The Science Behind Being Good at Leisure

Not all leisure is created equal—some of it feels good in the moment (pleasure) but leaves you depleted afterward. Other forms of leisure actually restore you (enjoyment). They lift you up, deepen your sense of meaning, and make you more fully alive. The difference matters, and leisure well used is a skill—and it’s one you can cultivate. In this episode of Office Hours, I explore what leisure truly is and why it’s essential to happiness. Drawing on both philosophy and modern behavioral science, I explain why contemplation, art, time in nature, learning, and deep connection with others feed you in ways that passive diversion can’t. The goal is not to squeeze more activity into your life. It’s to live more deliberately, in ways that genuinely support your happiness. And if you’re not sure where you stand, take The Happiness Scale https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale to see whether enjoyment is an area that needs strengthening. — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (06:15) What enjoyment is, and why pleasure falls short (12:37) Pieper’s case for leisure as the basis of culture (15:22) The kind of leisure to avoid (19:22) What true leisure is (23:58) How connecting with beauty affects your brain (30:50) The benefits of time in nature (35:56) Structure your leisure (39:50) Don’t waste your leisure (42:11) Set leisure goals (44:48) Why our culture focuses too much on work (46:48) Q&A: The benefits of volunteering (48:01) Q&A: Helping others with cynicism and skepticism (49:53) Q&A: Teaching happiness to kids — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427 • The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Four Cardinal Virtues: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Cardinal-Virtues-Josef-Pieper/dp/0268001030 • Leisure the Basis of Culture: https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/0865972109 • The Three Macronutrients of Happiness, and How to Measure Yours: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/podcast/the-three-macronutrients-of-happiness-and-how-to-measure-yours • Brahmamuhurta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmamuhurta • Routine and Project-Based Leisure, Happiness, and Meaning in Life: https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/journals/jlr/2012/volume-44/jlr-volume-44-number-2-pp-139-154.pdf • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admiral's Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 0:25Arthur Brooks?

  Joseph Piper asserted that leisure is the basis of culture. Is it? I think that work is the basis of our culture, and that's a big problem. Because what we elect to do when we're not getting paid, that's really who we are as people. And if really we're doing two things, working and then trying to gasp for air so that we can come back and work some more, that's a big problem. We need to have time that's not working, that's equally satisfying, that's equally deep, that's equally meaningful. That's the kind of balance that we're actually looking at. And to do that, that means that we need to be as excellent as our leisure as we are actually at our work. Leisure is not just

• 1:08Arthur Brooks?

  not work. Leisure is a different skill.

• 1:18Arthur Brooks?

  Hey 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. And that's what this show is all about. Office hours, like my real office hours at my university, are all about how we can all become happiness teachers, teachers of well-being, such that we can live better and we can bring that love and happiness to other people. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining me every week and recommending the show to your friends. As always, please do like and subscribe. Any place where you're watching this, where you're listening to this, and make sure that you feedback. Let me know what's on your mind. The email address is [email protected], or just write anything you want in the comments. We look at the comments too, wherever you're watching.

• 2:02Arthur Brooks?

  This episode, I want to talk this week about something that might seem like you don't need to get better at it, and that's leisure. But in point of fact, you probably do need to get better at it. If you're watching this show, it probably means that you're a striver. You're an ambitious person. You, you push a lot. So do I. I saw this really interesting story not that long ago of a hedge fund manager, guy who, you know, master of the universe financially, who, you know, runs all of these billions of dollars. And he had been working for 10, 15 years to start his hedge fund, had been working 100 hours a week during this entire time, filled with absolute ambition, never stopping, grinding,

• 2:44Arthur Brooks?

  grinding, grinding. Here in New York, where I'm actually recording the show here today at Spotify headquarters. He had it all, it seemed. He was wealthy. He was pretty famous, as a matter of fact. But then he had a couple of setbacks in his fund, then he decided it was time to cut his losses and close his fund. Now, he was already rich, to be sure, but there was something about the setbacks that, that ruined his sense of accomplishment. And I've talked about this in past episodes. Progress is everything. Regress is torture, especially for strivers. Anyway, he closed his fund, but that's not the point that I'm trying to make here. He was asked by a journalist, so what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? And, and, and the answer that the journalist was kind of expecting was, well, I'm gonna

• 3:28Arthur Brooks?

  open another hedge fund, get a fresh start. That's not what he said. He said, I'm just so tired. I'm gonna go to a beach someplace and do nothing. And that was kind of his plan. His near term, and maybe even medium term, who knows, long term plan was to, to do nothing, because the idea of doing nothing was the only thing that seemed like it might refresh his soul after so much time of grinding and striving and never resting, neglecting his family, neglecting his relationships. But it turns out, of course, that it didn't last very long. There's something about that leisure as chilling that didn't actually help him out very much, didn't give him what he was actually looking for.

• 4:12Arthur Brooks?

  Now, it's funny because I can, in a weird way, not in the billionaire hedge fund way, I can kind of relate to this. I've always actually had kind of a hard time getting much refreshment from my own leisure, as a matter of fact. Early on in my career, I actually wasn't doing what I'm doing now. I was a professional classical musician. I was a French horn player all the way through my twenties. I didn't actually go to college until my late twenties, and that by correspondence. I was traveling around, doing my thing. And during a bunch of it, I was playing in the Barcelona City Orchestra in the French horn section. And I was super, super serious then, as serious then about playing the French horn as I am about love and happiness right now. And I was a grinder, man. I mean, I didn't take a day off.

• 4:53Arthur Brooks?

