Arthur Brooks on What It Takes to Find Happiness

they deeply want to be. If you're feeling frustrated or disappointed in your ability to make changes in your life, then having someone in your corner to support and advise you is critical. Look, there's a lot of general advice out there, but figuring out which of it applies to you is difficult. You are different than other people and your life looks different than other people, so you need

solutions that make sense for you. Knowing how to apply certain tactics and tools to your specific life is my specialty. If you'd like to make two a better year for you, then book a thirty minute discovery call with me. It's a no pressure, no sales call where we determine if working together might make sense, and if it doesn't, I'll give you some ideas to take with you so you win either way. Go to when you feed dot net

slash coaching to book your free discovery session. That's one you feed dot net slash coaching to book a free discovery session, and I look forward to meeting you. You take all of your energies and you try to put walls up around yourself such that nothing bad can get to you. Ironically, the one thing that truly won't get to you is happiness. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or

you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Arthur Brooks, a bestselling author, social scientist, and the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He teaches leadership and happiness at the Harvard School of Business, and today Arthur and Eric discuss one of his many books, Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America From the

Culture of Contempt. Hi, Arthur, Welcome to the show. Thanks, it's great to be with you. I'm happy to have you on. We're gonna be discussing your latest book, Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt, And we're also going to be talking about happiness, which is a topic you have written a lot about. But before we get into either of those things will start like we always do with the parable.

In the Parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandsonth stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which

one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, appreciate that. And I've heard you talk about this in the past and talk about it with your guests, and so I've given it a little bit of thought because this is actually I teach at the Harvard Business School. I have a class called Leadership and Happiness, and this is almost exactly what

I ask my students to do. You know, what are they feeding? Which wolf? For the feeding and for me, it comes down to literally one of the choices that you gave. It's love or fear. This is what we've got, love or fear. And on my worst days, I realized that I am feeding fear. I am afraid of what people will think about me. I'm afraid of what's going to happen to me. And fear is sort of the shadow of the dark one over what we're doing in our lives. And there's an antidote to it, which of

course is, as you'd say, feeding the other wolf. But there's a way to do it too. In the Bible, St. John the Apostle says that perfect love drives out fear. But this is an ancient idea. Five years before that, Loud Sue said in the Dowd to Ching exactly the same thing, that the psychological opposites, not just philosophical and

theological psychological opposites are fear and love. When you stimulate the limbic system of the brain to experience love, it will literally crowd out because you can't be experiencing these two cognition simultaneously, the fear that is in you. So what I try to do each day is I say, look what's animating me today? What's animating me? And if it's fear, I know the answer to it. I gotta get out the sack of wolf chow and start throwing

it on the love side. That's what I have to do, and that's what I'm trying to do every single day. That's a more robust answering. You probably watered are sorry about that. I like robust. So what are some of your ways of getting out the love wolf chow in

your own life? So probably the most really profound psychological teaching from medieval times, from the Middle Ages, comes from St. Thomas Aquinas when he wrote Assume a Theologia that that had this really interesting and insightful observation that we have these substitutes for divinity in our lives, these idols that have these kind of divine characteristics, but they never give us what we really see their money, power, pleasure and

honor or fame. Money, power, pleasure and fame. And the problem is that when you're pursuing those things, you're always going to be living in fear. Now you're living in fear why because these are zero sum things. These are extrinsic things, which is to say that they come from outside you and you can't depend on them, and so you're always going to be afraid that you're not going

to get this thing. If you say, basically, I'm gonna be nourished by the scraps the world is promising it will throw it to me, then I'm gonna be living in a fear based world. And the answer then is if those are the bad for money, power, pleasure, and fame, there's a good for there's a divine for which are not extrinsick from outside you, but from inside you, and they're based not on fear, but on love and their faith and family and friendship and work that serves other people.

