How the Meaning of Life Affects Your Brain: Part 2 of 3

Don’t miss The Meaning of Your Life Virtual Experience, my free live global book launch event this Friday (3/27), where I’m joined by an extraordinary lineup of guests to dive into all things meaning. Learn more at themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com. This is Part Two of my series on meaning, where I explore the science behind the meaning crisis, a central theme in my upcoming book, The Meaning of Your Life (out March 31). In the last episode, we looked at boredom https://www.arthurbrooks.com/podcast/find-the-meaning-of-your-life-the-hidden-power-of-boredom. Today, I dive into the link between a lack of meaning and rising anxiety and depression—and why avoiding life’s biggest questions may be part of the problem. Why do we avoid the questions that matter most? Easy: These questions are uncomfortable—they don’t have clear answers and can’t be solved “once and for all.” However, the process of asking these unanswerable, ineffable questions changes the way we understand our lives, even if we cannot neatly articulate that understanding. As always, I share practical steps to get you to the “right” side of your brain, so that you can start building a life with greater meaning. — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://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 (04:59) The link between meaning and well-being (07:04) Lessons from Zen Buddhism (13:44) Two big questions for meaning (16:00) Hemispheric lateralization (19:43) Complicated vs. complex problems (25:33) Why left-brain logic fails for complex problems (26:54) Using questions to find meaning (33:20) Step #1: Schedule your mental workout (34:50) Step #2: Go for a long walk (37:25) Q&A: Combating contempt (39:55) Q&A: Travel protocols — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life Virtual Event: themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427 • Why Your Perfect Life Feels So Empty (Sneak Peek): https://www.thefp.com/p/arthur-brooks-why-your-perfect-life-feels-so-empty • 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 • Zen in the Art of Archery: https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen-Herrigel/dp/0375705090 • Hakuin Ekaku: What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373390412_Hakuin_Ekaku_What_is_the_Sound_of_One_Hand_Clapping • Carl Jung’s quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/723830-the-greatest-and-most-important-problems-of-life-are-all • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:29Arthur Brooks?

  Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression and anxiety than we've ever seen. This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems, including self-harm, addiction, et cetera, et cetera. So the question is, why? And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious, the word that comes up again and again and again and again is, "I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. My life feels empty. My life feels meaningless. I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything." There's this existential desertedness, hollowness, that they're actually talking about in their life. We have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains.

• 1:13Arthur Brooks?

  That's what it comes down to. And furthermore, there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work. And when you do this, you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic.

• 1:34Arthur Brooks?

  Hey, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show, if you've been watching, you already know that this is a podcast dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I'm a behavioral scientist, and that's my personal mission as well. The reason I do this show is because I need you in the movement. I would like you to live a happier, better life, and I would like you to share these ideas to lift other people up as well. And I want to equip you with the knowledge and the ideas and the habits and the technique to actually make that possible in your life and the lives of other people. Thank you for watching the show and for sharing the ideas in the show. Continuing to watch this show, if it's not your first time, please do recommend this

• 2:16Arthur Brooks?

  to other people so that we can grow a bigger audience dedicated to these ideas of love and happiness. As always, I would love to hear what you're thinking. Please feedback if you have any questions about what we're talking about here, any criticisms, any pushback, any clarifications. Please write to us here at [email protected] or put it in the comments. We read all the comments on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, any place where you're actually getting this. Also, please do leave a review and don't forget to subscribe. This is the second episode today of a three-part series on The Meaning of Your Life. The Meaning of Your Life is not just a concept, The Meaning of Your Life, it's actually my new book, The Meaning of Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. You can see the handsome cover right behind me here.

• 3:00Arthur Brooks?

  That book is being released March 31st, 2026. If you're watching this beforehand, it's coming out really, really quickly. And there's a special event I'd like you to be a part of for the launch of this book. It's an interactive event with people from all over the world. Thousands of people will be tuning in on March 27th. To find out about how you can be part of it on YouTube or on Zoom, there are a lot of different ways to be involved, please go to themeaningofyourlife.com. The website is actually listed here on the screen as I'm talking. TheMeaningOfYourLife, all one word, dot com to learn more. This is going to be your go-to spot, I hope, for this particular topic. I'll be joined by a lot of great friends. I'll be in person with Rainn Wilson, the comedic actor, a great friend of mine, comedic

• 3:45Arthur Brooks?

  actor from The Office. We'll be with Chip Conley, who founded the Modern Elder Academy, Hoda Kotb from the Today Show, Chris Williamson, Dan Buettner, all kinds of guest appearances from people who are friends who are really interested in this topic and very enthusiastic about the release of this book. We're going to be exploring life's biggest questions and we would like you to be there. It's completely free, so go to themeaningofyourlife.com, get a copy of the book in advance. If you want, get copies of the book for all the people that you love, especially if you like the book, that might make a nice holiday present this coming year. In any case, head on over to the website and learn more about what we're actually doing. Today, in the second of three episodes on the meaning of life,

• 4:29Arthur Brooks?

