Harvard's Happiness Expert: Why You Lack Meaning (And 6 Ways To Find It) - Arthur Brooks

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/specialoffer. People are falling in love less. If you're less likely to get married, they're less likely to live together. They're having less sex. The more that we turn off the right hemisphere of our brain, the harder it is to fall in love. Falling in love is a deep right brain experience that can't be solved. The meaning of your life is really understood in the right hemisphere of your brain, but tech pushes you to the left side of your brain. Then life starts to feel empty. And you're stuck in there because of this behavioral addiction of looking and looking and looking at the devices. Life feels meaningless when it seems you're random. Happiness has three macro nutrients. Enjoyment of your life, satisfaction, which is the joy of accomplishment with struggle. And meaning, the why of your existence, the way that you break this, you basically just need to do three things. So what advice do you have for someone who is looking for love? Women have three times the blood oxytocin, concentrations as men. To guys, I say, stare at her every time you talk to her. And within two weeks she'll say, "I don't know what it is, but I feel closer to you." Board of is hopelessly underrated. Hello everyone and welcome back to today's episode. I'm super excited to introduce today's guest, Arthur Brooks. He's a Harvard professor, social scientist, and best-selling author who teaches the science of happiness. He has also just published this new book, The Meaning of Your Life. Thank you so much for taking the time and being here today. Such an honor. No, it's my honor. It's delighted to be here. Congratulations on the show. Thank you so much. You're helping millions of people. Thank you so much. And so do you through your 16 books that you've published and everything you do. I want to start by asking you, why did you write this book? This new book on meaning? Yes. It really, I write my books at this point for one of two reasons. Number one, because I need to know the answer in my life. Or number two, I see the crisis. I see a crisis in the lives of people around me that I love. And it was the second category. I don't have a big meaning crisis in my life. I haven't passed, but what I saw was among my students who are in their mid-20s a major, major problem. And I needed to know what it was. Now we've all seen the problem. Depression has increased by a factor of three since about 2008, among people under 30, generalized anxiety has doubled loneliness, addiction, self-harm, all these things are going in the wrong direction. You say, well, we need better mental health, but the truth is that the number of therapists has quadrupled since then. So obviously that's not a sufficient answer to the problem. It's, I don't know if it's making the problem worse, but it certainly doesn't seem to be solving the problem. There has to be an underlying explanation. So this book is looking for the underlying explanation for all the suffering that I've actually seen subsequent to 2008. It's almost as if some diabolical force had entered our culture just right around 2008 and taken over everybody's lives. What could it be? And of course there is. And so this wound up being what is, you know, if the advent of personal technology with the screen-based life, screen-based mediated relationships, what's it doing for our brains, what's it taking out of our lives, and most importantly, what do we do to get it back? Can't wait to touch on all those topics. So first and foremost, what is happening in our society? Why are so many people depressed and anxious? And they lack meaning? Yeah, for sure. And the problem is a misbegotten way that we've come to understand human life. Which is pretty grand, but it really has to do a lot with the takeover of our society by tech-based engineering. Which I'm all about. I mean, I'm a scientist. And you and I are behavioral scientists. And so we like science, for sure. But the truth is that we've gotten this idea that engineering will solve all of our problems. That there's an app for that. That there's a machine that can solve all these problems. And that's completely incorrect. And it misapprehends the way that the human brain works. So the apogee of this ideology, which came out of Silicon Valley, California, was, of course, the smartphone. And the smartphone, which now 5 billion people have all around the world, contains technology that has utterly dominated the way that we interact with each other, the way that we spend our time, the way that we entertain ourselves. And that, in turn, has dramatically changed the way that the human brain works. In such a way that we can no longer ascertain, feel, even ask questions about the meaning of our lives. That's the emptiness. And that's what lies behind the mental health crisis. It's meaning. It's like, it's like a problem of philosophy, but it's actually neuroscience. That's so interesting. I know you talk about the doom loop. Yeah. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, this is so the way that we interact now. Where most people are deeply addicted to cell phone use, to smartphone use. And the way that that works is that you're dopamine cycles, which I know you've talked enough a lot about, about how dopamine works is behind all addictions. It's the the the catecholamine, the neuromodulator that that gives you the ability to want and like and learn and crave. And we need it as human beings. We've got to figure out where to go to get food. And we have to have an impulse to go get food and anticipate rewards. The problem is really maladapted to modern life. And so all addictions have to do with learning to get a reward, anticipating the reward, craving a reward. And that's all about dopamine. You know, I want to go gamble or I want to drink alcohol and then it turns into this self reinforcing cycle. Every addiction has a doom loop attached to it. So for example, if I'm the two biggest predictors of abusing alcohol are being bored and being anxious. And so if you're bored and anxious, you're at risk. And a lot of young people are bored and anxious. And so they'll drink because alcohol alleviates boredom and anxiety really, really well, really effectively, but very short term. And then it comes back more. And when it comes back more, you need to drink more. And then it escalates. And then you're stuck and you go down and down and down. Ultimately, you have to cut that doom loop. That's how all addictions basically work. And it's the same thing is true with our tech addictions. You know, where we want to distract ourselves from modern life. And we've gotten used to looking at our phones to do that. But the more that you do that, the more you habituate yourself to it, the less tolerance you have for not being distracted. And then you look at it more. And then you can't do anything else. And then you get more depressed. And so you want to be more distracted. And so you look at it more and more and more. And now you have, you know, the average 12-year-old is between four and seven minutes a day outside and between four and seven hours a day looking at personal devices. 12 years old. And that's the portrait of a highly addicted society in a doom loop that's getting worse. That's so sad. And yeah, I can definitely see it happening with my unfortunate little brothers, you know, people around me. And it's so hard to break free from that addiction. How do you advise people do it? How do they break free? Yeah, well, any addiction. And if the number one is you need to understand what's going on. You know, it's for people who are addicted to alcohol, it's very, very helpful for them to understand how behavioral and chemical addictions work. They can say, oh, that's what's happening inside my brain. I've been sort of subjugated to this thing. And so I have a whole chapter in this book on the neuroscience of how our brains are broken by technology. It has a lot to do with the hemispheric lateralization as a fancy way of saying that the two sides of your brain do different things. The meaning of your life is really understood in the right hemisphere of your brain. But tech pushes you to the left side of your brain. You're in the wrong side of your brain to even ask meaning questions. And you're stuck in there because of this behavioral addiction of looking and looking and looking and looking at the devices. So the way that you break this, is that you have to cut the loop in some place. Every addiction process kind of looks the same. I've studied addiction behavior and psychology for years and years and years. It's a very interesting thing and very