How To Find Purpose In An Age Of Emptiness with Arthur Brooks #675

Why does struggling for something make it more satisfying? And why can getting what you want leave you feeling flat? In this episode, I sit down with Arthur Brooks, one of the world's leading voices on the science of happiness, for a conversation that might change how you feel about your life. Arthur is a professor at Vanderbilt University, senior fellow of Harvard Business School and bestselling author of multiple books, including new title, The Meaning Of Your Life. He walked away from a successful career when he realised that despite a happy marriage, strong faith and good income, he struggled to feel happy. That personal reckoning led him to years of research into what really makes people thrive – and in this conversation, he shares the framework he developed to explain it. Using an analogy from nutrition science, Arthur describes happiness as requiring three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. We talk about why so many high achievers get the first one wrong. Suffering and struggle, he says, aren’t obstacles to a fulfilling life but essential ingredients of it – hence removing all friction from our lives can leave us feeling empty rather than content. We also get into goals, and why reaching them tends not to deliver the lasting happiness we expect. Arthur calls this the arrival fallacy, and understanding might change how you approach your next big challenge. On relationships, Arthur shares research showing that the healthiest marriages are not the ones with the least conflict, but the ones with the most honesty. We talk frankly about what that has looked like in our own marriages, what we can all learn from our parents when it comes to happiness, and the best (and easiest) way to send a positive message to our children. Arthur also shares what he’s learned about presence, faith and love from his relationship and his daily practices. We explore the difference between solitude and loneliness and how levels of social connection can be individual. And I hope you’ll pay attention to the section on why leisure needs to be treated as seriously as work. This is a warm, honest and personal conversation with someone who’s spent decades studying happiness – but who’s candid about how hard he’s worked to feel it himself. By reframing happiness as a direction not a destination, I think it could be a life-changing listen for you. The Thrive Tour: Transform Your Health and Happiness, a live show: Book Your Tickets https://drchatterjee.com/live Thanks to our sponsors: https://exhalecoffee.com/livemore https://boncharge.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/675 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Before we get into this week's episode, I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour, Transform Your Health and Happiness, to Canada and Europe this September and November. It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life-changing insights, and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer, and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues, go to drchatterjee.com/live. I really hope that you can join me.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Everybody wants to be happy, and we don't know how to do it. This is the thing. You don't try to get happiness. If you try to get happiness, you're going to be in trouble. You do the things that you need such that happiness happens to you. Work to enjoy your life, try to get more satisfaction, and search for the why of your existence.

• 1:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, guys. How are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rongen-Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

• 1:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, guys. It is so good to be back. I really hope you've had a relaxing summer. I have had the most wonderful few weeks, spending loads of time with my family. I've experienced many internal breakthroughs, which I can't wait to share with you over the coming months. And of course, here we are at the start of a brand-new season of my podcast. I have got some absolutely fantastic conversations lined up for you over the coming weeks and months, so let's get started with episode 675. Why does struggling for something make it more satisfying?

• 1:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And why can getting what you want leave you feeling flat? Well, in this week's episode, I sit down with Arthur Brooks, one of the world's leading voices on the science of happiness, for a conversation that might just change how you feel about your life. Arthur is a professor at Vanderbilt University, senior fellow of Harvard Business School, and bestselling author of multiple books, including his very latest, The Meaning of Your Life. In our conversation, Arthur shares what he calls his three macronutrients of a happy life: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

• 2:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  We discuss the genetics of happiness, the concept of earned success, and the difference between enjoyment and pleasure. We also explore the importance of leisure time, solitude, and self-transcendence, and along the way, Arthur shares some personal reflections on his own marriage, his relationship with his children, and the moments where he got things wrong and had to find his way back. We also discuss goals and why reaching them tends not to deliver the lasting happiness we expect, and relationships, where the research shows that the healthiest marriages are not the ones with the least conflict, but the ones with the most honesty.

• 3:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is a warm, personal, and uplifting conversation that I'm pretty sure will leave you with a deeper understanding of what it means to live a happy and contented life.

• 3:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Arthur, you're probably one of the most prominent voices globally talking about happiness. Where have you learnt the most about happiness from? Is it the science of your research, your religion, or your wife?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  So I've learned different things from those three sources. I've been married a long time, been married 35 years. I have a very happy marriage, a very high conflict, high honesty, happy marriage to a Spaniard. Right? And the truth is that I needed more happiness information in spite of the fact that I have a happy marriage. And I realised this not that long ago, about seven years ago. Now, I'm trained as a behavioural scientist. I got my PhD almost 30 years ago, as a matter of fact. But in the middle of my academic career, I left to run a company. And for 11 years, I was a CEO of a big nonprofit in Washington DC. And I was very unhappy by the end of it. I couldn't find the sense of meaning in my life, and I was very, very stressed out, et cetera.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  And I realised that despite the fact that all of the things in my life were technically on point, I have a happy marriage, I'm serious about my faith, et cetera, I have great kids, I make a good living, that I was doing a lot of things wrong, and I needed to get on point. I needed to get my happiness protocols on point. So I quit, I walked away, and I dedicated myself to actually being more serious about the science of happiness that I could bring to other people, starting, well, really with myself. And I began teaching that. And what I have found is this combination of the right conditions in your life, but also doing things on purpose, quite correctly, that actually will come together to make the happiest possible person. You can have a super happy marriage and be an unhappy person, is the bottom line, if you're doing a lot of other things wrong.

• 5:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about recently is that there are happy people out there who don't need a framework for happiness.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So in your book on happiness, you have this beautiful framework, these three macronutrients that are required, right? Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. In my book on happiness, I created this framework, which is alignment, contentment, and control. We can talk about that and compare and contrast shortly. But I also have to acknowledge that there are so many people out there, living in many countries around the world, who are probably naturally happy, and their culture, and maybe even their religion, leads to them doing the practices that we talk about, without them needing an expert telling them how to do it.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have good hygiene because of some of these things. And so did I, because I'm serious about my faith, and the data are very clear that people who are serious about religious faith are happier than those who aren't, that people who have happy marriages are happier than those who aren't. But I had a problem. My big problem actually comes back to the genetics of happiness. There are really interesting identical twin studies, from the psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Lichen and Teligen, who actually did these, they looked at this database on identical twins born between the mid-30s and the mid-60s that were separated at birth and adopted into separate families, which is quasi-experimental conditions, right? Because they were reunited about the age of 40 and given personality tests. And of course, there was a bunch of nerds like us with white lab coats, following them

• 6:59Speaker 01

  around with clipboards, collecting data. And it turns out that about half of your happiness is genetic. Now, what does this mean? This means that if everything is on point, religion, family, et cetera, et cetera, and you've got good genetics, you don't have to worry at all about the science of happiness. That's absolutely the case. It's like these guys who have unbelievable muscle protein synthesis because of their superior genetics, and they can eat like an 11-year-old, and they still look like a Greek god. Well, that doesn't work for the rest of us. And so I come from gloomy stock. You know, I come from parents who suffered a lot in Seattle, Washington, which has maybe even worse weather than Wilmesloe in northern England. And so the result of it is I had to do the work.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  It wasn't enough just to have some of these institutional things on point. I needed to learn more, is how that worked out. I'm a naturally unhappy person, which is why I study happiness. Are you a naturally happy person?

• 7:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's tricky. Am I naturally happy? I think so, and at the same time, I resonate with so much of your work because I have fallen into certain modern traps over the course of my life. Okay? And those traps, essentially thinking that external validation would make me happy. I learnt, when I got more external validation than I could have possibly dreamt of as a young boy, I realised, oh, yeah, this is a trap, you can read about it, but now you're in the trap. Okay? So I feel now, at 48, genuinely, I couldn't be happier. Like, and I feel there's multiple components of that.

• 8:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  But going back to your point about genetics, I don't know what my genetics are, but I would imagine that I won the genetic lottery when it comes to happiness.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  You knew your parents well. You said your father died about 10 years ago, and your mother's still alive. Were they generally happy people?

• 8:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think my dad, even when he was knackered and tired...

• 8:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  He'd always have a smile, he'd always tell jokes. He, I think he was naturally happy. And if I think about mum, yeah, obviously my parents are naturally happy.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  So they're sunny people. I know they're immigrants. Immigrants have a particular, there's a particular kind of hypomanic edge. And that's very characteristic of immigrants, of hardworking immigrants. It's that, you know, they want more, more, more, more, right? They tend to present kind of workaholically, but what they really want is these deep experiences of the life that they can actually lead, right?

• 9:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. Perhaps you could go through your happiness model.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can just outline it for the audience who may not be familiar with it. Okay, so explain those three macronutrients of happiness.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, that's great. And by the way, your model too, which I think actually maps pretty nicely onto the one that I talked about.

• 9:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I first came into the happiness business, I mean, I wrote a book 25 years ago about happiness and, and I got, got the flavor for it. When I came back to academia and I took a professorship at Harvard, I decided I was gonna do that, but I had to look at the whole field and say, what's wrong with the field? You know, why is it that happiness experts are not having more impact on how people live their lives? Everybody wants to be happy and, and we don't know how to do it. Now, now, part of the reason is because it's a misbegotten idea that you can be actually cosmically happy. I mean, we're going to have negative emotions, which is protective, which is a protective phenomenon. If you didn't have fear, anger, disgust and sadness, you'd be a tiger's lunch in, you know, 15 minutes. So you need these things and you're going to have negative experiences because you're walking through the world, but, but we want to be happier than we currently are and we don't know how.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Now, most of the, the research, when I came back to the field in 2019, talked about happiness as, as you feel happy and you have objective proof that you're happy, that's happiness. Well, it's completely circular and not helpful. So I went back to the way that you would define it by looking at the nutrition literature. Who has the best health and what are they eating? And what they find is that, you know, you'll break up into macronutrients, how, you know, how people are eating. And this gets to this whole concept of, of protein, carbohydrates and fat in proper balance and abundance, so that you'll have a healthy body and you'll eat in a healthy way. And you, as a physician, you had to give all kinds of people advice.

• 11:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Over the years that are getting too much carbohydrate and not enough protein, for example. So I knew that there was a model underneath that and I went to the literature to find out, okay, what are the phenomena that you find that are most correlated with people who have the most happiness? Number one, they enjoy their lives. And enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure. Pleasure is a largely limbic phenomenon, you know, activating the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum of the brain where you say, and it's a very blunt thing. I mean, you can get the same sort of pleasure, the same sense of ebullience if you, if your girlfriend says, I love you, or if you have a big bump of cocaine. I mean, that's, we have thrifty brains, right? And so pleasure is not, the, the, the secret to happiness is not pleasure. Pleasure doesn't lead you to happiness.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Pleasure in abundance leads you to rehab. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. It's a largely executive experience of pleasure, which means that if you're, if you're, if you love something, it really feels good and it could be addictive. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.

• 12:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  That's how it's sort of dangerous. That's how I've talked about it with my kids and my students over the years. So enjoyment is number one. You gotta enjoy your life and a lot of what I talk about is enjoyment. I work a lot with super strivers and hardworking people and that's where they're weak. A lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs, they don't enjoy their lives very much. They just don't, you know, because they, they don't do, for example, I mean, they're, I, I look at your show, which is super popular, really, really, really successful. They would not be able to stop the show for a couple of months every year. They wouldn't be able to do it. The reason that you can is because you're assiduous about that macronutrient of your happiness, which is to enjoy your life.

• 12:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  You wanna do that. So that's part one. And I have to give people lessons on how to enjoy their lives. Number, scientifically. Number two is satisfaction. Satisfaction, the second macronutrient, is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. It's a funny thing about Homo sapiens that we wanna, we want to accomplish things, but we must suffer or we don't find sweetness in them.

