The Rich Roll Podcast - Arthur Brooks On The Crisis Of Meaning & How To Actually Find It

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, bestselling author, and one of the world's leading authorities on human happiness. This conversation explores what he calls a psychogenic epidemic — a crisis of meaning driven by the very technology we can't put down. We discuss the three macronutrients of happiness, why our brains have been rewired to miss what matters most, the striver's curse, and an ancient escape plan for modern life. Things get personal when he diagnoses my happiness on a scale of one to ten. The results are humbling. I love this man. Take notes for this one. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today's Sponsors: Freaks of Nature: High-performance everyday essentials–deodorant, sunscreen, hydration, and more. Use code RICHROLL to save 10%👉🏼https://www.FreaksofNature.com WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll  AG1: Get a FREE bottle of D3K2, Welcome Kit, and 5 travel packs with your first order👉🏼https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll  Prolon: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift👉🏼https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll  Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 10% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼https://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll  Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at👉🏼https://www.airbnb.com/host

This episode is brought to you by freaks of nature because I'm a freak when it comes to making sure that what goes into and on my body comes from nature. If you're like me, active, outdoors a lot, prone to sweating tons, and into clean personal care products, then you probably have had a few experiences testing some of these products only to discover they're great in theory, but underwhelming when it comes to actually work. But I got to say, this stuff is great. It gets the job done. And then some, all without tradeoffs when it comes to clean ingredients. I've been using their deodorant and their mineral broad spectrum SPF 50 sunstick. Both of these have earned a permanent place in my routine. The deodorant is aluminum and baking soda free, of course. But somehow still holds up through long training days, which frankly surprised me. And their sunstick really does go on incredibly smooth, leaves no white cast and makes it ridiculously easy to protect your skin when you're outside for hours. Their sunstick sold out last summer and their deodorants sold out within one month of launching. But good news, everything is back in stock right now. I'm all in. I suggest you will be too. And right now is the time because when you go to freaks of nature.com, which is what you're going to do right now and you use the code rich roll, you're going to save 10% when you order now.

before it sells out again, so do it. As some of you know, I am in a very different season of training than I've ever been in before. I'm rebuilding slowly, intentionally, after this spinal fusion surgery that I underwent this past May. And I'm learning what it means to be patient with my fitness and how to prioritize sustainability over intensity. And I've got to say that whoop, specifically my new whoop,

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with greater results and intention. So I would suggest that you check it out. Go to join.wop.com slash roll for one month free of whoop. When there's not happiness, when you see a lot of misery, there's a blockage of one of these three macronutrients. So we've got an enjoyment problem, a satisfaction problem. Today's guest is Arthur Brooks. He is a Harvard professor and social scientist. From French horn player to CEO of a think tank to bestselling author. And one of the sharpest minds on what actually makes people happy. This is a psychogenic epidemic, which means it's highly,

socially contagious, creates lots of misery. Young people will say, life doesn't feel real. I'm living in a simulation. When did you first cut in on to the fact that there was a crisis of meaning afoot? Like, what is going on? When you see a lot of unhappiness, then you got to figure out what's actually happening. The reason is because I'm delighted to have you back. It's great to see you, my friend. There's a ton that I want to talk to you about. But let's start with the macro-nutrients of happiness, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. This third macro-nutrient of happiness is something that the modern world is fairly inhospitable to. That's right. It acts as an antagonist to meaning, meaning that, you know, Houston,

we have a problem, essentially, which is the reason why you decided to write this book. When did you first cut in on to the fact that there was a crisis of meaning afoot? Like, what is going on? I came back to academia in 2019. I'd been gone for a while. I'm an old school college professor, and I'd been teaching for a long time when I left in 2008. And I went to Washington, D.C., your hometown, and I ran this great big think tank for 11 years.

And I wasn't thinking very much about academia because I was completely absorbed in what I was doing. I wasn't paying attention to what was going on on campuses. I came back in 2019, and it was different than the world I'd left. So in 2008, as recently as 2008, college students were happier than people not on campus. They were falling in love and they were making friends

and they were experimenting with dangerous and weird ideas and having their minds blown and they were partying. And when I came back in 2019, depression rates had tripled clinical anxiety or generalized anxiety was up by a factor of two. There was loneliness. Campuses were racked by protest and identity politics and cancel culture and it was a completely different world.

And of course, as a behavioral scientist, the first thing I want to know is, you know, sort of Sherlock Holmes would cause this. And so I went in search. When you see a lot of unhappiness, which, you know, these mood disorders that really, really high levels represent, then you got to figure out what's actually happening. And you always know when you go into a company or a family or or into a culture and you see a lot of misery, there's a blockage of one of these three macronutrients. So the three parts of happiness, it's not a feeling happiness isn't a feeling feelings are evidence of happiness that's the smell of dinner the dinner is made up of protein carbohydrates and fat and the macronutrient profile is

off when it's not nutritious when when there's not happiness when you see a lot of misery one of the macronutrients is blocked or more so we've got an enjoyment problem a satisfaction problem or a meaning problem that's where the investigation started in 2019 and this is like the height of trouble on and there's no evidence that young people enjoy their lives any less than you and me. On the contrary, they enjoy their lives more. There's no less satisfaction. I teach at Harvard. Tons of satisfaction. It's the joy from accomplishments with struggle. You and I are satisfaction freaks. By the way, that's the reason that you and I have trouble with enjoyment and enjoying our lives. Yeah, we're going to get into that.

We need a book called How to Enjoy Your Life, which I'll write that book for you and me. Yeah, I mean, you have this sort of trifecta. You could write a book about each of these macronutrients and where we're getting it wrong. Exactly, exactly. But you and I have no trouble with satisfaction and neither do my students. The joy of accomplishments after struggle. You're the maestro of struggle of struggle. I mean, just look at your background of what you've done and ultra endurance athletes. These are struggle people for an unbelievable sense of achievement. The trouble is when it comes to meaning, and especially people under 35 and doubly especially people in higher ed, people who have all of the advantages, who shouldn't have meaning problems for some reason they did. And sure enough, when you do the survey research and you ask people, does your life feel meaningless? The explosion and the answer of yes came exactly in 2008, 2009. It bumped along. 15% of young people would say, I feel like my life is meaningless. 2008, boom, it goes up exactly contemporaneously with the increases in depression and anxiety. And what is the delta between that period of time and now? Because now we're in 2006.

Now it's up even more. So by 2019, that was before the coronavirus epidemic. And then it got worse. So everything got worse. When everybody went home and we were even more isolated, even more on devices, even more living the way that life had started to change by 2008, that was amplified by the lockdowns, the reaction to the coronavirus epidemic. And then it actually weirdly didn't even get better when the coronavirus epidemic waned. Yeah, you would expect that it would dip in the aftermath of that, but it continued. It continued because the behavior changed. So all of the the societal patterns, the way that we're living our lives, was exacerbated by the coronavirus epidemic,

turned, metastasized into patterns of behavior that are very, very addictive. And so now in this investigation, I'm saying, okay, this is got to have, this is a psychogenic epidemic, which means it's highly socially contagious, creates lots of misery, but has no obvious biological origin.

It's not like fleas on rats that create the bubonic plague. But it turns out there are always neurochemical markers. There's always neuroscience behind the markers of what we see. So looking at actually the misery that we find, there's a whole branch of neuroscience that illuminates how we've been using our brains wrong,

especially since 2008, that weirdly makes it harder to understand the meaning of life. This seems to disproportionately impact two cohorts of the population. young people and strivers. Right, right, young strivers. Why is that the case? The reason is because all of the patterns,

the neuroscientific patterns that we talk about, where we use our brains in a suboptimal way, are most concentrated for people who don't remember the before times. Rich and Arthur remember the before times. And furthermore, for people who are entirely within the cone of a technologized striver hustle culture is what we see with people who are highly educated. Highly educated young people are most at risk

for depression and anxiety because they're most likely to be using their brains in a way that's suboptimal for finding the meaning of life. Why would it not also disproportionately impact young people who are not strivers who look around and due to socio-political reasons aren't seeing a lot of opportunity and are kind of languishing in their lives.

This is sort of a different pattern that we've kind of always seen, as a matter of fact. People who are languishing, people who don't have a lot of opportunities, they've always struggled. They've always struggled with a lot of depression, sort of a melancholia. And that's just because life doesn't offer them very much purpose,

doesn't offer them very many opportunities per se. But here's a part of the population that's really interesting. People who are not classified as modern strivers, not trying to go to the best college, is not trying to get the most cutting edge jobs, people who will come out of high school and go into the trades, they're in way less danger for depression and anxiety. And it's interesting because I wouldn't have known this. I come from a family of college professors. My dad was a professor, his dad was a professor. I was the first generation

not to get a PhD until I got sucked into the vortex and got a PhD in my 30s. But not all my kids did that. And I had, you know, one of my sons came out of high school, worked on a farm, and then went into the Marine Corps. I was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps. I was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps near here at Camp Pendleton, California. And I got to know all of his friends. They're, you know, enlisted Marines in highly kinetic war fighting jobs. Happy. They have tons of meaning in their lives. They weren't struggling. I mean, they're struggling with, you know, drinking too much because they're Marines. But, but man, they had it going on. And they were way happier than the people that I saw that I was dealing with the young people that I was coming across graduate

students and undergraduates and colleges. So what you find is that there was something about this technologized life, the life in the simulation, which is how a lot of them talk about it, that was foreclosing the opportunities for finding meaning. And that's where the investigation took me, I started to look at what neuroscientists were saying about where the meaning of life is found neurophysiologically and why we're not able to do that anymore and the people who are most at risk. And then most importantly, what do you do? Yeah, the big differentiator is, the advent of all of these technologies that have essentially rewired our brains and completely changed our relationship with ourselves, with other people, and with the world. And this is really

the essential driver of this crisis. Yes, that's exactly right. And this gets back to the work of there's a great neuroscientist. Have you ever seen, had Ian McGilchrist on your show? He's at Oxford. And he's the most Oxford guy ever. I mean, he, you know, he wears a lot of tweed and And he's a, it's great. He's one of the great intellectuals of our time. And he has this, he brought back the idea of hemispheric lateralization, which is a fancy way of saying that the two sides of the brain do different things. When you and I were kids, we talked about artsy people and analytical people, right brain,

left brain. That actually doesn't hold up. And so that was largely abandoned. But the two sides of the brain, they do ask different kinds of questions and govern whole different areas of life. The left side of the brain governs the complicated problems of life, the how. to and what question, the technological stuff, the answers to the things that, you know,

the problems that we're trying to solve. You know, you wanna write a piece of software or find your way from here to LA, you use the left side of your brain. The right side of the brain governs why questions, mystery, meaning, the things that we really care about. So to get along from day to day to day, to make a bunch of money, you need the left side of your brain up and working.

But to understand why you'd even wanna do any of that, that's the right side of your brain. And, you know, so, I'm delighted that I know your wife and who's on a show sometimes. And Julie's a right brain adept. Yes. She's about mystery and meaning. She's all about mystery and meaning.

Every conversation is about mystery and meaning. And some people are really, really strong at that. And my guess is she's not pasted to her phone all day long because if you want to miss the meaning of your life, spend all day online. What that does is it forces you into left brain activity. if the only questions you ever ask are being typed into a Google search bar, those are not meaning questions. Those are how and what questions. Chad, GPT, can't ask or can't give you any information about questions that really matter

for the meaning of your life. And that's the world that we're inhabiting. Here's where the penny drop from you, Rich. So I started, you know, when I see the data and I'm on to something, I know where I'm going, but I start talking to people, interviewing people, and listening to the words that keep showing up and again and again and again and again. Because that's how you actually learned something. When you and I were in the Himalayas,

when we were with the Dalai Lama, and you noticed that he would keep saying a word again and again and again and again. I happen to notice that. Yeah. And that's because that's the word that you need to hear. Yeah. That's the word that's on your heart

that you actually need to become conscious of and he knows that because he's super adept. When you're listening to young people talking about their misery, they'll start talking about it again and again. They'll keep talking about, I don't know what I meant to do, my life feels meaningless. et cetera. But here's, here's actually how I started to understand how technology feeds into all of this.

