4 Ways to Avoid Your Professional Decline

What happens when the abilities that brought you professional success start to decline? In this episode of Office Hours, I explore how our strengths change with age and how to be happier as they do. Drawing on my book From Strength to Strength https://www.amazon.com/Strength-Finding-Success-Happiness-Purpose/dp/059319148X, I explain fluid and crystallized intelligence and contrast how Darwin and Bach responded to professional decline. As always, I leave you with practical steps to help you navigate this transition and find more happiness, meaning, and fulfillment as you age. — Brought to you by: • LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/Arthur—A science-backed electrolyte drink mix that helps you feel and perform your best, without sugar, artificial ingredients, or gimmicks. Get a free sample pack at DrinkLMNT.com/Arthur http://drinklmnt.com/Arthur • Helix Sleep https://go.helixsleep.com/audio-partner/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=brooks—A mattress designed for every body. Go to helixsleep.com/brooks http://helixsleep.com/brooks for 27% off sitewide for their Labor Day Sale—an exclusive offer for listeners of Office Hours. — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • In-person Retreats: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (10:40) How happiness changes with age (15:09) Who is happiest after 70 (17:40) The inevitability of age-related decline in our abilities (21:49) Lessons on aging from the lives of Darwin and Bach (32:05) Why our abilities decline with age (39:01) #1. Jump to the new curve (40:51) #2. Serve other people (42:15) #3. Develop your life philosophy (43:40) #4. Connect more deeply with others (46:28) Q&A: Navigating relationships with adult children (47:51) Q&A: Finding meaningful ways to spend retirement (49:01) Q&A: How to handle “deal” friends — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-of-your-life • Arthur’s newsletter:https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • The Happiness Scale:https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks:https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur • From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life: https://www.amazon.com/Strength-Finding-Success-Happiness-Purpose/dp/059319148X • Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/ • Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7480662 • Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-02113-002 • Charles Darwin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin • Johann Sebastian Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Arthur Brooks?

  I want to talk about a phenomenon that I've heard about again and again and again from people all over the world, successful people, strivers, go-getters, about how life changes and they don't quite know why. Why in the middle of their careers, they don't know what to do with themselves. Why things that used to feel satisfying no longer are. This is not just burnout. It feels like a kind of a hinge in what they're doing. The truth is that we really enjoy our careers, whatever we're good at, not just because we enjoy the work day to day, but we like to see ourselves getting better. And it's just abject torture when we're not anymore. The world talks about going up. The world doesn't talk about coming back down again. Your decline is inevitable.

• 0:56Arthur Brooks?

  Your misery is not, because you can actually get better in a new thing if you choose the right thing. How do we do that? I want to tell you four things to do.

• 1:15Arthur Brooks?

  Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. This is the show about love and happiness using science and ideas. I do the show as a matter of public education. I hope you're finding it useful and maybe entertaining as well. And I especially hope that if it enriches you, that you'll use it to enrich other people. You'll take the ideas, make them your own and share them with others. Or perhaps pass on this podcast so that we have more listeners. Please do like and subscribe so the algorithm understands that you like it and, and more people who are like you actually get it. And share this episode with other people. I would really truly appreciate that. That's one of the ways that we can reach the most possible people with the science of love and happiness and how we can share that to make a better world.

• 1:58Arthur Brooks?

  I would very much love for you to be a happiness teacher alongside me. That's real leverage in this movement. As always, if you have any questions about what we're doing or you have suggestions about what we should cover in the show, you can do so by writing to us at [email protected]. That's the, on the website for the show, that's the email address. Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on your platform of choice. If you want to go deeper on these ideas or you just like a little bit more over the course of the week, this podcast comes out on Mondays. Well, on Friday mornings at eight o'clock Eastern time, you will get, if you like, a copy of my newsletter. It's completely free. It'll come to your inbox. You can get that, you can subscribe to that at arthurbrooks.com/newsletter.

• 2:41Arthur Brooks?

  It's not the same thing as in the podcast and starts with a bunch of my corny jokes. And who wouldn't want to miss that? Well, today I want to talk about a phenomenon that I've heard about again and again and again from people all over the world, successful people, strivers, go-getters, about how life changes and they don't quite know why. Why in the middle of their careers, they don't know what to do with themselves. Why things that used to feel satisfying no longer are. This is not just burnout. It feels like a kind of a hinge in what they're doing. People are kind of casting about when they didn't think they were going to. It's a sense of insecurity at a certain part of their lives. It's very, very common. And point of fact, I've experienced that myself.

• 3:23Arthur Brooks?

  When I was about 50 years old, I was the, the chief executive of a, a big nonprofit in Washington DC, a think tank, a public policy think tank dedicated to, you know, better policy and economics and national security, a famous place. It was the height of my career. It was the best thing I'd ever done. It was a dream come true for me professionally. And I'd done it for a while. I'd done it for six years at that point. And I recognized that, that I didn't know what I was doing. Well, sort of emotionally, I didn't have the same drive. I didn't know if I wanted to keep doing it, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And that really put me at loose ends, I have to say, because I'd never felt anything like that.

• 4:04Arthur Brooks?