  I want to talk about the meaning crisis and what's actually going wrong in our lives, such that in the data, it's very clear that young people, particularly people under 30 years old, are having a harder and harder time, I'll give you the evidence for this in a second, finding what they think the meaning of their life is. What's that all about? Why is that happening? What's different about life today? And how can you actually start to turn the tables on that? How can you flip the switch and start not just answering what is the meaning of my life, but experiencing the meaning of your life more richly in the way that you live from day to day? That's what we'll be talking about today. I want you to understand the meaning of your life, and today is going to actually give you an idea how to do it. Now, in the last episode, I talked about you need to set the stage,

• 5:14Arthur Brooks?

  which specifically meant you need to actually have more blank space in your life. You need to be bored more. But now I'm going to tell you how to use the time a little bit better. How can you use the blank space in a different way? So that's what we're talking about. Now, once again, let me talk about the problem that we're experiencing. Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression and anxiety than we've ever seen. You've seen the data yourself and you've experienced it around the people that you know, for sure. If you're my age, it's your adult kids and their friends. If you're that age, it's your friends and maybe you too. Depression since 2008 has increased by about a factor of three, especially for young adults, and generalized anxiety has doubled. We've never seen anything like this.

• 5:58Arthur Brooks?

  This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems, including self-harm, addiction, et cetera, et cetera. So the question is, why? And there's lots of explanations for this. There's pop explanations, I've talked about this in the past on the show. You know, different generations always blame each other. You know, young adults will say, "Hey, thanks boomers, you know, for driving up the price of houses and destroying the environment or something." And boomers are like, "Ah, you're just a bunch of snowflakes." None of that holds water. There's got to be a better scientific Explanation for it, and there is. Turns out, when you look at the data on the meaning of life, that that explains this trend. Statistically explains this trend.

• 6:41Arthur Brooks?

  There's a group, I've talked about it before, called Monitoring the Future, that asks people, "Do you feel like your life is meaningless?" And the increases in people saying yes, follow the increases in depression and anxiety. It's inescapable, these things actually go together. When I started seeing that, I started to do interviews with people. One of the things that I like to do as a behavioral scientist is to look at the data and then go behind the data by talking to actual human beings. And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious, the word that comes up again and again and again and again is, "I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. My life feels empty. My life feels meaningless. I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything." There's this existential desertedness,

• 7:25Arthur Brooks?

  hollowness, that they're actually talking about in their life.

• 7:29Speaker 02

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• 7:58Arthur Brooks?

  I want to talk right now about how different traditions have dealt with this in the past, and then I want to relate it to what we can do today. Okay, now, this is going to be a pretty scientific episode, but I'm going to talk about the neuroscience that I really like, I really love to share with you in this show in as clear a way as I possibly can. And when I can, I'm gonna, or when I remember to, I'm going to repeat some of the hardest concepts here. But I think that this is going to be pretty clear. Here's the point. We have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains. That's what it comes down to. And furthermore, there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work. And when you do this,

• 8:42Arthur Brooks?

  you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic. That's what I promise you in this episode today. Okay. Now, when I was a 20-year-old, I remember reading a book that had been recommended to me by a lot of musicians. Now, I was a musician in those days. Those of you who followed my work for a while, you know that I was a classical musician, professional, full-time, from when I was 19 until I was 31 years old. I didn't go to college until my late 20s. My whole first career was as a classical French horn player. That's what I thought I was gonna do for the rest of my life. And I was really interested in all the different ways that I could train, not just my chops, but also my mind, to be a better musician.

• 9:24Arthur Brooks?

  A great musician that I knew recommended that I read this one book called Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugene Herigal. Now, he was a German philosophy professor from the mid-century, who had done a really weird thing. Instead of just studying all those depressing German philosophers, you know, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Hegel and, you know. Fine, those guys are fine. But he said, you know, I think there's a lot going on in the East that we're not aware of. Now, that might seem pretty obvious to you today, but in, you know, 1930, in Germany, that wasn't well-known because this stuff just wasn't in circulation. There was no access to it. So instead of just going to the internet, which didn't exist, or even looking at books, which you couldn't find, Eugene Herigal went to Japan.

• 10:07Arthur Brooks?

