4 Ways to Get Better at Friendship

We spend much of our lives building our careers. We chase success, recognition, and expansive networks—yet despite all of it, many of us still experience a quiet, persistent loneliness. In this episode of Office Hours, I turn to Aristotle and his work, the Nicomachean Ethics, to ask an age-old question: what makes a good friend? I’ll explore Aristotle’s three types of friendship, and suggest something that sounds counterintuitive: the best of friends are perfectly useless. I also share four practical ways to deepen the friendships you already have, and cultivate more of these useless relationships that create real meaning, deeper happiness, and a life well lived. — Brought to you by: • ⁠Noble Mobile⁠ https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks—With Noble, there is only one plan: The No-Bull Plan. It’s simple. It’s transparent. And if you use less data, you get cash back. Get an exclusive offer at: ⁠https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks⁠ https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • In-person Retreats: ⁠https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/⁠ https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (06:32) Why close friendships are essential to happiness (11:42) What a healthy friendship ecosystem looks like (14:54) Aristotle’s three types of friendship (23:57) Real friends vs. deal friends (31:17) Friendship step #1: Give yourself a friendship checkup (32:39) Friendship step #2: Identify the people who truly know you (35:06) Friendship step #3: Go deep or go home (38:24) Friendship step #4: Make more friends that you don’t need (41:32) Q&A: Adjusting to home after a year abroad (44:12) Q&A: Building better habits — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness:http://themeaningofyourlife.com/themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com • Meaning Membership:https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership • Arthur’s newsletter:https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • The Happiness Scale:https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks:https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur • Why You Should Want to Be Alone: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/hermit-solitude-benefits-happiness/678955 • I Matter to My Friend, Therefore I am Happy: Friendship, Mattering, and Happiness: https://experts.nau.edu/en/publications/i-matter-to-my-friend-therefore-i-am-happy-friendship-mattering-a • Friendship and personality as predictors of happiness: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-006-9012-7 •The average American has three best friends: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/friends-adults-american-how-to-friendship-difficulty-a8906861.html • Social Support, Social Strain, Loneliness, and Well-Being Among Older Adults: An Analysis of the Health and Retirement Study: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-05698-001 • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

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

• 0:00Arthur Brooks?

  Today I want to talk about one of the most fundamental areas of happiness, which is friendship. I've noticed in my work that the happiest people have a lot of real friends. They also have deal friends. Both are important, but real friends are required for you to be a happy person. A scourge in our society is people who are so busy, strivers, you, me, that it's all deal, no real. I was the chief executive of a big organization and I was really lonely. And so I actually started to do the work. And it wasn't theoretical. It wasn't just social science to me at that point. And since then, it's been great. I'm better at it. I've got a bunch of people that I talk to a lot. I make the time and it takes time. And when you do, you're going to love it.

• 0:42Arthur Brooks?

  You're going to find that you have something that you could say to somebody that is probably one of the most beautiful things that they could hear, which is that I don't need you. You're useless to me. I just love you. You need more people like that in your life. Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a social scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. And this show is all about how you can join me in that movement. I want to bring the best science back to ideas that I can possibly find around the science of happiness to talk to you about how you can improve your life

• 1:25Arthur Brooks?

  and how you can effectively become a teacher of these ideas by sharing them. Now to that end, thank you for sharing this podcast. This podcast has been growing in popularity across all the different platforms and that's really because of you. And I appreciate that very much because that's why I do the show. So please continue to do so. Please like and subscribe, leave comments, send me anything that you want to talk to me about at the email address for the show, [email protected]. Any criticism that you have, I want to hear that too. We want to make this show better and better and we want you to share this as widely as possible. While you're at it, please go do, pick up a copy of my new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Thanks to you, it debuted at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. I'm really pleased about that.

• 2:06Arthur Brooks?

  It gives it a tailwind to get it into the lives of more and more and more people. This is a book about the meaning of your life, but also how you can become a teacher of meaning and the idea of how we can live differently such that meaning becomes more accessible to the people that we love. So thank you for that. Thank you for getting the book. Thank you for watching the show. Thank you for passing it on. I really appreciate it a lot. You're not broken. You're meaning-starved. I talk to people all the time who are by any external measure, successful. They've built careers, they have families, they've checked the boxes. And yet, something feels off. Life feels thin. Like you're going through the motions. Like you're watching yourself from the outside.

• 2:50Arthur Brooks?

  And here's what I want you to know. That feeling is not a personal failing. It's not ingratitude. It's not something wrong with you. It's a meaning problem. And it's an epidemic. The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement, and distraction. It's terrible at giving us meaning. And no amount of success will fix that. I've seen it in my research and I've seen it in my own life. That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, in a program I've developed called "The Meaning of Your Life." It's not a lecture. It's not a quick fix. It's several days of real work in a small group on the questions that actually matter.

• 3:33Arthur Brooks?

  If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look.

• 3:39Arthur Brooks?

  Today, I want to talk about one of the most fundamental areas of happiness, which is friendship. This is something that might seem like the most natural thing in the world to some. But for many people, this is hard. And I have data showing that it's actually getting harder for people. There's more loneliness than we've seen since we've been keeping track of loneliness, as a matter of fact. And there are all sorts of reasons for this. I'm not going to devote this show to the perils of the inappropriate use or overuse of tech. But the truth of the matter is, I don't have to. If you've been watching this show, you know perfectly. Anything that substitutes for your in-person relationships is going to hurt you. Anything that makes those in-person relationships easier is going to help you. And when you're mediating your life through tech and through a screen, and you're not seeing people in real life, that's a problem.