  I'm an extremely ambitious and driven person and I'd never had a, a lack of linearity before. I was asking, you know, my wife and anybody who would advise me, what's wrong with me? You know, I don't feel the drive. I don't feel the fire in my belly. I don't want to go forward. I don't want to go back. I don't really want anymore. She didn't know how to help me because, you know, who knows what the heck I'm talking about? And I had to experience on a plane that actually led to a real epiphany for me. I want to talk to you about, which is how you can get your mojo back at any point in your career. And no matter where you are in your career, even if you feel like you're burning out

• 4:46Arthur Brooks?

  or losing interest or just generally losing steam, there is a new act in front of you. And I'm going to tell you how to find it. Now, back to that airplane story, because that story is one that I started a book with that I wrote in 2022 called From Strength to Strength. It actually initially appeared in a, in a, in a big essay in the Atlantic that I wrote in 2019. Now that wasn't all the way back to when I was 50. This was looking back on it. But that article where I talked about this subject, starting with the story that I'm, and I tell you now about the man on the plane, wound up being one of the 50 most read articles from all periodicals in the world in 2019. What does that tell you? It's not just that I'm some sort of special writer. I'm not. It's that this is something that people are dealing with.

• 5:31Arthur Brooks?

  I tapped a vein and the book that came out called From Strength to Strength in 2022 did as well. Back to the airplane. I was thinking about this kind of midlife ennui. And at, you know, I, at the time I was traveling a lot. I still do. I travel about 48 weeks a year right now. And I was traveling maybe a little bit less than that, but plenty. And I was on a flight, an evening flight from LA to Washington Dulles. I was living in, around Washington DC in those days, living in Maryland. And, and it was going to land around, I don't know, 11 o'clock at night. And so it was sort of dark, maybe an hour before we landed. I was tapping away on my laptop and I overheard a conversation in the row behind me. And now, now I wasn't trying to eavesdrop.

• 6:16Arthur Brooks?

  That would be pretty discreet, but I have to tell you, I'm a behavioral scientist. So my laboratory is overheard conversations. You know, if you're confessing to somebody in a Starbucks line, your best friend, you're waiting for coffee and he's talking about you having your heart broken. And I'm in front of you, keep your voice down because you know, that might be my next book. Anyway, so this conversation is clearly between a man and a woman. I can tell what their voices, and I can tell what their voices that they're elderly. You know how you old people sound, the cadence of their voice, the tone of their voice. And I'm kind of figuring that they're married. You'll see why. Now I can't make out his words. They're sort of muffled. But his wife's voice is really penetrating, coming right through the seat. So I can hear the answers.

• 7:00Arthur Brooks?

  So he says, and she says, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. Like man, now they have my full attention as a behavioral scientist. This is getting real. And then he goes, mumble, mumble, mumble. And she says, it's not true that nobody cares about you anymore or remembers you. So I'm kind of putting together a little portrait of who these people are. This is probably a guy who, well, he's not most of you who are watching this show, strivers, ambitious people, working to make your dreams come true, trying to get an edge in life. No, he's probably somebody who kind of let a lot of pitches go over the plate without a swing. And now it's near the end of his life and it's too late to do important things.

• 7:43Arthur Brooks?

  Maybe he was a high school teacher and got retired and was unappreciated or something like that. I mean, it just sounded like somebody who was just disappointed with the way that his life went. Made sense. Anyway, so their conversation ended and I went back to work. And in 45 minutes or so later, we landed at Dulles Airport in Washington. The lights go on and we all stand up and I turn around just to kind of get a look at the sad old guy, just to kind of put a face to the voice that I'd been hearing. And it turned out he was one of the most famous men in the world. Every single one of you watching the show, you would recognize who this person is and you probably admire this person as well. This is not just a famous, you know, politician or something. No, this is a real American hero who, with a relatively small group of people,

• 8:26Arthur Brooks?

  changed the course of American life some decades ago. And, and I heard, I mean, this is somebody I've admired for years. And, and I accidentally heard him telling his wife that he might as well be dead because everything good that happened to him is in the past. I mean, it's unbelievable. As we were leaving the plane, they were like right behind me and people were recognizing him. And as we passed the cockpit, the pilot was standing outside, you know, saying, you know, thanks for flying United folks like they do, but I'll talk like Chuck Yeager for some reason. He's, he recognized the hero, the man behind me on the plane. And he, and he said, sir, I want you to know that you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And I turned around and he was beaming with pride.

• 9:10Arthur Brooks?

  I thought, so which is it? Is it this one or is it the one an hour ago? But then I have selfish thought. I don't want to be that when I'm old, decades from now. I don't want to be on a plane next to long suffering Mrs. B saying, honey, I might as well be dead. Everything good that happened, happened in the past and that's long since done. Nobody remembers me or loves me anymore. I don't want that. I don't want that. I don't want it, you know, I, I want something good and new. I don't know what it is.

• 9:43Arthur Brooks?

  And she said, huh? She asked me who it was and I told her she was amazing. And I said, yeah. And then she said, so why don't you study this? I mean, you're a behavioral scientist, right? She says, why don't you use your PhD for something authentically helpful? You know, I took some offense at that, but that's a good point. And so I started looking into this. What can I do? This is at 50 years old. To move into something that authentically uses my talents? That I'm deeply interested in, maybe for the first time in my life? That gives me a new breath of air? A tall drink of professional and personal water when I need it the most? How do I do that? Is it possible? Well, the answer to that is yes.

• 10:29Arthur Brooks?

  I think I cracked the code. I'm going to tell you whether you're 30? Whether you're feeling like your first career wasn't what you thought it was going to be? And you don't want it, but you don't know what to do? Whether you're 45 and actually feeling a little bit of bird out? Whether you're in your 50s and, and, and what used to be easy is now hard? And you don't know why? And you don't like it, even though you did? If you're at one of those hinge points in your life? This episode is for you. Now, let me start this whole research exercise where I always do as a social scientist. I want to know what I can do to get happier as I get older. That's fundamentally what I'm talking about. So let's start by, by taking a level set. How happy in general are people at different ages?

