Why Wanting Less Actually Gets You More | Arthur Brooks

Key Takeaway

Today, make a reverse bucket list: write down a few desires for money, status, pleasure, or recognition that are quietly driving you, then cross off one you no longer want to organize your life around. Arthur Brooks argues that lasting satisfaction comes from reducing the denominator of desire, not endlessly increasing what you have. Naming a desire does not require abandoning ambition; it helps you pursue the goals that genuinely reflect your values.

Episode Overview

Arthur Brooks joins Dan Harris to discuss Build the Life You Want, his book with Oprah Winfrey on the science and practice of becoming happier. He frames happiness as a direction rather than permanent bliss, built through three “macronutrients”: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. The conversation also explores emotional regulation, envy, ambition, suffering, and shifting attention away from self-absorption toward service and connection.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Wanting Less Actually Gets You More | Arthur Brooks from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast, I'm your host, Dan Harris. All of us, every living being is trying to get happier, but often we go about it in the wrong way. We look for happiness in the wrong places. My guest today is here to talk about a book he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey about, as he says, how to build the life you want right now without waiting for the world to change first. Arthur Brooks is a great guest, fascinating guy. We like him so much.

He's been on the show several times, most recently in April of this year. This particular conversation, the one you're about to hear, first aired back in 2024 when his book with Oprah was released. Just a little bit more about Arthur before we dive in here. He's a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School. In this interview, he does a lot of myth busting around happiness. He talks about what he says are the three macro nutrients of happiness. We talk about the perils of pursuing pleasure, how to be effectively and wisely ambitious, how to ascertain if you have meaning in your life, how to manage your emotions, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy envy.

Again, Arthur's book co-authored with Oprah Winfrey is called Build the Life You Want. We'll be talking to Arthur Brooks coming up after this. Arthur Brooks, welcome back to the show. Hi, Dan. Nice to see you and talk to you. It's been, I don't know, a few months. Let's just say too long. Yeah, that's it. I agree with that. But I mean, I'm obviously up to date with all the great stuff you're doing with your enterprise. Congratulations. You're bringing a lot of people to a lot more happiness.

I'd love to see it. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations to you on this not so new, but new-ish book. It seems to be doing really well, and I'm very excited to kind of dive into it today. Thanks. Yeah, I know. It's been a thrill. It's been an interesting experience. It's the first book I've co-authored in decades, as a matter of fact. Yeah, and you had an obscure co-author that you're really kind of giving her a shot at the limelight. I don't know how you found it in your heart to have the generosity to bring Oprah on board.

Well, you know, Dan, that's how I was raised. How was she as a co-author? Was she sort of like picking apart your sentences, or was she pretty relaxed? She's pretty relaxed. I mean, the way that the co-authorship worked is, I mean, the book was her idea. The book wasn't my idea at all. She read my last book that you and I talked about on your show, called From Strength to Strength. And she also reads my column in The Atlantic. And she called me, and she said, hey, this is Oprah, and I'm like, yeah, this is Batman.

But it was Oprah. I mean, it was the voice, right? And I didn't know her at all. But as you know, when you're doing something that has a public audience, who knows who's listening or reading. And she said, you know, just read From Strength to Strength. Why don't you come on my show? I went on her podcast. We were like a house on fire. Exactly the same basic mission, lift people up and bring them together using ideas. But we have different ways of doing it. You know, she introduces ideas and people to her public, whereas I am the ideas, or at least I'm the guy who's supposed to be processing the ideas.

I was trained as a scientist to do exactly that. And she said, you know, if I still had my show, she says, you know, I used to have a show, right? I said, yes, I'm aware. She's lovely because, you know, she doesn't assume anything. And she says, if I had my show, I'd have you on as an expert on the science of happiness 30 times. And then you'd have your own following, she said. But you know, I don't have the show anymore. I'm just doing different things and sort of in the same vein.

What if we did a book that I kind of hosted? And I said, interesting idea. And so that's kind of how the book works, where she weaves in and out of the chapters and the science, and she puts in her own stories and says things about her own life, just like she would have hosted me had I been on the Oprah Winfrey Show. And when she said, let's do this book, what was her idea? What did she want to communicate? She wanted these ideas to get to a much wider audience.

The whole point that she felt that she learned from my work is that happiness is not a goal at all. It's not a destination. It's a direction, by the way, something you, Dan, have been talking about for a long time. Why? Because the ultimate state of bliss is not attainable nor even desirable. It's also not a feeling. Getting happier is not just trying to maintain happy feelings. On the contrary, it has a lot to do with your knowledge and your practice. I mean, I've talked about this with you, and I've heard you talk about it so eloquently.

If you want to get happier, you actually need to dedicate yourself to living in a different way. You have to have knowledge about what's going on. And that really spoke to her that I was using this particular approach, and she wanted to get that out to millions more people than it was currently reaching. Because a lot of people could be a lot happier than they are, and Oprah Winfrey wants a happier world, and so do I. What's interesting there is that you and Oprah want a happier world, and it seems like you're telling people happiness is not the goal.

So how do you unpack that? Well, she's good with words, and she invented a new word that squares that circle, which is that the goal is not happiness. The goal is happierness. That's the goal. And I realize it's a neologism, but it kind of gets the point across. The point is not that you're trying to get into this ultimate state of happiness, which would mean obliterating negative emotions, which is bad. We have negative emotions to keep us alive. Anger and anger and sadness and disgust, they can be maladapted.

They can be overwhelming. They can even become a medical problem. But the truth of the matter is that we have evolved these emotions because we need them to understand threats in our environment and to learn and conform and grow. You and I both have had negative experiences in our lives and plenty of unhappy feelings, and we're better men for it, is the truth of the matter. So that's not the goal is to get rid of all of that, and we should stop trying to get rid of all these things.

We should be learning to manage and learn and grow from those things, which is the process of happiness. I wonder if this is a little bit of a definitional debate, meaning because I don't necessarily argue to people that happiness is not the goal. What I argue is that happiness is a skill. But it really depends on how you define happier. Sorry, it depends on how you define happiness. If you're defining happiness as no negative emotions, well then, yes, I would say that's impossible and unwise. If you're defining happiness as my friend, Dr.

Mark Epstein does, which is more of the good stuff and less of the bad, and even if it's unsatisfying to the listener, it's the best definition of happiness I've ever heard, the more I think about it, which is it's just the ability to have more positive emotions than negative emotions more of the time. Yeah, and that's a comparative idea, you know, more and lesser comparisons, and so is happier. So that's the reason that the happierness is a good way to think about it, as opposed to thinking this is something I have to achieve.

And as long as I have these, you know, I have the so-called bad in my life, then therefore something's wrong. Another problem that we face today is that we have a culture that says that if you're experiencing negative emotions, something's wrong with you. And my students, for example, I mean, the university culture in the United States today is very much of a therapeutic culture that says that you're broken, or there's something distorted about your emotions when you're feeling negative emotions. And I'll say to my students on the first day of class, look, you're Harvard students.

If you're not depressed and anxious, then you need therapy. I mean, come on, man, it is a hard environment is how this works out. So we're basically saying the same thing, but I take the definition a little bit in a different direction as a social scientist that can give us something to grab onto that are specific sub-goals. So it's not just go get happier, that's too general. I talk about the sub-parts, the macronutrients of happiness, and those are the things that we pursue with different agendas and different strategies, and that's when it gets kind of interesting.

When I meet somebody, I can figure out pretty quickly where their diet is not up to snuff, where they're lacking in their macronutrients of happiness, and we can work on the sub-dimensions, and that turns out to be a pretty good way to start. Well, okay, so let's dive into the macronutrients. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Can you walk us through these? Yeah, sure. The first, well, and to think about it, if I said, what is your Thanksgiving dinner, the one thing you wouldn't tell me is the smell of the turkey, and that's the relationship between feelings and actual happiness.

Feelings are evidence of happiness, they're not the happiness itself, which is a very good piece of news for everybody, because people who mistake the feeling of happiness for happiness itself, they're going for the vapor of feelings all the time, and you as a skilled meditator, you know perfectly that feelings come and go, and you don't wanna be controlled by your feelings, on the contrary, you wanna manage your feelings so that they don't manage you, which is one of the great skills that you get from a serious meditational practice.

So that's the first thing to keep in mind. The second is that you can see the parts of the happiest people, that they fall into these three categories. These are the people who enjoy their lives, they get a lot of satisfaction in their activities, and they have a sense of meaning about why they're alive. These are the three big dimensions that we find. So these are the, macronutritively, we would say that these are the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness. Now the first is enjoyment, and a lot of people think enjoyment is pretty self-explanatory, but it isn't.