Those are the divine for. And there's a ten thousand articles on the social science of happiness and the science and neuroscience and social science of happiness. And if you boil the ocean of this literature, you will find that there are really only four things that reliably do bring happiness. They are faith, family, friendship, and work where you serve

other people and you earn your success. And these are the antidotes to the bad fear for I mean, if the you know, the bad wolf, the fear wolf is just chowing down on money and power and pleasure and fame and all the stuff that's scarce in your worries going to go away. And if you want to feed the other wolf, you need to put a deposit in each one of the four divine accounts every day. What

are you doing to cultivate your faith? What are you doing to develop your family, maintain and protect your family relationships? Thanks Givn's coming man, what are you doing with your friendships? And what are you doing says that your work truly is lifting other people up those are the questions to ask, and I try to ask myself every day. So faith, family, friendships, and work that matters. Yeah, that's a meaningful work. And

meaningful work only has two characteristics. They're not prestige and position and noney, none of stuff in the less The two things that matter to make your work meaningful are the answers to the questions and my earning my success and am I serving others? Am I earning my success? And am I serving others? There's a lot of things that people would say are parts of the good life that maybe aren't clearly delineated in these Where does pleasure

fit in this? Some degree of enjoyment? Because I think you also mentioned that if we talk about happiness, you talk about it having three sort of macro nutrients, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. There's there's some cross over here and then there's a little, perhaps some slight differences. I'm curious how those tied together for you. Sure, So happiness is like a meal, and there's lots of ways. If I said, what's dinner, well, it's what kind of

question is that? There's a bunch of ways that I can answer the question. What's dinner. I can answer in terms of dinner's macronutrients, which are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. I could answer dinner is the dishes that I had. I had a salad, and I had an entree, and I had some dessert, I had my vegetables. Or you could answer it in terms of the micronutrients that was in it. You know, all the different parts, the vitamins and minerals that actually go into it. There's lots and

lots of ways to answer the question. Or the ingredients, you know, the spices and the you know, the actual foods that you cooked. So the way to think about it is this way when I said faith, family, friends, and meaningful work, those are the dishes in your happiness. Those are the things you actually need to consume every day. Well, let's dig a little further into the purpose or meaning side of things. You recently talked about different ways or

the different parts of meaning. Should we go into that for a second. Yeah, sure so. Meaning and purpose or purpose is another way of talking about it. Although purpose is actually an aspect of meaning. Meaning is definitely one of the macronutrients of happiness, and it's actually one of the most paradoxical and so far as that there's nobody listening to us. Or when I said, when did you

figure out the meaning of your life? What was a significant event helping you figure out the meaning of your life, There's nobody that would talk about that week in Disneyland. They would always talk about something hard that had happened, something trying, taxing, maybe even traumatic, the death of a loved one. When I got really sick, when I lost my job and I was able to persevere, I actually found that I was strong and I was resilient, and that's when I figured out what I really cared about

is when things were threatened for me. And so that's an important point, is that meaning requires challenge and difficulty, problems, even trauma, which actually brings out sadness and makes you unhappy. And so the great irony of happiness is that happiness requires meaning, and meaning is associated with unhappiness. And so literally,

happiness requires unhappiness. And one of the biggest mistakes that we make in our lives today is that we spend a huge amount of our energy trying to avoid unhappiness. We got a huge length I mean, I talked to my students about this all the time I graduate students here at Harvard, and they spent a ton of their time trying not to feel sad, not to be rejected, not to take risk, not to get in trouble. And you know, it's like, don't go looking for trouble, but

trust me, trouble is going to find you, man. I mean, this is just life. And if you take all of your energies and you try to put walls up around yourself such that nothing bad can get to you, ironically, the one thing that truly won't get to you is happiness because you won't actually find meaning, you won't find out who you are, and you'll be afraid, and that fear will be coming in instead of the love. You'll be feeding the fear wolf. By doing this is exactly

what we're doing to a lot of young people. So we talk about, you know, safety is um and cancel culture and all these things that we complain about in our society today. That has everything to do with fear, and it has to do with the fact that we have a society that says, like, whereas in the sixties and stead, if it feels good, do it, man, today they're like, if it feels bad, Stop it if it feels bad, treated if it feels bad, and neesthetize it, make it go away. And that's a huge, huge mistake.

That's a preamble to the entire meaning lesson the meaning macronutrients in our happiness. If you want to be happy, you need meaning. If you if you're gonna have meaning, you have to be open to all types of experiences in life. Don't be afraid of aine. I mean, it's not gonna be fun, but you need it and it will ultimately and the vast overwhelming majority of cases you will get growth as a result of it. Yeah, it is paradoxical in that way, and yet we're so wired up.