• 13:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Suffering and accomplishment are both really important for us to get satisfaction in life. And this is a big mistake that a lot of people make. They want accomplishment without, without suffering and then they don't get satisfaction and they don't know why, they're not getting full flavor from their lives. And so you need to inject more suffering into people's lives. It's like eating a cake with no salt in it. It's like, something's wrong here. This doesn't have a complex flavor. It doesn't even taste good, right? Which is like American snacks, right?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  So, so, and, and it's funny because, you know, that's why you taught your kids, good things come to people who wait. Good things come to those who wait because what you're saying is that you're gonna enjoy your dinner if you're hungry.

• 13:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  At dinnertime, that you're gonna get a sweeter reward if you work hard for something. And it's not just because the work, working hard will give you a better accomplishment. It's because you'll actually deprive yourself and that in and of itself will lead to higher satisfaction, which is a funny thing. And then, of course, all of it downstream leads to the mystery of why you can't keep any satisfaction and the hedonic treadmill where you try and try and try, as Mick Jagger sang, but you can't get no, actually, you can't keep no satisfaction. That's what he should have said.

• 14:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  I can't keep no satisfaction. And the reason for that is you can't keep positive emotions around. That's not what positive emotions are for, is to give you a permanently nice life.

• 14:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  They're signals from the limbic system to you about what's going on in your environment as to whether you should approach or avoid things.

• 14:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love the, the nutrition analogy with micronutrients, because as you were just describing satisfaction, for some reason, protein popped into my head and I thought, you can't, you can't keep protein.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You can take it in and, and utilize it and turn it into muscle, but you can't really, you know.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  You have to keep eating it because you can't, you can't.

• 14:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  You can't actually produce it endogenously.

• 14:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, like satisfaction, right? You can't keep it.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  That's right. You can't keep no satisfaction, but you try and you try and you try. And then the weird part is, the reason we're so successful as a species is because we don't understand this. Mother nature wants us in the hunt. And so she says, oh, you know, you, when you get that thing, this, you get the Ferrari. When you get the Ferrari, then you're gonna be happy forever. And you get the Ferrari and, you know, two months later, you're like, yeah, I should have gotten the yellow one. And it's because you can't keep no satisfaction. And, and if you could, you'd stop hunting and, and you'd fail. So it's the mistake per se that, that Homo sapiens make that actually keeps us in a successful frame of mind, which is interesting. And, and this actually leads to a whole area of work that I've done on the, the choices

• 15:44Speaker 01

  that we have between animal impulse and moral aspiration. And so one of the things that, that you and I, as people from relatively traditional religious backgrounds, we believe is that if you're not at war with your animal impulses, you'll never achieve your moral aspirations and that's not to be fully alive. You know, the whole idea that you should, no, no, if it feels good, do it, said every hippie ever. And that's exactly how you would wind up divorced and friendless and fired.

• 16:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  And you need to be at war with basic moral, uh, uh, animal impulses and live in the space of your moral aspirations, which your prefrontal cortex will allow you to do.

• 16:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  That great big meaty executive center of your brain is to make choices that don't feel good necessarily, but give you the most satisfying possible life.

• 16:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's a beautiful idea to think about, this sort of clash between animal instincts and moral aspirations.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  You've got two spaces.

• 16:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful thing for us to think about because, yeah, if you just follow your animal instincts, you might get pleasure, not enjoyment, you might get short hits of pleasure, but at what cost?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And, and a vast cost, which is another lesson that we're trying to teach our kids all the time. It's like, live up, don't, don't live up to my, my moral aspirations, live up to your moral aspirations. And what you find is your kid, so your oldest is 16 and he's coming into his own. I mean, the first, I, I just met him a few minutes ago and he starts talking about doing well in school. That's moral aspiration, right? That's what you want from your kid and that's, it's unbelievably satisfying. Why? Because you see him doing something hard because it's hard. And that's one of the great secrets to the satisfaction that he's actually gonna get. And that's actually, and it's a huge, a signal that he's gonna be successful and happier in life as a result of it.

• 17:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Does it have to be hard? So this idea that satisfaction has to have struggle.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  When I hear the word struggle, well, I think it can be interpreted in many ways, right? So it could be interpreted as this is not something I necessarily want to do. This is something I'm having to force myself to do against my interests. Like, for example, let's say you want to be a really good tennis player.

• 18:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And in order to do that, you're going to have to train your fitness. You're going to have to go to coaching. You're going to have to work on your weak stroke, right? But you could enjoy that. You may not perceive it as struggle, but when you actually reach the goal or as you get better at being a tennis player, you're going to have this kind of deep satisfaction, aren't you? So, you know, help me understand exactly what we mean by that.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  So we naturally don't want to sacrifice and struggle. We don't want to pass up on the cookie. We don't want that necessarily, but we learn that something good comes to us when we don't have that. And that gives us satisfaction inherently. What you do find is that those who are willing to stand up to their own animal desires and willing to actually put to postpone their gratifications, that they actually do better in life. And, and one of the reasons that they do that, you find is you go, as you, as you look at people who are good at deferring their gratifications, they like deferring their gratifications.

• 19:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  They enjoy that. There is a, there's a, there is a sense of satisfaction that it comes inherently from dominating yourself. And you think about it, you know, you go to the gym every day like me. I mean, we're, we try to be fit and have healthy bodies and the whole thing. And you don't go to the gym and say, you know, this is going to feel so good. It's leg day. No, it's going to feel bad. It's going to feel, that's the point. And then when you come out of the gym, you're like, yeah. I mean, that's a really, really good thing is what I gain. When you were going through medical school and you were having, you know, sleeping three hours a night, getting ready for your exams, the whole point was that that per se showed you something about who you are as a person.

• 19:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, that's what it does, doesn't it? That's the key thing. It gives you self-belief.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, as you just met my son, he's just finished his GCSE examinations, which are the exams you do in the UK at around the age of 15, 16.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  In August, when the results come out, time will tell how we actually did in the, but, but I think even more importantly than that, it's about, hey, I had to, you know, had to not do some of the other things I wanted to do whilst I revise for these exams. And you can't really give that to someone else, can you? That is something that you could only get for yourself. That's self-belief.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're witness to your own sense of who you are as a person, not by doing easy things, but by doing hard things.

• 20:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you can't give, let's say he has an idea of what grades he wanted. And let's say in a, you know, in imaginary world, you could get those grades. Someone could just go, yeah, you know what? I'm going to give you those grades. Actually, you could still get the same grades, but if you haven't put in the work yourself.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's going to have a completely different impact on, on you and how you think about yourself.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a, you know, have you ever had Marty Seligman on the show?

• 20:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, but I'd love to. I love his research.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  It's fantastic. My mentor, one of my great mentors.

• 20:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Marty Seligman, he, in the sixties, he started to do work on learned helplessness. And learned helplessness is this idea that when you can't control the outcome of your actions, then you can just kind of give up. You get sort of depressed. The opposite is earned success. Earned success is the belief that I did that because I did something hard. I earned my success and that is the essence of dignity. That is the essence of understanding who you are as a person. That's one of the reasons that, you know, my students, they could very easily cheat on my exams and get an A in the class. They get a really good mark in the class, but that would give them no satisfaction. On the contrary, if they stay up all night studying for one of my exams and get the highest mark in the class, they're, they're, they're, they're overjoyed because they got that deep satisfaction.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And it wasn't just because of the accomplishment. It was also what they had to give up for the accomplishment. Humans are funny in this way. My dog doesn't want to struggle for his rewards. I mean, he would eat lying down if he could. He's a lazy, lazy boy, right? But the truth is, and, and part of the reason for that is that he doesn't have a complex prefrontal cortex in this way that says moral aspiration, not just animal moral aspiration. That's what's going to, going to give you this sense of the divine. And so this gets into the metaphysics more than just the physical aspect of this, doesn't it?

• 22:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, big style. I mean, when I, when I hear

• 22:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  the argument that, you know, you could cheat and get the grades, but you wouldn't build up the macronutrient of satisfaction.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You wouldn't build up the self-belief. I also think about, in, in my happiness model, alignment, right? Which is essentially, you know, when your external actions match up with your inner values. And I think even if you cheat to get those grades or you lie at work to get a promotion, right? Yeah, you got the promotion, but you sort of overplayed what you did and underplayed what your colleague did to get that promotion. You're not acting in alignment with who you are. So in those quiet moments, you can't hide from yourself. Like when you've not behaved in accordance with you are, I think that erodes away at you internally. So I think it's satisfaction and I think there's also an alignment issue there for people.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, I'd say it largely is saying the same thing.

• 23:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  I think it winds up asymptotically becoming the same basic concept.

• 23:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  And, and the metaphysics of it are really, really important because who cares about alignment? Well, you do, because you want that sense of rightness. You want that sense of goodness. Why would you be imbued with a sense of goodness? Now, there are people out there, these so-called called dark triad personalities, very high narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathic traits of low empathy, low remorse. That's according to Scott Barry Kaufman, like 7% of the population, but not the rest of us.

• 23:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  We don't want that. And, and, and you would say that's alignment perhaps with the godhead, you know, perhaps. Or, or, or maybe that's alignment with some sort of cosmic consciousness, which is, exists outside of us. But there's this idea that there's an, there's an ideal me. And I want to be, that alignment with the ideal me is the only thing that's going to give me the satisfaction that I, that I deeply, deeply desire. And when I find people who are low in satisfaction, I have to actually work with them on doing just that.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  A lot of young people today, you know, I mean, people, my, my friends will, people of my age, I'm in my early sixties now. And people say, yeah, my son, he's 28, you know, he lives in my basement, he's smoking weed, you know, he doesn't have any ambition. And, and I say, he's, what does he need? What he needs is something hard. That's what he needs. He needs something hard to do where he can actually start to understand. Well, he is, he's witness to the fact that he's not a loser. He's witness to the fact that he's actually somebody who can accomplish something that's worthwhile.

• 24:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's so interesting that all these kind of different lenses through which we can look at happiness. Because of course, I think happiness is something that we all want.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? I know it's maybe a bit more fashionable these days to say it's not about happiness. It's about meaning, when it's interesting because your last two books, one was on happiness, one is on meaning. But I actually very much like your model, which is meaning is one of the macronutrients of happiness.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 25:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's not happiness in and of itself.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Any more than protein is food.

• 25:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  You know, the carbohydrates are food. You need a balanced diet that has the macronutrients in it.

• 25:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  You need all three.

• 25:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  How would you sort of give us the top level snapshot of what you mean when you say meaning?

• 25:27Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 26:11Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 26:56Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 27:40Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 28:23Speaker 01

  Meaning is a combination of coherence, why things happen the way they do, purpose, why I'm doing what I'm doing, and significance, why my life matters. It's the answer to the three big why questions of life. Now, meaning is all about why. You know, we spend all day long on what and how to. I mean, that's, you know, the age of technology is being bombarded with how to and what, information we didn't even ask for, which has all kinds of, it's breaking our brains, quite frankly. It's hugely deleterious. And the neuroscience on this is just completely adding up to the fact that we're doing a lot of things wrong. This we know for sure. But the, the, the, the meaning per se is these why questions that we've largely neglected, more and more and more that we've neglected.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  And we crave a sense of coherence. Why are things happening the way that they are in our lives? Now, maybe you answer that with, in a religious context, because of the mind of God. Maybe you and I have a science background. It's because it's the laws of nature, the laws of physics. Maybe if you don't believe in science or religion, that you rely on conspiracy theories. You do your own research on the internet. That's a cry for coherence when people are doing that, which means that my life doesn't feel like it has meaning and I'm unhappy as a result of that. But, but it's important that we actually have some organizing theory of why things happen the way that they do. After that, we have to figure out why we're doing what we're doing. I mean, like you and I are having a conversation right now. Why?

