I want to talk today about finding meaning by being bored because your overall life kind of boring I hear that a lot people who say to me I feel like I'm living a simulation of an ordinary life And it's not that interesting and you don't like it Neither do I I'm waiting and I remember when I had this epiphany about this that it was the thing I at least liked in my life We hate a low sense of self-autonomy We hate that external low physical control. We want to be in control mother nature doesn't care She doesn't care if you don't like it There's all kinds of things that you don't like that mother nature allows your preferences are not her concern And you know what I'm telling you here, right? You can only find the meaning of your life if you allow yourself to be bored Hi everybody welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to Lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love And this is a show about how to do that using science I want to share these ideas with you because I need you in the movement with me lifting people up All around you I want you to become a teacher of happiness and this is a show dedicated to help you do so starting with yourself This is a show that we've been working on every week for a long time And it's really picking up a great audience thanks to you You're recommending the show to a lot of people. I know it's word-of-mouth is how it all works And and this week I actually want to start on a multi-week set of episodes dedicated to my new book The meaning of your life finding purpose in an age of emptiness. You can see it right here It drops on on March 31st I hope you'll pick up a copy or I don't know get a couple thousand copies and give them to your closest friends And I want to talk about the book and what's going on in the book about the problem of finding meaning in ordinary life This is like everything else my opportunity to talk about what I think is the biggest problem But also as you know if you're somebody who regularly watches the show This is the opportunity for us to do something really great for the world Because in every problem you find the biggest opportunities if you didn't have any problems There wouldn't be any opportunities Weakness is strength. That's one of the most important principles of behavioral science But it's also a common sense principle about life on earth So if you see a meaning crisis the meaning of life that's an opportunity for you to find yours and help other people find theirs as well So I'm going to do a few episodes on exactly that about the book itself now I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about this show this episode this series as always So too please do feedback Send me your thoughts at office hours at orthobricks.com the email and it's listed right below me here And don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple or on YouTube or wherever you're watching us or listening to us here today Also because I want to talk a little bit more about that book and you might want to learn more about it Please go to the book's website the meaning of your life.com the website that's appearing in front of you right now That's all one word the meaning of your life.com to learn more about a big event a virtual event that you can actually attend From your house. I'm hosting that on March 27th. So you can go deeper on this topic. It's completely free And you can learn a lot more from the book itself the meaning of your life I want to talk today about finding meaning By being bored boredom is something that I've studied in off a lot It's a very big area of interest to both psychologists and neuroscientists And you don't like it Neither do I. I'm going to talk to you about whether you like it or not you need it and how to incorporate it more seriously as a part of your Meaningful life how to make it not just easier, but something you can potentially look forward to I want to talk about reengineering certain parts of your life that include what you might have thought was boring But in point of fact Is something that will help you understand who you are as a person now. Stay tuned for a lot of reasons for that Let me start by by telling you how I started thinking about this particular topic He goes way way before I was a behavioral scientist as some of you may know because you've been watching the show or have followed my work for a while I started off my career as a musician When I was 19 I left college because that was a classical musician that's all I wanted to do and I didn't need a bachelor's degree To be a classical musician when you're auditioning for an orchestra and nobody's asking where you went to college And I went on the road. I actually didn't start with an orchestra. I started playing chamber music I was playing with a brass quintet. I was on the road about seven months a year starting when I was 19 So I am an inveterate road warrior these days. I travel 48 weeks a year for touring and speaking and media And and that just started when I was a teenager. It's become kind of a way of life Happiness is the open road. I really love it as a matter of fact. I don't hate courtyard marriots I don't hate airports. I don't. But there is one thing that I don't like about all this travel that I've been doing since I was a Lad since I was a Classical musician all the way until today Decades ago. I realized I hate waiting I waiting and I remember when I had this epiphany about this that it was the thing I at least liked in my life We didn't have any money when I was a when I was playing chamber music and traveling around and I was actually on tour with the great jazz guitar player Charlie bird Who introduced boss an nova jazz to american audiences. We were someplace north Dakota or something Which is beautiful by the way, but I was eating at a Howard Johnson's for those of you kids That was a chain of of motels and restaurants real popular back in the day And they were just basically diner food at the Howard Johnson's and I had to eat my lunch for my dinner whatever it was I