6 Protocols to Find Meaning and Build a Happier Life

Pre-order The Meaning of Your Life http://themeaningofyourlife.com (out March 31). This is the final episode in my 3-part series on meaning, and it begins with a question I couldn’t ignore when I returned to campus five years ago: why do so many successful, driven people feel anxious, depressed, and lonely? In this episode, I share three real-life stories from my new book, The Meaning of Your Life https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427. These stories reveal what’s missing—and why the problem isn’t a lack of enjoyment or satisfaction, but rather the third macronutrient of happiness, meaning. I finish by sharing the six protocols from my book to help you move beyond distraction and build a more meaningful life in six months. If you want to go deeper, I hope you’ll consider the book. — Brought to you by: Noble Mobile https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks—With Noble, there is only one plan: The No-Bull Plan. It’s simple. It’s transparent. And if you use less data, you get cash back. Get an exclusive offer at: https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks — 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 (02:52) Recap of Part 1 and Part 2 (07:56) Why I wrote The Meaning of Your Life (14:37) The connection between lack of meaning, anxiety, and depression (17:05) Why case studies matter (19:43) Story #1: The garbage disposal (24:13) Story #2: Just stay busy (26:40) Story #3: A long hike to…somewhere (30:02) What these stories reveal (33:18) Six protocols from The Meaning of Your Life — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com • 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 • Self-inflicted pain out of boredom: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178116301524?via%3Dihub • ... 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At REI Co-op, we don't just sell outdoor gifts. We use them, test them, trust them. So we know what to give this season. For joy rides, campfire cheers, and peak views. We know what to give the people you love who love to get out there. Because we're out there too. Just stop in and ask a green vest, like me. For the best gifts out there. Shop in-store or at REI.com.

• 0:30Arthur Brooks?

  You figure out the meaning of your life by residing in the right hemisphere of your brain where big why questions are asked. The main problem is that we're not getting to the meaning of our lives because we're doing trivial nonsense and sitting in the wrong part of our brains. Who cares? Why does it matter? Wouldn't it be better just to go through life? As Friedrich Nietzsche first suggested, that there is no why to life. There is no essence to all this stuff. So all you've got is existence, so make the most of it. Is this just a dumb conceit, an exercise in futility? The answer to that is absolutely not. There's a lot that you can simulate. There's a lot that you can fake. There's a lot of experiences that, in the computer world, they say passes the Turing test. You can fool your brain.

• 1:14Arthur Brooks?

  But the one thing you can't simulate is the meaning of your life.

• 1:24Arthur Brooks?

  Hey, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. If you're a longtime listener, well, not that long because this is, the show hasn't been around for that long. But if you've been here from the very beginning, you know the mission of this show. This is a behavioral science program dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. Using science and ideas. That's my mission in life. I want to share it with you and I want you to share it with others if you find this show useful. I've been talking over the past couple of weeks about my new book, The Meaning of Your Life. Today, when this show comes out, on the 30th of March, 2026, that's a Monday. If you're listening to it on the first day, the book drops tomorrow, Tuesday, March 31st. Please go to the website, themeaningofyourlife.com. That's right here. It's displayed somewhere.

• 2:10Arthur Brooks?

  On the screen around me right now, you can figure out what's going on in the book where I'm speaking, how you can get a copy of the book, how you can get involved in the community, all the different ways that you can understand better the meaning of your life and how you can bring it to other people. It's the book version of the show, you might say. I hope you enjoy it. I wrote it for you. If you do like it, please do share it with others and share the show with others as well and, and give me your thoughts about this show. Go to the, to the website and give us some feedback. Write to us at [email protected] or write any place where you're watching or listening to this on YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to put comments. We look at all the comments. We read them all. Critical, happy, unhappy, whatever they happen to be, because we want to know your feedback.

• 2:54Arthur Brooks?

  That's how we make it better. If you like the show, please do like and subscribe and suggest it to a friend. That's how we get this material to a lot of other people. Now, this is the third show in a three-part series. I want to go back a little bit and talk about the book and what the meaning of life actually means. And then I want to get today to the problem when you can't find the meaning of your life. So that's where we are today. Let me start with the two weeks ago, the first in this three-part series, in the trilogy of meaning, you might say. And that was a show that I did on boredom. Here's the motivation for that. Human beings are incredible at solving problems. This is a great thing.

