorious motivations and aspects of ambition? Not that I've been meditating that long, but it's a non-trivial period of time, and I'm still spotting all sorts of noxious tendencies flitting through the mind.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Well, Mother Nature, she's cruel, and she's wired us in particular ways. Mother Nature really only has two goals for Dan and Arthur and everybody watching and listening to us, which is gene propagation and survival, calories and mates, man. And the result of that is that we follow all of these weird imperatives, not quite understanding why we're doing it. Now, I do a lot of work in evolutionary social science, and so I'm charting these impulses back to the place to scene all the time, you know? Why do I want all these Instagram followers? Not me, but why do people want that? And the answer is because they want prestige. They want a higher place in the hierarchy. Why? Because they want to be admired by other people. And that got back to the idea of being more

• 31:03Speaker 02

  likely to survive in a tribe and getting more mates back in the old days. So you're going to have these impulses. But the point is, you need consciousness of these impulses. Vipassana meditation is a really interesting thing, because when you sit in meditation to try to get insight about yourself, you look at yourself in a certain remove. You say, Arthur is feeling envious today. What is it about? Arthur is feeling fearful about losing something today. Why might that be? And that remove, that metacognitive act, metacognition is the thinking about thinking. That's why Vipassana meditation is one of the very best things that people can do, not to shed these attachments, but to be

• 31:45Speaker 02

  aware of these attachments. Now, I do a lot of work, as you know, with the Dalai Lama. He's probably shed the attachments. I mean, he's a living Bodhisattva. I mean, he's enlightened, but the rest of us, probably not. But I'm telling you, I know it's true for you, and it's certainly true for me, that awareness of this, awareness of these tendencies is 80% of the way to not being controlled by these tendencies. That's been just a watershed achievement for me in my life, is becoming conscious of these things and systematically reviewing them through my own meditation practice.

• 32:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what I, the way I would describe it for myself, that I'm more aware of the, as I said before, noxious tendencies implanted into me through the culture and through natural selection, et cetera, et cetera. And theoretically, depending on the day, depending on how much sleep I've got, depending on the circumstances of my life at that moment, I'm less yanked around by them.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Right. I make bad decisions all the time, too. And but the time I make, it's interesting, you know, there's a game I play with my students to figure out what kind of bad decision you're going to make based on your noxious tendencies. It's a game called What's My Idol. Do you want to play?

• 32:59Dan Harris?

  Sure.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  So What's My Idol starts with the insight of Thomas Aquinas, who was paraphrasing Aristotle, very solid social science, before data were a thing, saying, every person has a tendency to follow one of four big idols in life. Here are the four: money, power, pleasure, and fame. Now, fame means admiration of others or prestige. It's a hierarchical thing. It's all that means. That doesn't mean having millions of people know who you are. Fame can be very local, but it means the admiration of others. Money is self-explanatory. Power means that you have disproportionate influence over other people. And pleasure, well, it's pleasure. You could be a pleasure seeker. Nothing wrong with pleasure, but the point

• 33:42Speaker 02

  is if it's your idol. And the idea of Aristotle and later Aquinas is that these things distract you from your ultimate bliss. If they become the goal in and of themselves, you're in big trouble. But they also assert that everybody follows one of them in particular. So when I'm playing with my students, and I'll play with you right now, I start by saying, think of those four: money, power, pleasure, honor. Which of those is not your idol that you'd get rid of right now? Maybe you don't even like it. So which one would you hive off? Which one would you shed, Dan?

• 34:15Dan Harris?

  Power.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too, baby. Now, how do I know when somebody doesn't like power? Because they hate people having power over them. And I'm sure that's true for you.

• 34:24Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  You don't want, I mean, that's why you struck out on your own. I mean, you're an entrepreneur. Because it's like you're like Sinatra singing My Way. I got it. Okay. There's three left, Dan. Money, pleasure, and honor, or the admiration of other people. You got to get rid of a second one. Which one are you getting rid of? You don't get it in your life anymore. Which one?

• 34:50Dan Harris?

  Shit, this is hard.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  It gets harder. It's going to get harder.

• 34:56Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I guess money?

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too. Me too. Money's fine, but really, is it that great? I mean, really? Do you want a 10-bedroom house? I mean, do you want a third car? It just, it usually, when people like money an awful lot, it represents something else. So I'm with you. Okay, you like it, but not that much. Now, now it's getting a little hot in here, right, Dan? Because you're down to two. And now you're going to have to get rid of one of them. I can already tell you like both because you're human. But which one do you like less? And would you kick away now? Pleasure or honor?

• 35:35Dan Harris?

  Honor.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  All right. So now we know that any time there's something that is going to lead you to look back on a moment in your life and say, that was the wrong thing. It's going to tend to revolve around giving in needlessly, not necessarily thoughtlessly, but not mindfully to that idol. And that's a really important piece of information, because you're, look, you're only human. You're going to have these things. For me, it's honor. For me, it's honor. It is. And, you know, look, I'm a university professor, and we're all kind of this way. It's not like you want a billion people to be uttering your name, but you want the right people to know who you are and appreciate your ideas for their quality.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  That's a very common thing in my field, and it's certainly true for me, too. And so I know every time I, every time I look back on my life and I say, I wish I hadn't done that, and I wish I hadn't said that, and I wish I didn't have these fears, and I wish I didn't have these hangups. It's all kind of honor-based. And that's because it's my idol. Now, that's important information for me, because now I know what I have to have sword in hand to slay, which is my tendency toward that.

• 36:43Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, I was really torn at the end, because I mean, I think fame slash honor, I mean, that is an idol for me. I just couldn't imagine a life with no pleasure.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's too extreme, of course, you know? And you would never have a life without honor if you're doing something useful. You're going to have people, even in your neighborhood, who say, Dan, he's a good guy. And that's a form of honor as well. So we don't want to take this to ridiculous limits and say you're going to live a life bereft of pleasure. What we're really talking about are these pleasures that we chase to the exclusion of more meritorious goals, again and again and again. And, you know, the little things that give you that sort of spice in life that you really enjoy, and you're not really very proud of. That's really what we're sacrificing here. So I don't want to set it up in such a way that you have to live a gray existence.

