The One You Feed - Arthur Brooks on What It Takes to Find Happiness

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

Arthur Brooks is a bestselling author, social scientist, and the President of the American Enterprise Institute. He teaches Leadership and Happiness at the Harvard School of Business.In this episode, Eric and Arthur discuss happiness as well as his book,  Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Arthur Brooks and I Discuss What It Takes to Find Happiness and…His book, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of ContemptThe four extrinsic things that feed off fear are money, power, pleasure, and fameThe four intrinsic things that feed off love are faith, family, friendships, and meaningful workHow happiness requires meaning and having meaning requires challenge and/or difficultyThe three aspects of meaning are coherence, purpose, and significanceHow writing out the thing you learned from a bad experience can bring meaning to itLearning to find significance in the small thingsHow we need to stop living in the future and appreciate being in the presentThe freeing idea that nobody really cares like we think they doThe more you judge others, the more you will feel judgedThe therapy for feeling insecure is to stop judging and start observingThe link between humor and happinessHow we should reject grimnessRejecting the expectations of the holidays can lead to more happinessArthur Brooks Links:Arthur’s WebsiteInstagramTwitterFacebookNovo Nordisk - Explore the science behind weight loss and partner with your healthcare provider for a healthy approach to your weight management. To learn more, visit truthaboutweight.comIf you enjoyed this conversation with Arthur Brooks, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Jonathan Rauch – The Happiness CurveRuth Whippman on The Complexity of HappinessSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the new year approaches, many people start reflecting on the year that has passed and start thinking about how they want the next year to be. Imagine if in 2022 you were able to have clarity on what matters to you and then have the tools to live that out. Imagine if you were able to be the person you really want to be. That's where I come in. I've helped hundreds of people from around the world become who they deeply want to be. If you're feeling frustrated or disappointed in your ability to make changes in your life, then having someone in your corner to support and advise you is critical. Look, there's a lot of general advice out there, but figuring out which of it applies to you is difficult.

You are different than other people and your life looks different than other people. So you need solutions that make sense for you. Knowing how to apply certain tactics and tools to your specific life is my specialty. If you'd like to make 2022 a better year for you, then book a 30-minute discovery call with me. It's a no-pressure, no-sales call where we determine if working together might make sense. And if it doesn't, I'll give you some ideas to take with you. So you win either way, go to one, you feed.net slash coaching to book your free discovery session. That's one, you feed.net slash coaching to book a free discovery session. And I look forward to meeting

you. You take all of your energies and you try to put walls up around yourself such that nothing bad can get to you. Ironically, the one thing that truly won't get to you is happiness. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Arthur Brooks, a bestselling author, social scientist, and the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He teaches leadership and happiness at the Harvard School of Business. And today, Arthur and Eric discuss one of his many books, Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. Hi, Arthur. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. It's great to be with you. I'm happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your latest book, Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. And we're also going to be talking about happiness, which is a topic you have written a lot about. But before we get into either of those things, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred

and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I appreciate that. And I've heard you talk about this in the past and talk about it with your guests. And so I appreciate that. And I've heard you talk about this in the past and talk about it with your guests. And so I've given it a little bit of thought because this is actually what I teach at the Harvard Business School. I have a class called Leadership and Happiness, and this is almost exactly what I ask my students to do. You know, what are they feeding?

Which wolf are they feeding? And for me, it comes down to literally one of the choices that you gave. And for me, it comes down to literally one of the choices that you gave. It's love or fear. This is what we've got, love or fear. And on my worst days, I realized that I'm feeding fear. I am afraid of what people will think about me. I'm afraid of what's going to happen to me. And fear is sort of the shadow of the dark one over what we're doing in our lives.

And there's an antidote to it, which of course is, as you'd say, feeding the other wolf, but there's a way to do it too. In the Bible, St. John the Apostle says that perfect love drives out fear, but this is an ancient idea. 500 years before that, Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching exactly the same thing, that the psychological opposites, not just philosophical and theological opposites, psychological opposites are fear and love. When you stimulate the limbic system of the brain to experience love, it will literally crowd out because you can't be experiencing these two cognitions simultaneously, the fear that is in you. So what I try to do each day is I say, look, what's animating me today? What's animating me? And if it's fear, I know the answer to it.