  And he decided he was gonna study Zen Buddhism. He had heard about this exotic philosophy, or religion, he wasn't quite sure what, called Zen Buddhism. So he went to Japan. Now, he went to a Zen Buddhism master and said, "Teach me." And the Zen Buddhism master said, "I can't teach you Zen." He said, "What do you mean? You're a Zen master." He says, "No, you don't learn Zen that way. The way that you learn Zen is by doing something that requires Zen, and then when you master that skill, you will know Zen." Like, huh, okay. I mean, I realize this is kind of abstract, and that's what Herigal was thinking. It was recommended to him that he study archery. Archery is an ancient art that is practiced by a lot of Zen masters.

• 10:50Arthur Brooks?

  He studied archery in Japan for five years to learn Zen. That's what he did. That's a really interesting book and I recommend that you read it. It'll, I'll put it in the show notes, Zen and the Art of Archery. One of the things that he found while he was learning archery is it's full of these kind of mysterious questions that don't have answers. And in point of fact, Zen is taught this way typically. It's taught on the basis of unanswerable questions that explore dark parts of the mind. For example, you probably heard the Zen Buddhism riddle. This is called a koan in, in Japanese. The most famous Zen Buddhism koan, and this actually comes from a 18th century Zen Buddhism master named Hakuenakaku. Here it is.

• 11:35Arthur Brooks?

  What is the sound of one hand clapping? Like you hear that and you go, right? Like not, that doesn't seem like that's what they're talking about. And, and you know, the truth is, there is no sound. So what's the sound of no sound? Right? Now, when you read Zen and the Art of Archery, you'll understand how that unanswerable question explored in the mind actually led to him understanding how to be an archer and thus understand Zen itself. Okay, I'm not trying to be too, you know, esoteric here. Here's really the point that I'm trying to make. I've contemplated that a lot and many other Zen Buddhism koans. Here's another, for example, a junior monk, Zen Buddhism monk is walking on a country road by himself and he sees a, a senior Zen Buddhism monk walking toward him in the

• 12:20Arthur Brooks?

  other direction. He greets the senior monk and said, where are you going? And he said, I don't know. I said, how do you not know where you're going? Why don't you know where you're going? And he said, because not knowing is the most intimate knowledge. Contemplate. What that kind of question has in common, like what is the sound of one hand clapping? Is to make you think without being able to come up with a coherent answer. And that's actually the point. There's something that that ancient tradition and every other religious tradition has figured out that when we have deep philosophical questions that can lead to understanding

• 13:02Arthur Brooks?

  beyond articulation, it does something to exercise the brain and mind. That's a tradition, by the way, in, among the ancient Greeks called aporia, or depending on how you pronounce it, aporia. I'm gonna call it aporia. Hey, I'm an American. Aporia is to sit in a place of puzzlement with unanswerable questions on purpose. Now, this is wacky by today's standards. Why? Because we have a culture, and you see where I'm going with this in a second. We have a culture that if you can't type a question into a Google search bar and get back an answer that makes sense to you, it's not a real question. I mean, it's weird because, you know, there's a whole generation of people who think that if it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist.

• 13:46Arthur Brooks?

  And so therefore, a question that can't be answered by Google search or even by AI, therefore is a senseless question. And what these ancient traditions have asserted, the ancient Greeks, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, all of the karmic religions, all are based fundamentally on unanswerable questions that would say, no, no, no, no. If you want to understand the deep mysteries of life, you can't feed it into a Google search bar. You can't ask ChatGPT because if ChatGPT can answer it, it's the wrong kind of question to give you the mystical knowledge. All right, now, we got to figure out if that's true.

• 14:27Arthur Brooks?

  And what I'm going to do today is to try to convince you that it is absolutely true and that you can understand the point that I'm making and you can use the point that I'm making very practically in your life. That's what I'm going to show you in the next half hour. Okay. Now, I have my own kind of colons that I assign to my students. I ask my students to just contemplate the following two questions. Why am I alive? Why am I alive? You can answer that, I guess, with respect to, you know, a sperm and an egg or the role of God in creating you or for what purpose or all of that. But fundamentally, that's a mystical question that requires understanding often beyond words. Here's a second question. For what would I give my life?

• 15:12Arthur Brooks?

  Really? Now, okay, if you're a parent and grandparent like me, that's super easy. What else? For what else would you give your life? Why do you know that? That what that does is that that exercises the brain in a very weird way.

• 15:29Arthur Brooks?

