Finding Happiness, Success and Deep Purpose with Arthur Brooks
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Hello and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am so happy you're here. But there is always room for more happiness, and that's exactly what we're talking about today. I'm joined by Arthur Brooks, a social scientist who studies human happiness and teaches about it and leadership as a professor at Harvard.

He's the bestselling author of 12 books, including his most recent and the topic of our conversation today, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, which debuted last month at the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

He's also the creator of the popular How to Build a Life column in The Atlantic. And previously, he served for 10 years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in D.C., during which time he was named as one of Fortune magazine's world's 50 greatest leaders.

Arthur is a wealth of knowledge, and I am excited to chat with him about how we can all live happier and more fulfilling lives. We'll dig into all the tactics and hacks you need to start putting these lessons into practice today, and hopefully also touch a bit on the links between money and happiness. There is a lot to cover, so let's jump in. Arthur, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted. It's going to be great. When I first read the title of this book, I thought,

Maybe this book is for my parents and it's not for me. Now, I've since learned that that's maybe not the case, but could you talk about who the book's for and how that's different from maybe the time of your life that it's about? Yeah, this is a book that basically says you don't have to leave your happiness up to chance as you get older.

And there are people who are old who are going to read it, and there are people who want to get old, and there are people who are getting older, and that is 100% of the population. And a lot of people think, like, am I going to be happy when I'm old? I don't know. Hope so. Live right. Hope for the best. And this book is basically a claim based on science and information

talking to the happiest people and the unhappiest people as they get older, that we don't have to leave our happiness up to chance. You can build a happiness 401k. Now we all know, and you know perfectly well, because you do a lot of stuff in finance, that the sooner you start your savings, the better it's going to look when you're older. So this is about happiness in the second half of life, but it's about starting to get happier in the first half of life.

I love that. I think we all want to be happy. But one thing I think it's important is how are we defining happiness in these conversations here and in the book? That's the first thing I ask my students. I have this MBA class that teaches Harvard Business School. And the first day of class, I go around and say, what's happiness? And they start talking about their feelings. The way you feel when dot, dot, dot, dot.

It's the feeling of whatever. That's not right. That's like saying that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. That's not the Thanksgiving dinner. That's evidence of the Thanksgiving dinner that you can perceive. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something else. When I look at the social scientists that people who are happy and unhappy,

Happiness is a combination of three, you might say they're macronutrients. So food can be defined in terms of three macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And you have to have them in balance and abundance if you're going to have good health and feel good. Happiness has three macronutrients that you need in balance and abundance. You need enjoyment, you need satisfaction, and you need purpose.

When I meet somebody who's not happy, I start looking diagnostically at these three things. The first practical takeaway that comes from all this theory is that if somebody's like, ah, my life isn't complete,

Some things are good. Some things aren't, but I'm not really happy. It means there's a lack of balance in one of these things. Either you don't have enough enjoyment in your life or you're actually not hitting goals, which means you don't have satisfaction or you don't have a sense of purpose and direction in your life. It's one of those three things. And so that's the first place to start looking if you feel like you're not where you want to be in terms of your happiness.

Is there like a quiz or a question you can ask yourself for each one of those things to figure out how you are on each one? There actually are. And that's why I write my column in The Atlantic every Thursday morning. So I'm digging into different aspects of that. And so the column in The Atlantic has got a whole bunch of quizzes. People who are into it, they want to read a little bit of the underlying research. Sometimes I'll talk about it like the Greek philosophers did. So Epicurus said happiness is all enjoyment. And the Stoics said happiness is all virtue and meaning. And the truth is we need to be both.

I have a column about, are you more Epicurus or are you more Epictetus? And it actually has a quiz in there on how to do that. So my column on that is a good way to start to test yourself. We'll look to the column and maybe some of those quizzes in the show notes. Yeah. One of the things I saw in the book that I thought was interesting was the reason why this shift from the beginning of your life

seem to be somewhat linked to the type of intelligence we have and how that changes over time. I think most people here probably haven't heard about fluid and crystallized intelligence. Can you walk through that for people who aren't familiar? Yeah, this book has the seven habits of people who get happier as they age. And one thing to keep in mind that's really important that I found over the course of my research is that there's a lot of similarity in the patterns of happiness over the first part of their lives. Generally speaking, the old

The older you get, the more that people diverge. So you see that people after about 65 go into two groups. One gets happier and the other gets less happy. And the group that's getting less happy, paradoxically, they tend to be the strivers who work the hardest early in their lives. You got to look at that. That's a big mystery. That doesn't mean it has to be that way, but we need skills. That's why I have the seven skills that the happiest people later in life have so that even if you are a striver, you're not doomed.

You just have to adopt these skills and do the work is what it comes down to. You know, everybody who is getting the hacks needs the hacks. And these are the seven hacks. Now, what's the first skill? The first skill is making sure that you're on the right success curve. A little bit of background on this. For about 100 years, psychologists have noticed that there's two types of geniuses.

There's early bloomers, people who have an early appearance in their genius, like child geniuses and young entrepreneurs. And then you've got the late bloomers, the Elon Musks and the Dalai Lamas. Those are the two types of geniuses out there. One's really young and one's really old. For the longest time, we thought, well, two types of people. The people who do this kind of thing, people who do this type of thing. Later, we figured out everybody has both.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to be Elon Musk or the Dalai Lama, but I have a lot of power to actually use my potential to the max

Early on, it's going to be innovative capacity, processing speed, indefatigability, my ability to go. Later in life, my abilities migrate toward my wisdom. Not necessarily to work all night and solve problems that are brand new and innovative, but to take existing knowledge, understand what it means, combine ideas and teach them. That's what you're really good at later in life. Now, the first type of genius is called fluid intelligence.