I got to get out the sack of wolf chow and start throwing it on the love side. That's what I have to do. And that's what I'm trying to do every single day. That's a more robust answer than you probably wanted, Eric. Sorry about that. I like robust. So what are some of your ways of getting out the love wolf chow in your own life? So, probably the most really profound psychological teaching from medieval times, from the Middle Ages, comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, when he wrote his Summa Theologiae, that had this really interesting and insightful observation that we have these substitutes for divinity in our lives, these idols that have these kind of

divine characteristics, but they never give us what we really seek. They're money, power, pleasure, and honor, or fame. Money, power, pleasure, and fame. And the problem is that when you're pursuing those things, you're always going to be living in fear. Now, you're living in fear. Why? Because these are zero-sum things. These are extrinsic things, which is to say that they come from outside you and you can't depend on them. And so, you're always going to be afraid that you're not going to get this thing. If you say, basically, I'm going to be nourished by the scraps the world is promising it will throw to me, then I'm going to be living in a fear-based world. And the answer then is, if those are the bad four, money, power, pleasure, and fame,

there's a good four. There's a divine four, which are not extrinsic from outside you, but from inside you. And they're based not on fear, but on love. And they are faith and family and friendship and work that serves other people. Those are the divine four. And there's 10,000 articles on the social science of happiness and the science and neuroscience and social science of happiness. And if you boil the ocean of this literature, you will find that there are really only four things that reliably do bring happiness. They are faith, family, friendship, and work where you serve other people and you earn your success. And these are the antidotes to the bad fear for, I mean, if the, if you know, the bad wolf, the fear wolf is just chowing down on money and power

and pleasure and fame and all the stuff that's scarce and you're worried it's going to go away. And if you want to feed the other wolf, you need to put a deposit in each one of the four divine accounts every day. What are you doing to cultivate your faith? What are you doing to develop your family and maintain and protect your family relationships? Thanksgiving's coming, man. What are you doing with your friendships? And what are you doing such that your work truly is lifting other people up? Those are the questions to ask. And I try to ask myself every day. So faith, family, friendships, and work that matters. Yeah, that's a meaningful work. A meaningful work only has two characteristics. They are not

prestige and position and money. None of that stuff's on the list. The two things that matter to make your work meaningful are the answers to the questions. Am I earning my success and am I serving others? the good life that maybe aren't clearly delineated in these, where does pleasure fit in this some degree of enjoyment? Because I think you also mentioned that if we talk about happiness, you talk about it having three sort of macro nutrients, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. There's there's some crossover here. And then there's a little perhaps some slight differences. I'm curious how those tie together for you. Sure. So happiness is like a meal and there's lots of ways. If I said, Eric, what's dinner? Well, what kind of question is that? There's a bunch of ways that I can answer the question. What's dinner? I can answer it in terms of dinner's macronutrients, which are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. I could answer dinner is the dishes that I had. I had a salad

and I had an entree and I had some dessert. I had my vegetables, or you could answer dinner is the dishes that I had. I had a salad and I had an entree and I had some dessert. I had my vegetables. Or you could answer it in terms of the micronutrients that was in it. You know, all the different parts, the vitamins and minerals that actually go into it. There's lots and lots of ways to answer the question or the ingredients, you know, the spices and the, you know, the actual foods that you cooked. So the way to think about it is this way. When I said faith, family, friends, and meaningful work, those are the dishes in your happiness. Those are the things you actually need to consume every day. Well, let's dig a little further into the purpose or meaning side of things. You recently talked about different ways or the different parts of

meaning. Should we go into that for a second? Yeah, sure. So meaning and purpose, more purpose, is another way of talking about it, although purpose is actually an aspect of meaning. Meaning is definitely one of the macronutrients of happiness, and it's actually one of the most paradoxical insofar as that, you know, there's nobody listening to us. When I said, when did you figure out the meaning of your life? What was a significant event helping you figure out the meaning of your life?

There's nobody that would talk about that week in Disneyland. They would always talk about something hard that had happened, something trying, taxing, maybe even traumatic, the death of a loved one, when I got really sick, when I lost my job and I was able to persevere, actually found that I was strong and I was resilient. That's when I figured out what I really cared about is when things were threatened for me. And so that's an important point is that meaning requires challenge and difficulty, problems, even trauma, which actually brings out sadness and makes you unhappy. And so the great irony of happiness is that happiness requires meaning and meaning is associated with unhappiness. And so literally happiness requires unhappiness. And one of the biggest mistakes that we make in our lives

today is that we spend a huge amount of our energy trying to avoid unhappiness. We go to huge lengths. I mean, I talk to my students about this all the time. I have graduate students here at Harvard, and they spend a ton of their time trying not to feel sad, not to be rejected, not to take risk, not to get in trouble. And, you know, it's like, don't go looking for trouble, but trust me, trouble is going to find you, man. I mean, this is just life. And if you take all of your energies and you try to put walls up around yourself such that nothing bad can get to you, ironically, the one thing that truly won't get to you is happiness because you won't actually find meaning. You won't find it who you are and you'll be afraid. And that fear will be coming in instead of the love you'll be feeding the fear

wolf by doing this is exactly what we're doing to a lot of young people. So we talk about, you know, safety ism and cancel culture and all these things that we complain about in our society today. It has everything to do with fear. And it has to do with the fact that we have a society that says like, whereas in the sixties, they said, if it feels good, do it, man. Today, they're like, if it feels bad, stop it. If it feels bad, treat it. If it feels bad, anesthetize it. Make it go away.