  I didn't take a day off as a French horn player for 22 years, not one day off. I mean, no joke. And when I first got married to Mrs. B., my wife Esther, she's from Barcelona. They're pretty good at leisure. And she was shocked because we would go on vacation together when we were newly married, up to the Pyrenees. And we would go camping up to the Pyrenees, for example. We didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel. So we'd stay at this camp place called El Templo del Sol, which in Catalan means "the temple of the sun." And it was beautiful and all that. But I'd have to start each day by taking out my French horn. And on the mountainside, I would practice for about two hours, just to keep my chops in shape and play my scales and arpeggios

• 5:35Arthur Brooks?

  and a few etudes and a couple of things that I was working on at the time. And my wife was just, she was just completely confused by why I would want to ruin my vacation by taking out my French horn and remembering my work. And the truth of the matter was, I was just bad at leisure, is the bottom line. And maybe a lot of you are too, kind of like that hedge fund manager. It's an improper understanding of it. So leisure is just not fun. And it feels like it's a break from work. It feels like not work. But then the work is grinding you down, but then the not work doesn't feel like it's fun either. And maybe you've been accused by somebody that you love a lot of not being able to relax, not being able to chill out. What do you do about that?

• 6:17Arthur Brooks?

  Well, I'm gonna tell you today because today's episode is about how to be better at leisure. How you can be as excellent at leisure as you are at your work. Now, if you're like my wife, you'd be like, why do I need to watch this? But if you're like me, you need free protocols for perfect leisure and you're gonna get them today. That's today's episode. Now, let me start at the very beginning when we're talking about leisure. It really starts with this one macronutrient of happiness. If you've been watching my show, you know that happiness really has three macronutrients to it. Kind of like food has the macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates and fat. Happiness is made up of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.

• 6:59Arthur Brooks?

  I write a lot and talk an awful lot about these macronutrients. And if you're looking behind me, you see that, you know, my new book, The Meaning of Your Life, that's about that third macronutrient, meaning, which is the hardest of all. But some people struggle with the first one, enjoyment. And if you want to get better at leisure, you need to get better at enjoyment. And that means to begin with, you need to understand what enjoyment actually is. So let's talk about that a little bit. And by the way, those of you who've taken the happiness scale on my website, if you go to arthurbrooks.com and you take the happiness scale, a lot of you have, thousands of you have, you'll know where you stand in these macronutrients, where you need work, and enjoyment or satisfaction and meaning. And if you're scoring below average on enjoyment, that probably means that you need to get better at leisure and this episode is for you.

• 7:43Arthur Brooks?

  Okay, and for me. So let's talk about enjoyment a little bit and how to get better at it. And then we're gonna get back to the leisure here in a second. Enjoyment isn't pleasure. That's the first thing to understand. A lot of people get that wrong. So the hedge fund dude, he thought that enjoyment was gonna be pleasure. It's like sipping a Mai Tai on a sunny beach someplace, doing absolutely nothing, that that was gonna give him the refreshment that he actually sought. And the reason it wasn't actually nutritious for his soul was because he was making the classic error of thinking that pleasure is the same thing as enjoyment. And it isn't, on the contrary. If your life strategy is getting as much pleasure as possible, you're not gonna wind up in happiness, you're gonna wind up in rehab. There's a reason for that.

• 8:26Arthur Brooks?

  And again, go back to the episode, I'll make sure that we link it right below here, to go back to the episode on what is happiness. It dropped a couple of months ago and it's gonna be really useful for you on this. But suffice it to say,

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 9:04Arthur Brooks?

  That it requires an understanding of how the brain works to distinguish between enjoyment and pleasure. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It engages the console of tissue in your brain that was evolved between 2 and 40 million years ago. And what it does is it basically gives you an emotional sense that there is something around you that's an opportunity and you should approach it. Positive emotions, including joy and interest and surprise, they come because you've sensed something. It's actually going to give you a whole lot of reward, like mates or calories or something. And that's really where pleasure comes in. Pleasure is a largely animal phenomenon in its way. I'm not casting aspersions. I'm not against pleasure, but we have to understand it biologically

• 9:48Arthur Brooks?

  because psychology is biology in so many ways, including this. What we need to do to make it part of happiness is not to get rid of pleasure, is to complete it by moving the experience of the pleasure from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex. And that means adding two things. Pleasure needs to be accompanied by people and memory. Now, what does that mean? That means it needs to be social and it means you need to be conscious of actually what you're doing to get the pleasure. So it's never automatic. And there's all kinds of things that we do automatically for pleasure. For example, there are all sorts of habits. You know, you pull out a cigarette. For example, you have another drink without really thinking about it. You mindlessly scroll social media. These are all automatic behaviors

• 10:31Arthur Brooks?

  that you do in search of limbic pleasure. But what you need to do is actually make these things social and make these things conscious, thus actually moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex, the executive center of your brain, the console of tissue, the 30% of your brain by weight right behind your forehead. That's what you need to engage for it to actually become part of your happiness. And that's what enjoyment actually means. You need enjoyment which is conscious, which is memorable, which is social, and also, by the way, it has pleasure involved in it. And in this way, you can manage your pleasures and your pleasures don't manage you. And you get the distinction, right? If you're being managed by your pleasures, look out. If you're managing your pleasures, fantastic, good for you. And the way that you do that is by turning them into enjoyment.

• 11:16Arthur Brooks?

  Okay, that's a reminder. I mean, that's just a reference back to what we've done in the past episode. If you want more on that basic science, then go back to that episode and watch that episode. Okay, now back to how enjoyment actually works. Enjoyment is really interesting because you're managing your pleasures in such a way that you're getting something really lovely, something delightful, something that really, really feels good, but you're not getting so much of it that it's addicting you, that's subjugating you. Basically, what it means is that you're refusing to be managed by your pleasures. That's great, but you're also not being subjugated by a complete lack of these pleasures. It's this balance. Enjoyment involves this balance between too little and too much. And that's because you're adult, your executive center, the C-suite of your brain

• 12:01Arthur Brooks?

  is involved in saying, yeah, give me more, but not too much. Getting that balance right is the essence of what it means to be a person who's fully alive, to actually be in balance. This is a lot of how we understand leisure with respect to work. Now, everybody watching me, not everybody, a lot of you watching me, you love your work. You love actually what it does, you love what you accomplish, you love how you feel when you're achieving these things and even the activities. Not all the time, because not all of your activities are going to be pleasant all the time, but a lot of the time are really, really pleasant. They make you feel, your work makes you feel alive. But you know what happens when you do too much of it. You get tired, you get ground down, you become ornery, and something actually becomes missing from your life. So this is the enjoyment factor that comes in from balancing. Now...