was sitting at the Howard Johnson's and I realized You know bugs me about this is not the fact that I'm going to eat, you know A grilled cheese sandwich and some chili or whatever I was eating which I wouldn't need today The problem is I come in and I sit down and I wait And I wait for somebody to give me a menu and then I wait for somebody to ask me my order Then I wait for my food and then I wait for my check and I'm just waiting the whole time and it drives me crazy I don't like it as a matter of fact So what can I do to change all that and I started putting together routines in my life that would make it easier I was start walking into restaurants And I would order on the way in before I even sat down and then when I got my lunch I would ask for the check with my lunch because I was trying to Develop all these sort of engineered protocols to it Until at one point Had kind of an epiphany That the way to solve that problem because you're never going to solve the problem of waiting You're never going to solve it because you know you get away for your flight Sorry, you can't do anything about that you get away for your groceries. You're going to wait The way to actually have it not make me bitter was not to change the world. It was to start changing myself I needed to change the inside not to change the outside world. Now there's lots of things that you can do and I still do But the truth is I became more comfortable with the thing that was bothering me the most about waiting Which was my my boredom And what I did I realized that that level of comfort with what I had to endure Actually led to big happiness results in my life That's what I want to talk about today Because when I became more comfortable being bored I didn't know it at the time. I do know now. I was using my brain in such a way that I was exercising the parts of my brain that I need To ascertain the meaning of my life And that might be just what you need as well. Okay, now the problem with waiting as I mentioned just a minute ago Is when you're doing nothing Because there's nothing occupying you it's unbelievably boring and we hate boredom now I don't have to probably convince you of that, but of course Behavioral scientists have tested the are a version of boredom how much we actually don't like boredom Which is to say doing nothing or using our time Unproductively where the locus of control is outside of ourselves. We hate it My colleague at Harvard Dan Gilbert. He's done these great experiments You know where people have to sit in rooms and and do absolutely nothing and there's a bunch of experiments That are pretty interesting where people are in the experiments usually undergraduates because they'll do anything for 20 bucks They'll bring him into the laboratory and they have to watch movies and they they're three kinds of movies sad movies Neutral movies or boring movies. Okay, so you know Some tragedy or or something that it's just a basic adventure or maybe it's like a you know a French art film Which is you know known for being Really really boring. Sorry to all my French art film friends out there But anyway, and then what they had was they had this like key fob or they could press a button and and self-administer an electric shock Kind of painful as a matter of fact I don't I do not know how they got through that through an ethics committee to the university But the people watching the films would occasionally shock themselves and they found that they shock themselves a lot during the boring films In other words, people prefer pain to board them. You're sitting there and oh, man Movies like just not moving. It's like Hey, there we go What they found also in in in a number of these self-shocking experiments is that on average about 25% of women shock themselves And about 2/3 of the dudes. So that's another problem the difference between men and women in their propensity to choose pain over boredom Maybe that explains a lot in your life. I'll put in the show notes some of these interesting studies in here There's one that was in psychiatry research in 2016 self-inflicted pain out of boredom kind of sums it up But you can actually see how they how they did the experiments. They're really well done. They're nice So why why why would they do that and the answer is we hate a low sense of self-autonomy We hate that external look as a control. We want to be in control When something else is controlling us it's inherently unpleasant and so the result of it is that we want to take
back control and shocking yourself as one of the ways that you can take back control about what's happening. When you're bored, it's like waiting for a delayed flight and you all know how that feels, that long delayed flight and you're waiting and every 15 minutes to give you an update and they're like, yeah, the inbound flight's been delayed and then there's a mechanical and we have to change out the crew or there's a flight attendant who has a conducting flight and isn't getting here and it's getting later and later and later and there's nothing in this kind of helpless feeling and so you fritter away your time on your phone but you hate it. Don't tell me you love playing solitaire on your phone, you don't. You're doing it to distract yourself from what? From feeling frustrated and bored because the boredom itself is actually unpleasant. That's an interesting thing also that here's one of the great paradoxes is how boredom changes our time perception and there's a lot of stuff I've actually written, done work on our perception of time. When you're not engaged in something and you pay attention to time, time feels like it slows down. I mean, time doesn't slow down, obviously. When you're not paying attention to it and you're doing something that's really entertaining, time feels like it goes by really quickly. In the extreme, this is what the great social psychologist Micheich Xieq sent Micheich wrote in his book flow. Flow is when hours turn to minutes and the reason is because you're losing yourself in a particular task. You all