Arthur Brooks
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
When you're ruminating, you can't stop thinking. You wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night. Usually, my serotonin levels are low because you're ruminating on something that's really important to you. That's why artists, they tend to be depressive and romantic.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Because it's all the same part of the brain and the same neurotransmitter associated with the behavior of how the brain works. So what's somebody who has very high serotonin like? What's their demeanor? That's somebody who's really calm and mellow. And it's like, no problem. And I can go think about something else. So yeah, I guess I'm falling in love. But you know, I got a lot going on.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's all good. Right? And so this is one of the reasons that some people will say that when they're on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, it's hard to fall in love. Because you don't have that. What's she doing right now?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. Obsession. And so that's in that period in the falling in love process, you send a hundred text messages in an hour, like an idiot. And you don't know why it's because you're ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Is this the one that rips you away from yourself the most? And a lot of jealousy and a lot of behavior. That's the surveillance behavior, for example, and things you wouldn't otherwise do. You're going back into your new partner's ancient Facebook past. It's like, are you kidding me?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But when you're in low serotonin, you can be like, I don't like this. I don't like this. I don't like the tone. Of that. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the people who try to avoid their unhappiness paradoxically avoid their happiness, which is the problem. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So there's a lot that you can do behaviorally, by the way, once you understand the nature of anxiety. But we still haven't gotten to the end of the neurochemical cascade of falling in love. So this is actually one of the reasons that relationships struggle is when one person is going through the neurochemical cascade faster than the other. And certain people, they tend to go through it real quick.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
There's actually a malady. There's a pathology called emophilia, not with an H. It's not a blood disorder. It's emophilia, which is people who fall in love too quickly. And what that means is they're just falling through this cascade really, really quickly. And they're just going, and by the second date, they're already doing surveillance behavior and jealousy and sending a million text messages.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so it happens to women more than men. And the guys are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, this is too much. But guys do this too. They fall in love super fast. And the more they understand this about themselves, the more they can kind of hit the brakes and say, oh, I'm doing that. Knowledge is power, man.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Because then when you bring your prefrontal cortex into the business, you can actually start to manage the process more and not let it manage you. So you don't feel like you're possessed by a demon or something every time. And then you're not freaking out and scaring away girls is how this would work.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Uh, okay. So that's stage three. No, that's three is, is the serotonin stage. Yes. All right. And stage four is, is, is really where you want to get in a relationship and ideally on the same schedule. And this is where relationships become pair bonds pair and pair bond mating is the goal, right? I mean, what we all want, I mean, except for relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
people who are really, really modern, but this isn't common. People want to fall in love and stay in love with one person for the rest of their lives. That's what people want, right? For a good reason. And I think that this is sort of the natural order of things when things are working properly. The last one is usually characteristic of oxytocin and vasopressin, which are the bonding hormones.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And when this really kicks in, that's when you're at the point where you adopt somebody as your kin, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Is that true? That's what's going on. What they're really trying to do when they're focusing on being happy, they're focusing on eliminating the unhappiness from their life and paradoxically miss their happiness. That's the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
this is this is this becomes your family and you know somebody from a neighboring tribe that you've never seen before somebody from the other part of the world who doesn't even speak your language you can you can adopt that person into your kin group and that's when the oxytocin which largely is mediated by activities like direct eye contact in real life by touch in particular that's how you know somebody is your kin and they know that you're theirs
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's why it's so great when you have children, you'll see this. When you lay eyes on your newborn baby for the very first time, there's an explosion of oxytocin in your brain. It's like the 4th of July inside your head. It's magic, actually. It's a gift from God. It's wonderful.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And when you fall in love with somebody and you get through the agonizing stages of 1, 2, and 3, which, by the way, you're still going to have those things. I mean, my wife's really, really mad at me. I'm like... I'm pretty bummed out. And I've got some of those early stages still going on. And of course, there's still, you know, it's tons of attraction, the whole thing year after year.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Surveillance behavior is still a little vigilant here and there. I'm trying to be vigilant. I'm not, you know, that much surveillance behavior at this point. I don't think I could face that. But yeah, she's looking at me. I'm fine, my friends. Where is he? Which isn't surveillance behavior. She's just curious about where I am because I'm traveling all the time. I'm on the road every week.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So traveling should be about...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's what they're doing. So they're hiding from bad vibes, not just expediting good vibes. Exactly right. And that's really the bad advice that they're getting from the therapy industrial complex in America today and around the world is that if you're unhappy, if you're suffering, it's evidence that something's wrong and broken and you need to eliminate it. That's exactly wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But the whole point is that you want to get to this bonding. You want to become kin together with this person in a particular relationship. And getting to that is really important. And staying there is the ultimate goal of a relationship. The early stages are passion. The bonding stage is what's often called companionate love, which sounds, as my kids rhyme, it sounds not hot.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
right correct companion at love but companion have love has lots of passion in it but this is it's your you want to get if you if you're going to fall in love and stay in love your goal is best friendship you want to spend every night with your best friend that's the goal and you can't get through you can't get over the agony you got to go through the agony that's the reason the friend zone almost never leads to these relationships because you've skipped the early stages
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. The friend zone is really... I mean, I've heard people. It's like, yeah, you know, we said to each other, look, if we're still not married in five years and, you know, we really... I mean, we get along so great, then we'll just go get married. And I've heard of that actually kind of working, but I don't believe it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
your partner should be your best friend or you should be best friends with your partner but marrying a best friend is not no strategy you got to go through one two and three you got to have a ton of attraction you have to have lots of anticipation euphoria you have to go through the bonding stage of rumination on the other person and then you have to arrive at best friendship through that particular process that's just leapfrogs right to the end yeah exactly right
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So this is why a lot of the stuff that we see in modern life is screwing up relationships so much. So dating apps, for example, they short circuit this process. They don't let you get into later stages because you're rejecting people at the storefront. Rejecting too many people at the storefront. That's why you can't solve for love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Plus, people are putting together dating profiles looking for themselves. You curate your choices on the basis of your tastes. And you want somebody who matches your tastes. Do we not mate assortively, though? We have a pretty minimal level of compatibility. And then what really attracts us is complementarity.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And dating apps don't actually give us complementarity because you're not like, I want somebody who completes me. I'm a Democrat. I want somebody who's a Republican. You don't say that. It's like, I'm not going to... I mean, the big majority... 71% of Democrats won't date a Republican. 41% of Republicans won't date a Democrat. Why is the difference? Quiz me this, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's exactly incorrect. If you had eliminated the sources of unhappiness from your life, the sources of suffering, And it's not a question of whether or not you delayed your gratification. It's a question of whether you embrace the suffering that comes along with doing a hard thing. You would have missed your success. That's what you would have missed.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Why the difference between Democrats and Republicans in a sort of political meeting?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's actually simpler than that. So that's good. That's good stuff. Okay. It's about gender. Ah, okay. Who's choosier, men or women? Women. Uh-huh. Who's Democrats, men or women? Women. Ah. Men are more likely to be Republicans. They're like, yeah. It's like, Democrats, I don't know. Show me a picture.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I think my last date was in 1989 or 1988 or something like that. The Euro's born. Fantastic. Nice. I know. Thanks. Thanks, man. That's okay. And, and, and, but the, the dating app, you set it up so that it's like, I like Sriracha and I want somebody like Sriracha. I want somebody who thinks Austin's cool. And pretty soon you're looking in a mirror. also not hot. You're getting your sibling.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's not what we want. We think we want that because we're narcissistic, but we actually don't want that. The happiest couples have lots of difference. They have lots of interlocking personality parts.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, that's the MHA. That's the, uh, no, the immuno, uh, major histocompatibility complex, the MHC. That's from the, all that stuff comes from the mid-90s t-shirt smelling tests. You know all that research, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you can, the olfactory bulb senses the major histocompatibility complex in others to get an immunological profile, a repertoire that's larger.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So you want somebody different than you. And there is no doubt that that is displayed not just in how your t-shirt smells, but actually how you display your personality. How you show up in the world. Is that,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
an adaptive explanation for why humans kiss no doubt you're sampling the saliva you're sampling the saliva you actually want to exchange something that's you know i mean it is it has pathogens in it but it's not like dangerously pathological and in the broad scheme of things yeah that's probably why that's probably why it is the case uh i'm fascinated with and there's more saliva exchange the more passionately you kiss somebody
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so therefore, the process of getting happier means accepting, embracing, being grateful for the unhappiness that comes along along the way of being fully alive. That's what meaning is really all about. It's like, you know, the masters of meaning, they don't start each day going, I'm truly grateful for all the nice things that happened to me today.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Okay, so the first stage is that that's how you can actually link up with somebody potentially. The second stage is one in which you have...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
a strong sense of wanting to be with that other person so you will pursue getting to getting to greater depth with that person the third stage is when you're really bonding to each other and the fourth stage is when you actually create kin and and and you will be with each other now and forever that's the whole idea it's the whole concept of your mind we're together this is it
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
As opposed to if you just stayed at stage one, which path a lot of people who have real pathologies in their relationships, it's just basically stage one, stage two, stage one, stage two, stage one, stage two.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's hookup culture is one or one and two over and over again, or the emophilic problem of careening through and then the other person going, whoa, and then starting again and starting again and starting again.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So you're looking for somebody, people who go through the stages together and wind up bonding together permanently, but they need to go deeper and deeper and their brains need to imprint on each other in these particular ways. That's how the psychology of falling in love is really just a biology of falling in love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So this is true. And there's a really interesting research going back to the 90s on this. You know the work of Arthur Aaron at SUNY Stony Brook. This actually got news because it was covered in the New York Times and it became sort of pop social psychology research. This was Love in the Lab. where he was actually simulating the neurochemical cascade. And here's how he did it. ALEX LANGSHUR Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So here's how he did it. He brought people into his lab. And it was people who didn't know each other, but who, based on surveys beforehand, were theoretically capable of falling in love with each other. So it wasn't people who were 30 years apart in age. And it was people who were opposite sex attracted and who would rate pictures of attractiveness more or less the same. So it was men and women.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It was all heterosexual potential couples. And they came into the lab. They come in opposite doors. They sit down at a table across from each other. And they don't know each other at all. They've never seen each other. Of course, it's undergraduate students because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And he starts asking him questions. He asked him 36 questions that escalate in terms of intimacy.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So question one is, if you could have lunch with anybody or dinner with anybody in the world, who would it be and why? That's like an icebreaker at a party, right? Steve Jobs, you know, whoever it happens to be. Well, why? Question 30 is, when's the last time you cried?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And why now your mom doesn't know that your actual partner probably doesn't know that, but you have to answer the question and you're going super deep. So this is simulating. You're just, you're screaming through the process of intimacy with this person. And then, ha ha. Now it's when it gets really good.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
They wake up and they say, I'm truly grateful for all the things I'm not going to like today. That's what the master says.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So at the end, they have to gaze into each other's eyes, blinking as little as possible for four minutes to release as much oxytocin as possible. And they would walk one after the other at a lab saying, I feel like I just fell in love. I feel like I just.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I don't know. One couple got married.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Not that day. Yeah. But a bunch of the couples wound up dating. A bunch of them, the couples wound up dating. And one actually after college got married. Wow. Yeah, yeah. No, it's unreal because we think that there's some sort of, you know, Disney soulmates kind of metaphysical thing going on, but we're made for pair bonds. Humans are made for pair bond mating.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
This is one of the most important imperatives of human life. and our brains are built for it. But this is the important thing that, this is one of the things that I teach my business students and my clients, is be careful with this. So, you know, I'm in my company, in my unit, I need more, I need a team building exercise. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do an offsite.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
No spouses so that we can really get to know each other better. I just put them in the lab, man. And so when you're all day long with somebody and you're working with somebody with whom you could conceivably have a relationship, even though you don't want to, you're paired up and you're looking into each other's eyes and you're talking about things that are important like your work.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And then you go on a lazy river like canoe trip. Yeah. And you're telling each other stories around the campfire. That's the reason that 31% of extramarital affairs start at work.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, you got to be careful. And so if you're a boss, every boss watching us here, be careful. Don't ruin people's lives. It's like no outside work activities that don't include plus ones. If people have partners or spouses, they have to be invited to these things. And you should be going with your partner or your spouse to the Christmas party.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, kind of. Respect the biology, man, because we have brains. That's a good way to put it. You have to respect the biology. And this is important about everything having to do with psychology, about anything about behavioral science, is that there's such a strong biological component to it, which is why you go back just a few decades when they weren't talking about the biology very much.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
They were missing a lot about this. The way that I teach this is that all the interesting questions come from philosophy and ancient wisdom. or even modern wisdom. Ah, there it is. Got the name of the show. There it is. There you go. Then you talk about the biology to understand mechanism of action. And then you talk about behavioral science to get the data.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I appreciate that a lot. It means a lot to me coming through. You've talked to everybody in the world. I'm slowly taking off the list.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And then you talk about management science such that you can actually use it. So it goes one, two, three, four, all the way through. And this is an entirely multidisciplinary understanding of human life. But if you skip one of those stages, you're going to miss the boat. If you don't know any neuroscience, you can't be a good behavioral scientist.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
If you don't know any behavioral science, then your neuroscience won't mean anything. It's not practical. Yeah, exactly right. And so this is a lot of what I wind up teaching is for my students to respect their own biology and respect the biology of other people and manage their lives accordingly.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Don't put yourself in, you know, just like you wouldn't walk in a bad neighborhood with $20 bills hanging out of your pockets. Don't do something that actually, it doesn't necessarily put you at risk. It just puts you at risk.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