Young people will say again and again, life doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel real. I feel like I'm, I'm in the matrix. I'm living in a simulation. And when they talk about their lives, dude, it's a simulation. I mean, you get up and the first thing you do is you look at your phone because that's your alarm clock. And then, and you get up and you go to work, which is on Zoom. And then you date on the app and your friends are on socials and your sense of, accomplishment might come from gaming and guess what? That's a simulated life. That's a, that's a left brain simulacrum for a real life fully alive. And the one thing you can't ever simulate is the meaning of your life. We're already in the matrix. The matrix is here.

Our lives are being increasingly controlled by the algorithmic gods. And we spend our lives staring at devices with intermittent real-life experiences, which are quickly and more rapidly dwindling and fewer and far between. The average child under 12 spends between four and seven minutes in nature a day, between four and seven hours a day on the screen. And the reason why that's salient in this conversation is because when you're engaging with life in that way,

you are depriving yourself from being able to engage with your right brain. That's correct. You're depriving yourself of the opportunity, the space, the bandwidth, the boredom to reflect on the why and the mysterious questions of life. To sit with the questions that actually matter the most. You're distracting yourself from, as they say, doing the work, which you automatically will do. Your brain is designed for you to think about the meaning of life. That's the reason that, you know, great-granddad role didn't come home and say to his wife, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. Oh, because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. But now I can open up, you know, choose your social media app and I can watch short form videos of people telling me what the meaning of life is.

And so I've got that sorted. Sort of and so we think. And here's the irony of it. Your great-grandfather, his life moment to moment was pretty boring. but his life wasn't boring at all. And if you're scrolling and looking at funny reels and online because the light is taking too long to change and you're always distracted, you're never bored moment to moment, but your life is unbelievably boring.

It's boring at the meta level. Why? Because a boring life is bereft of a sense of meaning. And an interesting life is full of meaning, notwithstanding the boredom that you endure from moment to moment. That's the paradox. So the left brain, you call it the, the emissary. It's all about the how and the what, right? It's fact-based. This is what AI is very good at. What AI is incapable of is engaging in the way that the right brain does, which you call the master, or you describe in the book as the master. And there's a distinction here that I think is super interesting. The left brain is very good

at solving complicated problems and the right brain is the master of solving or at least conjuring and asking the complex problems. It sounds like lots of chopping. So there's this differentiation between complicated and complex. Right, right. And that sounds like a real technical difference. And in point of fact, that language comes from mathematics. So my father was a mathematician and he would talk about

the difference between complicated and complex problems. It turns out it's pretty simple, this is just a simple. this distinction. Complicated problems are very hard to solve, but once you solve them, they're solved. Designing a jet engine was unbelievably complicated, really hard to do, but now we stamp out jet engines and the planes never crash. It's unbelievable. I mean, making a toaster is complicated. Lots of things are complicated. And that's what we train people to do in school today. That's what the hustle and grind culture does, is it trains you to do that. That's the questions where you get answers from chat GPD that actually make a lot of sense are complicated questions, answers to complicated

problems. The complex parts of life, the right hemisphere parts of life are super easy to understand and impossible to solve. So your marriage to Julie is complex, not complicated. Sorry, you'll never solve it. There isn't a solution to it. It's not an equation. You live with it. I mean, I've been married 34 years and I'm super in love with Esther. And I will be. gazing into her eyes as I take my dying breath. And I will never solve that problem. I never will. I mean, we'll probably have an argument when I get back today.

We probably will about something stupid. It's like decades and decades, and we have children, we have grandchildren. And we're going to have lots of grandchildren. And our life is full of abundance and love. And we worship God together. And we're still going to argue over the, who took out the recycling. It's so impossible to solve. And yet that's why I love my marriage.

You know, I like to watch football because it's complex, not complicated. It's very easy to understand, but I don't know what's going to happen and there's no computer that can simulate it, which is why it's exciting to watch. That's why sports is awesome because it's a complex thing.

You love your cat because your cat is complex. You don't love your toaster because your toaster's complicated. And this is a world that's telling us that all the complex things have a substitute that are complicated. The world says, you want to date? That's really complex.

It's kind of scary and kind of dangerous. I'll tell you what, I'm going to solve that problem for you with this complicated algorithm. You want to know people and have friends because you're lonely. Oh, I got a complicated way to solve that problem. It's called social media.

You know, it's complex finding a job and going to work and interacting with colleagues. Here's the complicated curve fit. It's Zoom work at a distance. It's all complicated solutions to complex problems, and that's bereft of meaning. The most complex problem being what is the meaning of life, what happens to us after we die, what is God, you know, what is beyond the universe, all of these unanswerable questions that conjure the ineffable. And the left brain wants to find answers to all of those questions.

And on some level, so does the right brain, but the right brain is engaging with the mystery of it. It's not results driven. It's not about finding the answer. It's more about like marinating in the question. That's right. It reminds me of, do you remember this? It was one of the early TED talks that became viral

that JJ Abrams made, the filmmaker, and it was called the mystery box. And he was talking about his full philosophy of storytelling and how he created lost, like these, you know, that hit show. And he understands that the anticipation of the audience is to wanna know like what's going on on the island and, you know, what happened these people.

But answering that question is always unsatisfying. It's the anticipation of the answer, or it's the journey of just being in that question that is so engaging for an audience. And I think the same applies to this idea of complex questions and answers. Completely. And, you know, people ask me a lot because I'm, you know, I'm a religious person.

And people ask, well, how do you get into it? How do you get into it? And, you know, I live in this intellectual world. And you say, well, let's, you know, get a bunch of books on apologetics. Apologetics are intellectual arguments for the existence of God, for example. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because that's a left-brain way to understand a right-brain problem. The way to do it is to go away and pray, to go walk a pilgrimage, to pray.

to pray your rosary, to go sit in meditation, you're not going to solve the problem. Or to sit with a Zen Cohen or the yin and yang, these dualities that are opposing forces that are both true and false at the same time. That's exactly right. And the Cohen is a perfect example of that. Every religious and philosophical tradition

is based on questions. And here's the weird thing about questions that don't have answers. You remember when we were kids? You remember Coco the Gorilla? Yeah. You remember Coco the gorilla was up there in Northern California who learned a thousand words. So Penny Patterson, her primatologist trainer, trained Coco to sign a thousand words.

And she answered all these questions. People said, ah, it's blurring the line between primates and human beings and homo sapiens. Uh-huh. No, it wasn't because that's the same mistake as saying that, A, AI is blurring the boundaries between machines and humans. It's not because all AI can do is answer questions. Coco the gorilla never asked a single question ever in her entire life. No non-human animal has ever asked a question.

And the only thing that chat, you can say to chat, GPT, ask me five questions, but it's just generating things on the basis of knowledge to its extent. The essence of being alive is asking questions. Why questions with no answers? And that's what Zen Coens are really supposed to do. They're supposed to get you to exercise the right hemisphere of your brain to find meaning. You know, it's the, all of the religious traditions actually do this. And, you know, I'll challenge my students to ask two questions to find meaning,

just to go away and think about why am I alive and for what would I give my life. And I challenge anybody to put those questions in a chat GPT. You'll get nonsense back. You'll get hilarious garbage back if you ask, hey, hey, Google. You know, what would I give my life for? Well, that's a very smart question that you ask. It's nothing. And when you were at Stanford in what was it, the late 80, early 90s, right?

Late 80s. Late 80s. And when you came back from a party on Saturday night at midnight or one or something like that, and you'd hang out with your friends and you'd have those really pretentious conversations in the dorm, that was one of the most important things you did in college. actually. And now, of course, people aren't doing that. They're watching funny reels and videos and they're looking at their phones. And the result of it is that they're not exercising the right side of their brains because the why questions are just going on asked. It keeps them stuck

in that doom loop that you talk about without an escape hatch. Yeah. The doom loop is a really common thing for all of us who've been interested in and involved in addiction and the pathologies of addiction. They all involve a doom loop where they're all based on something as iatrogenic, which is to say that something that is supposed to help you and winds up making your life worse. So for example, alcohol abuse is funny because alcohol abuse is most dangerous in the lives of people who are either bored or anxious or both because booze is great for treating boredom and anxiety. The problem is that boredom and anxiety come back with a vengeance. And so what solves your problem makes it where that's a, that's a frame of,

as Homer Simpson line, to alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems. And that gets you into the Zoom loop. I drink because I'm anxious and tomorrow I'm more anxious, so I drink more and you escalate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All addictive behavior works in that way. And the same thing is true with the way that we use technology, the way that we get into these complicated solutions to life's complex problems where I want distraction, I'm feeling lonely and depressed and anxious, I'm bored.

and so I look at my phone or I self-administer I self-soothed with technology which makes it worse and so I have to solve the problem more ultimately the way that you get out of a doom loop of any sort of addiction is you got to clip it you got to recognize it

and you have to say something's got to give how do you do that in your own life given the fact that your career is so intertwined with social media and technology and all these platforms. Yeah, so, and technology is funny because you know, there's really two kinds of addictions. There's the kinds of addictions

that you treat with complete abstinence. Those are easier than the addictions that you treat with moderation. You know, so if highly glycema carbohydrates are a big problem in your life, the wrong advice is don't eat any more food. I mean, I say, like, I don't drink alcohol, you don't drink alcohol.

Life is better when we don't drink alcohol, but we're not gonna die if we don't. The truth is that technology today is much more, white carbohydrates than it is like alcohol. You actually are going to use it because the world has changed. And look, you could throw it into the ocean and go join a Carthusian monastery,

but I'm not gonna. I mean, you'll have to pry my iPhone out of my cold dead hands to paraphrase Charlton Heston. That's not gonna happen. So the result is I need to learn how to use it as a tool as opposed to administering it as a medicine. Yeah. For the average person, I know, I mean, Tyler, like, did an experiment of getting rid of the smartphone.

And he lasted for a while and was happier. But ultimately, like, it's at cross purposes with some of the things that drive happiness. Because if you aren't available when your friends are trying to find you, you're not able to go meet up with them. You know, it just makes life too difficult in 2020, in the 2020s, right? So you do have to develop a moderation diet, which is difficult because it's sort of like, well, I'm using it, so I might as well look at this now and look at this and then you're off to the races.

Yeah, so there's actually pretty good science that talks about how we can moderate it in very structured ways that work pretty well. So for people who have, who are kind of left brain types and who want to live by protocols, you know, people who watch a lot of podcasts, there's three things to do and that will really, really change. So there's tech-free times.

There's tech-free zones and there's tech fasts. These are the three ways to think about it. Tech-free times, the tech-free times that really matter a lot or first hour of the morning, last hour at night and meal times. And there's a lot of neuroscience behind why that it happens. You mean, the neural programming that goes on in the first hour of the day is set in the first hour. And you're either going to be thinking with your, you know,

looking at your screen all day, or you can actually get a start on it. I recommend actually running around and picking up heavy things. first thing in the morning and actually not using your phone while you do that, which sounds insane to a lot of people, except that you notice that you have your best ideas in the shower. That's because your phone's not in there. And so in workout time, I'm sure that you felt that because you've done these, I mean, all night kind of deals. And you're not looking at your phone. On the contrary. And this is almost a transcendent experience in no small part because you're exercising, you're opening up bright hemispheric activity. Mealtimes are really important because

because homo sapiens are evolved to get a lot of oxytocin, you know, the neuropeptide that functions as a hormone for human bonding, when you eat together with eye contact, sitting around a campfire, this is 250,000 years old. This is how, it's weird because the idea of talking and eating and communing while putting stuff in our mouth, it doesn't sort of make sense,

but in point of fact, eating together without devices, even having an iPhone on the table, it's important that we not have devices on the table right now, because I'd look at it and think notifications, messages, and that would disrupt the oxytocin that I'm actually getting from looking at you in the eyes right now. That's why it's important that we do this show, not on Zoom, that we do it with each other,

plus we're friends. I love how you couch it in terms of oxytocin. It's like a deliberate choice to message this idea, like sort of package it in a masculine way, like the oxytocin protocol. Yeah, I know it's funny. Which is like, it's so, it's, It's obvious, right?