You know, back in the 60s, you and I don't remember the 60s exactly, I mean, I remember Woodstock happening, because I was a little kid, and I remember my dad seeing a hippie on TV saying, if it feels good, do it, and my dad saying, that's the end of America. He was kind of right, but anyway, the point of that was to mistake enjoyment with pleasure, and that's what a lot of people get wrong in their lives. They think that the pursuit of pleasure is a good goal, and it's a life-ruining goal.

I mean, there's all kinds of neuroscience that shows us that if we live our life like squirrels, simply trying to get the thing that gives us the most calories and mates, that is a terrible way to live a fulfilling life. What we need to do, by the way, is not to get rid of the sources of pleasure, but to add two things that will make them more human. Pleasure is a phenomenon that emanates from the limbic system of the brain, an ancient console of tissue that produces cravings and desires and emotions.

But what you want is to experience the source of this impulse in the prefrontal cortex, in the human part of your brain, in the C-suite of your brain, and the way that you do that is by taking a source of pleasure and adding two uniquely human things. Number one is people, relationships, and number two is memory. And here's the way to think about it, Dan. I mean, a lot of things that we do in our lives are, frankly, pleasurable and addictive. Not everything pleasurable is addictive.

I mean, you know, walking in nature while meditating is very pleasurable but not addictive. But a lot of things that people do, everything from drugs and alcohol to gambling to pornography to a lot of things, they capture activity in the brain. They actually establish pathways in the brain that make you very good at doing them over and over and over again in search of that particular pleasure. That's a brain-capture phenomenon, and it's animal. It's not very human and certainly not divine. But if you take that source of pleasure and you add people and memory, in other words, if you're doing something that's pleasurable and can be addictive, you don't do it alone, then you can get enjoyment, which is a source of actual authentic and enduring happiness.

Now, I'll give you an example. Beer companies, they never feature in their beer commercial a dude pounding a 12-pack in his apartment alone, never. That's how tons of people use their product. Now, the reason they don't do that is because that's an irresponsible use of the product and it's actually dangerous. It doesn't mean you're ruining your life, but everybody who ruins their life with alcohol kind of does that. So what do they show? They show the same guy clinking the necks of the bottles together with his brother or his friends because he's taking the source of the pleasure, which is the beer, and adding people and adding memories, which equals enjoyment, which is part of happiness.

So that's how we should be thinking about all of these pleasures in our lives to turn it into an enduring source of happiness. But does it require other people? For example, we use the meditating in the woods thing, right? That's a solo activity. If I'm not doing it with other people, am I on the wrong side of the pleasure-enjoyment scale? No. I mean, that's just a rule of thumb with things that can be addictive. And so there are a lot of things that give you really, really a lot of enjoyment and even pleasure.

Listening to music, reading a book, reading holy scriptures, indeed, meditating or praying, these things are very pleasurable, but they're pleasurable in a different way and the way that it affects your brain. So the rule of thumb that I give my young adult students and my young adult children, for that matter, is if it brings pleasure and you could be addicted to it, and we know what those things are, and you're doing it alone, you're doing it wrong. Got it. So that being said, there's a huge swath of activities that one can enjoy on one's own that are not addictive.

So, you know, I sometimes sit and stare at my son, even if he's playing a video game or reading a book, and I enjoy that immensely and that I don't need anybody else sharing the gaze. Yeah. Yeah. There's no brain capture that's going on there. There's no brain capture that's happening. But, you know, a lot of cell phone use, and by the way, your son, who might be playing a video game or scrolling Instagram, that could be capturing his brain. And that's one of the big problems that we have with screens today, is they're inherently isolated activities, therefore kind of falling into the wrong camp from getting it.

They can be pleasurable, but they can't be enjoyable. Yes. A lot of people will say, look, I really, you know, I just fritter my time away scrolling, you know, reels on TikTok. But then I always feel crummy about it. And the reason is because you were seeking the pleasure, but it never got to enjoyment. So therefore you didn't get happier. And you felt disappointed about not using your time in a way that it made you happier. That's really, that's really interesting. So if I'm scrolling right now, I'm looking for happiness, looking for pleasure in the wrong places.

We're not saying you should never scroll. But if you're if you've got the goal of of being deeply satisfied, you're unlikely to reach it because in order to be truly enjoying something like this, you need to be doing it with somebody else. Yeah, that's right. And so one of the things that I do, for example, is that my daughter and my youngest child was 20. And when she's home from college, which she was, she likes to look at hilarious reels on social media. And we'll do it together.

She'll say, look at this, Daddy, look at this. And we're just kind of scrolling it together. And it's actually so much better. Because when you're laughing with someone, it's more fun than laughing by yourself. And the reason is, of course, you're taking the pleasure laughing is incredibly pleasurable. It's extremely good for your brain. But you're adding these two magic ingredients, which is somebody that you love and a memory of doing it and turns into enjoyment. And it's it's a it's a it's magical, actually, how you can take that that source of pleasure and turn it actually into a meaningful part of your happiness.

A quick note before we hear from our sponsors, who, for the record, I actually like. We are very diligent to the point of being quite annoying to some of our business partners. Very, very diligent and picky when it comes to picking our sponsors. That said, I get it. Not everybody loves listening to ads. And that's why I want to tell you about a way to get this show ad free. It's called 10% Happier Plus. It's a subscription right inside Apple podcasts. Doesn't matter what app you're on right now.

You can find it right there. Every episode ad free plus a bonus guided meditation every Sunday from teachers like Joseph Goldstein, Sabine Selassie and Vinnie Ferraro. It's $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Quick note, if you already have my app, 10% with Dan Harris, you're covered. You don't need this as well. It's really for people who just want this podcast ad free and the money does not just fund the show. It also helps us give free app memberships to people who can't afford it. Look for 10% Happier Plus in Apple podcasts and hit subscribe.

We'll be right back after this. Have you ever thought about starting your own company? I've loved personally being an entrepreneur. I'm on my second company right now and I've got some germs of ideas for future companies. There's so much fun to be had in this sphere. However, there are also lots of nitty gritty hands in the dirt, detail oriented aspects to starting and operating a business that are not really my jam. So if you're like me and you're into the big ideas, but not so much into the nitty gritty of the details, you need to have a good ally, which brings me to one of our sponsors today.

Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US with over 1500 corporate guides, real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. What they help you with specifically is what's called your business identity. It's everything that makes your business legitimate and professional from public records and compliance to your website, email and phone number. To pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free, visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash happier free and start using free resources to build something amazing.

Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash happier free. OK, so satisfaction is the second of the macro nutrients, and I just use the word perhaps inappropriately in one of my most recent utterances. So please tell me what you mean by it and what maybe where I went ran afoul. Well, tell me what you said. I said something like if you're scrolling through media, social media, and you're looking for satisfaction. You may get pleasure, but you're not going to get a deep satisfaction because you're doing it by yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that was enjoyment. But you were also right about the satisfaction part, and here's why. Satisfaction is the joy, the reward that you get after you struggle for something. Humans are really funny. I mean, you know, my dog Chucho doesn't like to struggle for his rewards. You know, if you could just have him lay around all day and, you know, occasionally flop his head over in the bowl and eat, that would be the blissful existence for my dog Chucho. But because he can't follow the divine path, I don't think, we as humans, we need to struggle.

We need to strive. We need to sacrifice. We even need pain in our lives because that's actually how we earn something, and this concept of earning a particular reward makes that reward that much sweeter. It's a very funny thing about human beings that we don't see in other animals, but it's true in every culture and it's true for everybody of every age, no matter how impulsive they are. That's one of the reasons when your kids were little, you said, you know, you got to work for things.

You told them, you know, it wasn't just for their health that you said, don't snack all afternoon. You actually wanted them to enjoy their dinner. My father-in-law, who lived through the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, he was born in 1929. He just died a couple of years ago at a really old age, and, you know, he saw terrible things. He spent a bunch of time in a refugee camp because he was on the wrong side of that struggle, and he told me one time that based on that, he had learned an important secret of happiness.

I'm like, well, I'm all ears. Lay it on me. He'd lived a long time, and he said, the reason people aren't as happy as they should be is because they don't enjoy their dinner. And why don't they enjoy their dinner? He said, in modern life, they don't enjoy their dinner. I said, why not? He says, because they're never hungry. And you get the point, right? I mean, I don't want people to starve. But the truth is, when you're actually on a diet or you're trying to tune up your nutrition and you're purposively fasting a little bit, food is a lot better and brings you a lot more enjoyment, pleasure, but if you're eating with people and making a memory, that much better.