It increases naturally all the way through your 20s and through your early 30s, and it starts to decline in your late 30s and goes down really fast in your 40s. That's the reason that people are less likely to come up with some weird, big, eye-popping innovation when they're 50, much less so than when they're 30. When you're 30, you're at maximum innovative capacity.

In your 40s, your crystallized intelligence, that's the second type, starts to increase, which means that you get more wisdom, more perspective. You know more. You have a good memory. Your memory actually improves in a lot of ways, believe it or not. You can't recall Joe Smith's name. You forget that, but you remember all the important things and you can combine them. It's like you have a vast library and you know how to use it. One of the reasons that you forget stuff when you're older is because your library is so big that

that it takes time to go get a piece of information. It's not degradation. It's just the size of the library. The filing system is dense. And so later on in life, people use it. They become better Scrabble players. They can actually be better at foreign languages, even though their vocabulary is no good. Historians do half of their work on average after age 65 because it's pure crystallized intelligence. It's wisdom. They're teachers.

And at my university, the best teaching evaluations are uniformly over 70 years old. That's crystallized intelligence. The key thing is you got to be on the right curve. If you're 50 or 60 years old, you're like, ah, I'm struggling to keep up with the 30-year-olds. You're doomed, man. You're doomed. You're going to feel horrible about yourself. They're going to run circles around you.

But here's what you need to do. You need to school them with your wisdom. This has so much potential for rocking our world. Basically, you're on the first curve. And here's the thing. If you want to be happy and successful, you got to jump to the second curve. You got to go from the Elon Musk to the Dalai Lama. You got to go from the innovator to the instructor. You might change jobs. You might not. But you got to retool your life and what you're paying attention to and what you're trying to do. That's the first big skill of people who get happier as they age.

So if you're someone listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm in that late twenties, early thirties part of my life, I know I need to jump the curve eventually.

What does that jump look like? How do I prepare for it? What should I be doing with my time? Okay, so to begin with, when you're starting to see the decline, you're going to see it before anybody else does. The big problem is if you deny it and rage against it, but you're going to notice that if you're starting to burn out a little bit, you're starting to be a little less interested. The reason you want to do it less is because you're not as naturally good at it as you were before. That's your tell.

Ability is not the tell, desire is always the tell. Desire tells all always. What you like always indicates what your capacities are. And so when you're first starting, it's like, I don't know, man. This guy came to me with this great new startup idea, but I like, ah, I don't have a fire in the belly anymore.

That's a good sign. That means that you're actually in liminality. You're between the curves. So what do you need to do? You need to learn and you need to actually start combining knowledge. Instead of writing the book that has the big new mathematical treatise that nobody's ever come up with before, you write the book

that combines everybody's best idea and start learning about synthesis of things as opposed to the creation of brand new ideas. Synthesize things as opposed to inventing things. And that means different things in different professions. If you're a lawyer, that means what you should do is you start running a team of young lawyers.

You should go from a cowboy to a team leader. That's a really good way to do it. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, don't come up with a big innovation. Find people who can and make them successful. That's the reason that great athletes who are unbelievable early in their careers, they're really, really good as commentators on TV. It's not just because their knees have gone out.

Right. It's the same reason that entrepreneurs who are unbelievably successful can be graded VC later, because what they are is actually teachers. They're cultivating the next big talent. And every profession has something like this. Are there people that kind of are household names that have either done this well or poorly that bring the example to life? There are a lot of historical figures that have done it poorly and well. In the book, they talk about Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin is on everybody's list of greatest scientists. He changed the way that we think with his theory of natural selection, the theory of evolution, unbelievable. He came up with that at age 27 when he came back from his around the world voyage on the Beagle collecting botanical and zoological samples. From his late 20s, he was already the most celebrated scientist in Europe. He was rich, he was fit, he was the king of the Mambo, man. I mean, it was unbelievable.

And he dined out on these theories for the next 30 years. He just developed them, nurtured them, and used this big innovation. Now, the problem was he got stuck when he was about 50 years old because he hadn't been a very motivated student. So he didn't learn very much math or statistics. He didn't learn German. And if you were going to be a serious scientist, you needed to know German in the late 19th century. So what happened was that his own field passed him by mathematically. There was a Czech priest and scientist named Gregor Mendel,

who actually was more mathematically sophisticated. He invented the theory of genetics. And that's what Charles Darwin needed to progress in his own field. And he couldn't understand it, couldn't read it, and got stuck. And from the age of 50 until he died at 73, he never did original work ever again. He wrote 11 more books, but he hated them all. He died feeling like a disappointment. Why? He was stuck on his first curve, Chris. He was on his fluid intelligence curve. And it doesn't have to be that way because he could have jumped onto the second curve, but he didn't know it existed or he didn't want to do that.

That's a mistake. Okay, let's get a better case study of somebody who did it right.

Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, according to a lot of people, including me, I made the first 12 years of my career as a classical musician, and Bach's my favorite composer. He was unbelievable. He was the innovator of the high Baroque. He was inventing mind-blowing stuff when he was in his 20s. He was so famous. He was so great. And then music passed him by. At the age of 50, his son, he had 20 kids, by the way, so that guy was productive.

His son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, invented a new style of music called the classical style. And Bach, the father, couldn't keep up. He's like, I don't know how to write in this style. He couldn't keep up because his fluid intelligence was too low. So what did he do? He retooled his career as a teacher.

He turned from writing original pieces of music to writing textbooks about the High Baroque. He went from doing commissions for the greatest pieces of music to writing music for the church as part of his teaching responsibilities. And he became the most beloved teacher of his time.