Like, we know this. Yeah. You know, deep down, we know that if we want to feel connected to other people, we have to remove distractions. And we need to look them in the eye and we need to listen and be present with them and engage. Right. I know. I know. I know.

I know that we have to be reminded of scientific reminders. And, you know, one of the things I talk about when I'm working with couples, for example, is I have to remind men that their wives, their girlfriends, their partners, when they're with women. Women have three times as much oxytocin as men. because of the bond with infants. So they've evolved three times as much oxytocin, which means that oxytocin is more important for women than it is for men to feel alive.

And how do you get it with eye contact? Which is why guys need to learn when they're having a conversation with their partner to look at them in the eyes the whole time. And just that protocol, they're like, I don't know why she's happier. That's why. Yeah.

This is called the oxytocin marriage protocol. And there are four prongs to this. Yes? There is A, B, T, always be touching, eye contact, as you mentioned. What are the other ones? Julie's going to kill me. Yeah, having fun. Having fun as opposed to rehearsing grievance because that's reinforcing actual positive patterns

as opposed to negative patterns. So it's not, you know, it's like you said, let's work out our problems all the time. Pour water into the glass that has a little bit of dirt in it and watch all the water just dissipate, I mean all the dirt dissipate. That's fun. Have more fun together. Associate the relationship more with fun and last but not least is pray together, meditate together, have a transcendent activity that goes beyond the here and now together because then you're wiring your right hemispheres together. One flesh, what that really means is two right hemispheres bonded together in an antenna to the divine. That's what that actually means.

And this is why Julie said to me the other day that you are, our newest relationship guru. She sent me the video that you did on that. And we've been practicing it because I'm on this journey towards more intimacy. We can talk a little bit more about that. Because you love her, because she's your soulmate. And she needs that and you wanna give her what she needs.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And this is the medicine to treat my strivers dilemma. Yeah. my terminal case of strivers. Well, we also need to talk about enjoyment, which is another macro nature, but we'll get back to that. We'll get back to that.

We're kind of jumping around and jumping ahead. And there's a couple other things about tech. Yeah, yeah. So the third tech free time is the last hour before bet. And a lot of that is the disruption of the activated pineal gland and melatonin, et cetera, et cetera. But basically you should be paying more attention to your loved ones and less attention to your devices

such that you'll rest better. One of the things that we know is that you will really disrupt your rest if you're looking at looking at the screen. So it's first hour of the morning, last hour at night and mealtime. Second is tech free zones in your life. And the biggie is your bedroom. You shouldn't have a device in your bedroom. And the phone should be plugged in downstairs in a locked closet or something in the foyer of your house. And so it's just you get out of the pattern.

And it's very, it's actually pretty successful. People say, and this has happened to me too, even if I did. do have the phone next to my bed because I don't have an alarm clock and I'm on the road. I never look at it because I'm not in the habit of ever looking at my phone at night. And another tech free zone is a classroom, by the way. And this is a public policy discussion. But, you know, there shouldn't be a telephone, a smartphone in any classroom at any level from kindergarten through Ph.D.

That is insanity. 100%. The whole school day, as a matter of fact. And the most important hour is lunch hour because of socialization. And the last, but not least, is tech fasts. And I recommend a four-day silent retreat for everybody for lots and lots of reasons, but a tech-free, at least four-day retreat, spiritual retreat, meditation retreat, prayer retreat, religious retreat, whatever it is.

And I know you do these things and I do too. I mean, I go on retreats every single year. But four days completely away from your devices, these three things are a game changer. Hey, guess what, everybody? Today's episode is brought to you by AG1. I love springtime. I know you do too. It's so verdant and alive here in Southern California right now.

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time here, so much so that I couldn't even tell you how many experts and researchers I've hosted on this topic, let alone the number of episodes, but the science researcher that I trust the most on this topic is Dr. Walter Longo. He's been on the show a bunch. And through all of his extensive, rigorous research, he has devised what he calls the fasting mimicking diet, which is essentially a way of eating that produces the same beneficial effects of fasting without having to completely stop eating. And what he did is package his findings into a five-day program called pro-lon, which just takes all the guesswork out of it and makes the process easy and convenient. Basically, pro-lon provides you with everything you need, five days worth of structured,

plant-based meals that nourish you while maintaining your body in the desired fasting state. No decisions, no negotiating with yourself. You just follow the plan. It's an incredible reset. Everybody I know who has done it has loved it, myself included, and now you can too. For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day program. Just visit prolonlif.com slash rich roll. That's E-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-E dot com slash rich roll to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Prolonlife.com slash rich roll. We've talked about the what, like there is this crisis of meaning.

We've talked about how we arrived in this place, but we have yet to actually define what meaning is. I think when you say like, oh, like my life lacks meaning or I don't have purpose or I feel like, what exactly are we talking about? Yeah. It gets confusing for people. And I think when you say, well, you need more meaning in your life, that can be paralyzing for somebody because what are you supposed to do with that? It's too big. It's too big for sure.

And like anything else, when you have a big problem, the way to solve it is to break it down into smaller problems. Like anything else in your life. You know, if you say, if somebody comes to me and say, I'm really, really struggling in my marriage, that's too big. You know, you break it down into five or six areas of your marriage and figure out how to solve those problems. And what you find is when you're working on little problems that they scale up into big solutions. And so the same thing is true with meaning. Meaning really is a series of three little problems. The meaning problem is three smaller problems.

One is the problem of why things happen the way they do in your life. And you need to have an understanding, a belief about why things happen the way that they do. It doesn't have to be my belief. A lot of people are religious and that's how they have, that's called coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? Big why question. Some people are very scientific about that. Some people go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

That's a cry for meaning. You know, when you have a relative who's really, really into conspiracy theories on the internet, that's because they're looking for a sense of coherence because they're searching for meaning and they want meaning because they want to be happier. And so saying, you moron, look at the science. It's completely unhelpful. The way that you deal with this is offering them a better sense of coherence. How does that relate to a discomfort with uncertainty, though?

sometimes, whether it's conspiracy theories or religion or just looking for reasons why and how I ended up in this place, like, oh, you know, you get out the red string and you can, you know, like, you know, find the data points and connect everything and it makes you feel like, okay, I feel some sense of control or at least I understand the landscape because I'm just uncomfortable with the fact that, you know,

I can't make sense of it. Right. And absolute certainty, it turns out, is not necessary for a sense of coherence. So as a religious person, I believe that God has a hand in what's happening here on earth. I don't understand it. You know, the book of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible is all about not understanding pain and suffering, but that, but there, there is a logic behind pain and suffering. There is meaning. The book of Job is about suffering brings meaning and you don't understand why. That's the punchline of the book of Job,

but that's a sense of coherence without perfect understanding because remember, perfect understanding is a left brain thing. The idea that there is coherence and there's a source of coherence, that's a right brain thing. And it's okay.

You know, it's like, as I mean, I'm a behavioral scientist. I mean, that's where I live. And I believe that science, that there's a coherence behind science, right? But I don't understand at all. There's so much about neuroscience. I'm just a hack.

I don't understand anything. but I know that there is truth that lies behind it. I've studied mathematics extensively especially when I was in graduate school. There was so much math I didn't understand and I know that there was math explaining a lot of things that I couldn't get, but I knew it existed.

I knew it actually existed and that gave me a sense of coherence. So that's number one, is a belief that there is a structure and you have a family of what it might be. So the question is, why do things happen in my life? Like, that's a pretty,

that's a heady question. I mean, that's a profound. question and it's demanding, you know, rigorous honesty, I think, to really get to the bottom of it. Yes. So for somebody who maybe is unfamiliar with that kind of self-inquiry or probing, like what would be an example of that question? A lot of bad things are happening to me. Now, anybody who's been in recovery has dealt with us. A lot of bad things are happening to me. A lot of bad things are happening to me. I don't want to deal with why bad things are happening to me. I'm going to stay anesthetized.

so I don't have to deal with why bad things are happening to me. Breakthroughs happen when you confront the real reason that things are happening in your life and say, I want the truth. I want the truth. I'm going to get the truth and it's going to hurt. And that's okay. It's an amazing thing.

It's an epiphany is kind of how that works. And so that's what it comes down to. There's lots and lots of things happening. What do I believe? And I have an exercise in the book that gives you five different, possible explanations. Why? To get you started on it and put them in order because they're not mutually exclusive. And I'll give you an example of this. My dad was a head of Ph.D. in biostatistics.

He was a statistician par excellence. And he was super religious. My dad was a super strong practicing Christian. And he believed that that God controlled the universe. And one of the ways that he set up the universe was by creating random series of events that he built randomness into the universe. And he's, and I said, okay, you know, I'm being a, you know, I'm being a wise ass, dad. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You know, like adolescent. Yeah, well, what's a miracle then? And he said, a long tail event, duh. In other words, something is two or three standard deviations out on the, in the, in the distribution with the random variables. He said, it's so amazing. It's so sublime that God created the universe in this particular way, which says that there's not a, a, a distribution. discrepancy, behind the idea of a grand intelligence and the same time stochastic variation

and what would happen in your life. But understanding kind of how you see things is really important. Do you believe in willpower? Do you believe in will, free will? Do you believe in the essence of consciousness? These are all the kinds of questions that you actually get into. And guess what? Chat GPT can't tell you. Because all that will do is just exercise a couple of patterns in the left hand side of your brain. This is something to live with. Does it confuse people that you're a deeply religious person as well as a scientist? Sometimes, although there's a, traditionally, I mean, if you go back and look at Sir Isaac Newton, I'm no Isaac Newton, but Isaac Newton was super religious. If you look at Arthur Haley, I mean, these old school scientist from times back, you know, the early stages of the Enlightenment, they tended to be very, very religious people.

Charles Darwin was extremely religious. He was very orthodox in his Christian beliefs. And here's basically how they saw it. We see a tension between the creation and the creator, but there isn't any tension. If I were an art historian specializing in Picasso, you'd say it was a pretty crummy historian of Picasso. If I only understood Picasso's paintings, but knew literally nothing about Picasso and had no interest in Picasso whatsoever. Furthermore, if I said, Picasso doesn't exist, and you say, what are you talking about? Because I can't find evidence of them in these paintings.

I mean, I keep looking at the paintings. There's no Picasso in here. I keep reading Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling is not showing up in Harry Potter. That's the Pete Holmes joke. That's the Pete Holmes joke. Have you heard that joke? Yeah, yeah. The Picasso joke, actually, that was the example that my dad used to give.

You know, I grew up in Seattle. And the unique feature of Seattle is the space needle. You've seen it before, right? I was just there a week ago. Oh, really? Yeah. My hometown. And that was built it for the 1962 World's Fair,

before we were born. And the reason is because the theme of the 1962 World's Fair was man in space. Did you know that? I didn't. Yeah. And so the Space Needle was supposed to be sort of evoke images of space travel. And the big celebrity event at the opening of the Space Needle was Germont Titov, the cosmonaut, the first one to actually be in outer space.

and he gave this speech, spoke English more or less, and he gave this speech saying it was this total Soviet atheist line. I spent the whole afternoon with my telescope looking out into space and I saw neither angels nor God. And my dad said, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard because that's not where you're going to find God is by looking into the creation that God created. And that's the point.

