E194 - Arthur Brooks: How To Find The Meaning of Your Life

I don't have it. I want the real thing. I want to suffer. We try to solve it 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 fifty five years old, I retired from a CEO job after walking Santiago, praying, Lord, what do you want from me?

that exploded after two thousand and eight. And it was exactly coincident with the increases in in clinical depression and generalized anxiety. So there's this big debate going on, you know, why has depression tripled since two thousand and eight? Why has anxiety doubled since two thousand and eight? And there's all kinds of blame going around. You know, the the the millennials and Gen Zers blame the boomers and the boomers say you're just a bunch of, you know, delicate flowers and

But it really comes down to this meaning crisis. You find that the biggest 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 two thousand and eight.

It turns out it's a it's a small town in the Olympic peninsula of Washington State. And but you have to know the meaning of what you're looking for. So if if you're gonna 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 and turns out there's been a lot of work that's been done on that. In 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 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 a relative going down the rabbit hole,

doing doing his own research on the internet. Don't yell at him and 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 the purpose. Am I just going in circles? Is it all for nothing? You need to feel like you're doing something that actually makes sense. Like you 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 and then that's why goals and direction are so critically important. When you give uh like an adolescent just almost a trivial goal, like go from B pluses in this class to A minuses in this class, and they start going after that particular goal, they get much happier.

Because they have this sense of forward progress, which is how Homo sapiens are built. And the last why question is why does my life matter? That's the significance question. That's the that's really the question of love. Why does my life matter? Because My mom loves me. Because God loves me. That's the s the the real sense of your life's significance. And and if you believe that you have no essence, that you have no significance, your life is gonna feel meaningless. And so

When I'm talking to young people or anybody who's in a meaning crisis, I try to just try to dig in on which one of those things I need to do work on. Do I need to help them understand who loves them? Do I need to give them goals and direction? Do I need to introduce them to ways to understand the coherence of the universe? But I gotta know first.

It's like what happened here? You know, it was the happiest place in the world when I left, two thousand and eight. When did you go to college? When did you finish college?

Why what happened? Yeah, what happened? So when I came back to academia in twenty nineteen and I found the and I found the plague had gone through, something had gone wrong. Two thousand and eight, when I left, college was happier than non college. You know, people were falling in love like every week.

And and people were making their best friends for life and they were experimenting with ideas. I mean, the whole idea you'd go to college campus and hear crazy ideas and you'd like protest and try to get your professor fired. That's insane. That's just the nuttiest thing ever. You're supposed to be like

That is thrilling that they're telling me everything I learned as a kid might be wrong. That's the whole point, right? It's supposed to be a big adventure, right? It's supposed to be scary and dangerous intellectually. But that all changed. When I came back in twenty nineteen, it was like cancel culture and safe spaces and and and the huge amounts of depression and anxiety. Um and some campuses, fifty-five percent of the of the students were in counseling.

Which I got nothing against counseling, quite the contrary, but that's a lot. That that is an indication that something's really, really up. So I said, All right. What's the deal? And I started interviewing students. I I looked at the data and that's where I found these data on meaninglessness that had exploded. And then I started talking to people because the h the way you do forensic social science like I do is that you see you see a pattern.

You look for data to confirm the pattern. And then you start talking to people. So the penny will drop that will give you clues. Then you can start running experiments and do these other approaches. It's kind of like figuring out the source of a virus. That's kind of how it works, is if we're trying to figure out what caused COVID or something. And I started talking to students and young people. My students are in their twenties. I teach masters students, MBA students at the business school.

And they would you know, they would talk about their lives and be like, I don't know. I mean, I I I don't know what I'm meant to do. I do everything I'm supposed to do, but I don't know what I'm meant to do. And I don't know the meaning of any of these things. I don't know the meaning of these relationships. I don't know the meaning of my experiences. I don't they kept talking about meaning. It's like, wow, this is really deeply philosophical.

And and so I knew that that was up. They also said something really interesting though. They would say it all feels fake. It all feels fake. Like, you know, I get up, check my phone, scroll. social media, you know, watch YouTube short.

By the way, this is gonna be a YouTube short. They um and then I go to work. I don't go to work, I go into my bedroom and I'm on the zoom screen and I date on the apps and I do a lot of gaming and I want a big project but I can't dig in. And it all feels Like I'm living in a simulation of her real life. And and so that's when I'm starting to understand that there's something actually going on with the brain.

That's the dead giveaway. Now, as a scientist, that's where you start to get these clues because of these words that people say. And that's when I started looking deeply into the neuroscience of how life changed, especially after 2008 that broke our brains. And the truth is, it happened and it broke our brains in a way that we couldn't even understand or even ask questions of meaning. And that's where we are today.

You get the structure, the causation, the un understanding what's happening largely from biology, um, from studying neuroscience. You get data about why things are happening and how they work from behavioral science. And then you actually go back into the wisdom in Eastern traditions and Western traditions to have practices to use what you've learned to change.

the situation, to fix the problems, to enhance the strategies that you've actually got. So the whole thing requires triangulation across faith or philosophy, neuroscience, behavioral science, and then committing to action. That requires that I'm reading all the traditions and the different angles on these things. Now, when you find there's a discrepancy between Buddhism and Western psychology, sums up.

Thumbs up. You know that probably we're coming at it from the wrong direction, often in Western psychology, as a matter of fact. But when you find that these are consistent ideas and they're pointing you in the same direction, then you've got some confidence because you'll also be able to develop some tools, deep understanding and tools.

Why that why that's the case, the solutions, the many different solutions to that. So for everybody who's listening to this conversation that maybe reads your new book and studies your work. Aaron Powell What is the promise after having listened to this conversation that they can gain more insight on so that we can spend the rest of this conversation fulfilling on?

That's what this book is about. You know, there is a crisis. It's not your imagination. You're not weak. You're living the same way as everybody else. There's a reason that your brain has changed. You can change it back and live in a new way. And your life will never be the same and it will be much, much better.

So what is the Doom Loop? And let's kind of go and I'm curious your thoughts on technology in particular.

