How the Meaning of Life Affects Your Brain: Part 2 of 3

Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression anxiety than we've ever seen. This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems including self-harm, addiction, etc. etc. So the question is why? And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious, the word that comes up again and again and again and again is I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. My life feels empty, my life feels meaningless. I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything. There's this existential desertedness, hollowness that they're actually talking about in their life. We have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains. That's what it comes down to. And furthermore, there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work. And when you do this, you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic. Hey friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show. If you've been watching, you already know that this is a podcast dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I'm a behavioral scientist and that's my personal mission as well. The reason I do this show is because I need you in the movement. I would like you to live a happier, better life and I would like you to share these ideas to lift other people up as well. And I want to equip you with the knowledge and the ideas and the habits and the technique to actually make that possible in your life and lives of other people. Thank you for watching the show and for sharing the ideas in the show continuing to watch this show if it's not your first time. Please do recommend this to other people so that we can grow a bigger audience dedicated to these ideas of love and happiness. As always, I would love to hear what you're thinking. Please feed back if you have any questions about what we're talking about here. Any criticisms, any pushback, any clarifications, please write to us here at office hours at Arthur Brooks dot com or put it in the comments. We read all the comments on YouTube on Spotify on on Apple podcasts any place where you're actually getting this. Also, please do leave a review and don't forget to subscribe. This is the second episode today of a three part series on the meaning of your life. The meaning of your life is not just a concept. The meaning of your life. It's actually my new book, the meaning of life finding purpose and age of emptiness. See the handsome cover right behind me here. That book is being released March 31st, 2026. If you're watching this beforehand, it's coming out really, really quickly and there's a special event. I'd like you to be a part of for the launch of this book. It's an interactive event with people from all over the world. Thousands of people will be tuning in on March 27th to find out about how you can be part of it on YouTube or on Zoom. There are a lot of different ways to be involved. Please go to the meaning of your life dot com. The website is actually listed here on the screen as I'm talking. The meaning of your life all one word dot com to learn more. This is going to be your go to spot. I hope for for for this particular topic. I'll be joined by a lot of great friends. I'll be in person with rain Wilson. Their comedic actor, a great friend of mine, comedic actor from the office will be with Chip Conley, who founded the modern elder academy, Hota Kotby from the today show Chris Williamson, Dan butner, all kinds of guest appearances from people who are friends who are really interested in this topic and very enthusiastic about the release of this book. We're going to be exploring life's biggest questions and we would like you to be there. It's completely free. So go to the meaning of your life dot com. Get a copy of the book in advance. If you want, get copies of the book for all the people that you love, especially if you like the book that might that might make a nice holiday present this coming year. In any case, head on over the website and learn more about what we're actually doing today in the second of three episodes on the meaning of life. I want to talk about the meaning crisis and what's actually going wrong in our lives such that in the data. It's very clear that young people, particularly people under 30 years old are having a harder and harder time. I'll give you the evidence for this in a second. Finding what they think the meaning of the life is that all about why is that happening what's different about life today and how can you actually start to turn the tables on that how can you flip the switch and start not just answering what is the meaning of my life but experiencing the meaning of your life more richly in the way that you live from day to day. That's what we were talking about today. I want you to understand the meaning of your life and today is going to actually give you an idea how to do it now let in the last episode I talked about you need to set the stage, which specifically meant you need to actually have more blank space in your life. You need to be bored more, but now I'm going to tell you how to use the time a little bit better. How can you use the blank space in a different way. So that's what we're talking about now once again, let me talk about the problem that we're experiencing nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression anxiety than we've ever seen you've seen the data yourself and you've experienced it around the people that you know for sure if you're my age it's your adult kids and their friends. If you're that age it's your friends and maybe you two depression since 2008 has it has increased by about a factor of three especially for young adults and and clinic and generalized anxiety has doubled we've never seen anything like this is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems including self harm addiction etc etc. So the question is why and there's lots of explanations for this there's pop explanations I've talked about this in the past on the show you know different generations always blame each other you know young adults will say it's all you thanks boomers you know for you drive it up the price of houses and destroying the you know the environment or something and and boomers are like you're just a bunch of snowflakes none of that holds water. There's got to be a better scientific explanation for it and there is turns out when you look at the data on the meaning of life that that explains this trend statistically explains this trend. There's a group I've talked about it before called monitoring the future that asks people do you feel like your life is meaningless and the increases in people saying yes follow the increases in depression and anxiety. It's inescapable these these things actually go together when I started seeing that I started to interviews with people on one of the things that I like to do as a behavioral scientist is to look at the data then go behind the data by talking to actual human beings and when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious the word that comes up again and again and again and again as I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life. My life feels empty. My life feels meaningless. Is this existential desertedness, hauliness that they're actually talking about in their life. I want to talk right now about how different traditions have dealt with this in the past and then I want to relate it to what we can do today. Okay now this is going to be a pretty scientific episode but I'm going to talk about the neuroscience that I really like I really love to share with you in the show and as clear as I possibly can and when I can I'm going to remember to I'm going to repeat some of the hardest concepts here but I think this is going to be pretty clear here's the point we have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains. That's what it comes down to and furthermore there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work and when you do this you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic. That's what I promise you in this episode today. Okay now when I was a 20 year old I remember reading a book that had been recommended to me by a lot of musicians now I was a musician in those days those of you who followed my work for a while you know that it was a classical musician professional full time from when I was 19 until I was 31 years old. I didn't go to college don't wait like 20s my whole first career was as a classical French or play that's what I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life and I was really interested in all the different ways that I could train not just my chops but also my mind to be a better musician a great musician that I knew recommended that I read this one book called Zen in the art of archery by Eugene Herregel. Now he was a German philosophy professor from the mid century who had done a really weird thing instead of just studying all those depressing German philosophers you know Nietzsche and Chopin Hauer and you know heggle and you know. Fine those guys are fine but he said you know I think there's a lot going on in the east that we're not aware of now that might seem pretty obvious to you today but in you know 1930 in Germany that wasn't well known because this stuff just wasn't a circulation there's no access to it. So instead of just going to the internet which didn't exist or even looking at books which you couldn't find Eugene Herregel went to Japan and he decided he was going to study Zen Buddhism. He had heard about this exotic philosophy or religion he wasn't quite sure what calls and Buddhism so he went to Japan now he went to a Zen Buddhist master and said teach me. And the Zen Buddhist master said I can't teach you Zen and he said what do you mean you're a Zen master he says no you don't learn Zen that way the way that you learn Zen is by doing something that requires Zen and then when you master that skill you will know Zen. I mean I realized this is kind of abstract and that's what Herregel was thinking it was recommended him that he study archery archery is an ancient art that is practiced by a lot of Zen masters he studied archery in Japan for five years to learn Zen that's what he did. Now it's a really interesting book and I recommend that you read it, it'll upload the show notes "Zen and the Art of Archery". One of the things that he found while he was learning archery is it's full of these kind of mysterious questions that don't have answers. And in point of fact, Zen is taught this way, typically. It's taught on the basis of unanswerable questions that explore dark parts of the mind. For example, you probably heard the Zen Buddhist riddle. This is called a colon in Japanese. The most famous Zen Buddhist colon, and this actually comes from a 18th century Zen Buddhist master named Hakuin Akaku. Here it is. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Like here they can go, right? Yeah, that doesn't seem like that's what they're talking about. And the truth is, there is no sound. So what's the sound of no sound, right? Now when you're reason in the art of archery, you'll understand how that unanswerable question explored in the mind actually led to him understanding how to be an archer and thus understands Zen itself. Okay, I'm not trying to be too, you know, esoteric here. Here's really the point that I'm trying to make. I've contemplated that a lot. And many other Zen Buddhist colon's. Here's another, for example, a junior monk. Zen Buddhist monk is walking on a country road by himself. And he sees a senior Zen Buddhist monk walking toward him in the other direction. He greets the senior monk and said, where are you going? And he said, I don't know. I said, how do you not know where you're going? Why don't you know where you're going? And he said, because not knowing is the most intimate knowledge contemplate. What that kind of question has in common, like what is the sound of one hand clapping? is to make you think without being able to come up with a coherent answer. And that's actually the point. There's something that that ancient tradition and every other religious tradition has figured out that when we have deep philosophical questions that can lead to understanding beyond articulation, it does something to exercise the brain and mind. That's a tradition, by the way, in among the ancient Greeks called Aporia, or depending on how you pronounce it, Aporia. I'm going to call it Aporia. Hey, I'm an American. Aporia is to sit in a place of puzzlement with unanswerable questions on purpose. Now, this is wacky by today's standards. Why? Because we have a culture, and you see where I'm going with this in a second, we have a culture that if you can't type a question into a Google search bar and get back an answer that makes sense to you, it's not a real question. I mean, it's weird because, you know, there's a whole generation of people who think that if it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist. And so therefore, a question that can't be answered by Google search, or even by AI, therefore, is a senseless question. And what these ancient traditions have asserted, the ancient Greeks, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, all of the karmic religions, all are based fundamentally on an unanswerable questions that would say, no, no, no, if you want to understand the deep mysteries of life, you can't feed it into a Google search bar. You can't ask chat GPT because if chat GPT can answer it, it's the wrong kind of question to give you the mystical knowledge, right? Now, we got to figure out if that's true. And what I'm going to do today is to try to convince you that it is absolutely true and that you can understand the point that I'm making and you can use the point that I'm making very practically in your life. That's what I'm going to show you in the next half hour. Okay. Now, I have my own kind of Collins that I assigned to my students. I asked my students to just contemplate the following two questions. Why am I alive? Why am I alive? You can answer that, I guess, with respect to, you know, a sperm in an egg or the role of God in creating you or for what purpose or all of that. But fundamentally, that's a mystical question that requires understanding often beyond words. Here's a second question. For what would I give my life? Really? Now, okay, if you're a parent and grandparent with me, that's super easy. What else? For what else would you give your life? Why do you know that? That what that does is that that exercises the brain in a very weird way. These are hard or impossible to answer questions. And here's what the ancient traditions claim. When you contemplate those unanswerable questions, something happens to your understanding of the meaning of your life. It doesn't mean that you suddenly say, oh, the meaning of my life is 123 XYZ. You suddenly gain an understanding of the meaning of your life, subsequent to the consideration of mystical questions. And that's what my students find when I pose these questions to them and my adult children as well. Now, this is basically, and this is not just, you know, the mystical traditions or the philosophers, either many more modern behavioral scientists and even medical professionals have asserted this exact same thing. Perhaps the greatest psychiatrist of the early 20th century, Carl Jung and psychoanalyst said more or less the same thing. He said, the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. In other words, a problem is important, which means that it gives you knowledge of meaning if you can't solve it, right? Now, that might sound like I'm, you know, proposing the myth of Cicifus, you know, push the bolder up the hill and trying to figure out the answer to a question, let her roll back down again is like his exercise and futility. So just forget it. Go ask Chad GBT and try to distract yourself. No, no, no, he's saying that there is understanding beyond articulation. That's what I want to get at today. And it turns out, my friends, that