• 11:13Arthur Brooks?

  In other words, as people get older, do they generally get happier? By the normal progression of time or unhappier? I ask my students that. My students are on average 28 years old and I asked them that to vote. Do you think you're going to be happier or unhappier than now? Now, like 95% vote happier. They're optimists. They have to be, given their level of student debt. And it kind of makes sense because you know, my students are MBA students at Harvard. I mean, they're, they're, they've got a great future waiting for them. I've seen the data. They're going to make a high salary and have great jobs. And, and most of them are going to like their jobs, for that matter. At 38, they should be happier, they think, which is why they vote yes. I mean, those who vote no, I mean, I don't know what to tell them.

• 11:57Arthur Brooks?

  Um, and then I say, what about 48? 10 more years? And they say, most of them say, yeah, happier because more of same of all these good things are going to happen to me. And then I say, what do you think about 78? And almost everybody thinks they're going to be unhappier when it's 78. And I ask them why and they can't answer because it just doesn't sound like fun to be 78 when you're 28. And then I show them the data. Now, what they think is that their happiness is going to go up and up and up and up. And it's going to flatten out. It's going to come back down and get down, down again, which is a pretty depressing story. So what actually happens? And the answer is the opposite. There's a ton of work by David Blanchflower at, at Dartmouth College? Who's collected data on how happiness changes through the, through people's, you know, lifetimes?

• 12:40Arthur Brooks?

  And for most people, not everybody, but most people, it's a very strong empirical regularity. In the United States, Western Europe, South America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa. He's got data from countries all over the world. We vary in happiness in some ways, but not this way. It actually is the opposite of what my students think. Most people gradually decline in their happiness from their early twenties until their early fifties. Just a gradual decline. And again, for those of you who are regular viewers of this show, you're probably figuring out that that's nothing to panic about. Remember happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Enjoyment is an immediate happiness phenomenon. Meaning is a long-term happiness phenomenon. In your twenties and thirties and even forties?

• 13:24Arthur Brooks?

  Life is, it's sort of declining in enjoyment for lots of reasons. The house, you know, the mortgage, teenage kids, God forbid, you know, all that stuff is hard. But meaning is going up, meaning that's a long-term play. And in point of fact, that comes back around when people are in their early fifties. Most people from early fifties until like 70 get exceptionally happier. The only people who don't are people with unremediated mood disorders, depression and anxiety and, and addiction issues. So if that's you, take care of that for no other reason, perhaps, then you, you need your happiness renaissance in your fifties and sixties. Cause if you do, you're probably going to get a lot happier because not coincidentally, your teenage kids moved out.

• 14:07Arthur Brooks?

  Now, I mean, meaning really comes back into your life at that point, which is a beautiful thing. That's interesting enough, but then, then the plot thickens because around, you know, late sixties, the early seventies, it looks like it's constant then for the rest of your life, your happiness. But that's an illusion. It turns out that the population breaks up into more or less two equal sized groups. Where half the population gets happier all the way till death. And the other half of the population starts getting unhappier all the way till death. So here's what I really want to know, you know, pursuant to this question that was in my mind and hard. And it became really acute when I was on that plane. How can I be in the top branch and not in the lower branch when I'm older? What can I do now? So I'm not the old man on the plane?

• 14:50Arthur Brooks?

  What are the questions that I can do now so I can go on to something new in my fifties, my new thing? And I, when I'm in my eighties, um, I can be happy and not sad like he was. Now, it might seem like he should be happy because he had everything going. He was rich, he was famous, he was a hero, he's admired. Maybe he's just an aberration? Or maybe something's wrong with the way that he lived his life? That's the research question, isn't it? What can I do now when I'm feeling this discomfort? So that I can be happier now and happier later? That's the big question. Now, to begin with, in the research, I had to ask, who tends to be in the upper branch of happiness after 70? And who tends to be in the lower branch? And it's not who you think.

• 15:34Arthur Brooks?

  It turns out that successful strivers tend to be in the lower branch, not the upper branch. That's not what the world tells you. The world tells you money, power, honor, prestige, admiration of other people, fame. You get that stuff, you're going to be happy for the rest of your life. And it turns out the more of those things that you have, the more likely you are to actually be on the lower branch when you get old. Why? Well, this is the burden of high achievement, as some psychologists have called it. Oh, once again, I'll put stuff on this in the show notes, as I always do. The burden of high achievement is actually this. When you are identified as a super striver and successful when you're young? That is going to end at some point. And that's going to be noticeable to you, at which point you're going to be disappointed. What goes up must come down.

• 16:18Arthur Brooks?

  I call that the principle of psychoprofessional gravitation. I made that up because it sounds fancy. The truth is what that means is what goes up professionally must come down. And, and if you have a big party in your career, um, when you stop doing it because you burn out? Or you get worse at it, or you have to retire? You're going to be bummed out. And that's exactly what we find from a lot of people in the lower branch of the curve. Look, if you never do anything with your life, you won't know when it's over. But you? Office hours listener? I know you're doing it, trying to do a lot with your life. And so there's a danger on that, which means things are going to change. Either because they must, because of your health or wellbeing? Or because you suddenly can't see your way forward anymore?

• 17:02Arthur Brooks?

  Which is this common, common, common thing that we're talking about in this episode. So what I really want to know is this, and now here's where we're kind of nailing things down. This is how social science research goes. I'm kind of taking you into the Sherlock Holmes part of my business. I want to know, again, the biggest part is pretty surprising that the strivers tend to be on the lower branch. What about the strivers on the upper branch? Because there's always some outliers. The outliers who do a lot with their lives? What do they do so they can change as their life changes? Continue to strive in ways that are especially applicable to their talents and gifts? And get happier and happier and happier all the way to the end? There are people like that. What do they do differently than the norm?