know how that feels. For me, it's when I'm writing and I'm in the zone and it's like, wow, four hours, especially if I set it up right with my morning protocol to optimize my brain chemistry. Go back to that episode if you want. My six-part morning protocol, that's one of my earlier shows. I got a million and a half views or something. People really wanted to know what those protocols were. What it does is it sets you up neurochemically so that you can get more easily into a flow state and that's really, really, highly pleasurable. We're talking about the opposite here, not the flow state, the anti-flow state where you're not doing anything and there's nothing that is frustrating you and you're paying attention to time and so time slows down. There's a bunch of interesting experiments on that. There's one where people who are afraid of spiders, arachnophobia, are exposed to pictures of spiders and then they make them estimate how much time has passed as they're looking at pictures of spiders and inevitably they think they've been looking at these things for 15 minutes and it's been more like 15 seconds. I'll put that paper on the show notes, of course, in case you're an arachnophob or something. Also, you know about this when you're doing certain exercises. I plank every day, really, really good for your core. It's a great exercise for your back. My back hurts a lot so I got to do this and my PT says, "Yeah, I got to plank, two minutes every day." It's like two minutes every day. Okay, two minutes, two minutes. Two minutes feels long, man. It's easier than it was because I'm stronger than I was. But I'm looking at the timer on this and that's the longest two minutes of my day is my morning plank when I'm at the gym. That's just kind of how it works. That's the paradox of boredom is that boring use of time actually feels like it takes longer than non-boring use of time. It's not just the time itself is the perception of the time and this leads to this kind of vicious cycle where you got nothing to do and so you're bored, which makes you unhappy. That means time appears to slow and when time slows there's more boredom and the whole thing goes around and around and around and around. That's interesting because the work that I've actually done on alcohol abuse and substance abuse, the two main predictors of alcohol abuse are anxiousness, anxiety and boredom. So people who are really bored, they drink to relieve the boredom. And of course life becomes incredibly boring when you're no longer doing interesting things because you drink too much. So you drink more. Same thing is true with anxiety. If you're really an anxious person and anxiety is very effectively dealt with in an extremely short run with alcohol, it literally cuts the connection between the limbic system of the brain where the feelings of anxiety are at least originating in conjunction with your stress hormones and your prefrontal cortex where you're aware of the anxiety. So you're anxious. You just don't know it. Alcohol cuts that connection, but of course it comes rushing back the next day and you're more anxious. And so this gets you into these cycles. That's the problem with boredom and it's the same kind of cycle that we get into with abusive substances. So here's a question. Why would evolution allow this? I mean, why is it that we would actually be bored, ever be bored? Why wouldn't we eliminate that in evolutionary biology? And here's the reason. Number one, mother nature doesn't care. If she doesn't care if you don't like it, there's all kinds of things that you don't like that mother nature allows. Your preferences are not her concern, quite frankly. Your happiness is not mother nature's concern. If you're getting anything from office hours from the show, it's that you got to take control of your own happiness by standing up to your own natural proclivities. That's how you live in the space of moral aspiration, not in the space of animal impulse. This is kind of a case in point, mother nature doesn't care if you're bummed out because you're bored and that's the first reason. But there actually are a bunch of benefits that come from boredom and this is the big point that I want to get across and this is why I'm doing this episode in conjunction with this new book. When you're bored, in other words, think about nothing. There's nothing to do. When you're sitting there in your thoughts, there's a set of structures in your brain that are collectively called the default mode network, the DMN to neuroscientists. There's basically three sets of structures in your brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior singulate cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule. These are three parts that have a few functions in common. They allow you to, no, no, they govern and force you to self-reflect, thinking about yourself, thinking about your life, thinking about the mystery and what's going on around you. Don't self-reflect all that much. You think about yourself, my job, my car, my sandwich, my money, but you don't self-reflect that much about the deeper things in your life. Self-reflection is what you need to do to understand the meaning of your life. Why am I doing all these things? Why do things happen the way they do? What are my goals? What are my directions in life? Why does my life matter? That's self-reflection. By the way, those are the big questions, those are the deep questions I'm going to talk about in a future episode that constitute the three parts of meaning. Meaning is all about coherence. Purpose. Why am I doing what I'm doing and significance? Those are the three big why questions of meaning according to psychologists and philosophers. And that's exactly what you will naturally, involuntarily, start to assess when you're in the process of self-reflection, which you will do when the default mode network of your brain is illuminated, which you will illuminate when you get bored. But only when you get bored. You can't just turn it on, you got to let it turn on. Haha, that's the