And that's a huge, huge mistake. That's a preamble to the entire meaning lesson, the meaning macronutrients in our happiness. If you want to be happy, you need meaning. If you're going to have meaning, you have to be open to all types of experiences in life. Don't be afraid of pain. I mean, it's not going to be fun, but you need it. And it will ultimately, and the vast overwhelming majority of cases, you will get growth as a result of it. Yeah, it is paradoxical in that way. And yet we're so wired up that the natural tendency within us is to avoid pain, seek pleasure.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And to seek pleasure or just to seek peace to seek a lack of problems. And it's an error. It's just an error. There's no other way to put it. Now, when you get into meaning itself, meaning actually has three parts to it. So when people say to me, I don't know my meaning in life, what that really means is they have one of or more of three problems that we call these the meanings of meaning, as it were, you know, the aspects of meaning, coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the belief that things kind of fit together, that things sort of happen for a reason. And, you know, there are some philosophies like absurdism and nihilism and existentialism that say that actually there is no purpose. I should say there is no coherence.

Things don't happen for a reason. But most of us, we don't think that's true. We do think that things happen for a reason because you look back in your life and you say, oh, that's why I had to deal with that thing. That's why that particular thing happened. That kind of makes sense now. And so understanding that is key. The second is the purpose part itself and where it's not just a synonym for meaning. Purpose is the idea that you have a direction you're going in, that you have goals. Purpose means, you know, I'm going toward that thing that really will bring me meaning. So, you know, I have the goal of being able to support myself and my family. I have the goal of doing something meaningful and helping other people. I have a goal of knowing God better than I currently do. I have a goal of getting to heaven. And trauma of having a really bad childhood where your parents didn't make it clear that

your life matters. The number one predictor of thinking your life matters is having mom and dad who said your life matters and who acted as if your life matters and who are like, I don't want you to drive above the speed limit or try drugs. Then the reason is because you might hurt yourself and your life matters. That is hugely, hugely significant for actually predicting that. But when I talk to people and they say, I don't feel like I have meaning in life and it's hurting my happiness, I'll dig down to find which one of these three aspects of meaning is actually driving

them crazy. Do they think that things don't have any rhyme or reason? Do they have no goals? Or they not actually believe that their life matters? These are the three challenges. And so what are ways of creating coherence? You mean how things hang together? Yeah, how things hang together. So for example, I'm one of those people, I would say, I'm not one of those people that believes like everything happens for the best or for a reason. Now I have my own way of getting to coherence, but I'm kind of curious, what are ways of getting there if you don't sort of believe in that, like, everything happens for a reason kind of mentality? So when I say coherence, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a deterministic formula that's predestined to happen. There can be a lot of randomness in life.

And my father was a statistician, his PhD in biostatistics, and he was a professor. And he used to say that God's greatest miracle is creating randomness in the universe. And he said, isn't it a wonderful thing, the distribution of events and the way that they can occur, and God chose to make things actually happen randomly. He says, what a wonderful miracle. He was a dedicated Christian all throughout his life, but he was like a nerd Christian, right? So, you have this funny view of how this works, Christian, right? So you have this funny view of how this works. But there's nothing that's opposed to between the ideas of randomness and things happening following a distribution of events and happenstance, and believing that there actually is coherence. And the way to actually

understand this is to say, okay, I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows what's going to happen except God, but it might be random. Okay, fine. Going forward in your life. Now, let me look backward in my life. And so for for people who lack coherence and they feel like they're just kind of like Jetsam being tossed about on the surf of life and it's making them intensely unhappy and uncomfortable, write the narrative of your life. I mean, a lot of people end up trying to put meaning into their life by writing their own memoir, even if it's just a personal thing that you don't share with anybody. Try that. Try to write five pages of your memoir. I did this, and I did this, and I did this, and this. And guess what? You're going to find coherence. You're going to find a through line.