The natural tendency within this is to avoid pain seek pleasure. Yeah, yeah, totally, to seek pleasure or just to seek peace, to seek a lack of problems. And it's it's an error. It's just an error. There is no other way to put it. Now. When you get into meaning itself, meaning actually has three

parts to it. So when people say to me, I don't know my meaning in life, but that really means is they have one of or more of three problems that we call these the meanings of meaning as it were, you know, the aspects of meaning, coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the belief that things kind of fit together, that things sort of happen for a reason. And you know, there's some philosophies like absurdism and nihilism and existentialism that

say that actually, there is no purpose. I should say there is no coherence. Things don't have and for a reason. But most of us we don't think that's true. We do think that things happen for a reason because you look back in your life and you say, oh, that's why I had to deal with that thing. That's why that that particular thing happened. That it kind of makes sense now, and so understanding that is key. The second is the purpose part itself, and where it's not just

a synonym for meaning. Purpose is the idea that you have a direction you're going in, that you have goals. Purpose means you know, I'm going toward that thing that really will bring me meaning. So you don't have the goal of being able to support myself in my family. I have the goal of doing something meaningful and helping other people. I have a goal of knowing God better than I currently do I have a goal again into heaven.

You know, that's a that's a tremendous kind of purpose that brings a sense of meaning and ultimately happiness to people's lives. And the last of significance, which is simple, my life matters. You know. There are a lot of people who struggle with this. They say, I don't see how my life matters, and trauma of having a really bad childhood where your parents didn't make it clear that

your life matters. The number one predictor of thinking your life matters is having mom and dad who said your life matters, and who acted as if your life matters, and who are like, I don't want you to drive above the speed limit or try drugs. Then the reason is because you might hurt yourself, and your life matters.

That is hugely, hugely significant for actually predicting that. But when I talk to people and they say I don't feel like I have meaning in life and it's hurting my happiness, I'll dig down to find which one of these three aspects of meaning is actually driving them crazy. Do they not they think that, you know, things don't have any rhyme or reason? Do they have no goals, or they not actually believe in their life matters. These are the three challenges. And so what are ways of

creating coherence? You mean how things hang together? Yeah, how things hang together. So, for example, I'm one of those people, I would say, I'm not one of those people that believes like everything happens for the best or for a reason. Now I have my own way of getting to coherence, but I'm kind of curious what are ways of getting there if you don't sort of believe in that like everything happens for a reason kind of mentality. So when I say coherence, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a

deterministic formula that's predestined to happen. There can be a lot of randomness in life. And my father was a statistician, this PhD in biostatistics, and he was a professor, and he used to say that God's greatest miracle is creating randomness in the universe. He said, isn't it a wonderful thing? The distribution of events in the way that they can occur, And God chose to make things actually happen randomly. He says, what a wonderful miracle. He was a dedicated Christian all

throughout his life. But he was like a you know, nerd Christian. Right, So you have this funny view of how this works, but there's nothing that's opposed to between the ideas of randomness and and and things happening following a distribution of events and happenstance and believing that there actually is coherence. And the way to actually understand this is to say, Okay, I don't know what's gonna happen. Nobody knows what's going to happen except God. But it

might be random. Okay, fine, going forward in your life. Now, let me look backward in my life. And so who are people who lack coherence? And they feel like they're just kind of like jet some being tossed about on the surf of life, and it's making them intensely unhappy and uncomfortable. Right, the narrative of your life. I mean a lot of people end up trying to put meaning into their life by writing their own memoir, even if it's just a personal thing that that you don't share

with anybody. Try that, you know, try to write five pages of your memoir. I did this, and I did this, and I did this and this, and guess what, You're gonna find coherence. You're going to find a through line. It may have happened relatively randomly, but you're gonna find the meaning that is the thread that actually goes through it.

So you look at your life. You don't necessarily believe that the events are predestined, but you look at your childhood and your early adult life, and one thing led to another, lead to another, and you built one thing on top of the last thing, even including on the ashes of the stupid mistakes that you've made in your life. And on the basis of that, there is coherence. And that's a very important exercise for people to undertake. Yeah.

