Pod Insights Office Hours with Arthur Brooks 7 Habits That Lead to Happiness in Old Age About this episode Most people assume getting older means getting less happy. Maybe you’ve thought it too. But the research shows otherwise. In this episode of Office Hours, I’ll show you how your later years can be some of the happiest of your life and how to make that happen.
I’ll take you inside the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. I’ll explain why well-being follows a U-shaped curve and why, after midlife, your trajectory depends on the “investments” you’ve made.
I’ll also share the seven habits you can start practicing today to build your own happiness portfolio so you can enjoy more satisfaction, purpose, and joy in the years to come.
In this episode, I cover:
• The biggest misconception people have about their happiness after 50
• Why life satisfaction bottoms out in midlife, then rebounds stronger than before
• The one bad habit most strongly linked to marriage dissolution
• How learning to handle life’s inevitable setbacks pays off in your future well-being
• A case for expanding your mind, reading widely, questioning assumptions, and exploring unfamiliar ideas
• Why love is the strongest predictor of happiness in old age, and why one truly close connection can matter more than many casual ones
• Listener questions on happiness and age, if happiness is relative, and how to make the most out of a long commute
We’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please email us at [email protected] . And please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening!
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Where to find Arthur Brooks:
• Website: https://arthurbrooks.com/ https://arthurbrooks.com/
• 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]
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(04:14) The typical trajectory of happiness
(09:34) How the Harvard Study splits people into two groups in old age
(15:03) Why uncontrollable factors don’t define your future
(15:54) How to take the reins despite your genetics
(17:23) The four most powerful habits for steering your wellness in old age
(28:13) Get good at coping
(31:16) Be a lifelong learner
(35:15) Invest in your relationships
(40:45) A summary of all 7 habits (and Arthur’s #8)
(41:57) Q&A: How does what makes people happy vary across age groups?
(45:58) Q&A: Is happiness relative, or do people experience it differently?
(47:35) Q&A: How to stay happier during a long commute
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Referenced:
• Leadership and Happiness course: https://www.hbs.edu/coursecatalog/1885.html
• How to Build a Life: https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/
• The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Files-Insights-Arthur-Brooks/dp/B0F4MFQ6VN
• The Harvard Study of Adult Development: https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/
• Good genes are nice, but joy is better: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/
• Robert Waldinger’s website: https://www.robertwaldinger.com/
• The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Lessons-Scientific-Happiness/dp/198216669X
... References continued at: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/
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Transcript 10,960 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:00 Arthur Brooks? Let's ask the basic question. When people get older, do they naturally get happier or not? As a matter of fact, it's not readily apparent. When I ask my students, "What does it seem like to you to be 58 versus 28?" "I don't want that. I don't want that." And I say, "Why?" And they can't quite say why, except that it doesn't sound fun to be middle-aged or old. Well, it really depends on your quality of life, doesn't it? Do people all experience life with the same level of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning? Nope. They have different tendencies. And that means some people, AKA me, and some of you have to work harder on our habits. And that's a blessing. You and I are held to a higher standard, and that's what has to make us elite happiness athletes.
1:50 Arthur Brooks? Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I teach at Harvard University where I teach classes on the science of happiness. That's what I write about in The Atlantic. Every Thursday morning I have a column called "How to Build a Life." It's your column for the science of happiness with new ideas every single week. My new book is right here, "The Happiness Files." It's 33 essays that are a lot like this show on how you can be happier at work and happier in your life, and they're ideas that you can bring to other people as well. What do I want? I want you to live a happier life based on science, and I want you to become a teacher
2:35 Arthur Brooks? of this material with me. That's why I've created the show, that's why I do my work, and that's why I'm so grateful to you for spending the next 45 minutes with me, looking at science in the public interest, science that you can use to lift yourself and other people up. Now, please let me know what's on your mind. Leave comments wherever you're viewing or listening to this show. Make sure that you note the email address if you want to send an email directly to me and my team. That's [email protected] . And while you're at it, please like and subscribe so that the algorithms smile on the happiness science that we're trying to bring to the rest of the world as well. This is one of the ways that we can spread these ideas.
3:17 Arthur Brooks? And by the way, while you're at it, please send a link to the show to one and a half million of your closest friends. Now, I've been looking at the comments, and I know what's on your mind, and it's kind of what's on my mind as well. Here's a question that I've gotten over the past few weeks of this show that I want to look at today, namely, "What can you do, for that matter, what can I do, to give us the best chance of getting happier as we get older?" A lot of people are concerned about this. My students at the university are, on average, 28 years old. They're master's degree students. They're not kids, but they're pretty young. They're in their mid-20s, and they're thinking... About the future, sometimes with a little bit of dread, actually. Why? Because getting older doesn't sound like fun.
4:01 Arthur Brooks? In our culture, we tend to valorize and almost worship youth as if this should be the happiest time of your life. And yet, it doesn't feel that way a lot of the time. Still, when I ask my students, what does it seem like to you to be 58 versus 28? 78 versus 28? I don't want that. I don't want that. And I say, why? And they can't quite say why, except that it doesn't sound fun to be middle aged or old. Well, it really depends on your quality of life, doesn't it? And your quality of life depends a lot on your investments right now. That's what I want to talk about. My subject today is the seven investments that you can make today that are going to pay off now pretty, pretty well and a lot later.
4:46 Arthur Brooks? And this is actually what we find based on longitudinal data and the best science available. This is based on studies, not suppositions. So these aren't just old kind of hackneyed ideas. These are the things that are actually showing up in the research that's been undertaken over the past 90 years or so. These are the seven habits that lead to greater happiness as you walk through the voyage of your life. So let's get started. Now, to begin with, let's ask the basic question. When people get older, do they naturally get happier or not? Most people don't know. And the truth is, when I started studying the science of happiness, I didn't know either. As a matter of fact, it's not readily apparent.