  These are hard or impossible to answer questions. And here's what the ancient traditions claim. When you contemplate those unanswerable questions, something happens to your understanding of the meaning of your life. It doesn't mean that you suddenly say, oh, the meaning of my life is 123 XYZ. You suddenly gain an understanding of the meaning of your life subsequent to the consideration of mystical questions. And that's what my students find when I pose these questions to them and my adult children as well. Hmm, now, this is basically, and this is not just, you know, the mystical traditions or the philosophers either. Many more modern behavioral scientists and even medical professionals have asserted this exact same thing.

• 16:14Arthur Brooks?

  Perhaps the greatest psychiatrist of the early 20th century, Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst, said more or less the same thing. He said, "The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble." In other words, a problem is important, which means that it gives you knowledge of meaning. If you can't solve it, right? Now, that might sound like I'm, you know, proposing the myth of Sisyphus. You know, push the boulder up the hill and trying to figure out the answer to a question, let it roll back down again. It's like his exercise in futility. So just forget it, go ask ChatGPT and try to distract yourself. No, no, no, he's saying that there is understanding beyond articulation. That's what I want to get at today.

• 16:59Arthur Brooks?

  And it turns out, my friends, that we can sort out the mystery of what they're saying in much more, much clearer, more distinct neuroscientific terms based on very recent advances in neuroscience and behavioral science. They're exactly right. And I'm gonna tell you why and how you can use that knowledge. The explanation for why unanswerable questions give you special knowledge about the meaning of your life. Starts with a theory of what neuroscientists call hemispheric lateralization. Now, it's a fancy way of saying a simple thing, that the two sides of the brain do different things. The right side of the brain does one thing, the left side of the brain does something else.

• 17:40Arthur Brooks?

  We have to call it something fancy because that's how college professors get tenure, is put on fancy words. Hemispheric lateralization. This is based a lot on a number of important neuroscientists working. Now, you might think, oh, yeah, I remember that from, if you're my age, you'll say, I remember that from the 70s, when people were either artsy or analytical. Right-brain artsy types, or left-brain analytical types. I thought this, by the way, I was raised by a painter and a mathematician. My father was a mathematician, my mother was an artist. We all said, oh, mom's super right-brain. And dad's, he's really left-brain, because he's a mathematician. And I always thought I took after my mom, because, you know, all I wanted to do was play the French horn, write music, I painted a lot, I liked to write poetry. I mean, I was like, the arts guy.

• 18:22Arthur Brooks?

  And I had no interest in math and science, which might be surprising to you right now, because of what I do for a living. Well, it turns out that when I finally went to college in my late 20s, I took a bunch of classes in economics, and calculus, and linear algebra, and basic statistics, and I already said that. Anyway, the whole point is that I started studying math and quantitative methods for the first time, and it lit me up like a Christmas tree, man. I'm like, oh, it turns out that I'm left-brained like that. No, wrong. The way of thinking about hemispheric lateralization in those days was stupid and wrong. Because we don't have one side that does the arts, and the other side that does the math. But, we do have different ways of answering questions and solving problems in the two sides of our brain.

• 19:05Arthur Brooks?

  And that takes me to the work of the famous and great neuroscientist Ian the Go-Krist. He teaches at Oxford University, he's a medical doctor and neuroscientist. This is one of these guys who spent a lot of time in school. He's an M.D., Ph.D., who is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. And he looks at the most cutting-edge research, and conducts the most cutting-edge research on how the different sides of the brain do different things. Back to the old theory of hemispheric lateralization. He wrote a very important book, I'll put it in the show notes, called The Master and His Emissary. And what he says is, your brain works like the master and the emissary, where the right side of the brain is the master that asks the big questions. The left side of the brain is the emissary that goes out and actually tries to find the answers analytically.

• 19:47Arthur Brooks?

  Big philosophical questions, basic analytical, and day-to-day tasks. You have two sides of the brain, because you gotta do stuff. So he'll give an example like this. On the right side of the brain, I'm like, what's the why of my life? Because I'm made to worship and love. Love who? Love my family. What does it mean to love my family? Well, to adore them and to take care of them. What does that mean? Well, taking care of them means I gotta support them. How do I do that? Then the left brain kicks in. By going to work and going and buying groceries and being a responsible individual and following certain moral laws. See what I mean? You have the big why questions of life?

• 20:27Arthur Brooks?

  And you have the more quotidian and prosaic how to and what questions. Right side, left side. There's another way of thinking about this that I actually learned when I was studying applied mathematics. I was working for the Rand Corporation, which is a very famous think tank in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, California. And that's where I was actually working on my PhD. And to make a living, I was doing military operations research, which is to say, applied mathematics to do modeling for the US Air Force. Now, one of the things that I found was that mathematical models of war situations are notoriously inaccurate. And one time I asked a really great mathematician, I mean, this guy was a master of these methods.