There's the physics and there's the metaphysics. And you're just not a very good intellectual. if you're interested only in the physical side, but not the metaphysical side. The metaphysical side is the why of it all, and that's really, really where it gets interesting. To me, there isn't an inconsistency because I think the more steeped you are in science,

the more wild and magical and unbelievable everything gets, right? Which would lend itself to a deeper appreciation for just how insane. You know, it all is. Like, once you get to, yeah, okay, the big bang, but like, why the big bang? Like, what was before the, you know, all of that, right? Like, these unanswerable questions.

My dad used to say, the miracle isn't walking on water. The miracle's water. Right. But then you have to reconcile that with the scientific method, which is premised on the idea that everything is understandable through, you know, rigorous investigation. Right.

Right, and that is, all that is is a left hemisphere curve fit for the mysteries of the right hemisphere of the brain. That's what it comes down to. It's like I'm doing the best I can to apprehend in a complicated way the complexities of the universe. And that's a good thing to do. But if you get stuck in that, you can make the mistake of thinking everything actually is complicated. You know, by the way, that has led to misery and the death of millions of people. You know, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about scientific socialism. Their whole concept of society is that it's ultimately a scientific system and that we can solve it in the same way that physicists are trying to understand the natural laws of the universe, the natural laws of nature.

And people will follow absolute patterns because it's all just atoms. It's all just molecules, not appreciating the fact that people are complex. People aren't complicated in this way. And when you treat people like they're a machine, you will take away their humanity. will become ultimately alienated. And when they don't behave the way that you want them to, you gotta force them to do that. That's all of the mistakes and all the demagoguery and nuttyness of and tyranny of humanity has been based on that error.

So we've made it through one of the three big questions. Meaning. In Man's Search for Meaning. We talked about coherence, the question you have to ask yourself to get to the bottom of that. That brings us to purpose and a next question.

So purpose is often used interchangeably with meaning, but it's not the same thing. It's a component of meaning. Purpose is goals and direction in life. It's the why question of why am I doing what I'm doing? Not why do things happen the way that they do, but it's why am I doing what I'm doing? Why is ritual doing what ritual is doing?

It's the, why am I continuing to do this podcast? Why am I doing that? Why am I going and getting, why do I continue to live the life that I live? And if the answer is for no reason, for no reason, then all you're doing is actually going in circles. People, humans are made not for achieving goals, but making progress toward them. And there's a lot of research that shows that if you actually think that your happiness is going to come from getting to the finish line, you're going to be in a world of hurt. This is one of the reasons that Olympic athletes, they typically suffer a clinical depression after they win the Olympic gold.

it's because it's like it's going to be so good. But that misapprehends how the limbic system actually manages emotional systems. We have emotions for no other reason than they're an alarm system that we've ascertained a threat or an opportunity. Negative emotions say, look out. You've just perceived a threat. I'm going to give you negative emotionality so that you'll be averse to that threat. Fear, anger, disgust, sadness. Positive emotions, joy, interest, surprise, say, I've just alerted you to a possibility of

of getting a mate, having, you know, getting calories, survival, et cetera. And so I'm going to give you the incentive to approach is what it comes down to. If you think that your emotions exist to give you a permanently good day when you win the Olympic gold, when you win that race, when you get that billion dollars, when you finish what you're trying to start as a human being, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. What you need to do is to make progress in your life toward goals. But you gotta have the goals and that's purpose. It is an intractable problem because I'm sure every athlete who's striving for an Olympic gold medal will say, sure, I know that.

You know, deep down though, do they? You know, it's sort of like self-aware. It's again, a self-awareness thing. It's like, yeah, I'm aware that like life will continue after this, but still I'm going to go for this. And maybe, you know, on some level, like I do believe that, like, I do believe that, like, like my life will be permanently better. That's because Mother Nature is lying.

Mother Nature lies to us all the time. Mother Nature wants us to make the mistake of believing that when we hit the goal, all will be well, because that's how we stay in the hunt. I mean, if you actually figured it out, if you actually figured it out that you can't, it's not that you can't get no satisfaction,

you can't keep no satisfaction for more than like a minute, you'd stop trying and you'd starve to death. You'd get hunted down summarily by some wild animal. at least in the place to scene. And so the result is that Mother Nature, your ancestors passed on their genes

because they were strivers. And they were strivers because they thought that they would keep satisfaction from hitting that goal. And then when they didn't, they got back in the hunt again. But that's, and that's not the secret to survival,

but it is the secret to happiness is understanding that. One of the great secrets. But this is a Cohen-esque sort of thing because we need, we need goals. We need things that we're working, towards that we're engaged with. But we can't be caught up in the externalities of those and what those will do for us

when we achieve them or fall short of them. Yeah, the Buddhist solution to this is called intention without attachment. So the whole idea is in sailing, there's a concept. It's a very, it's a really common word in Spanish, El Rumba. Rumba means, in English, it's called the rum line. R-H-U-M, the rum line, which is the Euclidean distance between where you are and where you want to go.

You have to establish that such that you can make progress toward your goal. You can't start sailing. Maybe it's America. I don't know. Maybe it's India. So you need the rum line. That's a very important idea in life.

The problem is that if you're only attached to the end point, the last, the pin at the end of the piece of yarn, then life will become an exercise in futility for you. You need to have intention or you're not going to be to make progress, but you have to have detachment from actually getting there. It might be India. It might be Hispaniola, but I'm going in this particular direction so that I can actually make progress in my life. And that's the trick. That's the trick is actually figuring out how to have the

detachment to the goal while having intention toward it at the same time. So coherence, purpose, and now significance. Significance is, why does my life matter? Why does my life matter into whom? That's love is what it comes in. People who are lonely, they have a lack of significance. People who are bereft of a belief that there is cosmic love.

They really lack significance. And so this is one of the reasons that people who don't have love relationships in their lives who are too detached in no small part because of the misuse of technology, which is incredibly detaching for people. incredibly isolating for people. That's how it's one of the ways that that the misuse and overuse of technology when it isolates people, it erodes their sense of meaning because of this

last question, because of significance. If you, if I ask you, Rich, who loves you? What would you say? My wife and my kids. Yeah. My parents. Anybody else? Some friends. Close-knit group of friends. do you feel love of the divine uh that's a that's a that's a that's a trickier one i know i'm working on it's a hard one i know i know it's a hard one but the reason that that's an important question not that you have to have an answer is that living in the idea that you're a beloved child of the divine is a search for significance and therefore it's a search for meaning and you're not going to answer it because i defy anybody me included look i'm a lifelong religious believer, but, you know, it's like, show me proof that God exists and loves you.

Sorry, that's not the way it works. That isn't the way that it works. But that's what we need to be thinking about. You need to have people and entities and a world around you where there's significance, where your life actually matters. And that's the third part of meaning. I mean, this is the easiest on-ramp, it seems to me, for somebody who's struggling with this question of finding meaning in their life. Begin with who are the people that are important to you and the people for whom you are important. And making a deeper investment in that

is kind of an immediate catalyst towards meeting. Sure. That's the number one way that people start to find the meaning of their life. And when they're most lost is actually, it's one of the reasons that one of the great solutions to finding meaning of life is giving your heart away. That's one of the, which is the most complex thing.

It's like, again. So now we're getting into the escape hatch to the matrix. Yeah. And you've got like these very practical series of strategies to find meaning in your life. And the first of which, the very first one that you offer is this idea of giving your heart away. Yeah. Well, before that, of course, is clipping the doom loop. You know, you know, one of the things.

We talked about the tech and all that. Yeah. So when people are in recovery for substance abuse, they say don't fall in love with the person sitting next to you in a 12-step program. It's like, first, let's get clean. Yeah. First, let's... The hilarious thing in recovery, though, is that people come in and, you know, when there's a bit of a pink cloud and they have a taste of sobriety, they want to solve all of their problems at the same time. And it's like, let's just deal with this, you know.

Or like, or there's the case of the person who is still in some degree of denial and says, well, I don't, you know, like, yeah, it's not that big of a deal. I need to solve these other problems, not understanding that you can't get off, you can't even. begin this journey until you resolve that issue. You gotta get off the junk first. Yeah. You have to do that because that's what's actually hijacking. Remember, when you're in the doom loop, the solution to your problem is actually the cause

of the greater problems and you have to get out of the doom loop before you can actually live in a different way. That's what it comes down to. So once that's done, and then you're actually asking these questions, then the first very practical thing to do is to take the most complex risk of your life, which is to give your heart away. And we have every incentive.

in modern life in the complexified technologized modern life pursuant especially to 2008 to not give your heart away to to not take risk risk is the funniest thing because risk is not about being fearless risk is about being incredibly fearful but being courageous that's what it really comes down to and and that's a very right brain thing is to be I'm afraid I'm afraid this is scary this is dangerous and I'm going to do it anyway that kind of cognitive dissonance that tension is it leads to a whole a whole lot of a sense of meaning. And the most important one of those things is to do that thing that nobody really understands, which is falling in love.

Yeah. I heard you say to Tim Ferriss, like, if you find somebody and you fall in love with them, you should marry them. He was like, whoa. Not so fast. That's a little reductionist. I will admit that. Right.

But I think what you're getting at is an important point, which is the way that dating culture is now with scrolling and apps. It's just, it's infinite choice. And if you're, you know, if you're somebody who's in demand, there's absolutely no incentive to commit to anybody. And so you can just do this forever. But that is its own doom loop because it is a dopamine-inducing thing. Like there's always somebody better on the next, you know, if I just keep moving my thumb up and down. Yeah, the paradox of choice is an absolute left-brain complicated phenomenon where it's more, more, more, more, more.

And you're trying to basically solve a problem in a complicated way. if I actually look at enough people, then I'm going to be able to optimize this. And that's actually not how it works at all. That is not how it works. You know, that's not how love works. You're not going to suddenly say, you know, in the 343rd person you find

is you're swiping left or right that that person is your soulmate, that's not what works. I mean, it's like you and Julie wouldn't have been together under the current technological circumstances, probably. I never would have.

I mean, I married a girl who didn't even speak English. I didn't speak Spanish. There was something complex. I mean, if I'd set up a dating profile, I'd be like, yeah, I got to make sure this is this person, you know, like really likes my kind of music and votes the way that I do and, you know, likes to eat saracha, I don't know, you know, whatever. You know, I'd be trying to date myself and, man, that's not hot. There's nothing soulful in that at all. And I just ran into in a music festival

in the Burgundy region of France, a girl who'd smiled at me. And I said, I don't, God's talking to me. I don't understand, man. And we couldn't even talk to each other. And I, this is the before times. And I quit my job and move to Spain to see if I could learn the language and close the deal with this girl that I just had the premonition, right? That's pure right brain. At what point did she fly to, did she fly to New York, like not knowing if you were going to even show up at the airport? Like, there's no cell phones or anything like that. Like, this is, you know, you guys were way out on a limb. Well, yeah, she's a pretty entrepreneurial person.

Life is a startup, I guess, but putting capital at risk. But she had the sense, too, and we look at it now. And it's interesting because we've grown up together. I mean, I was 24 and she was 25. And, yeah, we met in Bijong at a wine tasting, and we had an interpreter, and we went out on a couple of dates, and I went home to tell my dad, I think I met the girl I'm going to marry,

and it's like, yeah, you're a hopeless romantic. And she came to visit me, I was living in New York City, and she came to visit me that Christmas. And she had been taking English lessons for six weeks since then or something. I don't know. We still couldn't talk to each other. But we were just in love and we didn't know why. And we didn't know why.

And the answer is because we were one pulsating meta right hemisphere is what it came down to. There was no, even if there were dating profiles, hers would have been in Spanish or Catalan. And mine would have been in English and we wouldn't have been able to even read them. is the whole point. And so when solving for love, you've already lost. If you're trying to solve for love, you've already lost, understanding and living in love and taking risks and having your heartbroken and trying again and learning, that's the way it's actually supposed to work. That's the way that we're, that's the way we're evolved. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a surrender. It's a form of

surrender. You know, you can couch it as risk, but you are wagering. yourself for another person and there's there's just no way to know if it's going to work out and trying to you know create a blueprint or a listical of pros and cons isn't really the way that it works on some level you take this incredible leap yeah totally and you know dating amps are a brand new thing 62 percent of long-term relationships now start on dating apps which is a lot they're getting better because now the really good ones are not trying to maximize time in app. They're trying to maximize time in person. Basically, it's actually how we meet each other.