You know, it's interesting that uh if you go back to the the industrial revolution or or or even the late nineteenth century, the promise was that, you know, physics and chemistry were going to solve every problem. And science was gonna find the solution to every social problem. And so you had Karl Marx promising scientific socialism, which ended pretty poorly, or or even people in in countries like the United States promising scientific public administration where we could set up a government.

that would uh where people would work like machines and er and you know, everything would be great. And that doesn't work that way. And there's a reason it doesn't work this way. Which is that all the things that we care about as human beings, this is the beautiful thing about those of us who are interested in the metaphysics of life, not just the physics of life, is that we are complex adaptive creatures. That we live in a complexity of mystery and meaning.

Now, now there's a neuroscience behind that. Your brain is hemispherically lateralized. You got a right side, you got a left side. The right side is dedicated to the why questions of mystery and meaning. The left side is dedicated to the complicated questions of how to and what.

the engineering approach to life, which is largely emanating from the philosophy of Silicon Valley, which is that we can hit the singularity, we can figure all of it out. We can build algorithms that are even better than humans and suggest that we're nothing more than the left hemisphere. That life is nothing more than a series of complicated problems. But we live in the space of mystery and meaning. We live in the space of complexity. Most of the things you care about, you can't solve.

I mean my marriage. I've been married thirty five years. I haven't solved it. I'll never solve my marriage. That's why I love my marriage, because it's different. It's alive. You know, it's funny. We had I was having a kind of a Stressful conversation with my wife as I was driving up here today. And and just as I threw my phone away, she texted me, I love you.

That's the complexity of my marriage. No algorithm would predict ex the dynamics of how that actually worked. And so the result of it is when we're looking for these complicated solutions to the complex problems of life. We become alienated. We turn off the hemisphere of our brain that we actually need to understand the meaning of our life. That's the problem. And that's a doom loop.

Because the more that you distract yourself, the worse it gets. The worse it gets, the more miserable you are. The more miserable and meaningless things feel like they are, the more resistant that you are to sit in the in the stillness of yourself. the less tolerant you are of actually being with yourself. For so the more that you scroll, and the more that you swipe, and the more that you shop

And things get worse and worse and worse. It's very much like anything that actually implicates the brain chemistry of of addiction. Yep. You know, people are bored or anxious and so they drink alcohol. Those are the big predictors of alcohol abuse or boredom and anxiety. And and that temporarily relieves it, but it makes it worse. And so you do it more and you escalate and you wind up in alcoholism. And we have the same basic set of problems. That's the doom loop of technology.

It can get this this exist I'm curious your thoughts on how this existential this existential angst to find the meaning of our life could be really Simply supplemented with a walk in nature and

Right. So you're determined to actually make a change in your life. Then you need to get clean, which means you need to do something to heal your brain. And then you need to do the hard part, which is live differently.

Right, to become comfortable with yourself. You know, what interesting thing about alcoholics, they always move. They always think if I get, you know, I move to a new place where I don't know anybody and I don't have all those like degenerate friends, things are gonna get better. So you move from LA to New York.

And the first thing that pops out of your suitcase is you. That's the problem. And so so really the solution to this is we gotta get clean. We have a have to have a better relationship with technology and eng and the engineered life. And there's a lot of stuff in the book about how to do that. There's a lot of science about how to get clean.

from th you don't throw your phone in the ocean. I mean you look at you, you're you're a spiritual adept, but you still have a phone. And that's because you have a proper relationship with your devices. You manage them and they don't manage you. And I talk about how to do that.

very practically with actual protocols. But then you have to live differently. And the way that you have to live differently is by doing things that stimulate the right hemisphere of your brain. There were ordinary. You know, my great grandpa LeRoy Brooks didn't have to think about this. But I'll tell you something, he didn't come home from work and say, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today because his brain was working right. His brain wasn't he wasn't flooding his HPA axis.

He was using his brain properly. And but so so what was ordinary no longer is. And we have to retrain our brains in the old ways. And that's really what this is all about. How are the ways that you can illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain once you're no longer being managed by your technology?

Today was leg day. That's really uncomfortable is the whole point, but I'm intolerant of psychic pain. People don't want mental pain. They don't want they try to they resist sadness and fear and anger and disgust. and boredom. They don't like that. So they they think that there's something wrong when they feel those things. That's that's that's as wrong as thinking that the pain that you feel when you're underneath the bar And when you're doing a the bench press.

supposed to feel that way. And and an and a characteristic of a life where a uh f with a brain that's working properly is that you're bored a lot. You know, that's there was no way to escape that. You know, great grandpa Leroy was bored all the time. But here's the irony. He was bor bored from moment to moment, but his life wasn't boring. People today, the average American checks her or his phone 205 times a day.

Th if you're at the f supermarket checkout line, everybody's looking at their phones. Right. And that's because they're resistant to boredom and they're never bored moment to moment, but their lives are boring. That's the irony. We're the opposite Elite Roy. And so what we need to do is one get clean, as I mentioned, but then live like Leroy. I should've just called this book Live Like Leroy.

that laboratory experiments on how much people hate boredom, they're hilarious. I mean, I have this colleague named Dan Gilbert at Harvard. He's a psychologist. He's a great envisionary psychologist. And he's done these experiments where he invites a bunch of undergraduate students into the lab. 'Cause they'll do like anything for twenty bucks.

And and he'll sit him in a chair in an empty room with nothing to do. Fifteen minutes. Just sit there for empty for fifteen minutes. Nothing to listen to, nothing to see. And he gives him just a little key fob. And if they touch the button, they self-administer a painful electric shock. So you know what he's studying? Yeah. Boredom or pain. A quarter of the women shocked themselves. Two thirds of the guys. It's kind of what you need to know about men.

It's okay. It's okay. But it's a shock machine fundamentally. And when you're looking at your phone every 13 minutes, and that's on average, if you're sitting behind a light, You're looking at it the whole time. Like anybody wonder if anybody texted me? I wonder if there was something over there on

of information because this is what we're getting is information. Information, information. Did you want that information? Not necessarily. You're being flooded by information. Information and that's keeping you away from the mind wandering, the flights of fancy. It keeps you away from the space of deep meaning. You're gonna have to suffer. Blank space if you're gonna get to meaning is what it comes down to, which is why I I give my students homework to get on a flight.

And not look at their phones. Yeah. To ride the train and have their f hands in their laps looking out the window and say A tree to walk for an hour before dawn without devices, to to not look at their phones for the first hour of the day during meals and the last hour before bed. And life changes fast.