emotional peril you know why would you put yourself in a situation where you find yourself unduly attracted to somebody and you don't know why and mess up your relationship even if you don't do anything it just it doesn't make sense yeah because you're going to be in turmoil avoiding temptation is way easier than resisting it it's the same reason that if you're on a diet you don't have cookies that's right the near occasion of sin yeah David Buss wrote he's fantastic he's fucking phenomenal I don't even know him and I love his work his work on jealousy yeah
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's unbelievable. The evolutionary basis of the differences in jealousy between men and women.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. So the whole, David, I mean, he's everything he writes is visionary. He's a god. Yeah, it's fantastic. So the whole idea is that in surveys, you find that men are especially jealous of the concept of their mate having sex with another man. Right. Women in heterosexual relationships are driven mad by the concept of their, or the vision of their mate saying I love you to another woman.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Emotional versus physical jealousy. And that has a biological basis to it because in the ancestral environment, before DNA tests, And before evidence is abundant, you got to know if you're a man that you're raising your own offspring. And if you're a woman, you have to know that your mate is not going to run off and raise somebody else's offspring. And so that's why you have these differences.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And this really explains a lot. So, for example, one of the things that you find from this is that if a man wants to be forgiven for infidelity... he should say according to this theory right i'm not advocating this because don't be unfaithful but to be forgiven for infidelity according to this theory he should say Like, I mean, I didn't love her. I only love you. I don't love her at all.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But you haven't slept with me in a long time, and I have needs. And that was the whole thing. She'll take you back, according to that theory. Now, she is unfaithful. She should say, it wasn't about the sex. It was disgusting. But he told me he loved me. And you haven't said that in a long time. And I need that. And he'll take you back.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. But then of course there's the natural level of curiosity, high level of cognitive ability. Right. I mean, those are table stakes though. That's your point, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
See, David Buss' work is very, and he didn't, by the way, this is my practical application of this. He is very, he's going to watch this and disown it completely.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. And respect the biology is what it comes down to. That means understand yourself. Understand how you're wired. Don't act on your impulses. That's respecting the biology and acting accordingly. That's managing your brain, managing your limbic system so it doesn't manage you is what it comes down to.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
There's also a real understanding in that work about sort of the basics of what people need in opposite sex relationships, for example. I mean, it's not just David Buss's work. There's a lot of the evolutionary biology of attraction suggests that
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And, you know, this is the time, you know, where you run the seam between the scholars who would be indecipherable and the influencers who have all the audience in the world, but they don't do the science. You run the seam between them. Why? Because you're connecting the best ideas to the people who can use them. That's a big deal. That's a huge service.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
fundamentally i mean you're not going to be reductive about this because there's a lot that goes into falling in love and staying in love and and having relationships but but fundamentally women require adoration it's and this is called often called the adoration admiration dichotomy adoration means baby you're everything i would literally take a bullet for you you're so wonderful you're so beautiful because and from evolutionary biology would suggest you need somebody who's going to take
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, who's going to be protective, completely protective, way beyond what reason would suggest. You're insane for that particular person, whereas men need admiration, which is basically, you know, that is the largest gazelle I've ever seen that you just dragged into the cave, man. I mean, that's going to feed our family for three. You're so big and strong, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so it almost suggests that what guys need is like, just admiration. I need you to admire me more than anybody else admires me. Right. And we're not egomaniacs, but these are differences that actually would get back to, I'm going to just take care of you and the kids forever. And I'm going to protect you because I adore you so much. And you're going to admire me for this.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And again, I need to be admired. I mean, I do need to be adored as a husband and as a person and the whole thing. So it's not that simple, but there's a lot to that. There's a lot to that. And so one of the things that all guys will say, what's the secret? And it's number one, adore her. And number two, be admirable. Be admirable. Actually, be admirable.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
She's not going to admire you if you're not admirable, for God's sake. And adore her. What if I don't feel it? I don't care. I don't care. Adore her. That's the secret. Weirdly. I mean... Yeah, there's more to it, but maybe not that much more to it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Oh, men over-perceive attraction from women and women under-perceive attraction from men. Very reliably. Very reliably. It's like, ah, yeah, the waitress just smiled at me. I think she likes me. Dude. She wants a tip.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And... And you don't see him the way he thinks you see him. Correct. And that's sort of weird that perception gets into it. No, I've... That's a funny thing, you know, in... My almost 34 years of marriage, nobody has ever, no woman has ever looked at me that way. Nobody. There's been the slightest hint of any attraction. Now, I get it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, it's not, I'm not like that much to look at, but you know, there's not, not once. I don't get guys who over-perceive. Never.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The insecure overachievers. So in, in, in relationships. Yeah. Yeah. So give me a story.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You're scaring people off. You're behaving in a weird way. Knowledge is power on this. Knowledge is always power on these things. One of the things that we find is that this is this whole literature on metacognition that suggests that when you move the experience of your emotions into your prefrontal cortex by journaling through, some people use therapy, through prayer, prayers of petition,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
um through uh meditation for example meditation techniques mindfulness meditation techniques they move the experience of very strong aversive emotions into the prefrontal cortex where you can manage them more effectively one of the best ways to do this by the way is simple journaling of of strong emotions and and hard experiences so this gets back to something you asked about a little bit earlier which is anxiety
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Right. Anxiety. So you're an anxious person. And what that means is you have an overactive adrenal system. You have an HPA axis that, you know, is kind of, and that's part of your success, by the way. I mean, it's like, would you trade it away if you could?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. I mean, this is one of the reasons is your weaknesses are your strengths and your strengths are your weaknesses. And you can try to eliminate your weaknesses, but all you'll wind up doing is eliminating your own success and satisfaction in life. That's just the way it is. You better learn how to manage your weaknesses and embrace them and be thankful for them.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I think I've probably had a lot of caffeine already today, which is good. Good, good.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's the only, that's the way you got to live your life is the way that that works out. But it doesn't mean you don't go, they don't go unmanaged. So for something like anxiety, anxiety is unfocused fear. That's the best definition of anxiety. Fear in the ancestral environment was supposed to be episodic and intense and rare. You didn't feel fear that often. But when you did, man, it was all on.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You heard a snap of a twig behind you, you take off running and climb a tree, whatever it happened to be. In the modern environment, fear is chronic and mild. And the reason is because there's nothing trying to chase us down and kill us. That's very rare. On the other hand, there's Twitter. Which feels like it's stalking us in some sort or what X. It's social media. It's the modern environment.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's stressful. It's cars honking. It's whatever it is. And so just the limbic system is mildly, the amygdala is sort of on sending a weak signal to the hypothalamus and stimulating the pituitary gland in a little bit and then asking the adrenal glands to kind of drip out.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
cortisol so you're on and that you're getting this epinephrine so at two o'clock in the afternoon that pit of the stomach feeling and you know this feeling because this is your life right so how do you deal with that the answer is not to avoid you go to a doctor and a doctor might say take a benzodiazepine drug Take a little Xanax and you're going to feel a little bit better.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's true because that will mute the activity in the HPA axis. It'll be inhibitory. A much better way is to lean into what it was supposed to be, which is fear. And so a good exercise for somebody who's anxious like you or me, I'm super anxious person, is to, at the end of the day, say, okay, five things are freaking me out, but they're kind of like ghosts. I'm not focusing on them.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'm actually blocking out the real source of my anxiety. I'm just anxious. Number one, what actually is the source of my anxiety? What is the fear that that's based on? Make it real. Write it down. What's the fear? Step two, what's the worst thing that can actually happen? Literally the worst thing that's actually going to happen. Sometimes it's like, I'm going to die. But sometimes it's like,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The stock market goes to zero. Then what's the probability that's going to happen? We're smart people. What's the probability that worst case scenario is going to happen? And then step four, what would I do if that happened? Write it down because you would do something, right? Okay. What am I really worried about? That thing, that thing, that thing, you know, it's like, it's cancer, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
What's the likelihood? Pretty low. If it happened, what would I do? I'd get treatment. I'd actually get treatment, right? And when you do that, you've turned your anxiety into fear and you'll shut it off. Why? Because you put it in its proper place. You've given it direction. You've managed it. You've actually managed your limbic system so your limbic system is not managing you.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Then go through the other four things and you'll sleep better. And part of the reason is because you'll calm your HPA axis. Your adrenal system will actually... And again, there's all kinds of other things to do, like box breathing and all sorts of physiological things. But this is a good, good way to actually cope with this so that you can continue to use that gift that you have.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But that gift isn't manipulating you in all sorts of ways that hurt your quality of life.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
it's actually four so we went through four but there's not a stage five i counted wrong oh yeah okay right yeah oxytocin is that you know the connection phase yeah stage four yeah uh i was thinking about um relationships that have started to mature but are enabled by being long distance
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, it's very problematic. And a lot of my students are going to be in long distance relationships because they're, you know, they'll form the pair. Some of them will pair up in business school and then one of them will work in San Francisco and one of them in London. And and, you know, it's eight hour time difference and they're not going to see each other that often.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But, you know, it's OK because we'll see each other a couple of times a year. And I'm sorry, because you're going to be in close proximity to other people and the neurochemical cascade is going to happen and oxytocin can occur. So, you know, respect the biology. And, you know, I'm explaining this and they're like.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so that's one of the reasons that those long distance relationships usually don't work is because we're not built in our ancestral state to be living in continents apart from each other. We're supposed to do eye contact and touch. I mean, it's so important that I can practically save a marriage just by having people understand that they need to get back on the oxytocin express.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the way to do that is two simple rules in every marriage. And this is how marriages fall apart.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
is they stop touching and they stop looking at each other in the eyes and so the two rules for everybody's married watching us and they want their marriage to be like it was not like in the very beginning because that's insane but they want like what it was in year four like year three or something every time you're together you're touching and every time you're talking you're making direct eye contact those are the two rules
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Now, there's going to be more to it. Also, don't be a jerk and take out the trash and unload the dishwasher and don't sleep with a coworker and yada, yada, yada. But if you follow those two rules, the biology will be on your side instead of being on somebody else's side in this. And that's critically important. But that's what you don't get in long-distance relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so when they're doing that, I'll say, okay, your number one expense is that you're going to be together two times a month. I don't care where you're in the world. You're going to be together two times a month and setting up your work schedule so that you've got all of your vacation time is in long weekends and all of your discretionary income is, is plain fair.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I know a lot. So... I have anecdotal information about that. I mean, I've got data on how much more people know than they did before because of the new ways of learning, for sure. There's a ton of research on this. But also, you know, it's very interesting to me. So two of my kids went to college and one didn't. And, you know, my older son went to Princeton.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And if you're not into it, then you're not enough into your relationship. That's the price that you need to pay in order to make this work longer. Absolutely. Absolutely. And still it's dangerous. Still tough. I mean, you should be, I mean, it's like, you need protocols around this. I practice these protocols as well.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I don't travel on weekends because I'm going to be home with my wife on weekends. I'm gone all the time during the week. 48 weeks a year I'm on the road because I'm on tour. I'm speaking to her and, you know, it's phenomenal. It's great. But I'm home on weekends because I want to sleep with my best friend.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So that's really what we're talking about now is the staying in love part is actually remembering that you have a pair bond and the pair bond requires that you don't make mistakes and you continue to cultivate, you continue to cultivate the oxytocin mediated relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so it's not making mistakes and doing things that will, I mean, stupid mistakes, like, like getting into a different pair bond, obviously, but also not doing things that will pull you apart from that, from that person, not making decisions that get in the way of the relationship. And so that is your prominent relationship is the most important thing is the person on whom you will be.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
gazing as you take your dying breath. And that's actually what you want. And that's really, really important. Now, religious couples have a real advantage on this. And that's because almost every major religion has a concept of marriage, which is that marriage is your antenna to the divine.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so most married couples who are religious, one of the things that they believe is that when I love her, it's God's love for her coming through me and vice versa. And her love for me is God's love for me coming through her.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's when, and so, you know, when I'm counseling couples that are getting ready to get married in the church, for example, I'll say the most intimate thing that you're going to do, and they think I'm going to talk about sex, praying together. That's literally the most intimate thing that a couple will ever do.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
My younger daughter is graduating from Providence College, a nice northeastern college. My middle son didn't go to college. He joined the Marine Corps. And he's a sniper with the Marine Corps. He's a Marine sniper. Like, he's a total maniac, right? Six foot five. He looks like me, but six foot five, a lot of tats and hair. Oh, I was going to say, has he got the hair or lack of it?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I know couples who are, you know, churchgoers, they'll go 50 years and never pray in front of each other because it's too embarrassing. They'll have like six kids, but they won't pray in front of each other because that feels more intimate.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So that's one of the basic maintenance things for, or if you're not religious, then meditating together, using some sort of an antenna to the metaphysical forces that you are feeling. And some people would say who are atheistic will say it's a simulacrum, that something is actually happening in the brain because of the neurochemistry.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I happen to believe that there is a metaphysics to it, that there is a divine element to these types of things. But using those things, because it's that important.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's the reason that people will fall in love and two years later hate each other. They'll fall in love, but they won't get to the best friend stage. They'll never get to companionate love. And that's because all they had was attraction. Passionate. They had the passion that came from the obsession and that came from the bonding. But they actually never got to friendship.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the reason was because they're not cut out to be friends. They don't have enough compatibility or complementarity to actually be good friends to each other. Or they're not cut out. They're probably not good friends to anybody.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Did you have a scholarship? No, I didn't scholarship. No, no. I just quit my job. Quit your job. And, and, and I went to Spain and I found a job in the Barcelona city orchestra. I was a French horn player in those days. And so for, because I was in, I was, cause I wanted to be able to communicate with her.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Oh, it was insane. It was insane. She didn't speak any English. I didn't speak any Spanish or Catalan. It was in Barcelona.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And we learned each other's languages little by little by little. And two years later, I closed the deal. We've been married almost 34 years. And she's the mother of my children and grandmother of my grandchildren. Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, well, he's going to lose his hair, too, because, you know, he's a figure in the universe every bit as much as I did in my, you know, misbegotten youth. And so, this is Carlos. And Carlos' friends in the Marine Corps, none of them went to college. And they were all tough guys. And they were all diagnosed with ADHD as kids. All of them, right?