But it's important to understand that human connection doesn't actually work that way. It should be nothing more than a tool of facilitation as opposed to a way to solve the problem. Much, much worse, of course, is algorithmic ways to strip love to its component parts. and I'm talking about pornography, of course. That's really dangerous. That's a really, really dangerous thing. And people get super addicted to it, and it changes the brains and the whole thing.

But most importantly, it renders them incapable of the right brain metaphysical experience of romantic love. Because it's reducing it to an algorithm, a digital algorithm, and stripping it down to one of its component physical parts. That's not how we're supposed to, that's not to be alive, actually.

If there's a silver lining in all of these technology advances that have us so hopelessly hooked, it's that the everyday average person has a better understanding of the nature of addiction than 20 years ago. For sure. Like it used to, oh, you're an alcoholic or you're a drug addict and, you know, like, I don't, you know, you have this disease. You're not like me. But I think, you know, addiction is a spectrum condition and we're all on the spectrum. and technology has really connected us with the idea of how easily our brains can get hijacked and we can, you know, start to cultivate these obsessive-compulsive behavior patterns that

we lack agency over controlling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, human ingenuity is an extraordinary thing how many problems we've solved, but also almost all of the problems that were little that we've turned into major crises. It has to do with wanting, learning, and liking, which is to say the neurobiology of addiction. You know, think about it. You know, it's like I have a little bit of pain will I've figured out that I can create an analgesic

by eating some bark off a tree. And then I made it better chemically by turning it into something a non-steroil anti-inflammatory drug and hey, guess what? Like a narcotic drug, an opioid drug. This is unbelievable. And now 100,000 people are dying a year of opioid overdoses.

You know, solving little problems and creating huge problems. And a classic case of this is... This is the human condition. I know. I mean, we just stumble into these things, you know, even with the best of intentions and create larger problems every single time. Yeah, you know, the classic case of this in technology is boredom. We need to be bored.

Our brains need to be bored. The default mode network of structures in our brain actually is completely necessary for finding and understanding who we are in the meaning of our lives. But it's uncomfortable, and Mother Nature doesn't care if it's uncomfortable because nobody could ever do anything about it. Again, you know, great-granddad was bored a lot. And he didn't say, boy, I sure love being bored behind the mule, you know, because my boring job is so meaningful.

No, but his brain was working in the way it was supposed to. And, you know, my colleague, Dan Gilbert at Harvard, have had him on the podcast? I'm familiar with him, though. Visionary social psychologist. He's the world's leading expert in boredom. You did these boredom experiments?

You know the boredom experiment? No. They're awesome. You bring a bunch of undergraduates into the lab because they'll do anything for 20 bucks, right? And you put him in a room where there's nothing to do. Just a chair, 15 minutes. You have to sit there, silence in a chair.

there's one possibility. It gives you a key fob and it has a little button. And if you press the button, you self-administer a painful electric shock, right? And he wants to know pain or boredom and a quarter of the women shocked themselves. Two-thirds of the dudes shocked themselves. Yeah.

Because men are way worse at boredom. And so they prefer, one guy shocked himself 190 times and 50. So he got thrown out of the experiment because he's a sick and twisted freak. So anyway, you get the point that that we solve the boredom problem. The screen, the small screen in your pocket is the solution to the boredom problem.

But you need to be bored, just like you need that headache, just like you need the discomfort and our relentless, ingenious search to wipe out the little discomforts from life lead to these problems. And what we're seeing today, the meaning crisis is just another example of the same thing we've always done. Have you seen this trend called Rod. dogging flights. Yeah, flights.

It's interesting that this is now like an act of courage and valor, you know, to like sit on an airplane and do nothing. Yeah. Terrifying. You know, like, oh my, you don't have, you didn't stack up your iPad with all kinds of movies or bring a bunch of books. But it is cool that like, yeah, I'm going to do this. Yeah.

I'm voting for my boredom because it's important. There's a performative aspect to it, I suppose. And at the same time, the bar's never been lower to kind of outpace your peers because everyone's so distracted. So if you can just purchase a modicum of, you know, kind of silence and serenity for deep work and focus,

you're at such an extraordinary advantage in comparison to everybody else. That's right. Now, when you gamify it, it may actually be a left-brain solution to a right-brain problem. Right, right. You know, one of my students, I mean, I teach at HBS,

so they're really, really competitive. They're awesome. They're super smart. And I'm talking about boredom and how the default mode networks works and we're, you know, working on a brain scans and the whole thing is like, I'm going to use my left brain to activate my right brain. I'm going to become great at boredom, you know. It's like I'm going to become the best at boredom, you know, for example.

And the whole point is that life is supposed to just naturally have boredom in it. And there should be these moments where of stillness. And to the extent that we've gotten out of the practice of that, We can't cope with it. We can't tolerate it. A tolerance for that has actually gone down. And as it has done so, of course, that collateral damage has been extensive. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

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of a website or domain. There is this thing that happens at out-of-town events. You're on from the moment you arrive until you leave, which is great, but it's also a lot. I hosted this great conversation with Sanjay Gupta about pain. And what I realized was that all the running around, the life, I found myself craving just space to decompress. Not a cramped hotel room, but actual space, somewhere with a kitchen where you can make your own meals, coffee in the morning, a living room where you can sit quietly, spread out a bit, let things settle before the next thing. These are things I look for when booking a stay on Airbnb.

And the thing is, when you're away on trips like that, your home is just sitting there empty when it could be offering someone else that same kind of refuge, that space to actually be present in a place instead of just rushing through it. So the next time you're planning a trip, consider hosting your home on Airbnb and giving someone else the comforts you look for when you travel. And the extra income, that can be put towards a future trip or a home improvement project. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. The other aspect of this giving your heart away idea isn't just expressing your love, you know, wagering your love, taking a risk on love. It's also taking the risk of

accepting love, receiving it. And, you know, that can be for a lot of people. And I would include myself in this, like more difficult than the giving piece. Yeah, it really is. And, you know, the greatest act of love that you can give somebody else is giving them an opportunity to be their best selves. And that means you have to, you have to take their love. You have to give them an opportunity to love you. The greatest act of selfishness is never allowing somebody to serve you, never allowing somebody to love you. And people do this all the time, you know, for all sorts of reasons. What is the source code behind the resistance to that? Part of it is, I mean, the source code behind the resistance to that is that the love that we're

expressing to other people is, I wouldn't say that it's performative, but I think it's pro forma. I think it becomes a common pro forma. It's the person that I, this is the person that I should be. It's love as duty as opposed to love as the code of metaphysics. Love is circulatory like blood. And if you stop it, because you give it but you don't take it, it coagulates. And it becomes unhelpful. It becomes dangerous, as a matter of fact. And the most selfish people that have ever met are the ones who don't allow themselves to be loved.

They're the ones who will act in a very kind way toward other people. But ultimately, they close themselves off. They're isolated from that. And that's a misunderstanding of what love actually is. Beneath the surface, I would imagine it's often driven by a sense of undeservedness or a fear, a fear of vulnerability. Like if I actually let this person know who I am, they would see how, you know, how terrible I am.

Or, you know, I can't possibly be honest with this person. So I can love them in my own way. And I suppose allow them to love me to some extent. but it's, you know, the, there's always like a veneer of separation. Yeah, I mean, let's get back to the strivers dilemma because nobody listens to the Rich Roll podcast who's actually not a striver. Let's just say that we have,

you're heavily over-indexed on striving individuals who are watching us, and I admire that. But there's a particular pathology that actually comes into this about love. I see a lot of people who are, you know, heavily workaholic. Workholism is a downstream pathology. behind it is success addiction. On your show, we've talked about it in the past. And that really comes from you.

You get dopamine from winning. Behind that is a pathology that largely has to do with the way that you're raised. So almost every striver, really hard-charging, successful individual, they have certain things in common in their childhood. And they look something like this. You get attention and affection from adults

when you do something well. A's in school, made the baseball team, first chair in the orchestra. And so you learn something from that, that love is something that's earned. It's not a grace. It's not a free gift freely given. No, no, no. It's an earned commodity.

And how do you earn it by achieving? So therefore, you're not a human being. You're a human doing. And that's how you go through life. A lot of people are like this. A lot of men are like this. A lot of men ruin their marriages by trying to earn their wife's love. You can't earn your wife's love.

It can't be done. You can only accept the grace of love freely given. And when you don't accept the grace freely given, and you keep trying to earn it with your achievements and your hard work and your personal merit and your responsibility, you drive her away. I'm a textbook case, Arthur. You know, you know that.

I know, but me too. I mean, when you say that, it's just like, it's like literally you're writing the biography of my life. I know, I know, me too, me too. And it's just, it's funny because, you know, and it's like I have all these conversations with very, very rich men, for example. And they'll say, they're their wife.

I it's like you you don't want me to work you know you want me to be around all the time but I notice you like what we can do with all this money and the wife doesn't have quite the words to say what's on her heart which is I'd take you over the money but if I can't have you all will take the money you see this is a this is a paradox that's a it's own kind of doom loop it's a catch-22 that we're actually and I was talking to a friend very very wealthy really really really super successful in this industry billionaire and And I said, because he grew up without nice things, as they say. And he knew when he was in his early 30s that things were going well for him.

He was going to get rich. He wasn't rich yet. But he knew he was going to get rich. And there's a really interesting thing. We're close. And I said, what did you think was going to happen and how your life was going to be better when you got rich? And he thought about it.

And he said, I thought my wife would love me. And I said, what happened? And he said, she didn't. Yeah, because that's not how love works. Can't be earned. It can't be earned. And again, you can know that, but you have to take the leap.

You must take the leap. And when you don't, it just means you're in another addictive cycle. When I think about my own relationship to this and kind of where I'm at now, I mean, going all the way back to the macro-nutrients of happiness, like I've got them covered except for the, enjoyment part. You know what I mean? Like I've got tons of meaning, you know, and I'm so grateful

and feel so privileged to have this vocation that that is personally meaningful to me and is meaningful to other people and it's deeply satisfying. And, you know, I get to wake up in the morning and, and sit down with someone like you and learn. Like, it's just, you know, I can't imagine anything better. But I'm definitely a workaholic. And even though I know, after, climbing many mountains and looking, you know, across the, you know, from the summit and seeing another mountain that I have to climb, I know that climbing another mountain is not going to do anything for me. It might have some kind of short-term benefit. But ultimately, and increasingly, it's a cross-purposes with solving my fundamental problem or my bigger problem, which is

finding a way to enjoy this life that I work so hard to create. Yeah. And I refuse to, you know, be a casualty of this dilemma. Like, I am so resolved to solving it. And yet I continuously get in my own way, you know, because I wake up in the morning and, you know, there's my wife or there's an opportunity to do something that I know will bring greater enjoyment into my life and will serve this goal that I have. But, you know, like, man, Arthur's going to be here at 11.

And like, I got, you know, I have so much prep I got to do, you know, like I can't let him down. And off I go. Yeah. And I'm, you know, here in the studio before the sun has come up. And strivers, one of the things that they have in common, and this is one of the characteristics, one of the diagnostic characteristics of the Stryver's dilemma, is if it doesn't put points on the board, it doesn't count. So, for example, a lot of strivers, they wear, they keep very close track of their biometric. you know, and one of the things they're looking at, for example, is something stupid like steps. The steps don't actually occur if they didn't count on your device.