He was jumping onto his crystallized intelligence curve. He had a studio full of students who adored him. He was known as a truly great teacher. He was working on this textbook called The Art of Fugue. He literally died mid-measure while writing one of the fugues. A hundred years later, a famous composer named Felix Mendelssohn found his manuscript. He's like, dude, you got to hear this to his friends. And they play it. They're like, this is beautiful. Today, we play that textbook as a work of art. He'd

He died with his kids surrounding him and his students surrounding him and his grandkids surrounding him. And he died with love and happiness on his success curve. By the way, on his better success curve, because dying happy is a good way to die.

Yeah. So he definitely nailed skill number one. And two. Okay. He nailed it, man. He nailed it. And he was a living proof that everybody's got both, but you got to jump when it's time to jump. You have to have faith that it exists and you got to have courage to make the change. And then what? What's next? The skills you got to master next are the things that make you not want to jump and then the things that make it easier.

So, one of the key things you find about people who are really unhappy and actually can't get happier, they wind up going downward in their happiness and stuck on this fluid intelligence curve and thinking about the past and kind of pissed off because, you know, I'm not appreciated anymore and...

trying to hide their weaknesses and all that, they have a really bad and nasty addiction, which is something that a lot of people suffer from. It's a success addiction. Now, all addictions implicate a neuromodulator in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of reward.

It's of anticipation. This is what gets you addicted to alcohol or cigarettes or gambling or methamphetamine. It's the dopamine that makes you want it, want it, want it. It gives you a mild burst of satisfaction and then it goes away and you want it again. Hit the lever again. We're like monkeys on cocaine. We lose our sense of proportion. We lose our sense of inhibition. We hit the lever, hit the lever, hit the lever again and again and again. Addiction is bad because dopamine can chain us.

The worst kind of addiction that I see for really, really successful people, I mean, some drink too much, some smoke, they shouldn't, but they're success addicts. You know what a lot of the ambitious people you and I know from a young age, their parents are like, you're special, you're a hard worker, you get A's, you always win. And they objectify their kids and the kids objectify themselves as homo economicus, FWB.

as the victorious one, as the successful one, and they get the cookie of success, and they hit the lever, they get the promotion, they get the extra money, they get the adulation, they get the compliments, and they love it. Literally, it stimulates dopamine in their brain. And when they're getting better on their fluid intelligence curve, man, it's like flying with terrifying speed. It's like the monkey in front of the lever hitting the lever again and again and again and again.

And then when the hits come less frequently, it's misery. It's a dysphoria. It's literally a scarcity of dopamine in the brain. And this is one of the things that distracts them from the evolution of their own strengths. Addiction makes them unable to pursue happiness.

You know, I live in Silicon Valley. So often everyone's like, you got to find your purpose, whatever you're working on. It could be bigger. You could be doing more. I juxtapose that to most of the people who I know who aren't obsessed with that seem much happier in their lives. Yet it's still something that even knowing that so many people chase. Hustle culture is a cult called workism.

Where your work is your identity, your work is your fulfillment, your work is your ego, your work is everything. And your work is your pleasure because of your success addiction. The main thing that we need to do is to establish what we call metacognition. Metacognition is very simple. The Buddhists always say when you have feelings and urges, you need to observe those feelings and urges. Now literally what's going on neurophysiologically

is that an urge or a feeling originates in the limbic system of the brain. That's the lizard brain. That's the back part of your brain that is stimulated automatically because of outside happenings. You'll be managed by that. If you're reactive and you're simply hitting the lever, if you're a cocaine monkey, you're just a limbic creature. You're like my dog, Chucho. Sees the cookie, eats the cookie. He's highly mindful. He's not paying any positive attention or spending any time thinking about anything. That's how a lot of people are who are deeply workist in that cult.

The way to defeat that is by simply journaling and thinking and putting time between your impulses and your actions. The Buddhists always say the time between action and reaction is the humanity in what we do. It's the true humanness in what we do. What's really going on here is you're moving an urge from your limbic system of your brain to your prefrontal cortex.

That's the human part of your brain, the big meaty lobes behind your forehead. Once it's there, you can manage it. To be metacognitive is to say, okay, I have the urge to be successful. I feel like I'm going to be unhappy unless I'm successful, and yet I'm not happy. You need to start journaling.

That's the bottom line. Journaling, it sounds sort of wimpy and weak and kind of dumb and sentimental. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is highly neuroscientific. Journaling is the single best way to go from my dog Chucho to me, to my prefrontal cortex. It moves your urges into the front part of your brain and then you can manage them. That's the single best technique for breaking these addictions is thinking about them metacognitively.

Do you need to journal that often to benefit from journaling? I actually do recommend writing down a few thoughts every day.

I don't think that actually spending half an hour in the morning, half an hour at noon, half an hour at night is probably a really great use of your time. I think it's really, really important to make sure that you record what you're doing. Now, some people don't have to do this in terms of journaling. One of the great things about functioning romantic partnerships is that you can be jointly metacognitive, but you have to work every day to be talking about what's happening to you limbically, to discuss your feelings with each other. For example, when I'm feeling workist, and it's really my tendency...

but left to my devices. I'm cocaine monkey all day long. I'm unhappy when I'm doing it. And I know enough about that because I'm pretty metacognitive, pretty self-aware guy. I don't necessarily go and write in my journal. What I do is I go and I talk to my wife. I say, I got a problem. I'm doing this thing again. And we jointly metacognitively move it to the prefrontal cortex of my brain where I actually can manage it. So having a partner with whom you can discuss these things with confidence is arguably an even more effective way to do this.

Could be a partner, your wife or your husband. It could be a friend, I assume, or a mentor. It has to be somebody who actually understands you, who can do joint metacognition with you, which is to say they really want to understand what's happening to you limbically, and they want to help you manage it as an executive. So they can actually function as the third lobe of your brain. It has to be somebody who knows you deeply. It can't be you're subordinate at work. That's not going to work at all.

