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Chapter 1: What is the modern meaning crisis and its impact on mental health?
It's unprecedented what's going on today. Depression tripled since 2008. Anxiety doubled since 2008. The biggest predictor is saying my life feels meaningless. The average American checks their phone 205 times a day. You're not weak. You're living the same way as everybody else. It all feels fake. I get up, check my phone, scroll social media. I want a big project, but I can't dig in.
And it all feels... like I'm living in a simulation. No, I won't have it. I want the real thing.
Chapter 2: How did technology contribute to the meaning crisis?
I want to suffer. We try to solve life like a complicated problem, but most of the things you care about, you can't solve. Everybody wants their calling. They want to feel complete because of what they do. People who have a calling have two things in common, earning your success in service to other people. I would have loved being a French horn player, which I didn't do it in love.
This was my mistake. When I was 55 years old, I retired from a CEO job after walking the Camino de Santiago, praying, Lord, what do you want from me? Who do you believe you fundamentally are? It's an absolute thrill to be an apprentice in the divine purpose that I believe is my life. That's who I am. There is a crisis.
Chapter 3: What are the three components of meaning in life?
It's not your imagination. And so the way that you fix that is by... Wow.
You're missing your life.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a social scientist, one of the world leading figures on human happiness, which is a big subject. He's a Harvard professor, a three times over New York Times bestselling author, and somebody who's going to help guide us as a maestro in the conversation today around the meaning of your life.
Arthur Brooks, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Andre. Could you help us by setting the lay of the land in terms of what the studies and the science is saying for... The current meaning crisis, like how bad is it compared to, say, 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago?
It's unprecedented, actually, what's going on today. People have been asking, does life feel meaningful or meaningless? Just kind of a throwaway question for the longest time. And a small percentage of people would say my life feels meaningless. That exploded after 2008. And it was exactly coincident with the increases in clinical depression and generalized anxiety.
So there's this big debate going on.
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Chapter 4: How can we live a more meaningful life like Leroy?
You know, why has depression tripled since 2008? Why has anxiety doubled since 2008? And there's all kinds of blame going around. You know, the millennials and Gen Zers blame the boomers, and the boomers say you're just a bunch of, you know, delicate flowers. But it really comes down to this meaning crisis. You find that the biggest –
predictor of saying I'm depressed and anxious is saying my life feels meaningless. And that didn't exist before. And boy, did it actually pop up after 2008. Can we define the term? Yeah. What's the meaning of meaning? Yeah. What's the meaning of meaning? Oh, that's such a Harvard question. That's such a logic-chopping question, and I promise I won't just, you know, wrap around the axle on this.
But that's a really smart thing, because—question, because when—if I told you, you know, you will find your bliss in squim, you'd be like— What is Squim? You know, is it a meditation technique? Is it a nutritional supplement? It turns out it's a small town in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. But you have to know the meaning of what you're looking for.
So if you're going to find the meaning of your life, which is not the meaning of my life. You need to know the meaning of meaning. What are you looking for? And it turns out there's been a lot of work that's been done on that. In my field of behavioral science and in philosophy, there's kind of an agreement that meaning has three parts, the three big whys.
So the meaning of your life is an understanding of the answer to three big why questions. Meaning is always why. It's never how to or what. Why question number one is, why do things happen the way they do? That's coherence. Why is the world coherent? You know, some people will answer that, like you and me, because of the mind of the divine.
Or I would also answer that because of the laws of nature, because of science. Some people who reject those ways of thinking will say because powerful shadowy figures are doing things behind the scenes.
Conspiracy theories are a struggle to answer the coherence question of why things happen the way that they do, which is why if you have a relative going down the rabbit hole doing his own research on the Internet, don't yell at him. Say, you moron, you know, read these studies. That's a cry for coherence, which is a cry for meaning. The second is, why am I doing what I'm doing every day?
You know, that's purpose. Am I just going in circles? Is it all for nothing? That why question is critically important because you need to be able to make progress in your life. You need to feel like you're doing something that actually makes sense. Like you say, like, if I asked you, why are you doing this podcast? You're like, no reason. That would be pretty meaningless.
It would mean that you're saying that the podcast doesn't have a whole lot of purpose. Thus, it doesn't have a whole lot of meaning. And that's why goals and direction are so critically important.
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Chapter 5: What does it mean to live with purpose and love?
They were working the fruits of the beautiful labor of God. And then later they were working by the sweat of their brow. They went from calling to no calling in its own way. And what do we want? We want to live in a particular way of integration, of faith, of hope, of love that actually makes it so that we're working in the garden before the snake.
It reminds me also of, I was very lucky and blessed to stumble upon some teachers early in life. So like at 16, not even necessarily just in person, but, you know, through different books and audios. I remember Earl Nightingale saying, you know, the strangest secret is that man becomes what he thinks about most often.
And that success, his definition of success, the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. The progressive, over time, realization of an ideal that you deem worthy. Does that resonate with you?
Completely. Homosapiens are dedicated to progress. The biggest mistake that strivers, and by the way, this is a striver show. These are people who want to be better. Nobody's like, yeah, I don't want to be better. I don't want, you know, anything like spiritual perfection. You know, no, no, thyself is the anthem for the striver. Yeah. That's good. That's good.
All strivers are sort of homo sapiens par excellence and what we truly want, which is progress toward something. The problem for the striver is the belief that once you actually hit the object of your affections, then you'll have a permanently happy mood. that your limbic system will keep you in a state of bliss. That's not how your limbic system works, man. I mean, you're not there.