5:29 Arthur Brooks? When I ask my students, you know, who are, as I mentioned, 28 years old on average, do you think you're going to be happier or unhappier in 10 years? Say 38. I say, imagine yourself when you're 38. They're like, ah, it's so old. And I'm like, just wait. And then I ask them to vote, happier or unhappier? 90% think they're going to be happier. The others are maybe a little cynical. They hope to be happier, but 90% is a lot. And then I ask them why? And they give me a very plausible explanation. They say, for example, the things that I want, I'm going to get. And it's true. I know, because I've been teaching for a long time. If you're working hard and you're a striver and you're ambitious and you're killing it,
6:13 Arthur Brooks? you're gonna get what you worked for. So be careful what you wish for, as they used to say. And it's true, because wrong dreams, bad outcome. But, you know, you want the job and the promotion and the success and the family and all those things. You're probably gonna get it. And that's why most people think that at 38, they're gonna be happier than at 28. Then I say, how about 48? And most people say happier still, cuz more of same. Then I start progressing through the decades and they get less and less enthusiastic. Why? Because it's murkier. Also because it just sounds like there's more problems as you get older, right? Well, not necessarily. It turns out there's a way that you can program these later years based on the smart things that you're doing now that will benefit you right now as well,
6:57 Arthur Brooks? but have a really great long-term payoff. They have a compounding interest in the business of happiness. And specifically, there's seven things that I'm gonna talk about. Now, back to this whole arc of happiness. People think that their happiness is gonna go up and up and up and kinda max out at some point and then come back down again. That's actually wrong. The average person tends to actually decline in net-net year-to-year happiness from the early twenties until the early fifties. Now, don't panic. This is not a bad thing. Let me explain why that happens. Happiness, for any of you who've been following my research over the years, you know that happiness has three macronutrients, three fundamental elements, components.
7:39 Arthur Brooks? They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three big parts of your life. You need to enjoy your life. You need to take satisfaction in your accomplishments and activities, and you need to know the why of your existence. Those are the three projects. The pursuit of happiness in the American Declaration of Independence. If good old Thomas Jefferson were a happiness scientist, he'd talk about the pursuit of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. That's really what the pursuit is all about. Now, when I see happiness for the average adult declining, it's actually not, it's not a scary or alarming thing at all. What this is, is that people enjoy their lives a little bit less than they used to, but they're putting more meaning in the bank.
8:23 Arthur Brooks? It means that you're trading one macronutrient of happiness for another. Enjoyment is a short-term happiness play. Meaning is a long-term happiness play. When you're in your 30s and you're raising your kids and it's a pain and you're worrying about your mortgage and your job's crazy and you've got to commute, it's not that enjoyable a lot of the time, but it's very meaningful. And what that means is that you're sacrificing some of your enjoyment now for a bunch of meaning later. And that meaning really starts to come home to roost in your 50s. What we see is a massive escalation in average happiness for people from early 50s until about 70. So this is a good time. I'm 61 years old and trust me, it's actually, it's pretty extraordinary. I wouldn't have known it when I was 31 and 41,
9:07 Arthur Brooks? but 61 is way better for a lot of the things that I did right. And I'm not paying that much for things I did wrong and we're going to talk about that more in a minute. So this is the thing to console you. If you find that enjoyment is really, really tricky, you're making these happiness investments. And those happiness investments in terms of meaning are really going to pay off a little bit later. So almost everybody gets happier between their early 50s and about 70 years old. That's what the data say. And then the population kind of breaks up into two groups. That's the point in which about half the population keeps getting happier and half the population starts back down again. Half and half. And it's pretty pronounced what we actually see. You see this group of old people that's really happy and you see a group of old people that's really unhappy.
9:52 Arthur Brooks? You don't see kind of neutral people in that zone. So I'm just going to take a wild stab at which group you want to be in. The goal is to be above your natural happiness trajectory all the way through and then get into that upper branch of the happiness curve after 70. What can you do today? Now, a lot of people are like, Have good luck, but that's not good enough for you, is it? You don't want to be on that lower branch. You want to avoid that and you want to get on that upper branch. My job today is to tell you the seven ways to get on the upper branch and to avoid the lower branch. And we know how to do it. Now, I'm going to tell you about some data that show us why we know that. And these are data that I mentioned in the very first episode of this podcast.
10:36 Arthur Brooks? This is called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This is a study that was started in late 1930s. I mentioned it quite briefly in that episode. I'm really going to dig into it today because this is the gold standard for longitudinal data. This is the best data available that track people over the lifetime. Interview them every year, year on, year on, year. Why? Because that's a crystal ball. These are data that start when people are teenagers and ask them how they're living, what they're doing, and then years, decades later, it shows whether they're happy and healthy. And then it compares those early behaviors with those later outcomes. This is great. This is exactly what we want. There's not very much data like this in the world because, you know, this is a huge investment.
11:17 Arthur Brooks? A 90-year data analysis, you know, the people were starting the study and funding the study. They're all going to be dead. So why would we do that? And when the answer is this good for humanity? And fortunately, some people did. This study started among sophomores at Harvard College. That's the undergraduate division of Harvard University in 1938 and 1939. Now, you're thinking to yourself, well, that's not a very representative sample. It's almost all white. It was all men in those days. And it was people of, you know, above-average means. So that doesn't really tell us anything. Well, don't worry because that sample was then later meshed up with another sample of people born in the same timeframe who didn't go to college at all. And so they were largely working-class background. And then the study started to include the spouses and partners of these people.
12:02 Arthur Brooks? And then it started to include the kids. And now it's representative demographically, it's pretty good of the American population, above and below average income, racially, in terms of gender, all this stuff. It actually kind of looks like America. And it goes to the present, the late 30s until the present. Now, there's some people in the samples that didn't make it all the way through. John F. Kennedy was in the original sample because he was a sophomore at Harvard in 1938 or 1939. The sample that was from working-class people in Boston that was matched up to these people, it actually included the Boston Strangler of all people, who obviously didn't also make it to the end of the sample, but most did. And they died over the course of the sample. There's a handful that are still alive, believe it or not,
12:47 Arthur Brooks? that have made it all the way through. But a lot of their spouses are still in, and their kids are still in. The whole point is, we get to track people over the course of their lives. It's super exciting, and it's actually quite amazing what we're able to see. This is a crystal ball. What did people do when they were young that led to good outcomes and bad outcomes when they were old? Now, here's kind of how it works. You want to look at two quadrants of people when they're old. We call them happy well, and that means that they're both happy about their lives, and we measure this in all the ways that happiness scientists do it. We say, "Compare yourself to all of the people," et cetera, et cetera. We do it in a way that's psychometrically robust and reliable, and also well, in terms of their physical health. So they're happy and healthy.