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I love young's. phrasing of uh how pleasure is tension reduction. Yeah. It makes me think about how that is in very much in essence what we're doing in In uh in all of those moments where we feel some sort of unease within ourselves and we cope, you know. Um, it's pr providing us some sort of solace moment to moment.

In your book I r I heard uh I saw you refer to Emerson and his you know, as his writings on on self reliance and cultivating this rebellious spirit towards a culture and society that profits off of the vampirification of your attention and your energy. And so I'm curious your thoughts on that because I feel like it really does take a g you know, going against the grain when the grain, the culture, is Every second of every day, of every moment is taking your attention towards this social machine.

And it keeps humans placid enough to take their energy by keeping them in a simulation by putting them in pods, running a simulation of life that's like sort of Good enough. That's pleasant enough. And the the rebellion against it comes when Neo, played by Keander Reeves, like no. No, life is meaningless. I won't have it. I want the real thing. I wanna feel it. I wanna love it. I wanna suffer. I want the real thing. And some people don't. Some people don't. They want the

Just give me a simulated version of my life. For me it's not enough. And for most people it isn't either. And there's a side effect to it, which is there's a disease, a psychogenic epidemic that crops up, an unintended secondary consequence. Called meaninglessness, downstream from which we find depression, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, self-harm. It's no good, man.

Right hemispheric experience largely comes from sort of six things. Number one is asking deep why questions that don't have answers, that you must ponder, that lead to wonder, that lead to discomfort.

is more of an attitude of observation, but it's largely based on these Coens, which are riddles and and they they're they're senseless in their way. Um so I'll give you an example. Um A young monk, right? Um uh uh Nsui is a is a junior monk. And and he finds a Jikichitsu, the the master monk, walking toward him on a path in the forest.

And he asks the master monk, Where are you going? And the and and the the master monk said, On a journey. And he says, What's the destination? And the master monk says, I don't know. And the junior monk says, Why don't you know? And the master monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate form of knowledge.

as opposed to experiencing a tree or a bird not through the name we've learned but through the bottom up processing of experiencing it raw in each moment, which allows us to actually meet life more fully and fully alive.

and discover things that we otherwise might not have if we just move through life with our preconceived notions and prejudices of it. Um likewise educo, right, which is the Latin origin of education, means to evoke from within. And so Aaron Powell That it seems like that that Greek term oporia and this like puzzlement of the seeking and searching allows us to discover instead of just Take the blue pill and walk through and do what you're told through life, you know?

Most people and what what they're doing is they're they're substituting information for the process of deep understanding. You need to read less and ponder more. And that's that's actually has is very sound neuroscience and behavioral science. What you find is that your understanding that your learning doesn't come because you have such a great teacher who explains something, you say, Ah.

If you if you're sitting in class and there's something that's very deep, you're learning philosophy or science or something that's very hard and you understand it exactly when the professor explains it. Probably it's not very good. What you need to say is, I don't get it, I don't get it. Then you need to go home and chew on it. Then you need to go home and work on it.

That understanding integrates the hemispheres of your brain between information and understanding, which is the way your brain is supposed to work. The modern information economy. Is just throwing random information that's pretty easy to understand all the time. Now that's not your philosophy in this show. Your show is dedicated I know it, is dedicated to asking people to ponder bigger ideas more deeply.

And that means that the big benefit from this is for people to watch this and then go on a walk without devices, ideally an an a half hour before dawn. as the sun is coming up and think about the ideas. Think about the three or four big ideas that actually they're presented with in your work.

for focus and for mood, for mood management. It's just really good for you to get up before dawn. I recommend when you know, I I get, you know, fifteen emails a day from people who's like, Professor, what do I do? You know, I I I graduated from college, I feel so lost. And the first thing that I'll recommend to everybody who really feels lost is, you know, it's not gonna Taking more creatine monohydrate, good, but that's not gonna do it. Twenty? You're doing twenty just today.

Pray and pray and pray and pray and walk and walk and walk your way into it, an opened aperture of spiritual knowledge that will then find you. So Guanacamino for an hour without devices before it gets light. And as the light comes up and do that every day for thirty days, and then we'll talk again. That's why I tell young people. And they always say the same thing. I didn't find what I was looking for, but it found me.

And that's what we're looking for is something that we're looking for the thing that's actually looking for us.

But I honestly believe also that, you know, the organism per se requires that I use I use it appropriately and that requires healthy protocols such that I can tap into the metaphysics and I'm not stuck in, you know, trying to build with willpower and cognitive bandwidth, the you know, the the havocs that I need. So I get up at four thirty.

And now I'm off in jet legs. I I'm on the road about forty eight weeks a year. Um three or four nights, not not all week. Um, but that means I'm changing time zones a lot. So this is correcting for time zones sometimes. I get up at four thirty, I I I lift heavy things and run around for an hour, first thing. I really I wake up my body and I'm I'm fully alive in this way. I work out, you know, and and and as as much as it sounds like kind of a bro culture thing, I'm sure you do too.

And this is a great thing. This is to say, I'm still alive. It's so beautiful. And then then is my the time that I actually dedicate to my my religious practice. And so depending on where I am, I either have half an hour of meditative prayer or I attend religious service. I'm a Catholic and I'm a daily communicant. So which sounds like your grandma, right? I bet your grandma literally was the daily communicator, right?

I mean you're you're you're Middle Eastern Christian tradition. And so there's a lot I mean uh uh and those they're badass by the way. They they've got it together that, you know, you're you're raised Orthodox, right? Yeah. That's a cool thing because they've got it together with respect to their religious protocols. I'm Catholic. And the great thing about being Catholic is like Starbucks.

You know, it's a it's a highly uniform and high quality product every place. Like every place. So uh generally speaking, I'll go to mass right after I I'll get cleaned up and I go to mass for a half hour. If there's not a mass available, I pray my rosary.

And then I'll go to Mass at night. Sort of depending on where I am. So either the Mass or Rosary in the morning and then what I didn't do at night. And so I begin and end the day in that particular way. In the space of relationship with the divine.

critically important. And I've studied many of the karmic traditions as well. And I've learned much of the technique that I use as a Christian from the karmic traditions. Sitting in meditation with the Tibetan monks, for example, is very it's helped me very much in the way that I practice my faith. After that, um and I have I I don't ingest any calories.

at at this point because I want complete clarity. I'll have you know because I'm working out hard, I'll have electrolytes and creatine monohydrate and and a few other supplements that I use that I like that I think are actually really good, but not caloric. I don't want nutrition. By the time I get back from mass, then I take the first bolus of psychic stimulant.

