Arthur C. Brooks

Utterly ordinary.

You know, it's funny.

Our grandparents, their lives were difficult and boring and all that, but they never looked back on it and say, my life was so meaningless.

It really did because, you know, when I was looking at it, you know, and I do research on this, you know, I see the epidemic of loneliness, of depression, of anxiety.

And I start interviewing when I see all these data just to kind of get, you know how you do it as a journalist?

You journalists are the best at this because you start doing these interviews and you start seeing a word drop and you go- Patterns.

And the pattern, it's like the journalists are the best at pattern recognition, right?

Yeah.

And they started saying, I don't know what I'm meant to do, or my life feels empty and meaningless, or I don't know the meaning of my life, again and again and again and again.

Or they'd say, my life feels like a simulation of real life.

I mean, I go to work on Zoom, and I date on the apps, and my friends are on social media, and I get my sense of accomplishment from what I'm doing, playing video games, and it's not real.

I feel like I'm in the Matrix.

And so these are the things that I'm actually looking for.

And it surprises me, but it kind of doesn't because in the moments in my life where I've really needed help, it's because I was doing all these six things wrong and I was losing the sense of meaning in my own life when I left my CEO job that led to From Strength to Strength.

I had this really interesting experience.

I'm like, I don't know what I'm meant to do, which is a meaning problem.

Yeah.

What am I meant to do?

So I did what people have done for thousands of years.

I went for a long walk.