• 3:35Arthur Brooks?

  This is the Homo sapiens advantage, as a matter of fact, this unbelievable prefrontal cortex that we have, 30% of our brain by weight. And it's only been in its extent form for about 250,000 years, since the late Pleistocene period. That's when human beings became capable of solving complex problems by, by looking into the future, practicing things that hadn't happened, by looking into the past and learning from mistakes. We could really time travel. We had this consciousness of ourselves. So, not only could I look out and observe things around me, I could look inward and see how other people see me. These are unbelievable cognitive abilities beyond any computer, what it could possibly do. And it made it possible for us to be an unbelievably successful species.

• 4:19Arthur Brooks?

  We're a problem-solving species. And ordinarily, that's great.

• 4:24Arthur Brooks?

  But not always. Sometimes we solve annoyances and create major crises. A case in point is boredom, which I talked about two weeks ago on the show. We solve boredom. We basically did. We, with our human ingenuity, we figured out a way to not actually be in a state of boredom, which we don't like because, well, it's kind of boring, isn't it? I told you about experiments that show how much we hate boredom. Experiments by my colleague Dan Gilbert, where people get shocks or they're able to give themselves shocks as opposed to just sitting quietly in a room. Ordinarily, they, they prefer pain to boredom, as a matter of fact. And so we found the perfect pain device to keep us not bored, which is also known as the device in your pocket, your phone, your, your access to the internet and social media

• 5:09Arthur Brooks?

  and email and texts, which you look at all day long, which the average person looks at 205 times a day so that you won't be bored. What I talked about two weeks ago on the show is that in eliminating boredom, we eliminated a minor annoyance and created a huge crisis. That crisis was avoiding the meaning of our life. Why? Well, as I told you, that shuts off a series of structures in the brain that are on when we're bored, that we also need to assess mind wandering, abstract thinking and the concept of meaning. You need to be bored more. That was part one. Part two was where I dug into what is meaning? What are we looking for when we want the meaning of life?

• 5:51Arthur Brooks?

  If we're going to solve the problem of getting the meaning of life, we need to define it. That was about sort of the meaning of meaning. And I, and I define meaning in terms of three principles of coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence is the answer to the why question, the mysterious why question. Why do things happen the way they do? Purpose is the why question. Why am I doing what I'm doing? And, and significance is the why question. Why does my life matter? The big three whys. When you answer those questions, you've, you've come to an understanding of the meaning of your life. Now, that requires a special use of your brain, which I suggested a minute ago on boredom. And to be more specific about it, in this last episode, which was last week, I introduced you to the world.

• 6:33Arthur Brooks?

  Or the great neuroscientist and philosopher at Oxford University, Ian McGilchrist, a brilliant man, a scientist of the highest caliber, who talks about hemispheric lateralization, the fact that your brain has two hemispheres, has two sides, and they do different things. Specifically, the left side of your brain is technology and engineering and solving problems and how to and what, all the stuff you do all day. Whereas the right hemisphere is the why hemisphere, the mystery and the meaning. You figure out the meaning of your life by residing in the right hemisphere of your brain where big why questions are asked. Now, you know already the problem, which is that we're foreclosing activity in the right hemisphere of our brains because we're using our brains wrong

• 7:16Arthur Brooks?

  in the modern world where we've wiped out boredom. And that's how it all comes together. The main problem is that we're not getting to the meaning of our lives because we're doing trivial nonsense and sitting in the wrong part of our brains. That was episode one and episode two. Now, episode three, right before the book comes out. Who cares? Why does it matter? Wouldn't it be better just to go through life, as Friedrich Nietzsche further suggested, that let's just suck it up, man? There is no why to life. There is no essence to all this stuff. So, all you've got is existence. So, make the most of it. Have a good laugh and live your life. Stop trying to find meaning in the first place.

• 8:00Arthur Brooks?

  Is this just a dumb conceit, an exercise in futility? The answer to that is absolutely not. And what I want to do today is to show you why you should want to find the meaning of your life, why I wrote this book in the first place, what you can get if you read this book and if you share these ideas with other people. Today, the importance of finding the meaning of your life. Now, let me back up a little bit about how my quest for understanding the answers to these questions started. And it really starts at the big picture level, at my natural vocational home.