sneaky little trick of Mother Nature. And you know what I'm telling you here, right? You can only find the meaning of your life if you allow yourself to be bored. And if you don't allow yourself to be bored, if you eliminate your boredom through, well, we'll talk about that here in a second. You're no longer going to be using your brain the way it needs to be used for you to find the meaning of your life. Now when does this happen naturally? When you're in the shower, right? You'll notice you get your best ideas in the shower and epiphanies come to you and you realize certain things about your life when you're in the shower. Why is that? Well, here's the reason you probably don't have your phone in there. Yeah, I know a bunch of you are like, yeah, I have my phone in there. Get your phone out of there for Pete's sake. I know it's waterproof, but come on. So I'm going to get back to this in a second because you know where I'm leading you to. I'm leading you to the ways in which we've learned how to eliminate boredom and the inventions that make that possible and the role that they're having for eliminating the meaning of life. I'm going to get there, trust me, but I want to ask you another question before I do that. Why now? Why now? You know, why is it that kind of for the first time in history, we're having this big meaning crisis and it's actually not exclusively now. I mean, I go back and I look at the autobiography of Leo Tolstoy, you know, the greatest, probably along with Fjordor Dostoevsky, the greatest Russian existentialist, the novelist. There's a lot of new interest among adults under 30 today in the Russian existentialist. This is kind of the new thing that I'm seeing actually among my students, people are very interested in it. In Leo Tolstoy's autobiography, he talks about the fact that when he was 51 years old, he wanted to do himself in, he wanted to end his life, and you think it to yourself. Well, you think it to yourself, well, that must be because he's a writer. I mean, he's a tortured artist. He was probably poor and life was tough, especially in 1890's Russia, man. No, no, no, that's not the reason. Leo Tolstoy was literally the most famous writer of his time. He was rich. He was famous. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature several times. He had a marriage that lasted his entire life. He didn't have these weird relationships. He had a complicated marriage, actually. They fought a lot, but they had 13 kids, so they were doing something right. They loved each other enough for that. That's not why he was so profoundly depressed. Tolstoy was depressed, he said, because he didn't know the meaning of his life. Now he, which sounds enough a lot like today, so many people tell me, so many people tell me that again and again and again. He was like ahead of his time. If you're struggling, you're a modern day Tolstoy. As he said, I turned to my art, I turned to my writing, I turned to my work. So he said at one point, he turned to science because science was uncovering everything.
which today would be technology, that's going to figure out everything. AI is going to figure out the meaning of my life right today, then it was biology and mathematics working out everything with infinitesimal certitude and exactitude. No, I didn't do it either. By the end of the day, he realized that where he felt that his life just didn't have any meaning at all and it wasn't worth living. Until finally, he decided to, in one last effort, he ran away. Temporarily, he ran away for a few months to think, but I need to end it. He went to a little village, some distance from Moscow. In this little village, he lived among these really simple Russian peasants, farmers mostly, and they didn't know who had just come to their village. This is like this guy with a beard showed up and Tolstoy, the most famous writer of his time, was completely unknown to them because they were illiterate, which is exactly what he wanted. He just wanted to live there and he just wanted peace and quiet. He didn't want people asking for his autograph. And what he found was, he found meaning from them. He said it wasn't because they were robes and hopeless and didn't care. It wasn't that at all. He said they found tons of meaning in their ordinary lives of their faith, their simple faith, the family relationships that they had, the close friendships that they had, the things they would do together, the way that they put their effort into their work, their agricultural work, and they found meaning in those ordinary old-fashioned things he found. And that's what saved his life because he realized that he needed to live like people in the old days. Here's my point. If you're struggling with meaning, which millions of people are today, that was rare during Tolstoy's time. It's not rare today. It means you need to take his epiphany into your life as well. Why is it that your great-grandfather never came home from work and said something like, "Do his wife, your great-grandmother?" "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." No. The reason is because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. It wasn't the thing, the flooding of the of the hypothalamic pituitary axis, the HPA axis, wasn't happening where the adrenal systems were completely freaking out because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. Now, here's the irony of your great-grandfather's life, compared to yours. His life was actually a moment to moment behind that mule or behind the machine or at the post office or wherever he worked. Pretty objectively boring. He didn't have a phone. He didn't have anything. He just had to live his life for a moment to moment. So, objectively speaking, his life was pretty boring and all the ways that I've been complaining about in my own life, too. But when he got to the end of his life, I guarantee you that at his funeral, his widow didn't say, "His life was boring, man." No. Because his life wasn't boring. His moments might have been, but his life wasn't. Now, think