inspirational, too. It's not just depressing. When you get out of any addiction-- and I know you've talked about addiction before in the show and everybody here knows addicts-- there are three things that happen for you to get off drugs, or get off alcohol, or stop gambling, or stop looking at pornography-- all these terrible things for people's lives. Number one, you gotta get mad. You gotta get angry. And you gotta say, I'm tired of this thing dominating my life. I'm tired of this behavior, or this chemical substituting for my relationships, because that's what addictions are. They're love relationships that are misbegotten, that are torqued, that are distorted. And they get in the way of the love relationships you really, really want. Many people stop drinking because they find that they can't stay married, because they're neglecting their spouse. Many people say they're not-- they want to pay attention to their kids, and they can't. Many people have told me they stop drinking because they want to pray, and they can't pray. They can't have a relationship with God. It's a relationship problem. So you gotta get mad and say, no. The second is you need to actually go through whatever the physical process. less of detox or rehabilitation is, and that's different for every kind of addiction. So if you're addicted to casino gambling, it's different than if you're addicted to alcohol. But thank God, we have all kinds of different modalities and interventions that will help to de-addict you. You need help is what it comes down to. Maybe it's a 12-step program, maybe it's a residential facility, whatever it has to be. But third is the hard part, which you got to live differently. Because when you're no longer addicted to something, you have to live with yourself. You know, you're there in your head. And that's what we didn't want in the first place. And so that new way of living is really, really important. And that's the same thing with smartphones to get out of the doom loop. Is that we have to understand, number one, you got to get mad. It really is. It's been designed to be highly addictive and it is. And it's ruining relationships and it's making life. So just to avoid boredom moment to moment, it's making your lives fundamentally boring. That's number. Getting mad. Second is that you actually need to do the work. And there's a whole chapter in this book about cessation protocols for smartphones. It turns out you don't have to go to a de-addiction clinic. You don't need a residential facility. You basically just need to do three things. You need to not look at your phone for the first hour of the day. Not look at your phone or even have your phone at the table when you eat. And you have to put the phone away an hour before you go to sleep. And you will change your life. That will change fundamentally your behavior and your attitude toward the phone through neurocognitive programming in the first hour establishing relationships while you eat. You should never eat alone as a matter of fact. You should eat with other people and without devices. And the last hour of the day, of course, is that you're working on your sleep architecture. Your relationships are getting better. And doing those three things. I mean, it's actually pretty simple but hard. And last but not least, you got to learn to live with yourself and you need to live in a new way. And that's really what this book is about, is living in a new way where you're opening the right hemisphere of your brain to the mystery and meaning of life. The right hemisphere and I find it so fascinating. Yeah, I know. It's really interesting thing. And this really comes from the work of Ian McGill-Christ. Have you had him on your show before? No. He's a Scott. He's not Scott. He's from the North of England. But he's a neuroscientist and psychiatrist actually. So he's a practicing physician with a PhD in neuroscience. He was an Oxford dawn forever and ever and ever. Now he's retired but he still does incredible work. And he's done the pioneering work on hemispherical lateralization, talking about the two kinds of problems that we solve with the different hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere is the analytical side that solves the complicated problems of life. I mean, it's all kinds of complicated problems. I mean, we're working on, you know, we're using all sorts of high-falutin technology right now and figuring that out as a complicated problem. Very important. A car is a complicated problem, right? How I get to work. How I got out here to the studio from Central London is a complicated problem. But that's not the only kind of problem. It's not even the most important kind of problem for our happiness. Our happiness depends on how we understand complex problems. Complex problems are super easy to understand but impossible to solve. You have to live with them. Love is a complex problem. Relationships are a complex problem. Faith in God is a complex problem. All the mystery and meaning or the texture of life, that's complex and that's mediated in the right hemisphere of the brain. That's all the why questions of life. The how-to and what is on the left, the why is on the right. So if all you can do is how-to and what, you'll never be motivated by any sense of purpose. Purpose is part of meaning in life. If you're just turning on the left hemisphere and turning off the right hemisphere with your technology all day long, what you're doing is just kind of going in circles and doing things and you never know why. You don't have any why. No, what do things happen? Why am I doing what I'm doing? What is my life matter? All that just goes unanswered and life starts to feel empty. Now you can kind of simulate that stuff like the relationships in your life but a simulation is nothing more than what the internet is supposed to do. Dating on the apps is a simulation of real life dating which is why people get so many more dates and less attraction and less love when they're on the apps. 62% of relationships start on the apps but they're less stable and people like them less. If you're just gaming by yourself, that's a simulation of human progress and achievement. If you're talking to people, if you're friends or virtual friends on social media apps, that's fake friendship. That's what it is. Because it's not real. It's intermediate by this left hemispheric matrix of behaviors. Look online over the zoom screen, that's fake interaction with colleagues. That's a simulated interaction. We're kind of living in that old movie, The Matrix. It's just a left hemispheric simulation of all the things that we want in the right hemispheres of our brain. It's all the mystery, the meaning, the purpose, significance, all the coherence, all the love. And that's what we're missing. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exema. So I get how it can steal your time. So why let Exema take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyse? Epglyse, lubricism app, LBKZ, a 250-milligram per 2-milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms, with moderate to severe axima. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies, Epglyse can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglyse, allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. I-problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyse. Before starting Epglyse, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Pay partnership with Lili. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyse and visit Epglyse.com or call 1-800-LiliRX or 1-800-545-5979. Stop. This is simply safe. Using smart AI cameras, live U.S. based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Play and starting around a dollar a day. 