• 37:33Dan Harris?

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• 38:15Dan Harris?

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• 38:57Dan Harris?

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• 39:38Dan Harris?

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• 40:18Speaker 03

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• 40:22Dan Harris?

  Just to remind people where we are, we're walking through the three macronutrients of happiness from the standpoint of Arthur Brooks. And we've talked about enjoyment. We're on satisfaction right now. And there was something you said early in your brief discourse on satisfaction that I want to loop back to. You talked about the necessity of struggle and pain.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:45Dan Harris?

  And suffering for satisfaction. That is, you need to go through that. You need to move through that in order to get the good stuff. This is a common theme among, I've noticed, among my recent guests on this show who have argued that we've created a world where for young people especially, and this is not their fault, this is the world we've created for them, where young people especially have lives of, one could argue, insufficient friction and struggle with helicopter parents and technology that allows them to get everything they want on demand. So that when they do experience the anxiety that is non-negotiable and inevitable in

• 41:27Dan Harris?

  life, they react disproportionately in that that, the theory goes, is producing or contributing to this explosion of anxiety we're seeing. Cultural, abroad in the overall culture, but especially among young people. Would you agree with the foregoing?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  It's completely true. I mean, it's empirically robust, as we, you know, academic weenies like to say. It's all over in the data. You can't miss it. The truth of the matter is that the explosion of generalized anxiety among young adults is basically a social peanut allergy. That's what it, you know, what's come of it. You know, I got, I mean, I'm not casting aspersions or people with a peanut allergy. But the truth of the matter is that we've, people have these, these, these particular medical aversions because they didn't have any exposure to the pathogen. You need exposure to pathogens for you actually to build up defenses. That's just truth. And that's as true psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, as it is anything else.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  And when, you know, the, we, I just made fun of the hippies a little while ago, but if it feels good, do it. That's sort of the 1960s version of self-care. Well, self-care today, the explosion of self-care, which is a very misguided concept. The truth is, you want to get happier, you should be doing other care. But even on campuses, we talk about radical self-care, which is serving your own needs first. The big way that we do that today is sort of turn the hippie maxim inside out. If it feels bad, make it stop. That if something feels rotten, it means there's something wrong with me. It means that I have a, that I have a pathology. And that's not true. You know, life is tricky. And again, negative emotions, negative basic emotions, or fear and anger and sadness

• 43:12Speaker 02

  and disgust, these keep you alive. Negative experiences are the ultimate way that we grow. We can get the satisfaction. You know, later we'll talk about meaning. You can't get a sense of meaning in your life unless you've actually suffered. There's a reason that most religions feature suffering in the religion itself because they understand that spiritual growth actually comes from adversity. We're doing our kids no favor by trying to protect them from the neural pathogens of social life. I don't want my children to be hurt. I don't want my kids' hearts to be broken. I don't want that. But I need that, and so do they. And so the result of it is that I have had to, to practice what I preach, to keep my hands off. It's hard. I mean, as a social scientist, I know the stuff that's going to break their hearts.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  I know full well, I'm looking at the data right in front of me, but I have to say, okay, okay, you gotta let them live. Because if they don't live, they're going to miss whole swaths of the happiness that should come their way. They're not going to learn. They won't grow up. And as a result of that, they're going to be frankly anxious and depressed.

• 44:20Dan Harris?

  Yes. And this for parents, and we're both parents. I have a young child, yours are, yours are less young, they're young adults, mine's like nine.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I'm a grandfather.

• 44:31Dan Harris?

  A grandfather. Congratulations.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 44:34Dan Harris?

  That's incredible.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Since last time I talked to you, I'm a grandfather.

• 44:37Dan Harris?

  At, congratulations. Seriously, congratulations.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Thanks. Yeah, no, they say, my kids had kids earlier. As they say, raise them Catholic, they do Catholic stuff.

• 44:48Dan Harris?

  I was just going to say, talk about enjoyment.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Oh, it's, it's a whole, yeah, Dan, it's, it's, it's God's reward for not killing your children when they're teenagers.

• 45:03Dan Harris?

  Yeah. But this does raise such a, for grandparents, for parents, this does raise such a, you know, a, this is something we need to be thinking about.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 45:14Dan Harris?

  I keep thinking of something, and I apologize to longtime listeners who might have heard me say this before, but something that my dad once said to me, which was, the hardest thing of parenting is just letting your kids make their own mistakes.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. For sure. No, it's, it's, it's, it feels horrible. And you know, the, the, the, the hard part is that, you know, it was easier for my parents to let me suffer because my parents didn't have any money. And my wife was literally raised by a single mother in poverty, in an apartment where the, periodically the lights would go out because they didn't pay the bill, you know? And, and so how are they going to bail her out? You know, she dropped out of high school at 16 to sing with a rock band. Her parents are like, I don't know, maybe it'll work out. You know, it was a different time because our parents had fewer resources, but you know, we've been blessed. And so the result is I can solve lots and lots of problems for my kids. But I can't do it.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  I can't do it. If I, if I really want them to have a full life that has all of the experiences in it, they're going to let them grow up and, and, and learn and have the full range of emotions that helps them find their sense of meaning and get the satisfaction that actually comes from working through struggles and challenges as opposed to having, you know, dad solve the problem.

• 46:32Dan Harris?