about your own life. I bet you're never bored moment to moment because you've found a way that we're going to talk about right now to eliminate your board a moment to moment. But is your overall life kind of boring? I hear that a lot. People who say to me, "I feel like I'm living a simulation of an ordinary life." And it's not that interesting. The reason is because the moment to moment boredom elimination is adding up to a boring life, the exact opposite. That's what Tolstoy found. But we got to talk about how we can find that, too. Now, this whole series on finding the meaning of life is going to talk about living in a new kind of old-fashioned way. Part of this is going to require that we understand how technology and engineering has made that harder, but part of this is going to be really, really practical on how we can do exactly that, while still being fully modern human beings. Now, let's talk for a moment about what I call the doom loop that people get into, that you might be in in your own life as well. Addiction medicine is always about, at least in this, the initial stages of addiction recovery, breaking the doom loop that all addicts are in. So, for example, you have boredom or anxiety or both in your life, and you find yourself drinking too much. And this goes on for a long time, and this leads to a more, actually, an objectively more boring life, and certainly a lot more anxiety, and that leads to escalation. And that's a trap. That becomes a doom loop. I drink the problem gets worse. I drink more. The problem gets worse. And you don't know how to clip that, right? Well, there's a doom loop that we're in as well. You're bored, and so what do you do? Well, you wiped it out with the anti-bordom device in your pocket, didn't you? You know, it's like I'm sitting in a stoplight, the stoplight's red. Man, this has taken a long time. I don't want to sit at the stoplight for three minutes. Out comes your phone. Look at your notifications. You look at your texts. You know, there's nothing there. What you're trying to do is not let the default mode network turn on, because that's uncomfortable for you is frustrating for you. You don't like it. So the device leads to the off switch on the default mode network. That leads to a lack of you understanding meaning. And this really starts to add up very quickly such that you have less ability to cope with your boredom, more depression, more loneliness, which comes when you don't know the meaning of your life, and you're not assessing the meaning of your life. And that leads to escalation in the behavior. I might as well look at my devices. And that leads to the crisis that a lot of people are in and the addiction and the simulation of a real life. That's the doom loop and it goes around and around and around. This eats away at your happiness. This eats away at the depth that you're actually feeling about your own life. That's a problem that you need to solve that you want to solve. And if you're still watching this episode is because you're committed to doing exactly that, and I want to help you do it. Okay. So this requires that you have a different orientation to your devices and a different orientation to your boredom. Let's start with part one, which is a different orientation toward your devices. Now I've done a whole show on phone addiction. I have a whole phone protocol show and I'm not going to go over that entire episode. Suffice it to say that you need to change your behavior with your phone not through your phone away if you actually want to break out of this doom loop to clip that. It's not abstinence. It's moderation. And part of the reason is because I could tell you to abstain entirely from your device use, but you wouldn't do it because you can't. You can't get into your bank account. You probably can't get it on a airplane anymore. You got to have that thing in your pocket and besides your mom's going to call you and that's a good thing. Here's all you need to do fundamentally. You need these basic phone free times, phone free zones and then phone fasts during the year. The phone free times that I've talked about in this show before are first hour of the day. You shouldn't look at your phone in the first hour of the day and then a lot of neural programming actually happens in the first hour of the day. You set yourself up for a day when you're going to use your brain the way it should be used, but not if it's the first thing you look at when you wake up. It's like next to you and then you look at a first thing. And then you start scrolling immediately. That's that's catastrophically bad. The second is the lasting before you go to sleep at night and part of that is blue screen activity, which interrupts the functioning of your pineal gland leading to lower levels of natural melatonin and then messes up your sleep architecture and you know that. But also it's because you need to be thinking about the meaning of your life. You need the default mode network to be working as you go to sleep because sleep time is real time. It's really important for you to have a proper working of your brain with a proper lead up to the proper working of your brain. That's really you'll sleep better, but also you use your sleep that'll help you understand the meaning of your life in a better way. The last time is meal time and part of that just has to do with evolution. We homosapiens still have brains that are accommodated the circumstances in the place to see as far back to 250,000 years ago. And the way that we understand meaning like what's going on in life is by talking to each other as we eat in groups like putting yak meat in your mouth around a campfire looking at each other in the eyes. You will get oxytocin and neuropeptide that is intensely pleasurable. You'll bond to each other and understand meaning more when you do that. But if your phone is sitting on the table even seeing the inanimate object and imagining the notifications and the texts that you're not experiencing will interrupt the oxytocin flow. So that's why