• 21:12Arthur Brooks?

  Why is it that we can never model these really highly, highly complex warfighting situations with any sort of accuracy? And he said, oh, because it's the wrong kind of problem. He said that the models that we put together are complicated methods and the problems that we're trying to solve are complex problems. Complicated and complex. Now, I'm not splitting hairs. Here's the difference. Complicated problems are, well, they're really complicated. They're hard to solve. You need computing horsepower and lots of genius, but once you solve them, they're solved. You know, building a jet aircraft is a very complicated problem. There were no jet aircraft 100 years ago, and now there are, and we stamp them out, and the planes almost never crash. It's amazing.

• 21:56Arthur Brooks?

  As a matter of fact, we solved the complicated problem with sufficient genius. Lots of things in life are like that. You know, building an app to figure out where you can find a pizza at 10:00 PM, that's a complicated problem. Is a complicated problem. It might seem kind of simple, but I defy you to build one in your in your garage. You'll probably burn your house down. And yet, it's been solved. You can go to the Walmart and get one for 15 bucks and it'll be, you know, sitting on your kitchen counter for the next 10 years. It's amazing. Well, they're complicated problems. Life is full of complicated problems. As a matter of fact, the whole engineering culture of Silicon Valley is based on the idea that all of life is complicated problems. We've got to solve these complicated problems. But here's the difficulty with that.

• 22:37Arthur Brooks?

  Anytime somebody reduces the richness of human life to complicated problems, bad things happen. That's what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called scientific socialism. That we could come up with the equations of human behavior and then with mathematical exactitude work them out. Theodor Dostoevsky said, "That's wrong." Because that's what he called the Palace of Crystal. You can't work out the things in life with mathematical exactitude. It's a different kind of problem. Woodrow Wilson, the former president, he talked about scientific public administration where you could actually figure out government so that people would be like cogs in a machine and that didn't turn out so great, I dare say. No matter what your politics are, we don't want to be treated like cogs in a machine.

• 23:21Arthur Brooks?

  The problem with all of that is that the things we care about the most are not the complicated problems of the dating app and the widget and the entertainment and the tech. And all of that. What we care about is not the complicated problems. We care about the complex problems. Complex problems are problems that are super easy to understand, but they're impossible to solve. You can only live with them and understand them. Case in point. The reason I love NFL football is because it's a complex problem that can't be solved. You can only watch it. You can only watch it and let it unfold. It's unsolvable. I don't care how big a computer that you have, how good the algorithm is, how powerful your AI is.

• 24:05Arthur Brooks?

  You're not going to be able to predict if in the Super Bowl, the Seahawks are gonna beat the Patriots. Now, they did. I kind of predicted that. I'm from Seattle, so you know. All is right in the universe right now. But the whole point is, I watched the whole game and I was like nervous. Why? Because I love it, because I care about it. And the reason is because it couldn't be simulated because it's not a complicated problem. It's not a tech problem. It's a sports thing. Sports is something that we love because it represents the passion and spontaneity of the things we most care about in life. Why is it that we want a cat, but not a mechanical cat? A mechanical cat is a complicated thing. A cat is a complex thing, meaning I understand it.

• 24:50Arthur Brooks?

  It needs to be scratched and it needs kibble and it needs a litter box and it needs warmth. But I never know what it's going to do because it's alive. That's complexity. That's just to live with it. All of love, all of meaning, all of mystery is complex, not complicated. All the things that you care about the most are complex, not complicated. My marriage is unbelievably complex. Which means that, you know, I've been married 34 years. In 2026, we'll have our 35th wedding anniversary. And I haven't solved my marriage yet because I can't solve it like a complicated problem. I just, I live with my marriage. I don't know what's gonna happen. Maybe we're gonna have an argument tonight. I mean, yeah.

• 25:34Arthur Brooks?

  That's why I love my marriage because it's alive. The fact that it's alive is because it's complex. You can't simulate my marriage, man. You can't do it. This is, by the way, the reason that you'll never have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend that's gonna satisfy you. And you'll never have an AI therapist that will give you what you need. Because you need another complex being that interacts with your complexity to actually give you the love that you seek and help you with the problems that you truly want to solve. See my point, right? And what I'm driving at is that we're in a world of complicated solutions and we're not solving any of our complex problems.

• 26:14Arthur Brooks?

  Because our complex problems are love, happiness and mystery and the meaning of life. And there's one thing that you can't solve with your most powerful machine and your best possible internet simulation of life. And that's the meaning of life. Now, back to what I was talking about with hemispheric lateralization. Complicated problems are on the left side of the brain. You're working through all the complicated problems, like, how do I get to work? Do I got a better way to commute? You know, what's the best GPS device to actually get that done? How am I going to solve this particular problem? I'm going to use the left brain, right? That's what I'm doing all day. And I'm using these complicated problems I'm solving with the left hemisphere. How, to, and what? Great.