  Okay, so we've talked about enjoyment, satisfaction. Let's talk about purpose. It seems not unrelated to, to everything we've just discussed.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a, it's a different species of problem, however. Meaning is funny because, you know, I can go, I'm really good at deferring my gratification. And almost everybody listening to this podcast is as well. I mean, if you're spending a bunch of time on something called 10% happier, you see your life as an enterprise. You're a startup entrepreneur and the company is you. That's the one thing I'm going to, I'm just going to assert that your listeners have in common. Because that's, you know, the title of the podcast and indicates that you're going to self-select into, into that group. So I'm not really worried about people listening to us saying, yeah, I can defer my gratification. I can go to the gym for 60 minutes a day. I can do cold plunges or, you know, whatever the heck people are doing these days. You can go a pretty long time without satisfaction either as well.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  However, I defy anybody to go for one day without having a sense of meaning about their lives and be happy. Happy, happy, as happy as they can be. On the contrary, if you don't actually have a sense of your life's meaning, you will be rootless. You will be at loose ends. You will be discouraged. And you know, there's a lot of psychological and philosophical research on this, but it's common sense tells us that that's the case as well. Now, meaning, you know, people always say, it's almost a joke. What's the meaning of life? That's a big question. It's too big, as a matter of fact. There's three subparts to meaning. The first is coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? The second is purpose, which is why is my life unfolding the way it is? What are my goals and what's my direction?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  And the third is significance. Why does it matter that I'm alive? Those are the three subparts, coherence, purpose, and significance. And I can, I have a test that I give people to see whether or not, to ascertain if there's a meaning crisis in their life, which for a lot of young people, there really is. And the way to fail this test, which is not failure, it's actually a really good outcome if you fail, because that means that you know what to start looking for, is not having answers to these two questions. There's no right answers. There's only no answers, and that's the problem. So do you want me to give you the little quiz?

• 48:40Dan Harris?

  Sure.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  All right. You can tell I'm a professor, you know, so it's very Socratic. So Dan, why are you alive?

• 48:56Dan Harris?

  That's a big question. The proximate cause to my being alive would be my parents meeting and having sex and bringing me into the world.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  What's the big why? As in, what are you, why, what are you on earth to do?

• 49:14Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, that's a different question.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  It is different because you could actually talked about, you know, there's the biology, there's the sperm and an egg. And or for me, it would be God created me. But but why, you know, why are you, why are you on earth? Why are you alive?

• 49:26Dan Harris?

  What's my job on the planet? I come at this belatedly, I would say I come at this from a Buddhist perspective of benefiting all beings. And I, for me, a key is the letter A there, all beings. That doesn't mean that I'm wearing a hair shirt and I'm endlessly self sacrificing.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:47Dan Harris?

  I am part of all beings.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:49Dan Harris?

  So it's hopefully an omnidirectional benefit machine.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's beautiful. And that's not belated at all, because it takes people their whole lives and perhaps many lives to come to that conclusion. So there's no lateness to that. On the contrary, it takes a lot of work to come to the conclusion. As I agree with you, I'm on earth. I was created to love and serve. I was created to love and serve. And and that means a lot of different things that I'm still trying to figure out what serving is and what serving isn't. And when I have to make a choice between serving this or that, how do I make that particular choice, etc. But that is a solid answer to the why question. That's a great answer to the why question. Now it gets harder for the second question. Maybe it, maybe it's easier for you. For what would you be willing to die today?

• 50:44Dan Harris?

  My family.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Anything else?

• 50:50Dan Harris?

  If somebody said, hey, you can, we'll put you to sleep and it would solve climate change, I would do it.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:58Dan Harris?

  And I suspect the more I think about it, there are any number of major issues. I would do it for world peace.

• 51:10Dan Harris?

  Hunger. Yeah, so if somebody said to me, we can, if you, we'll euthanize you in the gentlest possible way, and it would meaningfully reduce suffering in the world. That's a deal I would probably take.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then, of course, to be, you know, really rabbinic about it, we would say, okay, well, how about two people? Well, how about three people? Okay, but that's neither here nor there. So this is, you would, you would die for others. That's what you've said. And there's some very specific others, like your wife and children. And there are some non-specific others as well. These are very solid answers. And the reason that you give these solid answers, which shows me that you have lots of meaning in your life, is because you've thought about this. I mean, look, you're the guy who created 10% happier. Of course, you've thought about this, like, I don't know. I mean, it would be very, very strange to me if you didn't come up with these. But a lot of people haven't given this very much thought.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  So, I mean, you try this with your kids. Nine is a little bit young, but I remember, you know, my kids, it's actually kind of brutal being my kid, because, you know, when your dad is a social scientist specializing in happiness, you're always in the middle of some sort of human subject experimental design.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  And and, you know, all my kids had to write business plans when they were in high school, a strategic plan of how they wanted to spend the next, I'm also a business school professor, so the next 10 years of their lives, not that they're gonna, they're gonna adhere to it rigorously, but so that they have a sense of direction. And I would ask them these meaning questions. And I would say, okay, put together a business plan that is going to teach you your answers to the two meaning questions. And one of my sons, you know, when you have three kids, my kids are now 25, 23, and 20. My 23 year old's name is Carlos. And when Carlos was in high school, I mean, he's a middle child. He got 90% of the family oxygen, thought he was getting 10%. That was just, you know, it's middle children, right? And and he was, and he, he was goofing off, but he wasn't even having fun.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  And the problem was a sense of meaning. So I said, what are you gonna do to find the answers? And he said, well, I'm gonna go to college. I said, no, you're not. How do I know you're not? Because I'm Carlos too. I went to college and I wasn't ready and got kicked out. I spent 10 months in college and then spent my entire 20s working as a musician. It was my gap decade, right? I made it back to college at 30. And I said, you're not ready for college. What are you gonna do? And he, he put together a plan to find his answers. And he, he went away and he worked on a farm for two seasons. He was a dryland wheat farmer in an 8,000 acre working wheat farm in Idaho, Grangeville, Idaho. And then when he was 19, after his second harvest, he joined the Marine Corps. And he spent four years as a special ops combat marine.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  He was a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps at a Camp Pendleton with his, you know, doing his deployments overseas. And today, I mean, now he's 23 years old, he's married, he's gonna be a father soon. And and he's got answers. And he got the answers in the Marine Corps. You know, I'm not saying this is right for everybody. I'm just saying that this is the experience that my son had. Why, I say, Carlos, why are you alive? And he'll say, because God made me deserve others. Say, for what are you willing to die? And he will say, I'm willing to die for my faith and for my family and for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America. That's, he's, it's just, it's, it's clear to him. And he's happy. My son is happy. Happier.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Happier than I've ever seen him, because he knows he's finally acquainted with Carlos. And that's what we can all find when we actually go and search truly of the answers that we have to those two questions.

• 54:48Dan Harris?