• 8:38Arthur Brooks?

  I'm an academic. In my heart, I'm an academic. I was born to be an academic. I was running around the university campus when I was a baby. My dad was a college professor. That's all he did. From the age of 25, when he got his master's degree and started teaching at a college, all the way through to his PhD. And his whole life, as a matter of fact, he never, he literally never had any other jobs, except during the summers when I was little. College professors didn't make very much money. And so my dad during those days, you know, he drove a bus to the city to make ends meet. But he was fundamentally an academic. Now, why was he an academic? Because his dad was an academic. Seeing a pattern here, right? I had told myself I wasn't going to do it. I tried not to do it, but I got sucked in.

• 9:22Arthur Brooks?

  All the way through my twenties, I was a musician, as a matter of fact. I didn't go to college until my late twenties. Some of you have heard me tell that story. I won't bother you with it. But by the time I went to college and graduated the month before my 30th birthday, yeah, I'm going to do that too. It's the best life. I'm made to be on campuses. And, and I finished my PhD at 34 and became a full-time academic myself. When I got my first professorship, it was as good as I thought it was going to be. There aren't that many things that live up to the expectations, are there? The pyramids in Giza lives up to your expectations. The glaciers in, in Alaska, that lives up to it. Venice, that lives up to your expectations. And academia, the academic life really is great.

• 10:05Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, not for everybody, obviously, but for me, I mean, the teaching, the students, the research, the curiosity, it's so great. I've always loved it. And I loved it for the very first time. When I first took my first assistant professorship at Georgia State University after finishing my PhD in 1998. I was cranking out research papers. I was teaching big classes full of students, getting better at my teaching. It was beautiful. And one of the, the main things I liked about it was the culture among the students. They were happy. I like being around happy people and, and people in college and graduate school were traditionally, according to the data, but according to probably your experience too, if you're anything like my age, that was the happiest time of life.

• 10:50Arthur Brooks?

  That's when you made your friends. That's when you were falling in love. That's when you were hearing big new ideas that were blowing your mind, sometimes scary, controversial things and where you could have experiences of those ideas without being all freaked out. Yeah, it was great. That's what it always was. I went from Georgia State to Syracuse University. I loved it at Syracuse. And you're thinking, yeah, it's probably because of the weather, right? You know, no, it was the people. It was the students. It was my colleagues. It was the happiness. It was the culture. Well, along the way, I decided to make a little career change. I've made a lot of career changes. I went from French horn player to, you know, social scientist. That's a big one. But I made another big one in 2008 when I was 44.

• 11:32Arthur Brooks?

  I left academia to be a CEO, to be the chief executive of a great big nonprofit think tank in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute. That was a completely consuming job. That was the hardest job I ever had by far, as a matter of fact. It was exhausting. It had a high learning curve and I did it for almost 11 years. Now, that was so consuming that I wasn't paying any attention to university life. But I vowed to do it for 10 years. I did it for actually exactly 10 years and six months. I lived up to how long I said I was gonna do it and I got out when I said I was gonna leave. Now, I thought about what do I want to do when I'm done with that? And I couldn't get it out of my head. I had to go back to my home. I had to get back on campus.

• 12:16Arthur Brooks?

  That's where I'm made to be. And Esther, my wife, she's like, yeah, you gotta go back on campus. That's where your heart is. But I did, you know, about six months before I left, I got a few offers. I got offers from about 10 universities to go back and to be a professor. And I took the one that I liked the most, which was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. They offered the ability for me to actually teach more or less what I wanted and a lot of freedom to get back into my research, et cetera. And I thought, yeah, getting back to my happy place. My happy place. And I went back to academia in 2019 and it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same thing that I had left at the end of 2008. It had, it had darkened.

• 12:56Arthur Brooks?

  It wasn't just Harvard. It was academia in general, what had been statistically happier, brighter than the rest of the country. Had become darker, as a matter of fact. You found that students on university campuses, they were more likely to be suffering depression, way more likely than they had in years past. Since 2008, the rates of clinical depression among college students had tripled through about 2019. Generalized anxiety had almost doubled, as a matter of fact. This was a psychogenic epidemic, which is a fancy way that behavioral scientists like me talk about a source of real misery that doesn't have an apparent biological origin. Psychogenic epidemic.