I mean, your limbic system isn't there to give you happy days every single day. You'd be eaten by a tiger summarily if you actually didn't have negative emotions, if your bliss were persistent. That's why Mick Jagger's saying, I can't get no satisfaction. He should have said, I can't keep no satisfaction. Yeah. But I try and I try and I try.
The first thing that a billionaire says upon earning the first unit, I need another unit because I don't feel it. It isn't what I was going to feel. And so the point is, Nightingale's point is the progressive unfolding of a goal that's worthy. Progress is everything. And we see this all around us. You know, you can lose weight on any weight loss program practically.
I mean, there's some stupid, you know, the all pizza diet is probably not going to do it, but any serious weight loss diet, you're going to lose weight. And the reason is because you will be rewarded for with the goal of a scale going down that's sufficient to keep you from eating things that you like.
The problem with hitting your goal weight is that the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Which is why weight loss programs generally don't work. And that's this whole principle.
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Chapter 6: How can we find beauty in suffering?
What we need is a worthy goal that can only be, that really is always on the horizon and that we're working toward that. Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let me ask you to see if you'd agree with this. I've actually never talked about this, so I've been thinking about this. We believe there's an ultimate cosmic goal. We believe there's something beyond this life. Most people do, right?
I mean, and it's in different traditions. It's described in different ways, right? Yeah. We want to be happy in this life, but we actually can't be. We can be happier. That's my job. But it's imperfect happiness. But we believe that there's a cosmic bliss. We actually believe that. You and I believe that. That to me, kind of like thirst is evidence of the existence of water.
Hunger is a proof of the existence of food. That hunger for a perfect bliss is evidence that it exists. There is something beyond the here and now.
Yeah. I keep quoting, honestly, man, your book, this book is great. Like I really loved it. And it reminds me of the section humans lack these senses, but to assume they don't exist would be silly, even dangerous. We have no reason to believe either that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception.
On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware of. And that, uh, are as yet undiscovered.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of self-transcendence?
And it just makes me think of, okay, this is what you're referring to is a bit of more of a mystical calling and that there is water that we are thirsty for, union with God, however we want to describe it, that we find in our own individual ways. Do you feel that our calling is bestowed upon us by some unseen force or that we are co-creators with it, that we are complete generators of it.
How do you conceptualize that?
So that's a really interesting question because that is the, in essence, the answer to that question is whether or not you follow the Abrahamic or karmic traditions, right? The whole idea of co-creator of what the destiny is, is a more karmic view. The idea that your essence precedes your existence is more Abrahamic. The essence is the true you, who you're supposed to be.
Your existence is being born in this earthly experience that we're having. And the essence precedes you, meaning that there is a plan, but you have to discover it and live according to it. That's your goal in life. That's what it comes down to. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, of course, I have a view. I follow an Abrahamic religion. I go to mass every day.
And so my natural muscle memory is that essence precedes existence, that my essence is not co-created with my earthly existence. I have to... My intuition tells me, as well as my religious training, as well as Sunday school, that God had a plan for my life that existed before I did. And when God created my soul, he said, be a good and faithful servant. You know, live according to this essence.
But at the end of the day... If I'm wrong, that's okay, too. That's actually okay, too, because I believe that in the ultimate metaphysical sense, probably these two ideas, they converge.
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Chapter 8: How do we cultivate meaningful relationships?
And the idea of preexistence of essence and the co-creation of essence, there's no reason that they couldn't be the same thing when the continuum of time collapses, which in the deepest metaphysical sense, it almost certainly must. Yeah.
No, absolutely. Well said, man. It reminds me of the, you know, it's better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right. Whatever are the objective truths to the claims we have within our beliefs and religious beliefs, what is the ontological experience of the person who believes it, you know? And does that leave you in a better place where you're contributing more to the world?
Well, I'm going to take that one.
Yeah, no, and there's nothing wrong with... with following a particular physics. There's nothing wrong with that. I like my physics. I think it's really a great way for me to understand And I have no reason for, I have no reason to say, because I believe that this is right, that I must condemn everybody else. Right.
I mean, I encourage people all the time to, who grew up as Catholics, for example, who are curious about it, to do it. It's so great. It's so great. I just love it so much. It's the most important thing in my life. Mm-hmm. But I'm also just in admiration of people who have that experience who are my Muslim brothers and sisters. And I have many Hindu teachers when I go to – I'm not a Hindu.
That's not my beliefs. I study with a Dalai Lama. I've been studying with a Dalai Lama for 12 years. I love him. He's greatly enriched my life. And I don't understand how to quite – how to – To accept mine is not to reject theirs. And to figure out what that means is something that hasn't quite unfolded for me yet. But I think it's right.
I think one thing that is a pervasive plague is what you referred to earlier, which you also name as the arrival fallacy. Yeah. So, you know, even this kind of goes into... The positive psychology movement, right, which in its sincere form is a vehicle for self-realization. At a certain point, it can cross into a path of solacism and this unending task to fix a perceived broken self.
You know, people that take up the spiritual path much, you know, there's a saying that says, Like enlightenment or meditation is porn for perfectionists, you know? And so whether it's building a business or pursuing this path, we have this... pervasive and consistent delusion that our ideal life is someday not present now. Right. I was reading this book, The Age of Anxiety from Alan Watts.
Yeah, that's a great book. It's great. Yeah. I just started putting together a new book list for our community.
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