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Don't miss the chance to maximize your happiness and save money. Join over 37,000 people getting my newsletter by going to allthehacks.com slash email and signing up for free. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash email. I want to come back to some of these other skills that you can learn. You said something interesting when it was, okay, you could go to your partner and

There are things that I think often get construed with happiness, things like love or money. Are there components of happiness? I know you talked about enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, but some of the common things I think people think of,

I'm curious to get your perspective on them. So let's at least include like love or romance and money and maybe other common things people think are associated with happiness. And how do they fit into the picture? Sometimes they're idols and sometimes they're real. So here's the way to think about that in a very practical way.

There are four things that you want that are idols and that have a little bit of a divine quality to them. They attract you, they're magnetic, you know you want them. But they're not intrinsically satisfying. Those things are money, power, pleasure, and fame. All those things can be really good, but only when you pursue them instrumentally towards something that's more important than those things. Money is great, but if you pursue it for its own sake, it will leave you frustrated and empty. Power is the same thing, you'll become a tyrant.

Pleasure is incomplete because it's entirely limbic. It'll make you a little bit more animal. You need to actually combine it with elevation and morality to make it into enjoyment, which is one of the macronutrients of happiness. And fame is literally the only idol that we pursue. You can only ever be happy in spite of.

It's super dangerous, which is why social media is making us all so crazy today. Because everybody can establish a little bit of local fame and they get a lot of dopamine by seeing likes and ugh, it's awful. So those are the evil four. And they're not evil if we use them appropriately, like anything else. Wine isn't evil until you become an alcoholic. So these things create addiction and instrumentally they can be okay, but intrinsically they're the bad four, they're the idols.

There's the good four. Now here's the four accounts that you need to invest in every day if you want to be among the happiest people. This is what they all have in common. There's 10,000 articles of the habits of the happiest people. I've boiled the ocean down to these basic four. They all do these things every day. They practice their faith or life philosophy. You don't have to be religious. You just have something bigger than you that zooms you out on your own life. Your life is like the most boring sitcom ever with which you're obsessed.

My job, my car, my money, my ugh, it's just so boring. And yet we're obsessed with it. You need relief, you need peace. Life philosophy or faith or spiritual practice gives you that uniquely. So it's meditation or prayer or studying the Stoics or whatever it happens to be. You gotta do your thing and you gotta do it seriously. Second is family. The ties that bind and don't break.

It's important that you not choose them, but that you have them for your happiness. And God knows in many cases, we wouldn't choose them, right, Chris? And a lot of people are having a lot of trouble with their families. One in six Americans is not talking to a family member because of politics today. It's a huge problem for happiness. Unless it's a case of abuse, don't let that be you is the bottom line.

The third is friendship. We have a major loneliness crisis in the United States. Vivek Murthy, our Surgeon General, said that the biggest public health crisis in America today is loneliness. Not the coronavirus epidemic, not opioids, not guns, no, no, no, no, no. Loneliness. The average number of close friends that somebody 30 years old has has been cut in half in the past 20 years.

About half of people under 30 say that no one knows them well. It's horrible for every aspect of happiness. And part of the reason for that is that everybody knows how to make deal friends, but we know less and less how to make real friends. My book talks about how to make real friends if you're incompetent because you've only had deal friends. And the last is work. And work doesn't mean working hard all night long. It doesn't mean making tons of money. It doesn't mean having prestige. It means exactly two things.

earning your success, meaning your skills meet your passions, and serving other people, the people who need you. If you earn your success and you're serving other people, I don't care if you're an electrician or a librarian or a podcast host or a Harvard professor, you will be happy from your work. And if you don't have those things, you won't be happy from your work. Faith, family, friends, and work are the big four, are the things that we need to shoot for. And the things we need to avoid as intrinsics are money, power, pleasure, and fame.

There's a book called Happy Money, which talks about using money for happiness. And one of the interesting things they say is spending money on others is one of the five ways that can make you happy. That seems to fit a little bit in work, but is it important to share happiness, to spread happiness, to give happiness in order to be happy ourselves? Yeah, the way to get happier, there's an algorithm to it, believe it or not. A lot of people wish they were happier, but they're not. They're just obsessing on their unhappiness. But like anything else, you got to do the work.

And there's three steps to it. You need to understand it by doing the work and study it. Learn what the practices are. Now, you can do it by talking to your grandmother. You can do it by reading my column. You can do it lots and lots of ways, but you've got to do the work. The second is you've got to practice it. You've got to apply it. You can't read just a book about golf and become a better golfer. You've got to get out there and golf.

And so you need to take the applications that all of us in this field are talking about and practice them in your life. Do your gratitude list, do your forgiveness exercise, do your happiness strategic plan, but you got to do the application and then you got to share it.

This is the most beautiful thing of all. Why? Because you've got to make it metacognitive. The best way to make something metacognitive is to teach it. Why? Because you can't teach something limbically. You can only teach something from the executive center of your brain because you have to be able to articulate the idea. And so if you want to get happier, you really have to understand it and manage it. And the best way to do it is to teach it. Okay?

And teaching is just another form of sharing. So understand, apply, share. That's your happiness algorithm. Is sharing telling people about how they can be happy or trying to make people happy? Ordinarily, it's both. But I actually strongly recommend showing your cards. I've got this class. I got 180 MBA students in my happiness class. And so I say one of the ways they can get final credit for the class instead of writing the exam, they can set up their own happiness class for students who didn't get in.