• 4:24Arthur Brooks?

  You're going to get lonelier. You're going to become more detached. You're going to become more isolated. All that's pretty obvious. That's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk to you about, practically speaking, the health of your friendships and how you can make your friendships deeper and better, starting today. Because this is fundamental to your happiness. I'm waiting to start by thinking about your friendships.

• 4:47Arthur Brooks?

  Some of your friends you text any silly thought to. You know, this one person that I talked to. And, and we text stuff, sometimes serious, sometimes silly. Multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. Other people you only talk to a couple of times a year, but you really love them. And when you, when you talk to them after six months, you feel like no time has passed at all because you have this intimacy. Typically, those are people you knew when you were much younger. As a matter of fact, when your neural programming was, was setting itself. You know how that feels. Some are people that are not close friends, but you really look up to. And the degree of friendship that you have is something that you really value because it makes you a better person. Some are friends that you like, but you don't especially admire. Maybe on the contrary.

• 5:30Arthur Brooks?

  And what I'm trying to point out is that friendship is a very complex phenomenon. The way that we love other people in this philia, that Greek sense of, of brotherly or friendship love, is something that has a lot of facets to it. I've talked about in this show in the past, the fact that English is a terrible language for love. To love is to will somebody else's good. And we have a word for it, love. And you can love all different kinds of things. You could love your dog and your wife and the, the Red Sox and a Chicago deep dish pizza. And if you love them all in the same way, well, we got problems, right? But it's just one word. Now, the Greeks had seven different words for love, which is starting to make some sense.

• 6:11Arthur Brooks?

  But now we just take the one Greek word, philia, for friendship, friendship love. And we can break it up across the dimensions that I just talked about here. That means that if you want to have a happy life with a lot of friendship, you need a good repertoire, you need a good technique and a lot of understanding of friendship. And that's what I want to talk about in this podcast. Now, let's start the show by making a, a, a simple point, which is it's impossible to be happy without friends. It just is now. There are some people that I've met that have very few human relationships, but they're unusual. I wrote a column last year based on a visit that I was granted of with a hermit in the Himalayas. I actually went to a Tibetan Buddhist monk who's a hermit.

• 6:56Arthur Brooks?

  He sees nobody, day after day after day after day. He sees people maybe two times a year, and he granted me an interview, which was an unbelievable honor. He lives up in a little house in the Himalayan foothills, outside, way outside Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama is located, and it's just kind of him and monkeys. And he gets up at, you know, the crack of dawn and makes himself a little bit of breakfast, and he meditates a lot, and he reads holy scripture and goes to bed, and walks around, get a little bit of exercise, and this goes on for month after month after month. And I said, "How long have you been doing this?" He said, "27 years." And I said, "Don't you get lonely?" He said, "No, it's just pure bliss." Well, I'm sure it's true, but that's not typical. That's, I mean, your results may vary, but they probably won't. For the vast majority of people,

• 7:37Arthur Brooks?

  it's impossible to be happy without friends. There's decades of research that actually shows this. I'll put, as always, all of the references to the academic literature into the show notes, if you want to go look it up. There's a very interesting paper from the Journal of Happiness Studies from 2011, titled appropriately, "I Matter to My Friend, Therefore I Am Happy: Friendship Mattering and Happiness," that really shows this, that people who don't have friends just are way, way, way less happy. They're lonely. They want to have friends, too. The second big point that I want to make that's based on the same research body is that friendships, I mean, how much happier? Friendships account for 60% of the difference in happiness between individuals. So the variance in happiness

• 8:21Arthur Brooks?

  in individuals, we measure that variance using regression analysis, and friendship on the right-hand side of these regression models soaks up 60% of the variance in happiness between individuals. That's unbelievable. I mean, basically, if you want to know the difference between the biggest variance drivers, it's a successful romantic partnership and close friends. That's kind of what it's all about, and other stuff is just kind of pales in comparison. That doesn't mean nothing else is important. I'm just talking about life satisfaction. There are other things that matter. Don't get me wrong. It's not like, you know, it doesn't matter if you make a living. It doesn't matter if you practice your religion. I'm not saying that. That stuff really matters a lot for other things. But just for pure life satisfaction, man, friendship, it's really a big deal. Now, how do marriage and friendship relate?

• 9:06Arthur Brooks?

  You've seen my podcast on this, I hope. I'll drop it right below me here. If you want to click on it, go watch it after you're done with this one. And shows that the secret to a happy marriage, you know what it is? Deep friendship, AKA companion in love. So it all kind of collapses into this one big idea. Very interesting study from the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Shows the third point that I want to make on this is that that one of the greatest markers, one of the greatest predictors of well-being at midlife. I was gonna say like me, huh? Yeah, right. That's the guy who used to be at midlife. Is whether or not you can rattle off the names of a few close friends. If you're in an honest state and you're younger than me, 10, 20 years younger than me, or certainly my age. And I say, okay, give me three close friends. You're like, whoa, bad sign.

• 9:52Arthur Brooks?

  It's like, that's a big tell. That's a big predictor in the research on this. This is actually from the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, as I mentioned a minute ago. That's from Chen and Feely. I'll put that in the show notes, too. It's a good paper. And the last point I want to make on this is that people, they change when they talk about their friendships. Their selectivity tends to change as they age. But the number always has to be more than zero. Now, a lot of people will actually down-select. So people in their twenties, they tend to have more friends. It's kind of more fresh friendship meat in their lives. They're looking for more experiences. And when you get to be my age, it's a little bit less so. You find you tend to be more selective about the people that you're gonna spend your time with. But it's gotta be more than zero.