And that's what people used to get from these, you know, big festivals and, you know, the Thanksgiving feast when people were just, they were always a little bit hungry, and then they got that Thanksgiving dinner, and it was so wonderful. It was satisfying. And if you're not hungry, it's not satisfying. Now, that's the same thing with anything else. My students, if they cheat on my exam and get an A, there's no satisfaction in that. If they work really hard, even stay up all night studying for my exam and they get an A, it's enormously satisfying.

That's what we want. We want to defer our gratification for real rewards. And that's important because that talk, that helps us understand that struggle and sacrifice are not necessary evils. They're built into the process of satisfaction. There's another problem behind it, though, that's gonna get more into your world as a practicing, you know, a practitioner of Buddhist meditation that we all need to understand. Mother Nature tells us that if we get that satisfaction and that reward, we'll keep it, that we'll just get to enjoy it forever and ever and ever.

That watch, that car, that house, that relationship, that millionth Instagram follower, whatever your thing is, that once you get it, it's gonna be so wonderful. But it isn't. It just, it's evanescent. It just wears off. That new car smell goes away. You know, you move to a really sunny place. Six months later, you've accustomed yourself, you've habituated yourself to it because the brain experiences what's called homeostasis. It goes back to its baseline. So your emotions are ready for the next set of circumstances. It has to.

You die. It'd be actually dangerous if it didn't happen. But we never learn. And the only way for that not to wreck our satisfaction and lead us to frustration and disappointment is for us to fight against Mother Nature's little trick, which you do really well and you talk about an awful lot. So I'm in Dan Harris territory now, so I say this with appropriate humility. You don't need to have more. You need to want less if you want stable and lasting satisfaction. Your satisfaction is actually all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want.

Most people have a numerator increasing strategy, more. What's your goal? More? More of what? All of it. I don't want you to lay it on me. You need to be working on the denominator of your satisfaction equation, which is to want less, to think seriously, not about your bucket list, but about your reverse bucket list, crossing things out on that list. That's the secret. And only being very present, thinking very carefully about these things, interrogating your wants on a regular basis. This is why meditation is so critically important.

It gives you the space to actually interrogate your wants. Some people for the very first time in their lives. If you are wanting less, are you less ambitious, less effective, less impactful in the world? So theoretically, yes, but I've never seen it. I've never seen it in the wild. You know, my students will ask me that, but you know, my students are MBA students at the Harvard Business School. These are some of the most ambitious people walking the earth. And I say, I'm not worried about you guys.

I'm not worried about you, you know, and anybody who's listening to 10% Happier is a striver. They're working on the enterprise of their own lives. They're ambitious about getting better off in life. If you're actually working on your wants, as opposed to just your haves, as a striver, you're just simply going to get closer into balance than you were before. Think about it this way. Stop thinking about building your perfect life, like putting brushstrokes on a canvas. If you're doing well, that canvas is probably full, and a brushstroke will be indistinguishable from what's already on the canvas.

It might even get worse, because it'll just get darker and denser and uglier. Think about your life as a sculpture that you're chipping away, and you need to chip away the detritus of all the things that are distracting you from the true you, all of the obsessions and desires and toxic relationships and the search for money and status. Think about how those things really do affect you, and start chipping them away. That's why I have a reverse bucket list. I write down my worldly desires, the money, power, pleasure, fame matrix, and I start crossing those things out, not because I won't get them, but because when I'm fully conscious of these desires, I'm less attached to these things.

By naming these things, I'm less likely to chase them subconsciously. I'm less likely to affect my unconscious behavior, and boy, oh, boy, it gives me a tool of management over my life that I never would have imagined 10 years ago. So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that if we approach our goals not as a painting where we're adding more and more paint, but as a sculpture where we're taking away clay or stone or whatever the material is, that actually we can be more effectively and wisely ambitious because we're getting down to the nub of what actually matters.

Yeah, and if you're doing the work to think of what you want that sculpture to be, it's very unlikely to have a dollar figure attached to it. It's very unlikely to have an Instagram follower number attached to it. What it's going to have is something to do with your faith or life philosophy, something to do with your family relationships, something to do with the depth of your friendships, something to do with how you're actually creating a mark on the world that's lifting people up and bringing them together.

These are the things that really matter. And so deeply considering what you want that sculpture to be will give you the right ambition, and then you can shed the less meritorious ambitions and the ones that actually lead you onto this hedonic treadmill, this homeostasis, this more, more, more, more that never leads to real satisfaction that lasts. Can one really shed the less meritorious motivations and aspects of ambition? Not that I've been meditating that long, but it's a non-trivial period of time, and I'm still spotting all sorts of noxious tendencies flitting through the mind.

Well, Mother Nature, she's cruel, and she's wired us in particular ways. Mother Nature really only has two goals for Nan and Arthur and everybody watching and listening to us, which is gene propagation and survival, calories and mates, man. And the result of that is that we follow all of these weird imperatives, not quite understanding why we're doing it. Now, I do a lot of work in evolutionary social science, and so I'm charting these impulses back to the Pleistocene all the time. Why do I want all these Instagram followers?

Not me, but why do people want that? And the answer is because they want prestige. They want a higher place in the hierarchy. Why? Because they want to be admired by other people, and that got back to the idea of being more likely to survive in a tribe and getting more mates back in the old days. So you're going to have these impulses, but the point is you need consciousness of these impulses. Vipassana meditation is a really interesting thing because when you sit in meditation to try to get insight about yourself, you look at yourself in a certain remove.

You say, Arthur is feeling envious today. What is it? Arthur is feeling fearful about losing something today. Why might that be? And that remove, that metacognitive act, metacognition is the thinking about thinking. That's why Vipassana meditation is one of the very best things that people can do, not to shed these attachments, but to be aware of these attachments. Now, I do a lot of work, as you know, with the Dalai Lama. He's probably shed the attachments. I mean, he's a living bodhisattva. I mean, he's enlightened, but the rest of us, probably not.

But I'm telling you, I know it's true for you, and it's certainly true for me, that awareness of this, awareness of these tendencies is 80% of the way to not being controlled by these tendencies. That's been just a watershed achievement for me in my life, is becoming conscious of these things and systematically reviewing them through my own meditation practice. Yeah. I mean, that's what I would, the way I would describe it for myself, that I'm more aware of the, as I said before, noxious tendencies implanted into me through the culture and through natural selection, et cetera, et cetera.

And theoretically, depending on the day, depending on how much sleep I've got, depending on the circumstances of my life at that moment, I'm less yanked around by them. Right. I make bad decisions all the time, too. But the time I make, it's interesting. There's a game I play with my students to figure out what kind of bad decision you're going to make based on. on your noxious tendencies. It's a game called What's My Idol. Do you want to play? Sure. So What's My Idol starts with the insight of Thomas Aquinas, who is paraphrasing Aristotle.

Very solid social science, before data were a thing, saying every person has a tendency to follow one of four big idols in life. Here are the four, money, power, pleasure, and fame. Now fame means admiration of others or prestige. It's a hierarchical thing. It's all that means. It doesn't mean having millions of people know who you are. Fame can be very local, but it means the admiration of others. Money is self-explanatory. Power means that you have disproportionate influence over other people. And pleasure, well, it's pleasure.

You could be a pleasure seeker. Nothing wrong with pleasure, but the point is if it's your idol, and the idea of Aristotle and later Aquinas is that these things distract you from your ultimate bliss. If they become the goal in and of themselves, you're in big trouble. But they also assert that everybody follows one of them in particular. So when I'm playing with my students, and I'll play with you right now, I start by saying, think of those four, money, power, pleasure, honor. Which of those is not your idol that you'd get rid of right now?

Maybe you don't even like it. So which one would you hive off? Which one would you shed down? Power. Yeah, me too, baby. How do I know when somebody doesn't like power? Because they hate people having power over them. And I'm sure that's true for you. You don't want anybody... I mean, that's why you struck out on your own. I mean, you're an entrepreneur. Because it's like you're like Sinatra, singing My Way. I got it. Okay. There's three left, Dan, money, pleasure, and honor, or the admiration of other people.

You got to get rid of a second one. Which one are you getting rid of? You don't get it in your life anymore. Which one? Shit, this is hard. It gets harder. It's going to get harder. Yeah. I guess money. Yeah, me too. Me too. Money's fine, but really, is it that great? I mean, really, do you want a 10-bedroom house? I mean, do you want a third car? It just... It usually, when people like money an awful lot, it represents something else. So I'm with you.