So what do they do? They take my PowerPoint slides, they take my name off, they put their name on. They put together their own syllabus and they videotape the classes, they turn the whole thing in. And they're becoming totally metacognitive in everything that we've talked about. They will never forget these technologies once they teach them. So here's the great thing about happiness, the most beautiful thing. Write it all down, make your slides, discuss it at dinner.

or talk about it and say, I heard Chris Hutchins' podcast, which I love because it's a great podcast. And he had this guy who teaches at Harvard talking about the science of happiness. Here's the thing he said, I guarantee you there will not be a peep. People are going to be listening to you as if you were the Dalai Lama because everybody wants it. It's great to be a happiness professor because suffice it to say that it piques people's interest.

I love episodes like this. Sometimes we talk about money and I know people aren't going to go home and meet up with their friends at night and be like, you know, what's in your bank account? No,

Maybe some of our listeners are more excited about investing, but when it comes to the deeply personal side of money, it doesn't get spread. So the other one that you just mentioned in the good for that I think I want to spend a minute on is with faith. So you mentioned that it's not just organized religion, but I think so often someone might listen to this and think those two must be the same thing. It's not for me. I'm kind of scared of this, but I hear it. I'm like, gosh, you're telling me that the people that are the happiest have these four things. How does someone who's maybe...

Organized religion isn't a part of their life, but wants to bring faith into their life in the happiness sense. How would someone get started with that? There are lots and lots of ways to do that. And so the two ways that I recommend, if you're uncomfortable with traditional religion and or prayer, I recommend that you start a secular meditation practice.

Because meditation is highly concentrating, it actually will bring you to mindfulness and at the same time can zoom you out on the experience of your own life. It concentrates you on the experience of your own life and it zooms you out on the experience of your own life simultaneously. It's also extremely satisfying and it can help you to rebalance your hormone profile, all kinds of good physiology behind it. And the second thing is reading big ideas.

Start with the Brothers Karamazov. This is a study in human transcendence. That's really what it is. Read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Read the Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. All of these things are hugely available to us, and they'll blow you away.

your mind. If you're doing half an hour a day of that deep wisdom reading, you just won't be the same. At some point, you might want to experiment with the religion of your youth, because that stuff is unbelievable. I'm a Catholic, and Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, he's the reason that we read Aristotle today. Before him, nobody read Aristotle. Aristotle was lost.

And he said, no, no, no. Hey, guys, this is the best thing ever. And you understand Aristotle in this brand new way, whether you're religious or not. Read the Confessions of St. Augustine, a study in human psychology about the stirrings of the human heart. This stuff is so good. By the way, even if you're not religious at all, read the Bible.

Because it's the most culturally inflecting and impactful book ever written. So just to understand what's going on in society, it's a good idea to read the most impactful book that's ever been read. You can actually think that God was behind the writing of it or not behind the writing of it. Your mind will be blown. You'll experience day-to-day life in a completely different way. And that's really what it's all about because you need relief from the reality show of Chris Hutchins' life.

Does that mean that practicing faith could just be reading these deep ideas? Like that is actually a method for that aspect of happiness. What I recommend is reading them, but reading them in a very, very deep way. When I talk about reading something, slow down and read two pages.

underline those two pages and take notes, and then take 15 minutes and think deeply about what those ideas mean in the context of your day-to-day life. That's what the ancient philosophers called Lectio Divina, divine reading. In other words, it's to let the reading ideas seep into your soul. And it's a very powerful cognitive technique for reading in such a way that it really will change your perspective. So yeah, I just read Man's Search for Meaning today. No, you didn't.

I read the writings of Seneca this week. It's like, get out of here. You didn't. You read one page and then we'll talk because it's so full of wisdom. I want to see the underlined. I want to see the highlighting. I want to see your notes. And I want you to tell me what that actually did to change your way of thinking and your change your way of behaving today. That's Lectio Divina.

Wow. It's not audible at 2x. No, not, no. You know, that is so Silicon Valley, man. That is so absolutely true, is that I'm reading to harvest information so that I can use it for money, power, pleasure, and fame. Hugely problematic.

We got way off track. And I think if we were to try to come back, the next thing would be about using the science of satisfaction. Am I bringing us to the right place? Sure, absolutely. The science of satisfaction really is back to dopamine. It's the success addict is the one who hates hitting the lever because they think they're going to get satisfaction. And Mick Jagger's saying...

I Don't Get No Satisfaction, which is a super famous song. It's the third most popular rock and roll song of all time. The reason is because it has a message that people can really relate to. I try and I try and I try and consumer culture and sex and all that, but I can't get no satisfaction.

The truth is you can get satisfaction, but you can't keep no satisfaction because dopamine won't let you. Here's the concept for the moment. Every five minutes, we cycle through some really heavy thing here. I love this conversation, by the way. You're fast, man. So the concept is homeostasis. Homeostasis is the natural tendency of the brain to return all thoughts

physical and mental processes to equilibrium. For example, you get on the treadmill in the morning and you're running to get your heart rate up to 160, you step off 15 minutes later, your heart rate is back down to 80 or 70 or whatever happens to be. If it didn't, you die. Homeostasis returns you to baseline. It also returns you emotionally to baseline.

something really great happens to you. Your book is a bestseller, congratulations, one week from now, you're not going to feel a thing. Why? Because you can't stay on that high forever, you die. In ancient times, you'd be like, I found some tasty berries on a bush and I'm going to be permanently happy while the saber tooth tiger sneaks up behind you and eats you for lunch. You need to have emotions to guide your behavior, but you got to go back to the baseline to be ready for the next set of circumstances.

That's the reason you can't keep satisfaction in life. You hit the lever and you think it'll stay forever. And it doesn't. It stays for a minute or a day or if it's something really, really great, a week or a month. So the science of satisfaction says you can't keep it. And so therefore, you shouldn't tie your bliss to the idea that you can by running from thing to thing to thing. And the happiest old people have got this figured out.