• 10:35Arthur Brooks?

  And the happiest people, by the way, even among introverts, more on that in a minute. They're very close friends with their spouse if they're married or have a permanent romantic partnership. But they have more than one friend beyond that. That's what it comes down to. In other words, spouse plus one, that's sort of the magic formula. Spouse plus N, or N equals one or greater. Let's put it that way. And the size of N has very much to do with the extroversion/introversion continuum that you experience in your personality. So more on that in a second. But the bottom line is, even if you get more selective, you don't down-select to zero. You don't that, actually, if you want to be happy. So that's why it's all the more important for you to take stock of your friendship health today. Now, a lot of my viewers here for this show are young. A lot of you are in your twenties and thirties, and I hear from you all the time.

• 11:20Arthur Brooks?

  Now is the time, young friends, for you to be paying attention to the ecosystem of friendship in your life and getting it shipshape. That's why I'm doing this, because this is the big predictor. This is such a big deal for the prediction of you're going to get happier as you get older, especially into your fifties and sixties, is how good you are at friendship. So let's look at what a healthy friendship ecosystem kind of looks like. Let's just look at a typical friend group. I have interesting data on this from 2009. This comes from a poll of 2,000 Americans and asks about their friends, their friend group. The average American, average adult American, has about 16 people they would classify as friends. Okay, 16 friends. Is that a friend? Yes. Friend? No.

• 12:03Arthur Brooks?

  Okay, 16 people that are in that group that are called friends. Of these, they would classify three of them as friends for life. Like, this is it. We're gonna, this like, we're gonna be on rocking chairs, talking to each other, reminiscing about the old days. These are people that I'm going to be talking to for the rest of my life. Friends for life. That means that 13 come and go. Now, how long? That sort of depends. Five, besides the three, are people that they really like. Okay, so three friends for life. Presumably, you really like those people. And five others that may not be friends for life, but that you really like. That's what it comes down to. The other eight are not people that you either really like or are going to be friends for life. They wouldn't necessarily be people you would hang out with one-on-one.

• 12:47Arthur Brooks?

  They're probably not people that you anticipate talking to when you're 80. You might or might not know the names of their children, but you'll like them. You'll, I mean, you'll like them well enough. They have characteristics. They have friend-like characteristics. And that's what I want to get into now. What are the characteristics of the three, the five, and the eight? And what are the right proportions that are most likely to give you the happiest life? Then, what I want to talk about, most importantly, how can you make the proportions better? Okay, because that's really what it comes down to. It's not good enough for me to say, "Make more friends." I gotta tell you how and the right kind of friends with the right kind of depth. That's going to bring you what you actually seek. Okay, all right.

• 13:30Arthur Brooks?

  Now, that 16 is highly variable because that's an average across the population. Introverts have fewer and extroverts have more. When I talk to extroverts, one of the biggest predictors of extroversion, the biggest predictor of extroversion. If I want to do an extroversion test on you, the one question I'm going to ask actually isn't about friendship. I'm going to say, "How do you feel after a party?" That's what I'm going to ask you. And if you're like, "Exhausted," you're not an extrovert. If you're like, "Wired, I can't go to sleep," that means you're an extrovert. And it really has to do with when you're in a group of people, whether you get energy or whether it takes energy. That's one of the reasons that really highly competent introverts, they can do a party, but they pay for it, is what it comes down to. Now, I personally put the 96th percentile in extroversion, which means that I go to a party or I'm doing a thing. I have an event.

• 14:15Arthur Brooks?

  I do a lot of nighttime events. I give 150 speeches a year. I'm on the road all the time. And when I have a real nighttime event that finishes at 9:30 at night, I'm not going to sleep at 10. And if you've been watching the show, you know my morning routine. That's catastrophic because I'm up at 4:30. So it's a problem, right? You can actually see that. It's not all fun and games, being super extroverted. By the way, introverts are very skilled at certain parts of the friendship strategies that I'm going to be talking about here in a minute. So there's nothing better about extroversion and nothing worse about introversion. I'm just saying that the number tends to vary with respect to that dynamic. Let's think about the three, the five, and the eight.

• 14:55Arthur Brooks?

  And you know, how would we classify those people? What would we call those different kinds of people? And to do that, I want to go to the greatest thinker probably ever on friendship, which is not a recent social scientist, it's not somebody that one of my colleagues at the university. It's Aristotle. This is 2,500 years ago, and his Nicomachean Ethics, he talked a lot about friendship, about the importance of friendship, the beauty of friendship, the happiness that comes from friendship. A lot of the stuff that I'm talking about here, and there's nothing new. The new stuff is that we can run regression analyses using supercomputers, and even the supercomputers in our pockets, and that's amazing. We can do a lot more statistical analysis and get more data,

• 15:37Arthur Brooks?

  and we can actually do more brain scans and actually to see how, you know, the pleasure centers in our brains are touched when we have a meaningful relationship with another person. But the ideas, the philosophy, there's nothing new about them at all. And Aristotle, in writing the Nicomachean Ethics, he wrote a lot about different kinds of friends, and there's really nothing better that I can actually find. So what did he talk about? In the Ethics, he talked about the fact that there's three types of friends that have three different kinds of functions, and that lead you to three different levels of happiness. This stuff is gold, so let's walk through it slowly. At the lowest level of happiness is what he calls friendships of utility. And when I say the lowest, I don't mean they're unimportant. I don't mean that you should get rid of them.