  And just to say it again, if anybody's listening and feels like they don't have their answers, that's per Arthur, good news, because that that tells you what your work is to do.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Totally. You know, the worst thing is, I don't have, I don't have a sense of meaning in my life and I don't know where to look. You know, and so you look on the internet. The internet is kind of the, the go find a rock theory of management, where that, you know, you, the boss says, go get me a rock. Go get a rock and bring it in. He says, that's the wrong rock. Go get another rock. I mean, this is not, this is unhelpful. There's a lot of rocks out there, man. You know, if you don't have any concept of what you're looking for, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. And these, the, the beginning of the search comes with the why am I alive? For what am I willing to not be alive questions? And that will lead you in a lot of unexpected directions that might be philosophical, they might be secular, they might be spiritual, they might be non-traditional, who knows?

• 55:43Speaker 02

  They might just lead you back to the faith of your youth.

• 55:46Dan Harris?

  And again, we're talking about happiness here. Your contention is it's not a state of uninterrupted bliss. It is a state of growth and relative improvement, understanding that there's also gonna be suffering and pain as part of the deal.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and is important parts of the deal, especially in this last part of meaning. I don't know anybody, when I say, when did you find the answers to your two questions? When did it really become clear? My son would have said, I don't know, infantry training battalion on my 40th mile of a march without sleeping. Or, you know, people will say, when I got sick, or when somebody I love abandoned me, and then I saw that I didn't die, and that I was resilient. You need suffering. Suffering is unbelievably sacred. The worst thing that we can possibly do is to try to avoid our suffering, because in so doing, we avoid our sense of meaning.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  And when we avoid finding the answers to our meaning questions, we avoid actual happiness.

• 56:52Dan Harris?

  I want to talk to you today about a financial tool that my family uses and that many of the people on my team, including my CEO, also use for their personal finances. It's called Monarch. Monarch simplifies your finances and provides the clarity you need to hit your goals. It really is like having a financial advisor in your back pocket. To me, the most powerful element is really just the simplest one. It just gives you all the information in one clean display, so you can see how much money you've got in your various accounts, what your spending is like. And for me, as somebody who has a long history of worrying, sometimes for no good reason,

• 57:33Dan Harris?

  about financial stability, just being able to see everything in one place really calms the nervous system. But that's not all they do. They've got a weekly AI recap that can catch a spending spike before it becomes a problem. They've got these easy to read diagrams that helps you visualize exactly where you're spending each month. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use code happier at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com using the code happier.

• 58:10Dan Harris?

  I wear a lot of T-shirts because I work from home and I'm a podcaster and so I can be as casual as I want and it's a nice little way to rebel against several decades in the news business when I had to wear a suit all the time. And anyway, the other day I was putting on a T-shirt and I thought, man, is this one of these, it looks really good. And I was wondering, is this one of these expensive T-shirts that I got for my birthday that my wife got for me? And then I realized, no, this is a T-shirt from Quince, which did not cost me much money at all. And by the way, is much nicer and more comfortable and better looking than all of the expensive T-shirts that I recently got for the aforementioned birthday. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat, the sweater that

• 58:52Dan Harris?

  goes with everything, the perfect pair of pants or the tee you somehow always reach for first? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and merino wool. Their styles are timeless, versatile and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know

• 59:34Dan Harris?

  it was 10% happier. It is one of the best ways to support this show.

• 59:42Dan Harris?

  So, did we cover the three component parts of purpose, coherence, sorry, of meaning, coherence, purpose and significance? Did we get all three?

• 59:51Speaker 02

  We did. Thank you. And because, you know, we actually covered happiness.

• 59:55Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  When we talk about enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.

• 59:58Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Those are the three parts. Now, again, you know, you can spend the rest of your life setting up an agenda to discover and track down those things in your life. And that's in point of fact, what I do all day long. Next Monday, I start my new class, my brand-new semester, my spring semester class. And we're going to spend the entire semester looking at enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.

• 1:00:19Dan Harris?

  I'm going to say something that's going to sound like a criticism, but it's a compliment. I'm just going to hold up this sheet of paper. It's got two sides. These are all the questions I had for you and I have asked the first four. So, we've got a little bit of time left, but I just want to point out that there are so many things. We really, we really, we did a nutrient-dense discussion of happiness there. And the book gets, gets pretty tactical and practical on, on, on ways that we can increase our happier-ness. And so, before we run out of time, I want to touch on some of those if you're game.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:01:03Dan Harris?

  Okay, so there's a big, there's a big chunk on how to manage your emotions.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:10Dan Harris?

  In which you talk about things that you've already mentioned a little bit, like metacognition. But, but let's tee it up for us. What's, what's the top line on managing our emotions and why that's so important if we're interested in happiness?

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  A big error that people make about their emotions is that there's good feelings and bad feelings. We literally use those expressions, good feelings. I want more good feelings and I want fewer bad feelings. That's exactly the wrong way to be thinking about emotions because there are no bad feelings. There are negative emotions and positive emotions, but all emotions are, are information. So, the brain basically works in a triune way, works in a three-part way. The most ancient parts of your brain, they ascertain what's going on outside of you. You know, you smell things, you see light, you get an idea of something is good or bad around you. And it's very autonomic, it's very automatic. That sends information largely to your limbic system, which is a console of tissue deep

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  inside your brain that's been evolving over the past 40 million years. That the limbic system has the job, as we discussed a little bit earlier, of creating emotions and feelings and cravings and desires. All that is, is data. And all these data are designed to do is to inform you of what's going on, whether you should approach something or you should avoid it. That's what it comes down to. If it gives you pleasure, it's something that's probably a source of mates or calories or something like that. If it gives you fear or anger, it's stimulating a part of your limbic system called the amygdala, which is saying that this is a threat, so you should fight, flight or freeze. I mean, all of these things that we do, they have to do with the way that we react to the outside world and we send signals. Now, where do we send that information? Is to the third part of your