The happiest old people are no longer chained to the happiness wheel. We call it the hedonic treadmill, where you run and run and run. The thing is running against you, and there's a little evil guy in the corner turning up the speed. And after a while, you're running out of fear, because if you stop on a treadmill, boom, face plant. This is the very important thing that old people figure out, and they step off the hedonic treadmill.

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Is the hedonic treadmill similar to the concept of keeping up with the Joneses in our financial or cultural lives? It's related. That's actually a phenomenon called social comparison. The great

philosopher, president Theodore Roosevelt called social comparison the thief of joy. Unambiguously, social comparison will wipe out your happiness. It will mow down your joy. That's the reason that social media is a misery machine. It's based on social comparison and you're getting a fake version of somebody else's life, which you're comparing to the terrible version of your own life. Meanwhile, you're posting a fake version of your life. BS, that's not right. And so the

fake, fictional social comparison, and it makes you miserable. So the hedonic treadmill is bad enough. Lard on social comparison on top of that, and misery is in the future. Wow. People, when they're old, that are the most happy have gotten off the treadmill. Yeah. And I know you have a lot of opinions on bucket lists. I interviewed a guy named Ben Nemton a few months ago, who has written a lot about bucket lists. And

His inspiration was reading research of people who on their deathbed said one of their regrets was not living the life they wanted to. He has, through plenty of conversations, come to the conclusion that part of the reason people don't do the things they want is because they never take the time to write it down, write down how they want to get there, and life just gets in the way so they don't do the things they care about. So his inspiration

answer was, I think people should create a list, not just of jump off a bungee jump in New Zealand, but things in their life, in their relationships, in their family, with their health, and write it down as a bucket list. And I know you have some strong opinions about bucket lists. So I'd love to hear your perspective on all that. There's a lot that's right that you just said, but we have to be really careful. Bucket lists, as we usually understand them, are metastatically stupid and misery provoking.

I want to go in a hot air balloon. I want to make a million dollars. I want to publish a self-help book. Basically, money, power, pleasure, honor, bucket list items. Those are bad for you because what they do is they lower your satisfaction. They increase your attachment. They increase your craving, and it grows around you like kudzu. Your satisfaction is not a function of what you have.

Your satisfaction is a function of what you have divided by what you want. Don't have a haves management strategy with a bunch of trivial bucket list items. Have a wants management strategy of decreasing your worldly wants and your satisfaction will grow. That's the reverse bucket list.

The reverse bucket list is to make a list of all of the tacky cravings. I want the admiration of these strangers, and I want this kind of car, and I want this glamorous vacation. Write it all down. Great. Write it all down. And then say, I detach myself from this.

I officially no longer care about this. The right thing on the bucket list that you're talking about is making a list of the good four: faith, family, friends, and work that serve other people. Make a bucket list of those things. So the love that I want to have, the relationship I want to have with my adult children, the relationship I want to establish with my parents and learn about them before they die.

Those are family items, the deep friendships. I want to migrate all my deal friends to real friends because this is one of the great sources of unhappiness and loneliness. That's a bucket list item is real friends. That's actually meritorious. Seeing how I can do work that truly serves other people who need me. I want to go on a spiritual journey. That's a bucket list item that's really meritorious. So those are the things that actually should stay in the bucket and everything else should come right out.

So it's less about not having a bucket list and more about culling it down to the things that will matter. And then it sounds like you and Ben at least would share that having them written down somewhere and talking about what you can do this week, this day to make progress towards them is a valuable exercise. It's just not a valuable exercise if there's 300 things that include all kinds of crazy wants. No, sure. Bunchy jumping in the Mekong Delta.

No, no. Getting to know my father better. Yes, yes. That's actually right. So I think that he and I would agree to a very, very large extent. A bucket list is not a bucket list is not a bucket list. If you're filling your life with unsatisfied trivialities, all that's going to happen is you're going to wind up being less satisfied and unhappier than you were before.

There's been a common conversation about experiences, like money should buy experiences because experiences is the way to fulfill yourself and be satisfied and be happy. But I think a little bit of what you just said contradicts that concept. Yeah. So there's a lot of research on this. And I have two colleagues at Harvard Business School, Ashley Willems and Mike Norton, that are kind of the leading experts on how to buy happiness.

And there's basically, you can classify it in different ways. Some people say five, some people say six. There's really four things you can do with happiness. You can buy stuff, you can buy time, you can buy experiences, and you can give it away. Those kind of the big four ways that you can use money. Now, what everybody wants to do for their satisfaction is they want to buy stuff because they think that's the most tangible. But that's not right. Let me tell you a story. So I've been married 30 years.

And 29 years ago, I was having this great big blowout, unbelievably bitter argument with my new wife.

And we were arguing about how to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, ironically. And here was the deal. My wife's from Barcelona, and she's all about vacation and going to the beach. And I'm a thrifty, practical American. And we had zero money. And so I thought we should buy a couch to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I was a musician. And we'd just moved to the States from Spain. And she didn't speak English. And she was working a minimum wage job. And it was brutal. And so this is the argument. Beach, couch, beach, couch, beach, couch. And finally, we compromised and went to the beach.

And that's why I've been married 30 years. But that's not my point. The key thing to remember is that we were talking about that a couple of years ago, and we got a couch. That was like seven couches ago or something. And I don't even remember the couch. But I can tell you everything we did on that beach vacation because we were in love and experiencing it together. Here's the main mistake that people make. They think that physical things are permanent and experiences are evanescent. It's exactly the opposite.