I think my approach to that is not everything happens for the best, but I can make the best out of everything that happens. You know, literally that as you said, that there is a meaning that can be created out of the events that occur. Yeah, the key thing to keep in mind is that, again, trouble finds us. And when trouble finds you, what I recommend that people do. Somebody rejects you, Somebody says something that's me, Somebody hurts

your feelings. You didn't get that promotion, you didn't get the raise, you didn't get a job, you didn't get that person that you're in love with, etcetera. To actually look at the event and instead of saying that was a net loss, what a wash out. My life would be way better if that happened a different way. So, okay,

it happened that way. I'm going to list the things that I learned from this, list the things you learned, and doing that, you'll have a much firmer foundation upon which you can build on good and especially on bad things. And that's really important because when you do that, when one thing is built on another thing, including on bad things, where you learned, that actually creates the coherence that you seek. You can actually write your own memoir as you're living

your life, and that's really really exciting. Furthermore, I'm telling you, when you take the bad feelings that are existing in the limit system of your blizzard brain and you write things down that you're learning, you're making them what we call in my business meta cognitive, which is to say that you're bringing them to the prefrontal cortex of your brain and exposing your executive brain to these negative cognitions and finding the good that actually is in them and

finding the ways you can profit and experiences. Let's talk about significance, because significance is one of those things that more and more I feel like our baseline of what we have to do in order for it to be significant seems to just be getting ratcheted up higher and higher. Some of this, I think is social media comparison, although I want to circle around to you sort of saying like, hey, comparison is nothing new, it's it's bedevilled us for ages.

But I sometimes make the observation if I look at my parents life and what would have been considered a successful life for my parents versus a lot of younger people seems to be very different. Younger people seem to have more of a like, well, I need to raise great kids, I need to have a great career. I need to start an amazing charity. I need to do

like nine different things to be significant. Right. There's a really important new book out by the physician and neuroscientists at Stanford, Dame Anna m Key, and it's about dopamine. And what she shows in that book is that you can get addicted to pretty much anything, because anything that actually stimulates you in any way, or you look forward to it to enjoy it will give you a hit

of dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of pleasure and desire, and you produce it in the human brains so that you will encode experiences that you want to repeat. So when you do something that's kind of exciting or good, or you know, I have great kids, I got a promotion at work, I had a really hardcore experience, or drugs and alcohol for that matter, you give yourself some dopamine that puts you at a higher baseline for having to do it again, then again, and higher and higher

and higher and higher. And this is the problem that we face in society today. The key to that is finding significance in the small and this is a very deep philosophical and theological roots. And I'll give you an example of this. You know Mick Jaggers saying I can't get no satisfaction, right, And the truth of the matter is that he could. The problem is he couldn't keep no satisfaction. You can get satisfaction, but only for a minute.

The way to actually solve that and define the significance of every moment without trying to have higher and higher and better and better and more and more followers and more and more money and more and more success. I mean, that's just a rat race. Man is actually start being alive now and paying attention to the smaller things that should be providing the ultimate source of significance. And I give you an example of this. You know, I had his friend Man. He was a rat race kind of guy.

This is a guy I worked with when I was in my twenties. So in my twenties, I didn't have a traditional career at all. I dropped out of college when I was nineteen and I went on the road as a professional musician, and I was touring with these other four guys for a lot of my twenties, So I didn't go to college, and all was in my late twenties. My parents called it by a gap decade kind of And so I was working with this one guy.

He was two decades older than I was, and he was just always about the next thing, always about the next gig, and just a very worried, anxious guy. As a result of that, trying to find significance and and always finding that it was elusive. I was in you know my late twenties. At this time, he was in his late forties. He gets this really bad cancer diagnosis. I mean it was it was grim man. The doctors like,

you need to make out your will. You've got six months to live, and you know, he went on some experimental drugs at the time and had a couple of miracles, and then six months turned into a year, and a year turned into two years, and then it turned into thirty years. The doctor said, however, interestingly, this is a wolf at the door. So this is you know, the one you feed is one thing. The wolf of the door is something else. Entirely that we're staying with the

wolf themed. And he said, sooner or later, that wolf's gonna slip in and it's gonna kill you. I don't know if it's now. I don't know how many decades you're gonna get or how many months you're gonna get, but the wolf's gonna get into it. Really, so he lived like that. It was this incredible blessing to him. What did he do? He ratcheted everything down because he didn't know if he had a month, and so we ratched and so I was visiting him. His life completely

changed it was like a different guy. And I was hanging out at his house. He was living in Annapolis, Maryland, and we were hanging out at dusk one summer night with a bunch of friends and we were hanging it was great, and he says, hey, everybody, camericamere. It was just getting dusk. And he says, qat he was this flower. This bush had flowers on it and they were all closed, tight as drum. And he said, wash the flower. Washed the flower. And I said what he said, just watched