• 16:20Arthur Brooks?

  It just means that they're kind of necessary but insufficient, to use mathematical language about it, okay? These friendships of utility. Utility is just what it sounds like. These are useful people, they're useful to you. These are people that are, you're very friendly with, you like, you work with. The emotional bonds are not necessarily very strong. They might be quite weak, as a matter of fact. Here's the acid test to know if a friendship is a friendship of utility. If you stopped working together, if you stopped doing something that was a mutual... Financial or, you know, personal benefit to both of you. If you stopped doing it together, you wouldn't be friends anymore. You wouldn't be enemies. You just wouldn't stay in touch. Here's another test. What are the kids' names? Right?

• 17:02Arthur Brooks?

  Those are the eight people of your 16 who are not friends for life. And there aren't people that you feel quite close to. If you understand what I'm saying here. Colleagues, partners in a transaction that you really like. People who do each other favors that are of sort of mutual benefit. Those are, those are useful friends. These are also telek friendships. They have a telos to them. They have a use or function to them. There's another way that you would think about that. Now, the second type of friendship, according to Aristotle, is what he would call friendships of pleasure. Now, it's not that, you know, you're giving each other back rubs or, you know, something like that. No, that's, that's not, that's not what I'm talking about at all. And this is a, this is a family podcast. I'm not going to go further than that.

• 17:45Arthur Brooks?

  I'm talking about friends who like and admire something about each other. And if that admiration were to go away. If that, that one quality that you admire in the other person were to go away, so would the friendship. Right? That's what it kind of is. It's based on something that you really like. Now, these are friendship with somebody because they're, they're funny, because they're beautiful, because they're interesting. You know, these are just qualities that you actually admire in the person and find really magnetic. Now, sometimes that's wonderful, like, you know, somebody's just so fun to be around. Sometimes it's a little, the motives are a little less noble, like the person's famous or rich. And that's why you want to hang around them. That's what also would be classified as friendships of pleasure, but, but that's not as noble. That's not as admirable to have friends like that.

• 18:31Arthur Brooks?

  It's really people where it's like, I don't know, and I'm around her. I just feel good about myself because she's such a positive person. And you admire that. But if she didn't have that, there's nothing intrinsic. There's, there's no, the telos. Goes away. So they're kind of like these transactional friendships, but, but not exactly. They're, they're higher than that. And, and, and, and he classifies those as, as friendships of pleasure. Now, the highest level, now that would, by the way, so the first would be the eight. These friendships of pleasure would probably be the five, right? That you really like that person. You really like something about that person. Now, the three, the friends for life. These are what he calls friendships of virtue. These are not atelic, or they don't have a telos.

• 19:16Arthur Brooks?

  These are called atelic friendships, which means they don't have a telos. They're not utilitarian. They're useless, if you know what I mean. Cosmically beautiful useless. They're not worthless, you know, they have a huge amount of worth. You know, I've had people in my life like that too, but no, useless friends are people where, even if they did nothing for you with respect to money, or power, or pleasure, or fame, or anything like that, you just love them. How many people do you have like that in your life? Those are the three that the average person has who really, who constitute friends for life. That's what it comes, those are, that's, that's the highest level of friendship. And it's interesting because he talks very movingly and beautifully. I would recommend to you the, the Nicomachean Ethics.

• 20:01Arthur Brooks?

  If you can't remember that, and, and you never were subject to that in high school or college, I'll put the Nicomachean Ethics in the, in the show notes as well. You can get it on, on Gutenberg for free on the internet. Um, you don't need to buy it or anything. And you go through this, and he talks very movingly about friendships of virtue, where, where useless friends. What they typically have is kind of a mutual love for a third thing. And, and they, they kind of walk toward that thing shoulder to shoulder. And their love is refracted from that third thing. And maybe it's something really cosmic, like they're faithing God, or they have kids together. You know, my wife and I, we have a, we have a virtuous friendship. I mean, we have deep, she's my best friend. It was like, we have deep, deep friendship together.

• 20:41Arthur Brooks?

  And we have this love for the third thing, which is our, our Catholic faith, our, our children, our grandchildren, you know? That kind of thing, for sure. And, and there's a beautiful thing about that. We feel like we're walking into the future together, and it's that characteristic. And I have that with. With other friends as well, a very close friend named Frank. And, and you know, we, we share so many values. And what do we talk about? We talk about the things that we both love, our faith. We have this mutual love for our faith and we talk about it a lot, how important it is. And so that's a key thing. Looking for somebody who has that mutual love and you love that person radiating off that third thing. I think that's a nice kind of metaphor for how friendship should actually work. Now, this is not a mutually exclusive framework.

• 21:21Arthur Brooks?

  You can have people who are super useful to you in your life, but they're also friendships of virtue. You know, Frank and I have worked together. We have, I mean, we've worked on projects together. He has a, an organization, a nonprofit organization that he, that he's involved in. And so I got involved in it too. I was president of a big nonprofit and, and I asked him if he'd be on my board, you know? I mean, somebody who's like looking out for me all the time. And so we have worked together. We've, we've done stuff together philanthropically. That's fun. But the whole point is that the, the working together was a pretext to be together. Right? To look for more things to, to do. So you can co-mingle these. And by the way, I have tons of admiration for Frank, for his, his beautiful qualities. Meaning there's friendship of pleasure in there too.