• 29:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Why? I mean, it's like, and people come to really interesting hinge points in their lives where they're like, I couldn't answer that question anymore. It's like, I was doing my job, you know, I was a lawyer, went through law school, working really hard. And I got to the point where I was 40 years old and I was like, I don't know why I'm doing this anymore. They'll, they'll say, I don't know why I'm married to this woman anymore. These are purpose problems. And so when you see somebody who's like, they can't answer that why question, that, that, that lack of purpose is a lack of meaning, which leads to a lack of happiness. And that's a big crisis. We are made for directionality and goals and progress. We're not made to arrive, but we're made to make progress toward goals. It's a really interesting thing on this, on this, that, that you've seen all those,

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I mean, you've probably recommended to 10,000 people that they lose weight, right? I mean, you and I live in the two fattest countries in the world.

• 30:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Right? And so, one of the interesting things is it's actually really, really easy to lose weight, but almost impossible to keep it off.

• 30:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  And this is a happiness principle that's actually behind this. So it's, you're willing to forego eating the things that you like because you get the reward every day at the scale. But when you hit your goal weight, your reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. So congratulations. And that's why 80 to 95% of diets fail, which is to say you gained back all the weight within one year. Because we're not, we're not made to arrive. We're made to make progress.

• 31:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  And that's this whole idea of the progress principle of, of, of, of purpose in the meaning of life.

• 31:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I think about this a lot like you, Arthur. And in my own life, I've really been questioning the merit of goals over the last few months. I think different strategies are useful at different times in your life, right? So there was a time in my life where goals, I think, were very helpful for me.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm not convinced they are anymore, unless I use goals simply as a direction.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because, let's say, for example, your goal is, in fact, this is a great example because it actually was an example I witnessed at, there's something in the UK, well, around the world called Park Run. I'm not sure if you've.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Park Run?

• 32:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Park Run.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 32:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's, it's a huge global movement and it's massive in the UK. But in, in various towns and villages, every Saturday morning, hundreds of people congregate together and they do a 5K. But it doesn't have to be a run, it could be a walk. But when I had the CEO of Park Run on many, many years ago, he said, this is basically all about community. It's community disguised as a running event, essentially, right? It's not actually about the running. It's about being there with other people, doing something together. And you see this a lot with athletes. And, and someone I know at Park Run literally had a goal to run a 23-minute 5K. Nothing wrong with that, right? But a year before that, they weren't even running 30 minutes.

• 32:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, they weren't particularly fit or well. And then they trained really hard. And they were getting faster and they were getting leaner. And they were feeling good in their life, you know, that he was getting satisfaction because he was training, he was doing something hard. He was getting faster and stronger. And then he couldn't break 23 minutes. And he was so pissed off.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  He was so unhappy.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's like, jeez, I just can't do it. I'm like, hey, mate, listen, right? If you compare it to where you were.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  You are flying, right? You are one of the fastest runners here. You are faster than you were. You've got fitter, you're happier, you're more content. And so I think that sometimes is, is a way I think about goals. I think the problem with a goal is, or the way I see it is, the problem if I have a goal is, what happens when I reach the goal?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because then the day after, something that goal is redundant. Hence the Olympic athletes who struggle to get out of bed the following morning.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very common to have a clinical depression.

• 33:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what is your take on goals? Because I'm not saying they're not useful.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  No, no, no, for sure.

• 33:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  For me, I think at this point in my life, goals are simply a direction.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Well, you, you just described the arrival fallacy, which is a classic thing in behavioral science. The arrival fallacy is when, since I get so much satisfaction from, from, from, from progress, therefore, when I actually get to the fruit of my progress, when I get to the goal, then it's going to be unbelievable forever. And that's not the way that your limbic system works. The limbic system of your brain produces emotions, which are reactions to current circumstances. All the, the, the, the joy that you actually get from, from finishing that race, it's going to wear off really quickly because you've got to be ready for the next set of circumstances. Your, your limbic system keeps you alert and, and gives you appropriate emotions so that you can react correctly. It's not there to give you a nice day forever. And, and that's really disappointing to a lot of people.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  So the solution to that is to understand what the Buddhists have always called, intention without attachment. That's the, that's the balance. Intentionality is going in a particular direction with goals, but without a stranglehold on actually where you're going to arrive. So you don't suffer from the arrival fallacy. Now, for a lot of people, a lot of young people, that's really hard. But now you are at the point in your life where you actually just say, oh, that sounds right. Right? Because by the time you get to about 40, 45, 50, then you realize that your greatest disappointments in life didn't come because you didn't meet your goals, but because you did. Because you met your goals and you're like, that's so disappointing. Right? And so therefore you have to stop strangling the goal per se.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  And so I'm going in this particular direction because it's a good thing to do. And if something is going to happen, but that's not the be all and end all of my life. A million dollars is not the be all and end all. The, the yellow Ferrari, no.

• 35:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  So therefore, Arthur, you are a professor at Harvard. You teach happiness to.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  I'm moving to Vanderbilt, by the way.

• 35:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so you're moving. But you're teaching probably 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds about happiness and, and meaning and why these things are so important. Is it possible to really get these lessons at that age? Or do you almost have to pursue your animal instincts? Do you have to pursue what society has told you is going to make you happy to realize it's a fallacy? Or can you learn it before that?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  That's a good question. And, and actually, my students at Harvard are 28 on average, so they're graduate students. They're MBA students. So they've gone through a little, they've gone through the wars a little bit, but they've got a lot in common. And so they're, they're quite baffled about things that 20-year-olds aren't yet. I'll be teaching at Vanderbilt, younger people. I'll be teaching undergraduates, a, a class of about 1,000 undergraduates that I'll be teaching in, in this. And I'm interested to see exactly what the experience level is in life. The truth is, I wind up telling them a lot about their futures. It's a little bit of the crystal ball. These are things that you actually can't avoid. And a lot of it's a really happy story. So for example, one of the things I like to talk an awful lot about is that, you know, the big five personality model. You're familiar with that, right? Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness,

• 37:04Speaker 01

  and neuroticism are the three of the five aspects of personality. In almost all cases, people's personalities get better and they get happier, especially after about the age of 50. It's a really interesting phenomenon. And so I talk to my students about the fact that you're going to learn the hard way. There's going to be a lot of problems. You know, you're going to get, have your heart broken again and again and again and again. But by the time you're my age, you're going to be happier and your personality is going to be better.

• 37:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And so I'm telling them about things that they're going to experience. And then I talk to them a lot about avoidable errors that they can actually make. Because it's true, if you have more information about anything, for example, you could be a better golfer by learning about golf and then practicing and changing your habits in golf. And most importantly, the last phase, which is most important about learning any skill, whether it's golf or happiness, is you got to, you have to share it with other people.

• 37:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  You got to teach it.

• 37:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the things we were discussing when you came into the house this morning is something I learned about you yesterday, which is that you, I think, have moved 20 times.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? With your wife.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  I moved a lot, yeah.

• 38:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  You've moved a lot.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  I'm not in the witness protection program, but.

• 38:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Safe house to safe house.

• 38:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm glad we clarified that.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Aliases.

• 38:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  But what's fascinating to me is that that's a complete contrast to, to me, right? And so apart from when I was at university at Edinburgh, I have lived in the northwest of England. You know, I live in the town where I grew up. I currently live five minutes away from the house in which I was brought up and where my mom still lives. But I actually think more and more that me having this almost container of living in this town, I actually think has been really, really good for me because in a world now with infinite choice, where you can always say, well, would it be better to live there? You know, what if I moved? Oh, wouldn't it be nice to live somewhere sunny? All legitimate questions and legitimate things I've asked myself in the past.

• 38:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now I'm thinking more and more, hmm. If I think about your happiness model and I think about meaning, for me, and maybe this was because my dad was sick, maybe it's partially to do with my Indian culture or my upbringing. I have always felt that looking after dad and now mum is really, really important to me. And so if I personally, if I wasn't able to do this, I don't think I'd be living in alignment with who I am. I think I could have more work opportunities and do all kinds of amazing things. But I think that would come at a massive internal cost. So I guess the point I'm trying to make, Arthur, is I feel for me at least, you could call that a limitation.

• 39:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, elderly parents, sick. Yeah, you could frame it that way. I can also frame it a different way and go, that has really helped ground me in terms of what's important for me. And I've had to make my work life work around that in inverted commas, limitation. Does that make sense?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And you know, the truth is that people actually find who they are as people on the basis of of things that are difficult and the things that look like setbacks. And that's exactly what we were talking about with respect to satisfaction. Satisfaction is accomplishment with struggle. Yeah. You know, and this, these are the kinds of struggles that ordinary lives have. And if you try to avoid those struggles, well, you're not going to get much satisfaction.

• 40:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, but the funny thing is in my twenties, I think, although I probably would never have admitted it to myself, but I probably at times did get frustrated, not that I had to look after dad because I chose to do that. But I would probably see my friends go off and, you know, go to Bali for six weeks and go and do this and go and do that. And again, you know, we all have got a different life journey, right? And that's where I think faith and spirituality comes in, right? It's like, I think this is my path.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Someone might hear that and go, where's the proof? I'm like, I don't need proof because this is a belief system that I've chosen to adopt.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's a non-testable hypothesis. You know, you can't get any data on that, you know? That's, that's actually what faith is all about, is the idea of living in alignment with an idea that you have with the complete absence of outside data. That's, that's how physical culture and metaphysical culture actually can combine in a life, right? I mean, you're, look, you're a scientist. You have a biological background. You're looking at data, data, data, data all day long. But you actually have to be transcendent to that, to have a complete life as well, to live up to values that you don't have data. I mean, look, I could give you some data that say that people who take better care of their parents are happier than people who don't, but that's not the point. That's not what we're talking about at all, really. That's what it comes down to. And was it hard? Yes. And that was kind of the point.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  You showed you, you have evidence, you actually created proof to yourself that you're the kind of person who does that and you'll carry that with you for the rest of your life. And by the way, you also showed that to your kids. That's really important because, you know, you think about it, 10 years from now, you and your wife are going to have, I mean, your kid's going to probably be off the payroll.

• 42:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  10 years from now, they're going to be in their twenties. And, you know, I never thought about that at all, but now my kids are 28, 26 and 23. And they're all working, they're all doing their whole thing. I have four grandsons. I mean, they're all, they have, you know, their whole, their lives, but they want to be around us. And the reason that they want to be around us and live near us is so that we can help. And, and one of my kids said this, and this will probably resonate with you. He said, you know, you're kind of my safety net, but I'm sort of yours too.

• 42:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that. That's beautiful.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Uh huh. And that was certainly true with you and your dad.

• 42:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  You were each other's safety net. And it's like, we're, we're, it's divine. We're cosmically bound up in these, in these relationships. And, you know, perhaps God actually put us on the planet to take care of each other in this particular way.