the flower. And we're wearing at these little closed flowers and suddenly suddenly they all opened. They all opened, just popped open at the same time. And we're like just gasped with this intense satisfaction and thinking about it. Now, I get satisfaction from it, much much more so than so many more exciting things. On my hedonic treadmill on my building, the tower of Babel, all the way up into the sky was actually go down, be alive. Now

go for a walk without your device. You know, it's interesting. It's really helped me. It's really changed my life. I spend a lot of time getting smaller to actually find significance in my life. I'm a Catholic kind of go to Mass every morning with my wife. It's the same

thing every day, the same thing every day. And that's the point, you know, that's actually the significance that actually comes from the seemingly mundane and so doing the significance of my life is actually more apparent to me than it's ever been totally. It's what has drawn me to Zen as a path for me, because and is pretty obsessed on that very idea of like just the ordinary right now. I mean it's basically when Buddhism met Taoism, right that they sort of combined in made Zen and

so so you get both those themes. But there is that almost near obsession with the small things of life. Yeah, you know the tick not Han, the great Vietnamese Theravada Buddhist monk. He has his famous book everybody should recalled the Miracle of Mindfulness. It was very helpful to me in my life. And the miracle mindfulness is basically, you know, we spend our lives thinking about the future so that we can ensure a good past, and in so doing

we missed the present. We're not actually in a meaningful sense, we're not alive right now. So he said, when you're washing the dishes, be washing the dishes, wash each dish, and he walks through the process of washing dish. You think it's really boring, it's actually riveting. And that's the critical thing for us to keep in mind. So many people are missing their lives, you know. And and I

hesitate to say, turn off this great podcast. But if you want to turn off this podcast for minutes, what Arthur saying is when you're done with this, then be fully alive. Yeah. Well, I love that tick not han part where he talks about washing the dishes. I teach this in my Spiritual Habits program because what he says is, you know, you're washing the dishes to get done so

you can have a cup of tea. And then when you get to the cup of tea, but the problem is that if you don't know how to wash the dishes, to wash the dishes, you don't how to drink the cup of tea, to have the cup of tea, and thus we are sucked moment by moment out of the present moment into the future, which has been my experience. I mean, it's one thing to miss, like some of the more mundane things in life. But what I found is that by missing the mundane you you've lost the

ability to even appreciate the more beautiful things. Yeah, for sure, it's an inability to ever be here. It becomes actually an unwillingness to be fully alive in the presence. It's a really interesting thing. So, you know, I talked to my class about the best way to have a vacation, how many pictures should you take? What should you do with the pictures? And inevitably people do too of one of two things when they're taking pictures for a vacation.

Either they're taking pictures so that they can enjoy their current vacation in the future, when it is then the past. In other words, forget the current moment, don't enjoy it now, enjoy it later when you're thinking that it's the past. I mean, it's just it's complete insanity, which, by the way, according to the data, decreases your pleasure of your vacation.

Or number two, where you're actually living it so that somebody who's not you can be envious and be enjoying your vacation, which is what you do when you're posting your pictures on social media. Which according to the data, lowers your pleasure and your vacation by six It's a total loss to do this, and we're sleep walking through life. This is what psychologists called prospection and retrospection. Prospection is living in the future retrospection in the past, and this

is an incredible human trait. It's a miracle that we're able to do this. One of the reasons that we make so much progress is that we can practice future scenarios that we've never lived by imagining them and living through them. The trouble is that we become so obsessed with living in the future and so comfortable doing it that are our lives. They don't have significance and happening. That doesn't meaning you know, what does it mean to be living in the future and then and then missing

our current lives? You know, I know a lot of people who say, I feel like because I was planning for the future, planning for the future, working working, working for the future, I missed my kids growing up is a very very common lament, and it's just a general a specific case of this general problem that we're talking about now. So the average person is thirty to fifty percent of their time literally thirty of their time living in the future. The average go getter that's listening to us,

like real entrepreneur, is seventy living in the future. We all need to die all that back so that we can be alive. Now. Yeah, I certainly relate with that. I would probably put myself more in that seventy eight percent category. I've dialed it back and gotten better. But if I don't watch it, that's where I always think, oh yeah, totally. And you have a tendency. People will listen to us. They know who they are. You know