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Try, learn, fail, try. The average person goes through it five times. The average person goes through this thing five times. That means if they end up in a permanent relationship, either that or they end up in a convent, right, or a monastery, if the fifth one is the one, that means the first four are failure. You failed, but you learned, right? This is the same thing, by the way.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, you're an entrepreneur. This is startup. This is how it works. The average entrepreneur, this is according to stuff coming out of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, the average successful entrepreneur, successful in terms of a going concern, a business that actually makes money, has 3.8 failures.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's pretty close to the number of failures that you're going to have in relationships if you're an average person. That's because it's the most entrepreneurial thing you're going to do. It's a startup. This is the startup of your life.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And if you're not willing to take risk because you're actually trying to use an app to solve the problem or you're trying to wire around to have a simulacrum of the experience through, God forbid, pornography, which is horrible for you, because all that does is that simulates the whole experience, you know, step one. One, one, one, one, over and over again.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And then you're actually never going to have this unbelievably fulfilling experience of the most entrepreneurial endeavor of your life, which is your marriage. That's the startup. And that's actually one of the reasons, by the way, that the most successful marriages typically start as startups as opposed to mergers.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Where the magic zone is 28, 29, 30, that's when you're both getting into a startup together. You're co-founders of a startup. By the time you're way into your 30s, sorry, that it's more of a merger.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It is more difficult. And that's what, you know, that's one of the problems with actually waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, but you, but startups that work are mature startups. So, you know, getting married at 16, you know, the first time through, or you meet somebody for the first time and say, I've never felt this way before. Let's go to the little marriage chapel in Vegas.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But what ADHD kids all have in common is not that they can't concentrate. It's just that they have a difficult time concentrating on things that they find boring and incredibly easy to focus for long periods of time on what they find interesting. So my son can sit in a bush in a desert and behind the scope of a rifle for four straight hours with a tarantula on his arm. No problem, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the more experience that you have, the lower your failure rate is in this particular case. So people do learn. There is a learning process for entrepreneurs and for couples. And so your first relationship, you're like, golly, I mean, what did I learn from that? Oh, yeah. Here's the classic one.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The big thing that people learn often is that they'll get into a relationship with a so-called dark triad, and they'll know what to avoid, what personality characteristics to avoid. And so men who are most compelling to young women, for example, they tend to be narcissistic, Machiavellian, and somewhat psychopathic. That's the dark triad constellation.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I know you've talked about this before, and I've done a lot of work on the dark triad. Have you had Scott Barry Kaufman? Of course. Yeah. He's got his new book out soon. Yeah, and he's the master of that. He knows more about the dark triad than anybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so the big mistake that women will make is they'll get into a relationship with the dark triad, especially if they're emophilic, and so they fall in love quickly. Dark triads feed on that. Mm-hmm. because they will simulate the neurochemical cascade that they're actually not experiencing.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And then women, when they go through it the first time and have their hearts broken and their bank accounts drained, and all their friends have been slept with, they'll not make that mistake. They'll look for that again. Lesson that hopefully you only get once. And so heartbreak two, heartbreak three, they're usually learning different lessons unless there's a particular pathology.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the pathologies are... Number one, mate choice copying. This is a very standard thing where people who are already partnered are more attractive than people who are not partnered. And the reason is because in nature, you want to look for somebody who somebody else has done the work of finding them a good enough partner.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, that's one of the reasons that men in the eyes of women go up threefold in attractiveness when they're partnered already.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
women find men who are a partner more attractive than people who are not partnered. Question.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Same reason? It's a good question. Probably not mate choice copying. It's probably has, these are probably fertility cues is, you know, the kind of thing that you talk about. You can carry it. Typically, in the male brain, dopamine is stimulated because of a hips to waist ratio, which talks and length and shininess of hair, symmetry of facial features, the whiteness of the irises.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
No, of the whites of the eyes, not the irises, the whites of the eyes, because that shows liver function and good health. And those are cues for fertility as well. And men or women look at men and it's the neurochemistry is affected by the shoulders to waist ratio because this has to do with virility and fertility of men and ability to drag in the gazelle.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But put a book in front of him, it's a problem. So these methods of learning for my son and his friends have been miraculous for increasing the base of knowledge that they possess. Because this is how they learn. They learn from conversations between other people. They learn verbally. Their auditory learning is superior, absolutely. They just don't like reading books, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. That's the same phenomenon, by the way. You want to, you're attracted by people who have resource abundance that have more than they need. That they can actually afford something that's scarce and a lot of something that's scarce. So that's the reason that guys will go to Miami Beach on spring break and rent a Ferrari. And just like, well,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Because you want women to think that that's your Ferrari because you're rich enough to have a car you don't actually need, showing that you have abundant resources. My conspicuous consumption. Yeah, that's the reason, you know, the fifth watch. You know, that's kind of what it comes down to. I got, baby, I have more than I need.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah, exactly right. And again, I mean, man, psychology is biology. It's so true. And we have these weird tendencies to do these things and we don't know why. It's like, why are you peacocking? Why are you trying to actually peacock? Why do men put on way, way, way more muscle than they need?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, we can tell ourselves all day long that it's like, oh man, it's like really good for the muscle protein synthesis. It helps to manage my insulin and all the rest of it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's what it is. It suggests that you have more muscle than you actually need. because you have resource abundance, long nails on women. Yeah. Long hair on women. Uh, it's all the collagen and you know, they, what, what it suggests is a really, a very, very healthy metabolism and, and, you know, uh, good nutrition. And so therefore high fertility.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. So number one is finding people in real life. Number one is finding people in real life because there's really interesting new data out there that show that the instigation of the relationship, if it's mediated through technology, makes it less stable to begin with. So there's a new paper out that we can put in the show notes when I find it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I just wrote about it in this new book that I'm writing on meaning. Oh, and it's... It shows that marriages that actually start online, and by the way, 62% of relationships are starting online right now because it's crowded out. I mean, it's the VHS tapes of relationships that's crowding out Betamax. It's an inferior technology for actually finding people. That's what's available.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So you approach somebody in a bar and they think you're a creep at this point. Anyway, the problem with that is that it leads to when relationships, even marriages, are less stable and there's less attraction.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
when they're when it's actually mediated by that the better relationships actually come when somebody sets you up when you meet somebody through a mutual interest or through mutual people that you know and love that's really what it comes down to so people ask me it's like so where do i meet somebody and and you go someplace where you might meet the kind of person that you might conceivably find attractive so for example were you raised in a religion yeah but i don't practice it i don't care
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
There's something about the dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex that makes that a harder thing to do and to maintain focus, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a miracle for a whole class of people that were kind of dismissed.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
go to church, right? Go to the church for all the young people go to, but I don't believe it. I don't care. That's not the point. The point is you could, you could believe it. The point is you don't hate it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The point is you want to, you want somebody that has those values, for example, and somebody who has that in common with you potentially that you actually might find attractive and somebody who might talk to you despite the fact that you're bald or whatever thing that might not get you past the swipe left, right on the dating site. So number one is human mediated meeting. That's number one.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Number two, no more simulating, no more simulated, no more porn, no more pornography. And pornography is just absolute cancer for attraction and for expectation and relationships, especially for men, because men get deeply, deeply addicted to it. It just, it grabs you. And there's a lot of research on this. I mean, there's some research that suggests it's not addictive. That's not.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I've heard of him. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, I've seen some of his stuff on psychology, psychology today.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So I don't do this work. I don't do this work, but I find the preponderance of data compelling that it is highly addictive. And it does actually torque the expectations that men have about their relationships with women. And it tends to objectify women in ways that will harm your ability to go through the neurochemical cascade and get to oxytocin.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
In other words, it tends to interrupt the cycle. You got to go through the stages. And if you're interrupting the stages because of something you're doing to your brain to get the satisfaction that comes from just stage one, it's a problem. That's not what we're actually made for. And again, I mean, I know there are some scholars that disagree with this, but I just don't find it compelling.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
We may have a generation of young men in particular that can't get past stage one.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You're pretty serious consumer of this stuff. Yeah. Don't sell yourself short. This is not bro science.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Sorry to say that as a business school professor.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I think a very compelling hypothesis. Now, there are places in the world where you are seeing these effects. So, interior cities in China, where, you know, the ratio of men to women who were born over the past 30 years is 124 to 100. Yeah. And had to do a sex-selective abortion and, you know, all of, you know, the abandonment.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
One of my kids was, one of my kids is a Chinese girl who was abandoned at 12 hours old in a park in China. I mean, it was... And there was just millions and millions and millions. And in the early 2000s, a lot of them came to the United States because there was a big adoption movement that we were part of, as a matter of fact.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But the upshot of that is in that period, those people grew up and there aren't as many women as there are men. And there's a lot of trouble there. Sex ratio hypothesis is a... It's a big problem. And this is one of the reasons for the social instability in Chinese cities, as a matter of fact. And that's why they're importing girls from Vietnam.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's like guys... Officially inflating the sex ratio. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is no joke.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's not the kind of choice you want to be making in a society. And that's really not a choice you want to be making personally. Yeah.
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
what a young man should not be having to choose between you know violent antisocial behavior and seven hours a day of pornography that's a bad choice and the whole point is you get your life together turn off the porn start paying attention to becoming more successful get serious about your education in your business and get into the gym and all of that stuff that these guys like goggins and jocko and
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Jordan Peterson are talking about. That's why they're talking about these things. And so men don't have to make these weird bargains. It's like, okay, to stay out of prison, I'm going to look at porn. It's like dystopian. It's science fiction.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. The number one predictor of a man being successful is seeing his father loving his mother.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's defined as dad stays home and is faithful to mom. Right. That's what you want. It's like, as a dad, you got one job. Love her. If you want to raise successful kids, especially boys, you have one job. Love his mom.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's crazy, but it's great in its way. It's beautiful in its way. And look, here's the funny thing. I mean, people often ask, like, you know, what do I do? What should I teach my kids? It doesn't matter what you tell them. You could talk to them in a foreign language. Show them. All that matters is what you do.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So the number one predictor, for example, of kids growing up and practicing a religion is whether their father practices a religion. There's like a 40 percentage point difference in the father and the mother practicing on the predictive capacity on how the kids are going to grow up and behave. And it's almost certainly the case.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's because, I mean, when I was a little kid, I thought my dad was, you know, I thought he could lift the corner of the house. My dad was a math professor. He could not. Now I realize he was a nerd. At the time, I thought he was cool. Nerd. Yeah. Now that I'm a nerd, I recognize that. But... And my dad was a very proud guy.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, he never would have bent the knee to any other man, but he was on his knees on Sunday. And that had a big impact on a little dude. There's something bigger than my dad. And I saw it, and it, like... It's in there, right? That's really important in every part of life. If you want to teach virtue, practice virtue. Be the person you want your kids to actually turn into.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And they will become that. Generally speaking, they'll become that person.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And you have the metacognitive ability to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. This is the most important thing to keep in mind. I mean, we're talking about the psychology being biology, but we also have will. We also have a prefrontal cortex for a reason.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's the most important part of the neurobiology of all, is the C-suite of your brain, where you're actually making decisions notwithstanding your proclivities. I mean, you've got these urges. We all have these urges. You know, you look at a woman who's not your wife and you go, oh, man, she's really, really attractive and all that.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And then your prefrontal cortex, which is the behavioral activation system, the behavioral inhibition system, that's in the prefrontal cortex, bis and bas, behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation, right? And behavioral inhibition is more important because, you know, I want to hit my son and my prefrontal cortex says, uh-uh, no, because my father hit me and I'm not my trauma, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's a perfect example of metacognition. That's a perfect example of being the master of yourself. And we actually can do that, but you've got to have knowledge. You have to be strong, but you also actually have to have knowledge. And that's why all this stuff matters. That's how I teach happiness, is happiness is really a process of understanding the science,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You know, that's right. And it's not just that it's not practical. It's that it's irrelevant. And irrelevancy and practicality are totally different things. And that's one of the reasons that at Harvard Business School, generally the teaching method is case studies. It's case studies of people in actual business. That's not how I teach.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
practicing habits that go along with the science and then teaching it to other people so you ingrain it in yourself. And that's anything that you want to do, anything you want to get better at. If you want to become a better golfer, learn about golf and golf and teach golf. You know, doctors, when they're becoming surgeons, they always say, watch one, do one, teach one.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's how you become a surgeon. Anything in life actually follows that basic pattern, but you must have the knowledge such that the habits that you practice are not the habits that are just kind of
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The replication crisis is a big problem in my field. Yeah. A lot of people make their careers on... If it's too good to be true, and grandma would have said, I mean, I can find you a study that shows that conjugal infidelity will bring happiness.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I know, exactly. And besides, studies show. And anyway, so... But the whole problem, and this is like, you're talking about evolutionary psychology all the time and biology all the time. And this is my stock and trade as a behavioral scientist. For everybody watching, if your grandma would hear this result and say, that's wrong, she's probably right.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I think I'm the only faculty member that teaches science in terms of lecture and discussion. But the whole point is they form the corpus of knowledge along with me in terms of the questions that they're asking about their lives. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
move them beyond that yeah so that's actually what academics are really bad at that's so i have this column in the atlantic every thursday and i'm the retailer of academic stuff in this and so i'm not actually running the regressions or doing experiments myself i'm at the point in my career what i'm i'm looking i usually i will i'll survey a particular topic every week it's a different topic a different scientific topic in the happiness literature the you know the broader living better literature
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
and the neuroscience and behavioral science. And then the first part is here's what the science says. The second part is here's how you can use it. But you gotta practice it. And I'm usually 10 weeks ahead of my column and I'm practicing those things to see if it works. So I'm a lab. And this is the important thing. This is the important ethos.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You're not going to design experiments perfectly like a drug test in your own life because N equals one. And statistically, and there's no control group, but you are a lab. Start living like you're a lab. So learn something about this and set up an experiment in your life. And so you keep, yeah, I read an article and says that, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But the part of the limbic system dedicated to resentment is much, much larger than the part of the limbic system dedicated to gratitude. And that's why we have a negativity bias. And that's how we revolve because resentment and suspicion and anger keeps us alive. And gratitude is a nice to have. And I get it. Oh, that's very, very interesting. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
What that means is you need to practice gratitude consciously to override your negativity bias. And how do you do that? Well, I'm going to set up an experiment where I'm actually going to practice gratitude in a very particular way every day for a week, and I'm going to keep the data. I'm actually going to keep my own data.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Is it publishable in Psychological Sciences or the Journal of Personality Research? No, that's not the point. The point is you living better, but you're not going to do it unless you actually change your habits and experiment on yourself and treat your life like a lab. Should you limit the...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
becoming happier, seeing their lives as a startup where the currency of their fortune is love and happiness, and then how they can become happiness teachers in the course of what they're trying to do in business. So I'm bringing the science along, bringing the science along, and then they're actually applying it to their own lives and to their own business careers.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
In other words, get some information, set up an experiment and commit yourself to it. That's the most important thing is the doing as opposed to learning. Learn, do, learn, do, learn, do. And then by the way, teach. Because then what will happen is by the time you've done five or six of these experiments, there's one that's actually working for you and then you're teaching.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Then you start your podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
This is a teaching podcast. Modern Wisdom is a teaching podcast. It's not an entertainment podcast. It's an actual teaching podcast. Professor Williamson. Thank you. But you're retailing serious ideas. All the time, again and again and again and again. And people who stop with consuming the retailed ideas are missing, are missing out.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Because we've talked about a whole bunch of really practical things that people can do. Actually write these things down, you know, look at the show notes, put together a couple of experiments in your own life. And if you like them, share them. Like find some way to actually share them with other people. That's what social media is for.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's why God created YouTube and social media is for sharing ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Because anybody, any good societies, any strong societies based on strong families, obviously, and strong families require this one element, which is mom and dad loving each other. You know, that's what families have in common is that two parents who love each other and they've saved thousands of marriages. Thousands of, it's unbelievable.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the number one thing that really jumps out of their research is that they find the marriage killers. So in other words, not what to do right, what to stop doing wrong. That's how you start anything. If you go to the doctor and say, oh man, I think I drink too much. He's not going to put you on something to treat the trouble with your drinking.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