you shouldn't actually even have your phones on tables while you eat. But that's just it. That's it. First hour, last hour, meal times. That's it. The phone free zones. They most importantly include your bedroom. You shouldn't have your phone in your bedroom. You'll sleep very poorly. Now after you get used to this protocol, you can have your phone in the bedroom because you won't look at it. I could literally have my phone in my bedroom. I can use my phone as my alarm clock. I won't look at it at night because I'm out of the habit of doing that. But it takes a while to do that. I had to keep my phone which I actually ordinarily do when I'm home, which is I'm home half the time. I'm on the road half the time. The half the time that I'm home, my phone is closed up in a closet that has plugs in it in a different floor of the house. So you need something like that. Kell Newport, who teaches at Georgetown and writes great books about optimization of time. He has his phone foyer method. When he comes into the house, his phone stays in the floor of his house and he has to go out there to look at it if he actually at any time when he's home. So he's even more hardcore than I am. And then of course in classrooms. I mean, and I've been pounding the table and for years about getting
that are classrooms. Half of states still have phone use with absolutely no restrictions, which is insanity, just weak-willed politicians and school officials that are actually letting that happen. It shouldn't be happening. And then last but not least, you need time away from it every year. You should take at least four days a year away from your phone. Just do that. I'm not asking you to throw in the ocean. I'm not asking you to join a monastery unless that's your thing. Just doing that will clip the doom loop. It's basically detox. You will change the way that your brain works and then you'll be better able to at will turn on the default mode network and reintroduce this really important idea into your life of blessed boredom the way that your brain is supposed to work. And that's part two is the practice of boredom. It's got to be a thing. And again, you wouldn't have to tell great grandpa, you know, go practice boredom. He say, what are you talking about? That's stupid. I mean, why do I need to practice boredom on boredom all the time? You do because you're not. That's what it comes down to. You need to simulate the more ancient environment under the circumstances. And there are a bunch of different ways to do that. You know, this is one of the things that I recommend is that people work out more without headphones. And I do that at least once a week, sometimes more. But I'm really chewing on a problem in my work. I mean, not like a problem like a crisis, but, you know, I'm writing a column all the time for the free press. I got I got to come up with an angle. I got to come up with something interesting. And, you know, that's the hard part that actually requires the epiphany. I'm not going to get the epiphany if I'm never bored quite frankly, because when your bored is when it happens, that's the shower effect, right? Could take hour long showers. I prefer to work out for an hour and take a two minute shower. And so when I need the idea, I don't use headphones when I work out and it works the same way, because the default mode network turns on when I'm working out, especially if I'm doing so into cardio. And I get the idea. And never do I get the idea because I'm using my brain the way it was supposed to be used in the first place. When I'm commuting a lot of the time, I will, you know, which I don't do a lot, but, you know, my commute is largely on the plane. But often, if I'm flying from Boston to Washington, which is a very frequent commute to me or New York to DC or, you know, these relatively small flights, I won't get internet and I won't take out my computer. And I'll sit there. I'll sit there. I'll actually, I'll, I'll use the commute in that particular way or if I have a long drive for something. And it's actually beautiful. At first, it's like, ah, I got to do something. But then it's like, this is good. And once you get used to it, this is something that you'll really, really value. There are people, I mean, I have students at the Harvard Business School who talk about using long flights to do this. They'll, they'll use, there's actually a rude expression for that I'm not going to dignify in this show because this is family entertainment that, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll stare at the seat in front of them. You know, some people talk about like six or seven hour flights, no entertainment, no food, no sleeping, no bathroom. I mean, that's pretty hardcore. But the whole point is, what can you do to actually bring this back into your life? Now, what, what this really is in the, in the literature on meditation is a practice of mindfulness is what it comes down to. Mindfulness is hard because mindfulness is boring to a lot of people. And we're just really bad at boredom. You might think of mindfulness as kind of an exotic Buddhist meditation technique. But the truth of the matter is that, that it isn't that sophisticated. My colleague at Harvard Ellen Langer in the psychology department, she wrote the first big book that took the West by storm about mindfulness. It's called mindfulness. Look it up. She wrote it 25 years ago, which she talks about. And I've actually had her on a previous podcast where she defined it as noticing new things, simply noticing new things. So here's how you practice mindfulness according to her. You're sitting on the train, and the train rides like an hour. And you put your phone away, and you put your hands in your lap, and you look out the window. Yeah, you sick and twisted freak. You're not even looking at your phone. And there's a tree out there that you go by and you're like, huh, a tree actively notice things. It's what it comes down to as opposed to inactively noticing simulated things. That's what you're doing on your phone. You're