Right. That's how a lot of people think, because it's the scoreboard mentality. It has to go toward a particular thing because- We're just collecting medallions all the time because that's the only means by which we feel worthy in the world because we don't, we're not deserving of love until we earn it. And even if it's just steps, anything that will, work us towards that earning mentality is going to be like an attractive lure that's hard to resist. Precisely. That's the human doing as opposed to the human being. That's what it comes down to.

So let's take the three macronutrients and let's kind of see it. Let's take stock here. Where one is the person with the most meaningful, meaningless life you've ever met, Friedrich Nietzsche, right? Ten is the person is Julie really, you know, the deepest meaning of of somebody you've ever met that you know personally really well. What's your meaning number? I would say that I'm, so Julie's the 10 and Nietzsche's the one. Well, I don't know about Nietzsche, because Nietzsche's life actually was pretty meaningless,

but the person who's really, really at completely struggling. Yeah, I mean, I would put myself maybe a six and a half. Like I'm more than halfway there. Right. Yeah, like in terms of happiness, like I think I'm at like maybe a seven and a half. I think when it comes to the enjoyment piece, like I'm at six and a half. Like, yeah, so.

So, meaning you're at a six and a half. I'm like dancing around it. Yeah, you know what I mean? I'm like right there and there's something that's preventing me from taking that risk. Yeah, yeah. Okay, what about satisfaction? Satisfaction is high.

I think you're probably at nine and a half. I mean, man, you're killing it. What's your enjoyment number? I mean, it ebbs and flows. like when the kids are home over the holidays, like it's, it was high. I had like some peak experiences, but I would say on a daily basis,

it's probably, you know, around four. Yeah, it's classic. That's classic, me too. Me too, I mean, it's the same thing. And one of the things that people who really struggle with enjoyment have in common is that early in life, they typically mistook enjoyment for pleasure.

Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon where you're hitting the ventral tegmental and ventral striatom areas of the limbic system of the brain. right and and the the secret of happiness is not the pursuit of pleasure that's the that's the that's the secret to rehab is the pursuit of pleasure pleasure pleasure is social and memorable meaning you move the experience of pleasure into the prefrontal cortex where you can share it and remember it and manage it you have to manage your own pleasure so they don't manage you that's how

enjoyment actually works you can't get enjoyment if you have the achievement mentality if you have the earning mentality because you'll always be going you're you'll always default to satisfaction. The striver will forego enjoyment eight days a week to get more satisfaction. Sure. It feels like an indulgence. I don't need that because I get so much satisfaction

from this other thing that I do that, you know, I wanna make sure that people I care about are happy. But it feels optional to me. Like I can go without it. Yeah. So let me tell you the story about this woman I interviewed for, The first conversation that you and I had when we met

was from strength to strength, a book that I wrote in 2022. And this first time we met, when I was interviewing people for that book, which is about how to be happier later in life, this woman who's a icon in finance, my age. And at the time, when I interviewed her, she was in her 50s. And she said, like, when you study happiness, people treat you like a psychiatrist, right? And it was like, and she said, I've got everything I wanted in life,

everything I thought I wanted in life. I'm so unhappy. And I'm like, talk to me. She said, I mean, I'm roommates with my husband. I have a cordial relationship with my adult children. I used to go to church as a girl and I haven't. I don't know why. She said, you know, I think my employees are afraid of me, you know.

I don't have any hobbies. My doctor says, I got to get to the gym and stop drinking so much. What do I do? And I said, I mean, sister, you don't need Harvard professor to tell you what to do. You just wrote your own prescription. I mean, go away with your husband, get to know your kids, take a souvenir in your company and step back, go to the, go to AA, you know, get into the gym, get your life together, right? And she said, I know, I know, I know. I said, so why not? Because that's the real question. Why not if you know what to do? Because Rich, you know what to do. Why not? And she said, I've always chosen to be special rather than happy. That's the curse of specialness. That's the striver's curse. Any loser can have a happy family. Any loser can have a good relationship. with his kids any but not everybody can have a blockbuster podcast not everybody can be an alter endurance athlete not everybody can do that and we humans we want to be special and we will

sacrifice our happiness on the altar of specialness all day long now most people they don't have their option they're in the option because the specialness doesn't come along so like okay i can't get rich i might as well just like go play ball in the park with my son that's the code that's the code because that's that's the happiness that comes. And so for the blessed few, you, for the blessed few who are watching us, who were anointed with specialness, the happiness actually has to come on purpose.

And that's the hard part. That's the hard part. It has to be an intentional decision made consistently in inconvenient circumstances. Yeah, but it turns out that there, believe it or not, there's a philosopher that has written about this. Have you read Joseph Piper?

No. He wrote the four cardinal virtues. He's a great 20th century German philosopher who did tectonically important work. I think probably his best book is called Leisure the Basis of Culture, where he talked about the fact that your understanding of yourself and our society's understanding of itself actually doesn't come from work. It comes from leisure, which is really, really weird and not an American way of thinking. We understand ourselves as Americans based on what we do. That's when you're at a party, you'll say, you'll say, my name is Rich Roll.

What do you do, Rich? And they don't mean, like, what do you do with your kids? They don't mean, what do you do with your heart? They mean, what do you do? It's like, well, I have a podcast. Oh, podcasting. How interesting. And then you go talk about your work.

He says that who you really are is based in what you consider to be leisure. And leisure is not chilling on a beach. It's not killing time. That's the paranoid fantasy of every striver is going to the beach and having nothing to do. Shoot me. And the reason that you do that is because you're trying to not make your wife mad

or whatever, something like this. Leisure is learning, loving, and worshiping. That's what to come, and becoming completely excellent at that. Learning something that, I mean, you prepped like crazy for this conversation, but this is your job. I know you enjoyed it.

I know you enjoyed it in its way, but ultimately it was an achievement motivation toward the learning. It's learning for the sake of learning. Then there's loving, which is working on a relationship, like a real thing. You know, I want to be better. I want to be a more elite husband. I want to be better at that. And last but not least is digging into the metaphysics of your life. It's finding the transcendence. Is finding is getting in touch with your soul by actually doing the work that actually comes into that. And when you take time to do that and it doesn't compensate you in in terms of money or power or honor of the world,

then your life starts to become enjoyable for the first time. I mean, it's pretty clear cut and you made a pretty compelling case. I'm trying to take my advice. Look, brother. I mean, how does it work in your life, Arthur? You have all the self-awareness, you're steeped in the science, this is something you're able to speak about, you know, just basically so spontaneous,

and eloquently. But we're all humans and we struggle our own ways. Like what comes up for you? So last year when we were in India together, that wasn't your job. But it was a deeply, deeply meaningful experience to you. And no small part because you were doing Peeper's understanding of leisure, which was incredibly productive without having it compensating you in a professional way. In other words, you sheared the enjoyment away from the satisfaction, right? And professional satisfaction, which is how you're really good at getting. And it was also something that I could share with my wife

that we could do together. Yes, which meant that you were working on the worship side and the love side and the learning side, all the same time, I was working. So I was working. Here's the problem. I instrumentalize all of these truths in a way that gets me to greater satisfaction.

It's the problem. It's like, it's just, it drives everybody crazy. Me and my wife and my kids, it drives them crazy because I can turn anything into a job. Yeah. Well, it's, yeah. The happiness protocols. The whole idea of getting into happiness to begin with

was an antidote to what you were doing before that made you unhappy. And then you, you manifested it, you know, turned it into this incredible career where you're in high demand. Like, if you're traveling constantly, and, you know, speaking, et cetera. And you're in your bliss.

Like, it's clear that you love it. And it's so meaningful for other people. But it means that you're not home, you know, that much. And, you know, there's challenges with that. I would have to crack the code of the, you know, the Peeper's Dilemma, the striver's curse. I have to crack this code. And that's my, by the way, this is my goal for the next five years.

That's what it's going to happen. That's how I'm going to fix it. five years. Are you with me? Yeah. How are you at saying no? I'm pretty bad. I'm pretty bad because you know if you give me enough time in advance and it's an opportunity to do something and I haven't done it before, if you say, you know, next February, right? Next, no, no, because that's too, that's too close. Next September, will you make balloon animals at my my, my nephew's bar mitzvetsva in Fairbanks? I'm like, Fairbanks in the fall. Sounds good to be.

I know. When it's far away on the calendar, it's pretty easy to say yes and difficult to say no. It is. And especially if you're, if you're an experience freak. New, new, new, new, new, new stuff, new stuff, new stuff, new stuff, new stuff.

And, you know, part of that is interesting because that's chronic seeking behavior. It's another issue when it actually comes to meaning, but all the macronutrients of happiness. You know, seekers really pride themselves and looking for truth, but there's chronic seeking behavior and what's really happening

I mean you've been outdoors a lot in your life and you know perfectly that if you're lost in the woods what you're supposed to do, stay still. Don't start looking because they're more likely to find you than you are to find them and yet what we do in our lives when we're lost is that we start wandering around

we start looking, looking, looking, looking and what you need to do is to stay still so you can be found. That's a metaphysical truth is what it comes down to And that's a really, really hard thing to do, is to be sought as opposed to seeking. You talk about meaning as this thing that we think we're searching for.

We're trying to get it. We're trying to find it. But it's much more a situation of it finding you. Like I've heard you talk about like, did Steve Jobs, you know, invent the Apple computer or did he discover it? You know, it's like that Elizabeth Gilbert idea, the big magic where the ideas are all out there. And when one descends upon you,

it's your obligation to express it. And if you don't, it goes back and somebody else expresses it. Like we're receptors, we're receivers. And I think about, like, my life doesn't lack meaning. But when I had this experience with back surgery, like it was very clear to see a path to meaning with it. Like, God, the enamel.

the ineffable, the universe, you know, choose however you like to, you know, couch your relationship with the mystical and spiritual was giving me a time out for a reason. It's like I resist sitting still. Like I want to be on the go. I want to strive. And God's saying enough of that, we already know what that got you. The real learning is what happens when you're forced to sit still with yourself. So I'm going to take that away from you. And, you know, I had the choice of being resists. resentful or just trying to figure out with my left brain how quickly I could get back to being that person I was before, or I could take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity to figure out how to become someone and something better and different in the future, rather than

returning to some version of a person I was before. And I've really done my best to try to lean into that and acknowledge that. And as a result, it's been a profound experience instead of an annoying setback in my life. Right. Right. Surrender is unbelievably powerful. This is an example, and you and I've talked about this before, of not wasting suffering.

Surrender is the way that you don't waste your suffering. So the math of suffering, suffering and pain are not the same thing. Pain is a is a physiological phenomenon. It's a neurophysiological phenomenon. It has a sensory and an affective component. The sensory component is, you know, is inflammation oriented ordinarily.

And the sense and the affective component is, I don't like it, but that's an actual part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior to singular cortex that processes this affective pain. It's all, you know, psychology is biology fundamentally. That's pain. Pain is involuntary. It happens to you.

Suffering is your struggle. that ensues, the struggle that ensues against pain. Struggle suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance to pain. Pain times resistance. If you go through your life trying to lower the pain, you're going to have tons of pain because pain's going to come your way and you're not going to learn anything. If you lower your resistance to pain, you will suffer less. Don't try to suffer less by having less pain. Try to suffer less by having less resistance to the pain and then you will learn. And the way to do this is through metaphysical acceptance of these things. It's interesting because you know you're in the zone of finding greater meaning in your life. This is how suffering relates to meaning

when your pain is high but your suffering is low. High pain, low suffering. And you see this with people who are deeply enlightened. You see this with people who have tremendous physical setbacks and problems in their lives. And they have a deep kind of peace about them because their suffering is low, even though their pain is enormous. I mean, my mother-in-law, and the last three years of her life,

I loved my mother-in-law. And I was very close to my mother-in-law. And she was bedridden, the last three years of her life. She lived in 93. And she was in a lot of physical pain and a lot of torment about that because she was a very active person. And yet her suffering was lower

than I'd seen it before. And the reason is because she lowered her resistance to it. She lowered it through acceptance. And that's what you were, I mean, I talked to you when you were in this process of recovery and you use the language of non-resistance. Non-resistance is stop resisting. When you're in pain, you have a bad breakup. Let's say people are watching us. A quarter have had a bad breakup in a recent memory.