13:31 Arthur Brooks? The other group, in the other extreme, are people who are sad-sick. The sad-sick are low in happiness and they're high in sickness. Now, of course, you could have the off-quadrants here. You could be people who are happy and sick, and you could have people who are sad and well, but there aren't very many people in those quadrants. Why? Because by the time you're old, there's a huge correlation between being happy and living to be old relatively healthily. Again, I've known people, even in my own family, that were pretty happy and pretty old, but not very healthy. But this is not the normal state of affairs. And besides, I know what you want. You want to avoid being sad and sick, and you want to be happy and well. So let's look at those two quadrants, and that's what the research typically does. What are the practices of the people in these two groups? That's what I want to talk about now.
14:16 Arthur Brooks? Now, to begin with, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can't control that's going to put you in one of these two quadrants. And this is a big beef I have with a lot of the happiness science. A lot of the happiness science will be like, "Hey, you want to be happy." Be Danish. It's like, good, thanks, thanks, that's great. Make sure you've been already in a happy marriage for 40 years. Like, thanks, great, thanks. You got any news I can use? And that's where a lot of these kinds of data start. So, for example, in this Harvard study of adult development. Wait, let me back up for a quick second. Let me, let me give a little shout out to the people who run it. This, there've only been three directors in the past 90 years of the study. That's unbelievable. In academia, that's just completely unheard of. The guy who runs it right now is Robert Waldinger.
15:01 Arthur Brooks? He's a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School. He's also a psychoanalyst practicing as a clinical practice in patients. And he's a Zen Buddhist priest. This is a really interesting guy. He guest lectures for me in my, in my, in my classes at Harvard. I've interviewed him in different contexts. He's a great scholar and an unbelievable author. His last book was called The Good Life, which was a big bestseller. He's just a lovely guy, he's a wonderful guy. Before him was another psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School named George Valiant, who also ran it for more than 30 years. So, these guys are just visionary and they have this, you know, they have this just complete longevity in the way that they're in their own lives. They, they're, you know, they're not kids either. But that they're running the study in such a wonderful way.
15:45 Arthur Brooks? They're an example of the kind of life that we want to lead and they're leading the study. Terrific stuff. Okay, now, let's talk a little bit about the, about the, the things you can't control that are in the study. Number one is have a happy childhood. Well, thanks. Did you have a happy childhood? It's great, great for you. Bully for you, as they say in Britain, but, but you can't control that. Second is having a long-lived ancestors. Uh, yeah, I mean, it's like, I, I remember thinking that, seeing that and going, yeah. My dad died at 66, my mom died at 73. In today's world, this, this is not good longevity. And, and that's not great. The point is that we need to look at the things we can control, not the things we can't control. This is a really important thing to keep in mind across all the happiness science.
16:30 Arthur Brooks? I'm going to talk about this a little bit later, probably today, maybe in a later episode, that a lot of the happiness is actually, that we, that we enjoy. Our mood balance is actually genetic. But we can't fret about that. What we need to is look at the part that isn't genetic and manage our genetics better. Right. By having good habits. This is so critically important. And let me make the case right now about how you can manage your own genetics, good or bad. A lot of the twins studies where twin identical twins are separated at birth and adopted in a separate family. There's a bunch of these studies because that happened a lot between the mid 1930s and mid 1960s. This was not a social science experiment by diabolical scholars at Harvard University.
17:14 Arthur Brooks? I promise, I promise you. It just happened. And, and then when they were reunited as adults and given personality tests, they found that a lot of stuff was genetic, a lot of things about their personalities, but a lot of things about their behaviors as well. For example, about half of your tendency toward alcohol abuse is genetic. But if it came to me and said, uh, mom and dad were drunks. All four of my grandparents drank, drank too much. I'm doomed. I'd say, ah, you missed a stat because I have a way to turn that genetic proclivity toward alcoholism to zero right now. What is it? What is it? What's the new technique? Don't drink. That's the technique. If you have it in your family and you don't do it, you're not going to become an alcoholic. And what that says is if you know your genetic tendency, you can pay more attention to your habits and you win.
17:59 Arthur Brooks? It's a very important thing to understand. And that's what, what I'm really emphasizing here. Don't worry about the uncontrollable stuff. Only worry about the controllable things. And there's a bunch of controllable things. That's the point of this episode is the seven things that you can actually control. That will make you happier now, happier later, and happiest when you're old. Okay, this stuff is gold for me and for you. So let's get started. What are the controllable habits? Number one, well, actually talk about number one, two, three, and four. Cause the first four are a lot about your physical health. Now a note on physical health. I do a lot of stuff on wellness because wellness and happiness are intimately intertwined. I'm going to do future episodes on diet, on exercise, on sleep, all this stuff.
18:44 Arthur Brooks? I'm really into it. I'm a absolute gym rat myself because I know this is super important for mood balance. And I'm going to talk about what the science says about that in the coming weeks. But for the meantime, I want you to remember that there's a reason I mentioned before, that happy and well go together. Because when you're well, you are happier. Working on your health is super important for your happiness. Working on your happiness is super important for your health. So, to get in the happy well category, this is not one or the other. This is both. Starts with the four things you need to be thinking about with respect to your longevity, with respect to your basic health. They are smoking, drinking, diet and exercise. Okay, I know, I know, I know. But let's start with the most obvious at all. Don't smoke.