• 42:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, let's go back to my very opening question to you, Arthur, which is about what taught you the most about happiness?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Science, religion or your wife? Perhaps you could give us one thing, each of those things taught you about happiness?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, the, the relationship between religion and my marriage, for example, that I didn't understand that until relatively recently. Most religions, Hindus believe this very, very strongly, but also Christians and Jews and Muslims, that a marriage, a good marriage, a serious marriage is an antenna to God. And one of the reasons that most people have a vocation to marriage is because you can't understand God's love for you but for the earthly model of divine love that you actually have in your marriage. And so it's kind of like the nuclear submarine that has two keys to launch, to launch a missile, that, that you, you can't really reach God but with your spouse.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Because that's, and that's sort of, and most people get married for, for a particular reason. But, and, and it's very easy to, to, to reduce that to the, you know, well, because you need a sperm and an egg and you can, and the biological model of it. But there is something more, there's something more transcendent. There is something more metaphysical about that particular model. And so the result of it is that love, divine love and earthly love, these are the, the vernacular of actual happiness. They are. It's really, really important that those are the fundamentals. If I could only have, if I could get, had to get rid of all the science, I would. If I had to choose two of the three, marriage, God, science, I would get rid of science. I absolutely would.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  What that taught me, what the science actually taught me was why those things are so critically important and how to avoid the mistakes that people typically make and how to actually get better habits. So it's the kind of thing where you, you wouldn't want to get rid of a healthy diet. You wouldn't want to get rid of fitness, but you'd also want to have some information about how these things actually work together. And that's the sort of the three legs of the stool. It's this, it's the spiritual, it's this, it's the emotional and it's the intellectual parts of, you know, what we're trying to do in, in, in our lives. And that it's their, they're reinforcing mechanisms, to be sure. What gave me the most information? Well, I have to say that my, my, the love in my life was not on point, which is why I actually needed a better intellectual framework.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  And it's been enormously helpful to me and, and productive for me to make sure that it was clear that I was doing things right in my life.

• 45:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  What's really interesting is right at the start of this conversation, when you first brought up your marriage, you said I have a high conflict marriage.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 45:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  And.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not like we're throwing dishes.

• 45:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, but it's an interesting thing because there is, again, in terms of these societal belief systems.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think some people are of the belief that if I have a good relationship, that there won't be much conflict.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Right, right. And that's incorrect.

• 46:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is incorrect.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  That's absolutely incorrect. And that's, that's empirically incorrect. And, and so I actually just, my lab just fielded a survey to, to look at the, the quality of relationships on two dimensions, conflict and honesty. Why? Because what you find is that most people, they put more emphasis on conflict than they do on honesty for the quality of the relationship. But high conflict is actually not a problem if it's accompanied by high honesty, is what you find. And so, so what you really want is low conflict and high honesty, but that's like Shangri-La. There's, you don't find it that often, right? Though, what, what some people will do to avoid high conflict is that they'll have low conflict and low honesty, and that's just cancer for a relationship. Now, the worst possible marriage is one that's high conflict and low honesty. And that's just, you know, that's just hell.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  That's Washington DC. That's, that's, that's not where you want to be. But it's very interesting because I looked at that and what you find is that the most normal marriages that function and last are the ones that have, I mean, depending on the personalities, pretty high conflict, but really, really high honesty.

• 47:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting as you say that, I reflect naturally on my own marriage. And the two things that came up for me as you were talking there is, I mean, my wife, Vid, is absolutely incredible, okay? And one of the things which I think I found hard initially was how honest she was.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? She found it really easy and still does to be completely honest and direct.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Was that a source of conflict at the beginning of your marriage? It was like daggers drawn?

• 47:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I heard you say on another podcast this morning that one of the best ways to meet your life partner is on a blind date set up by one of your friends.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, that's how I met Vid, okay? And it was in 2007. I used to be a massive football fan or what you would call soccer. And I would follow Liverpool Football Club around Europe. So there was a huge Champions League final in 2005, like an iconic one. I, I flew to Istanbul with my buddy to watch it. And then in 2007, we were in the final again. And I was about to fly to Athens for the final with my buddy. And I got a call from an old friend. I won't get into every detail of the call, but in essence, it was like, wrong, are you still single? I said, well, you know, kind of. Why? And she goes, well, there's someone coming up to Manchester this weekend who is single.

• 48:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  She's a gorgeous barrister and I think you guys will get on. Do you fancy meeting her? I was like, listen, I'm literally about to fly to Athens for this football game. In principle, yes, kind of cool, you want to get back. In essence, we met that weekend. Three months later, I proposed. This was.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 48:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Pure whirlwinds.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  How old were you?

• 48:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was probably 29.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  She was?

• 48:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  27.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 48:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  You were ready.

• 48:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was ready. At the time, she lived in London, she was working as a criminal barrister. I lived in the northwest, where I still live, of England. And literally from blind date number one, it was both of ours first blind date. And literally from that moment, we didn't know how it would work. You lived there, I live here. A few days later, I, I was like, hey, I'm actually going to be in London. I've got Dave Matthews Man tickets with my mates, but someone's pulled out. We've got a spare ticket, do you want to join us? She came. Before you know it, three months later, whirlwinds.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Completely in love.

• 49:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Married after eight months. Okay, so mates of mine who were already engaged, what? You, you got here, you met her, you got engaged, you married before we've even got the marriage.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  So less than a year from meeting her to marriage.

• 49:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Less than a year, it was eight months. And so when you asked me, were these qualities causing conflicts at the start? Yeah, absolutely. I would say the first year of our marriage was actually quite hard.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because once the kind of whirlwindness of the first eight months had kind of worn off and reality kicked in. I certainly found that kind of direct honesty difficult because I was a real people pleaser at that time. I would say the right things, right? But actually, I've realised that's one of the best things in our marriage. And I've learnt through her that actually it's really important to say how you feel. Don't just keep the peace if you're not happy with it. You can say it nicely, but you've got to say it.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  It's very important. It's very important. Now, for a lot of people, they grow up in an environment where honesty is not common. You know, there's this, I mean, there's certain cultures in the United States, for example, regionally, where people just don't say what's on their mind. So you've ever been in Minnesota?

• 50:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Once, a long, long time ago.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  There's an old joke, there was a man in Minnesota who loved his wife so much that he almost told her. So you get the idea that for some people, that's actually really, really hard. And I married a girl from Barcelona. So they say what they think. And I come from Seattle, Washington, which is kind of a Minnesota-like culture, which, you know, I didn't hear my parents, you know, talking to each other. I never heard my parents have an argument, not once. I never heard it. I mean, they had a good marriage. And I'm sure that they had arguments, but the whole point was that that was quite foreign to me. But in my marriage, I actually had, I married a Spaniard. She's going to, she's going to, she's going to express herself. There was no way around that. And so it was really tricky from the

• 51:21Speaker 01

  very beginning. How do we, I mean, it's funny, because, you know, this is the topic that's actually most important to my students at 28, because they find it most baffling, is the startup that is your pair bond. That's the ultimate startup of life is falling in love. That's the ultimate, it's the most entrepreneurial thing that you're going to do. Because what you're doing is you're co-creating a startup enterprise. I mean, you can wait until you're in your 30s and it's more like a merger. Or there are lots of cases where it's more like a hostile takeover or an acquisition. But that's not, that's not the best model for marriage. You can tell I teach at a business school. And, and, and what you find is that that startup per se, when you think about it, it has all the rocky parts of it, where you have different styles of work and different styles of communication, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, what really, really holds it together,

• 52:06Speaker 01

  what I'm talking to my students about, is not the passion, it's the companionate love of living with your best friend for the rest of your life.

• 52:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's satisfaction. If you put it into your happiness model, right, this-

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's actually all of it.

• 52:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is all of it.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  It's really enjoyable. It's really enjoyable. It's unbelievably satisfying, which is-

• 52:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because it's hard, like, but, but that's the, the point I'm getting at with satisfaction is that, you know, you, you have to compromise. Like, you're two individuals, you're not going to see everything eye to eye, but can you still navigate that and figure out a way to walk side by side throughout your life?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  And by the way, one of the things that brings the most satisfaction is that you're jointly undertaking a hard project together. So it's, remember, accomplishment with struggle. In a marriage, that's kids. I mean, that's, that's a joint project, and it's a bunch of work, and it's unbelievably satisfying as a result. But here's the problem.

• 53:07Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 53:47Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 54:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Today's episode is sponsored by Lingo by Abbott. When glucose is relatively stable, you feel better day to day with steadier energy, mood, and focus. But over time, unstable and elevated glucose can impair your metabolic health and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Globally, more than 760 million adults are estimated to have prediabetes, many without symptoms or a diagnosis. Now, the problem is that our healthcare system often waits until you get sick before taking action, when we should

• 55:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  take a proactive approach. Now, most of us don't have access to our own glucose data, and therefore don't have clear feedback on how our everyday choices impact our glucose. That's where Lingo by Abbott comes in. Lingo is a biosensor and app that helps you see how food, movement, and lifestyle choices affect your glucose in real time, so you can notice patterns and build healthier habits in the moment. With Lingo, you can get to know your glucose to build healthier habits for today and tomorrow. For listeners in the US and UK, Lingo by Abbott is offering an exclusive 10% off a four-week plan. Just

• 55:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  visit hallelingo.com/livemore for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hallelingo.com/livemore.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  One of the reasons that, that couples don't stay together when the kids move out is because they've lost their source of satisfaction. They've lost the joint accomplishment with struggle. So one of the things I work with, my wife and I, we do, we do retreats for married couples on how to stay in love. People in their 50s and 60s, how to stay in love. And one of the big things we talk to them about is you need a new project, you need a new hard project together. Our project is teaching people about love and happiness together. We're going on the road. We just got back from New Mexico on Sunday, actually, where we, we let a couples retreat. But that's the thing that you'll find in 10 years, when the kids are out of the house, that you need a new thing to do. Of course, you do have, I mean, you, this podcast is a joint-

• 56:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is, but we've been doing it for a while, right? And in terms of, you know, I have taken up paddle over the last 12 months or so. It's a bit like pickleball, but it's, I guess it's doing a similar thing here that pickleball is doing in America. It's a mixture between tennis and squash. You can think of it like that. It's the fastest-growing sport in the world. It's literally blowing up. And I think there's a multiple reasons for that. One of the reasons, I think, for that, and I think this relates to meaning and a lot of the stuff you write about in, in the new book, is because it's played in community. You don't play singles paddle, you play doubles, and often you don't know who you're playing

• 57:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  with or against. So you're meeting new people, you're not on your phone, you're present for 60, 90 minutes. And I think in this world where people are glued to their devices, and they're feeling more lonely and isolated, I believe that one of the reasons that a sport like paddle is blowing up is because community sits at the heart of it. Now, you know, I am quite an experienced racket player from tennis and squash, so I play to a reasonably high level. And then I was looking for a game last weekend, and there was a mixed game. So I text Vid, I said, hey Paige, do you fancy playing paddle with me? Like, and she goes, what, me and you against someone else? I said, yeah, yeah, let's do it. And she hesitates, she goes, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. But do you want to play?

• 58:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think it'll be a laugh. Anyway, we went and played. And it was a laugh, because we haven't done stuff like that.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Was that fun?

• 58:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh my God, it was brilliant.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  And you want to do it again now?

• 58:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I think, you know, we're still married. I think it worked pretty well.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Some couples can't do that.