Which is a just a nerdy way of saying I drink coffee. And I drink a lot. I mean I drink but but in one dose I'll have between three and three hundred and fifty milligrams of caffeine, which is a lot. I mean but No, no, no. It's nootropic. Yeah. I don't use it for for waking. I use it for focus, which is really critically important. So caffeine blocks the A two A adenosine receptors.

And and there's a lot of evidence that suggests that if you use it to wake up, you're gonna get a crash in the afternoon and you've wasted the focusing properties. So I don't drink caffeine for two and a half to three hours until after I get up. And then I take my first nutrition. And when I do it which is heavy in protein and very low in carbohydrate, and do it with micronutrients that I actually get from

nuts and berries, et cetera, but a lot of Greek yogurt with protein powder, et cetera. Very clean. And then I get four hours of dopamine in my freefrontal cortex. I get the best concentration and focus I can get. I've done body and soul and and I've taken care of myself in a particular way and and and I don't have to think about it. None of this takes cognitive bandwidth or or willpower.

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Aaron Powell Any uh quick little tips to help intermittent faster tech and like set herself up for success, i.e., phone out of the bedroom or like what are some things you've found.

start the day with any ticks for the first hour, they can break the tick. But if you you can't do it after the first hour because of this programming that actually occurs. And so think of your phone as a tick. The two hundred and five checks a day, that's a tick, right? And it's much the same way. It affects the brain much the same way. Now, if you're in media, for example, you're gonna look at it to see what came in overnight, what's on fire, right? But that's just

Quick information then down. No scrolling. No scrolling. Put it away. The second protocol is not drink while you eat. I I recommend, if you can, not eating alone. Human beings, Homo sapiens, I realize you live alone, so that's a hard that's that's hard to do. But Homo sapiens were evolved to live in bands of thirty to fifty kin-based hierarchically arranged individuals. And we get a good deal of the neurochemical reward of that when we eat together and talk.

So we sit around a campfire and talk about our day while making eye contact and put pieces of yak meat into our mouths or gazelle into our mouths. And that's how we're And so never have your phone at the table. Never have your phone while you eat. Even if you're eating alone, never have your phone while you're eating. It's critically important. And the third is the last hour at night before you go to bed and put it away in a closet, locked away.

Um never and and this also requires, given this first and last hour, that you're not sleeping with your phone. My students will be like,

That there's a single classroom in America from kindergarten through PhD where you can have your phone. That's just nuts. That's child abuse. As elder abuse too, because a lot of people are anyway. And then last but not least, you need a fast. You need at least one fast a year. I recommend ninety-six hours. I go on spiritual retreat every year. Strongly recommend. It's great. The first day your brain is screaming for the device.

The second day you're calming down. The third day you're in bliss. And the fourth day you just wish it were lasting all year round. Yeah. And so just those protocols, that's simple stuff. Your life will change.

Now it's a weird thing that you'll find the people who are old who are on the apps too much. Some of the apps are actually getting much better by injecting more human experience into the algorithm. And this is a a truth in life. Look, the the the the robots are coming. The cyborg experience is coming. But the secret to living well under those circumstances is not by adding more robotics to your human experience.

by adding more humanity into the robotics. We need to add more human friction into all levels of what we're actually doing with machines. And and dating is a perfect example of this. So when you go on the apps and you date. Thank God. I mean it's like I'm old, so it's like I I I I I got married in the before times. But w what people will do is try to solve the problem of romantic love by setting up a sameness.

I want somebody who votes like me. I want somebody who, you know, likes California like I do. I want somebody who um likes Sriracha. I want somebody who wants to move to Austin. I want and and pretty soon they're dating themselves. Which is super not hot. Right. And and part of the reason is because

We intuitively know, this is a right hemispheric intuition, that we want somebody who completes us, not somebody who copies us. You don't want somebody who's just like you. You want somebody who makes the who, you know, is the perfect amalgam.

Thirty-five years, man. Unsolvable. Unsolvable. That's the point. The point is getting to deeper understanding with somebody who's not like you, with whom you can have Best friendship. That's really what's going on. And so when you allow yourself to give your heart away, when you do that risky thing, you're you're stepping into the unknown. It's super scary.

It's way beyond the complexity and the mystery of what most people do. And what we've done is engineered it into something that we can clearly understand. And the result of it is that we don't like it. And even though there's more availability of people than there's ever been before because of the technologies, there's less attraction. People are about a le a third less likely to be in love in their twenties as people were when I was in my twenties.

Like that's all there was to do. That's all I wanted. I mean it was all about love and because we were more comfortable exploring the mystery and the danger of the right hemisphere of our brains.

The natural occupation is actually a vehicle for self realization and um it's not just something nice to do. It literally becomes your vehicle for self actualization and realization. And uh I'm curious how we can just talk about how to zone in on discovering that calling. Or do you you refer to

you know, discovery of yours because you're somebody that started making pizzas, French horn player, think tank, happiness expert. You've gone through many different iterations and I'm curious how you've arrived.

The problem with that is that once again, we have a tendency to solve it like a complicated problem as opposed to experiencing our lives, finding our calling by what we do with an integrated approach that allows ourselves to do something that might be way off the beaten path or do something that's really different than what the best You know, the the engineering department at U university says is is actually the best life.

Here's the way to think about it. People who have a calling in their work have two things in common. These things do not include salary or position or title or mom's deepest dreams or what your college counselor told you to do. They have the sense that you're earning your success, that you're creating value.

that you're rewarded and recognized in some way, shape or form for something that you're authentically earning. This is why merit based systems are everything and like tenure and and l trust me, I'm an academic. Tenure's terrible. It's completely demotivating because you're not earning your success. You they can't fire you.

Um and loyalty-based systems are the worst. You kiss up to the boss and you're his friend and you you hang around. They're they're completely demotivating and they they they lead people to actually feel depressed and learn their helplessness. Earn success is the idea that th people need me.

And that's the second part, which is service to other people. If you earn your success and you're serving others, then you're in the zone of your calling and it can change, you can spiral in and out of that eight times. I I'm sure that you feel like you're living your calling with a show. I'm sure. I can see it in your eyes. But I bet that there have been other things that in which and there will be more things because you're young.