Okay, you like it, but not that much. Now it's getting a little hot in here, right, Dan? Because you're down to two. And now you're going to have to get rid of one of them. I can already tell you like both because you're human. But which one do you like less and would you kick away now, pleasure or honor? Honor. All right. So now we know that any time there's something that is going to lead you to look back on a moment in your life and say, that was the wrong thing.

It's going to tend to revolve around giving in needlessly, not necessarily thoughtlessly, but not mindfully to that idol. And that's a really important piece of information because look, you're only human, you're going to have these things. For me, it's honor. It is. I think I'm a university professor and we're all kind of this way. It's not like you want a billion people to be uttering your name, but you want the right people to know who you are and appreciate your ideas for their quality. That's a very common thing in my field and it's certainly true for me too.

And so I know every time I look back on my life and I say, I wish I hadn't done that and I wish I hadn't said that and I wish I didn't have these fears and I wish I didn't have these hangups. It's all kind of honor-based and that's because it's my idol. Now, that's important information for me because now I know what I have to have sword in hand to slay, which is my tendency toward that. Yeah. I mean, I was really torn at the end because I mean, I think fame slash honor, I mean, that is an idol for me.

I just couldn't imagine a life with no pleasure. Yeah. I mean, that's too extreme, of course, you know, and you'd never have a life without honor if you're doing something useful. You're gonna have people even in your neighborhood who say, Dan, he's a good guy and that's a form of honor as well. So we don't want to take this to ridiculous limits and say you're gonna live a life bereft of pleasure. What we're really talking about are these pleasures that we chase to the exclusion of more meritorious goals again and again and again.

And you know, the little things that give you that sort of spice in life that you really enjoy and you're not really very proud of, that's really what we're sacrificing here. So I don't want to set it up in such a way that you have to live a great existence. Like many of you, I have some pretty serious anxiety and misgivings about artificial intelligence. However, given that this appears to be a wave that is heading toward us, whether we like it or not, I have decided personally that information is power.

I want to learn as much as I can so that I can respond as effectively to whatever comes next. And that's why I was very intrigued when I saw that Masterclass has some really compelling content and programming around artificial intelligence. I'm looking at their very sleek app right now. They have a ton of other classes. They've got a lot of folks who've been on this show, Dr. Alison Wood Brooks, talking about the art and science of conversation, Amanda Ripley, who talks about the difference between a healthy conflict and high conflict.

It's a really compelling offering. Unlike other learning platforms, Masterclass puts you in the room with the people who define their fields, not just experts, but the best in the world. They've got 200 plus classes across 13 categories, business, writing, cooking, creativity, wellness, and more with plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash happier. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash happier. Head to masterclass.com slash happier to see the latest offer.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If I could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, it would be having a calmer, less anxious nervous system so that I could enjoy my life more. I have made massive amounts of progress in this regard in the past 20 years as a result of meditation and therapy and getting better at tending to my interpersonal relationships, but it's really a never ending process, hence the name of the show, 10% happier. As I often argue, the 10% compounds annually.

Better is a feeling defined by you and for BetterHelp, it's a BetterHelp therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional wellbeing with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over a hundred countries. It's progress and it's also getting better at regulating your nervous system or whatever's important to you, and I know that having a therapist has been very helpful to me in this regard. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash happier. That's BetterHelp.com slash happier. If you're a loyal listener to this show, you know that I am an avid worker outer, and if you are going to exercise on the regular, one thing you need, it's a non-negotiable, at least in my opinion, you need quality socks.

You can't skimp on your socks, and one of the sponsors of this show is Bombas, and they've been sending me these socks that I use when I work out. Not only when I work out, but also when I'm out in the world just wearing sneakers and I want some good looking socks, I go to my Bombas on those occasions as well. It's become a little bit of a source of marital discord because my wife and I compete for the Bombas socks, so that's reminding me I need to go order some more.

Long way of saying they make high quality socks, but that's not all they make. They also make footwear. Do you know what EVA stands for? Neither did I, but Bombas makes their sandals and slides from this super lightweight, cushy, waterproof EVA foam. It's like walking on marshmallows. They also make underwear and t-shirts, the best base layers you'll ever own. Head over to Bombas.com slash happier and use the code happier for 20% off your first purchase. Bombas.com slash happier code happier at checkout. Just to remind people where we are, we're walking through the three macro nutrients of happiness from the standpoint of Arthur Brooks, and we've talked about enjoyment.

We're on satisfaction right now, and there was something you said early in your brief discourse on satisfaction that I want to loop back to. You talked about the necessity of struggle and pain and suffering for satisfaction. That is, you need to go through that. You need to move through that in order to get the good stuff. This is a common theme among, I've noticed, among my recent guests on this show who have argued that we've created a world where for young people especially, and this is not their fault, this is the world we've created for them, where young people especially have lives of one could argue insufficient friction and struggle with helicopter parents and technology that allows them to get everything they want on demand so that when they do experience the anxiety that is non-negotiable and inevitable in life, they react disproportionately and that that, the theory goes, is producing or contributing to this explosion of anxiety we're seeing abroad in the overall culture, but especially among young people.

Would you agree with the foregoing? It's completely true. I mean, it's empirically robust as we academic weenies like to say. It's all over in the data. You can't miss it. The truth of the matter is that the explosion of generalized anxiety among young adults is basically a social peanut allergy. That's what's come of it. I mean, I'm not casting aspersions on people with a peanut allergy, but the truth of the matter is that people have these particular medical aversions because they didn't have any exposure to the pathogen.

You need exposure to pathogens for you actually to build up defenses. That's just truth, and that's as true psychologically, emotionally, spiritually as it is anything else. I just made fun of the hippies a little while ago, but if it feels good, do it. That's sort of the 1960s version of self-care. Well, self-care today, the explosion of self-care, which is a very misguided concept, the truth is you wanna get happier, you should be doing other care, but even on campuses, we talk about radical self-care, which is serving your own needs first.

The big way that we do that today is sort of turn the hippie maxim inside out. If it feels bad, make it stop. That if something feels rotten, it means there's something wrong with me. It means that I have a pathology, and that's not true. Life is tricky, and again, negative emotions, negative or basic emotions, or fear and anger and sadness and disgust, these keep you alive. Negative experiences are the ultimate way that we grow. We can get the satisfaction. Later, we'll talk about meaning. You can't get a sense of meaning in your life unless you've actually suffered.

There's a reason that most religions feature suffering in the religion itself, because they understand that spiritual growth actually comes from adversity. We're doing our kids no favor by trying to protect them from the normal pathogens of social life. I don't want my children to be hurt. I don't want my kids' hearts to be broken. I don't want that, but I need that, and so do they. The result of it is that I have had to practice what I preach to keep my hands off. It's hard.

As a social scientist, I know the stuff that's gonna break their hearts. I know full well. I'm looking at the data right in front of me, but I have to say, okay, okay, you gotta let them live, because if they don't live, they're gonna miss whole swaths of the happiness that should come their way. They're not gonna learn. They won't grow up. As a result of that, they're gonna be, frankly, anxious and depressed. Yes, and this for parents, and we're both parents. I have a young child.

Yours are less young. They're young adults. Mine's nine. I'm a grandfather. A grandfather. Congratulations. Thank you. That's incredible. Since last time I talked to you, I'm a grandfather. Seriously, congratulations. Thanks. My kids had kids earlier. As they say, raise them Catholic. They do Catholic stuff. I was just gonna say, talk about enjoyment. It's God's reward for not killing your children when they're teenagers. For grandparents, for parents, this does raise such a ... This is something we need to be thinking about. Totally. I keep thinking of something, and I apologize to long-time listeners who might have heard me say this before, but something that my dad once said to me, which was the hardest thing of parenting is just letting your kids make their own mistakes.

For sure. It feels horrible. The hard part is that it was easier for my parents to let me suffer because my parents didn't have any money. My wife was literally raised by a single mother in poverty, in an apartment where periodically the lights would go out because they didn't pay the bill. How are they gonna bail her out? She dropped out of high school at 16 to sing with a rock band. Her parents are like, I don't know. Maybe it'll work out. It was a different time because our parents had fewer resources, but we've been blessed.

The result is I can solve lots and lots of problems for my kids, but I can't do it. If I really want them to have a full life that has all of the experiences in it, they're gonna let them grow up and learn and have the full range of emotions that helps them find their sense of meaning and get the satisfaction that actually comes from working through struggles and challenges as opposed to having dad solve the problem. Okay. So we've talked about enjoyment, satisfaction. Let's talk about purpose.