we can sort out the mystery of what they're saying and much more, much clearer, more distinct neuroscientific terms based on very recent advances in neuroscience and behavioral science. They're exactly right. And I'm going to tell you why and how you can use that knowledge. The explanation for why unanswerable questions give you special knowledge about the meaning of your life starts with a theory of what neuroscientists call hemispheric lateralization. Now, it's a fancy way of saying a simple thing that the two sides of the brain do different things. The right side of the brain does one thing, the left side of the brain does something else. We have to call it something fancy because that's how college professors get tenure is put on fancy words, hemispheric lateralization. This is based a lot on a number of important neuroscientists working. Now, you might think, oh, yeah, I remember that from the, if you're my age, you'll say, I remember that from the 70s when people were either artsy or analytical, right brain artsy types or left brain analytical types. I thought this, by the way, I was raised by a painter and a mathematician. My father's a mathematician, my mother's an artist. We also have a mom, super right brain. And dad's, he's really left brain because he's a mathematician. And I was thought I took after my mom because, you know, all I wanted to do was play the French horn, write music. I painted a lot. I like to write poetry. I mean, I was like the arts guy. And I had no interest in math and science, which might be surprising to you right now because of what I do for a living. Well, it turns out that when I finally went to college in my late 20s, I took a bunch of classes in economics and calculus and linear algebra and basic statistics. And I already said that. Anyway, the whole point is that I started studying math and quantitative methods for the first time and it'll lit me up on your Christmas tree, man. I'm like, oh, it turns out that I'm left brain like that. No, wrong. The way of thinking about hemispheric lateralization in those days was stupid and wrong because we don't have one side that does the artsy on the side that does the math. But we do have different ways of answering questions and solving problems in the two sides of our brain. And that takes me to the work of the famous and great neuroscientist in the gochrist. He teaches at Oxford University. He's a medical doctor and neuroscientist. This is one of these guys who spent a lot of time in school. He's an MD PhD who is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and he looks at the most cutting edge research and conducts the most cutting edge research on how the different sides of the brain do different things back to the old theory of hemispheric lateralization. He wrote a very important book. I'll put it in the show notes called the master and his emissary. And what he says is your brain works like the master and the emissary where the right side of the brain is the master that asks the big questions. The left side of the brain is the emissary that goes out and actually tries to find the answers analytically. Big philosophical questions, basic analytical and day-to-day tasks. You have two sides of the brain because you've got to do stuff. So I'll give an example like this. I'm the right side of the brain. I'm like, what's the why of my life? Because I'm made to worship and love. Love who? About my family. What does it mean to love my family? Well, to adore them and to take care of them. What does that mean? Well, taking care of them means I've got to support them. How do I do that? Then the left brain kicks in by going to work and going and buying groceries and being a responsible individual and following certain moral laws. See what I mean? You have the big why questions of life and they have the more quotidian and prosaic how to and what questions. Right side, left side. There's another way of thinking about this that I actually learned when I was studying applied mathematics. I was working for the Rand Corporation, which is a very famous think tank in Los Angeles in Santa Monica, California. That's where I was actually working on my Ph.D. and to make a living, I was doing military operations research, which is to say applied mathematics to do modeling for the U.S. Air Force. Now, one of the things that I found was that the mathematical models of war situations are notoriously inaccurate. And one time I asked a really great mathematician, I mean, this guy was a master of these methods. Why is it that we can ever model these really highly, highly complex war fighting situations with any sort of accuracy? And he said, oh, because it's the wrong kind of problem. He said that the models that we put together are complicated methods. And the problems that we're trying to solve are complex problems, complicated and complex. No, I'm not splitting hairs. Here's the difference. Complicated problems are, well, they're really complicated. They're hard to solve. You need computing horsepower and lots of genius. But once you solve them, they're solved. Building a jet aircraft is a very complicated problem. There were no jet aircraft a hundred years ago. And now there are, and we stamp them out. And the planes almost never crash. It's amazing. As a matter of fact, we solved the complicated problem with sufficient genius. Lots