That you're gonna be able to manifest. You're a classic spiral, by the way. There's the the the social science of of career trajectories says there's four kinds of people psychologically in the way they pursue their careers.

Some are what they call experts. That's like your grandfather who kind of stayed on the same track. My dad had the same job for forty two years, same university, forty two years, college professor. Got about a two percent raise every year. Came time for tenure, he didn't even apply, just showed up in the mail.

Um it was like super predictable. He had a lot of security. And the reason is because what he wanted was something that was that that led him to have a lifestyle that he wanted and he could count on. Yeah. That's the that's the that's the expert career path. The transitory people who jump from thing to thing because they don't want to live to work, they want to work to live, right?

Then the two uh among real strivers, really successful people, are linear careers, which is ambition and points on the board. These are not the happiest people. These are people who only change jobs. let alone careers, when there's something bigger and better in line for worldly rewards, money, power, honor, coming right. The happiest people who are really, really successful strivers are the spirals.

They have seven to twelve year careers of their own design and nobody gets to nobody understands them but themselves. Sound like you? Starting to sound like you, right?

Am I serving other people? In other words, am I needed? Is how that works. And I don't care. Maybe it is making pizzas for a while. Maybe it's with a really frustrating boss. Maybe it's something you don't want to do. But the truth of the matter is that that's not the point if it's in the spiral trajectory of your calling. Yeah. And that's a beautiful thing.

And the penalty for Adam and Eve was they had to go toil in the garden, right? But read it closely. The bliss was working in the garden. The whole point is whether or not it has meaning. The whole point is whether or not it's the calling. They were working the garden. They were working the fruits of the beautiful labor 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.

His definition of success, the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Yeah. The progressive over time realization of a ideal that you deem worthy. Does that resonate with you?

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 your limbic system isn't 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 you're bliss

was pers 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. 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 doesn't what isn't what I was gonna feel. And so the point is, Nightingale's point, it's 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 y you will be rewarded 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. What we need is a worthy goal that can only be that 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 if you 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? Um

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. Thirst is evidence of the existence of water. Hunger is 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.

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

are as yet undiscovered. And it 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, you know, 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?

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, I uh of course I have a view. I follow an Abrahamic religion. I go to Mass every day, and so my my my my natural muscle memory is that essence precedes existence, that my essence is not co created with my earthly existence. I have to I my my my my intuition tells me, as well as my religious training, as well as Sunday school, that that God had a plan for my life that pr that that existed before I did. And when God created my soul, he said

Be a good and faithful servant. You know, g live according to this essence. But at the end of the day, um if I'm wrong, that's okay too. That's actually okay too, because I believe that in the in the in the ultimate metaphysical sense, probably these two ideas they converge. And the idea of pre-existence of essence and the and the co-creation of essence, there's no reason that they couldn't be the same thing when the when when when the continuum of time collapses.

Which in the deepest metaphysical physical sense it almost certainly must. Yeah.

that I must condemn everybody else. Right. Right. I mean, I encourage people all the time to to to who grow up as Catholics, for example, or 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. Right. But I'm also just in admiration of people who have that experience who are my Muslim brothers and sisters. Who are, you know, I and I have many Hindu teachers when I go to 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 twelve years. I love that I love him. He's greatly enriched my life. And I don't understand how to quite how to how to 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'm I think it's right.

Like enlightenment or meditation is porn for perf perfectionists. You know? And 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. Um I was reading this book, The Age of Anxiety from Alan Watts.

You're someplace else and you're missing your life. And that's important because, you know, we have this uncanny ability with this. incredibly developed prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer of the brain. That this is really the distinguishing factor, not the limbic system of emotion, but the the the thirty percent of our brain, that's a prefrontal cortex that that that that allows us to time travel.

your dog can't time travel. It can't, you know, think about the past and learn from its mistakes except intuitively, except with depending on instinct. And it can't think about the future and practice future scenarios. The problem is we're so good at it that we're never here now. And it's incredibly uncomfortable. Now, the father of positive psychology that you just referred to a minute ago is Marty Seligman, my great mentor, Marty Seligman. I'm I he's incredible. And he he believes that

presentism, mindfulness is actually unnatural to the Homo sapiens. That's why it's so hard. You know, people are like, okay, be here now and get into a a a mindful state. It's super hard because you s immediately the default mode network and your brain turns on, you start thinking about the future. He says we shouldn't be called Homo sapiens, we should be called homoprospectus.

Because we're naturally thinking about the future. The average person spends 30 to 50% of their time thinking about the future. The average striver, fellow striver, is 80% of the time. That's a lot, but you're missing your life. You know, here here's the thing to remember. Really old people spend more time thinking about the past. Really young people think about the future all the time. Um very few people spend very much time right now, but you can only love now.

Love only happens right now. The less you're here, the less you love. And that's God's plan for your life is love. To love and be loved, which requires that you be here now. To quote Ramdas, be here now. Why why would you want to be here now? Well, let's think about the porn of meditation.

The Dalai Lama told me that he discourages Westerners from becoming Buddhist. I was like, why? Why? He says, because they're doing it wrong. I said, what do you mean? He said, they want to meditate to feel better. Meditate to feel better. I said, so what should they be doing? He says, you should meditate so everybody else feels better. The point of your meditation is to lift up the whole world.

That's the point of your meditation. Not so that you will lift yourself up, so you'll feel less anxious. So that you'll become more productive, so that your depression will be alleviated. On the contrary, that's completely secondary to that. And that's the point of understanding that right now, right here, is the only time that we can love. And that's why when we have this conversation, you and I are here right now. We're not thinking about the future. And we're loving this moment.

And that's what we're trying to achieve. Because as we love this moment, we get to have this conversation and we're trying to bless other people. The point is not so that Andre and Arthur feel better. The point is that we're trying to lift up the world. And that's the essence of now and that's the essence of love.

Life, God, whatever the creator, the universe has given you certain gifts and skills and aptitudes and proclivities and and through that you're giving to the greater whole. Um

I have attained all of this knowledge. I've done everything asked of me. What is my job now? He's thinking I'm gonna become maybe a contemplative, you know, maybe I'm gonna become a teacher, I'm gonna be able to work inside. And then master says, Yes, you have attained enlightenment. Now your job will be to chop wood and carry water. Because the whole point is. As Mother Teresa said, don't do big things, do little things in love.