• 17:47Arthur Brooks?

  I found it and I'm going to tell you. I, I went through a lot of data sets, so you don't have to, my friends. And I have found the patterns of people who actually do this. To begin with, I want to, I want to point something out. You know, if you're feeling what we're talking about, to go back a minute ago to, um, that feeling of insecurity that people have at different points in their lives? Either early on, because you think you chose the wrong thing? Or later on, because you think you're burning out? Or, or even later than that, where things got weirdly hard? You just started hating something you used to like? Those are kind of the three big things that happen in people's lives where they have this, this kind of crisis. Um, there's actually a lot of research out there that shows that even though nobody ever told you? You're going to have a decline in your abilities? And that natural decline in abilities?

• 18:31Arthur Brooks?

  Is, is horrible for people because progress is the only thing that we like. We don't like being at a particular level. We like getting to a particular level. We like to see ourselves getting better. This is one of the reasons that almost any diet can be successful. Because this is such a huge reward to see the scale go down that you're willing to not eat what you like. The problem is that diets, almost none of them work at the end. In other words, you can't keep the weight off. You could take the weight off, but you can't keep the weight off. Because your reward, when you hit your target weight, is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Okay. So the truth is that we really enjoy our careers, whatever we're going to, not just because we enjoy the work day to day?

• 19:16Arthur Brooks?

  But we like to see ourselves getting better. And it's just abject torture when we're not anymore. One of the big reasons that we have these painful inflections in our interests? Has to do with the fact that we sense a change in our abilities. Even if nobody else sees it? We do. And it's like clockwork, it turns out. Decline, generally speaking, for almost every skill, including intellectual skills? They come and they almost always come earlier than we think. And these are the big explanatory variables by why we have these crises. There's the work I want to alert you to of Dean Keith Simonson, uh, uh, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.

• 19:56Arthur Brooks?

  Um, I'll put a, a, a magisterial article he wrote on this in 1997 called Creative Productivity? A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Um, he wrote that in Psychological Review, a great journal? Where he showed that with the majority of intellectual professions, creative and intellectual professions? That you peak 20 years after you start your professional life? You peak and then you start to decline. Now, on average, that's about age thirty-nine, forty for most people because people are like studying their careers and starting to do some work in it when they're in college. They peaked twenty years later is what it comes about. Now, not all of them. I'll tell you about differences between them. But what that means is that, you know, if you started a career in earnest

• 20:41Arthur Brooks?

  because of a couple of fits and starts early on at thirty, and you start like me burning out when you're fifty, and you don't know why, well, that's why. That's an empirical regularity that Dean Keith Simon talks about. Now, he doesn't actually give the reason for this, but I'm going to give you the reason for this because we actually know the neuroscience of why that actually happens for most people. Now, two points here. Number one is that decline is is pretty inevitable. What goes up must actually come down, including not just if you're, you know, Tom Brady, but if you're a librarian, or if you're an accountant, or you're a lawyer, a surgeon, you're a, you know, a professional French horn player, that what goes up is going to come down again. It's probably going to happen earlier than you think, according to the data. And that's the second point, is that you think

• 21:26Arthur Brooks?

  it's going to go on and on and on and on and on, and it isn't. Okay? The world doesn't tell you this. The world talks about going up. The world doesn't talk about coming back down again. There's no section in a bookstore in the self-improvement section called managing your professional decline, is there? No. And and that's too bad, actually, because if there were, we could save ourselves a lot of grief and go on to do great things. Actually, that's why I'm doing these podcasts, and I've written about this particular topic. Okay, now, I'm going to tell you why that happens, why the decline, and then I'm going to tell you what to do about it. First, I want to tell you about famous, a couple of famous stories where that actually happened, and of very, very famous

• 22:11Arthur Brooks?

  people. So you're not alone if this is you. If you're like, I don't, I don't know what I'm doing. I retired early because all my dreams came true, but I have no clue what I want to do next. Or I got fired, or my job went away. I don't know what else to do. Or I'm burning out. I can't focus on it anymore, whatever. I'm going to tell you that you're not alone in this, not even close, as a matter of fact. Let me tell you the story of Charles Darwin. And everybody knows who Charles Darwin is. If you have a list of the five greatest naturalists who have lived over the past 500 years, Darwin's on your list. Darwin is known for his incredible discoveries, and his story is pretty amazing. When he was twenty-two years old, he was selected to be the

• 22:52Arthur Brooks?

  naturalist aboard the Beagle, which is a sailing ship that was circumnavigating the globe, taking plant and animal samples and sending them back to continental Europe where they'd be analyzed. Now, the purpose of this was to see if there was some evidence they could find linking current plants and animals alive today with the fossil record in which they were different. Why were they different? You know, why are they different now? Well, Darwin was formulating a theory of this as he was collecting these plants and animals. And you already know what it is. When he got back, there was a five-year voyage, twenty-seven years old, gets off the boat, and immediately drops this intellectual atomic bomb called the theory of natural selection,

• 23:31Arthur Brooks?

  evolution. He hypothesized that evolution was, explained why things changed over thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, from the fossils to today. And nobody ever thought about this before. I mean, nobody had ever considered anything like this. And this changed science when he was twenty-seven years old. I could talk about what it did to science, but I'm more interested in what it did to Darwin. He became the most famous scientist in the world at twenty-seven, almost overnight. He became rich. He was famous. He would give lecture tours all over Europe to packed halls. He wrote books by the standard of those days that were bestsellers because they'd sell twenty-five or thirty thousand copies. Yeah, life's changed. And he was digging