He's going to tell you to stop drinking at the very beginning. So that's what they talk about, things to stop doing. And the number one thing gets to the crux of your question, which is to stop treating each other with contempt. Now, there's a whole concept in the, it's actually in the political science literature, but it's a psychological concept called motive attribution asymmetry.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You know about this? Is this why Nazis called Jews vermin? Yes. So, good, nice. Boy, you're good. You really know a lot about this stuff. So, motive attribution asymmetry says, I love, but they hate. And so, therefore, it's related to the idea that you will, with contempt, you'll call, you know, the Hutus call the Tutsis cockroaches and the German Nazis call the Jews rats, for example.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's because you can other them in that particular way. But it's based on this idea that I love Germany and they hate Germany. They're the other and they don't love us. They hate and I love. Right. In an implacable conflict, not just a genocidal situation, but an implacable conflict like a civil war, both sides believe that they love and the other side hates. That's the Middle East. No, no, no.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I love, you know, it's like I love my people and I love this place and they just hate us. And both sides think that and that's based on an error because both sides can't simultaneously love and hate. Right. And so the central idea behind that is if you have an implacable conflict that's leading to schism, that you're going to find that error behind it, mode of attribution asymmetry.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I'm not trying to sort out world conflict, but I can sort out a lot of conflict. Yeah. And almost all marital disillusion comes from mode of attribution asymmetry. So you take a couple that's on their way to divorce court and he'll be like, no, I still love her, but she hates me. And she'll be like, no, no. I'm the one who loves. He's the one who acts like he hates.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And the reason is because they're behaving in a contemptuous way that says you're worthless and I do hate you, even though you don't feel that way. John and Julie Gutman, one of their central insights is that we... we communicate so poorly because we're transmitting hatred when we don't feel it. Why? Why would that be adaptive? It's not clear why it's adaptive, but it certainly is a habit.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah. That's a lot of what I talk about is how to fall in love and stay in love. And part of the reason is because that's the most complex thing that we're going to do. So the modern world teaches us how to use complicated formulas to solve problems. That's what social media is all about. That's what technology is about. That's what all of the engineering solutions that we find in life is.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so what the habit is basically, so he'll look at a couple that he's met just now, talk to them for an hour and watch them in the laboratory discussing something of great contention. And he'll want to see if they're rolling their eyes. Because eye rolling is a real physical manifestation of contempt. Now, contempt is two negative emotions blended together, anger and disgust.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Anger is a hot emotion that's not correlated with divorce. Thank God with my marriage to a Spaniard. Disgust is a response to a pathogen in the insular cortex of the brain, the insula of the brain. Retreat. And what it says is that's a pathogen that might poison you. That's all we had before antibiotics and vaccines was the insular cortex that gave us a sense of disgust.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So that piece of chicken in the back of the fridge that you forgot about, you're like, yeah. Never, never, never, never treat another person like a pathogen. This gets us back to the Nazi thing that you talked about before.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
When you treat somebody like a pathogen, the way that you stimulate the insular cortex in an entire population is by talking about them in terms of disgust to stimulate that part of the brain. As such... making them utterly anathema and worthy of the greatest barbarity. Justifies mistreatment.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's exactly right, because it's the same way that you'd throw away, you'd hose off your shoes after stepping in something awful, or you'd throw away something that's rotted in your fridge, or you'd kill somebody who's an actual pathogen in your society by talking about them in this pathogenic way, stimulating this very, very volatile part of the brain.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Okay, take those two things and put them together. That's contempt. When you express contempt for somebody, that's interpreted as hatred. And that's what people do when they get into these suboptimal routines in their marriage. And they'll be like, you always say that. Really? Really? Again? Sweetie, really? And she interprets that as he thinks what I said is worthless. He thinks I'm worthless.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's what leads to this communication breakdown of I love, but she hates. No, I love it. He hates. And then you get divorced. People can literally get divorced because they don't know that their eye rolling is expressing hatred for their partner, which is almost in a way that.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
When you get hatred from another person that you're supposed to love, that is as painful in the limbic system of the brain as physical abuse. That's the same part of the brain. That's the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the limbic system that's affected when you're being rejected. That's what motivates social rejection and sadness.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's the affective part of all pain, as a matter of fact, that comes from that and is super acute. When you're getting, and you don't say, Holly, did you roll my eyes? No, no, no. You spoke volumes that you didn't think that you were, you didn't even mean it. And so what he does is what they do in the Gottman Marriage Lab is they treat, they teach people. Here's the beautiful thing about it.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
There's an app for that. There's not an app for the most complex thing in life, which is falling in love. You know, it's funny because you know exactly what it is, but you can't simulate it. You can't, you can't predict it. You can't solve for it. And even though I've been married almost 34 years, I don't know what's going to happen today. My wife will get really mad at me probably today.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Most couples just need to say what they really think, which is actually, I love you. I really, really love you. Really? Well, I really, really love you too. So let's not accidentally be telling each other that we hate each other. That's how the contempt comes in. And that's one of the examples of suboptimal habits that can ruin a relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And if you can turn that around and how you do that, knowledge and practice. The knowledge is don't do it. The practice is touch and eye contact. And then life gets better. What else is some of the suboptimal habits? Of couples.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Number one is, well, I mean, anything that actually pulls people apart so they have insufficient contact, neurophysiologically insufficient contact with each other is going to create a real problem. And so, for example, what you'll find is the habit of doing what you're really, really good at as opposed to what you're getting worse at.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
People will be getting, they'll be losing their relationship chops while they're getting better in their careers. And so they're spending a lot more time. One of the reasons they spend a lot more time at work is because that's what they're better at and that's where they're getting their satisfaction.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's one of the things that you find is that your career will never keep you warm. but your spouse will.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It'll make them special. And that's the special versus happy. A lot of people will choose specialness over happiness. Why? The world wants you to be special, wants you to stand out. The world, Mother Nature wants you to be special. Mother Nature does not care if you're happy, Chris. She does not care. She wants you to survive and pass on your genes.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And when you're really excellent and outstanding and getting more resources and getting better at your job, you're going to be more special, but you will be less happy. And that's why people will become, will walk into mediocrity in their marriage while they're walking toward excellence in their work. Hmm. And the result is they're going to be less happy. They're just going to be less happy.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Anyway, it's, it's, I'm addicted to success. And there's all this interesting neuroscience on success addiction. You know, when people are told, you know, usually good students who are also good athletes as kids, and they get all their validation from parents, and that gives them this neurochemical reward from success. You're such a hard worker. And that's another good report card.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And they're looking for the next gold star for their whole lives. These are the people when they get past the flush of a relationship and it starts to become a little bit boring, then they'll just like lean in to the specialness. They'll lean into the specialness. the adulation that actually comes from excellence in their work and let their marriage become utterly mediocre.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
My wife is Spanish. And so, you know, they're very quarrelsome people. Yeah. It's a diplomatic way to put it, yeah. And she would say that we're a defensive group. Fuego. Yeah, that's right. So we're defensive. We're Americans and Brits. So the result of it is that we're going to have a conflict today, but I can't predict what it's going to be. I don't know what it's going to be, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And you might be very admirable. You might be really, really admirable. The problem is that you're not adoring. That you're, you've stopped adoring because all you've, again, there's two things you need to do, guys. You need to be, you need to be adoring and admirable. And if you do a hundred percent admirable and zero percent adoring, you're going to lose your relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Phenomenal. How long was your tour?
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#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's sick. I really, I love it. That's the best. It's the best. Touring is the best. It's so fun. Yeah. It's so fun. I mean, some people hate it, right? I love it. I've been on tour since I was 19. You know, I was a French horn player. Either French horning or talking about... Oh, it's the best. It's the best. Talking in front of real people and getting up.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But you're also very... Are you an extrovert? I would say introvert. Are you? But I can swing both ways. The real question about that is not whether you can perform. The question is whether or not you've got more or less energy after a performance in front of people.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yep. Parents, okay.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Good parents still together? Yes. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I've been married for almost 34 years. I'm in love. I have a great marriage. But I still can't solve my marriage. I can't solve for it. I can only live it. So this is the thing. Everybody wants to solve problems that are complicated and they need to live the problems that are most important to us in life, which are complex. Complex problems can't be solved. They can only be experienced.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's a normal transition. That's a normal transition. Believe it or not, that's a neurobiological transition. That gets back to the work of Raymond Cattell, the British social psychologist in the 60s and 70s. He was really 50s and 60s and 70s, actually. He was the world's greatest researcher in his time on intelligence.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So I wrote a book on this called From Strength to Strength about how people, they go through the course of their careers and they find that their interests change and what they used to be good at, they're not as good at and they're good at something different and it's very disconcerting. So super high performers in their 20s and in particularly the early part of their 30s.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
they find that they're less, they burn out. They're less interested in doing something, especially with individual, indefatigable focus. That's because that's called fluid intelligence, according to Cattell. That's working memory, individual work, incredible focus on something, innovation, individual innovation, right? And that's highest as you're going through your 30s, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It tends to peak in your late 30s and then start to fall.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Your results may vary, but they probably won't very much. The second curve of intelligence called crystallized intelligence and comes in behind it. You've heard about this. This is wisdom, right? This is what all the things that you know, that's pattern recognition, teaching ability, mentoring and coaching, sharing ideas. That's what you get better and better and better.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So what you're 38, I mean, you're at the top of your fluid intelligence. 37. 30 years from now, you're going to be in the zone, man. You're going to be much better even than you are now, which is going to make you super potent, but you're going to get way, way more interested in and get much more satisfaction from sharing ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, the fact that you've become a teacher now, that's going to go to the max as you get older because you're going to be on this crystallized intelligence curve, but you're, you're, you're a little ahead of schedule, but not that much. How would you manage that transition? That is making sure that you're walking from one curve to another. So it's hard for some people.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
If you're a star litigator in your early 30s, you're the star lawyer. You can crack any case. You can solve problems by yourself. You should become, you should work toward going into management as you get older.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
If you're a startup entrepreneur, you come up with your brilliant whiz-bang idea as a coder. When you're 30, you should be actually a VC when you're 60 because you're, you become a talent scout is what it comes down to. I was writing academic journal articles, you know, during using early AI algorithms in my early thirties, using something called genetic algorithms that were learning algorithms.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And I was imposing them across economic processes to see how they predicted. It was very mathematical. I was writing papers. I can't understand today. No way. Yeah. And that was almost 30 years ago. And now, but I had like- It's like you're a different person. Yeah. And I had like 14 readers because it was so esoteric.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Now I have 500,000 readers a week for my column because I'm retailing ideas because I've become a teacher. Now, you know, I'll meet brand new professors coming right out of their PhDs and I'll look at their papers and say, do you realize what you're saying here? They're like, I don't know. They don't know. They're just doing the math. And I'm like, do you realize the implications of this thing?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
A football game is a complex problem. That's why you watch the game. You don't just simulate it on a computer because that would be impossible. Your marriage is a football game, right? And that's kind of, and so that's the spirit in which you go into it, which is I'm going to, I got to go live this thing.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You know, people will come and say, what's the secret to getting great teaching evaluations? I'm like, get old. And that's because the crystallized intelligence increases and that's the future. But you got to make sure that you're, you're walking onto that curve and everybody in their profession, some people have to change careers. And I'm all about that.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'm going to write a book at some point called how to reboot your life. Cause I've done it. I've had four completely different careers. They usually go about a decade each. And then I take the whole thing down to the studs and start again. And it's super fun. It's super exciting. You know, and I've done it a bunch of times.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I ran a company for, I ran a big think tank for a long time as a French horn player for a whole decade. And you know, that is great. But to do that, you actually have to know which curve you're on. So you don't actually try to create a career in the, and a lot of guys who are very successful as entrepreneurs. in fluid intelligence, they want that feeling. They want to get that feeling back.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And they can't get it back. They can't get it back because their brain has changed and they'll get way more satisfaction from doing something on the correct curve. And so I spend a lot of time coaching successful people to say, no, no, no, no, there's nothing wrong with you. You're just trying to get out. You're trying to stay on the old curve, walk onto the new curve.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So let go of this previous version of you. Yeah, yeah. Go from the innovator to the instructor. Go from the talent to the talent scout.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
How do I create the spear? I don't know. It's like, how do I sharpen that flint? But it's also one of the reasons in the ancestral environment where people didn't live very long that until relatively recently, we didn't have enough. We didn't have a stock of wisdom that would allow us to do these amazing things. Yeah, there was no corpus. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So, for example, it's like, of course, there was no electricity in biblical times. There weren't enough old, smart people to say, we already tried that thing and it didn't work. Let's try this new thing so that you could make substantial advances that go through history. That's why you need old people. That's why you need lots and lots of old people and you need to exploit what they've got.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I got to go make a mistake and get my heart stomped on and live and learn and live the thing again and live the thing again. And so when I'm talking about it, I talk about, number one, the brain science behind what it means to fall in love and experience that, and then the ways that we get it wrong, the ways that we chronically get it wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
This is actually- Exploit old people, that says Arthur Brooks. That's the thumbnail for the whole episode. Exploit old people. But there is not a C-suite of any substantial company in America that should not have at least one person over 70 in it. You need more old people who have vigor and health and ideas, but crystallize intelligence.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's one of the reasons that you look at Silicon Valley that are there's just too many young people. I mean, it's like, I say this as an old guy, but, you know, I was giving a talk at one of these tech firms because they have a lecture series always. And somebody asked me about a diversity thing about, you know, women and minorities and coding and engineering.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And that's a perfectly legitimate topic. But I said, on the topic of diversity, how many people, how many old people work here? And the guy's like, you mean over 30? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
punk so and and that's why there's so many mistakes that you see in these youth dominated cultures this is no wisdom being applied there's not enough just tons of energy so is there uh have you looked at any uh mapping of introversion extraversion over time is that is that a dynamic that does shift or is this just other stuff showing out as introversion or extra yeah so
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Extroversion has a couple of different dimensions to it. One is gregariousness and the other is assertiveness. Those are the two dimensions of extroversion. Extroversion is one of the big five, of course, as you know. And the big five almost all change as you get older. Your personality changes. You're going to be a different person. I am, and we all are. And your neuroticism is going to fall.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Your agreeableness is going to rise. Your conscientiousness is going to arise. Your openness to change is going to rise and then fall. And your extroversion is going to change where your gregariousness is going to fall, but your assertiveness is going to rise. That's what you find. That's what typically, canonically, that's what we find in the literature.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And generally speaking, your personality is going to get better. Generally speaking.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Better.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You're going to be happier. More enjoyable. And you're going to be more fun to be around and you're going to be easier to be married to. It's a good thing. I mean, it's like one of the things that you find, especially in neuroticism, people tend to be less depressed and less anxious when they get older. You're going to be a less anxious guy when you're my age.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I mean, I was a basket case when I was your age. And especially when I was in my twenties and I was a chain smoker. And I mean, I was just like, I was self-medicating to the hill, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Maybe. Although, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's self-administering nicotine. I don't know, but... There's a lot of literature on that.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And of course, that's the unit of the class my students are most interested in.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
A lot of people do. And the more special versus happy you are, the harder it is. The more that you're a success addicted workaholic, the harder it is because that's your death threat. It's a threat to actually see how you see your own success as a human being. The thing you're most afraid of that attacks your identity, that's your death threat.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
that's, and everybody has a death threat, has a death fear. You know, only 20% of people have thanatophobia, which is the, the, the pronounced and pathological fear of actual death. 80% of us don't. I mean, do I want to die today? No, but you know, it's okay. If I do, it's okay. But do I have a death fear? Oh yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
I'm afraid of failure because I want to be special because that's who I am as a person. I'm a successful person.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
So falling in love is a five-step process in your brain.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
four steps depending on how you count it number one is the is the ignition of falling in love ignition is attraction and falling in love this is one of the reasons that you know even people who aren't shallow want to look good because you actually if you're going to start the falling in love process you actually have to have sex hormones involved estrogen estradiol testosterone
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You're touching on one of the greatest fears of people who are in your space, which is the fear of irrelevance. And the fear of irrelevance, part of the reason is because you're in an industry that has to feed a beast. And that meant the monster's hungry. Feed me more podcasts. Yeah. You know, more... More sub-stock articles. More content, but also more demand and more supply.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's how the beast gets fed. I mean, it's when you got your millionth subscriber. Hit that subscribe and like button, folks. I mean, it's like feed the beast, feed the beast. And so that leads to this pathological fear of irrelevance. And irrelevance is a death fear for a lot of people. Now, the old version of the irrelevance was...