It may have happened relatively randomly, but you're going to find the meaning that is the thread that actually goes through it. So you look at your life. You don't necessarily believe that events are predestined, but you look at your childhood and your early adult life, and one thing led to another led to another and you built one thing on top of the last thing. Yes, even including on the ashes of the stupid mistakes that you've made in your life. And on the basis of that, there is coherence. And that's a very important exercise for people to undertake. Yeah, I think my approach to that is not everything happens for the best, but I can make the best out of everything that happens. You know, literally that, as you said, that there is a meaning that can be created out of the events that occur.

Yeah, the key thing to keep in mind is that, again, trouble finds us. And when trouble finds you, what I recommend that people do, somebody rejects you, somebody says something against me, somebody hurts your feelings, you didn't get that promotion. You didn't get the raise. You didn't get the job. You didn't get that person that you were in love with, et cetera. To actually look at the event and instead of saying that was a net loss, what a washout, my life would be way better if that happened a different way. Say, okay, it happened that way. I'm going to list the things that I learned from this. List the things you learned. And in doing that, you'll have a much firmer foundation upon which you can build on good and especially on bad things. And that's really important because when you do that, when one thing is built on another thing,

including on bad things where you learned, that actually creates the coherence that you seek. You can actually write your own memoir as you're living your life. And that's really, really exciting. Furthermore, I'm telling you, when you take the bad feelings that are just existing in the limbic system of your lizard brain, and you write things down that you're learning, you're making them what we call in my business metacognitive, which is to say that you're bringing them to the prefrontal cortex of your brain and exposing your executive brain to these negative cognitions and finding the good that actually is in them and finding the ways you can profit from the experiences. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really, No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's talk about significance, because significance is one of those things that more and more, I feel like our baseline of what we have to do in order for it to be significant seems to just be getting ratcheted up higher and higher. Some of this I think is social media comparison, although I want to circle around to you sort of saying like, hey, comparison is nothing new. It's bedeviled us for ages. But I sometimes make the observation, if I look at my parents' life, and what would have been considered a successful life for my parents versus a lot of younger people seems to be very different. Younger people seem to have more of a like, well, I need to raise great kids. I need to have a great career. I need to start an amazing

charity. I need to do like 95 different things to be significant. Right. There's a really important new book out by the physician and neuroscientist at Stanford named Anna Lemke, and it's about dopamine. And what she shows in that book is that you can get addicted to pretty much anything because anything that actually stimulates you in any way, or you look forward to it or you enjoy it, will give you a hit of dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of pleasure and desire, and you'd produce it in the human brain so that you will encode experiences that you want to repeat. So when you do something that's kind of exciting or good, or, you know, I have great kids, I got a promotion at work, I had a really hardcore experience, or drugs and alcohol for that matter, you give yourself some

dopamine that puts you at a higher baseline for having to do it again, then again, and higher, and higher, and higher, and higher. And this is the problem that we face in society today. The key to that is finding significance in the small. And this is a very deep philosophical and theological roots. And I'll give you an example of this. You know, Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction, right? And the truth of the matter is that he could. The problem is he couldn't keep no satisfaction. You can get satisfaction, but only for a minute. The way to actually solve that and to find the significance of every moment without trying to have higher and higher and better and better and more and more followers and more and more money and more and more success.

I mean, that's just a rat race, man. Is to actually start being alive now and paying attention to the smaller things that should be providing the ultimate source of significance. And I'll give you an example of this. You know, I had this friend, man, he was a rat race kind of guy. This is a guy I worked with when I was in my twenties. So in my twenties, I didn't have a traditional career at all. I dropped out of college when I was 19 and I went on the road as a professional musician and I was touring with these other four guys for a lot of my twenties. So I didn't go to college until I was

in my late twenties. My parents called it by gap, kind of. And so I was working with this one guy. He was two decades older than I was. And he was just always about the next thing, always about the next gig. And just a very worried, anxious guy as a result of that, trying to find significance and always finding that it was elusive. I was in my late 20s at this time. He was in his late 40s. He gets this really bad cancer diagnosis. my late 20s at this time, he was in his late 40s, he gets this really bad cancer diagnosis. I mean, it was grim, man. The doctor's like, you need to make out your will. You got six months to live. And he went on some experimental drugs at the time and had a couple of miracles happen, and six months turned into a year, and a year turned into two years, and then it turned into 30 years. The doctor said, however, interestingly, this is a wolf at the door. So this is, you know, the one you feed is one thing.