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at 4,999 a month. Observe. The North American dad, 50's, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offers appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him, boss. He's still on the couch, astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pick up. I think so many people can relate to what you just said. That feeling of this is like a simulation. It's like, what am I doing? I'm on Zoom with my colleagues all day and then I'm on the dating apps and then I talk to my online friends, just feels like this isn't real life. And you watch YouTube shorts until you go to sleep. You want to do a big project, you want to do something significant, but then it's just another day that goes by and the day is turned into the weeks and the weeks turn into the months. And that's how Attics Talk, you know, I got to do something different tomorrow, tomorrow. And our brains are broken, quite frankly our brains aren't working the way they're supposed to. It's bad enough for people my age, but it's much, much worse for people your age because you don't remember them before times. I mean, you grew up with these devices. Yeah, I was 13 when Facebook came around. There you are. I mean, that was a really, really important time actually. And my kids were really younger than you. I'm there early 20s, they're mid 20s, they're, I mean, they grew up with these devices. They don't remember life before them. This is real life. For me, you know, because of my neurocognitive programming and the, you know, the reduced synaptic plasticity after about the age of 30, I can't quite get interested in Instagram. It's an important sort of storefront for my work and there's tons of content and there's a lot of, I don't know, a million people following me and, and I put up lots and lots of videos on the whole thing and, and people like, do you think it's really cool to you enjoyed? Who do you follow? I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. I love that. Because I have, but it's not because of any merit at all. It's not any, it's not virtuous behavior. It's just like an old brain is what it comes down to. I get addicted other stuff for sure. That's amazing. I love that for you. What is the role of boredom? I know boredom is hopelessly underrated, we're, we're, we're, we're evolved to be bored. And what I mean by bored is that I mean to cast this version or, or speak negatively about it, to be undistracted and our minds to wander. Part of this right hemispheric activity involves, uh, set of structures in the brain called the default mode network. These are the parts of the brain that are highly active when you're undistracted by other things in your mind wanders. You have flights of fancy. You naturally think about deeper things, about meaning, and sometimes it doesn't feel that way. It feels sort of trivial like your, your mind is wandering onto something stupid, but you're doing important work as it turns out. When you're looking out the train window and your mind is wandering, that's really important. You've been evolved to do that. There's a set of things that are actually happening that you'll miss it if you don't. You won't be actually doing the cognitive work that actually needs to be done. And that's exactly what we've gotten rid of. Now, here's the irony, we need it, but we don't like it. But Mother Nature doesn't care. She doesn't care about her happiness and her enjoyment at all. She wants us to pass on our genes and survive another day. Mother Nature is cruel about that, and for the longest time, there's nothing we could do about boredom. My great-grandparents and yours, your great-grandparents, they were bored all the time. My great-grandfather was a farmer in Kansas, born in 1862, and I guarantee you that he never came home from work to my great-grandmother, Mary Ellen. As a honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today, right? Because his brain was working the way I was supposed to, and panic attacks are no joke, but there's this hyper activation of the HPA axis in the brain, which is like a flooding of adrenal activity that you don't want, and has everything to do with the fact that your brain is not in any sort of equilibrium. So now his life was plenty boring, because he was looking at that mule's butt all day long, and he had no Francesca psychology podcast to listen to. You're just like, "There were this thoughts." And I guarantee you that moment to moment that was pretty boring, but his life was really interesting. This is the opposite of how people are experiencing life today, moment to moment they're never bored, but their life is boring. Which is really ironic. I know tons of people who are watching us, you have a lot of young viewers and listeners, and they're like, "Yeah. I mean, I've eradicated boredom moment to moment, because I pull my phone out when I'm behind a light where I'm at the supermarket checkout line. But at the end of the day, I haven't done anything, and I feel bored. Your life is grindingly boring, and that's a big problem. It's not your fault. It's that your brain is not working the way it's supposed to. You need to be bored more." You know, sometimes I'm on the tube, and I consciously say, "I'm not going to stay on my phone, and I'm going to get bored for the next 30 minutes." And actually, I find it so interesting. I'm looking around at the people around me, you know, what they're doing at their faces, and I find it actually get more entertained by doing that than by being on my phone. So. Real psychologists, too. You're actually working. Yeah. And the psychoanalyzing everyone. Yeah. But yeah, I had an interesting experience talking about eating alone. I know you said it's not good to eat alone, I'm curious. It's not great. I mean, you need to do it in the right way. Eating mindlessly is a problem, and what that actually inculcates is turning. It turns food from a source of enjoyment into a source of pleasure, and so pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's a primal phenomenon, and it's really tapping the ventral tegmental area in the ventral stride of the brain, and to give you pleasure, which is good. But it actually is not a source of happiness until you make something social. So pleasure plus people plus memory moves the experience into the executive regions of the brain, largely in the prefrontal cortex, and that's something that you can manage. One of the biggest problems in life is when your pleasures are managing you. You want to manage your pleasures, and you can't when you're in this pursuit of pleasure. So I do eat alone sometimes, but I try not to scroll my phone when I do it, so I'm not doing it mindlessly. So you're really mindful about what you're doing. A good way to be mindful is to eat socially, is to eat with another person. That's kind of how we're evolved. We get a lot of oxytocin, exchange, which is the neuropeptide in the brain that functions as a hormone, it bonds us together. A lot of it is when we make eye contact while we're eating and talking about the day. It's a very funny thing. We were supposed to sit around the campfire in kin-based groups of 30 to 50 individuals, talking about the hunt, and talking about that neighboring tribe over there. This is how we know our kin, is the way that that works. Smartphones at dinner, or dinner alone with smartphones, which is even worse, interrupts that process. Yeah, I can definitely see that. Can I move on to the definition of meaning? How do you define it? So meaning is a series of why questions. The meaning of life is almost like a philosophical joke because it's so big. To say go find the meaning of life, you're supposed to go sit in the mouth of a cave and look for a guru in India or something good if that works for you. I've done that, and it's not a very efficient way to go about things. I have to say, it's pretty fun. But knowing exactly what the meaning of meaning is, it makes it possible to decompose meaning, and decomposition is a standard thing where you've got a big hairy, multifaceted problem, you break it into smaller problems, and then you solve those and put it back together again. That's how you do computer science, or say you do anything. That's how you get from here to there, as you figure out how to get part way and part way and part way. The meaning of meaning is really three smaller problems, three why questions. Number one is what philosophers call the coherence question, which is why do things happen the way they do. It's like things are happening all around us all the time. Life feels meaningless when it seems random when you're like a ball and a pinball machine. People look for coherence all the time. I'm a traditionally religious person, so I have a religious explanation for why things happen the way they do. I'm also a scientist, so I have a scientific explanation, and both of them together are magic. If I didn't have either, I might be doing my own research on the internet, in which case I might be falling down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, which are nothing more than a cry for coherence, which, because people want the meaning of life, and they want to be happier. The second is purpose. Purpose is the why question. You know why? There's got to be a reason that I'm doing the things that I'm doing, and the reason has to have goals and direction so I can make progress toward those goals. The happiness doesn't come from arrival at goals, but you have to be able to make progress. In Spanish, there's a great word is rumbo, rumbo, which means it's actually a navigational term. In English, it's a rum line, and it's the Euclidean distance. It's the straight line between where you are and