• 22:05Arthur Brooks?

  But most importantly is that this top level is what it comes down to. You can also, by the way, move between these categories. You start by working with somebody whom you turn out to really admire. And you keep kind of wanting to hang around with them and then you become very close friends for life. That happens all the time too. Um, I've even seen people who start off as kind of, you know, friendships of virtue and they wind up just kind of working together. I've even seen couples do this. I've talked to couples that have, you know, a family business or a business as a couple. And then they get divorced and keep working together. It's like, okay, man. I mean, it's hard to go from friendships of virtue down to friendships of utility. It's kind of like going from, you know, the friend zone into romance. It's, it's rarely pulled off, but I think it's probably done. Okay. Now, why do I tell you all that?

• 22:48Arthur Brooks?

  Because that's a really nice framework for understanding friendships. And that's kind of the three, five, eight. Right now, you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life. Or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed. To tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. There's one.

• 23:31Arthur Brooks?

  Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're gonna like how it feels. Another way to think about it is even simpler that I've talked about an awful lot in my own work. If you're familiar with with almost any book that I've ever written, I talk about it in this way. It's kind of two dimensionally. And and it it came from, you know, I was talking to my classes. And I remember describing to my kids the fact that I've noticed in my work

• 24:15Arthur Brooks?

  that the happiest people have a lot of real friends. They also have deal friends, but not just deal friends. And I would encourage my students to say, is this friend a real friend or a deal friend? And and my kids would kind of hear me talking about this. And I had to kind of think about what this meant in my own life. When I was confronted with it by my son Carlos. We were on a fishing trip, you know, for when he was a little boy, little boy, I mean, nine until 18. All he wanted for Christmas every year was to go away alone and fishing and hunting with me every Christmas. That's all we did every year. That's all he got for Christmas was like four days. And we would go down because we lived in Maryland at the time, so it was cold.

• 24:59Arthur Brooks?

  We would go down to Florida, we would go bass fishing, or we'd go off to Marco Island. And we would go fishing in the Thousand Islands. It's super fun. It was warm. And we would hunt, and I'm not much of a hunter, but he is, and you know, and he's a good shot. If when he was 11, he was a much better shot than me. And then he went on to become a professional sniper in the Marine Corps. So apparently it was early training, maybe aptitude. But the whole point is that Carlos wanted to do that with me, and it was wonderful. And just today, as a matter of fact, he texted me out of the blue. I see him all the time because he lives very near me. And he said, Dad, when are we going fishing again? Right? Just he was thinking of it. He wants to take me bass fishing because he's, you know, he's good at it. And and he's got the rods and reels. But one time we were on Lake Okichobee and we were bass fishing.

• 25:43Arthur Brooks?

  And we were just about to get out of the car and to get in the boat and go put our lines in the water. And my cellphone rings and he looks at me and I say, I gotta take this. So he gets out of the car and he's walking around and I'm taking this call. And it turns out it's something from, not exactly from my work, but somebody I wanna do some work with. I wanna do a deal with. And it is very friendly conversation. Afterward, I hang up and I get up 15 minutes later. And he said, who was that? And I said, his friend. And he said, he looks at me, he's like, real friend or deal friend? Cause he knows that if it's a deal friend, I shouldn't be delaying our bass fishing trip by 15 minutes. I had my priorities upside down. Smart boy, right? The problem with kids, they listen to you, right? So I think about that a lot.

• 26:27Arthur Brooks?

  And that actually was helpful to me because it helped me to get my priorities in order a little bit more. So let's talk about your friendships, whether they fall in the categories of real or deal. Real friendships are truly atelic. They are based on, they are these virtuous friendships or they're friendships that are tending toward these virtuous friendships. They might not be there yet, but you're really working toward that. The deal friendships are these friendships of utility, kind of like Aristotle talked about. And they're kind of incomplete because they don't involve your whole self. They don't involve your whole heart. They're necessary for the performance of a job and they require a kind of professional demeanor. They, deal friendships are good.

• 27:12Arthur Brooks?

  And by the way, I have tons of deal friendships and I like them a lot. My life is a lot better because of them. You know, one of the things that you find when you're my age, one of the reasons that on personality, I've talked about the personality dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. Agreeableness goes through the roof for the big majority of people once they get past 50 and 60. The reason is because when you're more agreeable, you have more deal friends and your life goes better. That's how it all kind of hangs together. You figure that out. Being a jerk is just totally not worth it because nobody wants to do anything with you. And that makes deals harder and that makes life harder as it turns out. So I got nothing against deal friendships. The problem I have is when it's all deal, no real. If it's all deal, no real, more on that in a second.

• 27:56Arthur Brooks?

  You're gonna be lonely is what it comes down to. Okay, so, social scientists often call these deal friendships expedient friendships. Interesting study that actually shows this very clearly, counting up these expedient friendships versus the true or perfect or real friendships in a very interesting article called Patterns of Friendship. Very old article, as a matter of fact, from 1961, before I was born considerably. So, it'll give you an idea of how we talk about this. But the whole bottom line is that real and deal, both exist, both are important. But, real friends are required for you to be a happy person. So, at the beginning of the show, when I said that you can't be happy without friends,

• 28:41Arthur Brooks?