of things in life are like that. Building an app to figure out where you can find a pizza at 10 PM, that's a complicated problem. A toaster is a complicated problem. It might seem kind of simple, but I defy you to build one in your garage. You'll probably burn your house down. And yet, it's been solved. You can go to the Walmart and get one for 15 bucks. And it'll be, you know, sitting on your kitchen counter for the next 10 years. Amazing. Other complicated problems. Life is full of complicated problems. As a matter of fact, the whole engineering culture of Silicon Valley is based on the idea that all of life is complicated problems. We've got to solve these complicated problems. But here's the difficulty with that. Anytime somebody reduces the richness of human life to complicated problems, that things happen. That's what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called scientific socialism. That we could come up with the equations of human behavior and then with mathematical exactitude work them out. Theodore Dostoevsky said that's wrong because that's what he called the palace of crystal. You can't work out the things in life with mathematical exactitude. It's a different kind of problem. A Woodrow Wilson, the former president, he talked about scientific public administration where you could actually figure out government so that people would be like cogs in the machine and that didn't turn out so great, I dare say. No matter what your politics are, we don't want to be treated like cogs in a machine. The problem with all of that is that the things we care about the most are not the complicated problems of the dating app and the widget and the entertainment and the tech. And all of that, what we care about is not the complicated problems. We care about the complex problems. Complex problems are problems that are super easy to understand, but they're impossible to solve. You can only live with them and understand them. Case in point, the reason I love NFL football is because it's a complex problem that can't be solved. You can only watch it. You can only watch it and let it unfold. It's unsolvable. I don't care how big a computer that you have, how good the algorithm is, how powerful your AI is, you're not going to be able to predict if in the Super Bowl, the Seahawks are gonna beat the Patriots. Now, they did, I kind of predicted that. I'm from Seattle, so, you know, all is right in the universe right now. But the whole point is, I watched the whole game and I was like nervous. Why? Because I love it, because I care about it. And the reason is because it couldn't be simulated because it's not a complicated problem. It's not a tech problem. It's a sports thing. Sports is something that we love because it represents the passion and spontaneity of the things we most care about in life. Why is it that we want a cat, but not a mechanical cat? A mechanical cat is a complicated thing. A cat is a complex thing, meaning I understand it. It needs to be scratched and it needs kibble and it needs a litter box and it needs warmth. But I never know what it's going to do because it's alive. That's complexity. That's just to live with it. All of love, all of meaning, all of mystery is complex, not complicated. All the things that you care about the most are complex, not complicated. My marriage is unbelievably complex, which means that, you know, I've been married 34 years in 2026, we'll have our 35th wedding anniversary. And I haven't solved my marriage yet because I can't solve it like a complicated problem. I just, I live with my marriage. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe we're going to have an argument tonight. I mean, yeah, that's why I love my marriage because it's alive. The fact that it's alive is because it's complex. You can't simulate my marriage, man. You can't do it. This is, by the way, the reason that you'll never have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend that's going to satisfy you and you'll never have an AI therapist that will give you what you need because you need another complex being that interacts with your complexity to actually give you love that you seek and help you with the problems that you truly want to solve. See my point, right? And what I'm driving at is that we're in a world of complicated solutions and we're not solving any of our complex problems because our complex problems are love, happiness, and mystery and the meaning of life. And there's one thing that you can't solve with your most powerful machine and your best possible internet simulation of life and that's the meaning of life. Now, back to what I was talking about with hemispheric lateralization. Complicated problems are on the left side of the brain. You're working through all the complicated problems. Like, how do I get to work? Do I got a better way to commute? You know, what's the best GPS device to actually get that done? How am I going to solve this particular problem? I'm going to use the left brain, right? That's what I'm doing all day. And I'm using these complicated problems I've solving with the left hemisphere. How to and what? Great. However, the Y side, the right hemisphere is where I deal with the complex problems. Now imagine that everything that I'm doing in life and contemporary life is pushing me to the left side because life is technologizing. Life