The wolf at the door is something else entirely that we're staying with the wolf theme. Yes. And he said, sooner or later, that wolf's going to slip in and it's going to kill you. I don't know if it's now, I don't know how many decades you're going to get or how many months you're going to get, but the wolf's going to get in sooner or later. So he lived like that. It was this incredible blessing to him. Right.

What did he do? He ratcheted everything down because he didn't know if he had a month. And so he ratcheted. And so I was visiting him. His life completely changed. It was like a different guy. And I was hanging out at his house. He lived in Annapolis, Maryland.

And we were hanging out at dusk one summer night with a bunch of friends. And we were hanging. It was great. And he says, hey, everybody, come here, come here, come here. It was just getting dusk. And he says, he has this flower, this bush that had flowers on it. And they were all closed, tied as a drum. And he said, watch the flower, watch the flower. And I said, what? He said, just watch the flower. And we're staring at these little closed flowers. And suddenly, suddenly, they all opened. They all opened, just popped open at the same time. And we were like, we just gasped with this intense satisfaction. And thinking about it now, I get satisfaction from it much, much more so than so many more exciting things

on my hedonic treadmill, on my building the Tower of Babel all the way up into the sky was actually go down, be alive now, go for a walk without your device. You know, it's interesting. It's really helped me. It's really changed my life. I spend a lot of time getting smaller to actually find significance in my life. I'm a Catholic and I go to mass every morning with my wife. It's the same thing every

day. The same thing every day. And that's the point. That's actually the significance that actually comes from the seemingly mundane. And in so doing, the significance of my life is actually more apparent to me than it's ever been. Totally. It's what has drawn me to Zen as a path for me, because Zen is pretty obsessed on that very idea of like, just the ordinary right now, right? I mean, it's basically when Buddhism met Taoism, right? They sort of combined and made Zen. And so you get both those themes, but there is that almost near obsession with the small things of life. Yeah. You know, Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Theravada Buddhist monk, he has this famous book everybody should read called The Miracle of Mindfulness. It was very

helpful to me in my life. And The Miracle miracle of mindfulness is basically, you know, we spend our lives thinking about the future so that we can ensure a good past. And in so doing, we miss the present. We're not actually, in a meaningful sense, we're not alive right now. So he said, when you're washing the dishes, be washing the dishes. Wash each dish. And he walks through the process of washing dishes. You think it's really boring.

It's actually riveting. And that's the critical thing for us to keep in mind. So many people are missing their lives, you know, and I hesitate to say, turn off this great podcast, but if you want, turn off this podcast for five minutes. What Arthur's saying is when you're done with this, then be fully alive. Yeah. Well, I love that Thich Nhat Hanh part where he talks about washing the dishes. I teach this in my spiritual habits program because what he says is, you know, you're washing the dishes to get done so you can have a cup of tea. Yeah. And then when you get to the cup of tea, but the problem is that if you don't know how to wash the dishes to wash the dishes,

you don't know how to drink the cup of tea to have the cup of tea. And thus we are sucked moment by moment out of the present moment into the future, which has been my experience. I mean, it's one thing to miss like some of the more mundane things in life. But what I found is that by missing the mundane, you you've lost the ability to even appreciate the more beautiful things. Yeah, for sure. It's an inability to ever be here. It becomes actually an unwillingness. Yeah, to be fully alive in the present. So it's a really interesting thing. So, you know, I talked to my class about the best way to have a vacation. How many pictures should you take?

What should you do with the pictures? And inevitably, people do one of two things when they're taking pictures for a vacation. Either they're taking pictures so that they can enjoy their current vacation in the future when it is then the past. In other words, forget the current moment. Don't enjoy it now. Enjoy it later when you're thinking that it's the past. I mean, it's complete insanity, which by the way, according to the data, decreases your pleasure of your vacation by 13%. Or number two, where you're actually living it so that somebody who's not you can be envious and be

enjoying your vacation which is what you do when you're posting your pictures on social media which according to data lowers your pleasure in your vacation by 16 it's a total loss to do this and we're sleepwalking through life this is what psychologists call prospection and retrospection prospection is living in the future retrospectionpection in the past. And this is an incredible human trait. It's a miracle that we're able to do this. One of the reasons that we make so much progress is that we can practice future scenarios that we've never lived by imagining them and living through them. The trouble is that we become so obsessed with living in the future and so comfortable doing it that our lives, they don't have significance and happening that doesn't have

any meaning. You know, what does it mean to be living in the future and then missing our current lives? You know, I know a lot of people who say, I feel like because I was planning for the future, planning for the future, working, working, working for the future, I missed my kids growing up. It's a very, very common lament. And it's just a general, a specific case of this general problem that we're talking about now. So the average person is 30 to 50% of their time, literally 30 to 50% of their time living in the future.