• 24:13Arthur Brooks?

  it, man, from his early, from his late twenties when he was doing this, until about fifty, he dined out on this. He wrote article after article, and book after book, and did experiment after experiment. But then something happened in his early fifties. All his progress stopped. He had, you know, the same kind of relationship to his work, all of a sudden, that he wasn't expecting that a lot of people, maybe you, have when you don't know what to do. It took a funny form, as a matter of fact. See, what had happened is that Darwin was a genius, but Darwin is actually pretty bad at math and statistics, and he couldn't read any languages but English. These are a real liability for biologists, for scientists of any kind, as a matter of fact, because the result

• 24:56Arthur Brooks?

  of it was that his work started a movement of science, where young scientists were better trained in these disciplines, were were working on the theory of natural selection and doing much more sophisticated models mathematically and statistically, and not always writing in English, which meant that he couldn't keep abreast of the literature that he had started. By about the time he was fifty years old, for example, there was one key advance he needed to understand that today we now call genetics. He couldn't understand it. It was written in German by a monk named Gregor Mendel, and and it was highly quantitative in a way that he wouldn't have understood the math. So the result was that he didn't get that, and his profession passed him by, and he felt kicked to the curb. Now, he wasn't kicked to the curb. He was still a huge hero.

• 25:42Arthur Brooks?

  He wrote eleven books after that, but he hated them. He considered them to be just straw, derivative. He felt like a charlatan. He lived for another twenty years, by the way. But he went to his deathbed miserable, often depressed. He wrote to his best friends, "I don't have the heart to do any science, which is the only thing that I enjoy." In other words, he was super burned out on his own profession because he couldn't make any more progress for the reasons I talked about. It's not just you. It's Darwin. He went to his grave feeling like a fake. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where they buried the Queen of England, and scientists venerate his grave, but he would have been the first to say, "Nah." If you're like me, you've got to be

• 26:25Arthur Brooks?

  drinking when you're in the gym, and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element, L-M-N-T. You probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar, no junk, just electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed. It's made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me, anyone who sweats. So, how do I use it? I use it in the morning, four forty-five in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything. It peps me up because I like to be real clear, and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I need.

• 27:11Arthur Brooks?

  Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at Drink Element. That's drink, just like it sounds, L-M-N-T dot com slash Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. I talk a lot on this show about my morning protocol that starts with a four-thirty alarm. But what most people don't realize is that your morning protocols actually start the night before, when you go to sleep. Here's what the science actually shows. Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired. It can actually make you less happy. You can't build a meaningful life on frequent, chronic, broken sleep. So, I take my sleep seriously. One of the best investments I've

• 27:56Arthur Brooks?

  made in this area is my Helix mattress. What I like about Helix is that they recognize something obvious but important. Different people sleep differently. Their website has a short quiz that asks about your sleep position, firmness preferences, and other sleep habits. Then they match you with one of more than twenty mattress models designed around your specific needs. Once that choice is made, the mattress ships directly to your door. It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly rare. Start with the person, not the product. If you're serious about improving your sleep and your happiness, visit helixsleep.com slash Brooks for twenty percent off sitewide

• 28:36Arthur Brooks?

  and additional offers. Invest in your sleep. Everything else works better when you do. Okay, now, I can tell you story after story of really famous people who are suffering the same way that so many, so many of us have, and so many of you will. But I also remember, my my method here is looking for people who are the super strivers, the ambitious, successful people, whose curves keep going up. Let me tell you about one of those, too, before I keep going with the science of what's actually going on. Let me tell you about somebody whose career actually started going down, and they went into decline, but they got happier. Okay? And that was Johann Sebastian

• 29:18Arthur Brooks?

  Bach, the master of the high Baroque, perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived. By the way, he's my favorite composer, as a former classical musician. Now, early on, Bach, like Darwin, was considered to be the genius of his generation. He was arguably the most famous composer in Central Europe. His life was full of commissions and and royalty coming to him, and and he had an astonishingly productive personal life as well. He had twenty kids, which is productive. And all was well until Bach was about fifty, when something happened. And that thing that happened was that musical styles changed. Concert music changed. And and believe it or not, the

• 30:02Arthur Brooks?

  musical style and the way that it changed was ushered in by his own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was one of the great pioneers of the classical style, as opposed to the Baroque style. Now, Bach tried to write in this new style, but he couldn't. He couldn't adapt. It's like something was wrong with his brain. He was like Darwin with genetics. Johann Sebastian Bach couldn't adapt to the new style, couldn't write in it. Now, like Darwin, he could have sort of shook his fist at the heavens and and been depressed. But it turned out he did something different, and this is going to provide a clue for us on how to have the normal course of change in your abilities not ruin your happiness. What happened to Bach was that he just changed his

• 30:44Arthur Brooks?

  career. He went from being the greatest musical innovator of his age to being the greatest instructor of his age. He took a position at the Thomas Kürkhe in Leipzig, where he was the organist, and he was the, it was the chorus master, and he wrote in the old style for the lectionary for the church. He wrote church music, which was, didn't have to be as daring or as innovative. And he became the most respected music professor and mentor of his time. He was a great teacher. He also continued to write text materials because he was such a great teacher. He was writing a textbook, effectively, on Baroque music called The Art of Fugue, Die Kunst der Fugue, when he died at sixty-five years old. As a matter of fact,

• 31:26Arthur Brooks?

  his son, who had supplanted him, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, he wrote in the margins of a piece that abruptly stopped, a manuscript that abruptly stopped. At this point, the composer put down his pencil and died, like, strong finish. And it was a textbook. So here's the point.