is getting more and more complicated. Life is promising me and it's an illusion and a lie. Life is in the culture and the economy and the leaders, they're promising me a perfect complicated solution to my complex problems in life. My problems of life and love industry and meaning. What's going to happen? I'm going to get more and more lonely. I'm going to get more and more depressed. I'm going to get more and more anxious. And what am I going to do? I'm going to binge the complicated stuff until the cows come home and it's not going to help. Does that sound familiar? It should because that's exactly what's going on. Okay. What are we going to do about that? When all our whizz-bang complicated technology, all this doing is giving us a more and more developed left hemisphere of our brains. Meanwhile, we're atrophying on the right. We're starving to death in the right. It's like, as Tolstoy put it, when you're trying to use science to actually solve the problem of love, he called it starving to death in a toy store. You're in the run kind of store. That's his point. You need to get over to the right side of your brain. And you're not going to do it with gaming and swiping right and surfing and scrolling and YouTube shorts. You're not going to do it. You need to do it in a different way. So, here's a way. Zen Buddhist Collins, the mysteries of the Bible, the unanswered riddles of life. Maybe that's it. I use the Zen Buddhist Cohen example, but let me give you an example of, that's a little bit closer to my own faith tradition. I'm a Christian, and in the Christian Bible, and also in the Jewish Bible, there's the ultimate book of right hemispheric, complex meaning, which is the book of Job. What that's really all about is Job, who's a character who is everything stripped away, and spends the whole book actually questioning why this happened. And by the end of the book of Job, after all is suffering, he understands without being able to articulate why suffering happened in his life by doing the questioning of the unanswerable questions. It's in every tradition. How are you going to do that? How can any of us do that? When we know everything, except the why of anything, that's the state that we're in. Where there's no mystery and no meaning, but a lot of stuff and a lot of tech and a lot of knowledge. How do we break out of that? What do we do? Well, let me propose some solutions on how you can actually use the wisdom of the ages to open up the right hand side of your brain, 'cause here's the point, my friends. Here's what the Zen Buddhist were suggesting, and the ancient Christian monks and the ancient Greeks with their aporia. What were they suggesting? If you simply query these unanswerable things, and you do it with patience, and you do it with sincerity, you will open up the part of the brain that you need to actually start to understand and experience the meaning of your life. And it'll happen to you like magic. Now, this is one of the reasons that most religious traditions send people away on contemplative retreats, and you're not supposed to bring your phone. Sometimes you're not even supposed to bring books, because all you're supposed to do is think, and they'll give you these ancient questions to actually think about. So, for example, this is how the Dalai Lama starts his day every day. They think, wow, I mean, I've heard, I read someplace that in Al-Glamah he. He meditates eight hours a day. Man, he's like sitting in the lotus position going, no, no, that's not how the Dalai Lama meditates every day. As you know, if you watch the show, I've worked a lot with this. Holy is the Dalai Lama We're gonna have content coming out on the podcast in the coming months of Actual events that I've done with him that I want to share with you. It'll be an exclusive look behind the scenes on that and I've asked him What does this meditation actually mean? He gets up at about three o'clock in the morning and the first thing he does is he meditates for two hours, but he does something that's actually called analytical meditation. And what he does is he'll read a couple of of Tibetan scriptures that are especially Esoteric that are really hard to understand that don't have a clear meaning and He will ponder those things for two hours. You see what he's doing, right? This is a porya sitting in the state of puzzlement on the basis of questions that don't have clear answers But rather only have understanding. That's exactly what he's doing. That's what Aristotle if he saw the Dalai Lama doing Oh, that's a porya. That's what you have to do. If you want to understand the deep mystery and meaning behind all things He's doing that not to come up with the answers to those questions But rather to raise his consciousness to the greater meaning of all things That's what's actually happening because of the way that he's using his brain Catholics do this too. This is called mental prayer and another way that we think about this is when when Christians call it Lectio Divina, which is that the divine reading where you'll read something is the most mysterious Hard to understand the thing that you actually can't in the Bible that seems like just it doesn't have an obvious Understanding it doesn't have an obvious application as a matter of fact you read it and you contemplate it to seek a divine Understanding that's