• 12:47Arthur Brooks?

  You know where I'm going with this work-life balance or work-leisure trade-off? Is kind of how we're talking about that? That's fair, but I don't want to talk about it that way. The reason is because I don't actually think there is a balance between work and life, because work is part of your life. But leisure has to be part of your life, too. Here's what we need to do to get as much enjoyment as possible, as well as satisfaction and meaning from our work and all the things that we do that are productive. We need to have time that's not working, that's equally satisfying, that's equally deep, that's equally meaningful. That's the kind of balance that we're actually looking at. And to do that, that means that we need to be as excellent as our leisure as we are actually at our work.

• 13:31Arthur Brooks?

  Leisure is not just not work. Leisure is a different skill. Now, now, that's an important thing to understand here, because that's not how people typically talk about it. Even the great, the great, the philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas, referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher." I mean, that's how important Aristotle is. Aristotle said, "We toil that we may rest and war that we may be at peace." That's this understanding that leisure's not working, but I don't want you to think about it that way. I want you to think about your life as a portfolio of wonderful things that include your generative financial activities and the things that are equally rewarding for making you an interesting, complex, satisfied person that are not the work part.

• 14:16Arthur Brooks?

  And that's the leisure part. That's why I'm going to give you protocols on how to be as excellent at your leisure as you actually are at your work. And the way to do this is with a pretty contemporary philosopher, or is to start with the ideas of a contemporary philosopher, who really, really loved Aristotle, but tried to turn those ideas into something that we're a little bit more, I don't know, maybe acutely aware of the experience that we're trying to have. And that was the German philosopher, the German 20th century philosopher, Joseph Peiper. Now, Peiper, who lived between 1904 and 1997, was most famous for a book that he wrote called The Four Cardinal Virtues. And, and there will be future episodes on these Four Cardinal Virtues,

• 15:00Arthur Brooks?

  because, believe it or not, it sounds so boring, right? I mean, the Four Cardinal Virtues, prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude. You know, wake me up when we're done. No, no, no. It's super interesting. It's unbelievably exciting when we talk about how he defines each one of these things and how they can change your life and how they can change your work and they can make you into a more excellent person. That's his most famous book. I want to talk about a long essay, sort of a book, essay that he wrote, that's really in line with what we're talking about here, which is called Leisure, the Basis of Culture. His belief was that, and he's German, okay, so like Americans, work, work, work, right? But he didn't write a book called Work, the Basis of Culture. That would be the most obvious book ever. He said not work is the

• 15:44Arthur Brooks?

  basis of culture if you do it right. If your culture does it right, then your culture's going to get healthier and happier and stronger because of what we do when we're not at work. But that's not chilling on the beach. That's not, you know, scrolling away your time on social media. That's not wasting your time at all. That's been great at this stuff. Fortunately, his essay Leisure, the Basis of Culture, gives you the secrets on how to do it. And that's what we're talking about here. Okay, now, the first big idea in Peiper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture, something is called ascidia. And this is an ancient, you know, Greek word, ascidia, that basically means spiritual and mental sloth. Okay, now,

• 16:25Arthur Brooks?

  when I talk about sloth, or also pronounced by philosopher Sloth, this is one of the seven deadly sins. You know, and the seven deadly sins, of course, is really important and popular in our, in our, in our, in our thinking because of the work of Dante and the Divine Comedy. And Dante is, you know, in this great book, in this great poem, he's going through hell, purgatory and heaven with Virgil, the philosopher, and they're looking at people who have committed these horrible sins. And sloth, sloth, is kind of in the middle. The worst is pride, and there's envy, and then there's anger. It's sort of in the middle is sloth. It's the, you know, sort of laziness is the way. And

• 17:08Arthur Brooks?

  we think of laziness as not wanting to work, hanging out. It's the couch, is what it comes down to. It's like, ah, I should work, yeah, but you know, there's- I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna binge some show on Netflix and I have that pint of Haagen-Dazs in the freezer and, and, and that new fuzzy blanket. So let's go. Now, that's not how Peiper thinks about sloth. He thinks about it fundamentally as a, a weakness that's spiritual and mental, not just physical. It's not just sitting around on the couch. It's not just, you know, hey, it's leg day at the gym. So I think I'm actually gonna, gonna, you know, hang out and not go to the gym instead. That's the least of it. Why? Because all of the physical kind of laziness that we have, clearly and obviously, it actually comes from a more of a mental or a psychological state.

• 17:51Arthur Brooks?

  And, and you might even join me in saying it's kind of a spiritual state. And so that's what a seedy really is, is the spiritual and mental sloth. And, and he says that, that the worst kind of spiritual and mental sloth starts with the wrong understanding of leisure. And these are ascetic activities. Here are the ones that he would really talk about today that are characterized by mental and spiritual sloth. This is the kind of leisure to avoid, according to Peiper and according to, well, us too, if you want to live the best life. Number one, scrolling social media. Now you should scroll. So I'm going to talk about that a little bit later and on many other episodes. I'm not against scrolling on social media, believe it or not. I'm not one of these, I'm not an activist about this at all. On the contrary, social media can be really good for you if you use it in particular ways. So stay tuned on how social media can make your life better.

• 18:36Arthur Brooks?

  But mindlessly scrolling social media, especially right before you go to bed. And again, you want to know how this affects your sleep? Go back to the nighttime protocols, the nine nighttime protocols episode. That one will talk to you about actually what happens to your brain by stimulating your stress hormones and inhibiting your pineal gland and all kinds of bad stuff that happens to you. But just in general, it's this kind of sloth. What it does is it puts your brain on hold. Now, interesting neuroscience suggests that actually what it does is it distracts you while stressing you out. Bad combination. But the whole point is that Peiper, even before the advent of modern neuroscience, would say that it's kind of, it's just slothball. It was just kind of lazy, you know, chuckling at memes, memes while you do that.

• 19:18Arthur Brooks?