• 13:40Arthur Brooks?

  So when I get back to academia in 2019, of course, I see this and I'm shocked and sad. Wasn't right. But of course, I'm also interested. I'm a social entrepreneur, heart. When I see tragedy and trouble, I also see opportunity. There's an opportunity to do good. I'm, as a behavioral scientist, dedicated to, well, you know, lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. Now's the time, I thought. But I gotta figure out what's wrong. What's going wrong? You already know, because I hope you've listened to the last two episodes. What's going wrong is that, starting about the time I left academia in 2008, we solved boredom.

• 14:23Arthur Brooks?

  That's when smartphones started to proliferate. 2007 is when the first iPhone was delivered. 2008, it was in almost everybody's pocket. By 2009, 2010, 2011, the apps were on every phone. Dating apps for about 2012 and on and on it went. Life became completely online is what it came down to. And not just online. Online chased people around. It was sitting in their back pockets all the time. And that got rid of boredom, which changed our brains. We were not using our brains, the mysterious, the right hemisphere of love and meaning. We weren't in the right space to actually do that. That's the last two episodes that I mentioned before. So who cares? Why does it matter?

• 15:06Arthur Brooks?

  And the answer is, that's actually why we had the mental health crisis on campuses, and not just on campuses. Disproportionately among people under 30 was this meaninglessness. What I found when I came back to academia in 2019, I started looking at the data, is the best predictor I could find of clinical depression and generalized anxiety was the answer yes to the question, does your life feel meaningless? In fact, I'll put the link to this in the show notes. There's data, excellent data that's been collected for a long time by the polling firm Monitoring the Future that asks, does your life feel meaningless? That was an odd question without very interesting answers for the longest time.

• 15:50Arthur Brooks?

  It kind of bumped along between, you know, I don't know, 5% and 15% of the population, until 2008, when suddenly it started taking a dog leg upward. Now, I'm not saying that people felt meaningless about their lives, because I left academia, obviously. It was because of the proliferation of the anti-boredom devices, of the devices that took meaning away. And when meaning goes, depression comes. Here's the reason we should be thinking about the meaning of life. If you go back to an earlier episode, I'll make sure this is linked to it right here. Happiness, happiness in life equals enjoyment, satisfaction, plus meaning.

• 16:33Arthur Brooks?

  If meaning becomes devoid, happiness becomes unavailable. That's why we have the misery crisis. That's why we have the psychogenic epidemic. Like, I've seen the data. There's no problem with enjoyment. Young people arguably enjoy life more than any other cohort. They're getting that right in a lot of ways. Satisfaction on my campus is super high. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. That's what they're doing all day long at Harvard University, is accomplishing things with a tremendous struggle, because it's a sacrifice what they're doing with this hard education at this fine institution, and many other walks of life in schools around the country. The problem is that when you look at the data, it is obvious and clear that meaning

• 17:18Arthur Brooks?

  has imploded, and that's what's leading to the unhappiness epidemic in America today.

• 17:25Arthur Brooks?

  That's why it matters.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  At REI Co-op, we don't just sell outdoor gifts. We use them, test them, trust them. So we know what to give this season. For joy rides, campfire cheers, and peak views. We know what to give the people you love who love to get out there. Because we're out there too. Just stop in and ask a green vest, like me. For the best gifts out there. Shop in-store or at REI.com.

• 17:57Arthur Brooks?

  I care about love and happiness. I want more human flourishing, so I need more meaning. Okay, so, once I find this, to my satisfaction, you know, this is before I started this book, by the way. I wasn't quite there yet. I needed to hear the stories that people would tell. Back in the old days, social scientists used to do their, their research in the following way. Adam Smith, who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, that was this treatise based on data about how market economies worked. It's kind of the early bible of capitalism, as a matter of fact. But it wasn't just a bunch of statistical correlations that he was putting together. No. Adam Smith said, you know, when this happens, this happens, et cetera, et cetera.

• 18:41Arthur Brooks?