• 58:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I mean, look, maybe if you were chatting to Vid, she might have a different perspective. But I was, I think I was pretty disciplined with my, my goals. It was, I think it was really good fun. We left the kids at home. We rarely do stuff like that, right? We went off and played. It was great. And I thought, yeah, maybe this is something we'll do more and more. Now, it might be that we're better off choosing something that none of us have ever done before, to learn together. I think that might be better.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  So that's interesting, because there's, there is some literature on this, but it sort of follows common sense. One of the things that couples who fall deeper and deeper and deeper in love after the kids move out have in common is they go deep into spirituality together. They explore religion. So a lot of couples, they're, they're kind of religious, you know, culturally religious, and they raise their kids and they're really distracted. The kids move out and they get super religious. That's this whole concept, this, of the ashramas, which is an Indian notion of the four quarters of an ideal life. The first quarter is brahmacharya, which is the student phase. The second is grihashta, the householder phase. That's you and your wife, raising your kids right now. You go into vana prashta at around age 50. That's the idea, retiring into the forest, typically with your spouse.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  And what are you going to do there? You're going to learn and learn and learn and learn, such that sanyasa, when you're old together, you can sit in the luminescent light of the true God. That's the whole idea from the ancient, you know, Vedic scriptures, as a matter of fact. And, and so what you're finding now is that if you want to do that, if you have this call to actually go deeper, but to go deeper together with the person, you know, that has that, vocationally with whom you have that reflection of the divine love, you're right on schedule.

• 1:00:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Specifically to what me and Vid could do, as we move into this, from your experience as someone who's been married for longer than me, but also your expertise and wisdom-

• 1:00:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is there a difference between me and her doing something fresh together? As opposed to something like paddle where ultimately I would probably be in inverted commas, the better player. One thing I had to try and do on Saturday, I think I did it pretty well was try not to coach her during the game.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  I did a couple of times, but try not to, right?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Your intuition is right on that.

• 1:00:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So my, my point is, do you, how would you think about this in terms of?

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  So it certainly depends on how much enjoyment and satisfaction you actually get from a particular thing. So you ever read a book by Joseph Peiper, the German philosopher called Leisure, the Basis of Culture?

• 1:01:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, but I ordered it yesterday because I've heard you talk about it and it's going to be one of my summer reads.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Oh, it's great. And this really, and this is his most, it's his magnum opus, really. I mean, he also wrote the Four Cardinal Virtues, which is a really, really good book about, you know, fortitude and prudence, et cetera. But, but this whole idea of leisure is the basis of culture is the concept that there's something that you, you need to do outside of your work, but that is hugely generative. It's not just chilling on a beach. It's what you do that creates tons of value that they don't pay you for. And it comes in three categories. There's deepening relationships, there's deepening spirituality or religion, and there's learning something new. Now, the best possible thing is leisure together, generative leisure together, which is where

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  to cement your marriage in those three areas, deepening your marriage, getting closer to God and learning something new together. So that's the thing. And so, so what are you studying together? What skill are you actually trying to get? What are you trying to do to grow your business? For example, those are possibilities. Are you trying to learn how to do triathlon? We know, I know a couple that they, you know, after their kid moved out, they started training for a triathlon together. It might sound trivial to somebody else, but the whole point is that it has to be something really generative where you see yourselves getting better together as a unit and that will, that will bond you in these, interestingly, it probably shouldn't be about work.

• 1:02:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I sort of reread your leisure section in your latest book, The Meaning of Your Life. And the bit I underlined, which I, which I just absolutely love was that this bit here, which is, "Leisure is a serious business in life that if done right, can save you from workaholism and serve as a calling itself." I thought it was absolutely beautiful. And I, you know, if you really reflect on society, we have become a leisure deficient society.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, totally. Absolutely. And, you know, the people who are most rewarded, the people that we admire the most are hopelessly success addicted and workaholic.

• 1:03:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  But that is the irony that a lot of the people we look up to or we see prominently online are leisure deficient because they're workaholics.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  They're horribly, horribly unhappy.

• 1:03:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this goes back to what we said before. I mean, this is my last podcast recording before my summer break. Like, the point is, is it's gonna be leisure, right? It's going to be, like, I intentionally shut the show down for Sit Sweets, right? Even though all the advice would be, you can't do that, right? I'm like, I am not playing that game. Cause that game, there's only one end result to that game. It's burnout, it's overwork, it's the decimation of relationships. My dad never did this. He couldn't do this, right? So in some way, I feel it's honoring my father and honoring the sacrifice that he made for me and my brother.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  And by the way, he could have taken more leisure, no doubt. He probably was driven. I mean, he's, he's an immigrant. I mean, he was probably coming from Calcutta, right?

• 1:04:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  And, and probably it was about poverty back there and to be the person who alleviated some of that, right?

• 1:04:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. And if we could just briefly just look at dad's life through your model, I think it would be quite interesting. So I would say, I used to say that my dad got success and happiness mixed up.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  But this is classic, by the way. Aquinas talks about this, Aristotle talks about this, that we have idols that we chase and we believe, I tell my students on the first day, you think that money, power, fame, that those will give you happiness automatically. No, no, no, you need to go directly for happiness and then you will be successful enough. And that makes them panic because of the word enough, which is ironic. And that gives me the rest of the semester to try to get, drill into their brains, this whole point. And a lot of people don't get that because they've been trained to this idea. If I'm successful enough, then everything will fall into place. And then they chase, chase, chase, chase for the rest of their life. And maybe, I mean, a lot of things that you honor your father for, but one of the things

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  that we can actually honor our parents most with is by reacting to the mistakes that they made.

• 1:05:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So a lot of people listening to us, their dads were maybe good men, but drank too much. Honor your father by not drinking too much, right? If your, if your parents didn't have a good marriage and, and they were good people, they didn't have a good marriage, honor your parents by learning what went wrong and have a good marriage.

• 1:05:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's beautiful, Arthur. It's such a beautiful way to look at things, to reframe things, to move on and make your life better, which is fundamentally what I think all parents want, is they want their children's lives to be better than theirs. I've reframed how I view my dad's life. He worked ridiculously hard. And when I say ridiculously hard, for 30 years, he only slept three nights a week. I know that is the main reason why my dad's not alive today.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  I know that, okay? If I could ask my dad one more question, I would ask him, hey dad, was it worth it? And, and the reason I'd ask him that is because it's very easy for me to say or think that he made a mistake, but if my dad's sole goal in life, his, you know, what gave him meaning, right? Was to look after his family, was to earn enough to look after his mom in India, his brothers, his sisters, and to give me and my brother a fantastic education to start life.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  And his patience, no doubt.

• 1:06:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  And his patience, he did that, right? Now, how much did he, how much did he enjoy life? I don't know. I've got memories of dad, you know, even when he was knackered, he would still teach me how to play snooker in a garage. We'd still play snooker. He'd still play table tennis with me and teach me how to do a forehand smash, right? So I think there were elements of his life. And I also think so the fact that, damn, my dad was on dialysis for 15 years. He lost a side in one of his eyes and he never complained once. I bet you my dad just reflected on his life and what got him to that point. So if I put him through your model, Arthur, I think he had bits of enjoyment, but I think a lot of his day to day life was a struggle, right? I think there was satisfaction there.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Cause there was serious accomplishment.

• 1:07:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  And it was hard.

• 1:07:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So I just more, as I get older, I, you know.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  And meaning.

• 1:07:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And meaning. So I think he had these things. So I'm reading The Meaning of Your Life, your latest book, and I'm like, I think dad had meaning.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Well done, dad. Well done. Now.

• 1:07:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't know if he had happiness, but he had meaning, but I don't know.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Well, see, this is the thing. You don't try to get happiness.

• 1:07:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, if you try to get happiness, you're gonna be in trouble. You do the things that you need such that happiness happens to you. And the things that you need to do are work to enjoy your life, try to get more satisfaction and, and, and search for the why of your existence. That's actually that, the same thing that you do, you don't say, I just want to be healthier. No, no, no, no. Tell me what to do to get healthier, such that health will find me.

• 1:08:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  It's the same thing with anything in life. I mean, in these big diffuse concepts of the things that we want in life. So your dad, looking at it from the outside, he probably could have had more enjoyment, but, and it's the same for a lot of men of that generation, by the way. I mean, my dad too. I mean, my dad, I mean, he could have enjoyed his life a lot more, but, but that was not thought of in those days in the same way that it is.

• 1:08:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't think they thought about, is this gonna make me happy?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think it was more, I've just got to do what I've got to do.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  There was this, the strong sense of duty would sometimes be, sort of militate against enjoyment. And for a lot of guys in that generation, they'd feel sort of guilty if they were doing something really, really enjoyable when they could be working, right? Now, is that the right approach? You have to decide, but probably you and I, I mean, I'm a little older than you, but I think, you know, I think I have a more balanced perspective on that. And I know that my kids have a more balanced perspective on that than I do.

• 1:09:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  But that's perhaps a luxury that we have.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:09:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because of the generation that came before us.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Here's the interesting thing about that though, which is really funny, because you find that people of very moderate means have higher levels of enjoyment than people who are rich. Rich people have lower enjoyment than people of moderate means. Now, one of the reasons for that is because they're rich because they sacrifice their enjoyment for more and more and more work. So that's, that's one of the things. And again, this is probably one of the great things about living in an advanced capitalist economy is that we can, we can make those decisions. I mean, if you were living back in, in 1959 in Calcutta, there weren't that many degrees of freedom. But if we live in the UK or the United States, then, then we can actually decide whether or not we're gonna work really, really hard. And middle class people, people of moderate means, they can afford to go to the park with their kids.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  They can afford to be, you know, hanging out with their spouse. They can do these really enjoyable things that, that a lot of workaholics and a lot of success addicted people just don't do. I wind up with some of the most successful people in the world that I'm talking to, that I'm working with day in and day out, giving them enjoyment lessons. This is where they're weak.

• 1:10:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, that's the irony, isn't it? That is the irony that in order for many people to be.

• 1:10:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  As successful as they think they need to be, they give up.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  They sacrifice one of the great.

• 1:10:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Enjoyment. Yeah. And actually, I had a friend who used to live in Denmark. And of course, what our culture values massively also influences our happiness because it influences what we do. And he said, in Denmark, in many offices, the norm is to stop at 4:00 PM. If you're still there working at 4:15, your manager's like, hey, is everything okay? What's, what's wrong? Because I believe, and again, I'm not Danish, but from what I've heard, they value leisure. It's like, no, no, 4:00 PM, you're done because now it's time. So maybe go and hang out with your kids, you know, enjoy leisure. You shouldn't be here with the office. Whereas I contrast that to the country you're born in. It's like, what? You're leaving at 4:00 PM?

• 1:11:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Get back in here. Exactly.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Interesting. And my grandfather was Danish.

• 1:11:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  And, and, and what you find is that this is, this is probably how we sort. So there's a reason that my grandparents, my great grandparents immigrated from Denmark. The reason was because they were ambitious. And so what they wanted in their lives was excitement. And this is a really interesting thing in the, in the, in the research on immigrants. Immigrants don't want contentment. Immigrants want excitement. They want an adventure. And, and if you're living in a country like Denmark, which has got, you know, the whole Yantala and the whole concept of hygge. Have you ever heard that word? H Y G G E? It's the, it can't even, in English, it doesn't really have a translation. It's the, the comfortable conviviality of friends on a cozy couch or something like that.

• 1:12:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Candles and candles and just chilling together. Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, I don't really want that. I want an exciting life. I want to be up in, here with you doing this. This is what I want, man. Because I'm my grand, grandpa, I'm named after him, Arthur, actually. It's like, and, and he wanted an exciting life. And so he, you know, he had his own business and, and they started a farm and their kids went to college and, you know, it was just this different strokes is what it comes down to. No doubt, that was your dad. Your dad was like, I want to buy down life. I'm going to go do this thing.

• 1:12:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. The more I think about these things, the more I think about that we can have models, right? Different models to help us realize what are the key ingredients of something like happiness. But actually, how we apply that model is going to be individual. It's going to depend on who you are, how you were brought up, what is important to you. So, you know, it's now, what, 12, 13 years since dad died? And I reflect now and I go, actually, you know what? I actually don't know. You know, maybe my dad made the right choices for him.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Did he, did your parents have a good marriage?