you are. That's right, that's right. Let's change directions a little bit and talk about our fears about what other people think about us. You've got a column recently titled no One Cares Well. There's a huge problem that most people in our society have. Some people have a little bit less, so you will have a little bit more. Some people have us kind of a superpower of not caring, but most of us don't have that superpower. And we find that we think an awful lot about obsessing on

what other people think of us. And it's interesting. Marcus Aurelius, the great Storic philosopher, one time said that we love ourselves more than we love others, but we care more about other people's opinions of us than our own opinion about ourselves. What an a gret A great irony that is, and it's so true, and so you know, I wrote about that. I wrote about the dilaterious phenomenon that worrying all the time about other people's opinions. And again, there's

an evolutionary basis for this that's very very clear. If you did not care what other people thought of you, and you crossed the wrong kind of lines in ancient society, you'd be thrown out into the frozen tundra, without a tribe, without a community, and you would literally die. That's when the wolf would say, there's a tasty lunch. I want

that one because it's alone. We have a hardwired tendency to care about what other people think of us, and I want to curry favor with powerful people and indeed with the group. So if you want people on social media to like you, and you want people who have a lot of social power to think favorably of you, that's why it's your hardwiring that's making you do that. But it's extre really suboptimal and maladapted to our current circumstances.

You know, we spend a ton of time, you know, trying to post fake versions of our lives on social media, which are depressing, disheartening, and by the way, they're depressing other people too, because we have an an incredible incapacity to realize that everybody's posting a fake thing, and we're the only ones who know that we're falsifying all. It's just quite isolating as a matter of fact. So there

are ways to get around this. So if anybody's listening to us says, yeah, I'm spending too much time thinking about it, I just wish I could not care. There are ways to deal with this, and the first way to deal with this is number one is to realize that actually nobody cares. I mean, they might think less of you if they cared about you, but they're not thinking about you. And there's a ton of research that shows that people are thinking about you way, way, way

less than you think they do. Even when they act like they're thinking about you, they're not thinking about you. They're only thinking about themselves. Me me, me, me, me, me me. That's what people are actually doing. It's so freeing to realize that nobody cares. It's so incredibly free because like, oh, that's great, nobody's looking at me. The second interesting way to do this is to think about how much we're judging other people. And we're judging other

people constantly. You know, this is good, this is bad, that person's fat, that person is then, that person is boring, that person is smart, that person is interesting, that person stupid, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And when we're judging everything all the time, is supposed to observing things, and this again, this is your practice. Ends you know that the idea of observation is such a powerful tool as opposed to judgment, But we're judging

things all the time instead of observing them. The result of that is that we're saying that it's legitimate for people to judge each other. You can judge each other, go for it, judge each other. That's saying you can judge me. And so the more you judge, the more you are open to the judgment of other people, and you will fall prey to the problem of caring about the people's opinions. So that's really important to keep it. Just don't judge just judge less. Take an hour and

don't judge anything, and you'll feel unbelievably relieved. You won't know why, and the reason is just because it takes a lot of your energy and you've opened the door to every else's judgment. So these are the two best tools. And then there are other things you can do about, you know, thinking about what actually embarrasses me about myself. And I'm worried about being judged on do it, go, do it, go, do it? I mean, I think about it. They think about the times that we crossed the rubicon.

I tell the story in my column about giving a three hour lecture to my graduate seminar on the first day of class and turned out my fly was down the whole time, right, and there's zero present chance like my shirt was coming out of it or so. It was just the worst. I mean, it was just really really embarrassing. And I realized after that, it's like, man, that happened, and I didn't die, and it didn't matter, and nobody cares. And they laughed about it, for sure.

I'm sure there are students from that seminar they're still cracking up about that, and it's fine. And I felt kind of free. Not not free to do it again, but I felt free a little bit under the circumstances. So, you know, make a list of the things that you're kind of embarrassed about yourself, and you think people might be laughing about you about make a list of them and then actually start laughing about them, and enter reduced them into conversations in the self deprecating way. You will

be basically opening up your jail door. Yeah, I love that idea. You have three different quotes around this, not judging others judge not that ye not be judged by Jesus. Whoever judges others digs a pit for themselves the Buddha and from the doubt a ching care about people's approval, and you will be their prisoners. Three quotes. I love. That is one of my favorite doubt a ching quotes

of all time. But it's so true. I've noticed that the less I have judged other people, the less I judge myself, and then the less I judge myself, the less I judge other people. It's a kind of a virtuous circle when I'm doing it in the right direction, and a you know, vicious spiral when I'm doing it in the wrong way. Oh yeah, for sure, and we

all fall pright to it. So basically, the key to keep in mind is that when you're feeling really insecure about yourself, really bad about yourself, the reason is probably because you're judging other people too much. That's almost always the case, and so doing that, you're exposing yourself to the judge mint of others, or you're saying to yourself, come on, man, bring on judge me, Just judge me.