• 31:43Arthur Brooks?

  Here's the point, my friends. He actually changed what he did. He went from great to decline to great in something else. That was, by the way, it was less remunerative. He didn't make as much money. He was less famous, but it was ultimately even more satisfying to him, which he did till the end of his life. He was surrounded as he was dying. I'm not sure he actually died literally with a pencil in his hand by his kids, many kids, many grand grandchildren, beloved students, and he died happy. So what's the difference? And what does it mean to you? That's where we're going. Now, to begin with, what happened to Baca Darwin? What happened to the man of the plane?

• 32:25Arthur Brooks?

  What happened to me? What happens to a lot of you sometime at these hinge points where we lose interest and maybe even lose ability when, as Keith Symington pointed out, we peak and we go into decline. That's a cognitive phenomenon. That's not a technical phenomenon. That's a cognitive phenomenon. That's our brains. We don't think that there's something wrong with our brains at 39, but it crosses every profession that I look at, I find somewhere between 36 and 45, with some exceptions that I can mention in a minute, where your brain is just fine, but what you used to be good at gets harder for some reason. Here's what's going on. In

• 33:05Arthur Brooks?

  the 60s and 70s, the great British psychologist Raymond Katell, he was the man studying intelligence. Now, human intelligence, there's a lot of ways that we know. It's like, there's always a lot of news when we talk about IQ and intelligence testing, or aptitude testing, or SATs, and we talk about that a lot. But really interesting is how human intelligence, no matter how you measure it, actually changes over the lifespan. That's what Raymond Katell talked about an awful lot. And he had a theory of two intelligences. The one that you have when you're young, which is called fluid intelligence. Now, that's the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems. It relies on working memory, quickness of thinking. It allows you to be really great at

• 33:50Arthur Brooks?

  what you do. That's increasing, that fluid intelligence through your 20s and 30s. That's super high. That tends to peak around age 39. In other words, what Bach was really great at when he was young, what Darwin was really good at when he was 39, what I was really good at when I was 39, that peaks then because that's based largely on fluid intelligence. When you're super good at what you do and you're a young striver, you're always maxing out on what requires a lot of this fluid intelligence, this reason, analysis, solving novel problems, working memory, facility and quickness of thought. That's what makes you a great litigator when you're in a junior associate at a firm, makes you so good at what you do and distinguish yourself from the others,

• 34:34Arthur Brooks?

  or a stock picker, or a composer, a video game maker, a coder, whatever it happens to be, not coder anymore because that's AI, but then software engineer using AI. That's what's gonna make you a star, is what it comes down to. But Katell recognized and showed in his research that fluid intelligence is just a first intelligence curve, goes up, hits its max around 39, 40, then starts back down again. That would be really bad news if that were your only intelligence curve. That would mean that everybody would be just wiping out and have nothing to do by about 50 or 55. Turns out, there's a second intelligence curve that comes in behind it, but it's a different kind of intelligence. Katell called it crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to use

• 35:18Arthur Brooks?

  knowledge that you gained in the past. This is your pattern recognition. This is your ability to use a vast library. See, when you're a kid, you don't have very much in your library, but you can find stuff out really, really quickly. You're good at solving problems with your feral intelligence. When you're older, that ability is less. You're slower, your working memory's not as good. I mean, mine isn't. You know, I miss names. I miss all kinds of stuff at 62. But I know a ton. I mean, I can do the show and I'm looking at notes and all that, but you know, I've learned a lot. I've written a lot of columns and books and academic articles, and I got recall because my library is full. Furthermore, crystallized intelligence favors teaching,

• 36:00Arthur Brooks?

  mentoring, managing other people. So what this shows is that if you want to be happy, and let's just say you're an innovative hybrid composer in your 20s and 30s and 40s, declining in your 40s, what do you want to be in your 50s and 60s and 70s? And the answer to that is that you want to be a teacher. You want to be the best possible teacher, the best manager, the best mentor. You want to be the kind of person who can say, you see this problem? I've never seen it before, but I have an intuition about it because I've seen so many other similar problems. You want to be able to explain long-haired ideas that would have been too complex for other people to understand when you were 30. When you're 60, you want to be able to explain them in a way that people can understand you. Huh. You know, the truth of the matter is, when I was

• 36:45Arthur Brooks?

  in my 30s, I was doing research that was so mathematically sophisticated, I don't understand my own papers today. What do I do today? I write, speak, and teach about science for bigger audiences than I ever had in the past. I'll be able for not scientists, and my guess is that you're following this. I mean, you might have to slow it down to 0.75 or something because I talk too fast, but that's beside the point. I'm actually a much better teacher than I've ever been. Now, here's one exception to this 20-year peak rule for intellectual professions: historians. It turns out that historians, this weird outlying thing, historians tend to do the best half of their

• 37:29Arthur Brooks?

  research after 65. I mean, in other words, they do half of their work after 65 and the better half of their work. Why? The answer is because history, writing history, is a crystallized intelligence profession. I mean, you got to be kind of inventive, right? You know, I'm going to write a new kind of book, but basically you need to know everything about that. That's why Doris Kearns Goodwin is so great today. And when you think of a historian in your mind, you don't think of a 30-year-old. You might think of an 80-year-old, as a matter of fact. They're in the zone for that particular profession. But that's the outlier. More to the point, people who are successful in the second half of their lives, when they go from the thing that they did so well,