If you experience something with somebody you love, it's permanent. But if you get a thing, you'll forget it and not care about it. And it'll be out on the curve of your emotions almost immediately. Buying stuff seems permanent and it will give you the satisfaction. And you're wrong. Your brain is lying to you. And there's all kinds of evolutionary reasons why your brain is lying to you. You need to go to the other three. But you got to do it in the right way. Buying experiences is great. But you have to do that with someone you love.

Maybe the person that you love and you want to know better is you, by the way. And if you really want to go to the Cambodian temples by yourself because you're actually trying to get in touch with something spiritually, that's great. Fantastic. But it has to be for a reason, and the reason has to do with experiences and improvement of a particular relationship.

Second, is buying time. Buying time means paying somebody to do something you don't want to do. Now, not everybody listening to us can do that because they don't have enough money. But if you can, why would you pay somebody to cut your yard so you have more time to do something you do want with someone you love? If you do it so you can watch something stupid on Netflix, all you did is waste your time and your money. And that's not so great. The last is giving it away, but giving it away to a cause that you love.

It has to serve your values. And you see what I'm talking about here, Chris. It's love and then love and then love and then love. You want to turn your money into happiness. It has to be based on love.

I heard you say not to watch something on Netflix. Would it be fair to say, unless you watch something on Netflix that's stupid with someone you love, then it's okay? Precisely. You got it, you're an A-plus student. I'll find anything I'm not supposed to do, as long as I do it with someone I love, then I can get around that. Yeah, this is the reason that neglecting your loved ones while scrolling social media is such a terrible thing for your happiness.

Because you're doing two things at once. Number one is you're numbing yourself with just a little shot of inadequate dopamine and your foregoing love. It's crazy plus crazy. That's an interesting point. I have to assume that technology has made a lot of building happiness in our lives difficult because of distraction or social comparison issues.

Is there anything it's done to make happiness easier? Yeah. So here's the key thing about technology. It always over promises and under delivers. And I'm not a Luddite on the contrary. I think this stuff is really great. Anything that substitutes for love will make you unhappier. Anything that compliments your love will make you happier.

All of the technologies, what do they promise? It promises you more love, and that's why you want it. I'm going to connect with people. I'm going to get social contact. I'm going to meet people. Phenomenal. It looks really great. But almost inevitably, it actually crowds out true human experience.

the experience of getting to know somebody, to share your heart with somebody. Now, there's a lot of neurophysiology to this. For example, the neuropeptide that functions as a hormone in the brain called oxytocin. This is intensely pleasurable that we get in response to eye contact and touch.

with other people. When people are really lonely, they do exactly the opposite of what they should do. Instead of going someplace and talking to somebody in person, they scroll social media, which gives you no oxytocin. It makes you lonelier. Social media is the junk food of social life. And apps for dating, what they do is they crowd out the experience of meeting somebody de novo.

They also have another big problem, which is that they don't give you enough complementarity with other people and they overload on compatibility. They make you so compatible as if you're dating your sibling, which is, how shall we say, not hot. This is a problem with how technology works. So here's the way to judge technology. Is it a compliment to my relationships, my real in-person human loving relationships, or is this substitute for those relationships? If it's the latter, it's bad for you.

I want to jump to one last section, which was about turning weakness into strength. Yeah. And I want to hear a little bit about that because I have some questions. Yeah, I know. That's a scary one, man. But this is a skill that all happy old people have in common that's really hard for young people to absorb. And once again, what's this book all about? This is the happiness 401k, meaning that these are the kinds of investments we need to start making at 25 or 45 or 65 so they'll pay off later. So it's very important to understand these things from the very beginning.

Old people all know that what's really off-putting is saying that you don't have strengths and being defensive about your weaknesses. I could come and be wearing an obvious toupee, right?

right now. And I'd be like, I think it looks pretty natural. And he'd be like, that thing looks like a bird's nest. Are you kidding me? And it would be ridiculous. And it would be a sign of defensiveness and insecurity. And that's the problem because life tells you if you've got a weakness, you should not share it. You should defend yourself against it. You should hide it as a matter of fact. And that's actually a huge mistake. What we need is human connection and your weaknesses connect you with other people. We're all weak.

You have good things about you that people admire, and that's magnetic too, to be sure. But if you really want to relate to somebody, you got to lead with the ways that you are like other people. And that's what old people do. I was a musician for a long time, and it really hurt my hearing because it's very loud playing in a symphony orchestra. And now I don't have hearing aids, but I'm getting a little deaf, quite frankly. And I'm in lecture, and these kids, they freaking whisper. You can't hear a word they're saying. So I'm like, what?

What? I said, so I asked my colleague, one of my colleagues, like, what do I do? And he's like, you say, hey, I'm 57. I'm deaf. Speak up. And it's hilarious. They all laugh and they can actually relate to you and they like you better. And they speak louder.

So you see what I'm saying, right? The connection is human frailty, and this is what we need to do. The most winsome people are non-defensive about their humanity. They're not hiding things. They know what they do well, and they know what they do poorly, and it's all good.

You said in the book, negative emotions make us more effective in our day-to-day activities. Yeah. Without negative emotions and experiences, we don't learn. And when we don't learn, we don't find meaning and purpose. So when people are trying to go from happy feeling to happy feeling to happy feeling, and they're trying to force unhappiness out of their life, paradoxically, they're actually avoiding their happiness because they're not getting sufficient meaning and purpose. That doesn't mean we should go looking for suffering, but suffering is going to find us and we need to find ways to experience it and learn from it.

Is that an indirect argument against being eternally optimistic? It's a common argument in our household. It's like circumstance arises. You could think of glass half full, glass half empty. My wife and I often take different sides of that, and it's a little frustrating. And I read that line about negative emotions, and I thought...