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
the CEO who was in Who's Who in, you know, 1928 or something like that, and then was kind of forgotten. The old joke is from Who's Who to Who's He in six months. You know, that famous Jack Nicholson film about Schmidt, where he's like Mr. Big at an insurance company. He's an actuary at an insurance company, and he has his
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
You know, he's going away party and he retires and he goes back to help out the young guys just to give him a hand. And he sees some guy throwing away all his files in the dumpster out back like a week after he retires. It's incredibly disheartening. And he's trying to find himself as the whole thing because his death fear really is his own irrelevance. And that's what a lot of people have, too.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But the whole point is we need to actually figure out what our death fear is. Hmm. And then the way that you confront that, I have a whole meditation I take my students through. My students are mostly afraid of failure because they've never failed. They're superstrivers. They're Harvard Business School MBA students. I mean, they're like... kings and queens of the Mambo, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And they've never gotten a B. And so their death fear is somehow failing. So I take them through, there's a Theravada Buddhist meditation that I take them through called the Maranasati. Are you aware of this? You know how this works?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The Maranasati is an actual death meditation that Theravada Buddhist monks in the southern tier of Buddhism, that's what Robert Wright practices, is that Theravada Buddhism. And if you go into a Buddhist temple in Thailand or Vietnam or Sri Lanka, that you'll, they'll often see pictures of bodies in states of decay, dead bodies. I have seen this. And imagine what it, it keeps going.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
The Maranasati meditation is for a couple of minutes in front of each one, you say, that is me. And that is me. Why? Because you are going to die. It is completely inevitable. And only when you make it the most familiar thing, your death, will you actually be alive. So the Maranasati meditation requires that you look straight into your death fear to make it completely ordinary.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
See, the truth of the matter is I'm going to fail. I'm going to be forgotten. you're gonna become irrelevant. You're not gonna have content. And so only staring into the beast by looking at the pictures of the cadavers of your own content creation.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Both men and women have both have both just in different ratios. And you need both for the ignition of the attraction for romantic love. But that's just the very beginning. The second stage is where you actually start getting neurotransmitters involved, most notably norepinephrine and dopamine.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And so I actually ask my students to write a Maranasati meditation where each part is the nine-part meditation canonically in Theravada Buddhism, where each part is. So for example, it'll be, I'm gonna think for two minutes. So I'm gonna imagine, I'm not getting the grades at the Harvard Business School that I thought I was gonna get. I'm getting lower grades than my companions and friends.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Next is I'm starting to get alerts from the administration that I'm not measuring up. The next is I think I'm going to have to take a leave of absence. The next is I'm not getting job offers. You know, step six is usually I think my parents feel sorry for me. That's when people start to cry. Because that's what the death fear around the fear of failure feels like to people.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Everybody watching us, what is your death fear? That is the threat to the intrinsic you. And if you don't get your mind around it, you're going to spend your time and your effort and your energy trying to earn other people's love. So if you're, for example, if you're a success addict, when you get married, you're going to try to earn your wife's love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And you're going to ruin your marriage earning your wife's love.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Because you'll never be enough. And then you'll go to work and try to earn her love. And you'll try to earn more money to earn her love. And that's what you'll do to try to feel alive and to actually not die. And you won't understand that you're starving her of what she really needs, which is you. This is how death fears can torque our entire lives. And so the practice of that is Go die.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Think about what actually keeps you up at night. Think about what it is that actually bothers you the most. When you think about what is your paranoid fantasy, what is the thing that feels to you most catastrophic? What is the thing that actually feels most catastrophic? Is it losing a particular person that you love? Is it being ridiculed and humiliated?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Is it not ever being able to make a living? You know, what is the concept that would destroy, that would utterly eviscerate your own self-concept of who you are as a person? That's where you need to write your Marin Asadi. And then stare straight at it every day. And you'll be free. You will be free. It's hard, but it's beautiful.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And this is one, just another example that your bliss lies through misery, lies through the tunnel of misery. Bring it on.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And what those do is they bring anticipation of reward, which is dopamine, and a sense of euphoria, which is norepinephrine produced by the adrenal glands right above the kidneys, right? And that's what makes you go from, I'm really attracted to this person to, I think she just sent me a text message. Like a text message, who cares, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Uh, 15. 14 and 15 are coming out in the next year. Uh, there's a new one about meaning. The one that's coming up about meaning is coming out one year from the 14th. Unreal. April 14th.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
We'll do it next time. And you're in Austin, Texas.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Arthurbrooks.com. I have my Atlantic column every Thursday morning called How to Build a Life. Putting out a lot of videos and ideas on socials like everybody does these days because you've got to feed the beast. I have a book every two or three years that comes out, a new one that's coming out in a year called The Meaning of Your Life, How to Find Deep Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's coming out. But everything is at ArthurWorks.com. Damn right, Arthur. I appreciate you. Thank you. I appreciate you too.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But it's the anticipation of reward and the euphoria that comes from seeing the thing pop up on your phone. That's really, I mean, psychology, Chris, is biology. And this is a perfect case study of that. And that's the second step in falling in love is those two neurotransmitters kicking in.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It's your storefront, right? Once you get people into the store, okay, but the storefront is really important, right? Because if you don't have the storefront actually looking good, people are going to walk on by. So that's critically important. Now,
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
This is actually one of the reasons that dating apps are so problematic because they don't go past the storefront, storefront, storefront, storefront, storefront, right? When you're stuck talking to somebody at a party, there is the initial impression, which is largely physical, which instigates the chemical response in the sex hormones.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
But then you have a conversation with the person, turns out they're intelligent, turns out they're funny, turns out they're interesting. And then that can solve, that can just cover a multitude of sins, physical sins, right? Okay. Then if you actually get to the next stage, that's when the neurotransmitters start to kick in and that's when things start to get weird.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
That's when the whole thing is like suddenly the outsized importance of a text message. That comes because of this anticipation of outsized reward and the sense of euphoria that actually comes in around these little things that wouldn't matter at all. Uncertainty, variable schedule. Exactly. But then it gets even weirder because that's when the misery kicks in.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
See, the process of falling in love entails a lot of jealousy, a lot of surveillance behavior, a lot of suspicion. These are not emotions that are typically associated with happiness, right? And the big part is this third step where serotonin levels dive. So low serotonin levels, as we all know, are markers or they're associated with clinical depression, right?
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
2011. Increasing meaning and happiness. That one. Fucking legend, you dude. Yeah, yeah, totally. And my whole concept of happiness rolls meaning into happiness, thus incorporating unhappiness into the process of getting happier, which of course is the standard experience of being fully alive. You want to be happy? You better be unhappy. Let's see how unhappy you can be before you can be happy.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And part of the reason is because, I mean, it's not well understood, but they know when they notice that when there's low serotonin in the synapse, that that's has a huge correlation with clinical depression. OK, so what do they do? They give you Prozac, for example, which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
It leaves serotonin in the synapse longer and alleviates depression symptoms for some non-trivial number of depression sufferers. Well, what's going on there, there's a lot of theories about this, but the best evidence suggests that there's a part of the brain called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that's especially active when serotonin levels are low. That makes you ruminate.
Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
And ruminating sadness, for example, is a characteristic of clinical depression. Ruminating on another person is how you bond to that other person. That rumination machine happens when serotonin levels go down. By the way, it's also really, really characteristic of artistic temperaments because you're ruminating on a creative product, like a poem or a symphony or an opera or even a business plan.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, yeah. So typically, 59% of these relationships are starting online now. 59%. It's eaten the world. So that's how it's happening. But still, between 15% and 20% of relationships that end in marriage start at work. So these are kind of in person. You know, these are not media. You're probably not falling in love with somebody on the Zoom screen.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
It's still when you're going to a place and you meet somebody and you're both available or... ideally you're both available because most affairs actually start at work too. We can actually talk about why that happens chemically. So, okay. So the way that it starts is the ignition of relationships, of romantic relationships is it has to do, it's hormonal.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
And so it's testosterone and estrogen and you know, the sex hormones are the ignition of attraction, basic attraction. And so we're uncomfortable with that because that, you know, what does that mean? That seems sort of unseemly. No, that's natural. That's biology. I see you and I'm attracted to you. Yeah, you're attracted to another person, right?
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Now, if that's all it is, then you're going to end up in relationships that people regret, that are not healthy, et cetera, et cetera. Generally speaking, when you're attracted to each other and get to know each other a little bit, then the second stage happens really, really quickly, just within days ordinarily, that involves two different neuromodulators, which is dopamine and norepinephrine.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Those are two neuromodulators that govern euphoria when you see somebody and anticipation. Okay. Anticipation, euphoria. Everybody who's listening to us, watching us right now has fallen in love, almost everybody. And it's like, can't wait, can't wait, can't wait. It's like, I just got it. The text just came in. You know, I think that's that person.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
You see the person from afar and you have that weird feeling of euphoria and anticipation.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, yeah, norepinephrine. Not epinephrine, norepinephrine, which is related, of course. It's all from the adrenal glands. It's highly related.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. So that's gas. Yeah, that's gas. And what that's doing is it's taking you then to step three, which ordinarily will start happening a couple of weeks in once you're dating and know each other. Then what happens is this crazy thing. where you implicate another neuromodulator, but it doesn't increase, it plummets.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
That's serotonin. So now everybody knows at this point, they think they know, that clinical depression implicates serotonin. So serotonin levels are too low in the synapse of the brain. And for blah, blah, blah, gobbledygook, what's going on is when people take antidepressant drugs like Prozac, that's supposed to increase the amount of serotonin in the bloodstream that's in the synapse. And why?
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Because there's all this evidence that when serotonin levels are low, you're going to feel sadness. You're going to feel rumination, ruminative sadness. Now, a part of the brain that that's implicating is a thing called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. It's literally a structure in your brain dedicated to rumination. I'm so stupid. I can't believe I did that.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
My life has been a mistake, et cetera, et cetera.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, well, not necessarily. What it does is it makes you learn from your mistakes. When you ruminate on something that happened in the past, you learn from something that didn't go right, so you don't do it again in the future. But it has other functions as well. That ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, it's ignited when serotonin levels fall. Another thing that it does is it involves creativity.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Creativity is rumination. So you're thinking about a business plan. You're thinking about writing a poem, a symphony, right? It's the same structure in the brain. Rumination. I'm so sad.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
She broke my heart. Or it's just like, I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop thinking about it. And when you're falling in love. This is step three. So serotonin level falls, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex lights up like a Christmas tree and you ruminate on the other person because you're bonding on the other person. You're bonding to the other person.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Now, it makes you do the insane things. Like I just sent a hundred text messages to that person and I humiliated myself in the last hour because I was so freaked out about the fact that she didn't answer me. that he didn't say anything to me or that he didn't sound right in that last call. He didn't sound right in that last call.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
It didn't look right, whatever it is, because we have a million ways to ascertain what's going on. And the reason that ordinarily you'd be like, I don't know, whatever, I'll figure it out, which you would in ordinary life.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
You can't do that because you're ruminating so much because your ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is turned on so high because your serotonin levels have fallen because you're bonding to the, you're imprinting on the other person. That's what's going on. You're writing a symphony in your brain about the other person. And your brain looks like you're clinically depressed in step three.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
That's the reason that people are like, it's so wonderful. It's so terrible. That's why. It hurts. It's misery. And if you stayed there for the rest of your life, you'd want to die. You would literally want to die.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
What you're trying to get to is the step four, where you have other hormones and neuropeptides, for example, oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone that says, this is a member of my tribe. This is my kin.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, well, that's when... What will happen is you start to recognize somebody as your partner. After a while, you have to go through these steps. But step four is the bonding that actually is involved in the production of oxytocin. So that's what you're trying to get to. That's what you want to get to. One, two, three, four. It's wonderful. It's terrible. It's frightening. It's exciting.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
That's the whole thing. But again, remember, you and I know Because this is our world. Psychology is biology. It just is. And you're doing all this stuff. You're not an idiot. You know, you're falling in love is the way that this works. If you understand this, you can manage it better.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, well, eHarmony doesn't do this necessarily because it doesn't actually take us through the steps.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Please go take your final.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
It's insanity. I get it. No, no. And for sure, I mean, you can manage it to a certain extent. The real problem, by the way, is when two people are falling in love, but they're at different speeds going through the neurochemical cascades.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
And what's happening, there's a whole, there's a syndrome actually that's identifiable in the literature called hemophilia, not hemophilia. It's not a blood disorder.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
And so the result is they get into relationships with what we call dark triad personalities. They're men who have high levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. The red pill boys. They have psychopathic traits and they feed on this for women who go right through the scale.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
And so a lot of what I'm doing is I'm saying, if you've got this thing, you need to manage yourself because you need to understand yourself. Gotcha. And you need to understand the people who are going to prey on you. Yeah. Because they will. You'll be a magnet for dark triads. And it'll be like, every boyfriend I have is a psychopath. But it's literally true. Yeah.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Not because you have bad luck, but because you're blinking light that says, psychopaths welcome.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
For sure. I mean, that's why emotional self-management is so critically important. That starts with knowledge. That's why I do the science. I don't do the science because it's whiz-bang, super cool. It is. I do it because it's in the public interest. And we get a better world when people fall in love and stay in love. That's it. But we have to call it that...