19:29 Arthur Brooks? Don't smoke. Don't put smoke in your lungs. I'm mostly talking about cigarettes, but I'm also talking about other things that you might smoke. They're bad for your lungs and that's bad for your health. I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of obvious at this point. Um, I remember I was a smoker in my twenties. I was a professional musician for a long time. Most musicians smoked in those days. Furthermore, I was playing in a, in a symphony orchestra in Barcelona, Spain. And man, this, the, the musician's lounge and the breaks and rehearsals. It was like, it was completely full of smoke. Everybody was smoking all the time. And that was in the like late 1980s, which for most of you watching this episode, that's like, were dinosaurs roaming the earth? No, but as a matter of fact, that, that was a long time ago.
20:11 Arthur Brooks? But we already knew that smoking was bad and, and, and I knew it. I knew it. Um, and, and I finally quit only because I set the bed on fire and, um, I was engaged and at the time. And, and I realized that it was one thing to kill myself with a stupid habit. It was something else to kill my wife-to-be with a stupid habit. So I actually quit, but it was hard. It was a really hard thing to do. Uh, smoking is horrible for you, obviously, but let me give you one statistic. You have a, if you're a lifelong smoker of cigarettes, you have a 70% chance, seven in 10 chance of dying of a smoking-related illness. And smoking-related illnesses are horrible for your quality of life.
20:52 Arthur Brooks? They're painful and awful and they're avoidable, which means that you have a lot of unhappiness if you're dying of a smoking-related illness. They will lower, it will rule, lower your quality of life. Stop smoking. That's number one. And it's, and again, I'm not trying to preach to you. I'm just telling you what the data say. That people are, are almost always in the sad, sick category of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Over these decades, if they're smokers. Second is substances. Now, this was in the early years of the study and for until relatively recently, really about drinking alcohol. Alcohol has had a kind of metamorphosis in the public consciousness. It's pretty interesting for those of us who are in the wellness and happiness space
21:34 Arthur Brooks? that young people drink less than their elders did. Many of you, if you're in your twenties and thirties, you drink less than your parents did. And part of that is because thinking has really changed. I mean, there's a time for people my age where we all believed that one or two glasses of red wine a night was really good for you. And that's not what the latest data say. I'm not saying don't drink at all. I'm saying be conscious of what you're actually doing and basically pay attention to your habits. One of the things that we find, that the study clearly finds, is that euphoric substances in general, and it's mostly alcohol in the sample, that they're neurotoxic, but they're also a relationship as you get more and more involved with them, especially if you become addicted.
22:18 Arthur Brooks? There's nothing for your happiness that's going to get better if you have a substance abuse problem, if you have a dependency on any euphoric substance. It's horrible for your happiness. As a matter of fact, that's the number one predictor of dissolution of marriage. Your marriage will fall apart, generally speaking, if you're an addict. And you're rolling the dice if you have any of this in your family, or you have any tendency that you have noticed in yourself. So here's what it comes down to. If you want to get happier as you get older, as opposed to unhappier as you get older. If you want your last decades of life to be your best decades of life, but you just want a progression of happiness, which you deserve, by the way, you need just be extremely assiduous about the way that you look at your own substance use.
23:02 Arthur Brooks? Now, people make all kinds of different decisions in their lives. I'm not judging anything. There have been times when I haven't driven the safest car. I've also had near-death experiences. I had somebody hit me in my Alfa Romeo last year at 65 miles an hour on the freeway, and that was a really, really scary couple of seconds in there. Car performed well, totaled the car, ended up off the road, and I went home and Esther said... You need a bigger car. But in much the same way, you could have an experience that that reminds you of what you're trying to do with your life with respect to any other decision that you make, including including substances. So so interrogate your use of alcohol and other and other substances in your life. That's what this would say.
23:45 Arthur Brooks? And here's a couple of rules you might consider. If you have any substance abuse in your family or you have any doubts in your own life, stop, just stop. You're never going to look back on your life and say, you know what? I wish I'd gotten drunk more. I don't know anybody who's ever said that. And there will be a lot of regret, potentially, if you don't. So if you wonder, kick it out. Number three is is diet and maintaining a basic, healthy body weight. And and there's a lot of debate about, you know, what's healthy and what's not healthy, what's too much, what's too little. There's a lot of eating disorder literature on the internet in the health and wellness space that I inhabit.
24:29 Arthur Brooks? You know, I see a lot of people that have a really unhealthy behaviors with respect to body dysmorphia. They're comparing themselves to people that have dangerously low levels of body fat, for example. I mean, what a weird problem that we should actually have in our society where they're kind of we're on the extremes so much on these types of things. Here's kind of what it comes down to. The happiest, healthiest people in old age are not extreme in what they do. And they maintain a basic, healthy body weight without yo-yo diets. They're not kind of going up and down and up and down and up and down. I've written about this myself. You know, people who gain a lot of weight and then they lose a lot of weight quickly. You find if you go on a very, very strong diet, especially a very restrictive diet,
25:11 Arthur Brooks? you have about a 30% chance of winding up with an eating disorder. And there's a psychological reason for this, which is this. We love progress as human beings. We love progress. Progress is the best. And and the result of of the reward from making progress in a diet is seeing the scale go down a little bit. You're willing to forego all kinds of food that you like. To see that scale go down, it's just so satisfying. But there's a problem when you hit your goal. You hit your weight goal, you know what your, you know what your reward is? You never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations, enjoy, right? I mean, that's the reason that these things are, they often, the diets so often fail. They have something like a 95% failure rate.