Stop resisting the pain. Stop distracting yourself from the pain. Lean into the acceptance of the pain. The pain's still going to be high. but the resistance is low, and you will acknowledge that tremendous pain, but you'll have less suffering, and that's the source of meaning.

The interim step, is it not, for somebody who finds themselves suffering, is to understand that suffering is a teacher. Like, if you are suffering, there is a message that is trying to be imparted to you. Your resistance to the pain is like this, crucible of learning if you're willing to, you know, deconstruct that and look at that. I mean, all of my bouts with suffering in the past have been incredible catalyst for transformation.

And so I have a, you know, I have a relationship. Sometimes I get confused between pain and suffering, but, you know, I've gone through periods of pain. I've volunteered for suffering. I've suffered unnecessarily. But every one of those experiences in my life has been a catapult for growth. and transformation. So for the person who is in the midst of that, you know, it's very polyana to say, well, this is your greatest opportunity for great. You know, it's like, no one wants to hear that. But ultimately it's true. And people who have endured, you know, these

types of experiences, often in retrospect, you know, later will reflect back on that and realize like that experience is what set them up for the better life that they're enjoying now. No, the truth is that there's nobody watching us right now who, if I asked, when did you find, what was the greatest teacher of meaning, of the meaning of your life, would say that week at the beach in Neitha? Not one. No, they would talk about a hard thing, you know, when I was afraid, when somebody died, when somebody left me. And I found my sense of resiliency. I found out what I was made of. I was actually, I found that I had more courage than I thought I had. You know, that's what it comes down to. And it's, you know, people in, in recovery are really good. at this too because they stopped trying to lower the pain of life and they started lowering the resistance to the pain in life. And they've understood that the essence of suffering actually comes from the benefit from suffering actually comes from working the right-hand side,

not the left-hand side of that equation. Hence, why you say never waste your suffering. Never waste your suffering. If you waste your suffering, you're going to suffer, but you're just not going to get anything from it. There will be no growth from it. So you get two choices. Suffering with growth and suffering without growth.

That's like the old joke. or Chi-Chi, right? Where it turns out that Chi-Chi is just horrible torture before you're put to death. And so you obviously want death, not Chi-Chi. People who are actually trying to lower their pain, they're working at it the wrong way because they're gonna have the same amount of suffering, ultimately.

I see this, I've been seeing this a lot, you know, I have aging parents and the amount of suffering that is caused by the resistance to reality. is really painful to bear witness too. It really is. And that starts much earlier even than old age. You know, when people, you're an athlete, and you're not going to be as good an athlete at 70 as you were at 50.

And when you resist that, when you cognitively resist that, when you don't like it, when you spend a lot of time thinking about it, women really suffer a lot with age. And part of the reason is because the way evolution works, there's, you know, the perceived mate value plummetz beyond, you know, years of obvious years of reproduction. Not inherent dignity, obviously, and in happy marriages, the value doesn't decline at all, but the whole point is that women perceive this a lot. And so the result is that they suffer like crazy. They suffer a lot. And they try to lower the pain of that by trying to

continue to be young and continue to be young and continue to be young, as opposed to stop resisting the fact that aging occurs. But it's intrinsically impulse. I mean, the entire culture, you know, is informing that response. Absolutely. You know, absolutely. This is we hate to lose things. And so we, we, we militate against something that we lose, which is nothing more than trying to lower pain. One of the things that that you talk about is this idea of, you know, love is not an emotion. It's a decision. And I can't help but wonder if you think of meaning is the same way. Like, is meaning a decision? Like, for example, with my back surgery, like, I, like, I'm,

I assigned meaning to it. I don't know that it inherently had meaning. I inferred meaning from it and I invested in that meaning. And that was very much on some level of conscious decision, I suppose. So if somebody is struggling with this idea of finding meaning and they're like, yeah, I can invest in my relationships or I can do these things.

And Arthur's got all these different threads I can pull and avenues I can pursue. But fundamentally, there is a degree of choice involved. Is there not? There is choice to invite meaning. Meaning can't be pushed. To get meaning directly

is like pushing on a string, which doesn't work. What you need to do is to create the conditions such that meaning can find you. And that's really what we're talking about. Giving your heart away allows meaning to find you,

asking the deep questions, pursuing beauty in your life, not resisting your suffering. What these things do is they make it possible. It's one of the things I talk about a lot And I talk about this book is the idea of the pilgrimage. You know, the pilgrimage is one where you think you're looking for meaning

and what turns out that what you're doing is you're putting yourself in the position where meaning can find you because you're tired and you've got blisters and you're broken down and your defenses are low. And that's when meaning actually finds you, which is one of the reasons that every religious tradition has always had pilgrimages involved in it, where you walk and walk and walk and walk. I'm going to go find this thing and then it turns that it finds you and it's different than what you thought it was.

Are you still doing the Camino annually? No, I've done it. I did it in 2019. It did in 2021. And I think I'm going to have to have my back fixed before I do it again. I just walking along. We're going to have to talk. But, you know, there's a lot that a lot of things that I do.

And, you know, one of the reasons that I wrote this book about meaning is because I really wanted to help my students. I wanted to help people who are struggling with this, but I want this for me to. I want this for me too. I want to make sure that my meaning hygiene is appropriate, that the ways that I'm living my life make it continuously possible that the meaning of my life will be present to me

and will actually find me. I'm imagining the parent who's watching this or listening to this who has a young adult who's struggling right now. Perhaps they're languishing or there's some indicia of, you know, some mental health stuff going on. They're noticing their child is disconnected

or, you know, in their best. bedroom, plane video, whatever it is, right? Like, this is the epidemic. I mean, every parent I talk to talks about this. What is the message A to the parent and then B, if you were talking directly to the young person? Yeah, so to the parent is, this is why it's happening, right?

It's not because the world is worse. It's not because the economy is more oppressive. Those things might or might not be true, but all of the explanations that the world is giving, you of these exogenous circumstances that life is actually harder. That's not why. Here's the reason why. It's because the circumstances under which your child is neurologically getting through the world have changed. And that's a problem. Then the second point is how do you help the child? And the way to help the child is not walk in and say, I just read this book by Arthur Brooks.

And there's going to be some changes and tech policy around this house. And by the way, when your kids are little, you should have some changes in tech policy. You know, your eight-year-old shouldn't have an iPad. It just shouldn't have an iPad. And should not have, you know, an iPhone alone in the room, which is predators climbing out, you know, out of the screen. I mean, there's all kinds of common sense that goes into this. And parents don't want to fight those battles where they need to.

But here's how I recommend this. And people ask me this all the time. It's like, this is good information. How do I get my young adult child, my teenage kid, to actually pay attention to this? And the way to do that is to say, I'm learning about this thing, and it's having a big effect on me, and I would really like to know your opinion about this as well.

Would you watch this and tell me what you think? Would you read this? Can we read this together? Because I think I would understand this better with your perspective as well and learning together. In the event that the kid is not receptive to that, which I imagine is probably more often than not the case, from an emotional point of view,

how do you support the child? Like, how do you show up for that kid just on the daily so that you're kind of in the solution? And, you know, at a minimum, not making things worse, but actually, you know, kind of promoting a new trajectory without being the overbearing parent who's telling the kid what to do.

Yeah, for sure. The answer is modeling. The best predictor of your kid looking at her, his phone during dinner, is you looking at your phone during dinner. it's actually doing the things that we talk about. It's funny because people often ask me, how do I get my kid to grow up and go to church?

How do I get my kid to grow up and go to the synagogue or be it observant in the faith? And the answer is have them see you impeccable in your metaphysics. The number one predictor of a kid growing up and being religious is seeing their father being religious. It's a funny thing. And there's a reason for that.

That's generally in a traditional nuclear family. This is not everybody's family, but in traditional nuclear family, the dad is the physically most powerful person that they've ever met. I thought my dad was like nine feet tall. And I remember asking my brother, do you think he could lift the corner of the house?

And my dad would never have been on his knees before anybody, but my dad was on his knees next to my bed saying his prayers every night. And for me, that's what I meant to be a man. That's what I meant. And so for me to grow up and be a man is to be on my knees before the divine. Because that's what I saw. The best way that you can actually bring more meaning to the life of your child is to invite more meaning into your life.

To practice the hygiene that I'll actually lead to it. That's the way. Put on your own oxygen mask first. Nobody wants to have a dad whose life lacks meaning. Nobody wants that. that that's how we bring this to the people that we love the most is by bringing these things into our own lives.

And along the way, reserve judgment of the child. Of course, because it's a struggle. They're playing out their life in the context of circumstances they didn't choose. And I think that the solution is always more love. You know, it's more love. It's like what the Dalai Lama said.

Like I'm wearing, see this red? This is from that experience. Yeah. Yeah, it's just. you know, the answer is always more unconditional love. Yeah, of course. It's, of course, you know, it's funny because my brother gave me a great advice. He had kids, kids before I had mine.

I said, so what do you do? He says, don't freak out. Don't freak out. Keep them close. Don't freak out. And thank God, because there were freak out moments in my kids' lives. And there's no reason to withhold love. There's never a reason to withhold love.

One of the things that I realized in reading your book and going through all of these pathways towards meaning is that they also are pathways towards enjoyment. Like the things that I am avoiding or resisting doing that could bring my life greater enjoyment are also the same things that contribute to meaning. Like it's in the Venn diagram, there's a significant overlap there. There is indeed.

You know, like surrounding yourself with beauty, like awe and wonder. Right. Not suffering. Not suffering. Giving your heart away, of course. And there's obviously we're sort of giving your heart away is not actually that enjoyable a lot of the time. There are certain parts of it that are enjoyable. But it requires an investment of time and attention. Yes. Yes, indeed. Yes indeed. You can't, you can't be working while you're doing that. No. No. That's right. And ultimately in the long run, it is it is a pathway to enjoyment. Is it not? Ideally, ideally, there's

a lot of enjoyable things about I have about my marriage, for sure, for sure. The one I want to drill down on before we conclude today's conversation is this idea of transcending yourself and going from, you know, the me, me of it all to making your life about something bigger than yourself. Yeah, yeah. This is the ultimate kind of catapult to meaning. Yeah, yeah. Transcendence is funny because, you know, there's a lot of lot of literature, a lot of behavioral science out there that shows that people who have a strong religious tendency, they tend to be happier. They tend to be happier. And the reason is because religion and spirituality are a real source of meaning, but it turns out it's not religion per se.

It's transcendence, which allows you to stand in awe something greater than yourself. So, Ryan Holliday, who's phenomenal on stoicism, of course, he gets tremendous transcendence. He transcends himself, self-transcendence from studying historic philosophers. I know people who do that, who in participating in extreme athletic activity, get this. I know people who study the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, people who do Vapassan meditation. But the whole point is you need to get out of the psychodrama of your life. Otherwise, I mean, it's me, me, me, as you say, it's my job, my car, my lunch, my money, my, it's just rich, it's just so boring and it's so terrifying and terrible and tedious all the time. And yet, Mother Nature wants you. I mean, look, think of all the

dreams you had last night. You were the star and all of them. You know, Mother Nature wants you at the center of the psychodrama because that gives you a better likelihood of surviving and passing on your genes, but it doesn't do anything for your happiness. You need to be in what William James calls the I-self instead of the me-self, looking outward, looking upward, as opposed to looking inward. And you need ways to do that every single day. The distinction between looking outward and looking upward, looking outward, an example of that would be investing yourself

in the betterment of other people, right? Or committing yourself to a cause or just carrying yourself with a spirit of contribution, going into every room looking to contribute rather than to extract. whereas the looking upward, that's the cultivation of a relationship with the divine and an investment in the mystical and ineffable. They go together in a lot of ways. You know, what you find is that when people really believe it living up to their spiritual potentialities, that they tend to serve others more to.