inactively, you're passively being fed fake things all day long. You like that? I know you don't. Actively on purpose notice real things. That's mindfulness. That's all it is. That you can turn it into something really sophisticated and and do your soul cycle or you know what it ever happens to be with an intention and all that. But you don't have to make it all that sophisticated. You can just live, you know, in your ordinary life. You're not changing the world when you do that. You notice that you've actually let go. You practice non-resistance to your boredom. And non-resistance is your friend when it comes to boredom because what you've done with non-resistance is actively decided to change your reaction to the non-resistance through non-reaction to the boredom itself is all the change that you actually need. The world's going to be the world. And when you do that, you've invited into your own life a process, a neurobiological process that you actually need. But also it's a metaphysical process. Because when you do that, you're going to find that you're a more spiritual person. Your person is more dedicated to deeper things in life. You're going to find that this starts to enrich your conversations because of the crazy ideas that actually came into your head that you never would have thought of before. You're not going to talk about some stupid release on on social media. You're going to be thinking about, well, what your parents probably talked about in their late night bowl sessions and their dorm because they didn't have any phone to look at in the first place. Maybe this is going to turn into a set of really deep and interesting dinner party conversations for you and your partner or your spouse. Yeah. That's the benefit your default mode network can bring to you. This can really change your life. I promise. It has really changed my life. I'm grateful for the epiphany at the Howard Johnson's because it led me on a path that really only came to full fruition when I when I started studying behavioral science and started working very, very seriously on the meaning of life, this particular problem. If you want more of this, you can find it in this book, the meaning of your life and also by going to the website, the meaning of your life.com to participate in events and and have discussions and join our community around this and many other topics that you'll be hearing about on the podcast and in and in a lot of other places. Before I sign off, I want to do as I always do some some some listener questions. First one comes from Lulu Wilson and the sources seek audio. I was wondering what are your thoughts on the highly sensitive person theory? Is it legit? What's your advice to young highly sensitive people that are growing up in an overwhelming world that expects young people only to enjoy partying and social media? Now, to begin with, you don't have to be a highly sensitive person to be bummed out about the fact that we have a culture that's putting us off into decline by paying attention to trivialities and not things that matter. Things that matter, they matter. That's what they call things that matter and and and news flash. The stuff that's in the simulation crossing your consciousness doesn't include that. So for everybody, highly sensitive or highly insensitive, if you need to break out of that doom loop, the cycle that we've been talking about in this show. But back to Lulu's big question, which is the highly sensitive person, which in the literature is just HSP, highly sensitive person, who also is somebody who is affected by SPS, which is known as sensory processing sensitivity. It is somewhat controversial. You know, it doesn't actually exist. I think it does. Probably like most things today. It's over, it's overestimated. Most people who talk about this say is between 20 and 35% of the population. When 35% of the population has something, it's not a pathology really anymore. It's just something that we all have. You know, this is how I talk about anxiety and sadness with my students, for example. I say you suffering from a lot of ruminative melancholy. Well, yeah, that's called life on earth. If you don't, you need therapy. But I get it because when it's at very, very high and acute levels, it can be corresponding to some level of disability, of anxiety and a lot of depression. And also just, you know, the way that people actually live, you know, one of my kids was, I had a doctor that was talking about this. And it's like, how do I know? It's like, he couldn't wear the seam on his socks and the wrong part of his foot, you know, that kind of thing. So bottom line is, if this is bothering you, I get it and I'm sympathetic. But here's the whole thing that I want to point out. The literature also suggests that highly sensitive people have super strengths. And this is true of all areas of neurodivergence or even disability for that matter. There's always super strengths that are behind it. Highly sensitive people, they tend to be more compassionate than average. They tend to be more pro-social than average. Do they suffer more? Probably. But are they better for humanity? You bet. So if you're parent with somebody like this, this is what you need to develop. So that your child, or if it's you, you can actually live up to what humanity needs from you and as a result to prosper along the way. So bless you for that. Here's an anonymous question. This comes in over the email address,
[email protected]. This is from Anonymous. Thank you Anonymous. Anonymous sends me so many. I've noticed that many people who are hoping to find a partner simply wait. These are religious people. And they say, "I'm just trusting God's plan." This is great. This is actually a theological question. I can't help but wonder if that kind of waiting is truly what God intends for us or for meant to take a more active role in seeking the right person. This is a bit above my pay grade, sweet Anonymous. The whole point of this is gets into in Protestant theology and predestination versus free will.