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  brain, which is the neocortex, the wrinkly outside tissue of your brain. It's wrinkly, by the way, Dan, because it's a one-square-meter sheet of brain tissue scrunched up inside your tiny cranium. And, and, and so it's just huge. It's just, it's the most amazing supercomputer ever created. And, and the most sophisticated part of it is called the prefrontal cortex, which is a bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's the C-suite of your brain, where you decide what your emotions mean and how to react according to them. If you give it time, that's the important thing. The most important way for emotional self-management to occur is to give yourself time for your limbic system to send the information

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  to your prefrontal cortex. And most people don't do that. Most people are, as we say, reactive. When they're angry, they yell. You know, they just, people who have horrible temper problems. It's they're basically reactive people and they're not giving time for their prefrontal cortex to catch up to the activity in their limbic system. Just to put it in sheer neuroscientific terms, metacognition is awareness of your thinking. It is awareness of your emotions. It's putting space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. And it is a whole suite of techniques that you can use to do that. So, you have more time to catch up. So, you're not managed by your emotions. You're managing your emotions.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  You're deciding how to act according to the information that you get. We already listed one of them, which is Vipassana meditation, insight meditation, where you're looking at yourself as if you were someone else, noticing your emotions, interrogating your emotions. That's a good example of a technique to make you metacognitive and to manage your emotional life, but there are many others.

• 1:04:34Dan Harris?

  My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I quote in pretty much every episode of the show, which, sorry if that's annoying, but he has this great little thing that he says to people. He'll say, imagine that your thoughts are coming from the person next to you.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And, and, you know, a great way to do that also is imagine the advice you would give somebody who's feeling the things that you're feeling. You know, somebody's saying, I'm really sad because, you know, I'm really, I'm fighting a lot with my spouse and the whole thing. And you'd be saying, well, tell me about it. Tell me about it. Well, what did she say? What did you say? What usually leads to this? You wouldn't be freaking out. You wouldn't be crying on behalf of the other person. Your heart wouldn't be breaking. You'd be treating it like an analytical problem because it is an analytical problem. It's just that when your limbic system is in charge, it inhibits your ability to be a good analyst.

• 1:05:24Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  To be, you know, your own meditation teacher.

• 1:05:29Dan Harris?

  Yes. In this section of the book, when we talk about, when you talk about, you and Oprah talk about managing your emotions, one, one concept you introduce is emotional substitution. What is that?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Emotional substitution is the idea that you can choose an appropriate emotion that's different than the one that you're feeling. Now, you can't do that if you're taking as given what your limbic system is delivering up. You have to have lots of space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. And you have to be able to say, I'm feeling sadness. I'm going to choose humor, which people can actually do. I pal around with a guy named Rain Wilson. You probably know him. Yeah, he's terrific. And, you know, he and I grew up about five miles apart in Seattle and we're, we're close to the same age and we're both classical musicians. We bonded over that. We didn't know each other as kids, but...

• 1:06:19Dan Harris?

  He plays the bassoon, if memory serves.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I was a French horn player and I went pro. He became an actor and I became a professional classical musician. And now we goof off all the time. And, and it's interesting because he, he did a little documentary about the fact that professional comedians often suffer from clinical depression. And Sarah Silverman was talking about that, a whole bunch of very famous comedians talking about that. It was a super interesting show for me as a social scientist. So, I asked him, I said, Rain, what is it about comedy that tends to make you depressed? And he said, no, no, no, you got it backwards. It turns out that depressed people, when they find out they're funny, they start using comedy as a means of self-defense. In other words, they notice that when they're feeling really crummy and they make a joke, everybody else laughs and they feel better. That's

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  a classic case of emotional substitution. It's highly metacognitive and he happened to cross it even when he was a kid. But all of us can do that in all sorts of interesting ways. For example, you might find that you're really resentful. That's not the only emotion that you can be experiencing. A lot of the times, it's a more relevant or a more realistic emotion to express gratitude than resentment. You know, if you're lucky enough to be sitting in first class on the airplane and your dinner is cold, you can feel resentment about that. But if you actually focus on the experience of actually having, you know, not sitting in, in the back and having a little bit more room to work and, and being more comfortable

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  in your seat and, and deciding to experience gratitude because you're metacognitive enough to have the space to choose an emotion, it's really transformative. It really is. But it requires that you have a, a presence of mind, that you be practicing metacognition. And when you have these negative emotions, you interrogate them appropriately to say, what part of this is helping me and what part of it is actually unrealistic? And can I substitute with something that's better?

• 1:08:13Dan Harris?

  You say, and I, please correct me if I'm, if my notes are off on this, but you, you list some other ways, four ways to learn emotional substitution, journaling, laughing, which we've talked about, hope and compassion. Do I have that right?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are certainly, and there's lots and lots. Those were simply four of the ways that we actually do that. Hope is, is one of the, is an emotional substitution for pessimism, typically. Compassion is a, is a good emotional substitution for sheer empathy, is what we find. Now empathy sounds like it's really wonderful. Everybody wants to be empathetic. Empathy is a virtue. It turns out it's a hugely overrated virtue. I mean, you know perfectly, and we talked about this earlier, the worst parents are the sheerly empathetic parents. You know, I'm gonna feel your pain, because then you become bound up in your child's pain and you don't actually do what you need to do, which is with a little bit of remove, allow your child to experience

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  an uncomfortable situation. Compassion is one that incorporates empathy, but you're not paralyzed by it and you can act according to the interests of the person that you love. And that's a choice. That's a, that's a choice that requires intellect and introspection and, and, and, and metacognitive work, quite frankly. You know, one of the things that I find, you know, having survived a bunch of kids through their teenage years, is in my prayers, my wife and I, we, every night before we go to bed, we spend a half an hour in prayer together, which is the most intimate thing with your spouse, is to pray together or to meditate together. It's incredibly intimate. And we would say, we would say, ask in our prayers, "Help us to do the right thing for our children, even

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  if we don't want to." Right? And what that was, was a prayer of compassion to replace the empathy. Hope is a, is a, is an act of agency that when you're feeling pessimism, why? Because it, pessimism is just a, it's a negative prediction. Hope, you might have a negative prediction, but it gives you a sense of strategy that something can be done and you can do it. And that's an emotional substitution that you can actually make. Hope is something that's like, "Yeah, I think, I think it's pretty rough. The doctor said that the prognosis is pretty grim." But hope means that I can actually do something that's gonna help my health. I can put it in my own hands and I'm actually gonna do that. So you see that these emotional substitutions are very appropriate, even more realistic than the one that you happen to be feeling,

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  and they can actually lead you toward greater happier-ness.