  He was collecting data, in his way. More importantly, though, he was talking to people, because that's what social scientists do. They're supposed to focus on the social part. So he would walk factory floors, talk to workers. He has a long section in The Wealth of Nations on the pin factory. How, you know, you make little pins, like sewing pins. And you roll out the wire and you cut it, you flatten it, et cetera. He talked about how workers that were in a pin factory, how they're actually doing their work, and talking to them about how they were living their lives. That's the richness in social science. And that's important that we not get away from that by just doing experiments and regression analyses. So that's what I do too. Once I see statistical patterns, then I start talking to people to understand, in real life,

• 19:26Arthur Brooks?

  what these patterns mean. And when I did, well, then I really started to understand this psychogenic epidemic. And I realized why I needed to write this book and why I needed to be a warrior in the cause for meaning. I did a whole bunch of case studies. Right now, you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep... Scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life. Or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore. But it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either.

• 20:10Arthur Brooks?

  But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Well, here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're gonna like how it feels. What I want to do now is I just want to tell you three stories. Three stories of real people that I talked to, and these are stories in their own words. Now, rather than summarizing these things, I'm just gonna read it.

• 20:54Arthur Brooks?

  This is from the introduction to the book, okay? So I'm gonna read a short section of the book. If you've got the audiobook, this should be pretty much the same, but only for a couple of minutes. Don't worry, I'm not gonna read you the whole book. But these stories are going to sum up why this is a very important issue as far as I'm concerned. Story number one is called "The Garbage Disposal."

• 21:13Arthur Brooks?

  Mark, age 32, is exactly what you would conjure up in your mind if I asked you to imagine a textbook driver. He's college educated, hardworking, and healthy. He's a bootstraps guy. His parents broke up when he was young and they never had much money. But Mark avoided trouble, went to college, unlike most of the people he grew up with, and landed an excellent job as a data analyst. Mark is a gym rat and in great physical shape. If you were writing an advice column for men on how to succeed in life, Mark would pretty much be the poster child for what you would recommend. But when we spoke and he told me all this, something sounded off.

• 21:54Arthur Brooks?

  As he described his situation on paper, a list of carefully managed accomplishments. His voice was hollow, as though he was describing a scenario he didn't really believe. I pressed him to go deeper. He paused, and then he said this. "My life feels empty."

• 22:14Arthur Brooks?

  I asked him what he was missing. He thought for a minute, and then he told me a story. A year or so ago, he was on a first date with a woman he'd met on one of the dating apps. Over dinner, she mentioned to him in passing that her garbage disposal was clogged, and she didn't know what to do about it. He volunteered to help her with it and ended up fixing it for her that very evening. He said that this gave him a deep sense of satisfaction and purpose. Later, at his own apartment, he remembered that his own garbage disposal was clogged up as well. The fix was easy, but he had just never got around to doing anything about it. A year later, he still hasn't. Now, maybe that sounds like a random anecdote, but I understood that he was expressing something profound.

• 22:59Arthur Brooks?

  Mark wasn't saying that he felt some sort of existential need to become a handyman. What he craved was the sense of purpose and significance that came from being needed by someone. The garbage disposal date never went anywhere, unfortunately, nor had any of his dates in years, he told me. The only way to meet women, he felt, was on a dating app. By his own count, he'd gone on 50 first dates. But the connections always felt fake. He never felt any authenticity with people he met that way, so he'd given up on the idea that his soulmate was somewhere online. Maybe, he feared, his soulmate simply doesn't exist. His friendships haven't fared much better. During the lonely coronavirus lockdowns, he moved to a new city he'd never been to, hoping to meet new people.

• 23:44Arthur Brooks?

  He didn't, at least not real humans in three dimensions. His job went fully remote and never came back in person. His work colleagues were and still are two-dimensional avatars on a Zoom screen. He only established a few social relationships in the new city, and now rarely sees anyone more than once a week. He feels stuck on the outside of life, viewing the world through a double pane window. To pass his overabundant free time, Mark, like almost everyone these days, is online a lot. Scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, he spends hours listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations, but it leaves him feeling empty. He calls it social pornography.

• 24:30Arthur Brooks?

  But like all digital distraction, it's hard to avoid without something better to do. And most of the time, there's nothing better to do. He craves a big, meaningful project, building something, writing something, and dreams of finding that project and immersing himself in it. But he can't come up with any ideas for what that project might be, so it's back online. Occasionally, he panics. Is this it forever? Will I die alone? Will I ever find what I'm looking for? But then the fear subsides, and he falls back into the zooming, scrolling, and isolation, and the months click by. Story number two.