25:53 Arthur Brooks? But, but also people who achieve this often keep going and that's what turns into an eating disorder. So the whole point is, and what the study really shows is people who are pretty relaxed about this, but eat in a healthy way and they eat healthier as they get older, without going up and down and up and down and up and down. So this is really the goal on this one, is learning how to eat in a way that's intuitive and extremely healthy, et cetera. And that's the goal, to be a healthy person, not to look a certain way on the internet, okay? Uh, and, and again, I'm not preaching to just young people. A lot of, a lot of people my age that really struggle with this a lot. Number four is exercise. And that's just what it comes down to. It's interesting because what the, what the researchers say for this one,
26:37 Arthur Brooks? to get happy and well when you're old is prioritizing movement. Now, my friend Dan Buettner, I talked about him in the first episode of the show. He did the Blue Zones and what he found is all the places where people that live to be over 100 is also the places where people tend to be really happy when they're older. Kind of like this study, they're always walking around, just walking around all the time. He's in Sardinia and Okinawa, Loma Linda, California. And they're all like, you know, walking, walking, walking. They're walking every place, they're walking with each other. And that's really kind of the thing, walking, ambulation is the human exercise of happiness, is what it comes down to. Um, almost every major religion has pilgrimages. I've walked the Commune de Santiago, which is this, you know, several hundred kilometer pilgrim,
27:18 Arthur Brooks? sorry, for you Americans, that's, that's miles, across northern Spain with my beloved. I've done it twice, I've done just the last eight days twice. I, I tried to do the 33-day, 800-kilometer walk and Esther's like, no. No, enjoy it, send me a postcard. Uh, so, so she's agreed, she's signed up for the eight-day versions. But this extraordinary is wonderful. And we try to take a kind of a powerful walk every night after dinner. And part of it is because we've seen this research. Walk, walk, walk, walk. You're going to be a happier person is what it comes down to. But part of it is also that this is something is deeply tied in to meditation. Most serious religious traditions have something that's called walking meditation. And you can do this.
28:02 Arthur Brooks? And at the same time, you get happier and you get healthier. But this is also ergonomically completely sound. You're not likely to get hurt. Most people can do it. Now, on top of that, all of the kinds of exercise are great. I've written columns and I'll make sure we post to the notes. Exercise that lowers your stress. Yoga and flexibility, really good for that. For example, that raises your sense of self-esteem. And again, I'm not a big self-esteem guy, but there are times when you need to feel better about yourself. And resistance training is absolutely great for that. Weightlifting is fantastic for that. For lowering levels of sadness and anxiety, stone two cardio, fantastic for that. So just be, I mean, just be an active person. Don't be a maniac about it.
28:46 Arthur Brooks? Don't be completely dogmatic about it. There are times in my life where, because I'm such a gym rat. I mean, I'm in the gym 60 minutes a day and I've done that almost seven days a week for decades. Where I can be like a little bit too freaked out about it when I'm missing it because of travel. Ordinarily is the case. But be an active person. Prioritize movement. That's habit four. Okay, so those are the big four that we're talking about with respect to your body and your mind. But the last three are a little less intuitive. Five, six, and seven. Habit number five is practicing active coping and getting good at your coping mechanism. Here's the deal. Life's hard. Hey, news flash. Arthur Brooks told me life is hard.
29:30 Arthur Brooks? You're going to have negative experiences regularly. That's what life entails. That's life on planet Earth. You're going to have regular negative emotions. Now, a lot of people are taught that when they're having negative emotions, something's wrong. That there's something, there's a pathology, they're broken in some way. That's craziness. That's, if you're not sad and anxious a lot, then you really need therapy. The reason you have negative emotions is your limbic system of your brain, the consolar tissue that was formed between 2 and 40 million years ago, it was created so that it would react to outside circumstances. And you would react in the right way. You'd make decisions in the correct way on the basis of the stimuli that your brain is experiencing.
30:12 Arthur Brooks? When you're having negative emotions, it means that you have perceived a threat, which is an indication there's something you should avoid. That's what negative emotions are all about. You're gonna have them all the time. 16% of the average person's day is spent in predominantly negative emotion. Now, you know, for people like me who are really high in both positive and negative affect, that's a future episode of the show to figure out what your affect profile, your emotional profile is. I promise you're gonna take a test to do that if you keep watching the show. For me, it's more than 16%, but that's natural. That's normal. The key thing is you gotta have a way not to eliminate it. Don't try to eliminate your sadness. Try to manage your sadness and learn from your sadness. That's the trick.
30:57 Arthur Brooks? And you need your way to do it. You need to get really good at it. Happy old people all have their technique, their super secret way to do it. It turns out they all fall in a certain set of categories. Again, coming up in the weeks ahead, you're gonna get those techniques. You're gonna get a whole bunch of different techniques to do something called metacognition, which is moving your emotional experiences from the limbic system into your prefrontal cortex, into your executive centers where you can manage your emotions and they don't manage you. But you gotta be good at one of those things. Some people get really, really good at therapy. Believe it or not, if you're gonna find therapy effective in your life, you need to be good at it.
31:41 Arthur Brooks? You need to have a lot of skill as a patient, and many people are. Other people are really good at meditation. Some people are excellent at prayer. But here's the deal. Be serious about your technique. Journaling, do it a lot. Get really good at it. The happy, well people all have their thing. So stay tuned in the coming weeks so I can tell you what the suite of things Or that you can get good at where you can manage your life's travails and turn them from a lot of suffering and sadness into sources of learning and growth. That's common. Okay, number six, learning. Happy, well, people are learners. Learning is, it's a beautiful thing. Um, I just talked about negative emotions. Positive emotions include
32:26 Arthur Brooks? interest. Interest is a positive, basic emotion. We love to learn. Your ancestors passed on their genes because they learned a lot and got better at life. Now, maybe 250,000 years ago, the learning was not, I mean, obviously, it was not reading books. 250,000 years ago, it was figuring out the watering hole that has a lot, had a lot of gazelles around it, or, or where the berries were on the bush out there someplace so they could get food, forage and pass on their genes, survive the winter, um, and you were born some, you know, hundred generations later. Fine. The point is that they had to be rewarded for that neurocognitively.
33:05 Arthur Brooks? The evolutionary psychology is very clear that if you, if something is good for the fitness of your genes, if something's gonna help you pass on your genes, it has to get, you have to have an incentive to do it. And, and one of the ways that we have an incentive to learn is that it gives you intense positive emotion for doing so. That's why, in point of fact, interest itself is a basic positive emotion. We love to learn. It gives us this joy to learn. So what does that mean? That means that you're gonna be happy and well if you're a habitual learner. The people in the sad, sick category, they tend to be people who stopped learning in, in, in early adulthood, really stopped learning. They don't read books. They don't learn new stuff. They're set in their ways. They don't, you know what they don't do?