The average go-getter that's listening to us, like real entrepreneur, is 70 to 80% living in the future. We all need to dial that back so that we can be alive now. Yeah, I certainly relate with that. I would probably put myself more in that 70% to 80% category. I've dialed it back and gotten better, but if I don't watch it, that's where I always am. Oh, yeah, totally. And you have a tendency.

People will listen to us. They know who they are. You know who you are. Yep, that's right. That's right. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Oh, yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason

Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's change directions a little bit and talk about our fears about what other people think about us. Yeah. You've got a column recently titled No One Cares. Well, there's a huge problem that most people in our society have. Some people have it a little bit less, some people have a little bit more. Some people have this kind of superpower of not caring, but most of us don't have that superpower. And we find that we think

an awful lot about obsessing on what other people think of us. And it's interesting, Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher one time said that we love ourselves more than we love others, but we care more about other people's opinions of us than our own opinion about ourselves. What a great, great irony that is. And it's so true. And so, you know, I wrote about that. I wrote about the deleterious phenomenon that worrying all the time about other people's opinions. And again, there's an evolutionary basis for this that's very, very clear. If you did not care what other people thought of you, and you crossed the wrong lines in ancient society, you'd be thrown out into the frozen tundra without a tribe, without a community, and you would literally die. That's when the wolf would say, hmm, there's a tasty lunch. I want that one because it's alone.

We have a hardwired tendency to care about what other people think of us and to want to curry favor with powerful people and indeed with the group. So if you want people on social media to like you and you want people who have a lot of social power to think favorably of you, that's why. It's your hardwiring that's making you do that, but it's extremely suboptimal and maladapted to our current circumstances. We spend a ton of time trying to post fake versions of our lives on social media, which are depressing, disheartening. And by the way, they're depressing other people too, because we have an incredible incapacity to realize that everybody's posting a fake thing. And we're the only ones who know that we're

falsifying our lives. It's just quite isolating, as a matter of fact. So there are ways to get around this. So if anybody's listening to us says, yeah, I'm spending too much time thinking about it, I just wish I could not care. There are ways to deal with this. The first way to deal with this is, number one, is to realize that actually nobody cares. I mean, they might think less of you if they cared about you, but they're not thinking about you. And there's a ton of research that shows that people are thinking about you way, way, way less than you think they do. Even when they act like they're thinking about you, they're not thinking about you. They're only thinking about themselves. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. That's what people are actually doing. It's so freeing to realize that

nobody cares. It's so incredibly freeing because they're like, oh, that's great. Nobody's looking at me. The second interesting way to do this is to think about how much we're judging other people. And we're judging other people constantly. You know, this is good, this is bad, that person's fat, that person's thin, that person's boring, that person's smart, that person's interesting, that person's stupid, etc, etc, etc. And when we're judging everything all the time, as opposed to observing things, and this again, this is your practice Zen, so you know that the idea of observation is such a powerful tool as opposed to judgment, but we're judging things all the time instead of observing them. The result of that is that we're

saying that it's legitimate for people to judge each other. You can judge each other, go for it, judge each other. That's saying you can judge me. And so the more you judge, the more you are open to the judgment of other people and you will fall prey to the problem of caring about other people's opinions. So that's really important to keep it. Just don't judge. Just judge less. Take an hour and don't judge anything, and you'll feel unbelievably relieved. You won't know why. And the reason is just because it takes a lot of your energy, and you've opened the door to everybody else's judgment. So these are the two best tools. And then there are other things you can do about thinking about what actually embarrass about what actually embarrasses me about myself and I'm worried about being judged

on. Do it. Go do it. Just go do it. I mean, I think about it. I think about the times that we've crossed the Rubicon. I tell a story in my column about giving a three-hour lecture to my graduate seminar on the first day of class and it turned out my fly was down the whole time, right? And there's 0% chance like my shirt was coming out of it or something my fly was down the whole time. Right. And there's 0% chance, like my shirt was coming out of it or so it was just the worst. I mean, it was just really, really embarrassing. And I realized after that, it's like, man, that happened and I didn't die and it didn't matter. And nobody cares. And they laughed about it for sure. I'm sure there are students from that seminar that are still cracking up about that and it's fine. And I felt kind of free, not free to do it again. But I felt free a little bit under those circumstances. So, you know,

make a list of the things that you're kind of embarrassed about yourself. And you think people might be laughing about you about, make a list of them and then actually start laughing about them and introduce them into conversations in a self-deprecating way. You will be basically opening up your jail door. Yeah. I love that idea. You have three different quotes around this, not judging others. Judge not that ye not be judged by Jesus. Whoever judges others digs a pit for themselves, the Buddha, and from the Tao Te Ching, care about people's approval and you'll be their prisoners. Three quotes I love. That is one of my favorite Tao Te Ching quotes of all time. But it's so true. I've noticed that the less I have judged other people, the less I judge myself.