  I'm gonna amend that now, so you can't be happy without real friends. And a scourge in our society is people who are so busy, strivers, you, me, that it's all deal, no real. And what I'll find when I talk to CEOs all the time, which is one of the most lonely groups I ever deal with in my work, I'll ask them to tell me about the people they spend all their time with, and there's no real friends on these lists. They might even be real friends with their spouses, they see them so little. And they have such a low level of emotional intimacy with that person. And they have so little in terms of shared loves with that person. It's all deal, man, it's all deal. And the other big mistake that I see for young strivers, and I'm talking to a lot of you, they say, "I'll have plenty of time for real friends, but right now, I'm gonna bust my hump."

• 29:25Arthur Brooks?

  All deal, all deal, all deal. No, don't do it, because what I'm talking about here is you're asking for trouble. You're asking for unhappiness. So, here now, we can refine what I'm trying to get at in the show, which is not how to have more friends, it's how to have more real friends than deal friends. And let me make the point again, that if you are too much deal and not enough real, it's probably because you're a seeker, because you're a striver. One of the reasons that you watch and listen to the show is because you wanna get ahead in life, and that's great, but getting ahead in life shouldn't get in the way of your life. And this is one of the classic ways that we do that, which is really important. Letting your work week turn into something that's a hellscape of striving.

• 30:10Arthur Brooks?

  It's interesting, because a lot of CEOs that I talk to, who are so incredibly lonely, I'll ask them, "When was the last time you had a real friend?" They talk about college, and they'll be my age. College is a long time ago, right? And the reason was because... That's what you do in college. That's your job. That's your gig in college unless you're not doing college right is what it comes down to. And so I have to train them. And that's what I want to do with you now. Every single person watching here can benefit from having better friendship skills. That I know. So no matter where you are in this continuum, you can be better. And if you're lonely, you can solve that problem, but you have to have better chops. That's what it comes down to. Now, this is the same thing as saying if your, your, your, your diet is out of whack,

• 30:55Arthur Brooks?

  you can fix it. You absolutely can, but you have to have knowledge and you have to have skills and you have to have habits and you have to have commitment. So that's what I want to ask from you today. I want you to take your friendship as seriously as you do your diet and exercise and work habits. And I know probably all of you have those first three things pretty well on point, but maybe not your friendship. So let me tell you the basics of regaining a better and healthier friendship balance so that you can have the real friends that you actually need in a proper friendship ecosystem to give you the maximum amount of life satisfaction and it will serve you as you walk yourself with your real friends into the future. Okay, to begin with, step number one, friendship, step number one. Give yourself a friendship checkup. And there's two tests for this, okay?

• 31:39Arthur Brooks?

  Test number one, ask yourself how many people know you well enough that if you were slightly off on a particular day would ask, you feeling okay today? You feeling okay today? That's funny because I've had Frank read something that I've published, my column, and text me, are you feeling okay? Cause there was something that was off in what I published in, you know, the Atlantic or the Free Press, depending on where I'm publishing.

• 32:10Arthur Brooks?

  That's pretty, that's pretty intimate, right? Are there people in your life that would ask you that? And then, by the way, that have the permission to ask you that, are you feeling slightly off? If you put up so many barriers, you know, so few people adequately well, that nobody could ask you that, that's a problem in that test number one is going the wrong direction. Okay, so this, again, this is not, this is not to say that everything is lost. On the contrary, I'm going to tell you how to fix this, but now you got to figure out if you've got something you need to fix. Test number two, list a few people, not including your spouse, with whom you're comfortable discussing personal things about your life. I mean, saying something really vulnerable like about your weaknesses. Now, it doesn't mean that you would have to, you would be comfortable divulging your deepest, darkest secrets. That's neither here nor there.

• 32:53Arthur Brooks?

  Maybe you have secrets, maybe you don't have secrets, and there may be things that you'll take to the grave. That's not what I'm talking about. But really personal things about yourself. Now, your deal friends, you're just not gonna do that unless you're in the TMI world, unless you're, you know, one of these people who's trying to get, you know, internet followers by, you know, talking about things that are way too intimate that you shouldn't be talking about inappropriately. I mean, here's the thing. If it's a deal, friends, inappropriate that you get too personal. And that's my point. How many people do you have in your life for whom it's not inappropriate for you to get personal? Okay? Take an inventory of that. List a few people. If you struggle to name two or three, that's a dead giveaway. And if you can, you know, be honest about this.

• 33:37Arthur Brooks?

  When was the last time you actually had that kind of conversation with that person? Don't make it theoretical. When did you talk about these things? If it's been more than a month, you're kidding yourself. Okay? All right. So take those two tests. And it's all green lights, good for you. Keep going with the podcast nonetheless, because you could still get even better. If these are red lights, then, then, then let's fix it. Here's how. To begin with, here's one of the things that I strongly recommend, that when you talk to people, either who are theoretically real friends, but that whom you've been neglecting, or could be real friends. I mean, don't force some sort of uncomfortable intimacy, but, but go deep. Go deep. I mean, one of the biggest mistakes that people make, and this is sometimes actually

• 34:20Arthur Brooks?

  quite gendered, as a matter of fact, you know, one of the things about the literature that shows that men, they tend to get lonelier as they get older, especially when they're extremely involved in their work, whereas women, they tend to get less lonely, they have better friendship chops. And again, your results may differ, because I know lots of lonely women, and, and lots of successful men are not lonely, but typically, the pattern is that men get worse and worse and worse as they get older. And the reason is because they get less and less personal with men, with other men in particular, who could be their friends. They kind of like, talk about like, so what kind of putter do you have? Right? Um, you know, where, where are you taking the family on vacation? It's like, who cares? It's like, I don't want that conversation with anybody. That is just not worth the time, is what it comes down to.