  It's just not a, a productive use of your, of your leisure. Getting drunk is another way of doing this, where you're sort of inebriating yourself. You're, you're anesthetizing your brain, you're distracting yourself, you're binge streaming some show. All of these things that are basically distraction from your ordinary life, that's sort of the just chilling phenomenon. And again, I got nothing against actually taking some time off and sitting on the beach either. I'm not, you know, trying to turn your leisure actually into another job.

• 19:47Arthur Brooks?

  Stay tuned, I'm gonna talk about that in this episode here. But it's really important to think, if you're trying to put your brain on hold, no, if you're trying to put your soul on hold, if you're trying to do absolutely nothing generative, nothing deep, nothing spiritual, it's asidia, as far as he's concerned. And that's beneath you, that's sort of morally and spiritually beneath you. It's also going to lead to your unhappiness, which I'm gonna show you in a second. True leisure is something that has kind of two parts to it. It's spiritually and mentally productive, and it has to, it tends to be contemplative. It's something where you're learning and you're growing. It's productive in this particular way, but it really uses your soul, heart and mind, soul, heart and mind, soul, heart and mind.

• 20:32Arthur Brooks?

  Why is it leisure? Because it's, it's not, you know, nobody's paying you for it, for example, and you're not behind the gun with it. You really are in charge of doing this for your, for your own generativity, for your own growth, for your own change. Here's some examples. Reading something really deep and reflecting on it. And again, the reflecting on it is really important. Maybe that's what you're doing while you're sitting on the beach. That is a really generative activity. You've maybe heard me talk about this, that this is a form of contemplative meditation, as a matter of fact. This is how the Dalai Lama starts every day, is for two hours, first thing in the morning, before it's light outside, in the Brahma Mahurta, in the Creator's time.

• 21:13Arthur Brooks?

  The Dalai Lama spends two hours thinking about a passage in Tibetan Buddhist scripture, something really deep. What does this mean? How am I supposed to interpret that? How does this affect my life? How am I gonna teach this to other people? That's an incredibly deep kind of leisure. That's an exciting kind of leisure, and it requires that you learn something in a particular way. Maybe you're reading, maybe you're watching the show, for all I know, but you're using it in a contemplative way. Another way is having of, of to have true leisure, according to Joseph Piper, is deep artistic experiences.

• 21:48Arthur Brooks?

  Where you're consuming art, where you're producing art, where you're deeply engaging the right hemisphere of your brain, which is the hemisphere that largely is in charge of governing meaning and mystery.

• 22:03Arthur Brooks?

  That's really important. Spending time in nature is very similar to that, as a matter of fact, because beauty is beauty. Beauty stimulates the right part of your brain and leads to generative growth in either artistic experiences or nature-based experiences. Learning new ideas or learning new skills is really important, especially when you're not learning it so you can make more money. It's not stimulated by an extrinsic goal. Remember, extrinsic goals are money, power, admiration of other people. Intrinsic goals are faith, love, experiences that are intrinsically satisfying. So if you're learning something, because it makes you a deeper, more spiritual, more interesting person,

• 22:45Arthur Brooks?

  notwithstanding what it will do to give you these worldly rewards, these are the kinds of leisure activities that tend to be contemplative and very productive, according to Joseph Pieper. Deepening personal relationships, a deep, deep, deep conversation with somebody. And again, you can think of all the conversations that you have. This idea of deep generative activity through conversation has really changed the way that I interact with friends, the way that my wife and I actually, that we socialize. So Esther and I, you know, I remember several years ago, some years ago now, maybe 15 years ago now, we realized that we didn't like most social activities. We didn't like them. We didn't like dinners with friends that much. And we thought about it and we kind of deconstructed why this was the case. Why do they drive us crazy?

• 23:30Arthur Brooks?

  And the answer is because they're so shallow. So where do your kids go to camp? Oh, yeah, little juniors taking sailing lessons. Waste my time? No, I would prefer to be in silence. Are you kidding me? And so we made a rule. Go deeper, go home. And so it's crazy, man. I mean, it's like you come over to my house for dinner and... You know, I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna eat some good food. That's not the point. You're gonna get nailed with, what are you most afraid of? That's my wife. It's gonna be heavy. And the reason for that is because we don't wanna see ya. We don't wanna see ya in our, in our, in our conversations. On the contrary, we want leisure properly understood. We wanna learn and grow with you. And if that's too much, okay, I get it. I mean, different strokes for different folks.

• 24:14Arthur Brooks?

  But these kind of deep relationships that you can have, I mean, that's, that's, that's the life in life. And the reason is so unbelievably generative, where you go home after a conversation like that and you say,

• 24:25Speaker 00

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• 24:51Arthur Brooks?

  I'm better. I'm better. My heart is fuller. The reason is because you just experienced the kind of leisure that you need to be experiencing all the time. And if you wonder why you're not getting that all the time, it's because you're probably not good enough at leisure. And the punchline of this is gonna be because you need to follow the three leisure protocols. So, this is where we're going. Now, before I get to the specific protocols on this, I do wanna explain a little bit more of the science behind a lot of how this works, the behavioral science research behind deep leisure, behind deep activities and how they affect people. And how they affect people in generative and very productive ways. There's a lot of social science literature that talks about different kinds of leisure activities and how they affect you.

• 25:34Arthur Brooks?

  And, and the bottom line from most of the literature is do-nothing leisure, which actually, a lot of it includes most vacation travel. It provides boosts and wellbeing that are very, very temporary. They're not lasting at all. Whereas pursuits that involve deep social engagement, personal reflection, a lot of nature activity, a lot of artistic activity, they tend to be way more sustaining in wellbeing. It's a really- Interesting article in the Journal of Leisure Research. Yes, there is a Journal of Leisure Research. This is called Routine and Project-Based Leisure. It's from 2012. So it's a little bit older now, but it certainly does still obtain this, um, these, these findings as far as I'm concerned.

• 26:15Arthur Brooks?

  And there's another article I'll put in there, Happiness Through Leisure, from a, a, a pretty interesting volume on this. Um, I'll put that in the notes as well. It's a volume called Positive Leisure Science. How does, how do leisure scientists actually do their work? You'll learn about that if you want to. Okay. So to be more specific about it, the literature, um, it kind of breaks things up into beauty, um, nature, and a few other basic areas. Let me, I, I'm not gonna, you know, go three hours into this, but I am going to take you through a little bit of, of how this, of what this literature looks at. To begin with, beauty creates a lot of emotional resonance. What beauty does, and, and, and to put it in a nutshell, uh, this is going to be topics for a whole bunch of future episodes

• 26:57Arthur Brooks?

  on the brain science of hemispheric lateralization, which is of course the two hemispheres in the brain, how they work differently. This is what a lot of my new research is looking at, is how the left and the right hemispheres, they tend to be mismatched and imbalanced in modern life. And they explain the explosion of depression and anxiety is we spend too much time in the left side of our heads and not enough time in the right side of our heads. One of the ways to open up the right hemisphere of your brain, to find more meaning, to find more mystery, to find more love, to find more happiness, is actually to, to get more beauty into your life. And most people, they get beauty into their lives through their leisure activities. This is one of the reasons that you gotta be good at leisure, is because you need to find meaning and mystery and happiness and love and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 27:40Arthur Brooks?

  Beauty creates a lot of emotional resonance. Um, and, and there's lots of funny stuff on this actually. So for example, if you're in a, a, a, a pretty good mood, you'll find that happy music will help you connect to that and help you understand that it's not just pleasure that you get from having this mood, but there's something behind it that you want to learn from. You can learn from your, your, your, your positive experiences, your positive moods, your positive emotions. And one of the ways to do that is by connecting to beauty that has kind of a happiness. To it, there's one piece of research that shows that the happiest song ever written is the Beach Boys Good Vibrations. That's not for me, but you know, whatever. You know, I'm an old classical musician, so my tastes run a little bit differently.

• 28:24Arthur Brooks?

  But actually, more interesting than that, that that same literature shows that you can connect to the the deep experiences and learning from your from your negative emotions as opposed to trying to banish your negative emotions by listening to sad songs. You'll get more meaning if when you're not working, you're listening to actually sad music when you're feeling sad. And you might say, well, that's counterintuitive. Listening to sad music will make me feel sadder, while it's not true. It'll help you to put into context your sad emotions, which is when you've been through a nasty breakup, which you probably have. You want to listen to sad music because it helps you understand your emotions, but you're also actually benefiting from leisure in those moments. Doing this systematically is kind of a good thing to do, is listening to more music that kind of matches your emotions.

• 29:07Arthur Brooks?

  Art creation is even better when it comes to generative leisure, as it turns out. And there's a lot of research, especially on the elderly who have a lot more leisure time. And the big difference between are you going to get happier when you retire as opposed to you're going to get unhappier when you retire? Here's the difference. Do you know, are you good at leisure or not? Is what it comes down to. I mean, I talk to people a lot about the liminal space between full-time work and retirement. And that's a really hard thing because that change, I'll do a future episode on retirement, I promise you, because there are retirement protocols. Things that you should do when you retire that will avoid a lot of big natural problems. Neurophysiological problems, as a matter of fact, but also help you to, you know, keep from making avoidable mistakes.

• 29:50Arthur Brooks?

  But just in general, even if you've been retired for 10 years, you're not going to like it if you, and you're going to die sooner if you're bad at leisure. That's really what it comes down to. So one of the things that we find is that elderly people who struggle with their leisure and they're retired, but they're, you know, they're kind of too old to work. And one of the ways that you can improve their lives a lot is by introducing the production of art into their lives. And so they, you know, they kind of tritely call that art therapy. You know, they start painting watercolors or, you know, throwing pots or, you know, whatever. Ever, you know, writing poetry, you know, writing haikus or something like that. It's much deeper than that. It's not just some sort of art therapy so that old people won't feel so depressed. On the contrary, it's a super important understanding of they're actually able to experience

• 30:34Arthur Brooks?

  and produce productive leisure for the first time. And, and they're using their brains the way that their brains should be used. It's also therapeutic in other ways, of course. There's a lot of work that shows that elderly people, when they, um, they can alleviate a lot of neurological problems by introducing beauty. And that's almost certainly a right hemispheric phenomenon in their brains. There's a bunch of Parkinson's stuff when people, when they hear a rhythmic piece. People who have a kinetic point, they have, where they're sort of rigid from Parkinson's. When they hear a rhythmic piece, they can, they can move better. And I remember this, my mother was really suffering from rigidity, from a Parkinson, a lot of Parkinsonian syndrome that she had, uh, later in life. She died at a relatively young age and it was, it was hard because she had a lot of health problems.

• 31:16Arthur Brooks?

  And, you know, there, there were times when she just couldn't move. And one of the things that she would do is that she was, she had been a classical musician her whole life. She was a professional painter and she was also a good amateur violinist and pianist. She would actually put music on, she would put on Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges. And, and, and which has this, you know, march in the middle of it. And she would put it on the march, this Prokofiev march, and, and she would start walking. It would help her start walking again, and that's a, that's a generalizable phenomenon. Alzheimer's patients, when they are having trouble remembering common things. If you put on music that they actually remember from a particular time, they'll remember faces and names from that time as well. And so there's all these therapeutic things.

• 31:58Arthur Brooks?

  That's, that's a little bit apart from what I'm talking about here, which is happiness and using your leisure appropriately. But there's so much good that actually comes from it. That's my point. Um, nature, of course, and, and this is a big problem. One of the biggest problems that we have is that we, you know, we don't know how to have good, have good leisure. And one of the reasons that we don't is we're not just naturally in nature. If you want to be inspired by appropriate leisure, go back and, you know, just read, you know, Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Or any of his, you know, his, Walden's okay. You know, his great essays were published in the Atlantic in, in the 1860s, uh, usually right after his death. And one of his most famous essays in the Atlantic was called Walking. I'll put it in the show notes. You can go back and just click on it. From the archives of the Atlantic.

• 32:43Arthur Brooks?

  Here is this vast savage hovering mother of ours, nature, lying all around with such beauty and such affection for her children as the leopard. And yet we're so early weaned from her breast to society that culture, which is exclusively an interaction of man on man. I mean, that was published in a magazine back in those days. What that is, is a celebration of the right hemisphere of Henry David Thoreau's brain when he was out in nature. And he was not getting paid. I probably got paid for the essay, but he certainly wasn't getting paid for the walk that was underneath it. This is becoming a huge problem. It's a significant period of each day in nature. That was, that was an experience of 90% of Americans in, at the beginning of the 19th century.

• 33:28Arthur Brooks?

  It's less than 20% at the close of the 20th century for Americans today. And, you know, walking around outside, it was an ordinary part of life and it just sort of is less, but it's also less part of how people see their lives, less how people actually are experiencing nature. And the result of it is that they're getting less good peeper variety nature. It's less generative. It's less contemplative how people are living their lives. One of the best ways that you can be contemplative and enjoy your life is just, man, go outside. That's why, you know, a lot of, it's hilarious. You know, when a lot of people have this, young people today, my kids in their twenties, they have this expression when they're online too much and they want to, you know, get back in touch with reality. They say, they have this expression, touch grass. Like, what's that?

• 34:11Arthur Brooks?

  That's literally go outside and, you know, touch this living, growing thing as opposed to looking at your screen all day. What's that? What that basically is saying is get away from this generative activity that's putting you in the wrong part of your brain and, you know, go outside and, and, and experience this generative kind of, if not leisure, at least get a break from you. There's tons of research on this. You know, at some point I should do a show on, on nature per se. But suffice it to say that it's really clear in the, in the research that the more time that you're outside experiencing nature as part of your leisure, this is the shortcut to experiencing leisure, leisure the right way. Even better, by the way, is think of

• 34:52Arthur Brooks?

  three or four big contemplative and philosophical ideas that you want to understand and then go for your hour-long walk, half an hour before the sun comes up and experiencing the sun coming up without your devices, thinking about these three philosophical things. You'll be killing like three birds with one stone. Your life will be better. Okay. We find in a lot of the literature that when, when leisure is properly experienced through these ways that I've talked about so far, these are just two, you know, artistic expression and, and nature, that anxiety goes down, there's better mood, there's more working memory. This is just better for you, um, as it is. And again, you might be saying to yourself, well, maybe that's just sitting on the beach, but remember it has to be something that has content to

• 35:36Arthur Brooks?

  it because that's what your brain actually needs. That's what your life actually needs. It also, side note, will improve your work. And again, this is not what I'm trying to do. Remember that it's not right that leisure is simply the absence of work, but leisure properly understood will, will improve your work. Iron sharpens iron, as they say in the proverbs. That means that when your work is better and you're good at leisure, your leisure will be better. And when your leisure is more skillful, because what we're talking about here, that your work will get better as well. And it's really clear that when people are great at leisure, their work gets enormously better. There's a really interesting 2012 study called creativity in the wild, improving creative responses through immersion

• 36:17Arthur Brooks?

  in natural settings. And that's in plus one, that's in, that's in an apex science journal. Once again, goes into the show notes. It, it basically talks about how you're better. You're better at your concentration, you're better at memory, you're better at focus, you work more joyfully if you're great at your leisure. It's also true that, that, that you'll be better at, um, a lot of your spiritual goals when you get better at it, if you're using your leisure for specifically for these kinds of goals. When people are asked to experience awe and to pay real attention to the depth of what they're experiencing outside, a great Jeopardy study that shows that they have more self-transcendence, a

• 36:59Arthur Brooks?

  greater sense of closeness to God, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Now that's a warm-up because we got to get to the. Really the meat of this, which is how do you get better at your leisure? The three leisure protocols. You know, I love this stuff. And basically, there's three things you need to do. You need to structure your leisure. You need to not waste your leisure and you need to set leisure goals. These are the three things that you need to do. And again, this might sound like I'm turning your leisure into work. I'm not. I'm just asking you to take your leisure with seriousness. And maybe some of you are watching this like, I don't need this. If you don't need this, great, but you might and you didn't know it. And I need it. This is what I do because I want a better life and this has really changed my life.

• 37:43Arthur Brooks?

  And I've been working on this with my students, you know, super strivers. And it's really, really helped them a lot. I want you to be an elite leisure athlete. And these are the three ways to get it done. Number one is structuring your leisure. And that means taking your leisure the same way that you would your workout. You don't go to the gym and just go to the gym like, I don't know. I mean, maybe I'll go to the elliptical for, you know, I'm not even going to turn on the timers. Going to go, you know, pick up this weight and go pick up that weight. And that's the way to get frustrated, not get into better shape. There are a lot of people who actually do that. They go to the gym thinking that being in the gym, they're going to get, you know, in better health. It's not being in the gym. It's actually what you do in the gym. It's the same thing as being at the beach isn't the point.

• 38:27Arthur Brooks?

  It's what you're actually doing in your leisure at the beach is, is actually what matters. And that means it actually needs to be structured. Three things to do. Take it seriously, schedule it and plan it is what it comes down to. That means leaving your device behind, um, having an, you know, a, making sure that you've structured it so that you know what you're actually going to be doing. You have an agenda of activities that you're engaged in. Certain days at certain times, you engage in different kinds of leisure. It's really important and it's actually kind of interesting that, um, how people have structured this in the past. Many religions, for example, have a concept called the holy hour. You know, of your grandparents, if they were Catholic in America, they used to watch this show on CBS.

• 39:10Arthur Brooks?

  Um, that was hosted, it was actually the most popular primetime show on CBS, believe it or not, by a Catholic. Catholic bishop by the name of Fulton Sheen and he had this like cult following practically. He came out in this red cape and he would talk about the holy hour and, and how to structure a holy hour each day. And he, he recommended that everybody, particularly priests, but, but lay people as well, do this holy hour. Now, the reason it was so popular, he was great, but the reason was because, you know, that, that's what Catholics all watched on CBS on one particular night during the week. And during that holy hour, he would recommend prayer, scripture, reading and meditation is what they would do, but really, really super structured. Nobody was getting paid for that. It's not like you, a priest gets a bonus in, in, in his check and, and you, if you do something like a holy hour,

• 39:54Arthur Brooks?

  you don't either, but it's a super structured and scheduled thing that you would actually do. That, according to people, is leisure and that's generative leisure because you come out of your holy hour. And if you've done it, man, I do this, I mean, every day, if you, my morning protocol, you go back to that show, you'll see this is something I do. I come out of it so generative, so much better. I'm just, my life is just better as a result of it. And that's according to people, not just because of what I'm doing spiritually, not because of what I'm doing to practice my religion, but because I'm understanding leisure, the way it's supposed to be understood. So that's what we're really talking about, you know, a structure. It's like I take a 30 to 40 minute

• 40:34Arthur Brooks?

  walk after dinner with Esther every day that I'm home. That's part of my structured leisure. It's scheduled. That's what we do. It's planned. It's time that we actually take. We actually have even, you know, because it's dark and because we eat dinner early and is, we finish dinner at 6:30, 6:45, we have these little lights on our jackets. It's like such an old couple thing to do. I'm green and she's red. We look like a Christmas tree between us. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Okay. That's protocol number one. Take it seriously like you take the gym. Structure it, schedule it. Second, don't waste it. It's so funny because, you know, people will have an hour for an hour break. That's serious time and they'll start by frittering it away.

• 41:17Arthur Brooks?

  You know, I'm gonna, I'm maybe I'll, you know, I'm gonna go look at the news a little bit. Kind of scroll the headlines, watch a few, like, let's see what's going on on social media. Let's, let me check my notifications. Don't do that. That's such a waste. I mean, you wouldn't do that when you start your, maybe you do that when you start your work. That's a waste of time when you start your work as well. That's kind of like, you know, I, I used to have this dog. I love my dog, Choo Choo. He was such a good boy. He died after, you know, 12 happy years with my family. But before Choo Choo would get into his bed, he had this pillow he had near the, he had near the door. And he would like walk around the pillow, you know. And why are you walking around the pillow? He'd walk around the pillow for, you know, a few minutes, sometimes for a weirdly long time before he'd get in the bed. Like, don't you want to get in the bed?

• 42:00Arthur Brooks?

  Anyway, I'm not here to psychoanalyze poor dead Choo Choo, but, but we kind of do that with our leisure, with our rest as well. We don't really get right into it for some particular reason. It's a serious thing, so don't waste your time. If your plan is to read a book from six to seven in the morning, which is not a work, a book about work. You're reading the Summa Theologia of Thomas Aquinas, or, or the Brothers Karamazov of Dostoevsky. And, and side note, you want a good book reading list, go to my website, arthurbrooks.com. I, I won the Guinness World's Record for the world's weirdest reading list. That's a lie. I just lied. That's not true. But I could, who knows if they've got that, that world's record.

• 42:38Arthur Brooks?

  These are all great leisure reading books for you. They've been leisure reading books for me. I didn't make any money from reading these things. If that's your goal for your leisure from six to seven, then, then hit it, man. I mean, six to seven in the morning, boom. You're reading. You're not wasting your time. You've got your book open and ready. I recommend that if you're gonna get up first thing and do that, leave it by the couch or the chair where you're actually gonna do your reading, open to the page where you're gonna start, so you don't waste any time at all. Start walking right on time. I mean, it's like ding ding ding, there's the alarm, out you go. If you go to a museum this Saturday for your leisure time. Get there on time, like a business appointment. If you're not as serious about the time as a business appointment,

• 43:22Arthur Brooks?

  you're not taking your leisure seriously and you're not an elite leisure athlete. That's number two. Don't waste your time. Number three, set specific leisure goals. Set goals for what you're actually trying to achieve in your heart and mind and soul with your leisure. We're very goal oriented people and we get more learning and generativity. We also get more happiness when we make progress in our lives. You shouldn't just have progress with respect to the gym and the job. You should be making progress with respect to your leisure as well. So if during your leisure time, which again, this is not just chilling. If you're, if you've decided, look, I'm going to read the whole Bible. Because, I mean, I don't, I don't care.

• 44:05Arthur Brooks?

  And by the way, if you're, even if you're an atheist, I mean, you should read the whole Bible because it's the most influential book that's ever been written in society. So you gotta know it, you know, you gotta know it to understand all these weird things that people say. You know, if you, you completely disagree with it, but at least you gotta understand it. So read the whole Bible, but that's a leisure activity. Understanding leisure, the way that we've defined it in this episode. So that means set about a goal of doing it. There's a million apps that you can get. There's a million plans online that you can get for reading the Bible in a whole year. In a, in a particular way where you're, you're reading it during a particular period of time and you're thinking about what it actually means. And again, if you're not religious, you're not thinking about what it means for your soul.

• 44:47Arthur Brooks?

  You're just thinking about literally what's going on historically or whatever. But, but make the goal of actually reading the whole Bible and pound through it in a particular year. It's unbelievably satisfying. You're like, wow, finished Leviticus. It's like, are you going to read Leviticus just like on your own? No, you gotta structure it and you gotta set a goal to actually get it done. If you're a meditator, work up in your meditation to the point that you can do a week long retreat and put it on your calendar. If you're listening to music and you're focusing on a particular composer, and I recommend Johann Sebastian Bach, who's the greatest composer who ever lived. Hey, man, I'm going to do an episode on Bach.

• 45:23Arthur Brooks?

  Bach, if you want to understand how Bach can change your life, you need to start listening to Bach, but listen to a little bit each day, figure out some way, talk to somebody or online, there are a million programs on this too, to learn the appreciation of what how Bach's music works and and then, you know, go to a concert in six months of, you know, the Bach B minor mass, his 1749 masterpiece. That was the culmination of the high bar oak. But do the work that leads up to making these particular goals come alive in your life. Now, these are the three protocols. Let me go back to one quick question. Joseph Pieper asserted that leisure is the basis of culture. Is it? It's not 1964 anymore when he wrote this book.

• 46:08Arthur Brooks?

  I don't think leisure is the basis of our culture. At least leisure properly understood. I think that one of the biggest problems that we have, and don't get me wrong. I love the free enterprise system. But I think that work is the basis of our culture. I really do in the United States. And that's a big problem because what we elect to do when we're not getting paid, that's really who we are as people. And if really we're doing two things, working and then trying to gasp for air so that we can come back and work some more, that's a big problem. That's a society that's deeply, deeply ill. And I think for a lot of people, and you could argue for big parts of our culture, that isn't point of fact the case. And let's, you know, get personal. Me too.

• 46:53Arthur Brooks?

  The worst parts of my life were when I was, my species was not Homo sapiens. I was Homo economicus. And and is only in parts of my life when I've learned to understand and to practice work and leisure in an appropriate balance has the culture of my family, the culture that I'm trying to be part of, the way that I'm trying to actually add generatively to the culture to which I belong, been better. And that's mostly driven by what people aren't paying me to do, which is the beautiful thing. My guess is that if I'm doing anything good for you here right now, it's because of what's actually going on in my heart and my brain and my soul and my mind. When I'm not actually doing my work, when I'm communing with the people that I love,

• 47:36Arthur Brooks?

  when I'm in periods of contemplation and prayer, when I'm trying to understand who I am, when I am, as Joseph Pieper would say, engaging in leisure properly understood. So what about you? Do you need to tune up? You need to get better at it? If you do this, I promise you, you're not gonna be sorry. Your life's gonna get better. But if you do, don't forget to share. Because if you do, that'll make it permanent. You'll be accountable to it. Well, that's where we are with Leisure. Let me take a couple of quick questions before we close. As we always do, we like to take questions at the end of the episode. This is a nice question from Zoe Kresak on email. Thanks, Zoe. I believe when people volunteer with us, and she runs a nonprofit organization, they become happier.

• 48:21Arthur Brooks?

  Is that true? How do we prove it? Yes, I wrote a whole book on that. The first book I ever wrote that anybody ever read, I'd written many terrible, boring academic books before that. But the first book I ever wrote was called Who Really Cares? In 2006. And by the way, it was really academic and boring. But the reason people read it is because weirdly, the President of the United States read it and talked about it. It completely changed my life when that happened, trust me. But it's a book about who gives and who doesn't, and what it does for people's lives. And that book, Who Really Cares? Really has a ton of research in it about all the beautiful things that actually happen to people when they give to others. That's a form of transcendence, to transcend yourself. One of the best ways you can make your life better is getting away from yourself.

• 49:05Arthur Brooks?

  And the best way you can do that is by loving and serving other people. And the easiest way to do that is to go volunteer. Easiest way to do that is to go volunteer. I promise you, you won't be sorry. Thanks for that, Zoe. Holly Johnson, by email. How does one overcome skepticism and cynicism in others? How to show them that expressing gratitude isn't a chump's exercise in futility? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's how you do it. You model it. Don't harangue anybody. Say, "Don't be such a cynic." Nobody wants to hear that. That will change nobody's heart. The way that they do that is by seeing your own genuineness. There's a funny thing about cynicism. Skepticism is... Can be problematic, but I'm a lot less worried about it. And, and by the way, cynicism and skepticism, they actually come from two different schools

• 49:50Arthur Brooks?

  of ancient Greek philosophy, the cynics and the skeptics. And skeptists, the skeptics were a lot more awesome. So, you know, who knows? I'll talk about that maybe in a future episode. But the whole point is that there's a kind of a tendency to bond with each other around cynicism. This is a drag, man. And you kind of bond over, you know, shared cynicism and negativity about current events. Don't let that be you, you know, like the boss is a jerk, you know, the weather's crummy. It's, it's kind of how, you know, when you have teenage kids, the ones you don't want them to hang out with are the ones who are the most cynical. This is if you're anybody who's my age, that's the Eddie Haskell effect. That's a famous character from that, an old sitcom from the sixties, actually predates

• 50:34Arthur Brooks?

  me, I don't remember when it was the first run called Leave It To Beaver. And they had this friend who was super nice to the grownups. As soon as they left, he was like this smart Alex cynic and everybody didn't want their kid to have an Eddie Haskell friend. But, you know, you do have these friends and they're not good for you is the whole point. The way that you actually get better friends and become a happier person and the way that you overcome skepticism and cynicism is to stop be so skeptical and stop being so cynical is what it comes down to. You won't actually be contagious toward other people and you'll be more immune to it. You'll be more boring on social media, I promise you, but that's the kind of boring you want. Last but not least, Sandy Perora sends a nice email. As a parent, I'm trying to figure out how to help my child build the same foundation

• 51:16Arthur Brooks?

  that I'm trying to build, how to learn happiness, practice it and carry it into adulthood. How do you do that? Same idea that I just talked about with Holly, model it. You know, with kids, it's a funny thing, especially if they're your kids. You can harangue them all you want, it doesn't matter. They will do more or less what they see, especially in the long run. It's extraordinary to me with adult kids now to see, you know, they do all the stuff that I, for better and for worse, that I used to do, you know, they're just, they're turning into me, ah, right? But a lot of things I like, the things that I saw, you know, people ask all the time, how do I make my kids grow up and practice my religious faith? And the answer, it doesn't matter what you tell them. It matters what they see. Do they see you on your knees? Do they see you in reverence for the divine? Well, the same thing is true for any of the happiness principles that we talk, you know,

• 52:01Arthur Brooks?

  talk about. Do they see you being grateful? Do they see you being impeccably honest and kind even when you don't need to be or when it's not warranted? That's actually how they learn it is by you modeling it. So I hope that helps. We've come to the end of another episode. If you liked it, please, please do share this with your friends. Leave a rating that helps the algorithmic gods of smile on us a little bit more. Like and subscribe and let me know your thoughts. Office Hours at arthurbrooks.com. Leave a comment. I'll read it, positive, negative. Follow me on the social media networks that you like. I'm on a lot on Instagram and LinkedIn and the other platforms as well. And Order the Meaning of Your Life.

• 52:46Arthur Brooks?

  It's a nice present for other people and maybe you can use it yourself. We can all use a little bit more meaning. Hope you enjoy it.

• 52:54Arthur Brooks?

  And I hope you enjoy your week bringing these ideas to other people. Don't forget that leisure is part of your life and leisure will make you happier if you do it like an elite athlete. See you next week.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting and completely delicious. Simply. Say yes to simple.