You know, it i if I had known what it meant to make pizzas, I wouldn't have resented making pizzas. If I look, I would have loved being a French horn player, which I never I didn't do it in love. This was my mistake. This is the reason that it didn't last. It's because I didn't do it in love. Right. Finally, I mean, better relate than never. When I was fifty-five years old, I retired from a CEO job after walking a long pilgrimage, the Commander of the Santiago, and praying, Lord.

Guide my path. What do you want from me? What do you want from me? And I believe God put the knowledge in my heart that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And I said, okay, I get it. Okay, I get it. And now finally, I can do this in love. I wish I'd done it when I was your age.

You have fear, anger, disgust, and sadness to alert you to threats that you've perceived below your level of consciousness. You have joy, you have surprise, you have interest. to alert you to to opportunities that will allow you to, you know, get food and pass on your genes, you know, mating, et cetera.

And and those are animal impulses is what it comes down to. That's not the goal, is to actually have a a series of feelings. And the biggest mistake people make about having happy lives is they chase feelings. Stop chasing feelings. Let feelings occur as they occur. This is the proper functioning of your brain. Look for the three elements of a truly happy life, which is enjoyment. It's not the same thing as pleasure. Satisfaction, which is the joy of actually achievement after struggle.

to go from pleasure to actual enjoyment of life? What does it mean to to become comfortable and celebratory of the struggle that goes into achievement and not just the achievement per se? What does it mean to find the meaning of my life through all the pain and suffering, which is actually part of the experience itself?

Uh paradoxical, right? It seems like it would compound the satisfaction that actually comes from it. It diminishes it. Because we say, if somebody's paying me to do it, then therefore it must be onerous. And so the joy, the intrinsic joy of something is is is lowered by the extrinsic rewarding of that thing. And so and so the the super striver, the highly motivated achievement-oriented person is all about the extr ext external reward.

uh scoreboard. Um, that's hard and that's a real problem in my life.

by reducing it to these scoreboard effects. I write books. Do you think I don't look at the New York Times bestsellers? I wanted to open a number one baby. That's what I want. But it spoils it. It ruins it. So how do you guard against it? Number one is knowledge. Number one is actually recognizing that that's the case.

It's actually feeling that that hollowness has a is is motivated by by by the extrinsic rewards. The second is actually having people who love you enough to hold you accountable to it. that's where marriage comes in. You know, that's where you have to you know, somebody who who denies you love except for the extrinsic reward doesn't love you. You know, what here's the pathology of strivers. They have the same kind of childhood.

I write about the book a little bit. Um these are people who become workaholics, for example. It starts when they're kids and they get the attention and energy and affection of adults when they do something good. They get a good report card, they make first chair in the orchestra. They you know, they're they're the lead in the play and and they their synaptically plastic little brains process this conclusion. Love is earned.

Love is earned. Now that's wrong. Love is a free gift, freely given, or it's not love. Anybody who makes you earn her love doesn't love you. And people go through life, if they're if they believe that love is earned, they'll marry people who demand that love be earned. They'll surround themselves with suck up friends. where love is earned, they'll believe that God God's love can be earned. And that's a craziness of life is a way that that works out. When you have the person who completes you.

Where the one flesh in a good marriage, in a romantic partnership, is the union of the right hemispheres of your brain, which becomes an antenna to God. That's what you're looking for. That's not about sex. It's not about N not being lonely. It's about it's about a it's about a link to the divine. That's what marriage is supposed to be. That's what best friendship with your spouse is supposed to be. It's that antenna to the divine with this union of the complex spaces of your brain.

That's the person who will say, You can't earn my love. And and the wor what you're doing in the world is deleterious and it's harming you and it's harming us. And that's what I get from my wife. I have a I have a a deeply, deeply mysterious relationship with my wife. My wife is trying to walk me into heaven. Side by side. I mean, she's the last person on whom I will. Lay my eyes as I take my dying breath. I firmly believe. And the next person I'll see is the Lord.

That's what I hope. That's what I believe, because that's what I feel with this union of our hemispheres. And she's the one who holds me accountable to get back to the grubby reality of the extrinsic rewards. When she sees me waiting until 510 on Wednesday, which is when the New York Times bestseller list comes out.

She's like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? That's just gonna lower your sense of love. That's gonna lower your sense of purpose. This is gonna lower who you are. This degrades who you are. And it pisses me off when she says that. She's completely right.

Right. In his view, we want happiness, which is the same thing as we want the divine. Which I believe you believe. Many people watching us believe. Many don't, but that's okay too. The idols that beguile us are false versions of that. They have divine characteristics, but they're, you know, they're they're they're golden calves. What are they? Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four. Very astute social science.

Because now, of course, we have all the brain scans that show that the four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. He was right. He was completely right. Each one of us is beguiled more by one than the other, and we know what our idol is. we have power because we're able to we're we're able to

avoid falling into the trap. Sometimes. Yeah. Not always. But we'll always be beguiled by that. The problem is, however, that we shouldn't get rid of these things, the whole idea of sell everything, you know, live like a pauper. Um, that's not the right solution necessarily, certainly not for most people. It's recognizing that those are intermediate goals and dangerous goals, but they can refract to the blessing of other people. You can do good things with money.

I I believe that the free enterprise system has lifted people out of poverty at rates unbeknownst to humanity. But if we make it into religion, if we make capitalism into a religion, then it then it then it ruins our happiness, it ruins our bliss. But if we use it to pull people out of poverty,

It's great. I your fame, for example, you're well known. People recognize you in the airport for sure. But here's the thing that can't make you happier. What it can do is make you more magnetic and have people seek the source of your power. Which is your belief and your bliss. And that will lift them up. And that's how it works. Use what could have been an idol as a way to refract to the greater glory and bliss of other people.

Um one can be inflationary or deflationary, the other one is just like being appreciative that's your whatever you've done has some sort of semblance of impact on people.

Because she understands who she is. And many people forget who they are because of what other people project onto them. On the other hand, people are gonna come up to you and say, I really, really love your work and it's helped me in my life. And they love you for th the true essence of who you are. Which is a a great blessing. That's the least obnoxious fame you could possibly ever have.

disowning it or not acknowledging who you are and the role that you've had in impact m impacting others is is not this altruistic thing that you're telling yourself, you know, it's actually a shadow aspect to not own and accept who you are and the impact you have.