Maybe sometimes you should take glass half empty. Maybe it's better. Or am I misinterpreting? No, it's absolutely the case. So my great mentor and friend Martin Seligman, he talks about rational optimism, but he's really talking about his hope. People often use them synonymously, but optimism is really just a prediction that everything will be OK.

Hope, there's nothing unrealistic about it. It's the idea that something can be done to improve the situation and I can do it. It's hugely empowering. There's always a reason for hope. Hope is a theological virtue in Christianity and Judaism. Hope is a good thing. It's a good way to be. It'll make you happier and it's a virtuous way to be as well. It's better to be realistic and to do what's appropriate and to do so with hope. So that's the distinction that I would make.

So I got a few rapid fire things before we wrap up. I know you have talked in the past about how you had this amazing job and then you thought about happiness and you decided to quit. People in their 20s and 30s, they're working a job. They don't love it, but they know that for some reason, sticking it out for a little bit of time, maybe not forever, will bring something. Whether it's they'll hit their bonus six months from now and that'll give them some comfort with their financial situation or they'll get that promotion. And I'm curious if you think

Is the answer that sometimes yes, that's the case or is the answer always you should probably cut bait as soon as you feel like it's not a good fit? It really depends on the circumstances. I know all kinds of cases where couples are not getting along, but they want their marriage to work. You need to think ahead about exactly what the circumstances are and whether you know something can be fixed.

and it's perfectly legitimate to suffer through circumstances you don't like in the moment because there's a greater prize. It's also the case that quitting a job every time you don't like it is a lost opportunity for you to prosper. It's a lost opportunity for you to grow as well too. The biggest mistake I see for young people, and this is a very practical thing that I tell my students, is if you quit a job, like your first job out of college,

Usually within 18 months, you're probably making an error because you're incapable of learning to like it when you change jobs and careers and cities all at the same time. That is the same cognitive and emotional impact as immediate family member dying. So what happens is people like congratulations, but you're actually grieving because there's so much change in your life.

And you tend to cross the cables in your mind. And you think that the change per se, the grief that you're feeling is because you made an incorrect decision. That's wrong. And so there are all kinds of ways to stay the course. Now, that doesn't mean you should be like, I hate this job. My life sucks. But 25 years from now, I'm going to get a pension. So I'm going to stick with it. That's an error. Okay.

You've lived in a lot of places. I'll give you the freedom to pick anywhere you've lived and tell people if they're going to that place, what's a kind of off the beaten recommendation for a meal, a drink and something to do. My favorite city in the world is Barcelona, which has been my second home for the past 35 years. That's where I got married. That's where I played in the symphony orchestra. I consider that my own home and it's the city that I actually know best. So where are you going to eat?

any place. It's Barcelona. It's one of the foodie capitals of the world. You go to a bar and you eat some bar food and you're going to be like, this is the best thing I've ever had. What are you going to drink? I don't know. I don't drink at all, but live it up. That's all I can say. It's Barcelona. And what are you going to see as a tourist? Oh man, throw a dart. The place is unbelievable. You can go to the Roman ruins. You can go to the Sagrada Familia. You can go to the ancient Romanesque churches. You can look at the Gothic cathedrals.

Holy cow. It's just like a living, walking museum of everything from modernism all the way back to prehistoric times. And so go to Barcelona, everybody. If you haven't been to Barcelona yet, you're barely living.

I have been for only a few days, but it's on the list to go back. There's a story you opened the book with that I know in a lot of interviews you started with, but I figure we should end on it, which is your situation on an airplane that kind of inspired you to write the book. Yeah. The great thing about being a social scientist is that the world is my laboratory and

And all the research is actually me search. That's actually the dirty secret of being a happiness specialist. And every time I start on a brand new project, it usually comes because I have an experience that really affects me. And that's actually where the story started. Eight years ago or so, I was on a flight, night flight from LA to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., and I heard a couple talking behind me on the plane. I could hear them. It sounded like a married couple, a man and a woman, and they sounded old, right?

Their voices were elderly, and I couldn't quite make out the husband's words, but I can tell by his wife's comments that this was serious business. She was consoling him and saying, oh, it's not true that it would be better if you were dead. It's not true that people don't love you and respect you, that everybody's forgotten you. It's like this went on for 20 minutes, and it was just, it was brutal. So their flight finally ends, and they turn on the lights, and I'm curious, and I'm a student of human behavior. This is probably somebody who's disappointed with his life because he didn't live up to his own dreams.

And I stood up and turned around, and it was one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody who's achieved 10 times what I will in my life. I would die to be this guy, so it seems. And if I did, I'd dine out on my success for the rest of my life. His feats of heroism are decades in the past, but still, he's rich, he's famous, he's got it all. I thought,

something's up here. This is no insurance policy. What the world tells you, that you get successful and you can bank it and enjoy it for the rest of your life, that's a lie. That's an obvious lie. So what's the deal? Is he an outlier or is he typical? Are the strivers the ones who tend to suffer or does he just have some mood disorder? And that's what started this investigation on what we can all do to invest in our happiness later in life. They came up with a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today was

that poor man on the plane. And I still look him up and I pray for him. I hope for the best. That's all I can say.

I, for one, am fortunate you had that experience because it led you to all this research, led you to the book. I think I'll be a happier person in the future because of it. So thank you. Where can anyone here, other than by the book, follow up with what you're doing and stay in touch? So I have a column every week in The Atlantic called How to Build a Life every Thursday morning in The Atlantic. And if you want to see just all the different essays and books and things that I write about happiness and even learn about my classes at Harvard, you go to arthurbrooks.com, all the information's there.

Perfect. We'll link to everything in the show notes. And thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Chris. Thanks for what you're doing. You're making me happy too. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.

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