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
That's right. The thing that you're talking about that's really important that I talk about with a lot of my students, a lot of people, because I'm on the road all the time talking about these things with young people and not so young people, because everybody wants love. People my age can fall in love just like a kid, because the brain is the brain.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
The thing that I talk about is what's the realistic expectation as you've gone through this neurochemical cascade and you want a relationship to endure as opposed to simply be established. You establish a relationship. What do you want it to be? What's the goal? And the answer is generally between two and five years after the initiation of the relationship, you don't want passionate love.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
You want companionate love, which sounds, my kids have heard me say this. They're like, dad, that's not hot.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Right? Yeah. Companionate love has tons of passion in it, but companionate love is based on best friendship. That's what it's based on. The foundation is friendship. The foundation of enduring love, enduring romantic love is friendship. Here's the reason that people will fall in love and then will break up and realize they hate each other. They don't just like whatever, they hate each other.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
The reason is because they're disappointed about the fact that they actually were incompatible as friends. And they've slept together. Right, right. You know, they've traveled together. They've done all this stuff. They told each other their secrets. They didn't like each other. And they're not even friends. They don't even like each other.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Right? And we figured out what works for us. Yeah. And that sounds awful. Yeah, yeah. You know what's more awful? Is not being able to stay in love. That's right. Not being able to actually have a best friend. Not having the person who truly understands you at a deep level. Yeah. It's better.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
I mean, marriages tend to be happier when they're based on best friendship and where they're still sleeping together. Of course, of course. But the truth of the matter is that you can't make the enemy the perfect enemy of the good. That's right. Right? When we're talking about these things. So there's all sorts of ways to organize your life.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
But a marriage cannot be organized over the long term around something that's not deep friendship. That's a constant.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Totally. Totally. Totally.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
That's not Disney. That's not Disney. It's my best friend. I mean, that's not the end of the film. It's my best friend. It's like, dude, I don't know. That's not happily ever after in the movies, but that is happily ever after in real life.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, it is. And this is one of the reasons that couples that are formed in religious communities, they tend to do quite well. Right. Because they have this supernatural basis for the relationship as opposed to the feelings basis for the relationship. If your assumption is that my emotions are everything, woe be unto you.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Because that depends on what you're digesting.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
It's terrible. It's terrible. By the way, this is not just about marriage. This is not just about relationships. It's about everything. Everything. Everything. Look, emotions are produced by the limbic system of the brain, a structure of tissue evolved between 2 and 40 million years ago.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
It's designed to take signals that come from the outside below your level of consciousness and translate them into a language that says either you should approach or avoid a thing. Right, don't die. That's what emotions are for. Emotions are for two things, to keep you alive and get your calories and find mates so that you can survive and pass on your genes. That's what emotions are for.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Biologically, that's what emotions are for. But we've built them up into this like cosmic thing. No, no, no, man. Their job is not to tell you the truth. The job is all it is to keep you not dead. And so the whole point is you have a prefrontal cortex in your brain with the tissue right behind the bumper, right behind a brain, 30% of your brain by weight.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
That's what makes you human is the prefrontal cortex as opposed to being a squirrel or something right behind your forehead. You want the emotional information to get to your prefrontal cortex so you can decide what do these emotions mean? where they come from, what am I gonna do, and should I disregard them? But if you're living according to your emotions, man, you're the squirrel.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
You know, it's like, gotta get a nut.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, I'm not feeling it today. That's okay. That's okay, go work it out. Go work it out. Or, you know, what do I wanna be tomorrow?
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that your prefrontal cortex can do that your limbic system can't is when you have, and by the way, this is one of the great secrets of the most, the marriages with the greatest longevity, right? When you feel avoidance, you practice approach. That's what great marriages have in common. And that's pure prefrontal cortex.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
So your limbic system says, avoid, avoid, you're annoyed. She bums me out. She's irritating me. She's on my case. There's dishes in the sink. I'm just going to go down to the man cave and watch a game.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Right? No, no, no, no. That's when you say, bring it in.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
it's like there's a you can get one I have a I have one touch flower ordering on my phone right and I touch a button on my phone and flowers go to my house my house yeah right and and I do it not when I'm feeling the greatest warmth from my wife but when I'm feeling the iciest yeah For Esther. I've been married almost 33 years at this point, so I got a lot of tricks under my belt.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
It's like, click. It's like, I'm not feeling it. Click. Because I want to practice approach when I'm feeling avoidance. Unfortunately, Esther's figured it out.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
Yeah, and this is how the master of your brain is governing the emissary. You know, when the prefrontal cortex is mastering the limbic system of the brain. Look, you need emotions. You'd be dead without them. Absolutely. You'd be dead every week without them, right? I mean, and people who want to live without so-called bad feelings, they don't understand emotions.
The Dr. John Delony Show
Greatest Hits Vol. 3: John’s Favorite Calls of 2024
But these are physiological responses to the outside world. You need to govern them using your full capabilities, your full capacities. That's what it means to be fully alive. That's what it means to be a human, right? And when you're watching the movies that say, go with your feelings, you're going to screw this up and you're going to be unhappy forever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Progress is actually what instantiates the liking, the wanting, liking, learning process that's from dopamine. Yes. That's what it comes from. Humans are made for progress, not for arrival. Yes. And so the whole process is, okay, discern the rum line. Yeah. Figure out the instantiation of what that means, practically speaking. And then start making progress toward it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's what a leader communicates to people. That's exactly right. That's why people will run through a wall for a great leader. But that's what you must do for yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well, I think it's so damn comical that it's stable across like honeybees and people. Oh, yeah. No, no. I mean, anybody who doesn't believe that psychology is biology. They just don't know the biology. They just don't understand the biology. Right. But there's another weird angle on this, though. See, this is one of the great paradoxes of this. So do you want to have progress in your life?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning? Number one, discern. Number two, create a strategy about actually how to arrive at the object of your discernment. And number three, start making progress toward it. Yeah, exactly. This is like one, two, three. This is what I advise you. Behavior therapy 101. This is when I'm talking to young men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because all the email that I get, all the email that you get is from young people in their 20s. How do I fall in love and stay in love? How do I find a job that's actually going to give me fulfillment? How do I have the life that I want to have because I have this hollowness in my life? It's like one, two, three. This is what we talk about. Here's the paradox. Here's the hell of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
If you arrive, it's a problem. Yeah, right. Because that's the arrival fallacy that we come up with. So a lot of people will say, why do all diets fail? Because they basically do. 95% of diets fail insofar as at one year after the inception of a diet, people weigh more than they did at the beginning of the diet. This is before the GLP-1 drugs, et cetera, et cetera. Why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And the reason is because you will forego all of the food that you like if you see the scale go down, because progress is everything. Because humans are made for progress. All of our utility, all of our, we get so much dopamine in the wanting, liking, learning process actually from progress.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
The reward for actually hitting your goal is you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. That's why 30% of stringent diets lead to eating disorders. Because people are like, I want more progress. And so they keep making progress.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And that's when healthy eating or healthy dietary patterns turn into unhealthy dietary patterns is because people want progress so very much. So the paradox of all this is you better have a rum line. And that rum line better be pinned someplace else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Congratulations on the new book.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
There's another weird angle on this, though.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
He's a completely unlikable character.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Good luck on your divorce.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And your cirrhosis. These guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years. So you can make a bunch of money in finance, of course, if you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out like raring to go. By 49, you have $400 million. And I've seen this again and again and again with people that I've worked with, that I'm privileged to work with. They retire at 49. Why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because they don't like their work. Their work is backbreaking, and they can't see their families, and they don't have love in their lives. But they've lost their chops on actually how to do these things because the plot has been lost in their lives. And so they retire at 49. And then they become very good at golf or tennis. And they get a nice day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
dark tan, and pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach, and then their life really falls apart. And here's the thing. Here's the thing, Jordan. Woe be unto the man whose dreams come true, because he will find that he had the wrong dreams. This is a real problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And you have to recognize that heaven is not on earth. Heaven isn't heaven. It's fine if there's an end to the rum line, as long as it's unattainable in this particular life, because we are not geared toward it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And let me put one more twist in this as part of discernment. So, making progress on the wrong line is, practically speaking, in worldly terms, having more. Having more of what? More money, power, pleasure, fame, more family relationships, more prestige, whatever it happens to be. But the real twist is not just having more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Satisfaction that you can actually count on in life is not having more of the things that you want. It's wanting less. Haves divided by wants is a much better model that's both biblical and psychologically robust. And so the goal should be for all of us, increasing the numerator, having more with respect to our goals, moving on the run line, and wanting less.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Or learning to be... Okay, so... One thing less.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Which, by the way, is our psychological baseline. From the Pleistocene, we're evolved toward resentment. We're evolved toward anger and fear because literally there's more tissue in the brain devoted to negative affect in the limbic system of the brain as opposed to positive affect because it keeps you alive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It's like Jordan Peterson exists today because Jordan Peterson's ancestors, starting the Pleistocene, were resentful. And the result of that is that you're evolved to say, First class in the United Airlines has really gone downhill. As opposed to, I'm getting there safe and fast. And I'm sitting in the front of the plane. I'm going to get off early and they're going to give me something to eat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It's unbelievable. That's why gratitude is a divine thing. And it's a practice. It's standing up to your limbic system. It's managing your affective evolved state so it doesn't manage you. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. when your wife was giving that talk on gratitude in the room next door at the same conference as Salt Lake City, my wife was giving a talk on forgiveness, which is also adapted, which is also standing up to the limit. Right, right, right. See, our wives, who are godly Catholic women, will be into them being married to us. Imagine this. Yeah, no, I don't like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Gratitude is a divine thing. It's managing your affective, evolved state so it doesn't manage you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Leading us in paths of righteousness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful parallel.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So discernment comes from a very strong view of the existence and essence dichotomy. So philosophically, we've been going back and forth forever. What precedes what? Essence or existence? Of course, in the 19th and 20th century, Sartre and all of the existentialists would say that existence precedes essence. You're born without a meaning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Meaning in life doesn't exist until you discover it or, no, no, until you create it. That's what Sartre said. The ethical life is one in which you have to create your sense of meaning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. Well, actually, Nietzsche was stronger. Nietzsche said that there is no essence, so stop looking. Right. for all intents and purposes. It's like, stop wasting your time for Pete's sake, because actually trying to create this illusion of meaning, this illusion of essence, what you're going to be, you're feeding into this global kind of delusion that people have. Now,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
The ancient Greeks, which of course led to, and the Hebrew tradition leading to the Christian tradition is, no, no, no, no, no. Essence precedes existence. And that means your job in life is to discover your essence. To discern. To discover, and that's discernment. Okay, okay. And that's what I believe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
There is truth. There is rightness. There are things that actually exist. It isn't all subjective. Edmund Husserl, I mean, in Phenomenology, talks about the essence of reality is what you perceive. That's the beginning of the problem. Right there, that's the beginning of the problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
We believe, you and I believe, I think that you and I would agree that there is an underlying reality and the adventure of life is figuring it out. Yes. And so that I want to align my perception with reality. That's my goal. Yeah, well, I think that's also a good definition of mental health.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's a... I got lucky. I think I got lucky. My father was a mathematician. And here's the funny thing. There's a lot of social science studies. People ask me all the time, how do I raise my kids in the church? So the most important thing in my life is my Christian faith. The most important thing in my life. That started when I was a kid. How old? Since before I can remember.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Why was it the most important? Because it was just... the central thing in my life. And here's probably the reason. So what we find when people ask, how do I raise my kids in the faith? The answer is have them see the most powerful physical person in their life worshiping. It doesn't matter what you say. You know this about because your dad, your father, like me, it does not matter what you say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
All that matters is what they see. Because that's how they receive information. And there's lots and lots of behavioral science on this, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And my father, who is a scientist, he had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a mathematician by background in what he taught as a university professor. He was a proud man. He would have been on his knees in front of no other man. But on Sundays, he was on his knees. And that had a huge impact on the little guy. That had a huge impact on me. So you respected your father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Thanks. And thanks for having me on the program. It's a pleasure. I'm delighted. And I write about human happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist by background.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
There was something bigger than my... I mean, I thought my dad was so powerful that he could lift the house. Right, right, right. He was a math professor. He could not. Right. And I saw my father on his knees. And that had this impact. Now, maybe I have the God gene.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
You know, maybe what we'll actually find out with, you know, the exhaustive mapping of the human genome and the advance of science that there's a God center in the brain that we have particular proclivities for, whatever it happens to be. But I don't think so. I think that what I saw was that that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an honorable, admirable man like my father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And my father stood in awe of the Lord. That's what I wanted to be. Look, I wake up, Jordan, I wake up many days an atheist. I wake up, I don't know. But then I decide to worship. And I decide to worship because that's what I believe I'm supposed to do. That's the ultimate rum line of my life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And behavioral science notwithstanding, that ultimately is the truth that I have to follow because that's the truth that I believe is most meritorious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
My PhD is largely, my work was dedicated to behavioral economics, but it moved much more toward the behavioral sciences and the psychological angle, and then later more toward neuroscience because everybody in the behavioral sciences now has to know a lot more neuroscience than they did when you and I were doing our PhDs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And that's conscious. This is Thomistic. This is purely Thomistic, right? I mean, this is the whole idea that it goes back and it goes back and it goes back until ultimately there is a creation of the first goal. It's the first mover, the first teleological mover, as it were.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I think that's right. And I think that we could make a very compelling argument, and people have in our field, that this is entirely evolved and completely materialistic. I think that's a totally legitimate argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, this is the time travel, which is only allowed by the 30% of our brain by way called the prefrontal cortex. Yeah, right. Exactly. And many people believe, by the way, that Adam and Eve became our ancestors, fully became our ancestors with a knowledge of good and evil because of self-consciousness, which we became in the moment that the prefrontal cortex allowed that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
just because we recognize that psychology is biology much more than we did in, I guess, the old days, in the 80s and 90s. I came late to what I'm doing right now, however. I've only been writing about human happiness in the way that I am for the past five and a half years. since I've been a professor at Harvard. I've written two big books since I came to Harvard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