• 35:05Arthur Brooks?

  And so the first skill is to actually getting, getting up the courage to go deep or go home. Right? Hey, this is really tricky for people who haven't done this, maybe since childhood. And, and by the way, here's a, there's an interesting reference I want to, I'll put in the show notes that is, this is harder for men than women. From the Journal of Community Psychology, it's a, it's a pretty old paper from, you know, the eighties, as a matter of fact, it's a really good paper that shows that women have denser, more supportive friend networks than men do. And they base their friendships on social and emotional support, not just on shared interest and, you know, cars or something. This is really important to, to, to be thinking and talking about with real friends or potential real friends.

• 35:47Arthur Brooks?

  Things that matter, things that actually matter to you in your life and not trivialities to pass the time. My wife and I really recognized this and it was really important because we've moved a lot since we've been married, we've moved 20 times. And, and it's not, I'm not in the witness protection program. We've just moved a lot, right? And that means that we move cities and that means we're alone a lot. Especially after our kids moved out, but before they moved back in with their families. We now live in an intergenerational home and very near different families and we, we've done that on purpose. I've talked about that on a show before. But when we were, for example, we left Maryland, all the kids moved out, we moved to Boston. And, and we were like two little clouds, you know, on the, in the sky.

• 36:32Arthur Brooks?

  And what we learned over the course of doing this is that we, we can actually accelerate the real friend process. By, by going deep and you know, it, it's risky because you know, we could come off as Mr. And Mrs. Intense, but we would, we would, two weeks after we moved to a place, we'd start having dinner parties and inviting people over to our house. We'd have a Bible study at our house. Why? Because people will be there 20 years and they don't know you're lonely. And so we would invite people over and, and we would have these immediate, pretty intense conversations that were actually super interesting and fun. Because that's what people want when you talk to them. And it's so, it's great. And actually I can have all kinds of funny examples of this. And one is actually not one that we initiated, but one of the best conversations we had, Esther and I were in Madrid.

• 37:16Arthur Brooks?

  I was on a speaking tour. And it was some friends of friends that invited us over. So it was like five couples and we didn't really know them. We know who they were. And this, the woman who was hosting this at her home, you know, she was like, she was great. And about 20 minutes into the conversation, she said, I got a question for the group. We're like, huh? This is all in Spanish, mind you, so it was more animated and louder. And she's like, how many of you have had such a big problem in your marriage? You almost got divorced. Dude, that's so heavy. It was great. And we talked about different things that, I mean, most of the couples hadn't gotten to that point, but, but everybody had a lot of conflict.

• 38:01Arthur Brooks?

  And it turns out that the couple we were talking to, they had almost gotten divorced the year before. And they told us about it. The husband, I have to confess, was a little uncomfortable, but you know, it was, it was a very interesting evening. And those, we've kept up with those people. And you get my point, right? Maybe they're not the three friends for life yet, but they're not just deal. Right? There's more to it than that. That's point two. Go deeper, go home. Three, make more friends that you don't need. Now, this is really important because people think that, you know, in the course of my work, maybe I'll meet the people that become friends for life. You actually have to go outside of your networks, your networks of utility to typically define the people who are, they're just going to be friends for their own sake, outside the workplace,

• 38:45Arthur Brooks?

  but also outside all of your professional educational networks. It's really important and there's actually a kind of a movement for people to, to get together and have dinner. Super busy striving professionals who are lonely to have these dinner parties and they can't say what they do for a living, the whole dinner party. Why? Because this is what strivers do. My name is Arthur Rooks and my job is, and what you've just done is you've reduced yourself to your job. Is what it comes down to. And that of course makes, makes it all deal. Because if you have an important job, then people want to be around you for that particular reason. Or maybe you're struggling to get more professional connections and, and, and that's not the way it's supposed to work. So go outside of these networks on purpose, looking in places where people don't need to be. They just want to be.

• 39:30Arthur Brooks?

  That's house of worship. That's good. Um, maybe that's a bowling league, a charitable cause or related to your work. It's something in the community. It's getting involved in community affairs and just talking to people. This is where you're going to meet future real friends. When you meet somebody you like, don't overthink it. Invite them over. Okay, this is part of the making friends you don't need. Uh, don't overthink it, just invite them over. Go out to, "Hey, wanna have lunch?" Right, and, and, and this is especially hard for men. Like, women are better at that. But it's especially hard for men to do, but do that. And it's amazing how much fun that can actually be. I mean, by the way, sometimes it can be a dud. Sometimes you're gonna go out to lunch with this guy who seems awesome and then he talks about his putter and then, sorry.

• 40:13Arthur Brooks?

  Doing this actually will start you on a path of finding a way to create an ecosystem that, that, that has these real friends that you actually need. I hope this is helpful. This has been incredibly helpful to me. Um, and it actually has, I have to tell you, changed the way that I live my life. Um, when, when Carlos said that to me, I realized that I was way too much deal and not enough real. And I also recognized I was the chief executive of a big organization at the time and, and I was really lonely. You know, I was really lonely, I was great, it was great going fishing with Carlos, but I needed friends, I needed guy friends. And, and, and so I actually started to do the work. And it wasn't theoretical, it wasn't just social science to me at that point.

• 40:57Arthur Brooks?