where you want to go. You're never going to be on that line when you're sailing, because there's weather and serendipity and storms and sharks, and I don't know, but you have to have that, or you can't make progress towards your goal, and you need that in life too. That's why goals are so critically important, and that's the second part. The third why question is why my life matters. That's the significance question. Why's my life matter? And to whom? Right? Now, once again, as a religious person, I've got a good answer to that. You know, why does my life matter? And to whom? I got a good one with that. But if you don't have any of that, wow. By the way, this is one of the reasons that religion is so good for meaning, because it answers all of those questions. Not everybody watching us is religiously, so sorry, that's not for me, but you've got to find other ways to answer those questions. And the only way you're going to find those is by exploring those questions, which means you need your full brain, especially the right hemisphere, which means you got to put down your phone. You can absolutely see how religion is such a clear, it gives you such a clear structure and direction and sense of purpose and community, and it gives you so many things. But for those people who aren't religious, how do they answer those questions? There's a lot of different ways to do that. So finding a sense of transcendence is really important. So people who study, seriously who study philosophy, for example, they can find all kinds of answers to those questions. I have a friend named Ryan Holliday, maybe you've seen his podcast. He's kind of the world's leading popularizer and proponent of ancient stoicism. You know, the ancient Greek and Roman school of understanding life with perspective and peace to control yourself, to live with yourself, to accept actually what comes, and all the principles they're in, it's a very sophisticated philosophy, and it answers the questions. You know, there are all kinds of ways to answer those questions through meditation practices, through, I mean, some people would say a good way to get started is using hallucinogens. I don't propose that. I mean, that's not my thing, for sure, but those are, but people who take hallucinogens for non-recreational reasons, they're searching for meaning. They want their brain to be able to ascertain meaning. Now, what a lot of them don't understand is that they've shut down the part of the brain that they need to do that, and they're just trying to maybe open it back up manually with these hallucinogenic drugs. I recommend actually doing it the old fashioned way, but just not shutting down the right side in the first place. But, you know, different strokes. So there's lots and lots of ways to actually do this. It's just that religion is a very traditional way that's shared by billions of people around the world. And I can say, based on the research and, of course, personal experience, that it's highly effective. I'm super excited to say that I have a book coming out on the 12th of January. It's called "How to be Magnetic, the Science of Charisma, Attraction, and Human Connection." And it brings together the science of charisma, like ability and attraction, with everything I've learned about human connection. The research, the theory, the exercises I actually sent my clients, and the stories I've never told. Because magnetism isn't a personality. It's a skill. And every part of it can be learned. Pre-ordery now, and you'll get two is and bonuses. An end of your journal, so you can walk into 2027 as your most magnetic self, and an audio guide to listen to before a social event to put you in a confident magnetic mode. The link is in the description below. So if someone is trying to create a more meaningful life for themselves, is answering these three questions the way or is there other things they can do as well? It's a little bit too abstract. You need to know what you're looking for. But then, like anything else, the way to do it is to put yourself in the situation where meaning can find you by living in a different way. Again, it's like that third step with the addiction. You've got to live in a new way. You've been drinking way too much, you're getting, you know, you're misusing alcohol. You got to get mad. It's taking over your life. And then you got to go to rehab, but then you got to get new friends. Then you have to live in a different way. You have to spend your time in a different way. You have to avoid being in circumstances that tempt you and beguile you. And so that's really what this book is about is the way the new ways to live. So you don't have to worry about meaning, but your brain is working right and meaning finds you naturally like the old days. Now these are all things that people used to do naturally. Just over the course of my great grandfather, Lee Roy Brooks, he would have done these things over the just natural course of his business of his life, but they're not natural anymore. They're not natural anymore for all the reasons that we've talked about. And so you need to actually do these things. And so that's what I walk through each one of these activities. And I've seen, because we're working with my students for seven years on this, that when they do these things, it's like, holy cow, I had no idea that this is what life could be like. And they're discovering things that everybody's always doing. So what are those things? Practical things. There's six things, really. And scientifically, what these six things are are the activities that are most correlated with right brain activity. Okay. So there's just as a point of reference. But there are a lot more ordinary than that in general experience and the kind of experiences that people have. This thing is actually, believe it or not, it's going deeper in conversation and concept. So one of the things that I recommend to my students is that they put all the devices away and they practice what the ancient Greeks called uporia, which is this state of puzzlement over questions that don't have answers. Now back in the day, this is what young people always did, you know, where people in my generation when they were in college, they didn't have smartphones. They didn't know they would sit around and they would talk to each other about unbelievably pretentious things. Do you think that God exists, you know, stuff like that, right? That's oporia and that's a right brain question because you don't, you can't answer that. You can only, you can only intuit, you can only go deeper on that. And so I have a whole set of instructions on the kinds of questions, the deep conversations that actually have. And here's kind of what it comes down to. The nature of humanity is not about information and answers to questions. You know, we think that AI is going to come along, be agentic and be kind of human. It never will be. It won't be because it's going to be really good at answering questions. It's never going to be good at pondering questions that don't have answers. You know, why am I alive? I can put that into chat, GPT right now and get garbage back. It'll, it'll, first it'll start by complimenting me about asking such a deep question. And then it'll give me the answers that five famous philosophers have come up with or something like that. But it won't be able to answer that for me. I have to ponder that. I'm not going to solve that problem and I come to a deep understanding of that. Why, why would I give my life for what would I give my life on this day? Google doesn't know that. They can give me a whole bunch of list of things that other people have said, but that's nothing. So information and answering questions, machines, gorillas can do that. But asking deep questions, that's the first activity that actually comes about in the search for meaning. That's number one. And is it true that someone else can't tell you what the meaning of your life is? Like you can ask, you know, the best philosopher in the world and they can tell you, this is the meaning of life. But from the sound of it, it's got to be intrinsic. It has to come from within. Yeah, for sure. It's very possible you'll never be able to articulate the meaning of your life because it's not a solvable problem. It's a problem that you understand. The things in the right hemisphere of your brain, all the problems in the right hemisphere of your brain don't have solutions. They're lived. So I'll give an example. My car is a complicated problem. My marriage is a complex problem. Very, very complex. I've been married for 35 years and I still haven't solved my marriage. I mean, I haven't solved it because, you know, I don't know if my wife can be mad, happy, today. And my