• 38:12Arthur Brooks?

  and then they maybe burn out or realize that they're changing, and they go on to something new, and they're successful, it's something that's crystallized and not fluid. They do a crystallized version of themselves. That's what Bach demonstrated. A lot of people that find weirdly that, you know, they'll step down from their post as a, some fluid intelligence thing, and that they, you know, they're a hedge fund manager, you know, and working in really innovative space. And then they go and they teach a class at the local business school, and they find it just glorious, and they're really, really good at it. Why? Because they were in the down slope of their fluid intelligence curve and frustrated, and they jumped onto the up slope of their crystallized intelligence curve, where they're actually getting better,

• 38:56Arthur Brooks?

  and once again, they were making progress, and they got happy. The truth of the matter is this. This is what the research shows. Your decline is inevitable. Your misery is not. Because you can actually get better in a new thing if you choose the right thing, which is to say, something on your crystallized intelligence curve. How do we do that? I want to tell you four things to do. Okay? Now, four things to think about. Then again, I'm going to put the, you know, the book or the article that are written on this in the show notes, so you can get, you know, the comprehensive plan. This is an abbreviated version of it. Number one, you got to make a jump onto that

• 39:38Arthur Brooks?

  new curve, and a lot of people are really afraid to do that. A lot of people will try to ride that fluid intelligence curve or force it, try to re-inflect it and force it back up. Oh, if I work hard enough, that working memory, that problem-solving capacity, that, you know, that edge, that'll come back. That'll come back. Yeah, no, probably not. The happiest people, they jump onto the new curve by finding the crystallized intelligence version of themselves. And so people who are great litigators in law firms in their 30s, they make good managing partners in their 50s and 60s, better managers, as a matter of fact. If you're a startup entrepreneur at 30, maybe you should be a venture capitalist at 60, because that's the teaching talent scout

• 40:21Arthur Brooks?

  version of that. Find the next great ideas. That takes a lot of humility, doesn't it? To dedicate yourself to the greatness of younger people in the fluid intelligence space? Yeah, that's a good thing, too. See, you don't have to quit your job necessarily. What's important is striving to detach progressively from the most obvious earthly rewards that come from fluid intelligence, even as you continue to work or advance in a career that has changed towards something that is more magisterial, something that is more crystallized. Now, the essence of the crystallized intelligence curve is not me, me, me, me, me. It's us. It's you. And that's the

• 41:05Arthur Brooks?

  second point. If you're looking for something and you're casting about, you don't know what it is, think about how you can serve others, right? I mean, crystallized intelligence is all about, generally speaking, teaching and bringing out goodness in other people, and that's a service, as a matter of fact. What can you do to find the strengths of other people as opposed to looking internally for the strengths of something that you used to be good at? And that's hard for a lot of people. That's hard when you've been a star, to be sure, but it's hugely motivating when you actually do that, unbelievably satisfying for so many people. I talk to people who say, I had no idea that mentoring others was such, going to be such a great thing. You know what? A lot of people who retire will come to me, strivers, and they'll say, I don't have a retirement plan.

• 41:50Arthur Brooks?

  Let's just say that they're financially independent. Good. And they're 60 years old. They have lots and lots of health and life ahead of them. Great. I usually recommend a portfolio approach of crystallized intelligence activities. Mentor two people, sit on two boards, teach one class, you know, put together a portfolio of things that actually do that, and then really develop the thing that you love the most, and that you just don't know that yet. And why are you going to love it? Quite frankly, because you're super good at it, but you didn't know it, because you didn't understand your own brain. Serve others. Look for opportunities.

• 42:25Arthur Brooks?

  Now meanwhile, one of the things that I recommend that actually goes really well, especially for older people, is that crystallized intelligence, for some reason, and I've got hypotheses as to why, lends itself especially good toward transcendence, to worship, to an understanding of philosophy, toward deeper thinking. You know, that's really where Bach went. I mean, Bach was always a pretty religious guy. He was a pretty serious Lutheran. But near the end of his life, he was asked, "Why do you write music?" And he said, "The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." At the end of all of his, at least later manuscripts, he would write "to the

• 43:09Arthur Brooks?

  glory of God" at the end. Last bar, finished, "to the glory of God." He spent hours every day with his Bible. He was the organist and the choir master at the Lutheran church in Leipzig, at the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig. He got more religious as he got older and found that that motivated him and fortified his crystallized intelligence. It was part and parcel with that. You can probably come up with some hypotheses yourself as to why that would be the case, but it is truly, you see again and again and again and again, that worship and teaching, serving other people through crystallized intelligence,

• 43:50Arthur Brooks?

  and offering up your soul as you see it, they go hand in glove. That's number three. And number four is to connect more deeply with other people, to connect more deeply. Because once again, crystallized intelligence is about us, not me. And the connections per se, therefore, need to be cultivated and are more satisfyingly cultivated as we get older. The truth is that this is completely consistent with all of the research on the matter. I've talked in the past about the Harvard study of adult development. I did a whole show on it, as a matter of fact. I'll make sure that's in the show notes, that link. And I talked about the 90-year longitudinal study that's still going, starting in the

• 44:29Arthur Brooks?

  late 40s or the late 30s, following men at Harvard and then their spouses, and then a sample of guys who didn't go to college, and their spouses, and then their kids. And now it's hugely representative. It looked at what they did over the course of their lives as they got older, that predicted being really happy and being healthy when they were truly old, like 80s and 90s. And there's seven things. And some of it's obvious. They didn't smoke, or they quit early, they didn't drink to excess, or they didn't drink at all, they didn't eat like 11-year-olds, and they got a moderate amount of exercise. But then it was got a little more interesting. That's the first four. The fifth thing that they did that predicted happiness and wellness was that they had a way to deal with their