• 26:57Arthur Brooks?

  However, the Y side, the right hemisphere, is where I deal with the complex problems. Now imagine that everything that I'm doing in life, in contemporary life, is pushing me to the left side because life is technologizing. Life is getting more and more complicated. Life is promising me, and it's an illusion and a lie. Life is, and the culture, and the economy, and the leaders, they're promising me a perfect complicated solution to my complex problems in life. My problems of life and love and mystery and meaning. What's gonna happen? I'm gonna get more and more lonely. I'm gonna get more and more depressed. I'm gonna get more and more anxious. And what am I gonna do?

• 27:39Arthur Brooks?

  I'm gonna binge the complicated stuff until the cows come home and it's not going to help. Does that sound familiar? It should, because that's exactly what's going on. Okay. What are we gonna do about that? When all our whiz-bang, complicated technology, all this doing is, is giving us a more and more developed left hemisphere of our brains. Meanwhile, we're atrophying on the right. We're starving to death in the right. It's like, as Tolstoy put it, when you're trying to, to, to use science to actually solve the problem of love, he called it starving to death in a toy store. You're in the wrong kind of store. That's his point. You need to get over to the right side of your brain.

• 28:25Arthur Brooks?

  And you're not gonna do it with gaming and swiping right and, and surfing and scrolling and YouTube shorts. You're not gonna do it. You need to do it a different way. So here's a way. Zen Buddhism Koans. The mysteries of the Bible. The unanswered riddles of life.

• 28:48Arthur Brooks?

  Maybe that's it. I use the Zen Buddhism Cohen example, but let me give you an example of that's a little bit closer to my own faith tradition. I'm a Christian and in the Christian Bible and also in the Jewish Bible, there's the ultimate book of right hemispheric complex meaning. Which is the Book of Job. What that's really all about is Job, who's a character who is everything stripped away and spends the whole book actually questioning why this happened. And by the end of the Book of Job, after all his suffering, he understands without being able to articulate why suffering happened in his life. By doing the questioning of the unanswerable questions.

• 29:33Arthur Brooks?

  It's in every tradition. So how are you going to do that? How can any of us do that? When we know everything except the why of anything. That's the state that we're in. Where there's no mystery and no meaning, but a lot of stuff and a lot of tech and a lot of knowledge. How do we break out of that? What do we do? Well, let me propose some solutions on how you can actually use the wisdom of the ages to open up the right hand side of your brain. Cause here's the point, my friends. Here's what the Zen Buddhists were suggesting and the ancient Christian monks and the ancient Greeks with their aporia. What were they suggesting? If you simply

• 30:17Arthur Brooks?

  query these unanswerable things and you do it with patience and you do it with sincerity, you will open up the part of the brain that you need to actually start to understand and experience the meaning of your life. And it'll happen to you like magic. Now, this is one of the reasons that that most religious traditions send people away on contemplative retreats. And you're not supposed to bring your phone. Sometimes you're not even supposed to bring books. Because all you're supposed to do is think and they'll give you these ancient questions to actually think about. So for example. This is how the Dalai Lama starts his day every day. You think, wow, I mean, I've heard, I read someplace that the Dalai Lama, he, he, he meditates eight hours a day.

• 31:01Arthur Brooks?

  Man, he's like, sitting in the lotus position going, no, that's not how the Dalai Lama meditates every day. As you know, if you watch the show, I've worked a lot with this holy, the Dalai Lama. We're going to have content coming out on the podcast in the coming months of actual events that I've done with him that I want to share with you. It'll be an exclusive look behind the scenes on that. And I've asked him, what does this meditation actually mean? He gets up at about three o'clock in the morning and the first thing he does is he meditates for two hours. But he does something that's actually called analytical meditation. And what he does is he'll read a couple of, of Tibetan scriptures that are especially esoteric, that are really hard to understand, that don't have a clear meaning.

• 31:46Arthur Brooks?