It seems not unrelated to everything we've just discussed. It's a different species of problem, however. Meaning is funny because I'm really good at deferring my gratification and almost everybody listening to this podcast is as well. If you're spending a bunch of time on something called 10% Happier, you see your life as an enterprise. You're a startup entrepreneur and the company is you. That's the one thing I'm gonna, I'm just gonna assert. that your listeners have in common, because that's the title of the podcast and indicates that you're gonna self-select into that group.

So I'm not really worried about people listening to us saying, yeah, I can defer my gratification. I can go to the gym for 60 minutes a day. I can do cold plunges or whatever the heck people are doing these days. You can go a pretty long time without satisfaction either as well. However, I defy anybody to go for one day without having a sense of meaning about their lives and be happy, as happy as they can be. On the contrary, if you don't actually have a sense of your life's meaning, you will be rootless.

You will be at loose ends. You will be discouraged. And there's a lot of psychological and philosophical research on this, but it's common sense tells us that that's the case as well. Now, meaning, people always say, it's almost a joke. What's the meaning of life? That's a big question. It's too big as a matter of fact. There's three sub parts to meaning. The first is coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? The second is purpose, which is why is my life unfolding the way it is?

What are my goals and what's my direction? And the third is significance. Why does it matter that I'm alive? Those are the three sub parts, coherence, purpose, and significance. And I have a test that I give people to see whether or not to ascertain if there's a meaning crisis in their life, which for a lot of young people, there really is. And the way to fail this test, which is not failure, it's actually a really good outcome if you fail, because that means that you know what to start looking for, is not having answers to these two questions.

There's no right answers. There's only no answers, and that's the problem. So do you want me to give you the little quiz? Sure. All right. You can tell I'm a professor, you know, so I'm, it's very Socratic. So Dan, why are you alive? That's a big question. The proximate cause to my being alive would be my parents meeting and having sex and bringing me into the world. What's the big why? As in, what are you on earth to do? Okay, well, that's a different question. So what's my job on the planet?

It is different, because you could actually talked about, there's the biology, there's a sperm and an egg. Or for me, it would be God created me. But why? You know, why are you on earth? Why are you alive? What's my job on the planet? I come at this, belatedly, I would say, I come at this from a Buddhist perspective of benefiting all beings. And for me, a key is the letter A there, all beings. That doesn't mean that I'm wearing a hair shirt and I'm endlessly self-sacrificing.

I am part of all beings. So it's hopefully an omnidirectional benefit machine. Yeah, it's beautiful. And that's not belated at all, because it takes people their whole lives and perhaps many lives to come to that conclusion. So there's no lateness to that. On the contrary, it takes a lot of work to come to the conclusion, as I agree with you. I'm on earth, I was created to love and serve. And that means a lot of different things. I'm still trying to figure out what serving is and what serving isn't.

And when I have to make a choice between serving this or that, how do I make that particular choice, et cetera? But that is a solid answer to the why question. That's a great answer to the why question. Now it gets harder for the second question. Maybe it's easier for you. For what would you be willing to die today? My family. Anything else? If somebody said, hey, we'll put you to sleep and it would solve climate change, I would do it. And I suspect the more I think about it, there are any number of major issues, I would do it for world peace, hunger.

Yeah, so if somebody said to me, yeah, so if somebody said to me, we'll euthanize you in the gentlest possible way and it would meaningfully reduce suffering in the world, that's a deal I would probably take. Yeah, and then of course, to be really rabbinic about it, we would say, okay, well, how about two people? Well, how about three people? Okay, but that's neither here nor there. So this is, you would die for others. That's what you said. And there's some very specific others like your wife and children.

And there are some nonspecific others as well. These are very solid answers. And the reason that you give these solid answers, which shows me that you have lots of meaning in your life is because you've thought about this. I mean, look, you're the guy who created 10% happier. Of course, you've thought about this. Like, I don't know. I mean, it would be very, very strange to me if you didn't come up with these, but a lot of people haven't given this very much thought. So I mean, you try this with your kids.

Nine is a little bit young, but I remember my kids, it's actually kind of brutal being my kid because when your dad is a social scientist specializing in happiness, you're always in the middle of some sort of human subject experimental design. And all my kids had to write business plans when they were in high school, a strategic plan of how they wanted to spend the next, I'm also a business school professor. So the next 10 years of their lives, not that they're gonna adhere to it rigorously, but so that they have a sense of direction.

And I would ask them these meaning questions. And I would say, okay, put together a business plan that is going to teach you your answers to the two meaning questions. And one of my sons, when you have three kids, my kids are now 25, 23, and 20. My 23-year-old, his name is Carlos. And when Carlos was in high school, I mean, he's a middle child. He got 90% of the family oxygen, thought he was getting 10%. That was just, it's middle children, right? And he was goofing off, but he wasn't even having fun.

And the problem was a sense of meaning. So I said, what are you gonna do to find the answers? And he said, well, I'm gonna go to college. I said, no, you're not. How do I know you're not? Because I'm Carlos too. I went to college and I wasn't ready and got kicked out. I spent 10 months in college and then spent my entire 20s working as a musician. It was my gap decade, right? I made it back to college at 30. I said, you're not ready for college.

What are you gonna do? And he put together a plan to find his answers. And he went away and he worked on a farm for two seasons. He was a dry land wheat farmer in a 8,000 acre working wheat farm in Idaho, Grangeville, Idaho. And then when he was 19, after his second harvest, he joined the Marine Corps. And he spent four years as a special ops combat Marine. He was a scout sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps at a Camp Pendleton with his, doing his deployments overseas.

And today, I mean, now he's 23 years old. He's married. He's gonna be a father soon. And he's got answers. And he got the answers in the Marine Corps. I'm not saying this is right for everybody. I'm just saying that this is the experience that my son had. I say, Carlos, why are you alive? And he'll say, because God made me to serve others. I say, for what are you willing to die? And he will say, I'm willing to die for my faith and for my family and for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America.

It's clear to him. And he's happy. My son is happy. Happier, happier than I've ever seen him because he knows, he's finally acquainted with Carlos. And that's what we can all find when we actually go and search truly of the answers that we have to those two questions. And just to say it again, if anybody's listening and feels like they don't have their answers, that's per Arthur good news because that tells you what your work is to do. Totally. The worst thing is I don't have a sense of meaning in my life and I don't know where to look.

And so you look on the internet. The internet is kind of the go find a rock theory of management where the boss says, go get me a rock. Go get a rock and bring it in. He says, that's the wrong rock. Go get another rock. I mean, this is unhelpful. There's a lot of rocks out there, man. If you don't have any concept of what you're looking for, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. And the beginning of the search comes with the why am I alive or what am I willing to not be alive questions?

And that will lead you in a lot of unexpected directions that might be philosophical, they might be secular, they might be spiritual, they might be non-traditional. Who knows, they might just lead you back to the faith of your youth. And again, we're talking about happiness here. Your contention is it's not a state of uninterrupted bliss. It is a state of growth and relative improvement, understanding that there's also gonna be suffering and pain as part of the deal. Yeah, and as important parts of the deal, especially in this last part of meaning.

I don't know anybody, when I say, when did you find the answers to your two questions? When did it really become clear? My son would have said, I don't know, infantry training battalion on my 40th mile of a march without sleeping, or people will say when I got sick or when somebody I love abandoned me. And then I saw that I didn't die. And then I was resilient. You need suffering, suffering is unbelievably sacred. The worst thing that we can possibly do is to try to avoid our suffering because in so doing we avoid our sense of meaning.

And when we avoid finding the answers to our meaning questions, we avoid actual happiness. We're about to leave on a family beach vacation and my wife in an act of kindness and generosity went on quince.com and ordered me some more of my favorite shorts. So I'm never out of shorts to wear. A couple of weeks ago, I got this pair of shorts from Quince and I've just been wearing them like all the time. So now thanks to Bianca, I've got three pairs, which I'm very excited about.

Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and Merino wool. Their styles are timeless, versatile and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60. I think I have three or four of those, but they give you the softness and quality you would expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. Quince also makes premium pants, fitted tees. I've got a bunch of their t-shirts and also polos and breathable active wear, quality basics designed to work across your wardrobe and hold up to everyday wear.

Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for high quality, not brand market. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash happier. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash happier. We had a little pool party yesterday with some family friends. They were about, I would say about 10 kids in the pool at the same time.