• 1:10:41Dan Harris?

  Okay, so that's managing your emotions, the, the brief overview. If you want more, obviously, read the book. One of the other things you talk about in the book is gonna be counterintuitive, and you mentioned it earlier, but I think it's worth dwelling on some time, dwelling on for some period of time here. It's gonna be counterintuitive for many people who are interested in getting happier. You mentioned it earlier when you said, "We shouldn't be talking about self-care, we should be talking about other care." So one of the, one of your arguments is that the counterintuitive route to happiness here is to focus less on yourself. Say more.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature, once again, wants you to survive and pass on your genes. And, you know, happiness, that's your business. Now, what Mother Nature wants you to do is to focus intensely on yourself all the time, to be the star of your own psychodrama. Me, me, me, you know, my lunch, my money, my friends, the traffic that I see, the, you know, everything, my job, it's just, and I'm telling you, it's just so boring. I mean, it's like watching the same tedious episode of the same reality show over and over and over again involuntarily and being simultaneously fascinated, terrified, and bored. It's so weird that we do this. And, and you have to be quite conscious, once again,

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  to stand up to Mother Nature, stand up to your impulses, and to get from being the, the, the object to being the subject. This is what the Buddhists call the "I-self" versus the "me-self." You know, it's interesting that there's a, there's a Zen koan, which everybody who listens to your show knows. A koan is a riddle that the Zen Buddhists use to train the junior monks, to contemplate a riddle. And when it becomes clear, it means you're getting closer to enlightenment. There's a famous koan of two monks that are approaching each other on a road. There's a senior monk and a junior monk. And the junior monk, when he gets to the senior monk, they're coming in opposite directions and a little path through the forest. He says, "Um, where are you

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  going?" And the senior monk says, "I am on a pilgrimage." The junior monk says, "Where's your pilgrimage taking you?" The senior monk says, "I don't know." The junior monk says, "Why don't you know?" And the senior monk says, "Because not knowing is the most intimate kind of knowledge." Now, that's a riddle. It sounds nonsensical in this way, but what the senior monk is really saying is that "I'm not completely awake and aware of my pilgrimage when I'm thinking about me in my pilgrimage. I'm the, I'm, I'm the, the, the object. No, no, no, look outward, observe, judge not. Be paying attention to what's going on outside

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  you all the time." I have a, a guy I work with, and, and he's a former fitness model. Can you imagine? I mean, this is a guy who, you know, took his shirt off on Instagram, so other people could see his abs for a living. This is quite something. And he realized in his late twenties that he had been miserable for 10 years. Miserable for 10 years. He had not eaten a single thing that he liked for 10 years, and all he ever did was look in the mirror. And he said, "You know what? This is gonna come to an end." So he literally took every single mirror out of his apartment, and he started showering in the dark, and he did that for a year. And

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  the reason he did that was because he didn't want to see himself at all, so that he could just observe the world as opposed to observing himself. And he said it was the game changer. Now, what he was doing is he was practicing Buddhism without knowing it, right? He was actually practicing "I-self" as opposed to "me-self." And I put my students through a rigorous set of exercises on how to do this, on how to actually go through the day, go through an hour, go through five minutes, never judging anything, using no judging language, which is referring everything back to your own tastes and needs. Not, "This coffee is so crummy." And I was like, "This coffe- coffee has a bitter flavor." Saying, "Ah, the traffic is horrible." No, no, no, no. A lot of people are on the road today. Now, of course, the Buddha taught

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  this all the time, but we can practice this like any other part of Buddhism and ordinary life without, you know, calling it anything that we want. And that's really important for happiness. This can be the big game changer for a lot of people.

• 1:15:06Dan Harris?

  So "I" is our capacity to discern, to, to know, and "me" is the self-referentiality that we add on top of the bare knowing?

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. "I" is me looking out. "Me" is the mirror.

• 1:15:21Dan Harris?

  Got it. So what do you do in this regard? Do you keep mirrors around the house? You, you're a guy who writes books. Do you look at your reviews? Do you check if your social media or newsletter are growing or shrinking? What, how do you manage all of this as a public figure?

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  I try to be pretty serious about it, because it could drive me crazy, as a matter of fact. You know what it's like to have a book on the market. When I have a book that comes out, the first thing that I do is I get rid of social media apps on my phone, which, by the way, it's a good idea to get rid of the social media apps on your phone, if you have a tendency to check them too much. I don't, I'm old enough that social media is not, hasn't wired my dopaminergic channels, so my brain isn't wired to get satisfaction from social media, because it came when I was of age. But I will be really curious about what people are saying about my work if I can, and I don't want to make it too easy. So that's one of the things that I do. I don't read reviews of my work. I actually don't do that, because that's like looking in a mirror. I find it intensely uncomfortable. I don't like it, is one of the things that I find. I don't look in the mirror that much, because, let's

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  be honest, Dan, I got a face for radio. You know, if I had, if I had your hair, I could be President of the United States, but at least, we all, all bald guys think that, right? So, but I do, I do follow certain protocols. You know, I, I work systematically, usually about once a quarter, I'll try to, to go a certain period of days, not using judgment-based language. And that, for judgment-based language, for me, is generally complaining. I'm just such a complain, I'm such a whiner. I don't really like that about myself. Now, I'm complaining about my complaining. You can see how this is like, my complaining is like a self-looking ice cream cone. I can't, you know, I never get to the end of it, is what it comes. And so I make, I, I declare a moratorium on the judgment-based language. And the, and the

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  result is I'm immediately calmer. You know, when, when Jesus says in the Bible, "Judge not lest ye be judged," it's incredibly important happiness advice. You know? Judge not, and don't feel like you're judged, and enjoy your life, he might as well have said. And so these are some of the protocols that I engage in.

• 1:17:23Dan Harris?