And then the less I judge myself, the less I judge other people. It's a kind of a virtuous circle when I'm doing it in the right direction and a, you know, vicious spiral when I'm doing it in the wrong way. Oh yeah, for sure. And we all fall prey to it. So basically the key to keep in mind is that when you're feeling really insecure about yourself, really bad about yourself, the reason is probably because you're judging other people too much. That's almost always the case. And so doing that, you're exposing yourself to the judgment of others where you're saying to yourself, come on, man, bring it on, judge me, just judge me, it's all good. That's the key thing to do. So anytime you feel insecure, the proper therapy is to stop judging and start observing and to do that therapeutically for an hour, and your whole mindset will change. Just a minute ago, you mentioned the humor aspect, the humor of teaching a class with your fly down, you know, the self-deprecating humor.

Let's talk about the link between happiness and humor. It's something we talk about on this show a lot. I've often said that I think levity is an underappreciated spiritual virtue, but talk about some of the things that may not be immediately intuitive to those of us who go, yeah, I think humor is a good way of increasing happiness, but you made some really interesting points in the column that were not immediately intuitive. Yeah. So to begin with, when you say you have a sense of humor or when somebody has a sense of humor, that means one of two things. Number one is that they appreciate funny things. And the second thing is that they make funny things. They both say he's got a great sense of humor. Either he cracks up when you tell a joke or he cracks great jokes. Those are the two ways we talk about it. And they're very, very different phenomena. Happiness is associated with the first.

It's not associated necessarily with the second. Funny people tend to be less happy than not funny people. They tend to be more intelligent, but there's kind of a tortured spirit behind the naturally funny joke cracker. I'm sure that there are some comedians that are unbelievably happy people, but you find that clinical depression and even sociopathic tendencies tend to run heavier among professional comedians than other groups of people. And you notice the people who are funniest in your community, they don't laugh very much. The people who make the funniest jokes, they don't usually laugh at other people's jokes and they don't laugh at their own jokes either. Notice this and you'll start to see this pattern as a matter of fact on the other hand people who laugh a lot

At jokes. I mean they just appreciate jokes They tend to be much happier and the great news is you can cultivate that there's some people who they have kind of a Persona of being bummed a lot and so they don't let themselves laugh But if you basically give yourself permission and this is actually something you can do you can when you go to a new place You can say, you know,'m going to laugh at everybody's jokes more. Just literally saying that, what it does is it makes it once again metacognitive. It brings it to your consciousness, your prefrontal cortex of your brain, and you literally will start laughing at other people's jokes more and you will get happier.

This is just, it's free, man. And it's something that we all should be able to do. It also is an incredible social lubricant. People will be like, I like him and I don't know why. And the reason is because he's cracking up all the time and I wanna be around happy people. I wanna be around people who laugh. It anesthetizes unpleasantness in a very real way. Not your jokes, but your laughter. Yeah, you also make the point to avoid being grim.

Reject grimness, you say. Is that sort of what you're saying there is to decide sort of as a position to be less grim? Yeah. And this gets political too, because, you know, our culture today, which is so unbelievably politically polarized, grimness is a weapon. Anytime you say that's not funny, you basically tried to take some power. You tried to grab some power. And that's one of the main ways our inability to take other people's jokes or to take offense when none was intended is a power move in our society today. And it transcends right-left distinctions. You actually find it across the political spectrum. This is key. And I'm sitting on a college campus,

and I see this all the time, where you make a joke at your peril and I understand, you know, stupid jokes or offensive jokes. And there are certain kinds of jokes that we should have moved beyond at this point in our society. And yet we haven't, but still the key thing is if you want to be happier, don't actually try to hurt people with jokes, but also don't take offense when none was intended by these jokes. And in so doing, you can be kind of in the anti grimness, more levity part of the culture. Will you give up some political power? Yeah. Will you be happier?