• 25:13Arthur Brooks?

  Just stay busy. Maria's parents are probably bragging about her to the neighbors right now. Their 27-year-old daughter has always been a bright light, top grades in school, never in trouble. She was always a leader and ambitious, completing a bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering, joining the military, and rising fast as an officer in the cyber and information sciences. She holds multiple associations and prestigious academic societies and think tanks. On the personal side, however, things aren't going well for Maria. Her extraordinary energy, the envy of others, isn't just her way to succeed, but also to distract herself. The hustle diverts her attention from an intense sense of emptiness that grows every year.

• 25:58Arthur Brooks?

  She appears hyper-focused, a woman on a mission. But she confesses privately that her life has no coherence. She has no idea where she's going, nor what she even wants. She hopes that through her work, a sense of purpose will emerge. But it never does. She feels no passion for it, no calling, no sense of vocation. When we speak, I ask her what big change she would like to see in her life in a year's time. She pauses for a long time and fails to come up with a definite answer. "Big questions like this make her feel afraid," she says, "so she avoids them by staying busy." "What if I never find the answers?" she asks me, "or if there are no answers."

• 26:44Arthur Brooks?

  What about her relationships? Maria has a boyfriend, but she doesn't know where that relationship is going. It's just okay, for now. She's an extrovert and has friends, but she says they're more deal friends than real friends. She rarely goes deep with anyone in her circle. She's not very close to her parents or siblings. Although she, in theory, is a religious believer, she doesn't practice her faith at all. I ask why not? She doesn't know. When she's too tired to work, Maria tells me that she would like to read books or do something productive and creative, but somehow doesn't know how to get started. Instead, she finds herself simply on her phone,

• 27:24Arthur Brooks?

  scrolling social media and watching YouTube, sometimes for hours at a time. This fills her with guilt for wasting time, but it keeps her mind off something she knows she's missing, but can't quite name. And finally, story number three. A long hike to...somewhere. Mark and Maria are among the typical high-performing adults I've met in my teaching and travels over the past seven years. Their lives look enviable from the outside, but they feel empty on the inside. They're waiting for their purpose to find them, but it never does. As they wait, they distract themselves with work and soothe themselves with tech. I feel a paternal concern for Mark and Maria.

• 28:08Arthur Brooks?

  After all, I'm old enough to be their father. Paul, however, is closer to a peer. He could be a younger sibling to me, in fact, and because of that, his story leaves me more shaken than the others. At 47, Paul would appear to have everything figured out. He's smart and friendly. He's married with three kids and has a successful career as a social scientist at a top university. Before I met him, I knew about him. I admired his work. But scratch the surface and a darker narrative emerges. Paul's parents divorced when he was very young and he grew up in poverty without much adult attention. A clever kid, he quickly figured out that adults gave him the approval he craved when he excelled in school.

• 28:52Arthur Brooks?

  Love, he figured out, is earned through achievements. So, all of his sense of purpose came from getting good grades, good test scores, the next gold star, in his words. And to maintain that sense of purpose, he essentially never left school, winding up as a professor. Ten years ago, Paul was ambitious and full of passion for ideas, writing a series of books in his academic field. They weren't bestsellers, they were too specialized and academically rigorous, but he was proud of them and he told himself, "The right people were reading them." The recognition he got for these books was his grown-up gold stars, but their luster faded over the decade as his career progress slowed. Each new book began to feel like the one before, and they all began to seem pointless,

• 29:36Arthur Brooks?

  in his words, and rote. Today, he feels like his research has little impact, that it makes no difference to the world and wins little recognition from other scholars. He is way behind schedule on a major writing project, but doesn't have the motivation to work on it. His sense of purpose and direction are fading away. It's not as if Paul has no time to work. The problem is how he spends the time he has. It's as if something is eating his brain so that he can't focus. An hour that he would have once used to read a research paper, he now uses to anesthetize himself, looking at social media to block the growing ennui. This distracts him from his melancholy, but, like Maria, he feels enormous remorse

• 30:20Arthur Brooks?

  for wasting his time. With the eloquence of Franz Kafka, he's a thinker and writer after all, Paul sums up his absurd feeling predicament. "Life is like a factory churning out days of my existence, indifferently prepackaged for my mandatory consumption."