And they were all playing with these great toys. Many of which we got from our sponsor today, Wayfair, including an awesome floating basketball net that my son has been dunking on on the regular. There's also, I don't know how to describe it. It's this floating thing with holes in it and you can throw a football into it. And my son has been working on a spiral in the pool with his friends. Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews.

Wayfair verified products are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10 point quality inspection. Shop thousands of products across every style and budget, whether you're trying to refresh your space for fall or transform your space for Halloween. Use filters, customer photos and reviews to find the right fit for your home. More than 20 million verified five-star reviews help shoppers buy with confidence plus Wayfair rewards. Transform your space with pieces that hold up to real life. Join Wayfair rewards today and get 5% back on every purchase.

Head to wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. So did we cover the three component parts of purpose? We did. Coherence, I'm sorry, of meaning, coherence, purpose and significance. Did we get all three? We did, we did. We actually covered happiness when we talk about enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the three parts. Now again, you can spend the rest of your life setting up an agenda to discover and track down those things in your life.

And that's, in point of fact, what I do all day long. Next Monday, I start my new class, my brand new semester, my spring semester class. And we're gonna spend the entire semester looking at enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. I'm gonna say something that's gonna sound like a criticism, but it's a compliment. I'm just gonna hold up this sheet of paper. It's got two sides. These are all the questions I had for you. And I have asked the first four. So we've got a little bit of time left, but I just wanna point out that there are so many things.

We really, we did a nutrient-dense discussion of happiness there. And the book gets pretty tactical and practical on ways that we can increase our happiness. And so before we run out of time, I wanna touch on some of those if you're game. Of course. Okay, so there's a big chunk on how to manage your emotions, in which you talk about things that you've already mentioned a little bit, like metacognition, but tee it up for us. What's the top line on managing our emotions and why that's so important if we're interested in happiness?

A big error that people make about their emotions is that there's good feelings and bad feelings. We literally use those expressions. Good feelings, I want more good feelings and I want fewer bad feelings. That's exactly the wrong way to be thinking about emotions because there are no bad feelings. There are negative emotions and positive emotions, but all emotions are information. So the brain basically works in a triune way, it works in a three-part way. The most ancient parts of your brain, they ascertain what's going on outside of you.

You know, you smell things, you see light, you get an idea of something is good or bad around you, and it's very autonomic, it's very automatic. That sends information largely to your brain. your limbic system, which is a console of tissue deep inside your brain that's been evolving over the past 40 million years, that the limbic system has the job, as we discussed a little bit earlier, of creating emotions and feelings and cravings and desires. All that is is data. And all these data are designed to do is to inform you of what's going on, whether you should approach something or you should avoid it.

That's what it comes down to. If it gives you pleasure, it's something that's probably a source of mates or calories or something like that. If it gives you fear or anger, it's stimulating a part of your limbic system called the amygdala, which is saying that this is a threat, so you should fight, flight, or freeze. I mean, all of these things that we do, they have to do with the way that we react to the outside world, and we send signals. Now, where do we send that information?

It's to the third part of your brain, which is the neocortex, the wrinkly outside tissue of your brain. It's wrinkly, by the way, Dan, because it's a one-square-meter sheet of brain tissue scrunched up inside your tiny cranium, and so it's just huge. It's the most amazing supercomputer ever created, and the most sophisticated part of it is called the prefrontal cortex, which is a bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's the C-suite of your brain where you decide what your emotions mean and how to react according to them.

If you give it time, that's the important thing. The most important way for emotional self-management to occur is to give yourself time for your limbic system to send the information to your prefrontal cortex, and most people don't do that. Most people are, as we say, reactive. When they're angry, they yell. People who have horrible temper problems, it's they're basically reactive people, and they're not giving time for their prefrontal cortex to catch up to the activity in their limbic system. Just to put it in sheer neuroscientific terms, metacognition is awareness of your thinking.

It is awareness of your emotions. It's putting space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex, and there's a whole suite of techniques that you can use to do that so you have more time to catch up. So you're not managed by your emotions. You're managing your emotions. You're deciding how to act according to the information that you get. We already listed one of them, which is Vipassana meditation, insight meditation, where you're looking at yourself as if you were someone else, noticing your emotions, interrogating your emotions.

That's a good example of a technique to make you metacognitive and to manage your emotional life, but there are many others. My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I quote in pretty much every episode of the show, which, sorry if that's annoying, but he has this great little thing that he says to people. He'll say, imagine that your thoughts are coming from the person next to you. Right, right, right. And a great way to do that also is imagine the advice you would give somebody who's feeling the things that you're feeling.

Somebody's saying, I'm really sad because I'm fighting a lot with my spouse and the whole thing, and you'd be saying, well, tell me about it. Tell me about it. Well, what did she say? What did you say? What usually leads to this? You wouldn't be freaking out. You wouldn't be crying on behalf of the other person. Your heart wouldn't be breaking. You'd be treating it like an analytical problem because it is an analytical problem. It's just that when your limbic system is in charge, it inhibits your ability to be a good analyst, to be your own meditation teacher.

Yes. In this section of the book when we talk about, when you talk about, you and Oprah talk about managing your emotions, one concept you introduce is emotional substitution. What is that? Emotional substitution is the idea that you can choose an appropriate emotion that's different than the one that you're feeling. Now, you can't do that if you're taking as given what your limbic system is delivering up. You have to have lots of space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex, and you have to be able to say, I'm feeling sadness.

I'm going to choose humor, which people can actually do. I pal around with a guy named Rainn Wilson. You probably know him. He's been on the show. Yeah, he's terrific. He and I grew up about five miles apart in Seattle, and we're close to the same age, and we're both classical musicians. We bonded over that. We didn't know each other as kids. He plays the bassoon, if memory serves. Yeah, and I was a French horn player, and I went pro. He became an actor, and I became a professional classical musician, and now we goof off all the time, and it's interesting because he did a little documentary about the fact that professional comedians often suffer from clinical depression, and Sarah Silverman was talking about that, a whole bunch of very famous comedians talking about that.

It was a super interesting show for me as a social scientist, so I asked him, I said, Rainn, what is it about comedy that tends to make you depressed? And he said, no, no, no, you got it backwards. It turns out that depressed people, when they find out they're funny, they start using comedy as a means of self-defense. In other words, they notice that when they're feeling really crummy, and they make a joke, everybody else laughs, and they feel better. That's a classic case of emotional substitution.

It's highly metacognitive, and he happened to cross it even when he was a kid, but all of us can do that in all sorts of interesting ways. For example, you might find that you're really resentful. That's not the only emotion that you can be experiencing. A lot of the times, it's a more relevant or a more realistic emotion to express gratitude than resentment. If you're lucky enough to be sitting in first class on the airplane, and your dinner is cold, you can feel resentment about that, but if you actually focus on the experience of actually not sitting in the back and having a little bit more room to work and being more comfortable in your seat and deciding to experience gratitude because you're metacognitive enough to have the space to choose an emotion, it's really transformative.

It really is, but it requires that you have a presence of mind, that you be practicing metacognition, and when you have these negative emotions, you interrogate them appropriately to say, what part of this is helping me, and what part of it is actually unrealistic, and can I substitute with something that's better? You say, and please correct me if my notes are off on this, but you list four ways to learn emotional substitution, journaling, laughing, which we've talked about, hope, and compassion. Do I have that right?

Yeah, these are certainly, and there's lots and lots. Those were simply four of the ways that we actually do that. Hope is an emotional substitution for pessimism, typically. Compassion is a good emotional substitution for sheer empathy, is what we find. Now, empathy sounds like it's really wonderful. Everybody wants to be empathetic. Empathy is a virtue. It turns out it's a hugely overrated virtue. I mean, you know perfectly, and we talked about this earlier, the worst parents are the sheerly empathetic parents. You know, I'm gonna feel your pain because then you become bound up in your child's pain, and you don't actually do what you need to do, which is with a little bit of remove, allow your child to experience an uncomfortable situation.

Compassion is one that incorporates empathy, but you're not paralyzed by it, and you can act according to the interests of the person that you love, and that's a choice. That's a choice that requires intellect and introspection and metacognitive work, quite frankly. You know, one of the things that I find, you know, having survived a bunch of kids through their teenage years is in my prayers, my wife and I, every night before we go to bed, we spend a half an hour in prayer together, which is the most intimate thing with your spouse, is to pray together or to meditate together.