33:49 Arthur Brooks? They don't interrogate their own beliefs. You know, one of the best ways to keep learning is to take an inventory of all the things that you believe and say, it's not true. And, you know, maybe go away from time to time, you know, for half a day or something, or go for a nice, long walk and make a list of all of your beliefs. Say, do I still think that? What do the data say? Also, interrogate your unbeliefs. A lot of what we do and how we define ourselves is in terms of the way of the things that we don't believe. You know, I don't, I never vote for any politicians. I vote against politicians. Or, you know, my parents had this belief growing up and, and, and I walked away from, I don't believe that anymore. Interrogate your unbelief. This is a learning experience about the serious business of you.
34:33 Arthur Brooks? And it'll, it'll give you an incentive to, to go look for big new things. It's so awesome. You're gonna love it, as a matter of fact. Be a lifelong learner. Now, the easiest way to do that is always be reading a book. There's always a book that you're reading. I'm always working on something. Now, a lot of it is because this is what I do for a living and I, I'm, I'm about ideas. And so I always need to learn new things, but the stuff is blowing my mind constantly. And it's a really good idea to, to read outside your silo. If you read, if you like to read novels, also read biographies. If you like to read biographies, also read science. If you like to read science, read more fiction. That kind of thing, but learning, learning, learning by reading, reading, reading is a good way to do it.
35:16 Arthur Brooks? Now, if you're not a reading learner, which some people aren't, a lot of people who have been diagnosed as children with ADHD, they learn a lot more by hearing and watching, but they use technology for exactly that. Don't use technology to, to fritter away your time. That's a dumb use of your time. Always be using your time, your free time, to be learning propulsively. And that means make a list of the things that you want to learn and then start marching through it. The most astonishing thing about YouTube, for example, is that you type something in that you want to learn about. You're gonna get a serious scholar on that if you look for it. You can also get a charlatan. But be a, you know, be discerning in the people that you're actually watching. And it's, it's, it's, it's actually incredible how much easier it is to learn in the past.
36:00 Arthur Brooks? But that has to be a priority in your life if you want to get older and happier at the same time. Okay, that's one through six. Now, the biggie. I've saved the best for last. Number seven, this is the one, folks. This is the one that you really want.
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37:16 Arthur Brooks? Love. You probably knew I was going to say that if you followed my work. And the reason is this. The guy who ran the study before Bob Waldinger, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, that all of this is based on, is George Valiant. George Valiant ran the study and he actually wrote an article, it's going into the show notes. It's an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry that was published in 2001 called Successful Aging. And that's where these seven habits were enumerated, was in that article. So go read the original article. It's a great read. You'll really enjoy it. George Valiant was asked, after he wrote that article and a couple of bestselling books about getting happier as you get older, just sum up all of it, you know? Give me a couple of words that I can remember. What's the bumper sticker for the Harvard Study of Adult Development?
38:01 Arthur Brooks? And he said, and I quote, "Happiness is love, full stop." I mean, it's not happiness is quitting smoking, full stop. That's important. That's one of the seven habits. But the biggie is habit seven, which is love relationships. You're not going to be in the happy well category, friends, if you don't have serious, real love relationships. And you're not going to get them mysteriously for the first time in your life when you're 90. It's not going to happen. You need to make that investment starting today. Now, I know what you're asking. What kind? Love is a very blunt word in English. We don't have a good language for love. The Greeks talk about love, and the Greeks really had a great vocabulary for love.
38:46 Arthur Brooks? As a matter of fact, I mean, the two languages that I live my life and my home life in are English and Spanish. English has love. Spanish is amar y querer. And those are two different verbs for it, which is a little bit better. But Greek has seven, seven different words for love. I mean, you think of, you think of eros, which is romantic love. You think of filia, which is friendship. You think of agape, which is divine love, love for God. But there's four more. The whole point is that it can be kind of dissected and split apart in different ways. And the whole point is having this magnificent portfolio of love in your life. The more that you have, the better off you're going to be.
39:28 Arthur Brooks? Now, there's especially two kinds of relationships that are characteristic of being happy and old. Happy and well when you're old, I should say. You don't need both. You need one. Both is great, but you need one. Number one is a stable, long-term, happy marriage. Okay, or stable, long-term, happy friendships. Okay, so you can be, you can have a series of unfortunate romances and wind up single when you're old and still be just as happy and be in that quadrant, but you have to have super deep friendships. Or you can actually not have as many close friends as you should and would like to, but have a very, very good marriage. But you gotta have one or the other. And it's even better if you've got both, obviously.
40:12 Arthur Brooks? I mean, it's multiplicative is the whole point. But my whole point is not to tell you that if marriage doesn't work out for you, that you can't be happy. No, friendships are great too, but you need one of these two things. Now, I'll talk in future episodes because this is a whole thing. And one of the major areas that I study is the success of romantic relationships. How to fall in love and stay in love. That's the most popular unit of my MBA class at Harvard. It's literally called falling in love and staying in love. That deserves its whole episode, multiple episodes, seasons on that. Because it's super interesting and super cool and super fun, the whole thing. Let me just say a minute on friendship and I'll do episodes on friendship in the future as well.
40:54 Arthur Brooks? The problem that a lot of people have who've had really good lives on paper, but wind up sad and sick is that they have friends, but they're deal friends. You know, friendships of transaction, friendships of convenience. And there's nothing wrong with friendships of convenience. These are the people at work who, they don't know what your kids' names are, but, but you know, they like you. As soon as their work finishes, so does the friendship is the problem. What you need is less deal and more real in your friendships. Real friends love you. Real friends are not useful. They're, they're useless. They're cosmically beautifully useless, not worthless. They're useless in this, there's that, in Greek you'd say they don't have a telos.