• 1:13:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  It depends what your definition of good is.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  In that generation.

• 1:13:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right?

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  My parents had an arranged marriage.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And that was totally fine with them.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. No. And by the way, arranged marriages tend to be pretty successful.

• 1:13:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think it was successful. They, we had a good, stable atmosphere at home. We did fun stuff together. I always knew that they were there for me. They sort of, I don't know.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Did they like each other?

• 1:13:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Actually, they like each other because somebody who was really smart and who loved both of them, put them together as probably a good match. And they were probably, interestingly, arranged marriages tend to be successful because we're better at, at, at, people who know us and love us are better at knowing us and figuring out who's right for us. They're better at that than we are.

• 1:14:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is why you believe, or you have data to support your friends putting you on a blind day is a good way to meet your life partner.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And one of the best ways that you can use an app, a dating app, by the way, is by introducing human friction into the algorithm. We all, we think that we're going to take the algorithms and take human friction out of life. Now, the way that the technology is going to work so it makes our life better and not worse, is we're going to be adding more and more and more right hemispheric friction into the left hemispheric algorithms that are in our lives. So for example, let your friends see the matches that you're getting on the dating app and decide which one you're going to go out with. That's one of the ways that you can actually use it, for example. So the reason I asked about your, about your parents, about whether or not they had a good marriage is that, that this is one of the great, this is one of the great gifts that they give us.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  You know, people will often ask, what's, what's the one thing I can do to make sure I have a good son? So your father has been super proud of you. I mean, you have a, not just a great career, but you have an aspiration to be a good man. And that's all, that's all a dad wants.

• 1:15:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Is his son to be a good man. You know the number one predictor of your son being a good man?

• 1:15:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Whether your dad was.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Loving his mom. You got basically, Ryan, and you have one job. Love your kid's mom. If you can only do one thing, and this is getting us back to the original question. What really, really is most important for what we're doing? Is this the knowledge, the intellectual part of what we're doing? Is it the spiritual part? Or is it, is it the love that people actually see? Your, your son, your son will be a good man if you love his mom.

• 1:15:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  It's, it's weirdly simple.

• 1:16:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because he will see that in terms of modeling. He'll go, okay, this is, you know, my father respects this lady. He's treating her with love, with kindness, with respect. He talks her with affection. Is that purely it? It's just the modeling that he then sees and then he takes out with him into the world?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  It's, certainly those things are true. But beyond that, that's how you will be happy. That's how you will be a happy man, by loving the woman who's on earth to make you complete. And, and, and to love is the will to the good or the other. To, to love is not a feeling at all. I mean, to love is a commitment. It's actual decision, notwithstanding your feelings. And when he sees you doing the one thing that will actually make you the man that you want to be, then he will see that modeled. And when he does that, he will be the man that you want him to be as well. That's the best gift you can give your son, is loving his mom.

• 1:16:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, I hope I do that, but, but this is a nice reminder to really go deeper and really show that more and more.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:17:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  We were talking a lot about relationships and you spoke beautifully before about how your marriage plays into your religion.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? There will be people listening, of course, Arthur, who are either no longer in a marriage or long-term partnership, or have no desire to.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  For a person who's listening, who is single, can they still be happy?

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And, and you know, that's a, there's a couple of different ways to cut that. But, you know, you've heard about the Harvard study of adult development. Yeah, famous study that Bob Waldinger, has he been on your show?

• 1:17:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  He's been here in this, in this room. Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Love him. I mean, he's actually guest lectured for me at, my colleague at Harvard. And, and that study, which is a crystal ball on being happy when you're old. What do you do when you're young? So you'll be happy when you're old. And it comes down to like seven things that people who are healthy and happy when they're old, they have in common when they're young, which is really, really helpful. Number, the first four are pretty obvious. Smoking, drinking, diet and exercise. You know, don't, don't misuse substances. You know, don't eat like a nine-year-old. You know, exercise, like walking around. I mean, it's just, it's pretty, it's pretty obvious. And, you know, don't smoke cigarettes, you moron. I mean, it's like, you know, obvious things that, that you, because, and part of the reason is because for happiness is if you have tuberculosis, you're not going to be happy.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  That's a really, really unhappy life. And so having some of these avoidable things that actually come from addictive behaviors is really important to keep in mind. But the last three of the seven are, number one is that have a, be really good at dealing with your problems. You need skills at dealing with your own problems and that requires reps and information. Some people are good at using therapy. Some people are good at Vipassana meditation. Some people are really good at prayer. Some people are outstanding in journaling. You need a way. The next thing is learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, being a learning machine so that you can continue to have an interesting life. But last, and which washes everything else out, is either a happy marriage or close friendships or both.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  That's it. So the answer to the question is, do you need a happy marriage? No, but you can't be alone. You can't make it through. I mean, life is not meant to be lived alone. Whereas profoundly social animals, and that doesn't mean you need 50 friends. I'm like, you and I are like these big extroverts.

• 1:19:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  But, but some people aren't. You know, one of my kids is a, my daughter is a, is an introvert. She needs two close friends.

• 1:19:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  There will, there will absolutely be, because you, you will have seen this before, but when this episode airs, in the YouTube comments, somebody will at this moment be saying, I prefer to be by myself. I'm not that person, Arthur. What do you say to them?

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Solitude and isolation are different things. We do, we, I mean, I need to be by myself sometimes too, but I need people in my life. Now, the, the very, very happiest people, they tend to have a best friend who they're also married to. I mean, and that's, and that's the key. That's the ideal of companion in love. But it's not, it's, it's, being married is neither necessary nor sufficient, actually. What you find is the happiest people, they have more than one friend who's, who's their spouse is what you find. And the people who like a lot of solitude, that's great, but they need somebody who loves them and that they can love. And I, by the way, I've met a hermit before. I, when I was in Dharamsala last time, I, you know, went up the mountain and found a hermit who'd lived alone for 27 years.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  And I interviewed him. He's not like us. He's not like most people. This is not typically the case.

• 1:20:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I guess what we're saying is that generally speaking, for most people, these relationships are really, really important.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Super important.

• 1:20:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of course, like anything, there are exceptions. Maybe that person leaving the comment is that exception. Maybe they're not.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Our friend, the hermit, has just written in, in the YouTube comments.

• 1:21:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He's like, you're wrong, you're wrong. You can't be by yourself.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  But this is, these are the exceptions that actually prove the rule.

• 1:21:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  We really, we need love. And, you know, it's interesting, because somebody asked me at a, at a media thing the other day. They said, we ask every, you know, at the end of a lot of shows, they say, here's the question we ask everybody, right? I said, okay, what is it? He said, what is life? It's like, holy cow, what is life? And I said, well, life, you know, why, why are we, why are we alive? You know, the why of being alive is to love and be loved. That's what human beings are made for, is to love and be loved. Therefore, life is love. And now, we need other people. There's all kinds of love. There's divine love, there's friendship, there's marriage, there's love for your children. But the whole point is, this is how we're created.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Human beings are created to love and be loved. That's the beautiful thing. And so, yeah, some people, it doesn't work out. Marriage doesn't work out.

• 1:22:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, your friend Sonia was here last week. And, you know, the thesis of her latest book is about, you know-

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  How to be loved.

• 1:22:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's how to feel loved.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  How to feel loved.

• 1:22:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not only to be loved, you have to feel loved as well, which I thought was a really interesting set. You said something before, I think it was really interesting, because this actually came up at a conference I was speaking at a few days ago. What was the difference between solitude and loneliness? Robert Lustig, who posed that question, I was on a panel, and Robert Lustig, who a lot of people know, he talks about sugar and all that kind of stuff. And he answered that question through the lens of chemicals. He said, the difference is serotonin, right? And he gave his rationale behind that. But as he posed that question to the audience, I was thinking, well, how do I think of it? Difference between solitude and loneliness? And the word that came up for me was belonging.

• 1:22:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  So if you're in a crowded room, you can still feel lonely if you don't feel that you belong. But I passionately believe that solitude is the most important thing that we all need in the modern world. And I think that's something that you make abundantly clear also in your book. And I feel that if you can be in solitude and be content with that, that is also belonging. You feel that, you know, I belong in this body. I don't need to distract myself from my present moment experience. For me, it just came up in the moment. I thought, you know, so how do you think about the difference between solitude and loneliness?

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Loneliness comes from isolation. Loneliness does not come from solitude. Solitude is to be alone and well. Isolation is to be involuntarily alone. That's what it comes down to, which is another way of talking about belonging. You know, you don't belong, you're involuntarily alone. And that's what leads to this sense of isolation. And that's what leads to loneliness, which is endemic. It's unbelievably pervasive in our society today. That's not because people are alone too much. It's because they are isolated. They're isolated from other people. And that has a lot to do with the way that we use technology, has a lot to do with the nature of our culture, has a lot to do with the legacy of COVID. I mean, there's a lot of things that actually have gone into it, right? So I love being alone. I love being alone, but fundamentally, I do not want to be isolated.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  I do not want isolation. I simply want solitude in concert with the relationships that I actually have. And I spend time alone in my thoughts every single day. And when I wake up in the morning, I spend time alone every single day. Seven days a week. And it's a very, very important part of my life.

• 1:24:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  One thing I do when I'm at home is I have one less coffee at home, because I've realized that if I go to the local coffee shop and have one there and sort of have a chit chat with the baristas, it just enhances my life.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yesterday morning, I was there, going through your book. And I think right at the start, there's a chat, you know, there's the meaning of meaning. And there is a questionnaire, right? The Meaning in Life questionnaire, which tells you where you stand at the present and what you need to be thinking about and working on as you continue reading this book. Right? Now, you've also got the questionnaire for people. It says in the book at themeaningofyourlife.com, right? Is that there for people that want to take it, right? But I would just say, get the book and you can actually do it. I went through the questions.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Right? How'd you score?

• 1:25:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, so I did them without seeing what the questionnaire meant. And then on presence, I scored 34.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Good, nice and high.

• 1:25:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And on search, I scored 17.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Moderate. You are a happy, you're happy at home.

• 1:25:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  I am.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  You're happy at home. And by the way, that's classic for somebody who doesn't move 20 times.

• 1:25:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:25:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's interesting.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  You're happy at home. You're fundamentally a guy, now, you're going to travel, you travel the world because you give all these lectures and you do all this media, et cetera, et cetera. But you want to come back here. You want to come back home.

• 1:26:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and the thing that I do, I've realized more than anything, is I orientate my life around my relationships. So whenever I get asked to do something, my first thought is, how does this impact Vid, the kids? You know, my ability to look after mum? That's my first thought, right? And I've just learned over the years that actually, your to-do list is never done. There's always something else you could be doing. If you wait until your to-do list is done in order to do the important things in life, you're going to find very quickly that the important things in life never happen. So I've flipped it intentionally over the last years,

• 1:26:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  where everything is about the relationship first and I fit my work-life around that. Now, some people are going to say, wrong, I don't have the autonomy you do. I don't, I don't have that possibility. I have to do something, like my dad perhaps. I get it.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I can only live life, honestly, as I find myself in it.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:27:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  I do. And what I would, if I make a prediction-

• 1:27:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Please.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Right, because I'm 14 years older than you. But also, because you're going through the ashramas, just like me. My prediction is you're going to start to revolve more around spiritual depth. My guess is that you and Vid are going to start looking, looking, looking. You're going to, I think you're going to retire into the forest a little bit.