It's all good. That's the key thing to do. So anytime you feel insecure, the proper therapy is to stop judging and start observing, and to do that therapeutically for an hour and your whole mind settle change. Just a minute ago, you mentioned the humor aspect, right, the humor of teaching a class with your fly down, you know, the self deprecating humor. Let's talk about the link between happiness and humor. It's something we talk about on this

show a lot. I've often said that I think levity is an underappreciated spiritual virtue, but talk about some of the things that may not be immediately intuitive to those of us who go, yeah, I think humor is a good way of increasing happiness. But you made some really interesting points in the column that we're not immediately intuitive. Yeah. So to begin with, when you say you have a sense of humor, or when somebody has a sense of humor,

that means one of two things. Number one is that they appreciate funny things, and the second thing is that they make funny things. They both say, he's got a great the humor. Either he cracks up when you tell a joke, or he cracks great jokes. Those are the two ways we talked about it, and they're very, very different phenomena. Happiness is associated with the first, it's not

associated necessarily with a second. Funny people tend to be less happy than not funny people that they tend to be more intelligent, but there's kind of a tortured spirit behind the naturally funny joke. Cracker. I'm sure that there are some comedians that are unbelievably happy people, but you find the clinical depression and even sociopathic tendencies tend to run heavier among professional comedians than other groups of people. And you notice the people who are funniest in your community,

they don't laugh very much. The people who make the funniest jokes. They don't usually laugh at other people's jokes, and they don't laugh their own jokes either. Notice this and you'll start to see this pattern as a matter of fact. On the other hand, people who laugh a lot at jokes, I mean, they just appreciate jokes, they tend to be much happier. And the great news is that you can cultivate that. There's some people who they have kind of a persona of being bummed a lot,

and so they don't let themselves laugh. But if you basically give yourself permission, and this is actually something that you can do, you can when you go to a new place, you can say, you know, I'm gonna laugh at everybody's jokes more, just literally saying that. What it does is it makes it once again metacognitive. It brings it to your consciousness, your pre for the cortex of your brain, and you literally will start laughing at the

people's jokes more and you will get happier. This is just it's free, man, and it's something that we all should be able to do. And also is an incredible social lubricant. People will be like I like him and I don't know why, and the reason is because he's cracking up all the time, and I want to be around having people. I want to be around people who laugh. It a nesthetizes unpleasantness in a very real way. Not

your jokes, but you're laughter. Yeah, you also make the point to avoid being grim, reject grimness, you say, is that sort of what you're saying there is to decide sort of as a position to be less grim. Yeah. And this gets political too, because you know our culture today, which is so unbelievably politically polarized, grimness is a weapon. Anytime you say that it's not funny, you basically tried to take some power. You're trying to grab some power.

And that's one of the main ways our inability to take other people's jokes or to take offense when none was intended is a power move in our in our society today, and it transcends right left distinctions. You actually

find it across the political spectrum. This is key. And I'm sitting on a college campus and I see this all the time, where you know, you make a joke at your peril and understand, you know, stupid jokes or offensive jokes, And there are certain kinds of jokes that we should have moved beyond at this point in our society, and yet we haven't. But still the key thing is, if you want to be happier, don't actually try to hurt people with jokes, but also don't take offense when

none was intended by these jokes. And so doing you can be kind of in the anti grimness more levity part of the culture. Will you give up some political power? Yeah? Will you be happier? Yeah? Will you be making a happier culture? A hundred percent? I want to swing around briefly to the culture of contempt, but before we do, this is the time of the year that brings up a lot of unhappiness in people. Some people love this

time of year, but a lot of people don't. I've been reflecting on the fact that there's a lot of expectation around the holidays, expectation that other people have on us, expectation we have on how the holidays should be. What would be a way to be happier through the holidays, will be a way to deal with those expectations more

wisely well? To begin with, one of the main reasons that people are unhappy this time of year is because they're disappointed, and the reason they're disappointed is that we have a tendency to believe or to remember past holidays is better than they were. It's called fading affect bias. It's a cognitive bias that we have where we remember the good parts of things and not the bad parts.