They don't learn from remorse because they don't have remorse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Dark triads, or you like to talk about dark tetrads if you're bringing sadism, of course. But the characteristic of people above average in psychopathy is the lack of remorse. And a lack of remorse is an inability to learn. Yes. You hurt somebody. You did something wrong. It had consequences if you don't feel remorse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That remorse is activating the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your brain, which is making you feel social pain. Right. You don't feel that if you have psychopathic tendencies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
When a dominance back to your wife talking about gratitude, by the way, because the same thing is the prefrontal cortex saying, no, no, no, no, no. You limbic system evolved to feel resentment. That's not, that's not, that's maladaptive. Yes. And I have decided to reprogram the limbic system, which tends toward resentment. And I'm going to reprogram it. It's the same basic pattern.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
This is self, this is self-management. This is the essence of self-leadership. Doing what feels good, if it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, avoid it. It's being managed by your ancestors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because the neuromodulator activity in the limbic system of the lobster brain. Because, once again, because psychology is biology. The lobster can't do anything about that. The big dominant alpha lobster, if there is such a thing, is going to fight to try to maintain that position.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
One called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life for strivers who are trying to understand the move from their fluid to crystallized intelligence and why they feel like they're burning out in the middle of their careers, how they can actually get stronger and better and happier as they get older.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And if it fails...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And so it dissolves. And we can make decisions. And that's the divine in us. That's the difference. And this is the essence of being fully human and fully alive. St. Irenaeus said, the glory of God is a man fully alive. What does it mean to be a man fully alive? It is managing your limbic system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It is not deciding that your level of affect that you have today is going to actually be the determining factor in how you treat other people. It is actually getting beyond who you were as a person. It's deciding to worship even though you don't feel a single... milligram of faith on a particular day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
If you're purely limbic, there are lots and lots of people who make an absolutely logical decision to commit suicide. If they're purely limbic. However, the divine in us, the divine console that allows us to manage our ancestral, our less evolved selves. Default. Default selves. It's the bumper of tissue behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex, which is the... what a miracle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
My dog Chucho can't do that. He can't time travel. He can't manage his emotions. The essence of being fully alive is doing exactly that. This is the message that we can give to all these young people today who are so desperate. They don't have to live like Jordan Peterson and Arthur Brooks. They don't have to go, you know, suffer through a PhD. They don't have to become behavioral scientists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
They have to learn to manage themselves. They have to put their prefrontal cortex in charge of their limbic systems. And that takes practice and that takes commitment and that takes good relationships that will actually bring that along. It's interesting because the best indicator of somebody being able to manage in a man, his limbic system, is a good partner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Job's wife is the one who says, curse God and die, right? Interestingly, chapter 38 of Job is where he puts God in the dock and he says, you know, All right, everybody told me to curse you and die and all that, all this bad stuff. So what gives? I'm a righteous man, what gives? And then God actually turns it around and says, what do you know? You're so smart.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And the second book I actually co-authored with Oprah Winfrey called Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is just the basic, straight-up science of human happiness that I wanted to introduce to large groups of people. And Oprah Winfrey, she hosted the book. much as she would have hosted somebody on her show when she had a talk show back in the old days.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Where were you when I created the stars and the sky?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And then Job accepts that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Self-management is the essence of, well, humility requires self-management too. We're not evolved to be humble. We are evolved as tribal societies to be humbled. but not to be humble. To be voluntarily humble is a decision that can actually lead us to live our best lives. Right, that's wisdom. And that's the 30th chapter of Job. That's the capstone of that thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's the big point at the end of the day where he is victorious, but still doesn't understand, puts God in the dock, and then is taught humility and accepts that humility and thrives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And again, he wasn't a hedonist in the modern sense. He was actually a highly moral character. But the whole point is to have peace in your life and surround yourself with people who like you and to have non-disagreeable conversations and to set your life up that has as little conflict as possible, which is catastrophically wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because unless you have sanctified suffering in your life, you will not become strong, you will not learn, you will not grow, and you'll make no progress on your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Which is inevitable. It will. My students ask me, so professor, are you saying I need to go look for suffering? I say, don't worry, we'll find you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings and happiness are like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner and your Thanksgiving dinner. You would not mistake the turkey for the smell of the turkey. The feelings are associated with something that's actually a lot more tangible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So we know, I mean, you and I are pretty interested in nutrition, that all food is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. These are the macronutrients of all food, including your Thanksgiving dinner. The macronutrients of happiness, which have residual smells, just emotions from the limbic system, the constituent parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
These are the three things that empirically we find in people who have overall a life that they consider to be the highest levels of well-being. Now, enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure. On the contrary, pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's largely a stimulation of the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum of the brain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And you tap it in all sorts of, you can get pleasure in all sorts of things. If your girlfriend says, I love you, or you have a big bump of cocaine, whatever it happens to be, you'll get the same because we have a thrifty brain. Right. But that's not enjoyment. Enjoyment is something that is permanent and can be experienced in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Before I was doing this, teaching at Harvard, and I teach a large seminar at the Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness that has 180 students, something like 450 on the waiting list and illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of. And before I was doing that, which is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
In other words, it has pleasure involved, but it adds people in memory, thus making it a permanent experience. And that's really important because that has all kinds of practical implications that I teach my students. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And iterability. And self-management. because once it's in your prefrontal cortex, you can manage your pleasures so your pleasures don't manage you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So one of the things I'll tell my students is that something that gives you a lot of pleasure, and it can be addictive, which most pleasures can be, not all, I mean, walking in the woods and saying your prayers, not particularly addictive, but highly glycemic carbohydrates and cocaine and alcohol and gambling and pornography and all that, if you're doing any of those things and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
because you're not going to be able to take it from pleasure to enjoyment and it won't be a source of happiness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, it's such that you, part of it is that by adding a human dimension to it, you're largely mediating the experience using your prefrontal cortex. And that's just as an empirical observation when you take- Why? Because it becomes memorable when you add people into it. Pleasure is not memorable, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It's a higher level of consciousness. You're actually more conscious of the experience because you're not thinking about the physical act. You're thinking about the mediating human experience that you're having.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
it strips it of everything except for those biological impulses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Which are beyond the pure limbic system. So it's not just a purely limbic activity. So the whole problem is when you... That's sanctification in a sense, or sacralization. It really is, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
fun um as an academic um i was actually the president of a think tank in washington dc i was the president of the american enterprise institute a free market oriented think tank which i was the chief executive of for 11 years before that i was a behavioral scientist at syracuse before that i was a professional french horn player right from when i was 19 until i was 31. i went to college by correspondence in my late 20s and early 30s
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right. Well, I just call it enjoyment. Right. And I'm using that particular term because enjoyment is usually thought to be something that is more nuanced, dimensional, and sophisticated than pure pleasure. Now, this is a problem with the language, of course, because, you know, this is happiness in general. Yeah, yeah, of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So there's not, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Okay, so why? And the reason is because enjoyment is permanent and pleasure is temporal, automatic, and animal. That's the problem. Well, what if I, okay, but I say so, okay, so I get it. My dog can feel pleasure the same way that I can. My dog can feel pleasure the same way as I can.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
My dog can't feel enjoyment in terms of the love relationships that I have with my wife that I can because my dog's brain is incapable of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And I think that that's part of the miracle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So I can say, I like that. I want to do that again for these particular reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Pretty much every time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Which is hilarious. That's Brad Wilcox and stuff. That's the funniest statistic. And it's like, nobody believes that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And then left music and went and got my PhD and became a behavioral scientist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
But here's the thing that gets back to the work that you've done over the years. Who is it who can't learn this? And the answer is dark triads. Who doesn't learn this? Why? Because narcissism, it's all about me. Machiavellianism, I'm willing to hurt you. Psychopathy, I feel no remorse. Satanism, I enjoy it. I'm not going to learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And so the result is that dark triads, they tend to exhibit compulsive, addictive behavior over and over again. It's self-defeating. They don't enjoy their lives because they actually can't make it from pleasure to enjoyment. They're incapable of actually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Public policy analysis. Public policy analysis. And my fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, we sound just like an addict. Which sounds just like an alcoholic. It sounds just like somebody who's addicted to gambling or pornography. Somebody who's subjugated to something, a repetitive behavior that they can't control.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's what that sounds like. And that's the reason, ultimately. And so how do you break out of it? You know, when we talked, I talk to people a lot because I've done a lot of work in addiction communities. And people say, I got to quit drinking. No. No. you need to substitute something better. Yeah, right, right. That's what it comes down to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because only when you substitute something better can you actually make this leap. Something that actually can take you to enjoyment as opposed to getting you stuck on pleasure. Yeah. And that requires relationship, and that requires love, and that requires memory. Why memory? Memory is such that you can actually, enjoyment requires that it be a permanent experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
When I was a kid, I grew up in a lower middle class home in Seattle. And we would have Thanksgiving like every other family. And every year, my mother was a good cook. And there would be this big turkey. You know how we do it. Yeah, I think you have Thanksgiving in October. But November, it's such a big deal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's right. At that point, north of the border, it's pretty cramped. Exactly. Every year, my mother would make this golden brown, beautiful turkey, and my dad would say, oh, it's so beautiful, honey. My dad loved my mom so much. And he would go and get the Instamatic camera, and he would take a picture of the turkey in the oven just to commemorate that moment, that beautiful moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Now, what was he trying to do? He was trying to memorialize something that was going to be highly pleasurable to eat such that we could enjoy that moment again and again and again. Now, We have 30 pictures of identical turkeys in the identical oven.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's just how we make things permanent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I was mostly interested in human behavior as an economist. I got a great technical toolkit as an economist, but I'm not that interested in cheese markets in Bulgaria. What I'm really interested in is why people do the weird things that they do. Right, so motivation. Exactly right. And I was studying things that don't have typical economic rationale, like why do people give to charity?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's right. And part of this is the synaptic development between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. That wiring is not complete in human females till about age 21. in human males till like 70. I don't know, but it's later. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, two of my kids are military. Two of my kids are US Marines.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And my son, Carlos, my middle son, he's a special operator. He was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, where his job was to jump out of helicopters at night, down a rope, into a theater of battle, and with a high-powered rifle and then shoot with optics at night. That's a really dangerous thing to do. That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do. That was super fun for him at 20.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Why do people admire beauty? Why do people love each other? And using the empirical methods and experimental methods that you learn in an economics milieu made it possible for me to study these things. And the taproot of all those things turned out to be human happiness. So when I left my think tank, And I was trying to figure out what do I want to do for the rest of my life?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I don't want to have anything to do with that. Why? Why was he willing to do this? And the answer is because he did not have adequate synaptic development between his limbic system and his prefrontal cortex.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It's like being a CEO, by the way. If you're a CEO of a company, you're probably going to have to leave in disgrace. If you're the prime minister of the UK, you're going to leave in disgrace.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Oh, yeah. But why do they do it? Because the disgrace that they're almost inevitably going to face is worth what they're going to enjoy in the meantime, in terms of the prestige. That's how much neurophysiologically we want that reward. By the way, Aquinas was really good on this. Thomas Aquinas, I don't think you've actually, you haven't talked very much about Thomistic thinking, right? No.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So Aristotle was brought to the modern world through St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. He was a Platonist, but he said, the pupil is greater than the master, and introduced Aristotle to more modern audiences in the 13th and 14th centuries. And he said that we are animated by four idols. that God is what we ultimately want. But God is inconvenient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
You know, God is hard to understand and a lot of one-sided conversations and a ton of rules. And so we take things that have kind of a God-like feeling to them and they're fourfold. He was an outstanding behavioral scientist. He could stand up to anybody today. He said that the four idols that we have that substitute for God are money, power, pleasure, and prestige.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I actually had a long process of discernment that culminated when I walked the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain, hundreds of kilometers walking across Northern Spain, praying the rosary and every day saying, Lord, guide my path, which is in a process of discernment is important. You've talked about this an awful lot in your work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So there's the three macronutrients that we've talked about are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And we dug in on enjoyment. We could do exactly the same thing for satisfaction and exactly the same thing for finding meaning. What is meaning? How do you interrogate meaning in your life? How do you actually find it? And that would get us back to discernment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because discernment is the essence of actually finding that particular macronutrient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's kind of- Well, you're certainly discerning something. But when I'm talking about discernment, I use it in an almost theological sense, which is to actually find the essence of your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So that discernment is really trying to find this essence. of discovering what your essence is. I just don't agree with Sartre. I just don't believe that you can invent your essence. We're not self-inventing. I believe that we exist in ad infinitum.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well, that doesn't happen. Or even worse, you would invent your essence as your identity, which is exactly what we're doing. See, to invent your essence is a Gnostic heresy. It's to say, I am a self-inventing creature. I'm this, I'm not that. I'm one of these people, I'm not those people. There's no shared story, there's no humanity, there's no... There's no love in that. And that's the problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
There's no relationship either. But to discover your essence, that's pure humanity because that's what links you to everything that has always been and everything that always will be. And that's exciting. That's an adventure. That's just...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And you talk about how people try to actually find what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment. I found, I thought it was to go back to my behavioral science roots and to look at what people actually most want in life using science and ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's the adventure. That's what the hero's doing in the hero's journey. Right, right. That's what a quest is. The quest is actually discovering your essence. Discernment is you on the hero's journey.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. I mean, everybody who's a fan of yours.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
No, no, no. But when I actually came back five and a half years ago as a process of discernment to teach... happiness and to create a big public apostolate in this as well, to talk in public education, because I'm working in the public sphere, not just at Harvard University. I'm talking in media. I write a column every week in The Atlantic. I write books that I want people to watch.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I do television. And the result of that is that I actually can't, I have to range really far from the roots of my discipline. You know, my discipline is, you know, theorem proof in economics and running regressions. That's just not good enough. And so when I looked at it, you know, I have to know where do the most interesting questions come from? They come from theology. They come from philosophy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