• 30:38Arthur Brooks?

  So what do you want? I ask him. He pauses, struggling to find the words. "I want to go hiking," he says at last. "For a long time." I ask him where he wants to go hiking. Paul's answer might be literal, or it might be metaphorical. I can't tell. "To where I might find what I'm looking for." So what's happening here in these stories? What's happening to these people? I think you know what's missing in their lives. They identified it in all the words that they said. There are many, many stories like this in the book. And one of the things that they all have in common is they talk about not knowing what they're meant to do. That life feels meaningless, or they can't find the meaning.

• 31:22Arthur Brooks?

  That there's an emptiness, a hollowness to everything they're doing. Some of them talk about the fact that they're... They feel like they should be doing something, but that what they do feels fake. That all their time online, behind the screen, it all feels like a simulation of real life. Well, that's what it feels like when you're using your brain wrong. When you're in the wrong hemisphere, as I talked about in last week's episode. There's a lot that you can simulate. There's a lot that you can fake. There's a lot of experiences that, well, in the computer world, they say passes the Turing test. You can fool your brain. But the one thing you can't simulate is the meaning of your life. That's an in-real-life thing.

• 32:06Arthur Brooks?

  That's why this matters. Is this you? Can you relate to these stories? Can you relate to the sense of emptiness? Funny, you know? People in times before we over-technologized and over-complicated our lives, their lives were actually pretty boring from moment to moment. I mentioned the other day, you know, your great-grandfather of mine, Leroy Brooks. Born in 1862. Whenever he came home to his wife and said, "Had to leave early today, honey, because I had a panic attack behind the mule today." Oh, his brain was working the way it was supposed to. And by the way, he was bored a lot. But here's the irony. His life wasn't boring.

• 32:48Arthur Brooks?

  At the end of the day, at the meta-level, there was nothing fake about his life at all. That yours? You're probably never bored moment to moment, but I bet you, when you check your phone 205 times a day, once every 13 minutes or more, that you feel pretty bored at the end of the day. That you feel like what you accomplished wasn't real. See, when our brain works the way it's supposed to, we have moments of boredom and suffering and discomfort, but it comes together to something really meaningful. When we get rid of all of those experiences, because of what we've done to solve our little problems, those little problems do go away and they turn into a great big problem, but ironically, is much worse than anything we experienced before.

• 33:32Arthur Brooks?

  This book is a guidebook on how to solve that. Now fundamentally, I've been talking about the problems in the last three episodes, but this book, two-thirds of it, is a six-part strategic plan for you in six months to find the meaning of your life. This is all based on science. It's all based on the cutting-edge ways, which aren't cutting-edge at all. They're living alive in real life to get to the right hemisphere of your brain where mystery and meaning can be found. The problems that can't be solved analytically, that can only be lived and understood in a spirit of love. But you have to know how to do it, and you have to make a commitment to doing that. And that's what this is really all about. Here are the six parts, and I'll get into it more deeply in future episodes.

• 34:16Arthur Brooks?

  If you want to get the details, read the book tomorrow, and you'll see. These are the six protocols for finding meaning. The six ways to get to the right hemisphere of your brain. Number one. Number one is to ask.

• 34:35Arthur Brooks?

  Big unanswerable questions. One of the things that all philosophical traditions have in common, almost every religious tradition has in common, because philosophy and religion are right hemisphere disciplines. What they have in common is big questions you can't quite answer. I've mentioned in the podcast before, koans, which are the riddles that they use in Japanese Zen Buddhism to teach novice monks. What's the sound of one hand clapping? That kind of thing. When you contemplate questions that don't have answers, it opens up your brain. Now, that was standard fare for dorm room conversations late at night when people who are my age were in college. But of course, what do you do when you come home from a party at 11:30 PM in college today?

• 35:20Arthur Brooks?