Very very common. It's a self defense mechanism. But it's also because we learn from things, and we keep getting benefit from the things we learned, and we we jettis in the parts of our memories that are not useful to us, like you know, Uncle Mike got you know, loaded and you know, passed out in the front yard after screaming obscenities of the neighbors on Christmas Day, you know,

that kind of thing. We leave that behind. So we tend to be disappointed when our holidays don't live up to either our expectations about the future, which tend to be very rosy, or our memories are nostalgic memories from the past. That's the key thing. The second big problem that we have is that we feel that a lot of pressure. You know, we feel a lot of pressure to sing the Christmas carols and to enjoy the holidays and for some people it's really really hard. I remember

this was very hard for my mom. My mom, you know, she suffered a lot, very ill for almost all of my childhood, and she would suffer on the holidays, you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were really really, really hard for her. And the main reason is because she felt it was an expectation for her to be the perfect mother and the perfect cook and have the perfect home, and she didn't feel she was up to it. That was a problem.

So what do we do, you know, for those of our listeners who they suffer a little bit on the holidays, Number one is reject the expectations and do your own thing. You know, if you find the consumerism really off putting, then put together Christmas with people who are like you, and you decide you're not gonna spend money. As a matter of fact, don't spend any money from any consumer

money from Thanksgiving through January. One. To be a rebel, the countercultural man and and be amazed that actually how happy it takes you by being countercultural per se and and being around people who do that. Or you know, when my kids were little, my wife who's from Spain, she often because the kids would be home. She would take one kid and go see her mother in Barcelona over Thanksgiving, and I would have the other, our two kids, and and she's like, oh, it's gonna be so sad.

And the first year I took him to a restaurant and then to the movies. And it became this tradition where I had two kids and they were competing to be the ones who were home to go to the restaurant in the movies with dad. And it was like, and you see me with my kids and look like a divorce dad. Who got who got, you know, custody of his kids? On Thanksgiving? It too pathetic to make a turkey or something. We were having this great old time.

Make your own traditions was the key thing. And then the third thing is leave the memories behind, leave her expectations behind. Just today's Christmas, today's Thanksgiving. Let it be what it is. Let it be what it is. And finally, actually one more, don't talk politics. Don't talk politics on the holidays, because you're gonna get politics in the way of your love. And your love is more important than politics. And that leads to your last question, doesn't it? It does?

And I'm gonna actually bring that back on you a little bit because you summarize your whole book on the culture contempt to a few lessons, and you then said it even similer. Go find someone with whom you disagree, listen thoughtfully, and treat them with respect or love. A lot of times for many of us, unfortunately, sometimes maybe the only time we encounter somebody who believes something different than us is when we're forced into our families of origin.

But you're saying, if you want the holidays to be good, then is not the time to try and take on the culture of contempt. Leave that for another time. Yeah, generally speaking, that's a good idea. That doesn't mean you have to avoid it. It just means that don't be going and looking for it, don't say. You know, there's the Democratic Party and the Repulican Party both have in different parts of these parties have put out a guide to how to beat your family and arguments, which is

actually evil. You know, this is evil to to giving people a guide on how they can vanquish their family members. And you know, Dale Carnegie, the great self improvement writer, one time said that a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion. Still, even if you win the argument, you lose the argument because nobody in history has ever been insulted into agreement. This is really really

important thing to keep in mind. So go rushing towards the people with whom you agree, listen to them with civility and love, and not just tolerance, with actual love. But on Thanksgiving and Christmas, you know, talk about the things that matter first, which is, you know, the people that you have in common, the love that you have for each other, the fun things that you've done over

the course of the year. And you probably won't even get to the politics by the end of the day, but you'll say, you know, my crazy Republican aunt Marge, you know, we love the same things and that's what really matters. Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up. I would love to get more into Contempt and talk about what it is and and all the problems. Your greatest book is wonderful. Maybe that will be another time. That'd be great. Thank you, yeah, thank you so much

for coming on the show. It has been a real pleasure to talk with you, and thanks for sharing so much your wisdom with us. You have a great show and you're doing a lot of good and I appreciate a lot being able to be some small part of it. Thank you right on. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of

exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community. Go to when you Feed dot net slash Join the One You Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.