wife is Spanish, so there's a lot of complexity in that. But it's also that that's why I love my marriage because two human dynamic beings with souls interacting and in a divine, companion way, connecting to God through the earthly love that we share. That's super complex. That's deep right brain. And so I don't want to be able to solve my marriage. Now, I could ask Chatchee PT, how do I get my wife not to be mad at me, right? And it will give me a bunch of dumb garbage, right? But that's not. It'll give me a left brain simulation for a right brain problem, which is not what I want at all. Absolutely. I'm curious, is happiness the same thing as meaning? Meaning is part of happiness. So happiness, the best definition of happiness is kind of, I use a nutrition metaphor where food is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are called macronutrients. And that's a lot of what I do is physical performance and human potential in conjunction with behavioral science because psychology ultimately is biology. And so it's very important. And I do a lot of that stuff when I'm working with people and working with teams. And so I say, you know, if you want to be happier, you need to have your diet on point and you need to get proper exercise, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, but that's just a metaphor for happiness per se. Happiness isn't a feeling any more than the smell of your food is your food, right? Feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness has three macronutrients, which are enjoyment of your life, which we've talked about a minute ago, satisfaction, which is the joy of accomplishment with struggle. And meaning, meaning the why of your existence. Those are the three macronutrients. What I have a series of protocols that I send people through to understand where they're deficient. It's kind of like a, I'm a nutritionist for happiness. And so what I'm working with people, I'll find out what they need more of and where their macronutrient profile is out of balance. I know a lot of really, really successful people who have super high satisfaction. They get tons of accomplishment from their work and they struggle mightily for it. The struggle gives you sweetness to your accomplishment, right? Which is one of the real paradoxes. It's the salt in the cookies that gives the flavor complexity. And without which, the cookie won't taste like anything. That's really important. But these people often will be unbelievably low in enjoyment. They don't enjoy their lives at all because they don't know how to enjoy. And so I have to get people enjoyment lessons. And they might be kind of moderate on, on meaning. And so I'm going to have to work with them a lot. Now, young people today, real strivers under 30, I teach at the Harvard Business School, which is a fancy business school in the States. They're very high in satisfaction because they're accomplishing a lot and working hard for it. They're pretty high on enjoyment. Higher than I was in my 20s because they have more money and they're able to do all kinds of things and they're pretty self-governing, but they're really low on his meaning. Because of all the reasons that we've talked about here, that's the crisis of our time. That's why they're depressed and why they're anxious. "Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exama. But why let Exama take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce?" Epglyce, lubricism ab LBKZ, a 250mg/2mL injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 lbs or 40kg with moderate to severe Exama. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies, Epglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglyce. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe, eye problems can occur. While your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyce. Before starting Epglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection, paid partnership with Lili. "Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyce and visit Epglyce.com or call 1-800-LiliRx or 1-800-545-5979. 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To begin with, when I talk to my, when I lecture on this with my students, inevitably somebody will put up their hand and say, "Professor, you're saying we need to go look for suffering." I say, "Don't worry. It'll find you." The question is what you do when it does, you know, how do you behave? The way to think about meaning and suffering is sort of based on, there's the Buddhists talk about it really in an effective way. They say the suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance to pain. pain. The pain is completely inevitable. It's a physiological phenomenon involving the brain and the reason that you have pain is because you touch the hot stove or your beloved breaks up with you and you have sensory pain and affective pain, you have emotional pain or physical pain, they involve different parts of the brain and this is going to happen and you have those parts of your brain for a reason. You don't want to get rid of pain or you're doomed, you're in really big trouble because you won't be able to react to of dangerous situations or situations that are not good for you. But you have choices, you have choices about how you're going to react and how you're going to manage it. The worst way to deal with pain is by trying to eliminate it and that's what we're doing to people in the 20s today. We tell them are you sad or are you anxious? Up, we got to eliminate that or something wrong with you, ooh, sounds like clinical depression to me and sometimes it is. The truth is as I tell my students, look, you're studying at Harvard University, if you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. I mean, it's a hard world, you're doing it on purpose, you're trying to achieve something, you're trying to get satisfaction from this and that's a really, really important thing such that as part of satisfaction, you can kind of turn it into meaning through suffering itself and so suffering is in a way optional. You can suffer a little bit less right now by lowering pain or you can actually get a lot of meaning from it while you suffer less by turning down your resistance to that pain. I'm not saying don't take your meds, I'm not saying even don't take a Tylenol. I mean, good, take an analgesic if you've got a headache but don't try to eliminate your pain. It's an exercise in futility and you're going to miss out on the growth in life. Yeah, I think modern society has done a really good job at eliminating any sort of friction and from what you're saying, friction is so important in getting that satisfaction. It is because what happens is what's left behind is emptiness and people say it's like I just, you know, it's weird, you know, there's this sweet suffering that comes when you have a really bad romantic breakup and you're, it has a sweetness to it. You don't want it, you wish you were back but at the same time there's a sweetness to it and you're listening to the same sad song over and over and over again to try to actually understand your emotions, that's a learning experience, that's you growing as a person, that's you getting your reps, that's you getting stronger is what that actually is. And if you eliminate that, neuro pharmacologically, for example, I mean, you could take a whole bunch of drugs to numb yourself from physical or or mental pain, what you're left with is emptiness and you've you've failed to grow from the experience. I also think that a lot of people, the only time they actually connect to themselves is when they suffer and when they're crying because they're so distracted as you say by their phones, by doing things all the time, that the only time they connect to their emotions or themselves is true pain and suffering. And that's one of the ironies is that actually when you are not living a full life, that emptiness per se actually leads to these mood disorders that we're talking about which then leads to a cycle, another doom loop of trying to eliminate that. So I say like, wow, so I'm on the phone all day and I don't really see anybody in person, so I'm lonely and I'm depressed and I'm really, really anxious and so and the doctor is meditating me to actually get rid of that and it leads to this cycle that is hard to resolve. It's a doom loop. So you mentioned two of the ways to create a more meaningful life, what are the other four? The one that's most interesting for a lot of your audience is going to be falling in love, which is the scariest thing. And it's become less and less possible in the age of the dating apps, of course. Now I'm not against dating apps in the contrary. I'm actually a scientific advisor to one of the dating app companies because they're inevitable. They're here and so we better make them better as opposed to just complaining about them. But everybody complains about them. I mean it's like everybody does. I don't know if you're that's that's part of your life, but I don't know anybody's like sure love the apps said no one. I actually had a good experience with them because I found my partner on a dating app three years ago. That's great. So you're not on the apps now. I'm not thankfully, but it was a hard period that I understand all the criticisms that they get. Well, and you were on the apps because there wasn't a better way. And there wasn't a better way because the apps crowded out all the other ways. So you see kind of that it was the technology that crowded out all the classical technologies. Now we went back a hundred years. You'd be in you know, you'd be in a village in Romania and somebody would have set you up with some guy you may or might not like. I'm not saying that this is better, right? And right now you have like you have nine kids at this point, you know, actually, you know, that's probably pretty meaningful. It's not it's not the life you that you would voluntarily choose necessarily. But the point is that that's the way that you were going to meet somebody. And so you did and you met somebody, but but you'll you'll notice that as soon as you did, you got off the apps as soon as you could, right? Okay. So apps are going to get better and they're going to be okay. And the way that I work with the app company that I'm involved with is adding as much human friction into the algorithm as possible. Why? Because the human friction is right brain experience. So for example, the idea is that you get a bunch of matches and your friend actually you have a close friend who chooses which of the matches are going to be your dates because that uses your friends right hemisphere and injects that into the experience. And so those are kind of the experiments that we're going through to see where people are going to find more attraction. And I walk in the book through the neurochemical process of actually falling in love ending up in the mysterious parts of, you know, neurologically about actually what's happening. But the bottom line is that that people find meaning through all of the good and bad experiences of romantic love. And they deeply, deeply, deeply want it. The fact is that the more that we turn off the right hemisphere of our brain, the harder it is to fall in love, which is why people are falling in love less. They're having their less likely to get married. They're less likely to live together. They're less likely to actually find attraction to each other. And in my 20s, which is a long time ago now, I mean, that's, that's all I wanted. It was to fall in love. I just wanted to fall in love. I mean, I cared about my career and I cared about making a living and I cared about paying my rent. I cared about my family. I wanted to fall in love. And so I was in the hunt for my soulmate, right? And that's less and less and less frequent. I've got the data on that. People in their 20s today are about a third less likely to be in love as people were when I was that age. And it has everything to do with the way that technology has made our brains move from the right hemisphere mysteries of love to the left hemisphere closed form solutions that we actually see or were mediating our relationships through screens. Absolutely. I've seen stats recently on how sex is declining a lot in CNC as well. I know. I know. And part of that is because of increased use of pornography, which is a screen-based technology, which is lowering desire in men because the vast overwhelming majority of pornography is used by men. But that's a deeply addictive thing and at least to depression, anxiety and loneliness among men. The more pornography that men use, the more the lonelier and more depressed they're going to be and the lower their confidence is going to be within real life women. So it's like this horrible doom loop that comes from that. There's nothing good from pornography. It's like the it's like the it's the meaning killer of our technologies. So I recommend actually treating it like an like an entrepreneurial experience. So if somebody came to me and said, I want to start business. I said, okay, right on. Let's do some work. Let's number one is let's start by what you want to achieve, right? And and some explosive reward. Then let's talk about how much risk you're willing to take. And let's talk about how you manage that risk. And then let's let's talk I've taught entrepreneurship. So then let's and then let's talk about actually the how the gears turn in setting up this business. Treat dating the same way. Look what's the explosive reward? Love and happiness. It's the most you could become a billionaire in love and happiness if you have a really, really good love relationship. It's phenomenal. It's also risky. You know, as you can get your heart broken, you can fall in love and be in love and and and and and your partner leaves you. I mean, these things happen all the time. It's really, really risky. So how are you going to manage that risk? Part of it is by understanding that you're going to live if these things happen. You're going to learn if and when these things happen. The average startup entrepreneur has four failures before her his for success. The average person who gets married has five heart breaks before getting married. It sounds pretty similar actually. And what do you do? You try. You fail. You're sad. You learn. You try again. And thinking about it in that particular way, right? I mean, it's hard. I mean, I have the data on breaking up and I have the data on mistakes and I have data on actually I even I even know what parts of your brain are are involved when you're really, really heart broken. But I also know that that process is one of the greatest processes for processes for for using the brain the way you need to to find the meaning of your life. You need to risk your heart and have it broken for you to find the meaning of your life and even better to have it broken and then find the love of your life. That's amazing. So once you have gotten in a relationship. Yeah. I know you talk about three rules of a successful marriage for actually four protocols. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I mean, there's a lot of stuff to have a successful ongoing marriage. Mine is 35 years. We will we will be married until we die. I mean, she's the last person I'll see is I take my dying breath. I have no doubt. That does not just say that we don't have conflict, etc, etc. But we do a lot of work together. together, we actually, we toured together and speak on how to stay in love for couples. And so for my wife, that's a very philosophical and theological thing, because that's what our graduate work is. For me, the comparative advantage is to look scientifically at what that is, and what I've found is, in the absence of obvious problems, abuse, abandonment, I mean, those are things that are going to ruin a relationship, you're not going to put a bandaid on that, right? You shouldn't stay around when there's abuse, you know, physical abuse, in particular, obvious, right? Everybody knows that at this point, and abandonment is not something you can rectify, somebody bales, what are you going to do? It doesn't really matter what, you know, your, what incantation, your, so, but for relationships that have just cooled, which starts to happen, by the way, typically that, the cooling peaks at about five years into either cohabitation or marriage, whatever comes first, right? So if you're living with your boyfriend at five years, there's kind of this, there's an old expression in the seven-year-age, it's actually a five-year-ich, right? And at that particular point in particular, either you've really got best friendship or you don't, because that's what you want. I mean, passion, if a stick's around, is going to drive you insane and make your life miserable. There's plenty of passion in companion love, but what you really want is that deep, deep best friendship is the way that that works. And then, over time, it's making sure that that sticks around, and that's what the four protocols are really all about, is how to make that stick around. The first is to stimulate systematically the neuropeptide, I talked about a minute ago, which is oxytocin. The best way to do that is direct deep eye contact on a systemic basis. Now, women have three times the blood oxytocin concentrations as men, and part of the reasons is because they need to bond more directly and intensely with infants. And so you have a baby, and you want to make sure that you're like, "I will die for this baby." You wouldn't know me, this baby is helpless. Why would I care about this baby? And it has everything to do with the kind of the mind meld, which is to say oxytocin release. So when women have a baby, you haven't had a baby yet, but when you see your baby for the first time, when your baby latches on in breastfeeding, the infant and the mother lock eyes, they stare into each other's eyes, and moms for the first time be like, "He's staring at me, and I can't stop looking at him." And it's super pleasurable because this oxytocin release, this neuropeptide in the brain of bonding and belonging and love, it's just a feeling of love. So that women need more. So when it comes to the oxytocin that you get with your partner, which is the same kind of kinship and deep belonging and a sense of us and a sense of who we are, women need it more than men and men forget that. And so if you're with your partner, and it's been a bunch of years, and you know, you're talking to each other, and he's not looking at you. He's kind of doing his thing, and he doesn't know that you, Francesca, need more eye contact. And so what I recommend to people is that, like, to guys, I say, like, yeah, we're kind of like kind of cooling on each other, stare at her every time you talk to her. When you're talking to her, you stop. Everything you're doing, and you look into her eyes as she's talking to you. And within two weeks, she'll say, "I don't know what it is, but I feel closer to you." She'll never figure it out. Well, now I've said it on a famous podcast, and now everybody's got this idea. I recommend that couples, before they go to sleep, no phones in bed, no phones in bed, no phones for the last hour before you go to bed, locked up downstairs in a closet with a time vault, if you need to. And as you're lying in bed, the last five minutes, you're talking to each other, staring into each other's eyes. You're going to sleep better, you're going to go to sleep feeling beloved, you're going to wake up feeling closer, and that's protocol number one. All number two is sort of the ABT protocol, which is always be touching, always be touching. Now, that's actually more important for the man, believe it or not. I'm talking about non-sexual touch, because we're stimulating the brain in a different way. That's when you're with him, just always be holding his hand. When you're walking down the street with him, lock your arm in his, he'll feel like he's seven feet tall. This stimulates a lot of vast represson, which is a cousin, neuropeptide, but it's in higher concentrations in men than in women. It makes him feel strong, it makes him feel like the defender, it makes him feel admirable. That non-sexual touch is critically important. So the rule is ABT, we're just, when we're walking, we're holding hands. When we're together, when we're sitting together, we're touching. That's what it comes down to. Now, I mean, some people care more, some people care less, but it's important for everybody. The third is having more fun. The fun rule is critically important, because once you start to actually get into a cycle of conflict in a relationship, or coldness, then you do typically, you go to counseling, for example, and your counselor never says, "So tell me everything is going right." They say, "Tell me everything is going wrong," and that has merit. But if basically you're spending every week rehearsing your grievances and complaints about each other, that's not fun. One of the things that's really important is that, you know, the glass of water that's your marriage, your relationship, has a spoonful of dirt in it, you know, taking a spoon and stirring up the dirt and the water is going to make it hard to take out, right? The best way to get the dirt out of the water, by the way, is taking a picture of water and pouring it into the glass, and the dirt will naturally come out. That's fun. Go do the things that you like doing together. You like riding your bikes together? You like going to the movies together? You like doing stuff together. Go have more fun. The last but not least is reading to each other, pray together or meditate together, depending on what you do. But reading really does this well. And so before you're locking eyes in bed at night, he should read to you, or you should read to him, or you should take turns, poetry, something interesting, something, not the newspaper, now, something that's less earthbound than that. We read the Psalms to each other at night. It's poetry, written by King David. It's great. And so we'll read Love Poetry, Pablo Naruda in Spanish, which is beautiful and wonderful. And we'll, you know, this has an almost narcotic impact, especially when done in a Spanish accent. I can imagine. The best. That's amazing. Wow. I love the distinction between what many versus what women need, and both the truth. But the truth is that you have slightly different emphasis on these different things, and all for critical importance. I recommend those things to the couples that are fundamentally okay, but they're cooling. And if you want to reignite this and you both agree that reigniting this is important, the second thing is sports keeping in mind, however, don't do those things with people who aren't your partner. You know, there's this old experiment that the psychologist, Art Aaron, where are the Art Aaron experiment from the '90s, where he had couples, not couples, strangers, they would answer questions of increasing intimacy and then staring to each other's eyes. What that was all about oxytocin release. And people are doing this at work all the time. They're running the Art Aaron experiment with their colleagues who are not their spouses, which is why about half of an extramarital affairs are happening at work. It's not because people are trying to have an affair at work, but they're accidentally falling in love because they're looking into each other's eyes and answering really deep questions and having these really intimate conversations with each other and they see their partner for two hours a day and they see that beautiful woman down the hall eight hours a day. And it's like, I don't know what happens at everybody ever. I don't know. I wasn't trying to fall in love, they all say, but respect the biology because this stuff's powerful. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland, you may not know this, but I have eczema, so I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about epglyce? Epglyce, lubricism ab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies, ebglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to ebglyce, allergic reactions can occur that can be severe, eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglyce. Before starting ebglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection, paid partnership with Lili. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about ebglyce and visit ebglyce.com or call 1-800-LiliRx or 1-800-545. 5-9-7-9. 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New customer offer for three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and feed extra, see mintmobile.com. What about friendship and developing more meaningful friendships? I know you talk about the three levels of friendship. Right. That's right. So not everybody has a soul bait in the cards. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, that's a, a lot of people do. I mean, most people on Earth have a vocation to marriage. That's what they're, and there's a reason for that. I mean, there's kind of a, there's a neurobiological reason for that is certainly evolved. Parabond mating is how homo sapiens work. It's not always the same pair throughout the course of your life because, you know, marriage is end and people die and people get remarried, et cetera, et cetera. But, but all of the weird arrangements that we talk about today, you know, ethical non-monogamy, that's all nonsense. That's weirdly aberrant. It's very rare. Most people want parabond mating, which is a very non-romantic way of saying it's just you and your boyfriend and you and your husband and together. That's kind of really what you want. Most people get that, you know, at least in a serial fashion, if not, you know, true monogamy told that to us part. But some people don't. You know, some people have a religious vocation that's celibate. Some people just never find the one. Some people just don't want that for whatever reason. It turns out that the data are very clear that you can get a lot of the same amount of meaning through friendship that you can't from that. But you must have one or the other. You can't go without anybody. You can't be isolated. I've met, I interviewed a hermit last year up in the Himalayas. I went, I went up real high in the Himalayas and I met a hermit, a Tibetan Buddhist hermit, who had not lived in community for 27 years, right? He saw people twice a year, so I felt very privileged to, that's very rare. You know, the truth is you need people and you need intimacy with people. If it's not a spouse, then you need really, really close, true close friendships. And you will get the good, ideally, by the way, both. Ideally, you're living with your best friend. - Yeah. How about when it comes to finding your calling, is it the same as what you do as a career? - Yeah, so calling is the fourth way that we're talking about. So calling is this idea that I'm doing in my work when I'm meant to do. I can tell that you feel like you're meant to do this work, but you feel it take a lot of interest and satisfaction in it. And that has this almost metaphysical property to it, right? 'Cause on your worst day, it's really meaningful. On your best day, it's sublime, but on your worst day, it's still meaningful, right? It's how that works out. And that's a hard thing. So I have a whole chapter on how to actually find that, on how you can feel like you're rewarded and recognized for the value that you're creating through your work and how you're serving other people. And it's a very interesting thing to do. And so that's really how it comes about. And a lot of what I do is helping people find their callings. I teach a graduate school. And a lot of my students wind up having the conversation, the hard conversation with them, that going and working at an investment bank and making a bazillion dollars, that's not your calling, that's not your calling. And they're like, "I know, I know, what do I do?" But that's really important thing to keep in mind. Are you earning your success? Are you serving others? And do you find it fascinating most of the time? It's a pretty easy test as the way that that works out. And when that's the case, it's gonna feel divine a lot of the time that you're gonna feel like you're meant to do this thing. And by the way, I mean, I wish it were the case that I had found my calling. But there are times in my life when I done, you know, when I kind of thought that what I was really good at was going to, or what was most glamorous or what paid the most, was what I was gonna be my calling. And it wasn't. I've done that, I've had four careers, and two of them weren't my calling. So, I mean, anybody can make that mistake. - And I know money isn't what necessarily buys happiness. But I know you talk about a certain amount of money that you should make to be happy or comfortable. - Well, you can drive away a lot of the common sources of unhappiness with a certain amount of resources. So poverty brings misbegotten unhappiness. Money never buys happiness. Money simply lowers the sources of unhappiness. Unhappiness and unhappiness, biologically, are different phenomena. We have a limbic system, which is between two and 40 million years old. That's the console that creates our emotional lives. And different parts of the limbic system produce negative and positive emotions. They're different parts, and we need all of them. We need all of these different emotions to react appropriately to life that's going on around us. What you find is that you will hyperactivate negative emotionality from ordinary sources of poverty. When you have, you're not meeting your caloric needs, or your kids are sick and can't take it to the doctor. And so a pretty moderate amount of money will lower those sources of unhappiness thus blocking your, unblocking your wellbeing. That's how to think about money. Now, beyond that, you can use money to raise your happiness, but not doing the things that people typically think. People often think that, you know, if I had the yellow Ferrari, I would be happy. That's wrong. I mean, you kind of know that everybody kind of knows that. If I hit the lottery, I would be happy. No, the first $75,000 of the lottery winnings would drive away your poverty. But then after that, you just have, you know, your relatives would be bothering you, and you'd be buying the wrong thing. You'd be attracting a spouse who doesn't love you. You know, that's, you know, kind of how it would work. So the way to use money to actually raise your wellbeing, you're actually raising your happiness is to use your money to buy experiences with people that you love, to buy time that you spend in an edifying way, to support things that you think are important or to save for the future. Those are the four ways that you can actually pretty much buy happiness. But buying stuff doesn't work. - I love that. That's amazing. - Can we quickly go through the other two ways? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just wanna wrap it up with it. - Yeah, yeah, the other two, the first of the next one is transcendence. And that's usually experienced through religious belief or spirituality, but not necessarily. The whole idea is that when you have something bigger than you, when you're pulled out of self-consciousness, you find meaning. And so, you know, students of my university that love the astronomy class. There's this big undergraduate astronomy class. They're crazy about it. The reason is because, as one of them told me, when I'd go in on Thursday morning, I'm all stressed out about all the things in my life. And when I come out, I realize that I'm just a speck on a speck on a speck. I'm just, it gives me peace and perspective. When you can zoom out on yourself and stand it off something bigger and more meaningful in your life, that brings meaning to you. For a lot of people that's religion, for me is a Catholic. That's just how I find transcendence in my life for Ryan Holiday at stoicism. I know people who do that through an understanding and contemplation of the greatest music that has ever been written or vipassana meditation. There are a lot of ways to do it, but transcendence is critically important. The last one is beauty. One of the characteristics of modern life that screen mediated, it's not beautiful. It actually isn't beautiful. And there's a lot of interesting research that shows that young people today experience systemically less beauty than people didn't pass generations. There's three kinds of beauty that I'm talking about. Artistic beauty, music, poetry, literature, art. People see it less and hear it less. And even if they do listen to a lot of music, many musicologists believe that melodically music has become less beautiful. You know, again, different strokes, but that's not all subjective. There is some objective reality in that based on treatment and control experiments. The second kind of beauty is natural beauty. And people are way, way, way less outside than they've been before. It's just they are. And you know, I know a lot of people in New York say, I'd like to take lunch in central parks like now. No, sorry. I mean, go get lost in the woods and then we'll talk. I mean, this is really what we're talking about. It's true, the majesty of true natural beauty. It affects your brain in very beneficial ways. And the last is moral beauty. Where you witness acts of goodness and kindness that give you the sense of moral elevation, which literally is experienced as a warmness in the chest, that is a sign actually that your brain is working the way it's supposed to. So I prescribe systematic applications of beauty to people's lives in those three different ways to my students. Part of their homework is to get more beauty in their lives. And it's just like, wow, where's this been on my life? Well, Mozart's been there the whole time, you know? You know, the mountains have been there the whole time. Mother Teresa has been there the whole time. And they say, yeah, yeah, I need this. They didn't know they needed it. I feel like this is such an incredible way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for all the value that you provided in this really short period of time. Thank you. You are amazing. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you for the message you're bringing to the world and the people you're lifting up. I can see that you're living or calling. It makes me happy to see. Thank you so much. Hank joined B.J.'s wholesale club. The day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now, Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks, and that's just pregame. He knows teamwork and B.J.'s knows savings. This is your home coach, home of the save. Join for just $20 at B.J.'s.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon, limited time offer, new members only. B.J.'s home of the save. Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Experian!