mental prayer and that's what monks have been doing for Thousands of years And you can do that too But should to do that you actually have to Transgress the norms and rules of the modern world Because we don't do that anymore. We don't remember. We've technologized ourselves three-quarters of the way to death Oh, yeah, no, I don't understand this. I don't understand this scripture. I don't understand this passage in holy scripture I don't know let me ask chat GPT and then chat GPT will come back with That's a very good question and and many of the greatest philosophers throughout all time I've asked that question. They're gonna butter you up in this way And then they're gonna start giving you you know what certain what a certain person has said and another person has said and another person Has said and nothing about the understanding that you actually might gain You can't outsource the work to a digital left hemisphere By the way, that's what AI is It's an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain, and it's great at that when you try to use it to help your right brain When you're using it as a therapist or a girlfriend or a buddy that's when it leaves you profoundly Existentially depressed and empty every single time because it can pass the touring test of the left side of your brain But it can't pass the touring test on the right side of your brain You know that that's not giving you what you need that you know. That's what's actually leaving you empty So to do a poria today is hard countercultural, which means you got to schedule it to your mental workout Now for some people it's really really hard to do a real workout You know I go to the gym every day for an hour because I've been doing it for decades It's become a total habit. That's what you have to do with a poria as well You need a schedule it now. I recommend scheduling five minutes a day or ten minutes a day to contemplate a mysterious Question a question of great mystery. Maybe it's his end, but it's colon. Maybe it's a passage from the Bible Maybe it's something something that doesn't have a clear answer for you and simply read it slowly and Then repeat it to yourself and sit in a state of puzzlement about that That's going to light up the right hemisphere of your brain and that's going to start to Exercise what you need to start finding the meaning of your life meaning it all sorts of different things The space that I actually do that is usually two times a day after I work out I go to Catholic Mass with my wife and it's tons of quiet time in there and there's Time for contemplation in there and then before we go to bed We like to pray the Rosary which is a thousand year old ancient Catholic meditation, which is repetitive prayer Where you're contemplating mysteries from scripture. That's my way What's your way? How are you going to practice a poria and practice it regularly? That's step one step two. Here's a here's a way to actually do this to make this a little bit easier You don't have to sit there because maybe that's hard for you the ancients have almost always Practice the poria while walking and there's the idea that ambulation walking walking walking walking is physical contemplative activity Walking meditations exist in almost a retrition as a matter of fact There's a reason the second colon that I talked about with the the monk walking around along the road who meets the senior monk walking in the Other direction the ambulation was critical to the second Buddhist monks Understanding that he was actually getting so if if sitting in a poria is really hard for you walk in a poria That's a good alternative and and and this is one of the reasons also that that pilgrimage is existing almost every tradition as well I got super special knowledge beyond my ability to articulate it Inefable knowledge when I walked the commander of the Santiago, which is this ancient 1,100-year-old walk it was for those of you who saw the movie with With martin sheen the way that that's what he was walking and what why was he doing that by the way because he was trying to understand the meaning of his life And that's what people have been doing for more than a thousand years. I guess I'm gonna walk 800 kilometers or whatever you do I think I did the last hundred sixty kilometers because I'm a slacker actually the reason is because Mrs. B said I'm not doing the whole thing and I wanted to do it with my soulmate, but yeah, man You'll find what you're looking for you will find what you're looking for you'll walk your way into Aporia and as such you'll walk your way into knowledge. I promise you now I'm going to continue with this if you keep listening to this series But if you really want more now get the meaning of your life This is what this book is all about. This is a very practical guide to doing things that never seemed practical See practical life today is a big mess practical life today is about this gadget and that app and this amazing Feed of engineering Practical life today is all left hemispheric and it's all complicated and the truth of the matter is that you need a right hemispheric Complex orientation toward your life if you want any prayer of finding the meaning of your life What I've tried to do today is to give you the beginning of The technique that has worked in every tradition, but this is only one way to do it There