The problem is that Mother Nature wants you to stay in the me self all day long and it creates great misery and it creates great idolatry and it creates great harm. Living more in the I self to understand who you are perfectly, but to not dwell on it. That's the secret.

it's a blessing to the world or it's a blessing to the divine. And and both of those things are are incredibly good for understanding the meaning of your life. Now, neurobiologically it's because these are right hemispheric experiences. But once again, I believe that these that that the the spiritual realm has physical manifestations. So this does not rule out, you know, the metaphysical properties and the the ultimate truths that we're talking about here.

So he talks about this all the time, that there is a a sameness to worshiping the divine and serving others. That in point of fact, you serve the divine when you serve others. You you worship the divine when you serve others. And when you serve others, you're worshiping the divine, whether you believe in the divine or not.

Sorry, it's like he saw what you were doing last night. And and that's just it's just nutty. But but when God appears to Moses in the burning bush and he said he basic and and Moses like, so what's your name? And God is like, I am. Right. I am. That's important. And that's a really important concept that we can only understand metaphorically. St. Augustine said, um, if you think you understand God, you don't.

Right. And and the ancients would say that you need the via negativa to understand the divine, which is not this, not this, not this. In Sanskrit, neti, neti, neti. A nutman, the whole concept of what it what God isn't is the whole thing. And the best metaphor for understanding this. This is my father's metaphor. My father was a great was a was a most brilliant man I ever knew. He was a biostatistician and deeply religious.

Yeah. So he was a you know, he was a scientist, but he was a brilliant scientist, but he was a deeply religious Christian. And he said that if I he said, if I were a scholar of Picasso, I'd need to know two things. All about Picasso's paintings and all about the man. And I can't get information about the one by looking at the other.

I can't find any information about Picasso the man by looking at his paintings because he's not in there. Similarly, if I revel in the creation, it's wonderful, which I do as a scientist. I'm in awe. But you know what? I want to know the creator too. I want to know the creator too. You know, tha that's what I want. I want the painting and I want the painter. That's where it really comes down to. That's the fulsome knowledge. That's the

That's holistic in the understanding of what it's all about. That's the ultimate experience that I seek. And that's the reason that my faith and my reason complement each other ultimately. Yeah. And this gets back to your point about the things unseen. The ultimate thing unseen is the ultimate seer. That's how I understand God is an example of what can't be seen because it's not in the creation. It made the creation. Yeah.

is that it militates against your show. That's the problem. You're being distracted from the one thing that you get to figure out, which is to know yourself, the ultimate mystery, the ultimate adventure. And you're being distracted from it by what? Twitter?

W why why why would you distract yourself from for one single second and the reason is because it's an uncomfortable bit of knowledge and because it's a hard question, because it's a complex question and because you have bad habits and because you're exhausted and you know, because you had a bad day at work. Or because the the thing is blinking and saying that somebody is on your notification.

But it's very important that people understand what the purpose of this is. Dating is not for entertainment. It's serious business because you're looking for the person that can actually walk you into heaven and that you will walk into heaven, whatever heaven means to you.

Because this is your divine connection. And again, like there's a lot of people watching us, but they're, you know, viewers of this show are not like, ah, it's all nonsense. They turned off the show a long time ago. They think that's nonsense. And and and romantic love is, you know, hooking up and no, no, no, no. The sexual revolution got this all wrong. It's divinity, man. It's really, really deep and beautiful and serious business. And you're trying to find.

the person that is supposed to become your Sherpa in the the business of the metaphysical.

sprinkle dollars out of a helicopter. Right. I mean But it's it's it's fundamentally different in how it affects you and others when you try to change the whole dial for one person. Right. And and there's an ancient um Talmudic saying from the book of the Sanhedrin, a man who changes one person's life changes the whole world.

Because each of us encapsulates the world, right? That's the that's the the union of the one and the all, which is a weird thing, right? I mean, it's mathematically impossible and yet spiritually are all things are are possible in this way. And um And a and I kept finding that when people did this really changed turned the whole dial for a whole person. Uh, that life was different for everybody. And I was telling my wife about this while she's having this dream. She said, you know

I think we should adopt a baby. And I'm like, it's only a book like Father of the Year. And uh and and so we started the process'cause she had me dead to write. 'Cause she's spiritually adroit and I'm just a guy.

And we we started through a an adoption agency in Denver called Chinese Children Adoption International, which is a you know, it's a it's a great organization. The the the founder of which wound up becoming one of my students in my nonprofit management class at Harvard, of all things, by weird

coincidence and a great it's a great couple that does this. And the Chinese government at the time was doing a lot of these. There's twenty six thousand foreign adoptions in the year two thousand four when we adopted our daughter. And um they they match the government matches you up. It's uh like this like completely murky, nobody knows how this numerology or computer algorithm nobody knows how. And the d the little girl, they tell you just a little bit about her.

She was abandoned at twelve years old, twelve months old. Twelve no twelve hours old. I'm getting the unit wrong. She was abandoned at twelve hours old in a park in southern China. It was my wife's dream. It was weird. And um we went through the process and about a year later we were we we we got to go pick her up. She was 15 months old and my wife couldn't go.

Because she was not a citizen. So she couldn't execute an adoption. We had two little kids at home. Somebody had to stay home with our boys, who were at the time three and five. And so I went by myself. And they'd never seen a guy alone, right? It's like, what'd your wife die? No, she's dead to me. And and um and it was it was it was the most magical experience. It was like it was weird because they had a that she was very sh shy. They said she's a shy baby.

And she's never been around men. And and so that's gonna scare her. And she's gonna she freaks out when somebody takes her away from her nannies. There's nine nannies for a hundred babies. She hasn't been picked up very much. They mostly just sort of spend all day lying in a crib and fifteen months old, under stimulated, et cetera. They did the best they could.

And so I was really, really, really nervous. And they bring you into a room and they they and they bring the baby over to you and they m the little baby and they she's like grabs me like a monkey. And and she looks up at me with her little eyes, a little like coal eyes, and she would let go. And I had to sign some papers. And so three minutes later, her nanny

W she'd know the only person she knew tried to take her back. She screamed bloody murder because she knew the link was there. The cosmic link was there. And ever since then, it's like my baby, my baby. It's my baby. She's my baby. Every time she comes home, it's like the first day in the orphanage. She's 22. Wow. She's a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. She's a badass.