• 1:27:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, literally this past weekend, we have been talking about, well, we're both very spiritual anyway.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, I think that's clear if people listen to the podcast. Yeah, we both meditate.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 1:27:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  I fell out of the habit, like, sort of last month, but I'm back on the horse at the moment. But I really enjoy meditation.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  And again, what has changed for me is that I no longer meditate for an outcome. I don't meditate to, you know, improve my mood, to be happier, to be more present, whatever it might be, like I used to. That's when I used to struggle with the practice.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Well, by the way, that's what the Dalai Lama said to me one time. He said, "The problem with Westerners and meditation, number one is they want to be spaced out, which is a problem in and of itself." He said, "But the other reason is that they meditate so they feel better." And I said, "Well, what are you supposed to do?" He said, "You should meditate so the whole world feels better." That's the, that's the point. I mean, you should meditate so that the world is lifted up. And I realize that that's a very abstract concept for a lot of people. But as we get older, we start to understand it, right?

• 1:28:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Totally. And I, I would say, we are becoming more and more spiritual. And the thing we've been talking about is, shall we set up a foundation? And donate money into the foundation and have it do good? And then, I'll tell you where I get to, Arthur. And, you know, one of the things I love most about your latest book is this idea about why questions. And actually, it very much resonates with how I think, which is, I've always felt this as a doctor, is that it's not about me telling you what to do. I can guide you, but at some point, you have to ask yourself, is this the right approach for me? And only you can do that. I can't do that for you. Like, I really feel the job of a good doctor or a good healer

• 1:29:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  is to help that person find what is right for them. That's certainly how I've gone about my career. And then, the clash I have in my head is, it's easy to think that a foundation will do more good for the world. And I think it could do. And at the same time, I think the way you change the world is to change yourself. So the best way to actually, I believe, change the world is to show up and be that present, kind, compassionate human. If I can do that, then in my circle, and we've all got our circle of influence, if you are compassionate there, that's the way you make change. So then, I have this clash in my head, thinking,

• 1:30:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  whatever foundation makes me more and more busy, so I'm less able to be the change? Do you know what I mean?

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  I do, I do, absolutely.

• 1:30:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm not asking, expecting an answer necessarily, but these are the thoughts I'm currently going through.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  A foundation like that is a great project for the two of you. A great project. It's an accomplishment with struggle. It's something that's really worth collaborating on, for sure. That's a really good idea. I really like that idea. But the truth of the matter is that the internal revolution that you're talking about, the continuous struggle that you have as a person, that's going to always have a lot more influence on the world. So for example, one of the things I talk about with married couples is if you don't, you read the newspaper and the world's on fire, you don't know what to do. Go home and love your wife. That's really, I mean, you want to change the world? Let's have more couples who love each other. That will change the world. You want to have, you want to, you want to lift people up? Have more families, people having babies and joyfully creating families. I mean, how many people?

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Because the world seems so crummy and no good. I'm not, I'm not going to get married and have kids. Are you kidding me? You have just basically, you're bashing your own head into a brick wall. You want to make the world happier? Fall in love, stay in love, have children. And so you, because you have a big profile, you're in the public eye, so am I. The best thing that we can possibly do is love our wives and love our kids.

• 1:31:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Love your wife, right?

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you do that stuff? It's kind of interesting you're saying that. Again, a football analogy. I thought back to when I was a teenager, growing up in the northwest of England.

• 1:31:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, my older brother was a big Manchester United fan. He still got a season ticket at Old Trafford. And I was a big Liverpool fan. And I went to school in Manchester. And so, you know, it was always about what football team did you support? That was kind of your identity at my school, basically. And at that time, there was a, you know, someone who's regarded as one of the most successful football managers of all time, Sir Alex Ferguson.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Famous guy.

• 1:32:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Famous guy, but what is interesting now as I get older, I reflect on some of the things I used to hear as a teenager. So, you know, footballers back then, as they are now, were paid a lot of money. So you're literally getting kids at eighteen, nineteen. Back then, we're getting forty, fifty thousand pounds a week. But one thing he always would try and do is get his young footballers to find someone to settle down with. He actively encouraged it. And a lot of those footballers at twenty-one, twenty-two would suddenly find themselves married with a child. Now, I can't remember how we did that or what, but I actually think what he was trying

• 1:32:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  to do was almost ground them and go, listen, all that money, right? Because these guys were in hotels every weekend, they're going to have, you know, all kinds of opportunity to follow their animalistic instincts.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Here's this older manager, I think, was trying to insulate against that, because hey, listen, if I can get you married, it doesn't mean they're all in the right marriages. But it's kind of interesting, isn't it?

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  They'll be way happier. And this is, it's a really interesting thing. We, our animal impulses will push us, will push us. But here's, here's the mistake that we make. We think that Mother Nature cares if we're happy. Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. Mother Nature wants us to pass on our genes and survive the winner. That's what Mother Nature wants for us. And that's the reason that we have these animal impulses. But we have this repertoire, this possibility of doing something so much better. We can choose our own happiness, but it means we must be at war with ourselves. We must understand that these animal impulses are going to lead us to do things that we don't want to do ultimately, in the long-term goal, the life that we actually want. Now, we know that less when we're eighteen and nineteen. That's why we need older people. That's why you needed your dad, who actually could say, don't do that, do this.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Say, but I want to do this. Sorry, you're going to do this, not that. And what he was trying to do was to help you understand that this particular decision, which feels good, is actually not the right decision for your life. And that's exactly why we have parents. Exactly why we have mentors, exactly why we have teachers, to actually push us into the right space of moral aspiration.

• 1:34:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Would you say from your research that there's a unique role for fathers when it comes to bringing up young men?

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. And that's one of the reasons that fatherless families are so hard on kids. It's so hard on kids.

• 1:34:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Different impacts on boys to girls?

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And that's an interesting thing, you know? There's a research that shows that one of the worst things that can happen to a boy who's adolescent or just pre-adolescent is his dad takes off with another woman. It's one of the worst things that can happen to a boy. Because that actually torques his understanding of what it means to be a man. That's a really, really big problem. It's literally better for your son that you die than that you leave your mother, leave his mother. Because if you die, your son will be like, yeah, my dad worked hard. My dad was a good man. My dad had bad health. But if he takes off with another woman, he doesn't understand who he's supposed to be. He doesn't understand the space of moral aspiration. Now, that doesn't mean that if your dad bailed, that you're going to be all screwed up. That's not what that means. I mean, but it means there's work to do under the circumstances.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  That affects women less. And it's interesting, because my father-in-law bailed when my wife was six with another woman. Took off, didn't pay child support, right? And, and when I met her, she was in her early, we were in our early twenties. She didn't trust men. Men are no good, men are weasels.

• 1:35:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Understand the point.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, men are just, they lie, that men want one thing, the whole thing. Took two years for me to close the deal. Two years. Why? I grew up in a home where my dad loved my mom. He died young, died at sixty-six, you know, and didn't have good health, and it was a huge problem.

• 1:35:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Sorry to say that one.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and my mother was ailing. She was profoundly demented by the time she was my age. But my dad loved her. My dad took care of her. And that's the model that I saw. And so the result was that I had to make my marriage into something more like my family. But the fact is, is if we had to choose one dad that was going to take off, it's better that it was hers. Because I needed that model.

• 1:36:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  If there's a guy who just heard what you, what you said there, Arthur, and perhaps they left their partner, their female partner, a year ago, because they felt, actually, you know what, we should never have gotten married. It was the wrong relationship. We were constantly fighting in front of the kids.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  How can they make sense of what you just said and not feel guilty?

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, and they do feel guilty. That's for sure. The question is, how do you make it as good as it can be? I mean, nobody doesn't feel guilty when things don't work out. That's the normal, if you never feel guilty about anything, something's wrong. I feel guilty about things. I mean, we all feel guilty about mistakes that we've made along the way. But the whole point is to, to continue to love your children and to help them understand exactly what happened, such that it doesn't look like this is a natural form of behavior. That is better to say, my marriage didn't work out, but I want your marriage to work out. You know, the right way to go through life is not to run off with your secretary. The right way to go through life is to, is to love the mother of your kids.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  And just because my marriage didn't work out that way, doesn't mean, doesn't mean that yours can't. Is to own it, is what it comes down to.

• 1:37:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  I guess that's what we said before when I was talking about that, and honesty, right? It's about being honest. And maybe, depending on the age, if your son, saying that, just saying, hey, I really want it to work out. There's a couple of reasons why it didn't. Or if you made mistakes, you can say, hey, listen, I really screwed up.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example of this. So I was, I wrote a book called From Strength to Strength in twenty twenty-two. It was, I learned a lot. And it was based, it was a very personal book, because, you know, my life was changing a lot, and I wanted to understand how the back half of my life, the second half of my life, was going to be really meaningful and successful in its own way. And I was interviewing a lot of people. And I was interviewing this woman, this icon of Wall Street, incredibly rich, incredibly successful, one of the most famous women in the world in finance. And she's my, she was my age at the time. I was in my late fifties at the time. And, and she talked, she was going through her achievements, which I asked her about. And then she said, and I'm so unhappy. I said, well, talk to me, sister. Was a problem.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  And she said, my husband and I are just roommates. I have, I guess, a cordial relationship with my adult kids. I think my, my employees are afraid of me. All I know how to do is work. I don't really have any friends. I was religious when I was a kid, and I always loved it, but I haven't gone to church in decades, and I don't know why. I'm drinking too much, I need to go to the gym, I'm getting bad, I have a bad lipid panel. I mean, what do I do? And I said, you don't need a professor to tell you what to do. I mean, you just wrote your own prescription. I mean, go away with your husband, take a souvenir in your firm, get to know your kids, get into AA, go back to church. I mean, obviously. She says, I know, I know, I know. I said, so why didn't you do it? And she thought about it, she was quiet.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  And she said, because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy. And it was like a knife to my heart. Because me too, me too. I mean, when I was a CEO, I worked 80 hours a week. I was on the road all the time. I missed a lot of my kids growing up. I made mistakes and I felt bad about it. And so I thought to myself, okay, so what am I gonna do with that? I can pretend that it wasn't a mistake, but I've talked to my kids in a different way. And I said, I did that and that wasn't the right thing. Furthermore, I get a do-over. I, you know, I, I, we, we set it up with our family so that we all live in the same place. We're, we're, we're, we're making your life now.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  We live in a place and we have one down the street and the other, the other down the street. Might, I have one child still in the military and when she comes back, she'll be around us as well.

• 1:40:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm gonna hope, I hope that happens to my kids.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  I see my grandchildren. I have four grandsons. I see them and they're proliferating. I mean, it's like the, the Brooks girls, they know how to have babies. And, and, and, and we're all in the same place because I get a do-over. But, but what I'm conscious of it.

• 1:40:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that's it, isn't it? It's, it's, you've made the unconscious conscious. You've owned what happened, right? The honesty is that, yeah, you know what? I probably overworked and I didn't see you guys as much as I could have done. I can't change that, but what I can change is how I go forward.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And I can, I can admit that that was suboptimal, that I'm not perfect.

• 1:40:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is also a powerful thing for our kids to realize, that we're not perfect, that we do make mistakes.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Of course, of course, that's honesty.

• 1:40:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Again, that's something I would say I've learned from my wife is that you don't have to put on this illusion of perfection in front of your kids, right?

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  It won't work anyway.

• 1:41:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  It won't work. I mean, until after about nine years old, they know you're hopelessly imperfect. And, and if you basically say, yeah, you know, I snapped at you, I'm sorry. Like, hmm. You know, I mean, if you're apologizing every single second, that's problematic. That just means that you're not learning and you're not getting better. But the truth is, you're gonna make mistakes. And I said to my kids, look, you know, I want you guys, I want you guys to have families that are stable and good and I wanna help. I wanna be helpful and I want, I wanna babysit your children and, and make your life better. And, and it's important that you be present in your own families and it's important that I be present in your own families. And I get a do-over. It's the best thing ever. And, and that's how you do it. Look, if, if, if something has happened in your marriage and it failed, for example,

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  you have to talk openly with your kids, especially as they're coming of age, about exactly what happened and how it could have been better and how they don't have to fall prey to the same fate.