  One of the exhortations in this section of the book is to...

• 1:17:30Dan Harris?

  Is don't water the envy weed. What do you mean by that? And how do we do it?

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Well, we are inherently hierarchical beings. We're pack animals. Humans live in tribes and kin, in groups of kin. And the result of it is that for them to be self governing naturally, you have hierarchies. You have people who have more status and people have less status, people have more power, people have less power. That's always been the case. And it's a natural facet of almost all primate communities, including human communities. The result of that is that Mother Nature gives us an impulse to want to climb in the hierarchy. And the way that we do that is that we have to understand ourselves in relation to other people, to see ourselves in relation to people who have less status, prestige, admiration, and people who

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  have more. And Mother Nature imbues us with this tendency to want what the people have who have more than we do, because it's, it's, it's, it's obviously advantageous for us to climb in this social hierarchy. You get more mates, you get more calories when this happens. So this is, look, the evolutionary biology and psychology couldn't be clearer that this is absolutely normal. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not defective because you tend to feel envy. However, like anything else, don't choose the animal path. Don't choose blindly, you know, Mother Nature's prerogatives for you. Take the divine path by understanding what Mother Nature is doing and actually standing up to it in a very mindful way. And the way to do that is to say,

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  hmm, there are emotional substitutions that I can make even in the case of envy. Case in point, there's really two kinds of envy. There's benign envy and there's malignant envy. Both of them, by the way, are bad for your happiness. Even benign envy is bad for your happiness. Malignant envy is horrible for you because it torques your morality. It makes you do things that you really hate about yourself. At the end of the day, the way for you to actually turn envy into something that's more nutritious in an emotional substitution is to, to, to practice admiration when you feel envy toward people that really have earned something. So start trying to disregard the attention that you're paying to people who believe that they have things that

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  they didn't earn, you know, influencers, people who are famous for being famous, internet famous people. Stop talking about them. Stop forming these virtual relationships with them. Stop paying attention to them. Don't watch them on TV. And then for people who really do enjoy a kind of life and of their own merit, you're, you're really, don't be envious of what they have. Be more envious of who they are for the reasons that they have these things. And then turn that into admiration. Then state the admiration. If there's somebody around you, if there's somebody at work that's really doing a great job and you wish you had that job and you wish you had that promotion, tell them that you admire that and tell them specifically what it is that you admire about

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  their status. Now, that's, it, by the way, it's really, really, it'll be really good for your career. But more importantly, it changes your soul when you do that, to be a person who's openly admiring as opposed to somebody who's secretly envious. You know which person you want to be of the two.

• 1:20:43Dan Harris?

  I guess the Buddhist add on there would be this notion of mudita, which is sometimes called sympathetic joy. I mean, happiness, taking delight in other people's delight and happiness. And there are specific meditation practices you can do where you imagine people you might be envious of and send them phrases like, may your happiness increase.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, loving kindness meditation is really good for that. Really good for that. And, and, and I believe we all should practice that. It'll make us a lot better off. But to have a sort of a list, I'm a big lister because journaling is one of the best ways to be more metacognitive. When you have a pencil in your hand, you can't be limbic. You have to be experiencing your emotions in the, in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. You can't write it down otherwise. And so one of the things that I like to make lists of, I make lists of failures. There's all kinds of reasons to do that. I have, you know, all kinds of, you know, lists of, of, you know, the, the, the goals that I'm making, et cetera. But one of the things that I really like to, to, to list is the list of people and things that I admire, you know, the things that I, and, and

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  then finding a way without, you know, without being a kiss up to actually express that admiration, you know, to, to make it public. You know, people that I admire, sometimes they'll just talk about it because, you know, I do a lot of, I do a lot of press. I do a lot of media stuff and just talking about it, even people I've never met before. And it sets me free, Dan. It really does. It, it, you know, the, the envy just releases when I actually, when I voluntarily, when I decide to turn it into admiration toward others.

• 1:22:19Dan Harris?

  We're not going to get to all the questions I wanted to ask you, but let me ask one last question, slightly difficult one. I know you said you don't read your own reviews, but I'm curious, there, I haven't read all of your reviews. They seem to be largely positive and the book is very successful. The one interesting critique I saw that I would love to hear your thoughts on, and I've had this critique directed at me, is that there's a, that when you talk too much about, and this, this is, this is the critiquer talking now, when you talk too much about the individual responsibility for happiness, you overlook the systemic structural contributors to human flourishing. And in your case, there've been some add on of like, hey, this guy used to

• 1:23:02Dan Harris?

  work for a center right think tank and advocated for cutting social programs. And so who is he to tell us that responsibility is on us, et cetera, et cetera. What's your take on this?

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Well, my basic take is that there's never a good reason to overlook your own journey toward getting happier. And one of the reasons is that nobody makes the world better who's miserable. Being miserable doesn't help the world. There's a reason on the airplane to tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping somebody around you. And the reason for that is that you're useless when you're struggling. You're useless when you're gasping for air on an airplane and you can't help your kid. And so you're risking both your lives under the circumstances. You need to work on yourself so that appropriately you can work on other people. There's nothing selfish about trying to be a happier person. The best gift you can give to your spouse is getting happier. I'm telling you, my wife has told me this, by the way. I mean, the reason that I

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  study happiness is I wanted to be happier. I wasn't happy enough. I became a happiness professor because I wanted to see whether or not the science could be applied to my life and make my life better. And I'm literally 60% happier than I was five years ago. I measure that because every semester I have to measure it with my students and I very rigorous ways, metrics on, on how this works. And I answer the questions honestly in relation to the other people that I know. And I've seen a 60% increase in my own personal happiness. That makes me a much better happiness teacher. It makes it possible for me to act in a more empathetic way, in a more social way. Now, the problem that we have in our society is that we have people who are activists who use misery

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  as a tool. That's the truth. I mean, I would argue that one of the biggest problems that we have in American politics today is that the political parties and the social activists are dominated by people that are trying to use misery to manipulate other people to do their work. I mean, you can, you can mobilize people in all sorts of ways that are good for demagogic leaders, but bad for them if people are miserable enough is what we find out. So when somebody says, too much work on happiness, how selfish is that? I, my rejoinder is, why do you want me to be miserable, man? Why do you want that? Now, of course, politics is politics. I get it, you know, and I've said a lot of things politically that I'm sure I would take back at this point in my