It's incredibly intimate, and we would say, ask in our prayers, help us to do the right thing for our children, even if we don't want to, right? And what that was was a prayer of compassion to replace the empathy. Hope is an act of agency that when you're feeling pessimism, why? Because pessimism is just a, it's a negative prediction. Hope, you might have a negative prediction, but it gives you a sense of strategy that something can be done and you can do it, and that's an emotional substitution that you can actually make.

Hope is something that's like, yeah, I think it's pretty rough. The doctor said that the prognosis is pretty grim, but hope means that I can actually do something that's gonna help my health. I can put it in my own hands, and I'm actually gonna do that. So you see that these emotional substitutions are very appropriate, even more realistic than the one that you happen to be feeling, and they can actually lead you toward greater happierness. Okay, so that's managing your emotions, the brief overview. If you want more, obviously read the book.

One of the other things you talk about in the book is gonna be counterintuitive, and you mentioned it earlier, but I think it's worth dwelling on for some period of time here. It's gonna be counterintuitive for many people who are interested in getting happier. You mentioned it earlier when you said we shouldn't be talking about self-care. We should be talking about other care. So one of your arguments is that the counterintuitive route to happiness here is to focus less on yourself, say more. Yeah, Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy.

Mother Nature, once again, wants you to survive and pass on your genes. And happiness, that's your business. Now, what Mother Nature wants you to do is to focus intensely on yourself all the time, to be the star of your own psychodrama. Me, me, me. My lunch, my money, my friends, the traffic that I see, everything, my job. It's just, and I'm telling you, it's just so boring. I mean, it's like watching the same tedious episode of the same reality show over and over and over again, involuntarily, and being simultaneously fascinated, terrified, and bored.

It's so weird that we do this. And you have to be quite conscious, once again, to stand up to Mother Nature, stand up to your impulses, and to get from being the object to being the subject. This is what the Buddhists call the I-self versus the me-self. You know, it's interesting that there's a Zen koan, which everybody who listens to your show knows. A koan is a riddle that the Zen Buddhists use to train the junior monks, to contemplate a riddle. And when it becomes clear, it means you're getting closer to enlightenment.

There's a famous koan of two monks that are approaching each other on a road. There's a senior monk and a junior monk. And the junior monk, when he gets to the senior monk, they're coming in opposite directions and a little path through the forest. He says, where are you going? And the senior monk says, I am on a pilgrimage. The junior monk says, where's your pilgrimage taking you? The senior monk says, I don't know. The junior monk says, why don't you know? And the senior monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate kind of knowledge.

Now, that's a riddle. It sounds nonsensical in this way. But what the senior monk is really saying is that I'm not completely awake and aware of my pilgrimage when I'm thinking about me in my pilgrimage. I'm the object. No, no, no, look outward, observe, judge not. Be paying attention to what's going on outside you all the time. I have a guy I work with and he's a former fitness model. Can you imagine? I mean, this is a guy who took his shirt off on Instagram so other people could see his abs for a living.

This is quite something. And he realized in his late 20s that he had been miserable for 10 years, miserable for 10 years. He had not eaten a single thing that he liked for 10 years and all he ever did was look in the mirror. And he said, you know what? This is gonna come to an end. So he literally took every single mirror out of his apartment and he started showering in the dark and he did that for a year. And the reason he did that was because he didn't wanna see himself at all so that he could just observe the world as opposed to observing himself.

And he said it was the game changer. Now, what he was doing is he was practicing Buddhism without knowing it, right? He was actually practicing I self as opposed to me self. And I put my students through a rigorous set of exercises on how to do this, on how to actually go through the day, go through an hour, go through five minutes never judging anything using no judging language which is referring everything back to your own tastes and needs. Not this coffee is so crummy. And I was like, this coffee has a bitter flavor.

Saying, oh, the traffic is horrible. No, no, no, no. A lot of people are on the road today. Now, of course, the Buddha taught this all the time but we can practice this like any other part of Buddhism and ordinary life without calling it anything that we want. And that's really important for happiness. This can be the big game changer for a lot of people. So I is our capacity to discern, to know and me is the self referentiality that we add on top of the bare knowing.

Yeah, I is me looking out, me is the mirror. Got it. So what do you do in this regard? Do you keep mirrors around the house? You're a guy who writes books. Do you look at your reviews? Do you check if your social media or newsletter are growing or shrinking? How do you manage all of this as a public figure? I try to be pretty serious about it because it could drive me crazy. As a matter of fact, you know what it's like to have a book on the market.

When I have a book that comes out the first thing that I do is I get rid of social media apps on my phone which by the way, it's a good idea to get rid of the social media apps on your phone if you have a tendency to check them too much. I don't, I'm old enough that social media is not, hasn't wired my dopaminergic channels. So my brain isn't wired to get satisfaction from social media because it came when I was of age. But I will be really curious about what people are saying about my work if I can and I don't wanna make it too easy.

So that's one of the things that I do. I don't read reviews of my work. I actually don't do that because that's like looking in a mirror. I find it intensely uncomfortable. I don't like it is one of the things that I find. I don't look in the mirror that much because let's be honest, Dan, I got a face for radio. You know, if I had your hair, I'd be president of the United States but at least we all bald guys think that, right? So, but I do follow certain protocols.

You know, I work systematically usually about once a quarter. I'll try to go a certain period of days not using judgment-based language. And that's for judgment-based language for me is generally complaining. I'm such a whiner. I don't really like that about myself. Now I'm complaining about my complaining. You can see how this is like, my complaining is like a self-licking ice cream cone. I can't, you know, I never get to the end of it is what it comes. And so I make, I declare a moratorium on the judgment-based.

language and the result is I'm in Cherokee. We're pack animals. Humans live in tribes and kin, in groups of kin, and the result of it is that for them to be self-governing naturally, you have hierarchies. You have people who have more status and people who have less status. People have more power. People have less power. That's always been the case, and it's a natural facet of almost all primate communities, including human communities. The result of that is that Mother Nature gives us an impulse to want to climb in the hierarchy.

The way that we do that is that we have to understand ourselves in relation to other people, to see ourselves in relation to people who have less status, prestige, admiration, and people who have more. Mother Nature imbues us with this tendency to want what the people have who have more than we do because it's obviously advantageous for us to climb in this social hierarchy. You get more mates. You get more calories when this happens. The evolutionary biology and psychology couldn't be clearer that this is absolutely normal.

There's nothing wrong with you. You're not defective because you tend to feel envy. However, like anything else, don't choose the animal path. Don't choose blindly Mother Nature's prerogatives for you. Take the divine path by understanding what Mother Nature is doing and actually standing up to it in a very mindful way. The way to do that is to say, hmm, there are emotional substitutions that I can make even in the case of envy. Case in point, there's really two kinds of envy. There's benign envy and there's malignant envy.

Both of them, by the way, are bad for your happiness. Even benign envy is bad for your happiness. Malignant envy is horrible for you because it torques your morality. It makes you do things that you really hate about yourself at the end of the day. The way for you to actually turn envy into something that's more nutritious in an emotional substitution is to practice admiration when you feel envy toward people that really have earned something. So start trying to disregard the attention that you're paying to people who believe that they have things that they didn't earn, you know, influencers, people who are famous for being famous, internet famous people.

Stop talking about them. Stop forming these virtual relationships with them. Stop paying attention to them. Don't watch them on TV. And then for people who really do enjoy a kind of life and of their own merit, you're really...don't be envious of what they have. Be more envious of who they are for the reasons that they have these things and then turn that into admiration. Then state the admiration. If there's somebody around you, if there's somebody at work that's really doing a great job and you wish you had that promotion, tell them that you admire that and tell them specifically what it is that you admire about their status.

Now, that's...by the way, it'll be really good for your career. But more importantly, it changes your soul when you do that. To be a person who's openly admiring as opposed to somebody who's secretly envious, you know which person you want to be of the two. I guess the Buddhist add-on there would be this notion of mudita, which is sometimes called sympathetic joy, happiness, taking delight in other people's delight and happiness. And there are specific meditation practices you can do where you imagine people you might be envious of and send them phrases like, may your happiness increase.

Yeah. Loving kindness meditation is really good for that, really good for that. And I believe we all should practice that. It'll make us a lot better off. But to have a list...I'm a big lister because journaling is one of the best ways to be more metacognitive. When you have a pencil in your hand, you can't be limbic. You have to be experiencing your emotions in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. You can't write it down otherwise. And so one of the things that I like to make lists of...I make lists of failures.