• 1:42:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, cuz it helps them as well.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:42:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Helps them realize.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Arthur, I, I followed your work for years. I think you're a brilliant communicator. I think your books are so wonderfully written and you have such a wonderful grasp of all these different fields, right? Science, faith, relationships.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:42:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, it's, it's wonderful talking to you and listening to you speak. There's so many other areas we could have gone into today about the meaning of your life, but the, the one area I wanted to touch on at the end of this conversation is about self-transcendence. Towards the end of this book, you write about Maslow's hierarchy. And this idea that once your basic needs are met, you know, food and shelter, you can then move on to self-transcendence. But you challenge that and you kind of disagree, I think, with the order.

• 1:43:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is, I think, very provocative, but very, very interesting. Help us all understand where you view self-transcendence, what it is, and why it shouldn't be left until the very end.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you refer to Maslow's hierarchy. Everybody watching your show is gonna know Maslow's hierarchy. Abraham Maslow in the 40s, he writes this thing, where he said, first you have food and shelter and then you have security and after that you have to have a self-esteem and community. And, and then at the very top of his hierarchy is self-actualization. Later in life, he said, that's actually not the highest one. The highest one is transcendence. The highest thing is that we can actually understand who we are deeply with respect to perhaps even our Creator. So, you know, people get old, they start to get, you know, sort of, they get kind of mystical. And, and the problem with that is this, is I've gone through my work and I've gone through my life, I've found that some of the most profoundly spiritual and enlightened people

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  I've ever met are poor. It's funny, isn't it? It's like they, they, they still have more to have adequate housing and meeting their caloric needs, but they love God a lot. They have an intense love for God. You're Indian. I go to India a lot. I go to India every year. And, you know, at one point I was making a documentary in Daravi. Have you ever been to Daravi?

• 1:44:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  No.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  That's, that was the world's largest slum. It's in, it's in Mumbai. It's, uh, it's like 750,000 people living on, on an amount of land that's smaller than Central Park. It would be like 40 people living in your house. That's this population density.

• 1:44:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, I've been to some of the Calcutta slums and it is humbling.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable. And, but what you find is all kinds of different sorts of people, very, very entrepreneurial people. You hear a lot of laughter and you see a lot of families and you see an intense love for God, an intense love for God. And the idea that I'm gonna wait, why would I wait until I have everything else in order to do the most important thing? And you know, Mother Teresa in Calcutta herself, she talked about the intense love of God that she and her sisters and the people that she served should have, because that's the most important thing. That's not the last thing, that's the first thing, actually. And that's open to absolutely every single one of us. Yes, we should wipe out poverty. Absolutely, we need more security.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  We all know these things. But the one thing that is truly democratic is our spiritual heritage that we could actually have for ourselves.

• 1:45:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's just so beautiful that. And, and I know that one of the reasons I hold the views I hold about even the relationship between money and happiness is because every other summer, growing up in our six-week summer holidays, we would go to India for the, for the entire six weeks. My mom, me and my brother, my dad would come for like three weeks and he'd have to fly back home and work and.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  What time of year, in June, July?

• 1:46:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  July, August. July, August, yeah, monsoon season.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  It was raining like crazy.

• 1:46:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  And they were some of the funnest times of my life. And you, you, you live inside a different culture. And you will see people with not very much, with the biggest smiles on their face. And one story I haven't, I told once on a podcast a few years ago is when I went to see my auntie about three years ago in Calcutta, in the block of flats where she lives, that the gateman, the porter who lets the cars in and out, like, I would chat with him every day, I'd sit and chat and, you know, that guy was happy, right? He, he did his job, like, it, it provided enough, right? He wasn't wealthy. And I always remember about 3:00 PM every day, he would just walk off and he'd sit with two or three others.

• 1:46:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  They'd just squat around with their little clay pots of tea and they'd be, in, in Bangla, we would say, adhamati, right? It would just, um, just in, in English, we say chewing the fat, right? Just sipping tea with his buddies and, and, you know, under a bit of shade, like laughing.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  The good life.

• 1:47:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I tell you, there's so many successful achievers in the West who don't even have time to do that, right? Something I thought about a few years ago was this idea that takeaway coffee. Wouldn't it be beautiful if we could live where you never needed to have a takeaway? You had five minutes to sit and enjoy your coffee.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  With somebody.

• 1:47:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, with someone. Whereas the fact that we even need a takeaway, it's like, yeah, cuz we're so busy rushing around that, yeah, I need my caffeine here, but I can't even enjoy it. So I need to, you know, I think that tells us something about culture.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's no enjoyment, actually, is coming from the consumption of the caffeine. We're using it instrumentally.

• 1:47:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that guy didn't ever take a takeaway tea. He wouldn't drink tea by himself. He drinks it with his buddies at 3:00 PM.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the, the big, the big point that you're making is about, about coffee specifically. Coffee should be the objective. It shouldn't be instrumental. The reason you're drinking coffee is not so you can do something else. The point should be the coffee. That's it. I mean, if it, if you're drinking coffee to drink the coffee, now that's a, that's a whole, the whole concept. I mean, take not Han.

• 1:48:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. He gets it in mind straight away.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. I mean, it's like when you're washing the dishes, you should be fully present while you're washing the dishes, because if you're not fully present, then you're actually not washing the dishes in that moment, which means you're missing your life.

• 1:48:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and he would, he would probably argue, if you're not present for washing your dishes, you ain't gonna be present for anything else.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Look, you're, you're, you're, here's, I think, the broader point, because it gets back to the whole point of why we're alive, which is to love and be loved. The, the amazing human brain, the most amazing thing that it does arguably is it gives us the ability to time travel. I can be prospective, I can be in the future, I can be retrospective, I can think of the past. And that's what makes us so competitive, because I can learn from the past, I can practice the future, I don't make mistakes. It's unbelievable. Where we're not ever is now. It's actually hard to be mindful. It's why you have all these sort of spaced-out Western practices of mindfulness meditation, because they know that, that if you're 80% of your time in the future, average person

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  is 30 to 50% of their time thinking about the future, entrepreneurs, people who are watching this show are 80% of the time in the future. They're in the future all the time. But here's the problem, you can't love in the future, you can only love now. If you're in the future all the time, you're missing love, which is to say that you're missing life. When you're having that coffee with your friend, you can love in that moment. That's the reason that the coffee anchors you in these five minutes that we're taking it and laughing with our friends in those moments. That's the reason that it brings you such great joy, is because you're made to love and you're being anchored in the now.

• 1:50:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Timeless wisdom. Timeless wisdom, Arthur.

• 1:50:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Arthur, you have such a wonderful way with words.

• 1:50:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  My final question for you is to do with what you

• 1:50:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  just spoke about when it comes to transcendence. You were talking about India, you were talking about how we all have access to that right now. I want us to think about that person who's been listening to this conversation, who is not present, is always rushing around, who feels that they overwork and that they can't see a way out. They certainly don't have time for spirituality or faith because they've got things to do.

• 1:50:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  If they were to say to you, Arthur, I want to be happier.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want more meaning in my life. What can I do? What would you say to them?

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  So I would actually take a pretty technical approach to doing something that you can only do now in your life. And this is how I've tried to change my life. In the years that I was missing my life, I'm running a company, a big, important guy. Right? What I did was, when I realized that this was a mistake, I did this profoundly present thing. I quit my job and I went for a long walk.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  I went on a pilgrimage. You know, just as when you're in India and you see people walking to Mathura in Upper Pradesh. You know, they're walking through the city of holy temples. I mean, it's just mendicants and people and normal people walking, walking. I walked the community of Santiago across northern Spain with my wife. We just walk and walk and walk. You're fully present because you have one job, which is walking. And you're praying and I was holding my wife's hand and et cetera. And I realized that what I needed to do was that protocol. I needed a pilgrimage in my life every single day. And this is what I recommend to people, whether it's religious or not. Now, what I do is I wake up every morning. I practice the Brahma Mahurta, which in Sanskrit is the creator's time. It's an ancient idea of an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  A Mahurta is 48 minutes. The Brahma Mahurta is two of them. The science, the neuroscience behind that says that getting up before dawn is really good for you, especially if you witness the sunrise. And you know, our friend Andrew Huberman talks about that, et cetera. So this is very solid. All that Vedic wisdom always has tons of Western science that came much later, that actually showed that it was good. I get up before dawn. I exercise every day. But my exercise is almost sacramental. You know, I generally speaking, don't listen to things because I want to experience that. And then I get cleaned up and I go to Catholic Mass every day. Esther and I go to Mass together every day. When I'm home, when I'm on the road, I do it by myself, either in solitude or in partnership.

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  And you're fully present. You're not looking at your phone. It's not long, it's 25 minutes. It's half an hour, but you're there. You're fully present. You're experiencing that. And then at the end of the day, we pray our rosary together, which is a form of ancient Catholic meditation. And we do it together and you can't check your phone. You have to be here now. Here's the point. If we have a habit of being not present, we need a habit of being present. You need a countervailing habit. What are people actually doing that they have to be present for? And wire that into their day. Wire that into their lives. That's what I recommend.

• 1:53:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love it. Ancient wisdom for modern times, but we've come full circle, haven't we? Because in that answer, right at the end there, my opening question fed right back in. There was the science, there was the faith, and there was the relationships. All three in one.

• 1:53:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Arthur,

• 1:53:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  some people will have come to you for the first time through this show because you've surprisingly not been on over the last years.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  And this show, by the way, is touching so many people, including me, all these years.

• 1:54:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, well, I'm very lucky. I get to do something from my garden that goes to so many people. The latest book, of course, is The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. I know you've written many books, but you know, the one just before this was on happiness. And then, of course, you mentioned the one before that I think was strength to strength.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  If someone says, Arthur, listen, I don't know which of those three to choose for my first Arthur Brooks book, how would you articulate the differences between them? And where would you point them?

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. This new book, well, the book that I wrote before, I co-authored it with Oprah Winfrey. And it was about, is a primer on the science of happiness, about enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. It's kind of, it's like a small version of my college course on happiness. And so it's the basics on the science of happiness. It's based on a lot of science, et cetera, but it gives people practices that they can actually use in their life. A deeper dive on meaning, this new book, it's really behind the biggest crisis that we face. The problem with depression and anxiety for people under 30 is really a meaning crisis. And this is a book about how modern life has broken our brains. So this is a book about the biggest problem in our life. If you want to learn more about the science of happiness, that's the last one. If you want to learn about the biggest problem that we're facing today

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  and how people can actually not fall prey to that, actually can repair themselves, how can fix their brains and their hearts along the way, then that's actually what this is for. They accompany each other in a way, as it happens. And so, you know, for me right now, this is the book that's really on my mind, I have to say. This is the one that's actually making me remember the reason I do the work that I do, for sure.

• 1:55:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, well, it's a wonderful book. The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Arthur, thank you for everything you do. Thank you for all the wisdom you share. And thank you so much for coming on to the show.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  I'm delighted to be with you. It's such an important thing that you're doing. And it's, as they say in the world of talk radio in America, longtime listener, first time guest. And I really, really appreciate what you're doing, you having me here today.

• 1:56:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming,

• 1:57:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out.

• 1:57:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

• 1:58:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.