  You probably scroll your phone, which of course has eliminated the conversations that we need to have. Number one is ask deeper questions. The most human thing, by the way. You know, the one thing that no non-human animal has never done is ask questions. That's the essence of what it means to be fully human. Not to answer questions like an AI, but to ask the big questions that an AI could never come up with. Number two is fall in love is to risk your heart. That is the most dangerous feeling, uncertain, complex experience is romantic love. I've done a whole episode on that, a very popular episode about the neurochemical cascade that happens inside your brain, the Fourth of July inside your cranium

• 36:05Arthur Brooks?

  when you're falling in love, the things you can't explain. And in fact, the ancient philosophers often talked about the fact that the meaning of life generally starts from the experience of romantic love. That's Plato's ladder of love from Dio Tim of Montine. I've talked about that in the episode on romantic love as well. You start with romantic love and you climb the ladder and you ultimately find the meaning of life. Give your heart away is part two. Part three is to seek transcendence. Now transcendence means to get above yourself. The great irony of life is that we're impelled to be intensely auto-focused. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. You'll never find the meaning of your life by looking at yourself. You'll only find the meaning of your life

• 36:49Arthur Brooks?

  by zooming out on yourself and standing in awe of something greater. The two parts of transcendence are looking up to the divine and looking out to love and serve others. That's part three. Part four is finding your calling. Your calling in life, what are you supposed to do? Now, whether that's market work or non-market work, there is something generative where you create value in the world, value in your life and with your life and value in the lives of other people. That's your calling. What is a calling? What do they all have in common? I don't care if you work for the post office or teach university or trying to become the president of the United States. The only way it will bring joy, meaning, is if you believe you're earning your success and you're serving other people. Talk a lot about that in great details

• 37:34Arthur Brooks?

  about how to do that in the book. The next part, part five, is to seek beauty. Beauty is a right brain experience. And beauty is exactly what's missing when everything is a simulation. You can't simulate true beauty. I defy you to look into the highest quality computer screen and find something that is as beautiful as the actual forest of which the picture's been taken and transmitted to your screen. Can't do it. I defy you to take a digital representation of any music and have it be as beautiful as what you would hear in person. The experience of a painting that you're seeing. Artistic beauty, natural beauty, moral beauty. I defy you to find the examples of moral beauty you can find in real life with true people.

• 38:19Arthur Brooks?

  If you go on social media, you won't find it. On the contrary, you find the opposite of moral beauty. You need more beauty in your life to make your brain work properly. And last but not least, and this is a future episode. I'm gonna have to do a whole episode on that. And that, that's the hard one, which is suffering. Never waste your suffering. The truth of the matter is that growth, that learning, that understanding who you are as a person and finding the meaning of your life requires a non-trivial amount of suffering in your life and, and, and learning from it as opposed to resisting it. There's a lot of research that shows that unhappiness is largely a right hemispheric experience, not coincidentally, the same hemisphere that you employ to find the meaning of your life.

• 39:02Arthur Brooks?

  I will talk about how the greatest minds, the philosophers and the theologians have talked about suffering as a pathway to meaning and make it that way in your life as well. But just remember this, the key to understanding suffering in life is not to eradicate yourself of pain, but rather to learn how to manage your resistance to that pain. Then more meaning can be yours through the inevitable suffering that is part of any good life. You'll get more of that, obviously. I mean, I just gave you a quick synopsis. That was a thumbnail sketch. Two thirds of the book are those six areas. And I give you real protocols and real ideas, real habits that you can adopt. I'm a practical man after all. The idea of doing this kind of social science is to give you information that you can actually use and you will find it in the book.

• 39:47Arthur Brooks?

  And I hope you use it. I hope you pass it on. I hope you find meaning. People see it in you and they want to find the meaning of their life as well. Because if we do that, well, the world really starts to change. Thank you for supporting this project. Thank you for sharing the ideas with others. If you like this podcast, please let me know your thoughts, actually critically or uncritically, praise or criticism, I like it all. Send it to us at [email protected]. Please like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple and leave a comment. As I said before, I'll read it, even if it's negative, especially if it's negative. Thank you for taking time to feedback. If you've got any suggestions for new topics or what we can do on the show, or you have any questions about any of the sources, or you think there's something I need to correct, just let me know.

• 40:31Arthur Brooks?

  Follow me on on social media. We have a big and growing group on social media that are following these ideas on Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms. And order The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in the Age of Emptiness, right back there. Get it for somebody that you love and I hope you enjoy the book. Go to the website, themeaningofyourlife.com to get started. And as always, thanks for watching.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new Fall Arrivals in-store and online now at lululemon.com.