And it turns out it was this catalytic experience that really glued our family together. Now we're very close. My kids are all really different from each other, but you know, we live near each other. I live in the same house with one of my sons and his wife and their kids. I live with my grandsons. The others are right up the street. But the whole point is it's been this

experience of of, you know, bringing home this baby and bringing us all together and through the hard times and through the easy times. Love is actually what keeps you together is what it comes down to. But you have to have a physical demonstration of that sometimes. We're dense Right. And and and and you you you have to m see the model of it. And a lot of us when we see her, we still see the model of the person that was brought to us that wasn't the product of

genetics. It was the product of nothing more than a than than a dream and a message from God and and a decision and and and and all of these things are actually even more important than than the than the flesh and the blood and the genetic similarity that we have.

when you're experiencing negative emotions, a aversive emotions, fear, anger, disgust and sadness. That's when your right brain and the way that you've they test this by the way is you look at the musculature of the face. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the face, the left side of the body. When you involuntarily uh you use muscles on the left side of your face, it means your right side is more active and that's more common when you're suffering.

is what it comes down to. So we know that. Now the right side of the brain is also implicated in in understanding meaning. And so not coincidentally, almost certainly, I mean this is only plausible. There's been no tests of this, but it makes perfect sense. That that's why when you ask people when they really experience their life's deepest meaning, they always talk about something painful.

that they talk about mm my mom died. My business went bankrupt. I got fired. I went to jail. Really, really painful times in their life. And they'll say, and that's when I had acute understanding of something. I understood meaning in that particular way. The problem is that we have a tendency to to want to avoid it because we hate pain. We're aversive to pain because of our evolutionary biology. You know, pain means that there's a threat. And so we avoid it. We try to avoid pain.

This is the the great insight that the karmic religions have brought to us, is that suffering is not the same thing as pain. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain. And that means we got two options. You can try to lower your pain or you can lower your resistance to the pain. When pain is inconvenient and utterly avoidable, you might want to take a Tylenol when your back is hurting.

But when pain is unavoidable, like by the way, most back pain, the way to deal with it is to accept it. That's the best way to live your life, so that even when your pain is high, your suffering isn't. And in that lowering a resistance, you inevitably find more meaning in your life.

sit with insight into the nature of your suffering without trying to lower it. And that's that's the way that we do that. You know Every religious tradition talks about non resistance. Nonresistance. What does it come down to? You mean the the the Christian religion, my own religion, worships a guy hanging from a device of torture. In the act of physical pain.

Why? Because that's a metaphor for life itself and a metaphor for the ultimate meaning of life in the Christian religion. It's not coincidental that his suffering on the cross is emblematic of the meaning of life. And that he's God. That's the ultimate solidarity that actually comes to us. the the paradox of suffering is that when we try to avoid suffering, especially when we try to avoid pain, we accidentally avoid meaning and that leads to avoiding happiness.

So you see that. You never look at, you know, somebody that you're attracted to sexually and they're so beautiful that you want to cry. That's because it's a different kind of beauty, right? That's not what we're talking about. But you hear I get really emotional when I my favorite composer is Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer ever lived. Hugely spiritual guide, by the way.

He said that aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the enjoyment of the soul. That's what he believed, right? And he would put to the glory of God at the end of every manuscript, right? In and you know, he had twenty kids. Yeah. This is that guy was productive. And

And Ba you know, I listen to Bach, man, it's it's just hugely emotional. When I talk about when there there's certain things that I see in natural beauty, when I when I see examples of moral beauty. There's a great psychologist named Rhett Diesner, who's the world's leading expert on moral beauty. He'd be good to have on the show, as a matter of fact. He's Rain Wilson's uncle. Of all things. Isn't that weird?

is to experience more beauty. Mm. That means go for a hike. I mean, I look out the your the window of your house and it's like stunningly beautiful. California hills and mountains, incredible. Um, listen to the work of Bach or whatever actually does bring you to tears in beauty. Experience the moral beauty of people that are exemplars. Read the life of

Mother Teresa, somebody who really is a a m a deep moral exemplar. This will illuminate the right hemisphere. This will give you the complex experience of life's meaning.

You don't get burnt out as easily because your fuel your fuel source is fundamentally different. Right. Um any any words there?

Let me see if I can put it into a formula, right? I'm kind of about formulas at the end of the day. Um When you're not feeling it, when things are out of alignment, even if you're successful, it almost always means you're following a particular worldly formula.

And and here's what it is. You are loving things. You're using people and you're worshiping yourself. That's the the the dark formula. There's darkness in the world and that's the dark formula. Now, how does darkness work? It takes the light and changes it a little.

Right. A and the reason that people fall for this is not because it's is so outlandish. There's nothing outlandish about what I said. It sounds a little right. And the reason it sounds a little right is because it's just off. It's just off. Here's the formula that if we can correct and live according to it, it will bring us the meaning that we seek and thus the happiness that we crave in greater abundance. Use things. It's great. It's a a world of abundance. It's so beautiful.

Use them. Enjoy them. Right. Seriously. I mean it's great. I mean, people who are trying to be so ascetic all the time and feeling guilty about eating that wonderful dinner or or or having a watch that you think is nice and and and reading the time off it. Use things with joy. But I love them.

Right. And then Jesus is asked in the New Testament to sum that up. He says, I mean, because, you know, the Ten Commandments is a lot to remember. He said, Don't worry about it. Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. Right. And that's all you need to remember. Okay. So then St. Augustine and you know, three cent generation, three centuries later. It's like that's kind of a lot to remember. So then he says, here's what you remember. Love and do what you will.

St. Thomas Aquinas in 1265 in the Summa Theologia then defines love to will the good of the other as other. That's what it comes down to. So if you don't know what to do, right, and you can't remember the formula we talked about a minute ago.

notwithstanding your feelings, because Aquinas says it's not a feeling. Love isn't a feeling. It's an act. It's a commitment. Right? It's not to Jesus didn't say to like your enemies. He said to love your enemies, notwithstanding your feelings. That's power.

Love and do what you will. Love and do what you will. Make the conscious decision to love and do what you will. And that's where you'll find happiness. And that's where you'll find meaning. And that's what to do today, no matter how dark things feel.