Yeah. Will you be making a happier culture? A hundred percent. Yep. I want to swing around briefly to the culture of contempt. But before we do, this is a time of the year that brings up a lot of unhappiness in people. Some people love this time of year, but a lot of people don't. I've been reflecting on the fact that there's a lot of expectation around the holidays,

expectation that other people have on us, expectation we have on how the holidays should be. What would be a way to be happier through the holidays? What would be a way to deal with those expectations more wisely? Well, to begin with, one of the main reasons that people are unhappy this time of year is because they're disappointed. And the reason they're disappointed is that we have a tendency to believe or to remember past holidays as better than they were. It's called fading affect bias. It's a cognitive bias that we have where we remember the good parts of things and not the bad parts. Very, very common. It's a self-defense mechanism.

But it's also because we learn from things and we keep getting benefit from the things we learned. And we jettison the parts of our memories that are not useful to us. Like, you know, Uncle Mike got, you know, loaded and, you know, passed out in the front yard after screaming obscenities at the neighbors on Christmas day. You know, that kind of thing, we leave that behind. So we tend to be disappointed when our holidays don't live up to either our expectations about the future, which tend to be very rosy, or our memories, our nostalgic memories from the past. That's a key thing. The second big problem that we have is that we feel a lot of pressure. We feel a lot of pressure to sing the Christmas carols and to enjoy the holidays. And for some

people, it's really, really hard. I remember this was very hard for my mom. My mom, she suffered a lot, very ill for almost all of my childhood. And she would suffer on the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were really, really, really hard for her. And the main reason is because she felt there was an expectation for her to be the perfect mother and the perfect cook and have the perfect home. And she didn't feel she was up to it. That was a problem. So what do we do? You know, for those of our listeners who they suffer a little bit on the holidays, number one is reject the expectations and do your own thing. You know, if you find the consumerism really off-putting, then put together a Christmas with people who are like you, and you decide you're not going to

spend money. As a matter of fact, don't spend any money from, any consumer money from Thanksgiving through January 1st. Be a rebel. Be a countercultural man, and you'll be amazed at actually how happy it makes you by being countercultural per se, and being around people who do that. Or, you know, when my kids were little, my wife, who's from Spain, she often, because the kids would be home, she would take one kid and go see her mother in Barcelona over Thanksgiving. And I would have the other two kids and she's like, oh, it's going to be so sad. And the first year I took them to a restaurant and then to the movies. And it became this tradition where I had two kids and they were competing to be the ones who were home to go to the restaurant and the movies with dad.

And it was like, and you can see me with my kids. I look like a divorced dad who got, you got, you know, custody of his kids on Thanksgiving. It was too pathetic to make a turkey or something. We were having this great old time. Make your own traditions is the key thing. And then the third thing is leave the memories behind. Leave your expectations behind. Just today's Christmas. Today's Thanksgiving. Let it be what it is. Let it expectations behind. Just today's Christmas,

today's Thanksgiving, let it be what it is. Let it be what it is. And finally, actually, one more, don't talk politics. Don't talk politics on the holidays, because you're going to get politics in the way of your love, and your love is more important than politics. And that leads to your last question, doesn't it? It does. And I'm going to actually bring that back on you a little bit, because you summarized your whole book on the culture of contempt to a few lessons. And you then said it even simpler, go find someone with whom you disagree, listen thoughtfully and treat them with respect or love. A lot of times for many of us, unfortunately, sometimes maybe the only time we encounter somebody who believes something

different than us is when we're forced into our families of origin. But you're saying if you want the holidays to be good, then is not the time to try and take on the culture of contempt. Leave that for another time. Yeah, generally speaking, that's a good idea. That doesn't mean you have to avoid it. It just means that don't be going and looking for it. Don't say, you know, there's the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, both have in different parts of these parties, have put out a guide to how to beat your family in arguments, which is actually evil. This is evil, to giving people a guide on how they can vanquish their family members. And Dale Carnegie, the great self-improvement writer one time, said that a man

convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Even if you win the argument, you lose the argument because nobody in history has ever been insulted into agreement. This is a really, really important thing to keep in mind. So go rushing toward the people with whom you agree, listen to them with civility and love and not just tolerance with actual love that on Thanksgiving and Christmas, you know, talk about the things that matter first, which is, you know, the people that you have in common, the love that you have for each other, the fun things that you've done over the course of the year. And you probably won't even get to the politics by the end of the day. But you'll say, you know, my crazy Republican Aunt Marge, you know, we love the same things. And that's what really matters.

Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up. I would love to get more into contempt and talk about what it is and all the problems. Your greatest book is wonderful. Maybe that'll be another time. That'd be great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show be another time. That'd be great. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been a real pleasure to talk with you. And thanks for sharing so much of your wisdom with us.

You have a great show and you're doing a lot of good. And I appreciate a lot being able to be some small part of it. Thank you. Right on. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.