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  life. I don't know anybody who, who, well, I know some people who still adhere to everything they said when they were 25 years old, but I certainly wouldn't, you know, there's a lot of things that I would take back. There's some uncharitable things that I've said and done. But at the end of the day, my goal is to, and Oprah Winfrey's goal and the people who are part of this movement, their goal is notwithstanding their politics. Look, you got right leaning people and left leaning people. And the goal is to lift people up and bring them together so that we can understand ourselves more, so that we can love each other more freely, so that we can actually talk to each other in ways that we wouldn't have been able to before. I want people to have a hunger for, for love and for a hunger for happiness. And, and then who knows, maybe we

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  can find solutions to the intractable problems that we're still screaming at each other about and miserable and saying that people who disagree with us are the devil. And last I checked, nobody has ever been influenced by hatred.

• 1:26:19Dan Harris?

  Yes, I believe you in one of your columns said you can't hate or shame people into agreeing with you.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  Not an effective technique. Yeah.

• 1:26:30Dan Harris?

  I tend to agree with that. But I, the, I still though, struggle a little bit with

• 1:26:39Dan Harris?

  the micro and the macro here because I don't know that I would want to say that, hey, we can't make the structural changes that I think would lead to less environmental degradation, more equality, et cetera, et cetera, until everybody gets happier.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Right. No, I mean, I think we can actually do both. I think that we have a responsibility and an opportunity to try to get happier. And we also have to do good. And one of the things I've written about a lot is one of the best ways to get happier is to do good. One of the best ways to get happier is actually to work on the things that you actually care about, but to do so not with misery, to do so not with hatred and contempt, but to do so with joy and love. That's really important. And, and think about it this way, the things that we're talking about here, whether you're talking about immigration or, or environmental protection, or whatever the cause is that really animates you, you can think of the values that undergird that as a weapon or as a gift. You're going to be ineffective if you use them as a weapon. And if you're miserable, you're probably

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  going to use them as a weapon. If you think of these things as a gift, you're going to, you're going to be wanting to share them with other people with love. And the way that you're going to be able to do that is by listening to them to understand why their point of view actually differs from yours. So it's an endogenous process. It's a, it's a self-contained, it's a system in which if we're happier, we're more effective in social causes. And when we, when we, when we share our, our, our values and social causes in a spirit of love, we get happier. And that's the positive feedback loop that we actually need. And I think that we actually can, and I've seen it a lot of times in people. Unfortunately, right now in American politics and the highly ideologized environment of media and politics that we see today, we're in a downward loop where,

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  you know, people are unhappy and so they, they, they act with greater contempt and hatred toward people who disagree with them. And that makes them unhappier. One of the things that we find, you know, the great, one of the great teachings of the Buddha is that hatred is like picking up a hot coal to throw at somebody else. You're the one who gets burned the worst. And they're never truer than in American politics circa 2024, right?

• 1:28:51Dan Harris?

  Indeed. Is there something you were hoping to cover today that we didn't get a chance to get to?

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  No, I mean, you're I mean, you're an old hand at the best interviews in the business. It's actually kind of kind of great talking to somebody who's in the business of happiness like you and who spent all your formative years grilling people on television. You always you're incredibly adroit at getting to the most interesting questions, I have to say.

• 1:29:16Dan Harris?

  Thank you. I appreciate that. But before I let you go, I do want to say that my younger brother over the last year has gotten increasingly interested, even though I was I have been his brother his whole life. He has not been super interested in the stuff I'm interested in. But over the last year, he has gotten interested in meditation and doing life better generally. And I saw recently that he put together a list of the books that have been most influential for him over the last year. My book was not on it, but your book, your last one, From Strength to Strength, was on it. So I was very pleased to see that. And I wanted to pass it along to you.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm delighted and delighted to help out your brother. Please give him my very best. And on my list is your book.

• 1:29:59Dan Harris?

  Thank you. I appreciate that. Can you, before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book of the new book? And any other stuff that we should know about that you've put into the world, your column, your website, your socials, whatever?

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So the last book is Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which I co wrote with Oprah Winfrey. At arthurbrooks.com, which is the website, kind of the omnibus website, that's got all the stuff that I do. It's got a lot of it's got a lot of free resources, like personality tests that you can take and media that you can download and videos that you can watch. And every Thursday morning, I publish a column about 1,200 words on the science of happiness at theatlantic.com called How to Build a Life. Between those three things, people will be overdosing on happiness. And who knows, you know, if we're overdosing on that, it's not so bad.

• 1:30:51Dan Harris?

  Yeah. And don't forget from Strength to Strength that I'll put a link in the show notes to the interview I do with Arthur about that. It's a it's it had a big impact on me, that book. And Arthur's column is excellent. And I've there are nuggets from that column I've saved and kept in my notes as I'm writing my next book. So it's been all of your work has been quite meaningful to me. So it's always a pleasure to see you. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  Thanks, Dan. Thanks you for your work, too. Your work is lifting up millions of people around the world, and I'm one of the millions.

• 1:31:21Dan Harris?

  One last thing before I let you go. If you want to listen to the show without ads, check out 10% Happier Plus, which is a subscription that is available right inside Apple Podcasts. If you become a subscriber, you'll get every episode ad free. That's new episodes and all the episodes from our vast 10 year plus archive. Look for 10% Happier Plus in Apple Podcasts and just hit subscribe. And a quick heads up, if you're already a subscriber to my app, 10% with Dan Harris, you've already got access to ad free podcasts. Ad free listening is baked right into your app subscription along with everything else. So please don't pay twice. You can check out the app at danharris.com and you can

• 1:32:02Dan Harris?

  check out 10% Happier Plus inside Apple Podcasts. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I deeply appreciate it. See you soon. Deuces. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Cashmere, David Hart, and Hayden Broome. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. And Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thanks for listening. Peace.

• 1:32:37Dan Harris?

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