  And he will ponder those things for two hours. You see what he's doing, right? This is a poria, sitting in a state of puzzlement on the basis of questions that don't have clear answers, but rather only have understanding. That's exactly what he's doing. That's what Aristotle, if he saw the Dalai Lama doing this, oh, that's a poria. That's what you have to do. If you want to understand the deep mystery and meaning behind all things. He's doing that not to come up with the answers to those questions, but rather to, to raise his consciousness to the greater meaning of all things. That's what's actually happening because of the way that he's using his brain. Catholics do this too. This is called mental prayer. And another way that we think about this is when, when Christians call it lectio divina,

• 32:29Arthur Brooks?

  which is the divine reading, where you'll read something that's the most mysterious, hard to understand thing that you actually can to the Bible. That seems like just, it doesn't have an obvious understanding. It doesn't have an obvious application, as a matter of fact. You read it and you contemplate it to seek a divine understanding. That's mental prayer. And that's what monks have been doing for thousands of years.

• 32:54Arthur Brooks?

  And you can do that, too. But to do that, you actually have to transgress the norms and rules of the modern world. Because we don't do that anymore. We don't. Remember, we've technologized ourselves three quarters of the way to death. Oh, yeah, no, I don't understand this. I don't understand this scripture. I don't understand this passage in Holy Scripture. I don't know. Let me ask ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT will come back with, "That's a very good question." And many of the greatest philosophers throughout all time have asked that question. They're going to butter you up in this way. And then they're going to start giving you, you know, what a certain person has said, and another person has said, and another person has said, and nothing about the understanding that you actually might gain.

• 33:37Arthur Brooks?

  You can't outsource the work to a digital left hemisphere. By the way, that's what AI is. It's an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain, and it's great at that. When you try to use it to help your right brain, when you're using it as a therapist, or a girlfriend, or a buddy, that's when it leaves you profoundly existentially depressed and empty. Every single time, because it can pass the Turing test of the left side of your brain, but it can't pass the Turing test on the right side of your brain. You know that that's not giving you what you need, that you know that's what's actually leaving you empty. So to do aporia today is hard, countercultural, which means you got to schedule it. It's your mental workout.

• 34:21Arthur Brooks?

  Now, for some people, it's really, really hard to do a real workout. You know, I go to the gym every day for an hour because I've been doing it for decades. It's become a total habit. That's what you have to do with aporia as well. You need to schedule it. Now, I recommend scheduling five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day to contemplate a mysterious question, a question of great mystery. Maybe it's a Zen Buddhism koan, maybe it's a passage from the Bible, maybe it's some something that doesn't have a clear answer for you, and simply read it slowly and then repeat it to yourself and sit in a state of puzzlement about that.

• 34:56Arthur Brooks?

  That's going to light up the right hemisphere of your brain. And that's going to start to exercise what you need to start finding the meaning of your life. Meaning it all sorts of different things. The space that I actually do that is usually two times a day. After I work out, I go to Catholic mass with my wife. And there's tons of quiet time in there and there's time for contemplation in there. And then before we go to bed, we like to pray the rosary, which is a thousand year old ancient Catholic meditation, which is repetitive prayer where you're contemplating mysteries from scripture. That's my way. What's your way? How are you going to practice aporia? And practice it regularly? That's step one.

• 35:39Arthur Brooks?

  Step two, here's a, here's a way to actually do this to make this a little bit easier. You don't just have to sit there because maybe that's hard for you. The ancients have almost always practiced aporia while walking. And there's the idea that ambulation, walking, walking, walking is physical contemplative activity. Walking meditations exist in almost every tradition as a matter of fact. And there's a reason the second koan that I talked about with the monk walking around along the road, who meets the senior monk walking in the other direction. The ambulation was critical to the second Buddhist monks' understanding that he was actually getting. So if, if sitting in aporia is really hard for you, walk in aporia. That's a good alternative. And, and, and this is one of the reasons also that, that pilgrimage is exist in almost every tradition as well.

• 36:25Arthur Brooks?

  I got super special knowledge beyond my ability to articulate it. Ineffable knowledge when I walked the Camino de Santiago, which is this ancient 1,100 year old walk. It was for those of you who saw the movie with, with Martin Sheen, The Way. That, that's what he was walking. And what, why was he doing that, by the way? Because he was trying to understand the meaning of his life. And that's what people have been doing for more than a thousand years. I guess I'm going to walk 800 kilometers or whatever you do. I think I did the last 160 kilometers because I'm a slacker. Actually, the reason is because Mrs. B said, uh-uh, I'm not doing the whole thing. And I wanted to do it with my soulmate. But yeah, man, you, you'll find what you're looking for. You will find what you're looking for. You'll walk your way into aporia.

• 37:08Arthur Brooks?

  And as such, you'll walk your way into knowledge, I promise you. Now, I'm going to continue with this if you keep listening to this series. But if you really want more now, get the meaning of your life. This is what this book is all about. This is a very practical guide to doing things that never seemed practical. See, practical life today is a big mess. Practical life today is about this gadget and that app and this amazing feat of engineering. Practical life today is all left hemispheric and it's all complicated. And the truth of the matter is that you need a right hemispheric, complex orientation toward your life if you want any prayer of finding the meaning of your life.