41:39 Arthur Brooks? They're atelic. They don't have this, the kind of worldly purpose to them. And I've got a few friends like this that I just love and, and it wouldn't matter what I do for a living. You know, they don't need me for something in their jobs and I don't need them for something in my job. We just love each other and we're gonna text each other. I have a friend who texts me, he's not my religion. He texts me holy verses from his own religion, which just, I love. It's beautiful. I learn and it's wonderful and, and, and I value that so much and I'm so grateful for it. But that's the characteristic of those, of that, people in the, in the healthy well, who are basing that love on friendship, that's what they have in common. Okay, now why do I tell you this? You gotta start that now. Real friendships don't start like in the nick of time.
42:23 Arthur Brooks? You're not on your deathbed and form a real friendship and say, "See ya and check out." It takes a lot of work, actually. It takes commitment. It takes, it takes investment. So that's what it comes down to. Happiness is love. Love is happiness. Full stop. That's really what we're talking about on how you can get happier as you get older. Okay, let me sum up here. And I know you've seen the captions so far. Habit number one, don't smoke. Habit number two, careful with substances. Habit number three is, is proper diet. Habit number four, prioritize movement. Happiness habit number five, practice coping.
43:08 Arthur Brooks? Have your coping practice, you might say. Number six, keep learning. Number seven, happiness is love. That's what it comes down to. That's your big seven. Do those things, you're not gonna be unhappy. Now, there's one thing I would add to it that I didn't study very much in this, in these data, which is your spiritual life. And, and part of the reason that's not in the list, that's not number eight, is because that wasn't a priority of this research. But it is a priority of my research. So I'm gonna come back to that. That's my number eight is prioritize a spiritual or philosophical life if you're not religious. What does that mean? Future episode. But prioritize that as well. We'll add that as my, as Arthur's number eight to these top seven.
43:52 Arthur Brooks? We don't have much time left, but we do have time for some questions because the questions are phenomenal. The questions are so great. And so I wanna take three. I wanna take three now. This first one is from Ley Marzuela. And Ley wrote in on Spotify. Thanks, thanks Ley for writing in. How does, uh, what makes people happy vary as people get older? It's a good question for this. In other words, Is what makes you happy when you're 25 the same thing it makes you happy when you're 55? Uh, the answer is yes and no. The yeses are all pretty obvious. You want love when you're 25, you want love when you're 55. But you want love from different people at 25 than at 55. And when you're 25, you want your mom's love probably. When you're 55, it's very likely that mom's not around. And so that's, there's gonna be a changing of the guard.
44:37 Arthur Brooks? By the time you're 55, I hope mom is still around, but by the time I was 55, my parents were long gone. Um, so there's some of that. There's just the natural things that happen with age. But love is going to be something that you need. Something else that's actually kind of different, by the way, is that you'll be, on average, better self-managing emotionally at 55 than you are at 25. You just are. And here's a really interesting thing. As you get older, you will find that you have the same negative, basic and positive emotions as when you were a young adult. And that's because the limbic system is the same. It doesn't change and emotions are not there to give you a nice or crummy day. Emotions are there to give you a signal that something, as a threat or an opportunity, has crossed your horizon. So you should avoid it or you should approach it.
45:21 Arthur Brooks? That's all emotions are. Are the strategic warning or alert system for you. But here's the thing that does change. You learn as you get older that emotions don't last. When you're 25 and somebody breaks up with you, you're like, I'm gonna be sad forever. Or you think when you're 25 often, if I get that job, I'm gonna be so happy forever. And the answer is no, you're not in both cases. Because emotions can't last. They can't last because homeostatically, which means you have to go back into your equilibrium, you have to be ready for the next emotions, because emotions keep you alive and surviving. They're supposed to give you information of what's going on right now, not what happened 10 years ago. I mean, sometimes you get a sweet or bitter memory, but that's kind of it.
46:04 Arthur Brooks? What you figure out as you get older, that emotions don't last, even though Mother Nature tells you that they're going to, so that you'll react appropriately. This is one of Mother Nature's tricks. Mother Nature says, you're gonna be sad forever, so you better avoid that circumstance. Or, you're gonna love it forever if you get that gazelle. You're gonna be so happy forever. She's lying to you so that you'll stay in the hunt. But you're not, and when you're my age, or 20 years older than me, you've got that figured out. And so somebody cuts you off in traffic and flips you the bird or something, it bums you out. When you're my age, for like a minute. Because the next thought that crosses your mind when you're my age is, you know,
46:44 Arthur Brooks? that's not gonna bother me in an hour, so I'm gonna get a head start on not caring right now. Now, the reason I say that, Lei, is that you can use that information now. You can move that into your prefrontal cortex and manage your emotions by understanding something it took me decades to actually figure out through experience. So that's one of the ways that happiness changes over time as well. The other thing I'll mention is that the enjoyment part of happiness, remember, happiness is enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. That the enjoyment part changes because your sophistication about the things about which you get enjoyment changes. You know, if you like to have a glass of wine when you're 25, it's probably not the same wine you're gonna like when you're 45 and have a little bit more experience with wine and a little bit more,
47:28 Arthur Brooks? and a little bit more money. You're gonna like, you're gonna say, "Oh, that stuff was rot gut", and you're not gonna like it. Now, again, go back to habit number two from The Seven Habits. At 45, you might have cut out all the wine at that point, which is not bad for your happiness, quite frankly, but you get my point, right? You tend to have a higher sophistication in music as you get older, just because you've listened to more music and your education changes. That's kinda how happiness changes. Great question. Question number two, this is from Nick D'Agostino, also from Spotify. Thanks, Nick, for your question. Is happiness relative? Do happy people all experience life with the same level of enjoyment? Or does it vary? And the answer is, yeah, there's a lot of difference between people.
48:12 Arthur Brooks? And that gets back to the genetics I talked about earlier in this episode. 50% of your baseline mood, this is how you feel when you first kinda wake up in the morning most days, it's genetic. We know that from the identical twins, where they rate their happiness, and you find that 50% of how you mostly wake up and what you go back to after, you know, being moved in and out of your baseline by varying circumstances across the day, that that's a genetic thing. I mean, your mom, or dad, or whatever, have accounted for it a lot. I've mentioned it before in this, in this show. That's actually my problem, you know, I have kinda, I come from very gloomy stock. And so I gotta work harder on, on my habits, because I need to manage my genetics.