• 45:12Arthur Brooks?

  problems. For some, it was therapy. For some, it was worship. For some people, it was journaling. They had a way to do it they got good at. Number six was that they worked with lifelong learners. Their brains were interested. They were curious people. But by far, more than anything else, was number seven, which is that they had a lot of love relationships. They generally speaking, had good marriages, or at least very close friendships, and usually relationships with their adult children. That was the big predictor. That was the big swinger in happiness. And this is what Bach found certainly by surrounding himself with his family and students. And that's what everybody in the research shows. Those who actually get happier as they get older, they get on the right curve where they serve

• 45:54Arthur Brooks?

  others, and they surround themselves with family and friends and people that they actually love. That is the important thing to be thinking about. So if you're struggling with this, if you're wondering about the future, and you're at loose ends, you don't know what to do, and you don't want to wind up like the man on the plane, because of course you don't, jump to the new curve. What is the new curve? What is it? Two, serve other people. Find a way to serve other people. That's probably on your crystallized intelligence curve. Worship, develop your life philosophy, go deeper into the biggest questions, and connect with them, people, in a spirit of love. And you don't have to worry about finding

• 46:37Arthur Brooks?

  the new meaning of your life. That's how the meaning of your life, at any stage of your life, will find you. Let's do some questions before we finish. Let's start with Frank T. Frank T., thank you for writing in to [email protected]. I don't want to sound too desperate, because that was great when things start like this. "But what advice would you give us to navigate the rest of our lives without being too needy toward these amazing people we made from scratch?" Isn't that a charming way of talking about your children? Actually, Frank, you're talking about your biological children. I have two biological children, and one by adoption. And it doesn't matter if your kids are the make or buy decision. See, I'm a business school professor. You'll love them exactly the same. And it's the

• 47:18Arthur Brooks?

  same question. And I appreciate your question as well. Here's the thing with particularly adult children, as your life is changing. The desperate question is, "How can I get them to love me more?" It's always the desperate question. That seems needy. How can I? It's needy in a marriage. Can I get her to love me more? The right question is, "How can I love her more?" The right question about your adult children is, "How can I love them more? What can I do to love them more?" Which, by the way, is not necessarily showering them with cash. What can I actually do to love them more? The secret, the paradox of happiness, is that we as humans, this is not the paradox, this is an axiom of happiness,

• 47:59Arthur Brooks?

  we are built to love and be loved. Here's the paradox. To be loved, you love. You give the thing that you actually want, and that is most true with the people who are closest to you. Laura M., writing into the website as well. "I'm concerned about what I will do when I retire." These are all on theme for today. "I worry it will just be cooking and cleaning all day long. I don't think I know what I want to do with my free time, and our finances won't allow for much travel." That's fine, because it turns out that, you know, cooking and cleaning and traveling, fine. But ultimately, there are two things to do as you retire that'll be most satisfying. Number one is service, because that's on the crystallized intelligence curve, whether it's compensated or not. It's just a natural

• 48:41Arthur Brooks?

  crystallized thing to do. And I talked about that, refer to the episode before. But second is something I've talked about occasionally on the show as well, which is leisure. But leisure's not chilling on the beach or traveling to see the Acropolis. Real leisure, according to Joseph Peiper, the great German philosopher, is really one of three things. Deepening your spiritual awareness, making more profound your relationships, and learning new things. Those are the three parts of actual generative leisure. And that's the promise of what we can all do that doesn't require that we have unbelievable finances and financial security. And that works in literature as well. I'm not just making that up, obviously. Anonymous writes in, "What is your advice on fair weather friends, friends who may have started out

• 49:24Arthur Brooks?

  as friends of pleasure or utility?" That's good Aristotelian language, Anonymous. Thank you very much. "But later on, only show up when they can get something from you, a favor, a good time." So those are deal friends. Those are deal friends. We all have a lot of deal friends. Nothing wrong with deal friends, but they don't satisfy. What satisfy are real friends. And so what do we do as time goes on about fair weather friends? You don't worry too much about them. You can turn some deal friends into real friends, but your real friends are your real friends. They just love you. They don't want you for anything else except you. And you know who they are. So with fair weather friends, especially as you're moving on in your life, as you move on with your life, and a fair round, that's great, because they're pleasant, but you don't pursue it. You put your work into

• 50:07Arthur Brooks?

  the real friends. You don't put the work into the deal friends. And you will get back what you invest in. That's true in anything else in life. So make sure you're investing in the real and not in the deal, and you'll actually start to sort your relationships. You'll have a portfolio that's paying higher dividends in love. We're done. I hope this has been useful to you. We're going to sign off now. Please let me know your thoughts by writing in, as our friends have here today, [email protected]. Leave comments wherever you are watching or listening to this. We will see them, I promise. And please do like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on the other platforms. Please do recommend this show to one or two million of your closest

• 50:48Arthur Brooks?

  personal friends. And while you're at it, order for this couple million people, The Meaning of Your Life, my newest book. We want people to have more love and more happiness in their life, and we want to be responsible for it if we possibly can. Okay, not millions of them, but at least pass on some thoughts and prayers to them, and maybe a suggestion that this podcast might be right for them, too. Thank you for listening or watching, and I'll see you next week.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, General Manager at Saffron Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend, Happy.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, Special Finance Manager at SaffronCredit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit SaffronCredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.