Arthur Brooks
speaker
491 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 1 Aug
Arthur Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right, right.
matched
It doesn't amaze me at all because these are dopamine-based addictions.
matched
The way that people treat their technology is much the same way as alcoholics treat alcohol, that gamblers treat gambling.
matched
I mean, the truth is that they all want to do that and they all truly are envious of you for doing that, but they can't do it because of the chemistry in their brains is actually linking them to their devices.
matched
And they have a sick relationship, a disordered relationship with their technology.
matched
Right.
matched
And I've studied leisure a little bit because as a behavioral scientist, it's a very interesting topic.
matched
It turns out that philosophers and psychologists in the middle of the 20th century had a lot to say about leisure.
matched
It's not chilling.
matched
It's not recharging so that you can actually do more work.
matched
It's a serious business, actually.
matched
It's a serious part of life, per se, if you want to live the best possible life.
matched
Probably the best writer about leisure is Josef Pieper, who's a 20th century German philosopher.
matched
And he wrote a very famous book called Leisure, the Basis of Culture, where he talked about the fact that it should be something incredibly generative and incredibly productive that they just don't pay you to do.
matched
And he found that leisure that's most productive, that does the most good for psychology and the soul, is sort of in the areas of deepening your relationships, deepening your spiritual or philosophical life.
matched
or learning something that you don't have to learn and taking it really seriously.
matched
So just chilling on the beach, looking at nothing, that's okay for an afternoon, but that's not a serious pursuit that's actually worth going after for a month.
matched
So he, you know, what we would think of is there's sort of three legs of the stool.
matched
There's the work leg, there's the leisure leg, and there's the sleeping leg.
matched
And what that suggests is there's about eight hours in the day that you should be dedicating toward things that are, that deepen your life, but they're not paying you to do.
matched
Showing 41–60 of 491 · page 3 of 25
← Previous
Next →