48:56 Arthur Brooks? Exactly what I talked about in the case of substance abuse earlier in the episode. So, do people all experience life with the same level of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning? Nope. They have different tendencies and that means some people, AKA me and some of you, have to work harder on our habits and that's a blessing. You and I are held to a higher standard and that's what has to make us elite happiness athletes. That's what has to make us good at this, better habits. And when people admire you for doing that, then they're going to copy these habits and they're going to get happier. And that's your apostolate, that's your mission. Congratulations, it's harder for you and that means you're going to do better at it. Okay, number three is from Stephanie Baines. She, she wrote in to [email protected] .
49:40 Arthur Brooks? Here's the email address, there's the email address, write in, thanks Stephanie. She says, I recent, oh, this is a good one and I gotta read the question, it's gonna take a second. "I accepted a new position just recently. I'll be commuting a long distance every day. Stephanie's gonna have a two-plus hour each-way commute." That's a lot of commuting, daily, daily. "Moving is not an option. I've done this commute before and I'm hoping to figure out how to increase happiness on this commute." I remember you saying, she's followed my work for a while, "You can't decrease unhappiness by increasing happiness." Is the only answer really just removing the commute? Do I turn down the job? Okay, great question.
50:24 Arthur Brooks? Commutes are brutal and the reason I know this is from a study that I'll put in the show notes. This is from Kahneman and Kruger from 2004, 2005? In the, if memory serves, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal. It's going in the show notes if I got that wrong. And what they found was that commuting was one of the, the, the things that people do every day that brings the most negative affect. So, living close to work won't bring you happiness, but living far away from work, generally speaking, will bring you more unhappiness. And so that, Stephanie, I know that this is a great job and that this great job, you know, you're gonna earn your success and serve others, it's gonna be great, it's gonna raise your happiness. It's gonna raise your happiness.
51:05 Arthur Brooks? But the commute's gonna raise your unhappiness unless you manage the negative affect that that brings very, very proposively, okay?
51:15 Arthur Brooks? What this has to be going forward is not, you know, unfortunately, I have two hours each way. It has to be, I get two hours each way to do very specific things that I want to do with my life. That's what it has to come down to. Those two hours are work hours in the business of Stephaniness. Okay? That's really important. And here's what I recommend. And here's, this is based on the research and also my experience. I would recommend doing three things in your commute. And that means your commute time is precious time. Don't, don't fritter it away. Don't listen to, you know, a podcast you're not interested in. Listen to this podcast. No, but do, don't, don't waste it.
51:57 Arthur Brooks? Listening to dumb, you know, drive time radio, which is mostly stupid ads. Don't do it. Here's number one. Number one is contemplation, meditation or prayer. And again, not the kind of contemplation that, you know, single point meditation that puts you into a trance and then that's dangerous for traffic. But you get the point. Something that actually puts you into a meditative space that is your thing. For me, I pray the rosary, which is an ancient Catholic meditation. When I have to do something that entails a long drive. And there have been times when I have, you know, a half an hour commute or something. The first 20 minutes are my rosary. So I use that time, which is really, really beneficial. Something that is me and that I want to do. Really important to me. So find your contemplative tradition. That starts your commute. Okay?
52:41 Arthur Brooks? Morning, evening, maybe both. Second, calls. I mean, this is the great thing. I mean, the hands free technology that we got now is just so good. And there's a lot of research that shows that, that really in a lot of ways that calling is better for your communication than, than even Zoom. For lots of different reasons. I won't go, maybe I'll go into it in a future episode, but, but suffice it to say that, that hands free technology, calling, talking to somebody when you're in the phone, uh, when you're in the car can be very, actually quite intimate. But you got to program those things. Number one is there's going to be some calls for work, usually on the way home and on the way in. That's your real friends. Program it so that you're doing it at the same time as somebody else and you're on a schedule. So it's not serendipitous. You're not going through your entire book and hoping somebody's
53:25 Arthur Brooks? So make sure that you've got a good, you know, half hour slot on most days. This is a great way to deepen your real friendships because you're programming your commuting time to do just that. Me and my buddy Frank, we talk when we're on, we're in the car a lot. It's great. He lives in Atlanta and, and I don't live in Atlanta, but we talk to each other a lot because that's when we're actually using our time. And number three is learning, learning, learning, learning. That's the biggest part of it is going to be books and podcasts on the things that you really care about. Books is great because you can make a list of the books that you want to read. Spotify is fantastic for this. Spotify has a huge library of books that you have access to and just start walking through it, man. You're going to get through so many books that you've always wanted to read.
54:08 Arthur Brooks? Some of them are hard, you know, to, when you're not looking at the words on the page and when, when, when the guy or woman reading the book goes too fast, I got it. But there are lots of things, not just novels, things that you can actually read. Many people say, you read me your book on my commute. It's so gratifying when people tell me that. Or podcasts, you know, things that are really nutritious and, and positive for you. I hope Stephanie, that office hours becomes part of your commute. If you do those three things and you program those hours, you're going to look forward to your commute. You're going to get smarter, more informed and happier as a result of it. And that's what's going to reduce the unhappiness part of it, maybe even to zero. Okay, friends, that's all we got time for today.
54:50 Arthur Brooks? I hope you've enjoyed office hours, listening and watching as much as I've enjoyed doing this. This gives me so much energy. Please let me know what questions you have, what feedback you have, what comments you have. Like, subscribe, help us with the algorithms, but just as much criticize, comment, do it on the platforms that you're listening on, or send your comments into [email protected] . And I look forward to hearing what's on your mind and I'm really looking forward in the future weeks, telling you what's on mine. Thanks very much and I'll see you next week.
55:31 Speaker 01 LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.
55:40 Speaker 01 We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.
56:02 Speaker 03 Now streaming on Paramount+. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for that. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser.
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Previous Fame ruined me, but faith saved me: Office Hours meets The Office, with special guest Rainn Wilson Next My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated