Suffering as a Meaning Making Experience

Why does so many people feel like modern life is simulated rather than real? Because it is. We're living in the matrix That movie, The Matrix came out twenty seven years ago. I hate to shock and sadden you. It'll make anybody who was alive then feel old But the plot of that movie was that a great artificial intelligence was dominating the human race and kept the human race placid in a pleasant simulation so that it could feed off human kinetic energy It kept them in pods and ran a simulation And the truth of the matter is that we are subjugated people necessarily, but by algorithms that fundamentally you are creating a simulated version of a real life. that's pleasant enough, keeps us from being bored and that feeds offer attention and energy and money. We're living in the matrix. And that's why people say I don't know, it doesn't feel Like real dating. doesnn't feel like real friends scroll, scroll, scroll. Doesn't feel like real achievement, game, game, game because we're living a simulation What's happening neurologically So was's happening Neurobobiologically is that we're literally in the wrong half of our brains. So this is the work of Ian the Gilchrist, the great have you had him on the show? to the show? He's fantastic. He's an Oxford neuroscientist. He's you know a great genius And he brought back the whole idea of hemispheric lateralization That's the concept that the two halves of your brain do different things. I mean, they do a lot of things the same too, but the fact is that they have different core competencies. Now when I was a kid in the seventies, this is long before you youngsters were born, there was this belief that there were right brained left brained people. Right brained people were creative, left brain people were analytical. My mom who was an artist, was a right brain person. my father who was a mathematician was a left brain person Growing up I was a right brain person like my mom, because I was a musician. I was a classical musician, and I painted and I wrote poetry And then I got my PhD and I became apparently a left brain person because I'm became of scientist. Well, the truth is that that theory didn't work What does work, however, is what Ian McGilchris brought back to show that we have We ask and answer different questions with the different hemispheres of our brain. The right hemisphere is the complex why, the mystery and meaning of life, the things that set us out in the hunt for the things that matter in life. The left brain is the how to and what. It's how we execute. It's the linear side. it's the analysis, it's the engineering It's the apps of life for the left brain side And what's happening is that we're running a simulation of life, we're running a left brain simulation to meet our right brain questions of love and mystery and meaning can't simulate the meaning of life Is it not a good thing for people to be more rational and analytical and objective? Is this not something that Only a couple of decades ago, we were trying to push more on people. Yeah, I suppose, except that we need both. The truth is that we need both because life is full of both kinds of problems. Look, if you don't know the why of the things in your life The how to and what mean nothing But if you only know the how to and what, then the why and the why is elillusive, I mean, you get the point that I'm trying to make. I mean, you can either be incompetent at executing anything in your life, or you'll have no purpose in the life that you lead, you actually need both. You know, I go to work every day, I'm, you know traveling around, doing my job. It's great. I know how to do it competent at it because my left brain is working properly. I know how to get where I'm trying to go and do what I'm trying to do. I can write my speeches and my columns and book, et ccera But I kinda know why, which is that I want to do something good for the world. I want to support the people that I love. I want to glorify God. That's what I want. That's the why side. and that originates on the right side of our brains Furthermore, all the things we really care about are not the analytical things, the things that we care about or not the physical, they're the metaphysical. That's what we really care about. So I'll give you an example A big left brain question is how does my car work I actually don't know. on a slightest idea, right I just I mean, it's a car, right? And but I could know becausecause I could actually get a book or I could you know get a guy and come teach me or I could watch a bunch of YouTube videos And that's knowable because those are complicated left brain questions. My marriage is a right brain problem It's completely unsolvable I have to live with it. I can't figure it out. I will never figure out my marriage Dude, I've been married thirty five years before it just You know, an hour ago She texts me, I love you. Good luck on the podcast I'm sure's true she loves me Tonight, I could call and she might be completely pissed off at me No. Yeah, but you did decide to date somebody with Latina blood. that adds a level of complexity, I grant you. Correct. And it's likeah to multiply it. She's a big pulsing right hemisphere, right. Sure enough.. But this is the thing. The reason I love my marriage is because it's unsolvable. Right? The reason people want to get a real cat, not a mechanical cat is because it's alive and things that are alive are right brain problems and things that are mechanical are left brain problems. And so what we've done is we've We've solved life. We've solved life. I mean we have I mean everything we're trying to the engineering, the Silicon Valley set of solutions for everything that we're trying to do that actually pops through the screen at us that dominates our culture that increasingly can be simulated and understood through artificial intelligence. All that's doing is it's a curve fit through the messy business of life using these left brain algorithms. and that's not going to get done what we need to get done. It is going to leave us. lonelier and more depressed and more anxious. Here's the thing Your brain knows So for example, this is one of the reasons that the more pornography people look at, largely young men, because more than eighty five percent of pornography is being consumed by men. Now you're thinking your, I know you're thinking. Who are the fifteen percent or old men No Is it you Thank you. How you very much the more pornography that men look at, the lonier they get So in the moment they feel less lonely and the more satisfied they feel, but the more unsatisfied and the lonelier they actually get because it's a simulation for the experience they're actually seeking. And it's unsatisfactory as a result of that. You want actual human connection with another person That's what you actually want and you're settling for a a two dimensional similacrum for it What are some of the other counterfit sources of meaning that people mistake for the real thing. Achievement is a counterfeit source is something that you actually get that doesn't build anything real of any real consequence in life. So the idea is like you just score in a game gives you a real short term sense of achievement, which is a source of purpose, which is a component of meaning But is it real? is fake. It's a's it's counterfeit. It's it's simulated. And that's one of the reasons that you'll find that you got to do more and more and more and more and more to keep up with it. You don't you know, they used to say, if you want to, if you really want to lived a good life, you know, you need to do, you need to have a son. lant a tree and write a book I don't know I've done all those things. I don't know if I planted a tree any. That's what you miss. I don't have a gre thumb, this isn't my problem. I mean plant more trees. But the whole point is that what those things have in common is that they're real They're in real life, They're real achievements in real life. They don't say, plant a tree online You know, pretend you're planting a tree. you know, get really good at doing it. H a sun online You know, the whole idea of simulating these experiences is unsatisfactory. does it simulates the experience in the moments. That's another example. Having friends is another way is no another way we think about it. Virtual friends, they simply don't meet your needs. And one of the ways that we know this is that the more virtual friends that you have, the less that you're actually illuminating in the experience of interacting with them, the right hemisphere of yourrain You know one of the reasons that you don't like to do your show virtually because you don't have the same experience. And the reason is that you and I are connecting with our right brains right now are youre and our friends. I mean, we text and talk to each other even when we're not doing a show, which is great because we're friends and we have that texting relationship because we've actually looked at each other in the eyes and had real no fooling conversations with each other. And that's how you have to link with other human beings. Otherwise, it's a simulated friendship This is one of the biggest realizations I had when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life toward the end of my twenties I had all of these friends because shock horror in the nightlife industry in the northeast of the UK. there weren't many people that were into the things I was getting into. but many people that You know, maybe they'd heard about Sam Harrison and they were thinking about doing meditation or they'd read bit of Robert Green and then got stuck after a couple of pages and then were struggling with that and then felt real bad because they couldn't sit still. All of these things that I was going through. I was finding it difficult on the front door of a nightclub to find people to resonate with. So I made friends online that were into the same sort of things that I was And I found that these friends kind of distilled out into two strador of people. Even if all that I'd done was as I was going through a city on a train, stopped off for a thirty minute coffee with someone That person immediately went into a different bracket of I've actually met this person. They're real in three dimensions, they're real. Yeah. because your brain actually apprehended that person in a different way. What you did was you had an imprint of that person in you know, flesh and blood in real life, which is, by the way, how the brain was evolved. You know we are Our brains are more or less the same size and shape. There's slight physiological differences, trivial for what we're talking about here, as they were two hundred fifty thousand years ago in the middle Pleistocene. And during that period, all human beings lived in bands of thirty to fifty individuals who were kin based and hierarchically related And that meant that the relationship they had with each other was absolutely paramount and our brains are wired for in person relationships. That's one of the reasons that you get oxytocin when you look at somebody in the eyes. You and I have a better conversation when we have this bonding hormone that's actually going through our brains, when we're looking at each other in real life. You don't get it through Zoom screens. There's a lot of research on this at this point You get a different kind of experience when you have the in real life experience. And so one of the things that I do when I'm talking to couples And my wife and I do we do work, you know do we'll do these marriage retreats, for example. And onene of the things that we'll do is couples will say, okay, Before you go to sleep, you need to stare into each other's eyes. Before you go to sleep, and you're ling on, you know, lying in bed, you know, on your sides, looking at each other stare each other in the eyes for five minutes. That's it, That's the prescription because you want to establish this thing that probably they haven't had for a really, really long time and that your brain actually needs so that your brain registers, that's my person You can't get it any other way. Why is it that meaning can't be simulated Meaning can't be simulated because meaning is this fundamentally complex right hemispheric experience. And so whenre the simulation is always in the wrong side of the brain That's it'll look like it's meaningful But it isn't. It is what it comes down to. It'll feel like in the moment, like love but it isn't. It'll feel like friendship, but it isn't.' So interesting with this conversation because A lot of people When I think about how this lands on the internet, there is cohort of people that will say something like This is good enough. This is actually as good. There's a disbelief that you actually do need to go into three dimensions. There is a I'm happy to wait for the sector robots to come. I'm happy to have the AI partner. There's even company that makes AI versions of your ex's. So if you don't ever want to leave the relationship with them, you can just keep on texting. And I think that kind of when I read those comments, it makes me sad. makes me sad because I think It sounds like somebody who's got hurt or is scared that the world isn't going to be able to give them something that they know that they can get compliantly online permissionlessly with lower risk of rejection or zero risk of rejection. And it makes me it makes me sad, but yeah, it's so much of what we're seeing the modern world is people getting what they want, but not what they need.. And this is something that people need but don't realize that they want. Yeah Well, they do know that they want to just don't know how to get it and is ordinarily what's actually happening. I mean, I rarely meet somebody who would say, I actually would prefer not to meet anybody in real life. I mean, there are people who are goraphobic, for example. There are people that have particular pathologies along these lines. But the truth is they feel like it's the best that they can actually get under the circumstances. Look, when when sixty two percent of couples are forming online then it's very hard to form. It's increasingly hard to form a offline And if you're an exceptionally online person or you're living in a remote location or you you know came of age during COVID, which means that you don't have social skills that were're wired into at a tender age. then then you're going to struggle is what it comes down to. But here's the thing to keep in mind The biggest predictor of depression and anxiety is to say I don't know the meaning of my life or my life feels meaningless. That's the number one predictor. Why? It all gets down to the fact that these pathologies they actually follow from this sense of emptiness You know, so people will often say, so why has depression tripled? Why has anxiety doubled? Which they literally have clinically since about two thousand eight Why? And they'll say, well, because generational difficulties because, you know, boomers wrecked the economy and created income inequality and made houses expensive or something. They have all these exogeneous economic explanations for this stuff. These are all wrong is what it comes down to. Since two thousand eight, when life has become increasingly online, and we you know, the average American is now checking her his phone two hundred five times a day What you've done is you've shoved yourself into the wrong hemisphere of your brain and in so doing, you haven't been able to naturally experience this meaning and that's what leads empirically, that's what actually leads people to feel empty, to feel depressed, to feel anxious, to actually feel lonely That's a big predictor is what it comes down to. We have a meaning crisis. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution, somethingomething that identifies low tea faster than a high school bully, and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where function comes in. 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So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save twenty five dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health d. com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom Check out. Let's say that you're going to design a life for someone to have as little meaning in it as possible. Yeah. What would that consist? It would start by waking up when the sun is warm You know, making sure you don't start your day before dawn Make sure you start your day when kind of when you get up Make sure that if you have an alarm clock that is your phone L is your phone before you roll out of bed U Then make sure that the first thing that you do is eat a bunch of, you know, highly processed foods high in sugar. Make sure you get your coffee in the first five minutes So you get a big dose of caffeine and make sure that you're looking and scrolling on your phone while you're eating your first meal. That's a really important thing to do. Make sure that your whole first hour is is neurocognitively programmed to be on the screen. Then make sure that you have a remote job It's very important that you go to work back in your bedroom and you look at a screen and you look at a screen all day long. so that your colleagues are kind of squares on the Zoom screen. And you see them sometimes in clients, and et cetera, et cetera. And you don't actually know where anybody lives, you don't have a relationship with anybody, right? It's actually better if you don't see anybody the whole day, as a matter of fact. Now if you're gonna to date, make sure that it's swipe right, swipe left and so that you're only getting a two dimensional understanding of the person that you might want to fall in love with as well Like no multidimensional, multi sensory understanding of who the person is, makeake sure you can't smell that person right. I mean that's really important because You know, the olfactory bulb does all kinds of meaning related things in the brain. So make sure you rule that out, right and make sure that on your own dating profile, you're lying a lot. That's important too, right?. Th then let's make sure that for fun, that you're spending sort of the evening not doing anything of real importance. I mean, you're not working on a big project, you're not going out and seeing people, that you're kind of staying in and scrolling and watching YouTube shorts And and if you're doing something that's kind of competitive and achievement oriented, make sure this's gaming Make sure that, you know, it's really oriented toward that. So it's kind of writing your life into disappearing ink. U and then go to bed. Make sure you didn't do any exercise. importantmortant not to do any exercise at all, right And, um, and then times where N equals any number that you can conceive of. So that that that you're never bored. You're never bored But your life is grindingly boring So here's the key. If you want your life to have no meaning, make sure that there's no boredom moment to moment But that day to day and week to week and month to month, life is boring That's what you're actually going for as opposed If you want your life to be really meaningful. Make sure you got plenty of board moment to moment And then then your life won't be boring at all Is not a strange paradox? It is. I mean, my great grandfather, Lib Roy Brooks is born in Olatha, Kansas married the sheriff's daught John James was the sheriff was strung up by uantrail's raaiders during the Civil War. Kid you not. This is Americana in my family, Chris And and he married Mary Ellen in a L of Kansas And that's pretty much what I know about him But I'm going to make a prediction about good All L right. He never came home to Marry Ellen and said Honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today brain was working the way it was supposed to promise you That his life behind the mule, looking at a mule's butt was was pretty boring moment to moment. But he was not bored His life wasn't boring 'causeuse he was living a real life But a lot of people today who have figured out a way by checking the screen and living online and living the hustle and grind culture That's been engineered out of Silicon Valley in various other places around the world, Hide or Abad and wherever you want that not being bored from moment to moment gives them the most boring lives possible the case that ambitious people are particularly susceptible vulnerable to meaninglessness. So Asking for a friend, right Of course. Of course Me too. I'm I'm like a Senior version of you, man Except you're not gonna to be bald. That's right I'm going have to lose a lot of hair, too. You didn't have to lose lot of hair, I know. If I had your hair, I'd be president of the United States right now. I think you would. I'm Yes and no. So one of the problems that really ambitious people have is that they they they don't know how to live with themselves So ambition, striving bususiness U is really a way that people anesthetize themselves because they're very, very uncomfortable. So you know, to I'll give you an example, one time I was talking to a great friend of mine, who traveled constantly for work constantly for work and his wife was just in his grill She just like he had kids. and she says that I miss you. And you always every year you tell me that this year is going to be different And And I realized getting to know this guy really, really well. the problem wasn't that his job made him travel too much. The problem was he didn't want to be home He didn't want to be home. He wanted to be distracted because his life stressed him out so much This is what it's like to be a striver is like having this unbelievably chaotic life And you need to distract yourself all the time. And so sometimes your ambition will be distracting you, Sometimes your success will be distracting you. Sometimes it's your overriding need to be special or to be applauded by others is your way to distract yourself from all the things that are actually going on, all the storms and things inside your head And when you have a down moment, then you panic And that's when the screen comes out. or for that matter, that's when alcohol and drugs come out. There's very interesting data from theECD that show that above average, busier than average people are above average risk in alcohol and alcohol abuse So you don't think, you think of somebody who' an alcohol abuseer as an alcoholic as somebody who's down and out, you know, you know, a bum Right? No, it's more likely to be an investment banker. It's more likely to be a wealthy, successful podcaster And the reason is because successful strivers anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol, with pornography with screens, with anything that will actually make you feel like, don't leave me alone in here, man. I don't want to be alone in here, whichich is why they're strivers in the first place How often do you think people are pursuing goals because they genuinely want them versus because they want apppproval So Everybody pursues goals because human beings, homo sapiens only get satisfaction in their life when they're making progress. It's that satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment of making progress toward an accomplishment with struggle. That's what satisfaction is all about. why That's why goals are incredibly important and struggle and pain are incredibly important. That's what it comes down to. These are the two things to teach your kids is have goals accomplish stuff and struggle and don't be afraid of pain Those are the things that you teach your kids and they'll get lot of satisfaction. satisfaction is one of the maconutrients of happiness to be sure. The trouble with that is that if it's somebody like you, highly intelligent, super hard wororking, unbelievably energetic, then you can actually start fooling yourself into thinking it's actually not about making the progress and the struggle and the hustle and grind of life itself It's actually about if I finally get that thing, then it's going to be okay when I finally get that thing. So, you know, I've I've I've worked with Olympic athletes And and and It's funny because you'll often they think they're alone in their struggles and you'll say, didid you When you won that gold, were you depressed afterwards, they'd be like, how'd you know? Like becausecauseuse it's always everyvery other gold medalist. It's literally called gold medalist syndrome. Yeah, it's called gold medalnd. And what it is it's in my field in behavioral science is called the arrival fallacy And the arrival fallacy is just like I got to get there. And when I get there, I'm going to feel that thing. Now what was the thing I'm going to feel? this gets back to your question. I'm going to feel like I'm worthy I'm gonna feel like I'm something I'm gonna to feel like I'm special. I'm finally going to feel like I'm special and you don't And you don't And that's the problem. That's what a big part of the driver's curse. You know what's fascinating about the arrival fallacy No one's ever been able to make it popular So the concept. Yes, ye. cororrect. tellell me the most well known book on the Arival Fallacy that points it out exactly. Yeah I know.ucking on my way out to Australia texting Mark Manson about this. And I was explaining one of the problems I was trying to navigate with the show. this live show that I was doing that I was put together. And one of them is that a good bit of it is kind of about the arrival fallacy. It's a PG version because I'm aware that it's the most unsexy topic to ever talk about Yeah. And his response was good luck I've tried to talk about this publicly and every single time it's fallen flat. I know. It's not just not mimetic people don't want to talk about it. It's not just mimetic neutral. that people will accept it and maybe bring it up and maybe not. it's actively antimemetic. People don't want to hear it and won't tell their friends about it. No, I know. It feels saying to people that are still climbing, which everybody is. The view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it's going to be. It feels like you're sucking the gas out of their fuel tank. Yeah while they're still on the way up. It's like you as a fat person. saying to someone who's starving, well food's not that nice in any case. And it's an unteachable lesson. And the only way that you can learn it is by getting there. because the alternative to this with the arrival fallacy is that every successful person ever in history has been inducted into some kind of cult pulls the ladder up after them where everybody gets the same memo, which is so I know that all of the problems that you had, all of the internal voids, your feeling of insufficiency, the chip on your shoulder from when you were a child, your desperate desire for validation from random humans on the internet. I know that all of that was fixed when you got the thirty thousand square foot house but we need to tell the puse that that's not the case. So you now are a part of this elite group of people that are trying to s up everybody else into not trying to strive for it. Y. That's the alternative, which is or is it more likely that's just the sense that the gold medalists got. And that's not to say that it's everyone, but it does seem to be a pretty big cohold. wayay more than the people that are striving would think it is. Yeah. So there's a reason that it's anti mimatic, and that's because it goes against Mother Nature Mother Nature wants you to be fooled The reason that that the that the ancient Williamsons Right? from some place some Anglo Saxon tribe of something southern S getting Yeah The reason they passed on their jeans is because they were fooled by mother Nature. that they were fooled. that they actually they chased the arrival fallacy again and again and again and again again. Now the reason that you're not going to be satisfied, the reason that it can't be satisfied is because otherother nature needs you in the hunt But the only way you're going to stay in the hunt is with the promise that you're finally going to get there Now, there's a side note to this. There's a metaphysical side note to this, by the way This is kind of a this is a little a little bit of a side note that kind of takes us in the Tcendate dimension. We'll come back to Ryd Halouse in a second But you know, there is a philosophical set of arguments for the existence of something, which is that the desire for something is actually proof of the existence of its object. So for example The proof that water exists is that I feel thirst proof or evidence that food exists is that I feel hungry I want unremitting happiness. I want it And I feel like I can actually get it somehow, but I can't, I can't But that philosophically, proof that it does exist Not here That's actually proof of a Divine afterlife actuallyually, it's evidence of a divine afterlife, that you have this hunger for unremitting happiness which suggests that it actually does exist, but you can't get it in this life Maybe you can get it someplace else is what it comes down to. And this is one of the great proofs in most of the both Abrahamic and Karmic religions for the existence of Nirvana, heaven, whatever it happens to be. Anyway, Mother back to the question at hand. whyy would mother Nature play this trick on us because because we gott to stay hungry She wants us to stay hungry. So she's wired in a mistake. She's wired in a mistake. She's wired in something that it is such a deep mistake that we make again and again and again that even when people speak a manifest truth that people deeply believe, they still will reject it. I remember when Davidrooks, you know, the author, David Brooks he and I have are super old friends. We're not related. Share a surname, a commenturname It's a common surname, right? And so my Brooks is you know snuck out of Lancashire in sixteen thirty. to Massachusetts, one step ahead of the County sheriff But in his came later anyway, David Brooks, He said, I remember years and years and years ago. He said You know, being number one in the New York Times best seller list, it's really not that great We're having lunch And I said Let me try. Let me see how it feels, right And that was exactly the point that you made. Now Now Ryan Holiday talks about that too. The first time he had a book that was number one in New York Times bestest sellist, he's like, this is great. And the next week it was some yooyo who had a stupid book as number one. And he realized how little it actually meant. But he wanted the next one to be number one too Actually, it's more tyrannical than that Because if your next one doesn't make number one, now you used to be great, and there's almost nothing worse than that. Yeah, the only thing worse than never having made it is having fallen off. Yeah Yeah, I almost I wanted to do a show at one point where I talked to a producer about the idea of a TV show. called I used too Be famamous where, you know, as a behioral scientist,'ll go talk to people who are like living relatively ordinary lives and they used to be famous. Some are happy, some are not, some are addicts, some are crazy Some are like normally married Fascinating show wildly unpopular You know, like just it's just. Yeah. But if you if you if you want to have that, it's the underdogs story. Yeah right? It's from zero to hero, notot from hero to zero. Although it's pretty interesting when when you hear about people who are living who are much, much, much happier than they were in the limelight. H You know, when people are living ordinary lives Um and and there' they used to be really famous and people go, o, I remember He was so and so in the partridge family or something Now he's got a happy marriage and four kids and you know,, you know, he works for a cardboard box company or something said How can people work out the meaning that they've got in their life? What are the big questions that they should ask? Yeah. There are three big why questions that constitute meaning. and this actually comes from the work of Michael Steeeger, who's a really good social psychologist at uh in Colorado. And he has the three parts, the three elements of meaning, which are called coherence purpose and significance And there are three why questions. Number one is You have to have an answer to the question. you know, whyy are things happening the way they are in my life You if things are happening all around me all the time, whyy Part of meaning is having an answer to that.ay Maybe that's your religious answer because of the mind of God. Maybe that's your scientific answer, because these are the laws of the universe. Maybe you're a conspiracy theorist and say because powerful people are doing these things. Conspiracy theories are nothing more than crying out for an answer to the coherence question, which is a meaning problem You know, when so if you have a relative who's going down the rabbit hole on the craziest conspiracy theories,'t don't throw data in their face and say you moron. That's the wrong way to approach it. They're having a meaning cris. They're having a happiness crisis is the reason they're doing this in the first place So Cohereis, number one, you know, why things happen the way they do. Second Why am I doing what I'm doing? That's purpose Purpose and meaning are not the same. Purpose goals and direction so you can make progress So why am I doing what I'm doing? And the answer is, I don't know, you can't make progress. ' mean just going in circles. You're just a carnival cruise ship just kind of randomly going around and around and aroundound and around That's the reason I find crues unbelievably depressing. They don't go someplace. right? I'm a paleological individual like you. I want a goal, right And that's purpose. And so the in the In the research, you know, Sonya Lubaersky's stuff, haveave you had her on the show? She's coming on next week or the week after. Super good. Yeah. She's awesome. And she's at UC Riverside. And she does these work on goals. and you'll give students these just random goals. Like you're getting a B minus in physics you know, It's going to be plus this semester. J that goal, they get happier, they get more directed, life seems better because they have more meaning in life. That's what it comes down to. Even arbitrary goals work better to have meaningful goals And last but at least is significance. and that's My life matters You know, my life matters to someone You know, to my dog, to my wife, to God, to my kids And so that's the love question. and all these things are completely missing in modern culture for so many people. You know, whyy do things happen the way that they do? It's just random, I don't know Why am I doing what I'm doing? I have no idea. I get up and I scroll I get up and I surf, I get up and I on a Zoom meeting for a company I don't care about And and, you know, what is the significance of my life? Why does my life matter don't think it does And that's those are the three things to actually keep in mind. Before we continue, most people in their thirties are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their twenties discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels someomewhat different, strength gains take a little longer, The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see Mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Mitoure from Teline contains the only clinically validated form of rylin A used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones in studies This It supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder. It's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your thirties, forties and fifties and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a thirty day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now you can get up to twenty percent off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline dot com slash modern wisdom and using the code mododern wisdom A check out. that's timimeline. com slash modern wisdom and modernisdom, a check out What happens psychologically when life feels random When life feels random, then it feels like anything could happen at any time and there is no control. There are no levers that you can actually pull. So you're not an active player in your own life when there is no coherence. When you don't see a pattern, it's a big problem You know, when you when you you remember when you learned to drive How old do you have to be in the UK Seventeen. Okay And when you first, you know, you got a lot of confidence, but when you're looking at the traffic and like it' like it's like chaos. Wildly intimidating. I learned to drive in a mini, which is a very British way to do it, but it's fucking terrifying. like half the height of everybody el. Yeah. And you know, any system that you're in that doesn't seem to make sense That's that that that it tends to feel really, really meaningless because you don't know what you can actually do to have some sense of agency. There's no sense of agency when there is no coherence.' what it comes down to. So for example, if you believe that things happen the way they do because that's what God wills, then you're going to try to work that lover. You're going to pray For example, you've had a relationship with God. If you believe it's because of the laws of science, you're going to learn more about science and you're going to actually enter into that particular dimension. So for example, I'm a behavioral scientist. I really believe in science. I really believe that it's just like it gives you incredible amounts of power My job is to explain the science and explain how people can interact with the science. It's a pure coherentnce play is what it comes down to And if it's all about conspiracy theories, then I'm going to get online and you share them with my friends So that's why coherence really matters so that you can have agency over your life And why are directionalist people so psychologically fragile. They're fragile because they don't know actually in which direction they're going, which means they can't make progress. Now remember, this whole idea of happiness comes from making progress toward a goal. And there's tons of really interesting examples of this. The weight loss literature is super interesting in this So Diets are all effective and they're all catastrophic failures is what it comes down to. Effective in sofar is that almost any diet will make you lose weight But they have between an eighty and ninety five percent failure rate after a year, meaning you gain all the weight back and then some This is a weird industry. It's like a forty billion dollar industry in the United States that failsboros of nutritional advice. It's craziness. you know, nine out of ten times they fail. No, now why are they successful? and economically, is because temporarily they make you make progress. but they ultimately fail because once you get to your goal, your goal we The reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Conggratulations. And then you get the irrival fallacy is what it comes down to. So what you want in life is something where you can just make constant progress. I want to be like I want to be better dad I want to be a better person I want to create more value with my work. and there's no end to that. I can't be like And well, I got to the best d I can possibly be. So that's all good. No, I can always work to be a better husband. I can always work to be a better friend. I can always work to be a better citizen I can always work to love my country more. I can always work to actually do something more important in my work and reach more people with a with the the moral objectives that I have. And that's what I need. I need goals I can't meet I don't I think that The confusing thing is if Significance is about being valuable to others and not famous Why is it the case that modern people confuse the two Part of the reason is because what strivers they get into, there's actually a pathology that that that is in the middle of this. So what you find is that certain people Let me back up a little bit Um I work I'm sort of a dririver whisperer in my work, I specialize in people who do incredible things. Right? And that's just because That's fun, although it is, but because that's the kind of books that I write. you know, people who do amazing things and still don't have perfect lives That's 's kind of my area of research matter of fact They have a common childhood And it kind of looks like this. You know, super strivers who are never satisfied and struggle They generally speaking, found that they only got attention and affection from their parents when they did something. When they got good grades, when they made pitcher on the baseball team, when they made first chair in the orchestra, when they when they, you know, set up a lemonade stand and made more money than anybody thought possible, whatever it was, right And their parents, often their parents are immigrants or came from poverty And they'll reward their kids when they do a thing thinking that they're actually wiring in success and happiness for their kids. What they're telling their kids is that love is earned They're teaching their kids that love is earned And kids will learn that. And when your brain is synaptically plastic, boy will you ever leararn that lesson? And then you will go through life trying to earn love Over and over and over and over again. You'll look for if you're a man, you'll look for women who make you earn their love Right? And that you'll spend your marriage trying to bring in more and more and more and more money, for example. Women will try to stay young forever by trying to earn their husband's love You'll find that they will surround themselves with sycophants and yes men who are just like fake friends who make you make these people earn their love with gifts and favors and fanciness and you'll surround yourself with people because you believe that love is actually earned. Well, the truth is that that's wrong Real love isn't earned, It' a free gift. Freely Gevin, to Grace Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you That's what it comes down to. But they don't learn that because that's actually what they've what they've what they've and they've and evolved over the course of their lives. And they become success addicts, winning addicts, looking for the specialness. And in the modern economy, when you can metastasize that from one to your family, to your community, to your church, to your city to the whole world on the internet then you're going to be searching for the adteration of Strangers because it's the best possible dopamine hit that you can get And life is going to feel gray if you don't get it So this is a pathology that actually people have. and the more talented you are, the more danger you're in One of my favorite ideas of yours is this difference between specialness and happiness.. It's so good. When you see it, it's something that you kind of can't see anymore. Yeah. And it's a lot of people who are, you know, people watch and listen to modern wisdom because they want an edge You know, it's good, it's entertainment. I'm'm I'm fan Long for I meta ye Yeah, but it's It's actionable material people Well, I'm actively making less actionable material. Yeah, know. which is an interesting pivot at the moment, I think. There's a new term floating around, which you might not have seen yet. It's called Gind sllop And Gind sllop is kind of this Fuck your feelings just work harder achievement and progress and optimization at any cost. And I think that people are feeling a lot of fatigue. I've felt that for a while and you know I go back and look at What I was talking about two years ago, eighteen months ago A lot of that was, I'm going to try and feel my feelings a little bit more. I'm going to try and see if there's something a little bit deeper. I'm going to have a little bit more fun. I'm not going to optimize for outcomes at the expense of experience And that has really come to a head. I think for a lot of people. I think it's worsened by AI. I think that if you can have an oracle in your pocket, which you always had, but now an oracle that speaks to you personally and knows exactly everything that you need and kind of gives you this very curated, idiosyncratic, customized version of what it is that you want in a chat format. It as almost as if you're speaking to your best friend that happens to be God People have got information overload And I don't think that they necessarily need more of just getting like You like have foie gras made just force feeding high velocity, like high density stuff. Yeah. And I think that At least for me, what I'm finding myself enjoying lots of is I took something away from that. Yeah And I had a good time. Yeah as opposed to optimizing for You know, you think about short form or blinkist or spark notes or you know, whatever your favorite summary Service of choice was, likeike what is it that you're doing? You're like trying to get to the outcome? Yeah, no you' to get points to the board. you get points to the board. Yeah, total. No. and I can't remember that was a digression from something from the original that we. me saying if significance is about being valuable to others Yeah and not about being famous, how can people confuse those two? Oh yeah. And so specialness and happiness. Correct. Yeah. So specialness and happiness is really, really interesting because the idea of I mean, I will literally hear people say, look, any loser. can have a family You know, any loser can have an ordinary job and provide for his wife and kids But not everybody can start a company Not everybody can be CEO, not everybody can have a famous podcast. Not everybody can do those things. And in other words, they're saying, I know what would make me happy and I'm going to forego that happiness for what I think is is a happiness beyond it which is specialists And that Always lead a Ran Al does I mean, again and again and again, I talk to people my age, I talk about people who are older than me. I mean, it's like this classic thing friend who is twenty five years old on now Um an icon in finance an absolute icon of finance And I said When I said, how old were you when you figured out you were going to be rich It said thirty two He knew what it was. It was thirty two years old. He said it was like, you know I actually left this bank and I actually went and opened my own firm and it was starting to make money. and we weren't rich yet, but I realized I was going to be rich And I said, you must have thought, what's it going to be like to be rich? What's it going to be like to be rich? What's going gonna to happen? He said, Yeah, he's not very materialistic gu. doesn's a boat. He doesn't have fifteen houses. He doesn't have any of this stuff Re really wellalth fey. Scott Galloway f My doopelganger. I should go I should I I said to Scott the other day because we were doing a thing together and I said, you know, we should go on tour together with Stanley Tucci That's a you under a big red cup. That's right. That's right. It's like, three card Monty or something like that. It's like which one you get? which c Baldy And so and he said and and I said, so what did you think when you got rich, how life was going to be better. How'd you really think life was going gonna to be better? Becauseuse this is interesting for me as beavioral scientist. I mean, this this is deep And he thought about for a while and he said I thought that when I got rich, that my wife would love me Really love me And I said, so what happened And he said didn't? They just stared at me and There was this moment of pathos Right? It was this moment that's like this, What's pathos this moment of deep understanding and feeling Right that and it's almost as if when he he had never said it before. when he articulated it, he understood it for the very first time Do you think he'd selected a wife that was the sort of person whose love needed to be won. Of course. well. Of course, because you know, if you believe that love is earned, then you're going surround yourself with people who make you earn their love. Yeah. Every single time. you've got cause and effect going on. Of course. I've got this line from an essay I wrote recently, what you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private. Nice. G me an example A your psychological resilience, you know, in boardroom. People call it strength. They call it decisiveness, assertiveness. They call it anti fragility but around your kitchen table, it makes you put up with a relationship that you should have left long ago Re makes you impenetrable to the actual psychological and emotional needs that your spouse needs. I had a Navy SL sat here at Andy Stump and he said, know I built myself up like my entire career was made out of being a person who doesn't quit. And that caused me to stay in a marriage that was toxic for ten years longer than I should have done. Your strengths are your weaknesses, but Y weaknesses your strengths What's that mean You tell me? figure Uno reverse carded me on a limerick that I don't understand. But I mean, Riddler sat opposite me here, are you Batan villain. cororrect. Yeah. Bald man, the Baldi. the um the, um What is your greatest weakness Unc. How have you turned that into one of your greatest strengths and what you do? Paying attention to every different permutation of how things could go to ensure that the plan is in place, hypervigilance. I Galactically unreasonable attention to detail. Exactly right What's your next biggest weakness In this similar sort of circuit is that overthinking?. You fear failure Fear. You fear shame fear shame rather than faily. How does your fear of shame? L I'm not divulging anything to our friends sound No one's fing surprised.r. No one's surprised here. It's nothing that haven't said on stage in front of thousands of people with tears in my eyes. It's the shame faced boy part of the program. Yeah exactly. So how how' the fear of shame which by the way, is very common for working hard enough so that you don't have to feel it. Yeah, you know, overachieving outstripping what anybody thought Yeah to the point where nobody could ever think that it would be something shameful. R. But it does cause you, again, what you what you' are p prised for in public you pay for in private, it means that you have Um opening up about how you feel, especially about weaknesses and vulnerabilities It's hard. It' hard to do because you go, well, I'm supposed to have it all together. The reason that the world gave me, the love that it gave me is because of L at my competence and here it is on display and I'm and then you go, I need to I and there's a ole in this armor I need to show it to somebody Uh and I and the map that I have of reality from the real world gets ported across. into the relational world. Yeah And that's very, very difficult to that's a tough thing to watch. It feels like being Batman and Robin for a lot of people. sorry, It feels like being Batman and Bruce Wayne for a lot of people You know, it feels like You have one life out there, And then when you come home, you can either choose to keep the mask on, but taking it off means that you have to start living this double life where you need to not feel the things that you do privately when you're in public and not use the that you have publicly when you're in private.ight Right. And that actually can be really disconcerting and it can be highly damaging for personal relationships. And this is one of the reasons that you find that when people start to get really famous that they're much more at ease in front of a thousand people than they are in front of one person. becausecause they actually have to use a different set of social skills. They've got the theater ability in front of a thousand people. but when they're actually talking to mom or you know, an actual no fooling girlfriend, life it gets real dicey real fast, right? It's what it comes down to But what you put your finger on is that, look, you will pay in private for what you're applauded for in public. But you will also, you know, what you're paying for in private is the source of your strength in public.. And that what that means is that you shouldn't just try to You shouldn't just be thankful for what they're applauding you for in public, on the contrary, you should be down on your knees thankful for the weaknesses that you have as well. And that's the That's the pro move That's what it comes down to. that's actually how we ultimately learn to manage ourselves. is that we recognize that we have these frailties, that we have these weaknesses, that we have these you know feet of clay. And we say, thank you. Thank you thank you for that weakness because indeed that is a source of my strength Yeah, most of the things that you're most ashamed of are just the dark side of something light that you're really proud of. Yeah. And you know if you've got a sword, most swords are double edged And sometimes it nicks you on the back swing. Yeah. That doesn't mean that you throw the sword away. Yeah. Just just means that you learn how to hold it proper. And then the Ace move is being grateful for the wound for the wound itself. It's really interesting because actually what you find in a lot of Eastern philosophy is that, you know, we have a tendency to be very stoic about the way we talk about problems and suffering and weakness in our life to say I will bear up under it I will, I do accept it. I do accept it, but it's not enough to accept it. You need to love it that's really that that that ultimately is the is what makes you fully human is to actually love it and to accept it as the divine will. This is the way it's going to be. And because it's happening, that's what I want My will, I want what I want is what is happening sort of axiomatically. I realize it' sort of philosophical in this way. But ultimately, I think this is what we need to where we need to get in our lives is recognizing that there are both strengths and weaknesses that we actually have, and we should be as grateful for our weaknesses as we are for our strengths You might not believe me, but this sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the night gown, It's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my eight sleep. The eightight Sleep Pod five comes with a smart covey throwing your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to twenty degrees. and now they've added the world's first temperature regulating duvet and pillowcase. So you've got three hundred sixty degree coverage for deep, uninterrupted rest It's like being Walt Disney without the cryogenic chamber And the racism. 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That's e Ght sleep d. com slash modern wisdom. and modern wisdom Cck out I had this idea the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribion error, that We are often prepared, especially in the modern world, right blaming our parents for stuff is basically a ride of passage in modern psychology in modern therapy culture. But if we're not prepared to lay our strengths at the feet of our parents, then maybe we shouldn't be so to call them the villains for what's wrong with us. So know you say that your desire to work hard is because you were never freely given love at home. alsoso the same thing that's made you so driven and ambitious. right. You say that your hypervigilance was brought out because people didn't observe your needs ahead of their own Isn't that also the same reason that you're so concerned to ensure that everybody else's welfare is bght before yours. All of these things are they're not even two sides of the same kind. It's just a single fucking piece of metal, This thing exists. It's woven throughout it all.. And what you're doing is right now you're being very subversive because what you're doing is subverting the culture of grievance M which h actually you're pretty good at that at this point. I've noticed that. people got really angry when I when I talked about that. Yeah. you didn't like it. Well, the whole point is that, you know, the unhappiest people are people are whose identity revolves around grievance and victimization And this is, by the way, one of the ways that people in positions of relative cultural authority and power keep you subjugated The way that I a baby boomer like me, technically in the last year of the baby boom can conscript culture warriors or G Z into my movement is by convincing them their're victims and they should be aggrieved. aboutb how the world treats them, about how older people treat them, about how the culture treats It was easier before you, so there's no point in trying now. Yeah. well, or you should be really mad about it. You should be angry about it. You should be you carrying a sign in the streets. Apply your efforts to complaining about the problem as. to go trash starbucks. Yeah. ye. Yeah, yeah yeah. ye. So it seems like a lot of what you're laying at the feet here the issue is largely technology. that that is one of the biggest movers. Is that a fact? This's the tip of the spear. It's actually what it is. It's The technology is a manifestation of the way that the culture of engineering has given us this scientism, this conceit. that every problem is a complicated problem that can be solved As opposed to the most important problems, which can't be solved, they can only be lived with and understood. that a more human approach to what we're talking about is that there are plenty of complicated problems that we can solve, but the most important ones are the ones we can't solve And that's what properly it's interesting because that's what most of the you know, Buddhist teachers will say that the wrong turn of the West that was the scientism that said that everything is a solvable complicated problem. Whereas what we need is balance between complex and complicated. The complex problems of the right hemisphere and the complicated problems of the left hemisphere, and they exist in a system. And there are many things that we shouldn't try to solve because we can't We should live with them We should understand them. We should leave them as permanent mysteries that actually give our life flavor. But the truth is that especially over the past twenty five years, in the era of hyper development of technology That is an expression of the idea that no, no, we're going to hit the singularity, man. We're going to live forever We're going be actually be able to figure out how to upload our brains. We're going to be able to solve any problem with whatever app or Dooad or or supplement or whatever it happens to be, that we will have the scientific acumen to solve everything that actually is a problem in our lives. That's just axiomatically wrong. And how do I know that? Because we're solving more and more of these problems and we're getting less and less and less happy It's the same kind of thing to say, for example, If we hadn enough therapists, we wouldn't have any more depression. Well, depression has tripled. And the number of therapists has tripled So what's going on here Obviously there's a cause and effect problem and a glitch in our logic I wonder if This is part of the reason why people are feeling exhausted. They've got personal development fatigue. Yeah. Pmanently asking the Y question permanently trying to optimize everything beccomes exhausting. uh, the cost that you pay of trying to optimize everything is worse than being under optimized. Yeah the process of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections would And yeah, all of this together is like, dude, I got enough on my plate? Yeah. I got enough on my plate. Do I need more homework? Yeah. Do I really need more homework? Right right now as opposed to like U I'm trying, I'm trying I'm trying and I'm trying hard and that's that's pretty good Yeah. And you know, there's nothing wrong with these big Y questions. The problem is having these big Y questions and believing that if you watch enough internet videos and t enough supplements that you'll be able to answer these things. And this is of this is a big generational difference that we actually find. there' everyvery philosophical school Um of note and of merit has something that the ancient Greeks called Aora which is to sit in a state of puzzlement over questions that can't be answered Zen Buddhism is based on conens. Cos are riddles You know, what is the sound of one hand clapping? a strange, unanswerable question. You're supposed to ponder that and in the pondering, you gain a certain kind of complex knowledge, which we know is, you know, dominantly processed to the right hemisphere of the brain, right The big generational difference is that what's very's missing for a lot of people's lives today is that at night with their friends, they're not having these BS philosophical conversations about big questions that can't be answered. That was what you did Right at eleven thirty after you came home from a party with your friends at college in nineteen eighty five Is it like, I don't know, dude Do think God exists Right? It's like Wow, dude. And and now it's like And so we've stopped doing that one thing. There's nothing wrong with big Y questions The problem is that we only ask Either ask questions that can be addressed by Google or ChatGBT Or we believe that if we have enough scientific knowledge that these questions can be answered. Both of those are a big, big wrong turn. They're a big, wrong turn philosophically, but they're also in wrong turn neurobiologically Weird isn't it because promise of modern technology, culture, science, being able to answer a lot of questions and fix a lot of the problems that previously were huge, infant mortality. fucking cuts on you. You know how Ignee Samelwise died? No fucking m. tellell me. So guy that discovered the Germ theory of disease, he finds that child bed fever is being transmitted from corpses to newborn babies because the doctors weren't washing the hands in between. begs his colleagues to adopt hand washing, he gets laughed out of every single institution that he's trying to do it to. he keeps on talking about it for so long that he drives himself insane. Everybody thinks that he's insane and his wife commit him to an asylum. while he's being removed from his own home by the nurses are taking him away to the asylum. He gets a cut on his leg The cut on his leg is treated by a doctor who doesn't wash his hands after touching a corpse and he dies due to this infection most Yeah. traragically ironic way to die. Uh But yeah, we've got all of these promises That's greatade by the modern world. and problem is No one, it's the first time that we've had the oracle R? It's the first time that humanity's gone through the Wow, maybe we could answer everything, maybe all of the problems as opposed to some of the problems. Yeah, yeah. And the all idea is that if we we Dig a little deeper, we'll find We dig a little deeper, we find it. But you're saying that there's a particular category of challenge, which is simply unsolvable. You're digging when you're in saying what's the or something. Yeah. ye. this is important because this is, you know, a classic mistake that people make. There's a conceit that people have. I talked to a guy one time who was a big part of the war on poverty in America, which was this idea that we're going to be able to wipe out poverty with social programs, with social welfare service. And it did a lot. I mean, social welfare programs did a lot to lower caloric needs and make sure there's more public access to education and all kinds of good stuff But the truth of the matter is that after a certain point, it starts to wire in pathologies actuallyct it makes it harder for people to actually become independent, et cetera. Because they become reliant on the money. That's the idea. Yeah, that's the whole idea of this. It's certainly not true for everybody, but it's certainly true for other people. And and I asked him who is one of the architects in this war on poverty What would have made it that would truly have one you really wiped out poverty once and for all. And he said just a little more money N But that's what a lot of people in the valley think today. is that we're going to get aailable for that. that these are solable problem. We just need to go deeper. We need to go deeper. I mean, you saw the test experiments with UBI from a couple of years ago They failed. bothoth of them failed. They failed, failed massively. Yeah. Now tell me, don't tell the s, let's say why What do they do R remember Not fully. I mean, I know that people they looked at the discretionary spend, they looked at where people were putting money away. They looked at how much of it was being spent on things that people said they needed to prioritize stuff like healthca. It wasn't going on healthcare. The quality of the food wasn't increasing. It wasn't going to education. Yes. The whole point is that if it went toward human capital development, if it went toward what my parents would have put it into It would have been great. It would have been this fabulous thing. And the whole thing is just based on this idea that everybody has the same values, that everybody has the same priorities, which they don't. And it wasn't a question of money. Furthermore, when you actually give people for nothing, you strip away their sense of earned success. and earned success is part of this idea of satisfaction. It gets into this idea of progress. It gets into the wiring of homo sapiens That's what it comes down to. It denies the primacy and respect due to human evolutionary biology, which I know is something you love, right? Me too, right? Because it explains so much of the odd behavior that people have. And so every time that we try to reorder the way that human beings are wired evolutionarily with some utopian idea that we've got this technology, we've got this economic policy, we've got I've got this new idea for how the genders are going behave toward each other. Yeah, no. From now on, we're no longer going to be like people were fifty thousand years ago It's going to fail It's going to fail. and you need to you need to go with the the current. You need to actually swim with the current or you're ultimately going to fail is what it turns out. Getting back to the technology thing, how do you interrupt this doom loop that everyone's on? So the doom loop is that I'm, you know, I don't want to be bored because I don't like boredom because it's boring, right? And so I distract myself. And when I distract myself, what I do is I become less tolerant of boredom My life feels less meaningful because I'm actually illuminating the parts of the brain that are necessary for that. And so I'm more at loose ends. And so I spend more time online. more time scrolling, more time you know doing what people do when they're really bored. And that makes the problem worse, much the same way with drugs and alcohol, you know, and how escalation and dependence actually works Um The two biggest predictors of alcoholism are anxiety and boredom And so when I'm anxious and bored, I drink. Well, that makes boredom and anxiety worse the next day. And so I drink some more and then down and down and down and down it goes. And so what you have to do you're in a doom loooop Any addictive process is a doomable. The same thing is true with the way that we use technology, the same way is true of, you know, anything any is totally hidden under the radar, by the way. Coltely. You know, most people Despite the fact that alcohol' is having a resurgence only after it was recently sort of stripped away Most people understand I I I doing this and I didn't used to do this. and when I do this, I keep it seems to be ratcheting up. I'm drinking more than I used to' That's probably not good Well, depends on how much you drink might be good. W, I mean, if you're getting to five, six, seven drinks a night, I don't think That's a big problem. Yeah. But But how many times does that entropy start to build Yeah Because your tolerance're chasing, you're not chasing having the drink, you're chasing the sensation of the drink Yeah. and your tolerance, Yeah, exactly. I drink that's a doom loop. drink ten. twenty times a year, maybe at most now. and that means half a corona in. I'm like, it's nice.. So being fourteen again. you know, this is cool. Like the same thing a half racket fourteen. I don't know. it's The problem with using your phone in this way is it's completely socially acceptable under the radar. Nobody is ever going to say. no one's ever going to come over. How many times L someone will make aoke about dude, you're on your phone a lotonight V's very different to dude, you're pissed again and it's five nights in a row. Yeah. L that's different. Yeah, right. It's much more obvious the gambling thing, the porn thing, these kinds of compulsions, these kinds of habits are significantly more obviously destructive than using your phone is. and then while I'm doing it, I can feel myself internally fucking rolling my own eyes that, yes, okay, too much time on the phone is too much You know what I mean? I know, and there are other, by the way, there's a whole spectrum of these things of these dependencies that are all involving know, the dopamine cycle in your brain, someome of which are not just sort of neutral and hidden, like the phone, someome of which are applauded You know, if you're a workhaholic, nobody will say, I mean, if like, if you're a pathetic alcoholic, nobody will say it's like Chris You were you drank You know, you drank seven hundred and fifty milliliters of gin last night. I saw you put that. Congratulations. You're excellent.. You they going to say you got some problems. I mean, I think you're got to get that looked at, right But if you work sixteen hours a day and neglect your family, you're going to get a promotion and a raise You're going to get rewarded for that So there's some addictions that you know people actually love because it works in their favor. It enriches them And it actually leads to the world's rewards, which people admire So the point is that we have a responsibility to look after ourselves, look after the pathologies that are actually inherent in our behavior. and to see, is it actually making my life better or is it making my life worse, notithstanding the reaction of the rest of the world? What' does fixing the doom loop look like What it's fixing, means is clipping it. meanans cutting it at a particular place. So All addictions gettingting out of addiction is they have sort of three steps in common It's really behaviorally they have three steps in common. Now I'm not talking medically, I'm not talking about the medical interventions because that's different for different things with gambling and drinking and methamphetamine and whatever But the three behavioral steps in getting out of an addiction O number when you got to get pissed. pissed. it's like this is subjugating me. This is I'm in a cage And I'm tired of it. I'm tired of actually being a wholly owned subsidiary of that company or this behavior or this culture. I'm tired of it. I'm not going to put up with it. You need to fight back by rebelling. That's number one. You need the spirit of rebellion. If you're not ready to rebell, you're not gonna to get out Number two is you need to figure out how to stop You need to actually have an algorithm. And that's dependent on what the substance or behavior actually is. There are different ways to do it. But there's tons of science in every area. If you can get addicted to it, there's science that tells you how to stop And then the third is You have to learn how to live with yourself again Because you've been distracting yourself from yourself. If you're addicted to something, it means you didn't like being home in your head That's what it comes down to. And you know, like I haven't haven't drink since I was thirty eight years old And I remember In my thirties, I didn't like being home in my head D didnn't like it. Did't want to be there And so I left I got a little relief. I had a little vacation in the bottle And it just it was going nowhere good and it was really clear and then my dad died. And and, you know, a couple of people I cared about said that's your future You decide your future Right? And so I stop But it was the hard part was step three. The hard part was actually being alone with myself, being awake with myself, being alive with myself is what it comes down to. And that's probably even more extreme for people who are very, very online Because you're trying to break the doom loop of how technology is breaking your brain, not letting you find the meaning of your life making you angry and depressed and anxious and lonely. You're addicted, which is why you keep doing these self terrible self destructive things to yourself. You first you get pissed and second you gott to quit. and look, I got the algorithms to help you do that. But then man You need new friends You know, you need you need to live in a society. You need to live, you know, in people who are alive in real life. and you have to be able to sit behind the wheel of your car at a red light with nothing to do. in your thoughts Right? and being a supermarket checkout line without your phone and walk before Dawn without a device and hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet and say, that's the sound of my feet on the path And that takes work. How easy is it to recover from this? I think a lot of people feel like they're lost and totally unrecoverable. It's absolutely possible I've seen it again and again and again and again. I mean, look, this is this This is not heroin that we're talking right here. I mean, the process of detox, for example, isn't you don't even have to give up your phone You just have to put it in proper boundaries and have some rules in your life Right and actually have some proper habits. And you know, our life is if you have a fairly functional life, you've got good habits already, right? I mean, you get up at a certain time, you work out every day, You eat something that you don't eat like an eleven year old. I mean, you have good habits. and then you just put protocols around it. You know, it's like Huberman talks about protocols and which has kind of affected the culture. It's a culture of protocols. and I'm an absolute believer in that when it comes to your phone. I mean, you wake up in the morning. If you can, don't look at it at all for the first hour for neurocognitive programing if you're a journalist or, you know you have your job, you got to look at it, make sure nothing's on fire. putut it down. That's it for the hour, right first hour of the day While you eat Neurocognitive programming, while you eat is critically important. It's best not to eat alone and never eat with your device The brain is actually the neuroeptides in your brain, most notably oxytocin. they flow very liberally when you're eating with somebody. This is how, you know homo sapiens would establish and foster kin bonds is by sitting around a campfire, putting pieces of yak meat into their mouths discussing their day and looking into each other's eyes That's how we're wired. If you have a phone on the table while you eat Or God forbid, if you're looking at it, there's no none of this neurochemistry happens. What if you're on your own then you might read a book. You might listen to music. But don't at your ph Hm, there's a meme online of guy starves to death, even though he had food because he couldn't watch YouTube. Yeah because his phone had runan out the b O it's like died of sepsis because he didn't go to the bathroom. He couldn't take his phone in there. So and last, but at least it's the last hour of the day. Now that part of that is sleep architecture and blue light etcera, et cetera, pineal gland, melaton, yada yada. We all know the physiology of that. Part of that is just the way that you actually understand yourself at the end of your day and get ready to rest. If you're living with your partner, that's critically important to your relationship is not to be looking at your device in the last hour. so you can be fully present as you drift off to sleep together. That's super, super important for your relationship. But just those three things Then there's phone free zones. You shouldn't have your phone in the bedroom, ever, ever, ever ever Because I mean, God forbid, you get up to pee at three o'clock in the morning and look at your phone. That's a big mistake. over Well, I mean, it's It's your pineal gland shuts off, right? No more melatonin for you And so which is problematic on its face, but it's also just you spike your cortisol. I mean, it bad stuff happens to you. So the phone should be in a different floor in a closet. plugged in someplace from an hour before you go to bed until after an hour after you get up. That's number one. it's aone free zone. Second is that, I mean, this is just basic public policy. there shouldn't be a phone in any classroom, in any school in the world between kindergarten and PhD It is complete insanity. because it interrupts everything that we're actually trying to do. and it's child abuse There's phones in classrooms You know and the most important hour they shouldn't have phones is during lunch, by the way M because they need to It's even worse. It' even wor shouldn't be in classroom, definitely shouldn't be., other theory. I, of what's going in the classroom is not that interesting to begin with. I mean, I don't think I ever learned anything in public school. I think it was mostly babysitting, but But, you know, at least I had friends. and they don't have friends And then and then people need phone fasts. they need Technology fasts, I recommend ninety six hours a year is kind of this is and there's a little bit of research on this that shows that this actually can break the relationship that you have, so you prove to yourself that you actually don't need it and you're kind of in a state of bliss by the fourth day You know, it's really I mean, I go on a spiritual retreat every year for four days. No phone. Oh, it's great. First day it's like children screaming in my head Second day, I'm calming down for a third day. I like it. The fourth day I wish it were the whole year That's what it comes down to, but just those things, ph free times, phone free zones Pone fast can do this part two. This does not give you part one, which is rebellion or part three whichich is you got to get comfortable back with yourself different processes How important is romantic love to meananing That's one of the best ways you can turn on the right hemisphere, Brian. because that's something you will never solve How do I know that? Because if we could have solved algorithmically romantic love. We wouldn't still have app developers that were trying to make the ultimate dating app The dating apps are fundamentally a left brain solution to a right brain problem Right now they're getting better But the way that they're getting better is by figuring out ways to add more human friction into the algorithm as opposed to taking human friction out of the algorithm. So for example, you're finding early experiments which suggest A good way for you to find your matches on an app is to have your matches, some of your app matches go to your best friend and have your friend decide which ones you're going to go out with. because you're adding a right brain into the mix. You're adding your friend's right brain to the mix, for example, or having a whole bunch of potential people in a group that I will actually meet in a mixture You know, that's a good way to do how too Mhm. and then pair up if it's meant to be or make friends, if it's not. And so those are ways that we actually do that. But the the point of the matter is that the human brain U is is highly attuned to this incredibly complex, indescribable of falling in love. That's one of the reasons that all country and Western songs are about romantic love. That's the reason that the greatest poetry is about romantic love, because it's not described scientifically. It's described artistically because it's a right hemispheric experience. So you want to turn on the meaning in your life G' get your heart broken I mean, go take a risk I mean, that's that's when you find the meaning of your life, right? I mean, when you've had your heart broken That's horrible And that's hard But that's meaning rich. That's when you ask all those big questions. You' definitely alive. You'll learn a lot about yourself You learn a lot about yourself, right? Unless you stayed drun What's the ladder of love The Dote of Mantinea was this prophetess that Socrates sought out So Socrates thought of the Dotima Montinea and she described to him that the way to find the meaning of life starts with this ladder. And each ring of the ladder gets you closer to the meaning of life. And the first rung of the ladder is falling in love The first run of the ladder is actually attraction toward the beautiful other romantic attraction, not just like, you know Chris is awesome.'re so smart.'s such a great show. It's such great conversation. such a good. Thank you. Thank you. It's It's like that spark that you can't quite understand. Now actually, we do understand neurochemically what's happening when you're falling in love. We know how the sex hormones start and then we get the cateacolamines actually involved along the way and then we get really dramatic drop in serotonin and then we get the neuropeptides. and in the sequence, we know when the sequence is off between two people is why they don't 's why they don't actually succeed in a relationship. There has all kinds of really fascinating neuroscience of falling in love, but it's still a mystery. I tell you, that the neuroscientists who are doing this cutting edge research, they can fall hard in love just like anybody else. They can like, I don't know what happened I don't know what happen Yes, you do. You wrote that paper Right But still, I mean, it's like I teach this stuff to my students at the Harvard Business School about the the neuroscience of falling in love, but I don't understand this relationship with my wife I just love her You know, I just it's like, okay, yeah, a lot of oxytocin and vasopressin, and you know, and there's some amount of dopamine and neurpine effine involved. And and there drops in serotonin when you're fighting. and you know That's not it. It's because it's this deep metaphysical experience. Most religions believe As Montinee of Diotima, Socrates' prophetess suggested that romantic love is the beginning of antenna to the divine that and most religions believe that if you're in a serious marriage, And you deny your spouse love, you're denying your spouse God's love That's how brain and complex this actually is just because you can exxplain how gravity works It doesn't mean that you're not going to hit the ground if you jump out of her The skyscraper. You can understand it pl well. Yeah. Yeah St still at the mercy of these things. There's that u interview that Sam did with Daniel Carniman it must of thinking fast and slow, Nobel Prize winner after many, many decades of studying the fallacies of the human mind and mental models and all of the different ways that our rationality goes awry Has it made you any more rational Not really, notot really,. I know, no, it's interesting too. you know and Sam and I I've had one conversation more or less along these lines. He's the most soulful atheist I've ever met He really is. He's a soulful guy. I really have You'd be a great believer apart from the lack of belief But that's the point because his soulfulness would seem, might seem on the outside to contradict his Uber rationality as an atheist, But it doesn't because these things coexist. These things can reside next to each other and because Sam's brain has two hemispheres to it, so does mine, so does all of ours Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a Seet. It's salty, orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. 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That's drinklmN dot comot Flush A wisom Do you think people think enough about transcendence No I don't, And transcendence is important because it once again, it contradicts Mother Nature's tyranny So Mother Nature wants you in the psychodrama of your utter stultifying Christmas fromom moment to moment to moment, my job, my flights or late, you know, my podcast guest, you know, might be good. I got to prepare for that thing. My stomach is rumbling. I forgot to eat lunch and oh yeah, the payment didn't come in for that thing It's so boring But Mother Nature wants you to be the star of that psychodrama all day long in your head That's what William James called a me self me self. It's looking at yourself and thinking about yourself all day long. And you need that for self reference to make your way in the world. If you don't understand what you're doing, you're going to be a pretty bad driver. You're going to be in a traffic accident pretty quickly. But there's also the I self which is looking out of the world which is transcending yourself by looking out at the world in which you're one player, but you're only one player in it And it's interesting because Transcendent experiences are those where the me self disappears and the I self becomes dominant There are times actually when when they become confused and that's kind of what a fugue state is psychologically. where you become disassociated with yourself in this weird way. And all of us have experienced this. I remember one time and I had a lot of my mind, and I was putting gas in my car, and I was just like really worried about it. it was back when I was a CEO, and my life was like a living like dystopian hellhole, right And everything was a problem every single day. And I was putting gas in my car and it was eight o'clock at night and I finished and And I got back in my car and I was driving my daughter was with me in the car. And she was a little girl then. And there's this like weird clanking sound behind me. like somebody had a muffler down right behind me like they were following me. I said, honey what sound? I said I don't know It's a clanky cl, clank, cl. They theyre following me. what's going on until people started pointing to me at my car and I realized that I had driven away with the hose in my gas tank and I I pulled it out of the gas pump and I was dragging it behind me. The whole mechanism behind me. Clanky clanky clank, right And so I thought somebody else was doing a thing that I had actually done. I had confused the me self in the Iice self. I was in this like weird fug state. It got real real fast when I took it back to the gas station and these four Iranian dudes were standing around the gas pump really mad Like who destroyed our pump I also found out how much it cost to fix a gas pump expensive. But the whole point is that what we want is not to get into a fug state We want to have these experiences where we can be in the eyes self, where we can stand in awe, we can get outside ourselves. which is religious experiences. and that's spiritual experiences and philosophical experiences. experiences of service and love toward other people unbidden by any self interest And that's where life gets really interesting and beautiful. And when you do that, when you truly are in a transcendent state, That's when you're in the right hemisphere of your brain and you don't find meaning, meaning finds you which is why I'll often recommend it people. It's like, I don't know how I find the meaning of your life? Go volunteer Go volnteer, go pray I' not religious. I don't care I's always said, Go pray. Why? Because when you do that, you will induce a state in your brain and you'll want to do it more. What is it that people are missing? Why is transcendence So rad without engineering it in that way, at least in the modern world. Yeah, it's especially true in the modern world that it's rare because the modern world is a big mirror Big me self That's especially true online Online, you're looking into your mirror constantly. because you're looking not the at the dialogue you're having with other people looking at them What you're doing is that you're think about it as the Zoom problem The problem with Zoom when you're in a Zoom meeting is you're always looking at yourself in the Zoom meeting. It's really hard. It's a really good idea to turn off your own camera. Or at least your own view of your own cameras. you can focus on the other people. But one of the ways that Zoom has made communication a lot harder for people is because you're always in the me self, even when you're trying to be in the I self. And this is true certainly with social media as well. You're looking at your likes and your mentions and how did people interact with what I was doing? And it's this one big virtual mirror of everything that we're doing. It's become very It's induced narcissism where it wouldn't have existed otherwise, which is incredibly misery provoking because it kills meaning in the crib. from the very beginning, you can't get out of yourself, you can't get out of your head. And that is increasingly true. Now, it's interesting because people who haveve experimented with trying to stay in the eye clf on in literature, but also just in real life have had these incredible results. I had this PT. This guy worked on my back. my back hurts And so you get to my ge, your back hurts, right? And And he always he worked on my back every week G guy, unbelievable. I mean, it justs like talented Full of love you know And and I said, how did you get these skills? I mean, is this were you always a physical therapist? Acupuncture? said, No, no, used to be I used to be a fitness influencer They' tell me more. I gotta know, tellell me more. But yeah, you know, I basically took off my shirt on Instagram it was kind of sold supplements and it was all about the abs. And And I said, how was that? He said, it was the worst, It was the worst. I didn't eat what I wanted for ten years I was so miserable. I didn't have any normal relationships at all. I couldn't have any functional relationships with women because I'd be so jealous about the fact that I'm showing my body off for other people. I'd be looking at my I gott to get a photographer because this guy doesn't understand the shadows. He said it was horrible and I was miserable and I was sad and I didn't know what to do. So so he said, I finally I gave up I deleted all my accounts I I enrolled in acupuncture school. But here's the most important part, he said I got All of the mirrors in my apartment, every single one of them And I showered in the dark for a year. so I couldn't see my abs. And then I finally was free And he's happy Most people I think L to the work for something that's supposed to be transcendent. Yeah. Uh, callalling Yeah. what do you think people What do you think people think they're talking about when they talk about finding your calling. Yeah. They think it's going to be the thing that they well, I mean, there's kind of two versions of it. the two graduation speeches. you know, grraduation speech number one. is Go find a job that you love and that's fun and you'll never work a day in your life. Now that speech is being given by a cardboard box magnet who's so severely workaholic that he's had three heart attacks and two divorces by the age of forty Right. So don't believe it, right? Or The second speech is G save the world No pressure You know, it's like my generation wrecked the world, go save the world. You know,'s that's the second speech. That's both of those are wrong fundamentally you're calling Genally speaking finds you as the thing that you can't stop thinking about. is the most interesting thing R? It's not the thing that you think I'm going to be the Savior and I'm gonna to be the great Messiah. and it's not the most fun thing necessarily. The thing that's most interesting to you is often not that fun. Actually. a lot of the time it's actually not that fun It's just something you can't get out of your head. is something you feel you really need to do. Second Gal Creating value with your life is earning your success, is being rewarded for something that you do well. whereere you create real value with your hard work and personal motivation And more importantly, you're serving somebody where somebody needs you That's what it comes down to. Are you earning your success? N are you really earning. Are you recognized and acknowledged for real value that you're creating kissing up to the boss And not because somebody's trying to be nice to you, no, no, no, no. You're really creating value. and does somebody actually need you That's what it comes down to. That's your calling How do you know how does somebody know when that chasing status instead of their callingead of meaning. Mostly people deep down No. Because what it comes down to is when you're creating true value and people need you, then you can it I mean, you can sort of imperfectly measure that with respect to status, but you actually know when there's true value behind it. people have an innate sense of that, a strong, innate sense of that. And I've interviewed a lot of people about this. You know, I talked to a guy who builds homes, homebuilder, right? He a He got his master's degree in biochemistry from MIT and was going on to get his PhD and his parents really, really wanted him to be a scientist as the whole thing. But he recognized that he He his he only felt truly alive He was only truly interested when he was buildilding stuff That's what it came down to. and you became a home buildilder as a result of that. So it's really, really important to listen to what your heart is telling you about this. Status is a very, very bad barometer. A lot of people are using status or using fame or power or money because they don't want to look at the truth They don't want it's like looking into the sun of something And a lot of people make big mistakes for a long time as a result of that Like they're doing something. they don't That's not their calling Burns him out I don't like it But they should like it,'s paying so much They should like it they got so many followers for Pete's sake. unhappy. That's what people need to be paying attention to. Look, if you're doing something that's highly rewarding, but you're unhappy, it's not your calling U Wonder how many people said in that p I mean a lot I meet a lot, like I teach at a big business school I meet a lot of people who honestly think They go into business school thinking U I will I will find my calling becausecause it's going to be something that's going to pay me so well, which means I'm so good at this thing that it's got to be my calling. No no, no, no No, no, no. On the contrary Look I walked away from a career in classical music When I was thirty one years old m I could have done it for the rest of my life Right? It wasn't my calling. I'd done it since I was eight. I'd been doing it since I was a little boy But it wasn't my calling. and I made a living and I made some records and How was S un happy He wasn't my call I'd spent many years on it. Id spent decades on it, as a matter of fact, but there was no choice but to walk away because it wasn't my calling What about The fear that comes up when someone is faced with that realization. They've got the inertia, the momentum, the suk cost fallacy No, it's no joke. It actually requires an unbelievable personal entrepreneurship But lookook, entrepreneurship is not about building business, It's about building your life Right? Great entrepreneurs, they change all the time They make all kinds ofanges. You know what Trumy entrepreneurs have in commonon. They have a bad business idea and they chase it until they're broke That's what bad entrepreneurs have in common, right? Good entrepreneurs, they try this and it's not quite right and they change And they go from this thing to that thing and they sell when it's time and start a new venture. That's what great entrepreneurs have in common. If you want to be an entrepreneur in the business of your life, you cannot afford to some cost fallancy with your own career or your own relationships or your own interests. Aile. that you have to change is what it comes down to. Now There's a very interesting theory about people who need to change the most. The people and these are called spirals. This is a spiral career pattern. There's four career patterns psychologically. There's linears who just kind of go up and up and up and up and up and up and up in their careers. and the only change when something is better There are transitories who kind of just skip around all over the place. They don't live to work, they work to live Right?, you know, I'm going to be a barista that I'm going to run and, you know, drive a moving van and I fell in love with a girl in San Diego, so you don know There are what's called expert, which is like slow and steady Yeah, It's lifestyle, right? My dad had the same job for forty two years, for example. And the reason is because it was secure And because it was Low stress Right And that's what he wanted. The post office is an expert career path But a lot of people Probably disproportionately, a lot of the people who are watching this show are spirals for every seven to twelve years. What they need is to take their career down to the studs and start again and take everything they learned in the last one Funge it into something that's meaningful in the next one but have a new adventure. The first turn is hardest For me leaving the French horn and becoming a scientist, that was brutal Going back and getting a PhD when I didn't know what I was doing, it was really, really, really hard, right? Second turn, easier. Third turn, easier. I'm on my fourth turn right now. who knows mayaybe Ten years I'll be a circus clown . But the whole point is that's what it means to live an entrepreneurial life where you're pursuing your calling because you have the agility and the courage to be an entrepreneur in the enterprise in the business of life What about the role of beauty Physical beauty, any kind of beauty. Beauty is a transcendent experience. One of the things that a lot of people have observed about the modern technocratic life is it's not beautiful It's bereft of beauty Now why is that? Because stuff that goes on in the left hemisphere of the brain never prioritizes beauty. Beauty is a right hemispheric experience. You know, it's when people see beautiful sunset sometimes they'll c You know, when people hear I work at music, you know, people listen to Bach B minor mass. And it's like they weep Why and they can't experience As a matter of fact, anytime you become emotional, And you can't quite explain it, it means you're having a right hemispheric experience H, something that moves you weirdly Right? When some people when they talk about religion, they get really choked up Some people when they listen to music, they get really choked up It's really interesting how this works, but those are right hemispheric experiences. And disproportionately that's when it comes to beauty. If we have a society that's entirely left hemispheric That's technocratic that's complicated and not complex's not going to beautiful. And that's exactly what we find I mean, there's compelling evidence that music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past. Newer music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past. I can't really judge that. but you know, this is what This is what we pay, you know, musicologists to do or something that Moral beauty is harder and hard to find. Moral beauty is just kindindness toward others for no apparent reason. You find very little of that on X You know, you find very little of that online, rightight U that natural beauty is harder to find when you're when you're never in nature whichich is sort of axiomatic but a lot of people say, you know, it's I got this incredible screens saaver of El Capitan in Yosemite. It's like There's the real thing. It's gonna blow your mind Right? And the reason is because it is an entirely different neurobiological. experience for people when they're actually out in nature. If you're behind the screen, you're not getting beauty is what it comes down to. And so artistic beauty is Absent, moral beauty is absent, natural beauty is absent. and the reason is because we're trying to filter everything through the left hemisphere. The simulation isn't beautiful. If you want to know if you're too much in the left hemisphere of your brain, it's whether you ask yourself, is there enough beauty in my life? And if the answer is no, it probably means that you're too far to the left What about if there's not enough suffering? Yeah as the hard one I left actually I wrotad about that in this book and I left that to the last chapter because I was putting it off put enough, suffering is the ultimate. meananing making experience. And we've talked about that. we've talked about heartbreak talkalk about loss, talkk about grief and There's a little part of limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulular cortex that is really, really active when you experience social exclusion. when you experience loss It was evolved so that you would be averse to sadness. Sadness is supposed to be really, really painful And you don't want it. So people actually, they don't suffer so much from sadness. They suffer a lot from fear of sadness. You know, you're trying to avoid sadness, which is what motivates a lot of our behaviors. Most of the things, most of the reasons we do what we do is because we're afraid of bad we're afraid of negative emotions But at the same time Most people will talk about the most meaningful periods of their lives were at times of the greatest negative emotion in their lives. Negative emotion brings Meaning unless, unless we try to eliminate it And this is another wrong turn that we've taken because once again, in our left hemispheric conceit of the complicated world, the singularity is one of which we will have eliminated pain, eliminated sadness, eliminated negative emotionality, eliminated negative experiences That's not only impossible, it's actually suboptimal death for what it means to be fully alive We don't want to be We don't want to suffer, but we must suffer change the things that people want and what they need I know. And the fact that those two don't cross over all that much. And Mother Nature is a wicked tyrant. which has kept us alive for generation after generation, but animal impulses are not the same thing as moral aspirations It seems like you're saying that Enjoyment and satisfaction haven't collapsed in the same way that meaning has. No. That's right. That's right. It's really interesting. I mean I didn't know, you know, when I see a big happiness problem when I look at the The depression explosion, the anxiety explosion, I know that one of the channels of happiness is blocked. This is is a diagnostic matter Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. We've talked about it on the show a couple of times as a matter of fact, these are the three macronutrients of happiness. You want to be a happy person. you need to enjoy your life, which back to an early part of the conversation, by the way One of the reasons that you're moving from a pure achievement orientation in the show toward when you're having more fun is because you want to increase enjoyment, which many strivers struggle with. They don't enjoy their lives very much and they want to enjoy their lives more and they don't know how because they're always trying to put points on the board So that's a different subject. I'm going to write a book about how to enjoy your life because I want to figure it out because I need to figure out before I die. So Enjoyment which is not pleasure pleasure plus people plus memory. It's conscious phenomenon is actually pretty high for most young people Satisfaction, which is the achievement of worthwhile goals with struggle pretty high, especially for drivers made my MBA students at Harvard They're real high in satisfaction because they're accomplishing a lot and they're struggling a lot. It's meaning that's collapsed And that's the reason that we have this unbelievable happiness unhappiness crisis in our society today V ever told you my idea about Frankkel's inverse law? Oh no, tell me, Victor Frankl. Yeah, so there's that famous quote When a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. Yeah, rightight these arguing lack of meaning causes to seek temporary relief and superficial pursuits rather than addressing some This is before scrolling un it existed. Yeah Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue, but there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure They distract themselves with meaning. If ease, grace, joy, and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful The TLDR is you prioritize meaning over a happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you. Yeah I did But you know, It's absolutely the encapsulation of the striver's lament You know, it's like I can' I can't everybody else is having a great time And I can't feel it. I don't you know, they're out dancing and they're at a club. I mean, think about it's like you're club promoter. And heart I'm Fren horn player in my heart, you're a club promoter in your heart, right And everybody's having a great old time and you're like, no, no This is my business. Don't enjoy yourself. I'm gonna suffer over here. I think in a real way, and the meaning part is quite right, but I think ordinarily strivers are addicts for satisfaction from achievement And so they will put points on the board when they can't feel They can't feel enjoyment. And so they put w awward. And part of the reason is because they they've never learned how to do itropriately. They've actually never learned how to do that. Enjoyment once again it takes has at its root things that actually make you feel good. But that's not the right, you know, feeling good, just pleasure is a terrible goal. I mean, the end of the road for pleasure is not happiness. it's detox, right? Because that's just addiction is what it comes down to. If it feels good, do it was the hippie motto and it didn't end well U, so So that's so that's important that that you add people and memory to it. so it's a conscious experience. It's in the prefrontal cortex, not just in the limbic system It's not apppparent for everybody how to do that, especially if you're brought up in this way where I got to do more, I got to do more, I got to do more. becausecause what happens is this idea that you're stopping and smelling the roses feels like waste of time Maybe you have parents who say that. You practicing? I remember that? they would yell through the door this I was practing five hours day when I was in fifth grade And And and so then the whole idea of stopping and going and having fun feels like I feel kind of guilty about it And so you're you're frankly just bad at it And you don't like to do things you're bad at. You don't learn how my wife is really good at enjoyment. really she just really enjoys life She's Spanish I mean, that's like's whole country of people who enjoy life, right And in the states we're a little bit less good at it and I'm especially bad at it. So part of that, actually one of one of the protocols helping peopleeople like you and me is understanding leisure and actually having a structured, disciplined approach to leisure. is actually take if you don't know how to do it, take it seriously. Need to work hard at not working so hard. But it turns out there's a philosopher who specializes in understanding leisure and that's Joseph Peeeper. who wrote Leisure, the basis of culture. Have you read it it's great It's a little thin book that he wrote. He's one of the greatest, you twentieth century German philosophers untainted by Naziism. thank God And he wrote you know, the four cardinal virtues. He wrote these really beautiful books, but his probably his most influential book was Leisure, the Basis of Culture, where we defineed culture as a serious business It's not chilling on a beach which is called acidia, also known as laziness or toorpor. And know it's like I can do that for like an hour And then you don't want to run away screaming. It's the worst. He says that leisure is something that you're not being compensated for by the outside world, but that's creating value That's leisure and that's what will bring you enjoyment. He talks about in terms of deeepening your spiritual or philosophical life, deepening your relationships, and learning things you don't need to learn. You're just learning things you don't need to learn. when you think about what you're doing with the podcast, right? you're deepening relationships. You're talking about things you don't need to talk about, right? And you're doing people would say, yeah, I'm you know, I'm not sure I fit into this table, but that's leisure because you w want to jooy it I have a friend who was given a Eerizeed by a coach He was told that he needed to start doing a hobby but he wasn't allowed to try and get better at it. and he decided to take a watercolor painting, I think and did the first few classes or sessions or whatever and immediately found himself going to YouTube to find out what exactly the best kind of paintbrush was to do the thing. and I'm going to find, actually, what's the best class in Austin that can do? because I can get better. If I can do this. and what's the cadence? Do I need to be doing it three times a week in order to maximize my I going to be strugg. It's gonna be diffult but three times a week. so I get got the And turnurn into a job. Coach San came in and said, not allowed to try and become better at this thing doing it It should be a teically. A teically. So that's, you know, and it's interesting because Aristotle talks about that with people. That real friendship is based are is Aellic. You know it's the same idea, right So if you have your friends, because it's a teelic relationship, it has a Telos, has if they're useful It's not it's kind of deal, friends But real friends are Aelic. They're actually useless It's the same thing with your activities, the relationship that you have with the activities in your life. If it has a really, really strong Telos I'm going to get better at it because I don't know, yeah, you know what betet I could sell that So strip that strip the love out of. My brother and I were both very talented classical musicians. He's three years old and he's a bass player. St string base, C classical string base I was Frenchor I had that I was super teleic He was Aalic. and he still plays. He still plays in community orchestras. He's an extremely skilled amateur. He loves playing the bass He loves music. He loves it so much. He doesn't earn a dime from it That's why he loves it Let's say that someone feels completely empty right now. Yeah Why should they start? What are the most important habits in order to increase the meaning in your life? Yeah so the things to be thinking about are along the lines, the sustaining activities that will actually use your brain the way it's supposed to be used. So number one is understanding that your emptiness is not some sort of psychological weakness that notwithstanding what anybody's going to tell you there's not something wrong with you on the contrary, your brain is working the way your brain works. and you're living in the world and the malfunctions are not your fault The malfunctions are you're going with kind of the slip stream of the culture. culture is being driven by the technology. It's making you work in a way that's completely contrary to your ancestral habitat, and that's what's making you feel like garbage That's what it comes down to. It's kind of like you're eating meal after meal of twwinkies and wondering why your digestion is wonky and weird. That's why iss what it comes down to What we need to understand then is you need to become aligned. You need to have a brain that's properly hemispheric, that's properly balanced between the hemispheres of what you're doing, which means you need to change your behavior. So number one is getting right with technology That's the number one thing that almost everybody today needs to do. Almost everybody's addicted Almost everybody has a dysfunctional relationship with it, some more, some less. me less because I'm older. I remember the before times Right? I mean, I could you could throw Instagram up in front of me. I'm like oodness, this is really good for my business You know, this is good. wildly interesting for, you know, sharing my ideas with other people, right You know, clips of you and me talking. People really like ' And that's great, makes me feel great, but'm not going to get, I'm not going to scroll for an hour and like But many and the younger you are, the more prone you are because you don't remember them four times. So actually changing your behavior with respect to it, and there's ways to do it. That's what I write about then You got to live in a new way You got to live in a new way. The first thing I recommend to almost everybody is go get bored Lord good at it, right? I don't mean like this whole thing where you stare at the front of the seat in front of you for a nine hour flight of the way to Greece. Ruging. Rw tuging a flight? Yeah, it's a great expression, isn't it? Yeah Yeah, it's disturbing. But the whole, I mean, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about actually living moment to moment. you know, putting your hands in your lap when you're in the on the train looking out the window and saying, huh tree You know, being fully alive and saying, I'm fully alive right now So you know, one of the ways to do that is to become more comfortable with you know, repetitive prayer or meditative ideas that you would actually bring into your life. So you can be more mindful, justust bring in some of those ideas. so you can become more comfortable with your brain working the way it's supposed to, which by the way, ignites the default mode network in your brain, which you know about, the set of structures that allow you to mind wander Mind wandering leads to meaning. It's just as as as as predictably as night turns the day. That's the second thing and then is actually having the experiences that that naturally open up the right hemisphere of your brain. That means allowing yourself to actually Fall in love and make friends and doing things in real life with other people in relation to other people and taking risks in your relationship. It means actually entertaining the idea of something metaphysical beyond yourself The left hemisphere is profoundly physical The right hemisphere is metaphysical It says there is something more And again, you don't have to do it my way. I'm a Catholic. I got a mass every day. You don't have to do it that way. You can do it like Sam Harris suuper right hemisphheric guy because he has a sense of soulfulness. He has a sense of things beyond what we can actually see and touch He believes there are things that we can't see and touch that exist. He doesn't think it's God you know, you do transcendence your own way lookingooking for calling how by serving other people and being needed, by doing something, you know, by allowing yourself to be served and loved. This is actually how you can find these things. Looking for beauty A experiencing more beauty, real beauty, real beauty, you' not behind the screen. It's not there. It ain't there, man. I don't care how long you look at it. It's not going be. That means going someplace in nature, listening to music that really sends you I don't know, read a poem, go to a museum, right? Witness somebody helping other people just for no reason but not least is lean into your suffering Bring it on. You know, it's like you have this I make my students say my suffering is sacred and There's there's a, you know, do you remember Norman Vincent Peelle? Do that name ringy bell? Okay? He had a very famous self help book in the sixties called The powerower of Pitive Thinking. sound that rings a bell, right? He was a minister at a Protestant church in New York City And he would say every single day when he started the day the Psalm This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And he would have you you know, he was like the gratitude list originator and the whole thing, all these good things, good things, good things. list all the good things that are happening. You're like, list the bad things and say, I'm grateful for that too. Bring it on say as you wake up in the morning, it's like I'm really grateful for the beautiful things that are going to happen this day and And I woke up today. I's like I good to see Chris. It's going be great. I'm really grateful for that. But something's going to happen today. I'm gonna get a phone call or a text or an email that I'm not going to like. Bring it on. I'm grateful for that too Because when I lean into that, then I'm going to be fully alive That's the moment I'm going to be fully alive And that attitude of non resistance to pain will actually lower the suffering paradoxically as it raises the meaning in life Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen,rthur you're awesome. I appreciate the hack out, youen. Thank you Why should people go? New book? What else is going on? Yeah. So I'm all about you know, looking for the sources of meaning in life. And so my my my website Arthurbrokss. com actually has all kinds of ways people can interact. We have the meaning experience, which is a collaboration of people from all over the world on the internet that meet once a month and talk about different ways to find the meaning in life. And I give an academic lecture and then we have this great discussion. So we have all kinds of stuff and many ways to survey and measure where we are in our meaning journey, many ways to interact with each other.s all all the website, orvers dot com He. Alrighty See you next time, everyone Thank you Thank you. They' right. I mean, you're the best emy You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfare gets it. planning on dining alfresco or relaxing poolside