  And since then, it's been great, I'm better at it. I've got a bunch of people that I, I talk to a lot. I make the time and it takes time. Sometimes you gotta put it on your calendar, call Frank, whatever it happens to be, your Frank, whoever that is. And when you do, you're gonna love it. You're gonna find that you have something that you could say to somebody that is one, probably one of the most beautiful things that they could hear, which is that "I don't need you. You're useless to me. I just love you."

• 41:28Arthur Brooks?

  You need more people like that in your life. All right, let's take a couple of questions and finish. Um, Luciana writes into the website, I hear this one sometimes, "After an incredible final year studying abroad in Spain, love the, love the year abroad in Spain, where I thrived academically, felt healthy and experienced a deep, meaningful relationship. Everything suddenly unraveled. When I didn't get a job, my relationship ended and I had to return home to an environment I had outgrown." Yep, came back to real life. I got it. How can I rebuild my confidence and sense of self-stay granted my values and faith and move forward without feeling stuck in what I believe was the best year of my life? It wasn't the best year of your life, Luciana. It wasn't. What it did was it showed you something

• 42:11Arthur Brooks?

  about yourself that you really liked. Part of the reason that it was so easy for you to do all these things when you were doing, you were living abroad in Spain is because there was a different Luciana. You know, there's a different version of you. There's a version of you that might be more impulsive about a beautiful relationship, maybe finding a real friend and going deep or going home. When people are outside of their home zone, their personality actually changes. When I first moved to Spain, when I was 25 years old, I had to learn Spanish. And as I was learning Spanish, I had a completely different sense of humor. I had a different personality, as a matter of fact. And the result was I made friends in a very different way. This happens frequently when you're away from home. And a lot of the time, you learn things about yourself

• 42:53Arthur Brooks?

  that you really, really, really like. So that's not, I promise you, Luciana, that's not the best year of your life. The best year of your life is still to come. What you get to do from that year in Spain is to ask three questions and do the work here. Number one, question number one, what did I learn? What did I learn about myself when I was there? What did I learn about the way that I make relationships? What did I do? What did I learn about how I feel healthy? What I put in my body? You know, how I do my work? Second question, what do I want? Because the most important thing you learn about yourself is what you want, is the nature of your desire. And it turned out that what you wanted was different than what you thought you wanted. What do I want in my life? What is it about that that I want to return to?

• 43:36Arthur Brooks?

  It's not Spain. It's something about you in Spain. And third, what's my plan for getting there? Because that Luciana is still there and you can recreate it. See, here's the thing. You actually brought home all of the things that you love so much about the year in Spain in you. They're in your suitcase with you. But you actually have to think about it. What do I want? What did I learn? What do I want? And what's my plan for rebuilding that based on the tools and knowledge that I got during that beautiful year? Second, this is from Alan, writing into office hours at overthrift.com. Can you share some advice on how to build and maintain consistency,

• 44:20Arthur Brooks?

  especially when motivation fades? Presumably, this is about habits and you're trying to live differently with respect to diet or exercise or relationships or anything, really. The answer to this about is not using your prefrontal cortex when you're trying to do something automatic, making things automatic so you can save your willpower and your cognitive bandwidth for new things. The key is doing things automatically. And the key to doing things automatically is habits. And the key to habits is starting small. So BJ Fogg out of Stanford wrote a very interesting book called Tiny Habits. You want to start exercising, he's like, do one push-up, right? Doing that every day sort of wires the brain to be doing that.

• 45:02Arthur Brooks?

  Now, here's how I think about that, about starting small. And the metaphor is for working out really works really well. So people ask me all the time, because I'm a fitness and health nut, because your body really determines a lot about your ability to be happy, because psychology is biology in so many ways. How do you start to work out? And a lot of people haven't and they don't know how and they want to, but they can't stay on it. And they go to a trainer and the trainer tells them to do 10 sets and, you know, body parts and the whole thing and they're sore and I got it. Don't do that. Okay. For the next six weeks, four days a week, do something for 30 minutes. Same thing. Get on an elliptical machine. Usually aerobic activity before you start doing resistance activity is the best way

• 45:46Arthur Brooks?

  to go, because what we're trying to do is to build the habits. You're not going to try to build all your muscles, but build the habit so that you can go forward. So that means like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. Do one half hour. Same workout for six weeks, that's 42 days. Only then will it have been established as a habit. There's a lot of literature that shows that habit formation takes about 42 days for most things, especially physical activity. And so that's what I recommend. Same thing, same thing, same thing. The sameness is critical for programming in the habit. Don't mix it up. Like, that's what I'm telling you. If you want to start eating healthy, I will give you a health maintenance plan, but you got to eat the same eight to 10 things over and over and over and over again until it becomes an actual habit, until your body adjusts.

• 46:31Arthur Brooks?

  So that's what I recommend. And this is the same thing with anything else. Break it down into something small, something manageable, something repeatable, and do it until it actually becomes a habit. And then the consistency takes care of itself, because your brain will say, that's the thing that I do. That's true of anything. We're done. Let me know what your thoughts are at [email protected]. Like and subscribe. Boom. Hit the subscribe button, please. We need the support and we need the algorithm at God's to help us in all the ways that we reach as many people as possible. That's on Spotify and YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment. I'll read it. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on all the other social platforms where we have a lot of content that are not in the podcast. And do order The Meaning of Life. Did I say The Meaning of Life?

• 47:15Arthur Brooks?

  The title of my book is The Meaning of Your Life. And that's really important to learn more about this book, about this movement, and how you can be part of it. And if you want, there's somebody who's struggling, get them a copy too. Thanks so much for watching. See you next week.