There's all kinds of reasons to do that. I have all kinds of lists of the goals that I'm making, etc. But one of the things that I really like to list is the list of people and things that I admire. And then finding a way without being a kiss-up to actually express that admiration, to make it public. People that I admire, sometimes they'll just talk about it because I do a lot of press, I do a lot of media stuff, and just talking about it. Even people I've never met before.

And it sets me free, Dan. It really does. The envy just releases when I actually, when I voluntarily, when I decide to turn it into admiration toward others. We're not going to get to all the questions I wanted to ask you, but let me ask one last question, slightly difficult one. I know you said you don't read your own reviews, but I'm curious. I haven't read all of your reviews. They seem to be largely positive and the book is very successful. The one interesting critique I saw that I would love to hear your thoughts on, and I've had this critique directed at me, is that there's a, that when you talk too much about, and this is the critiquer talking now, when you talk too much about the individual responsibility for happiness, you overlook the systemic structural contributors to human flourishing.

And in your case, there have been some add-on of like, hey, this guy used to work for a center-right think tank and advocated for cutting social programs. And so who is he to tell us that responsibility is on us, et cetera, et cetera. What's your take on this? Well, my basic take is that there's never a good reason to overlook your own journey toward getting happier. And one of the reasons is that nobody makes the world better who's miserable. Being miserable doesn't help the world. There's a reason on the airplane they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping somebody around you.

And the reason for that is that you're useless when you're struggling. You're useless when you're gasping for air on an airplane and you can't help your kid. And so you're risking both your lives under the circumstances. You need to work on yourself so that appropriately you can work on other people. There's nothing selfish about trying to be a happier person. The best gift you can give to your spouse is getting happier. I'm telling you, my wife has told me this, by the way. I mean, the reason that I study happiness is I wanted to be happier.

I wasn't happy enough. I became a happiness professor because I wanted to see whether or not the science could be applied to my life and make my life better. And I'm literally 60 percent happier than I was five years ago. I measure that because every semester I have to measure it with my students. And I have very rigorous ways, metrics on how this works. And I answer the questions honestly in relation to the other people that I know. And I've seen a 60 percent increase in my own personal happiness.

That makes me a much better happiness teacher. It makes it possible for me to act in a more empathetic way, in a more social way. Now, the problem that we have in our society is that we have people who are activists who use misery as a tool. That's the truth. I mean, I would argue that one of the biggest problems that we have in American politics today is that the political parties and the social activists are dominated by people that are trying to use misery to manipulate other people to do their work.

I mean, you can you can mobilize people in all sorts of ways that are good for demagogic leaders, but bad for them if people are miserable enough is what we find out. So when somebody says too much work on happiness, how selfish is that? My rejoinder is, why do you want me to be miserable, man? Why do you want that? Now, of course, politics is politics. I get it, you know, and I've said a lot of things politically that I'm sure I would take back at this point in my life.

I don't know anybody who, well, I know some people who still adhere to everything they said when they were 25 years old, but I certainly wouldn't. You know, there's a lot of things that I would take back. There's some uncharitable things that I've said and done. But at the end of the day, my goal is to and Oprah Winfrey's goal and the people who are part of this movement, their goal is notwithstanding their politics. Look, you got right leaning people and left leaning people. And the goal is to lift people up and bring them together so we can understand ourselves more so that we can love each other more freely so that we can actually talk to each other in ways that we wouldn't have been able to before.

I want people to have a hunger for for love and for a hunger for happiness. And then who knows, maybe we can find solutions to the intractable problems that we're still screaming at each other about and miserable and saying that people who disagree with us are the devil. And last I checked, nobody has ever been influenced by hatred. Yes, I believe you and one of your columns said you can't hate or shame people into agreeing with you. Not an effective technique. Yeah, I tend to agree with that.

But I the I still, though, struggle a little bit with. The micro and the macro here, because I don't know that I would want to say that, hey, we can't make the structural changes that I think would lead to less environmental degradation, more equality, et cetera, et cetera, until everybody gets happier. Right. No, I mean, I think we can actually do both. I think that we have a responsibility and an opportunity to try to get happier. And we also have to do good. And one of the things I've written about a lot is one of the best ways to get happier is to do good.

One of the best ways to get happier is actually to work on the things that you actually care about, but to do so not with misery, to do so not with hatred and contempt, but to do so with joy and love. That's really important. And think about it this way, the things that we're talking about here, whether you're talking about immigration or environmental protection or whatever the cause is that really animates you, you can think of the values that undergird that as a weapon or as a gift.

You're going to be ineffective if you use them as a weapon. And if you're miserable, you're probably going to use them as a weapon. If you think of these things as a gift, you're going to be wanting to share them with other people with love. And the way that you're going to be able to do that is by listening to them to understand why their point of view actually differs from yours. So it's an endogenous process. It's a it's a self-contained system in which if we're happier, we're more effective in social causes.

And when we when we when we share our our values and social causes in a spirit of love, we get happier. And that's the positive feedback loop that we actually need. And I think that we actually can. And I've seen it a lot of times. And people, unfortunately, right now in American politics and the highly ideologized environment of media and politics that we see today, we're in a downward loop where, you know, people are unhappier. And so they act with greater contempt and hatred toward people who disagree with them.

And that makes them unhappier. One of the things that we find, you know, the great one of the great teachings of the Buddha is that hatred is like picking up a hot coal to throw at somebody else. You're the one who gets burned the worst and never truer than an American politics circa 2024. Right. Indeed, is there something you were hoping to cover today that we didn't get a chance to get to now? I mean, you're an old hand at the best interviews in the business.

It's actually kind of kind of great talking to somebody who's in the business of happiness like you and who spent all your formative years grilling people on television. You always you're incredibly adroit at getting to the most interesting questions, I have to say. Thank you. I appreciate that. But before I let you go, I do want to say that my younger brother over the last year has gotten increasingly interested, even though I was I have been his brother his whole life. He has not been super interested in the stuff I'm interested in.

But over the last year, he has gotten interested in meditation and doing life better generally. And I saw recently that he put together a list of the books that have been most influential for him over the last year. My book was not on it, but your book, your last one from Strength to Strength was on it. So I was very pleased to see that. And I wanted to pass it along to you. Thank you. I'm delighted and delighted to help out your brother. Please give him my very best.

And on my list is your book. Thank you. I appreciate that. Can you before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book, of the new book and any other stuff that we should know about that you've put into the world, your column, your website, your socials, whatever. Please. Yeah, sure. So the last book is Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which I co-wrote with Oprah Winfrey. And Arthur Brooks dot com, which is the website, kind of the omnibus website that's got all the stuff that I do.

It's got a lot of it's got a lot of free resources like personality tests that you can take and media that you can download and videos that you can watch. And every Thursday morning I publish a column about twelve hundred words on the science of happiness at the Atlantic dot com called How to Build a Life. Between those three things, people will be overdosing on happiness. And who knows, you know, if we're overdosing on that, it's not so bad. Yeah. And don't forget from strength to strength that I'll put a link in the show notes to the interview I did with Arthur about that.

It's a it's it had a big impact on me, that book and Arthur's column is excellent. And I've there are nuggets from that column I've saved and kept in my notes as I'm writing my next book. So it's been all of your work has been quite meaningful to me. So it's always a pleasure to see you. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, Dan. Thank you for your work, too. Your work is lifting up millions of people around the world, and I'm one of the millions. One last thing before I let you go, if you want to listen to the show without ads, check out 10 percent happier plus, which is a subscription that is available right inside Apple podcasts.

If you become a subscriber, you'll get every episode ad free. That's new episodes and all the episodes from our vast 10 year plus archive. Look for 10 percent happier plus in Apple podcasts and just hit subscribe. And a quick heads up, if you're already a subscriber to my app, 10 percent with Dan Harris, you've already got access to ad free podcasts, ad free listening is baked right into your app subscription along with everything else. So please don't pay twice. You can check out the app at Dan Harris dot com and.

You can check out 10% Happier Plus inside Apple Podcasts. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I deeply appreciate it. See you soon. Deuces. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart, and Hayden Broom. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. And Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thanks for listening. Peace. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind.

Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, national average 12 month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June, 2024 and May, 2025.

Potential savings will vary. Rubrik is the security and AI operations company built for what happens after an attack hits, not just the moment before. AI has turned the threat landscape into quicksand, moving too fast for any human to fully predict. That's why an agentic cyber resilience platform matters. Automated recovery, clean data, a business that keeps moving no matter what hits. One platform, not a patchwork of stitched together tools and gaps. Don't wait for the next attack. Secure and accelerate your business at rubrik.com. Again, rubrik.com.