• 37:52Arthur Brooks?

  What I've tried to do today is to give you the beginning of the technique that has worked in every tradition. But this is only one way to do it. There are many other ways that you're going to get in this book, The Meaning of Your Life. As a matter of fact, there are literally five other ways that you're going to get it. Another one you'll get in next week's episode and going forward, I'll talk a lot more about them. But trust me, if you do these things, your life is really going to change. This is backed by science and experience and my own life. Before we finish, let's take a couple of questions. I love the questions. Please keep writing in the questions and thank you so much for doing that. Austin, he says he read my book, Love Your Enemies and liked it. Thank you for that, Austin. It really helped him calm down. Now, that was a book, Love Your Enemies. I didn't make that up.

• 38:34Arthur Brooks?

  Obviously, that's Matthew 5:44. That's from the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. Those are words of Jesus. Those aren't my words. I didn't make that up. Clever, right? But it's a book about actually how that's the most transgressive teaching in all of humanity. That that's what actually can change anybody's life by not just, you know, coexisting with your enemies and not just tolerating your enemies and, and, and, you know, not having, you know, a basic, nonviolent attitude toward your enemies, but actually learning how to love your enemies. And that requires that you understand love in a different way. To love is not a feeling at all. You don't have to feel warmth toward your enemy. You need to love your enemy, which is to will his or her good. That's the ancient definition of love, by the way, which transcends feelings.

• 39:19Arthur Brooks?

  Okay, anyway. I read your book, Love Your Enemies. It's helped me calm down. However, I still struggle with getting mad when I see social media posts or even just a bumper sticker on a car on the drive to work. I got it, brother. I live in the world too. On a practical level, how might I combat this contempt I feel for others? And act with love? Here's how you do it. Here's how you do it. You stand up to your own limbic system. Your limbic system is reacting to what you see, which is actually being processed in the occipital lobe of your brain. The visual cortex of your brain. Your limbic system is being excited by that because you're perceiving a threat, a threat to your way of thinking or your threat to your way of life. That contempt is happening to you.

• 40:03Arthur Brooks?

  But that doesn't mean that you have to act on it. On the contrary, you can take an opposite signal strategy. You see somebody who's got an obnoxious bumper sticker, and I don't care if it's right or left. It depends on how it affects you. Start by praying for that person. And not that that person will take the bumper sticker off their car. Pray for that person and say, I hope that person has love in their life. I hope that person has a beautiful life. That's a loving kindness meditation in the Buddhist tradition as well. We start with loving kindness toward yourself and then toward your loved ones. And then you extend it actually out toward the people you don't even know. And finally, to the people that you don't even like. That's a really, really hard thing to do, but you can will that.

• 40:45Arthur Brooks?

  And when you do that, your orientation changes completely. Austin is magic. Jesse Stokes, last but not least, once again, coming into the email address. I was wondering if you have any travel protocols that you follow when you're traveling so that you're still your best, highest functioning cell phone traveling? I absolutely do. Those of you who saw my morning protocols, we'll put that in the show notes. The evening protocols, the phone protocols. I've got an episode we're gonna do in the coming months called Relationship Protocols. I'm protocols, baby, because I'm all about science in the public interest and applying it to my own life through better habits and better behaviors. Why I don't have to think about everything constantly. And I absolutely do have travel protocols because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year. So what am I gonna do? I'll put together an episode on it. Thank you.

• 41:29Arthur Brooks?

  I'm not gonna go through it now because that would be 45 minutes. Jesse, you don't want that. But you will wanna watch that when I actually put that together in a very organized way. So I'll be kinda like George Clooney and up in the air, except like George Clooney, PhD nerd scientist. I'll do an episode like that. Thanks for the, thanks for the idea. Well, that's it, my friends. Let me know your thoughts at [email protected]. Like the episode if you liked it. Subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, all of the above. Leave a comment and make sure that you tell your friends that this is the show you like to watch. Also, follow me on all the social media platforms, IG, LinkedIn, yada, yada. I love it all and I put content on Instagram especially.

• 42:12Arthur Brooks?

  That's actually like people don't see anyplace else. Order The Meaning of Your Life, the book behind me. It comes out this week to learn more. I hope that you find the meaning of your life. I hope you found that this is a useful episode for you. And maybe after you stop watching this, you'll turn off all your devices and sit in the poria, answering the questions, the beautiful questions, the divine questions that don't have immediate answers, but the understanding of which contains information about the meaning of your life. See you next week.

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