And what you find is that these two things are multiplicative. Serving others and developing your spiritual self, these things go together really well. They're beautiful things that actually go together. And they enhance each other in their ability to get you out of the me self, get you out of the mirror and thus help you find meaning, help you find through transcendence. Yeah.

These are all vehicles for surrender, acceptance, and humility. Like it's a surrender of the ego. It's a humbling of your high sense of self. It's a disabusing of your self-obsession. And it's an acceptance that you're not the center of the universe. Right. You remember when we were with the Dalai Lama, and I don't know if this registered, but he talked about a photograph that he saw from 1969 photograph.

It was called, what was it called, Earthrise. It was that photograph that an astronaut took from the surface of the moon of the Earth. Now, for us, like, huh, interesting. That was mind blowing in 1969 because nobody had ever taken a picture of the earth, not on earth, ever. First time ever. And it made people like, whoa, that is like crazy stuff. And the Dalai Lama said that he found that a very reassuring photo. I was like, what?

Because he said it reminds me that I'm so small and that gave me perspective and peace. It's funny. My university, most universities, the most popular class or one of the most popular classes for freshmen is astronomy one. And they're not astronomers, like English majors and communications majors, but they love the astronomy class. So I asked a student, why do you all love the astronomy class so much? She's like, I don't know, but you know, I go in on Thursday morning. And, you know, I just had a big argument with my mom. And I think my boyfriend's breaking up with me. And I think I got a B in a class, which at Harvard is like a big deal. And I go into astronomy and I come out an hour later and I realize I'm a speck on a speck on a speck. Mother Nature wants you to be huge, but you need to be small. You need to get smaller.

It's what it comes down to. And then you'll have perspective. As an intellectual exercise, like we've all seen the videos and we're telescoping out and further. And we're getting smaller and so you're like, wow, that's like, we are just nothing. And then we just immediately snap back

to self-obsession and being the main character in the universe. That's right. Then you look at your text messages and you're like, can you believe she said that? Or whatever. Why is it, like, is there a neurological explanation for why we default to this? Yeah, for sure, because virtually all of our attention has to be focused on what we individually are doing. So our self-awareness is at the cognitive center of all the things that we do.

Because if we had a natural tendency to not be at the cognitive center of what we do, we'd get in a car crash within the first 30 seconds of getting behind the wheel. You know, this is absolute self-defense. But once again, Mother Nature could not care less, whether it makes us happy or not. Because happiness isn't actually a measure of or a means of evolutionary fitness. You consider the Dalai Lama to be a mentor. Yes. If not, you know, the mentor of you.

How many times have you visited him or spent time with him? For over the last 12 years, many times. Several times in the States and many times it is home in Aramsala. Yeah. And what would you use? say is if you had to synopsize or drill down on the most impactful wisdom that he has shared with you that has had the most has had the most meaningful impact on your life what would that be he's taught me um so many things so many things that i carry with me and so many things that i that i love he's he's helped me

to be a better person he's helped me to be a better catholic he told me i want you to be a better Catholic man. He didn't try to bring me into his own religion, into his own philosophy even. He wants me to be the best person that I can possibly be. And when he sees me every time he reminds me of a lot of different moral lessons that he's emphasized over the years. And the one that always reminds me in the vein of what we're talking about right now, he tells me again and again, he told us when we were there to remember that you're one of eight billion. Remember the eight billion in your one. Because in doing that, then your uniqueness is not diminished in any way, but your sense of actually the part that you play in the world can be emphasized.

And that's the sort of emphasis that we actually need to be the happiest person, people that we can be and to serve the world in the way that we possibly, the best way that we possibly can. The cynical part of me thinks, this is obvious to all of us. Where's the profundity in making that statement? Yeah. Most profound things, the most profound things in life are the things that you knew to be true, but that you forgot.

That's where real profanity really comes in. There's nothing very profound about something that is completely new to you. It might be insightful, it might be important, it might be profitable, but there's something that you know to be a deep truth, but you're off track because you forgot it. The reminder of that is the most profound thing

that you'll ever hear. What is your daily practice look like in terms of nourishing your spirituality and making sure that all of these these areas of life that are contributing to the macronutrients of happiness are being served. I have to be really disciplined and rigorous about it because I know myself.

You know, my wife doesn't have to. My wife is a, she's spiritually, deeply adept. And she can have what looks to me like a complete mess of a schedule and still have it really all together and the important, I can't do it. I can't be done. I'm relating to that.

Yeah, I can't do it. And so, because my wife will just naturally do the important things. She does the important things. But for me, I practice the Brahma Mahorta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time. That means I get up before dawn. And there's a lot of neuroscience behind why that's good for your performance and creativity and your focus, et cetera, but also for your happiness. I exercise every day because that's really an important way for me to manage my high level of negative affect. A very high negative affect. Negative affect means negative natural mood that I experienced, which is nothing dangerous, but I'm highly hypomanic,

meaning I have high positive and high negative affect. And so my bigger challenge is not getting happier. It's getting less unhappy. And the first thing that you can do to manage high negative effect is to pick up heavy things and run around first thing in the morning. That's the best possible way to do it. And then I follow that on every single day with spiritual practice. I go to mass every morning. And so, you know, Catholics are, it's a Catholic. That's wild. I mean, you've told me that before, so I've heard it. But, you know, that is, that's a, that's quite a commitment. Yeah. That's a rare, that's a rare thing. It's, it's, there are probably four percent of Catholics do that, four percent of practicing Catholics do that. But, but again, in a way, it's not, it's not that

hard because Catholicism is like Starbucks. It's a highly uniform product that's easy to find in its way. But also this is deeply, deeply, deeply spiritual experience that's remarkably the same from day to day that reminds me for half an hour a day, at 6.30 in the morning, who I am. That's who I am. That grounds me to my relationship to the divine. Every day, every day, every day. It's a little window onto the metaphysical every day.

And then, you know, that I tightly control my diet and exercise. I tightly control it because I understand biologically, actually how it's going to affect my mood, how it's going to affect my productivity, how it's going to affect my focus, etc. and my career, my work, my vocation, my calling is all about ideas. It's all about bringing ideas that matter to as many people as I possibly can. And I can't afford to, and again, this is a strivers thing to say,

but I don't feel like I can afford to lose a day that I actually have when there's ideas to be. Yeah, that's, I know, I know. That's dangerous out. I know. Danger. Blink, blink, blink. I got it. Yeah, I know.

And so I design my consumption around that about. what I eat, what I drink, when I consume caffeine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I finish up the day looking at the divine as well. I pray the rosary with my wife. That's a thousand-year-old ancient Catholic meditation, very, very much like the Eastern meditative practices. And it's repetitive prayer, repetitive prayer,

contemplating certain scenes from the life of Christ, which we do together because we're wiring our right hemispheres together as an intended of the divine. We believe that our marriage is an intended to God. I believe that if I deny my wife, my love, I'm denying my wife God's love and vice versa. And so that's the stakes, man. That's the stakes. Wow. That's intense. Well, we're all a manifestation of God, right? To love your beloved is to love God. And to be loved by God. Yeah. That's what it means to love and be by, see, God is made manifest

in the loving relationships that we have on earth. This is one of of the reasons that people are so funny that, you know, they'll say, you know, why do people get so religious when they have kids? And it's not because it's a good way to set down a set of rules. That's, that's not it. It's that when you first, you remember this, when you first have children, and they're so rotten, they're so difficult, and they go to sleep and you're sitting in their room while they're asleep and they've got those little red cheeks from having been rotten all day long. And you're like, I just, I love him so much. I love him so much. Say it to my little son Carlos, Carlos,

was all with a troublemaker, I love him so much. And then I would say, and that's how God feels about me, because I'm lying in my bed and God is saying, Arthur was so rotten today, but I love him so much. The whole point is that the love that we have on earth is a taste, it's a foretaste of the divine love that we can all experience. That's my belief.

And so to not practice that, to not practice divine love and the model of divine love on earth, it's a, it's malfeasance, on my part. And the last thing that I do is I go to sleep, there's an Eastern Orthodox practice, the Eastern Orthodox monks, they have a prayer. And the further east you go in Christianity, the closer you get to Eastern religious practices, the more you get toward carmic religious practices. Not to say the Karmic religious doctrine, but the practices are very similar. The Eastern Orthodox monks have what's called the Jesus Prayer that they'll pray again and again

and again. And there's a very famous book called The Way of a Pilgrim about, just a mendicant beggar walking around praying this Jesus prayer because a monk told him that he should pray the Jesus prayer 10,000 times a day. That's all he had to do with his life. Here's the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner. And you pray the first half as you breathe in and the second half as you breathe out and then you link it up with your heart. And then it becomes your life. That prayer becomes your life. The last 15th, I've gone to sleep praying that prayer every night. Just the last thing on my lips.

Do you know this therapist called Phil Stutz? Yeah, yeah, famous, because he had the documentary made about him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's been on the show a couple times to become a friend, and Julie and I have gone to see him. And, you know, this is a guy who specializes in treating strivers. Right.

Like his whole career has been, and he has this operating philosophy that one of the primary reasons why, you know, these super successful people are so unhappy is because they deny three unassailable truths that life is, I have it on my wrist. Pain, the need for constant work, and where does it say here? They deny pain.

Well, basically, the reason for the unhappiness is that there is a belief that if they reach a certain level, they won't have to suffer pain, they won't have to deal with uncertainty, and they can retire from having to do any work and work defined broadly, right? And so disabusing people of this, there's always going to be pain, there's always going to be a need for more work, and life is uncertain. And so once you accept that, surrender to that, there's a liberation. and a freedom.

Yeah. But he's also, I mean, he's kind of an iconoclast, but he's a profoundly spiritual person. And he essentially, like he understands my wife and me and he basically, he's almost like a mind reader, like he can read energy and he just, he just knows people, you know, incredibly well. He's a huge crystallized intelligence, unbelievable pattern. And he just, he just said to me, the solution that you're looking for, he goes, it's all about your wife. It's all about you getting more connected with your wife and then the two of you together connecting with the divine,

like in his own words. But he's essentially saying a version of what you're telling me. And he's like, this is the path that you have to walk. Right. If you want to liberate yourself from. She's been put in your life for a reason. Yeah. Look, Rich, she's your guru.

Julie's your guru. You have to be close to your guru. There is no other way. She's been put on earth as your channel to the divine. I know it's true. I know it's true. And I have some work to do, I suppose. Yeah, for sure.

We do. Look, this is why we get 90 years. This is why we get all this time. You know, if you were 10 years old and enlightened, it would be a different matter. But we don't get that. Look, there's a reason in the karmic religions that they talk about that we get all these years because we're trying to make progress. And if you were at 59 years old, you were there already, it means it's time to die.

And it's not time to die yet. It's time to live right now and to learn more. Look, I write books about this stuff and I struggle with it. I struggle with it. And that's actually the reason I write the books about it is because it's part of my pilgrimage. This show is your pilgrimage. That's what it's really all about. And you're making progress.

Like, I've known you for a bunch of years. I've seen progress. And that's a beautiful thing. I appreciate that, man. Let's close it down with just a few thoughts for the viewer or the listener to synopsize this whole idea of meaning, how to capture more of it and engender your life with the beauty that it makes available. Your life has meaning. It does. Can you articulate it?

Probably not. That's fine. But you get the opportunity to go in search of it to, to, in so doing for it to find you. And when it does, the richness that your life will have will be beyond what you could have possibly imagined. Do the work to find the meaning of your life and the payoff will be something

that will be made manifest in a life that will lift other people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, which is ultimately why I believe we're put on earth. I love you, Arthur. I love you, Ruthven. Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing today. I appreciate you.

Yeah, likewise. All right. Will you be my accountability partner? Yeah, if you'll be mine. Okay. All right. Until next time. Thank you. Bye, right. Peace.