and you know, should you participate in faith without works as dead in the, in the epistle of St. James. And there's a lot that goes into this. That's theologically and philosophically, really, really, really dense. But here's how I think about it. As a, as a, as a traditional, you know, person of faith, as we say, sort of euphemistically. I'm a Catholic, as most of you know, I go to Mass every day, really important part of my life. I believe I have an opportunity to participate in, in the divine will for my life. And again, even if I weren't traditionally religious, I would believe that there is a metaphysical design for my life. And I want to participate in it. I really do. And I believe I do have free will to participate or not participate in it. And falling in love is staying in love is really a part of that. Look, I've been married 34 years going on this year. It'll be 35 years that I've been married to Mrs. B. And, and Esther and I, I mean, it's like, we have the same sort of difficulties as anybody else. We annoyed the heck out of each other, of course. We participate in what we believe is the divine will, which is that I will be laying my eyes on her as I take my dying breath. We participate in making sure that that's the case. And that I'm the gaze that I have in my dying day is one of loving this. The way that I do that is by participating when I the divine will is, which is to make my marriage into, into an antenna to the divine. And that means participating in that will. Now, there's a really nice book that's worth reading for people who are religious, but even if you're not, it's philosophically really good. It's by Alfonso's Laguari, and I'll put it in the show notes. It's called Uniformity with God's will. And what it really says is, you know, this is interesting, a lot of religious people say, I give in to God's will. I give in. Not my will, Lord, but yours, I give in. This goes farther. This is way more profound than that. That's like, Lord, make me love what you want. Make me want what you want. That's Uniformity with God's will, with the divine will. And even if you're not religious, look, things are gonna happen to you. The elite metacognitive athlete of all the things we talk about in my class and on the show and in my column and in my books is this. The elite athlete actually says, I want what's gonna happen today. Bring it on. That's Uniformity with the divine will. Can you do that? Well, this book by Alfonso's Laguari is really, really helpful for that. That's the Buddhist concept of right desire, by the way. To desire what's happening, not just give into it. So this is not a purely Catholic idea. Last one, then we'll be done. Anonymous. Once again, this is a different anonymous. I mean, it's like so many people named the kids that these days writing into the email address. Were you ever afraid of wasting your time and skill? This is to me. Was I ever afraid of wasting my time and skill? What did you do to rectify it? Yeah, every single day. That's actually my biggest problem is not that I'm wasting my time or my skill. It's that I'm pathologically afraid of it because I am a success addict extraordinaire. This leads to my workaholism, my self-objectification. It starts off, but as a little kid, I got all the attention and affection because I did cool stuff, like get good grades or we learn how to play the French horn, like a professional, not my parents' fault. This is just the way that it was. And the result is that I misprogrammed my little limbic system into the belief that I earn love, which meant that I became addicted to achievement and success. And I got dopamine when I was winning. And that's been, like I'm 61 years old, and I'm still fighting this thing. My problem is not that I'm wasting my time and skill. My problem is that I'm pathologically afraid of wasting my time and skill, which means I'm trying to put points on the board all the time. Now, I'm not talking about me, fellow strivers. I'm actually talking about you. You watch and listen to this show because you get the same problems I do, which are not low-class problems. I mean, you're winning for a reason, but you deserve to have a happy life and you need to understand yourself in the process of doing so. For me, that it harms a lot of enjoyment. Now, back to an early episode of this show, what is happiness? Enjoinment, a satisfaction, plus meaning. This show today is about meaning. I write a lot about satisfaction and talk about it too. My big problem is enjoying my life because I'm trying to put points on the board all the time. And so what I need to do is actually understanding the true nature of what leisure means. Leisure is not what the Greeks would call a sedia, which is chilling on a beach, man. It's really productive, generative activity that people are just not rewarding me for in worldly terms. And so that's the secret is to break out of this conundrum, to break out of this iron cage of success addiction, is learning how to enjoy my life. I'm going to write a book about that at some point, but I'm going to do future episodes on you if you are like me and you need to enjoy your life a little bit more about how to do that. Okay, we've come to the end of the episode today and I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it was super boring for you. That's all I can say. Let me know your thoughts at
[email protected]. Remember the email address, keep writing in the questions. We're getting hundreds of them and they're great. Like and subscribe. Hit the like and pound the subscribe button because that's how the algorithm gods, the metaphysics of Spotify and YouTube, how they smile on us even more, because that will lead other people to get this in their feeds and then they'll learn that this is a show that they can use as well. Leave a comment, leave comments, comments, comments. We read them all, even if they're negative and I shed a tear, but that's what I need to hear as well. Follow me on all the socials. I put content on the socials that are not actually going into the podcast all the time. On Instagram, a lot on Instagram, also on LinkedIn and other platforms, and order the meaning of your life and get it for your loved ones. We won't sell out, but the sooner you order it, the sooner you get it. I hope this has been useful for you. I love talking to you. Thank you for joining me and I look forward to seeing you next week. (gentle music)
PodcastTranscript AI