are many other ways that you're going to get in this book the meaning of your life There's a matter of fact there are literally five other ways that you're going to get it Well another one you'll get in next week's episode and going forward. I'll talk a lot more about them But trust me if you do these things your life is really going to change. This is backed by science and experience and My own life before we finish list. Let's take a couple of questions I love the questions Please keep writing in the questions and thank you so much for doing that Austin he says he read my book love your enemies and liked it. Thank you for that Austin It really helped him calm down. That was a book love your enemies. I didn't make that up. Obviously that's Matthew five forty four That's what a sermon on the mount love your enemies pray for those who persecut you those are words of Jesus those aren't my words I didn't make that up Clever right, but it's a book about actually how that's the most transgressive teaching in all of humanity That that's what actually can change anybody's life by not just you know Coexisting with your enemies and not just tolerating your enemies and and you know not having You know a basic non-violent attitude triggered and he was but actually learning how to love your enemies And that requires that you understand love in a different way the love is not a feeling at all You don't have to feel warmth for your enemy. You need to love your enemy, which is to will his or her good That's the ancient definition of love by the way, which transcends feelings Okay, anyway I read your book love your enemies. It's helped me calm down However, I still struggle with getting mad when I see social media posts or even just a bumper sticker on a car On the track to work. I got it brother. I live in the world too on a practical level. How might I combat this contempt? I feel for others And act with love. Here's how you do it. You stand up your olympic system Your limbic system is reacting to what you see what says what's actually being processed in the occipital lobe of your brain The visual cortex of your brain your limbic system is being excited by that because you're Perceiving a threat a threat to your way of thinking or your threat to your way of life. That contempt is happening to you But that doesn't mean that you have to act on it on the contrary you can take an opposite signal strategy You see somebody who's got an obnoxious bumper sticker and I don't care if it's right or left it depends on how it affects you Start by praying for that person and not that that person will take the bumper sticker off the car Pray for that person and say I hope that person has love in their life. I hope that person has a beautiful life That's a loving kindness meditation in the Buddhist tradition as well We start with loving kindness towards yourself and then towards your loved ones and then you extend it actually out toward the people You don't even know and finally to the people that you don't even like That's a really really hard thing to do, but you can will that and when you do that Your orientation changes completely. Austin is magic Jesse Stokes last but not least once again coming into the email address I was learning if you have any travel protocols that you follow when you're traveling today that you're still your best highest functioning cell phone traveling. I absolutely do. Those of you who saw my morning protocols will put that in the show notes. The evening protocols, the phone protocols. I've got an episode we're going to do in the coming months called relationship protocols. I'm, I'm protocols, baby, because I'm all about science and the public interest and applying it to my own life through better habits and better behaviors. Why don't I have to think about everything constantly? And I absolutely do have travel protocols because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year. So what am I going to do? I'll put together an episode on it. Thank you. I'm not going to go through it now because that would be 45 minutes just so you don't want that. But you will want to watch that when I actually put that together in a very organized way. So I'll be kind of like George Clooney and up in the air, except like George Clooney, PhD, nerd scientist. I'll do an episode like that. Thanks for the, thanks for the idea. Well, that's it. My friends, let me know your thoughts at office hours at authorbrooks.com, like the episode. If you liked it, subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, all of the above. Leave a comment and make sure that you tell your friends that this is the show you'd like to watch. Also, follow me on all the social media platforms, IG, LinkedIn, Yada Yada. I love it all. And I put a content on Instagram, and especially that's, that's an escalated, people don't see any place sells order the meaning of your life, the book behind me. It comes out this week to learn more. I hope that you find the meaning of your life. I hope you found that this is a useful episode for you. And maybe after you stop watching this, you'll turn off all your devices and sit in the poria, answering the questions, the beautiful questions, the divine questions that don't have immediate answers, but the understanding of which contains information about the meaning of your life. See you next week.