They come from art. They come from history. That's where the interesting questions come from. They don't come from when you and I were writing our papers, when we were writing our papers inside the university. We were looking at where the data were and what question we could get from the data.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's the wrong place to start, which means I needed to become much more sophisticated in philosophy and theology than I'd ever been before. Then I needed to understand the mechanism of causation, which is the modern neuroscience, which is the cutting edge of our field. And only then could I expose it to the empirical scrutiny that comes from the way I was trained and you and behavioral science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And then I had to talk about how do you use it? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing I'm really curious about. Psychoanalytic practices, that's you. Okay, okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It's... Business is just another vehicle for expressing who we are as people. You know, the whole idea of work-life balance is a huge problem because it suggests that your work is not part of your life. Right, right. It presumes alienation. Absolutely. It presumes self-objectification, which is a deeply problematic and sinful thing to do. That makes you homo economicus. That's no good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Work-life balance is a problem, is the bottom line. So what I say to my students on the very first day— Yeah, it also implies that work isn't life. No, absolutely not.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. What's life? Leisure?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I'll take Joseph Pieper's argument that leisure is the basis of culture, but only when it's based in learning and contemplation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
No, no, I mean, I want work before the fall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
yeah right attend the garden right in the garden that's right and you discover that by discernment yeah and that's what you're teaching exactly what do they think of that well it's amazing so the first day of class i say look a bunch of you you want to start your own companies and your startup entrepreneurs and the rest of you idolize entrepreneurs because you're going to make your fortune working for companies other people have started etc etc that's great but it's trivial
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Because the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is the enterprise of you and you're the founder. Start treating your life as a startup today. This is what we're going to do. What do startup entrepreneurs do? They're willing and able to take risk in exchange for the potential explosive rewards that come from it. And to understand- That's an adventure. That's an adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And by the way, you have to know what the denomination of your rewards are. If you're thinking in Thomistic terms of money, power, pleasure, and fame, woe be unto you. But if you're thinking in terms of love and happiness, game on. Let's talk about how to get explosive returns and love and happiness for the entrepreneurial endeavor of you incorporated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's how the class starts because that's the hero's journey. And everybody's entitled to that. What do you mean by entitled? You mean it's available to them? Because we're born to it. Because this is to be born in the divine image of God, where God is inherently generative. God is inherently creative. God is inherently loving.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And this is the gift, not that we're going to be happy or have happy feelings or to have positive affect all day long.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Absolutely. On the contrary. And so that's one of the reasons that the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which is a good life, well-lived, full of suffering and full of experiences. Right, right. And adventure again. That's the thing. And that's what I want everybody to have. That's what excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And the master stroke is to be able to say, I am truly grateful, Lord, for this day full of blessings and happy feelings. And I'm also grateful for the things that are going to change.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
This is my journey. This is the dragon I'm going to slay. Yeah, yeah. And that's what I'm teaching. That's the gist of the class.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So it's the same as everybody, where they want to have a good life, well-lived, but they don't necessarily know what that means. Yeah, right. So they're the same as all of us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Of course, of course, of course. I play a game with my students. It's called What's My Idol? This is one of the very first sessions of the class. What's my idol? Where I take them through a little bit of Aquinas. They read a little bit of Aquinas. And I say, look, this is the first modern, really great behavioral scientist is St. Thomas Aquinas. And it's, don't read it for the religious parts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Let's read it for the behavioral parts of this. And I say, okay, he says that the idols that you're going to chase are ultimately, there's going to be one that attracts you more than any other. And that when you do, you'll always do the things that you'll later regret. That's the thing about it. Okay, and that's behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And that's very empirically robust. A very empirically robust assertion, of course. We know this from all the literature, that when people chase these idols, that they're ultimately, they don't get what they wanted. Right, they're self-defeating. And they tend to have a lot of regret. So I say, okay, let's play a game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And the way to do this is not to say what's your idol, but to eliminate the ones that they're not your idol. Okay. Do you want to play? Sure. Okay. Sure. So money, power, pleasure, honor. And honor is not what we say with my marine children, which is to serve with honor. That means to be honored. Yeah, the narcissistic gratification.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, so that means fame or what we have in academia, which is prestige, to walk in and people say, oh, this is Jordan Peterson. He wrote that paper. You know, that paper that got the award last year or whatever it happens to be. Or the admiration of strangers or the admiration of the right group of people, right? Which we want. It's your lobsters, right? That raises serotonin levels.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Okay, so think of those four. And then let's think of the one you would first eliminate, which doesn't mean you don't have it at all, but rather that you have the population mean. level of it. So you've got rid of money, for example, you wouldn't be poor. You just have exactly the population mean amount of that. So you wouldn't be in, there would be no deprivation whatsoever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Money, power, pleasure, fame. Which one do you kick away?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So if I were to, you're the clinical psychologist and I'm just a working class economist, but I would say that the reason for that is because you hate when people have power over you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I hate being told what to do. Not everybody hates that. Yes, I understand that. People who really like power actually are not bothered that much when people have power over them because it feels legitimate inherently. So it's kind of an interesting thing. So you find that totalitarians are pretty comfortable when they're in totalitarian systems. They would just like to be the totalitarian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right, right, right. Dictators admire dictators.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I know. So that's okay. So now we've established that about you. You kicked away power. You got three left. Money, pleasure, and honor. What's next?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. And I would also postulate, correct me if I'm wrong, that given the fact that your material success, among other things, has taught you, using your self-awareness as a behavioral scientist, that there's not that much nice stuff that you can get with money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
The things that I love the most are not things you buy. I just, if, you know, people say, if I could keep everything in a knapsack, I would be detached. And I say, no, I would still rent everything I want. The whole point is that, you know, buying stuff is not that interesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I have a whole lecture on actually how to buy happiness with money. Oh, yeah. You have to go exactly against your limbic system. Why? Because your limbic system tells you to accumulate resources beyond what you need to show your evolutionary fitness such that you can get more mates and propagate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
You need more buffalo jerky and flints in your cave. Okay, so you got two left, pleasure and honor. Now it's hot in here because these are things that you like. Yeah. And this is normal. Yeah. But you've got to get rid of one and go to the population mean, which is a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, and now we've established what your temptation is. Now we've established, that doesn't mean that you can't tame it, but you must know it. You must say to yourself, When I do the wrong thing, it's because I pursue honor. By the way, I'm exactly like you. Why? That's too bad for you. Well, it's too bad for my wife and yours.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I mean, it's because, you know, I hate people having power over me. I don't want to have power over others. I was a chief executive for 11 years, and the thing I hated was when people called me boss. It made me intensely uncomfortable. It made me feel embarrassed, even humiliated when people said boss, because I felt like they were setting up a hierarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It felt passive aggressive, even when it wasn't. wasn't because of the subversion. Money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I'd hate, you know, I hate dictatorships and I wouldn't want to be the dictator is the bottom line. Money. Okay, yeah. Pleasure. I mean, I'm a very self-disciplined person. You know, I wake up at 4.30 in the morning. I work out for an hour and it hurts every day before dawn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And I'm in better health than when I was 30. And part of it is because I'm not a sensualist. Because I can actually do that. I mean, I like feeling good, but it's not high on my list of priorities. You know what tempts me?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
this that's what tempts me and i know it's true and i know i have that particular tendency and that knowledge is power why because that knowledge is being stored in the episodic memory of my hippocampus and it's accessible by my prefrontal cortex and i can use it to manage my limbic system and that's that's being fully alive As far as I'm concerned, that's being fully alive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And when my students understand that, they can not just avoid errors, they can feel like they have control. They can feel like they have a sword and shield on their hero's journey.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So I, among other things, we talk about the process of discernment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, discovery of their own essence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I ask them to contemplate questions that don't have clear answers but do have understanding. Because this is the essence of how philosophically discernment works. So I'll ask, and I've done this to my adult children as well. When my kids were 18 years old, I would make them write a business plan. As a B-School professor, I can kind of get away with that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And the whole point was, what are you going to do with the next five years of your life? You're the entrepreneur of your enterprise, and I'm the venture capitalist, kind of, so I deserve a business plan. I want you to tell me what you're going to do to find the answers to two distinct questions, or to find an understanding of the answers to two distinct questions. Why are you alive?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And for what would you gladly give your life on this day? I want to know the answers to those questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
These are deeply existential questions that are rooted in almost everything itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. Those are the same thing. And the other one was? Was, why are you alive? Which means, who created you and for what purpose? In your belief.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Those aren't the same thing. Oh, absolutely not. There's what you desire and what you desire to desire. There's a whole series of iterations about that. And a well-constructed life, the one in which you're really in charge, has good knowledge such that based on accurate knowledge of who you are and why you are, you can make the alterations that are appropriate. That's what it really comes down to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And that's the best that we can use in behavioral science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right. This is the psychodrama. The problem with the psychodrama is that it's me, me, me. And me is the wrong answer. So that's what we talk about when we talk about faith in what I teach. It's not about a particular religious faith, notwithstanding the fact that I practice one. It's self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is the essence of awe, of getting small.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I've done a lot of work in the last 11 years with the Dalai Lama. And he told me one time that one of the most profound experiences he had was in 1969 when he saw that photo that the astronauts, the American astronauts, took of the Earth from orbiting the moon. That famous photo. And he said, I'm so little. And it was a sense of peace that came over him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Now, there's 7% of the population that doesn't feel that peace. According to Scott Barry Kaufman, it's dark triads.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
No, no, because of the narcissism. Yeah, right. The narcissism component of the dark triad or dark tetrad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
How annoying. They cannot experience the happiness that comes from self-transcendence. Right, right, right. And that's why they're stuck in this... the land of Nod. That's why they're stuck pacing and roaming the land of Nod. They're the most miserable creatures for that reason, and that's why they've fixed them off the rest of us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well... As a neurocognitive matter, we actually understand what a discernment process does literally through pilgrimage. So, you know, Ian McGilchrist's work, it was phenomenal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
One note is that I've been a subscriber to The Daily Wire for years and highly recommend it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I recommend that it's a well-produced and high-integrity organization with quality that one can count on, run by people who truly believe in what they're doing and are mission-focused. And there's not enough of that in the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, it's a Scottish, you know, he wrote The Master and His Emissary about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, the hemispherically lateralized brain, where the right side of the brain asks the big questions, but doesn't actually come up with the answers because the biggest questions in life don't have answers. They only have understanding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Now, the left side actually solves complicated problems. The right side deals with complex problems. Complex and complicated are fundamentally different insofar as complicated problems, they're hard to find the solutions to. But once you have the solutions, you can replicate them with almost effortless ease. Right, right. You should make them into an algorithm. Exactly right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And that's the reason that you use the left side of the brain disproportionately when you're looking at social media or using technology. Engineering solutions are left brain solutions. The right brain problems are those that have very easy... Answers. We won the football game. They lost the football game. She fell in love with me. She didn't fall in love with me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
I have something I want to do. I don't have something that I want to do. But you can't answer the questions. You can only have an understanding of the questions. And to come to the understanding of those questions, you have to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain, you have to be undistracted and let your mind wander to stimulate the default mode network in your brain, which is intensely uncomfortable. Because we hate boredom. When you were at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, your colleague, Dan Gilbert, who's a wonderful social psychologist, he did all those experiments about people being bored.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So he would put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do, except they had a button in front of them. You remember these experiments? No, not specifically. If they touch the button, they get a painful electric shock. Oh, yes, yes. And it turned out that 80% of the participants shocked themselves rather than letting their default mode network run free. Even animals will do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Absolutely. And one, they had to throw out this particular guy because he was such an outlier, shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. We hate boredom. We hate the default mode network. But unless you engage the right hemisphere of the brain and the default mode network by purposively just walking. and repetitively praying.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Unless you manually stimulate that part of your brain, you are not going to come to understanding about the why of your life. You're going to be stuck on the how and what. And you're going to be path dependent. And I knew that. I knew that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
It tends to be high negative affect. And so you're familiar with the PANAS test, the positive affect, negative affect sequence, which is I administer it to all my students at Harvard. I make them take this because I put them into four categories. The high positive, high negative category. It's high affect people. That's you and me, which are the mad scientist profile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
The high positive, low negative, which everybody wants to be, which is actually not great for a lot of things, which is the cheerleader.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, that's the cheerleader. And they make bad bosses too, by the way, because they can't take criticism or hear bad news. You have people who are high negative and low positive, which is the poets. And then the people who are low affect, low, low, those are the judges. You know, very, very low affect, sober. Stolen. They make good surgeons, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh my God. That's not what you want. And so I actually categorize people and then talk about the strengths and weaknesses that each one of these has.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Now, the people who are most likely to be able to affect discernment most, at least conventionally, by undertaking these techniques are the mad scientists because they have access to very high levels of affect, but they have to understand themselves to do that. This was the thing. I had this background as a behavioral scientist and I wanted to know the why of my life
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
And from that, to figure out the direction forward or uphill, as you say. So that was two questions. Yeah. The why and the direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well, the why of life is really the meanings. Yeah. Not at all. And then once you understand the meaning, then you can figure out what direction you're going in because the direction per se is not meaning. The direction is just a direction. Yeah, okay, fine, fine. So in other words, here's the way. That's the difference between strategy and aim. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
So in sailing, there's a concept called the rum line. Are you familiar with it? No. R-H-U-M line. And it's a very important metaphor in Spanish. It's called el rumbo in Spanish. And that's something you use a lot, the rum line. What it is, it's a direction with a destination. and you have to have it if you're doing navigation and sailing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
That doesn't mean you're going to go exactly to that point or you're not going to get blown off course. You can't actually make any progress unless you have a rum line. And so that's the whole idea. The meaning is the rum line. And then you can start making progress toward the goal, notwithstanding the fact that it's not perfect.