November 23, 2022 • 49 mins
On this episode of Next Question with Katie Couric, Katie explores the subject of happiness. Because as a culture, we seem to be obsessed with achieving it. Just look to higher ed. Some of the most elite universities tout courses on happiness — the science of it, the value of it, the history and future of it. But the search for happiness has also seeped into our regular podcast consumption and our must-watch TV shows. So what’s the deal? Why is happiness the carrot dangling just outside of our reach? And what defines happiness anyway? To find out, Katie talks with one of those aforementioned happiness scholars, Arthur C. Brooks, whose most recent book is called “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric, and this is next question. Today.
We're going to be exploring happiness because we seem to
be obsessed with that as a culture. Just look to
hire ed. Some of the most elite universities tout courses
on happiness, the science of it, the value of it,
the history and future of it. There are podcasts about happiness,
(00:21):
whole genres of earnest TV shows built to temporarily evoke it.
I'm looking at you, Ted Lasso. Why are we all
so smitten with happiness? Is it because the world is burning,
because we're doom scrolling, because the internet makes us want
what we can't have. Let's find out. My guest today
is none other than happiness expert and one of those
(00:44):
aforementioned happiness scholars, Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur also writes a
regular column for The Atlantic on happiness, and his most
recent book is called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success,
Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second half of Life.
Here's our conversation, with all due respect, Arthur, what makes you?
(01:09):
What what makes you qualified? And what makes you an
expert on happiness? Yeah? So, I I am a PhD
social scientist and I have studied behavioral economics and as
social psychological principles my entire career. I started off by
studying beauty and why people admire things, why people love
and are attracted to beauty. Later I was studying philanthropy
(01:32):
and sharitable giving, why people voluntarily serve other people, And
I kept finding that in those two areas, the tap
root was happiness. The tap root was trying to live
a better life. And so I thought to myself as
I as I got to the middle part of my career,
you know, I'm going to study the main thing, the
main thing that everybody wants. You know, I have the
(01:52):
I have the skills to look at these things. You know,
I'm trained and applied statistics and all of these things
that people suffer through and they're getting their PhDs. But
it's very easy to get kind of stuck, you know,
studying marginal things. And when I started talking about the
science of happiness, which there really is a huge science.
I'm really bringing in the neuroscience and the social science
(02:12):
and the philosophy of happiness, and and using my academic
skills to bring these things together, I found everybody wanted
to know more. And this is the magic part of
the Katie. You know, we're all we all have skills,
you know, we've all worked hard to be good at
what we're doing. The real question for us in our
careers is the why. And I got to the point
in my life when I said, you know what, the
(02:33):
why of my career is to lift people up and
bring them together. And the way that I can do
that is using my knowledge and my skills to help
them pursue their happiness. And so I decided I was
going to do that for the rest of my life.
Do you think happiness is the wrong word for what
we're all searching for? Because it can be so fleeting
and so elusive, and I'm not sure if it is
(02:57):
even accurate in terms of what you talk about in
your book, right, Yeah, I know. So that's actually that's
the first issue that I raised in my class. I
teach a class in the Science of Happiness at the
Harvard Business School and I have a hundred eight students
in about four hundred on the waiting list. I mean,
it's it's a class that obviously, hey, kids free candy.
(03:17):
I mean they I mean, happiness is something that they
think they want. And one of the the ways that
I reasons I use the word happiness is to bring
people in. And then when we're talking with more precision,
we boil it down a little bit more So on
the first day of class, I say, Okay, you spent
all your elective points to get into the happiness class.
You obviously must know what it is. So what is
it in a cold column, which is you know? You
go out and see you Okay, you know what's happiness?
(03:40):
And they'll say, that's the feeling I get when you know,
I see my family and Thanksgiving or something, and I'll
talk about their feelings, and I say, no, that's not right.
That's like saying that your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell
of the turkey. You wouldn't say that. I mean that
the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner,
and your feelings of happiness are evidence and stuff, something deeper,
(04:01):
more profound, a real phenomenon that you can study and
practice and share. And then we start to develop the
idea and the truth is that happiness is really a
combination of three things, as a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction,
and purpose. Those are the big three things that people
are looking for and the truth is you need all
kinds of experiences and emotions, You even need unhappiness to
(04:24):
get those things. You need a full life, fully alive,
and and the science actually brings out all those ideas.
So you're right, we got to get people's attention. But
happiness is a much deeper phenomenon than just hey, I
feel happy. I think of words like contentment, fulfillment, and
inner peace, even as happneyed as that phrases, when I
(04:47):
think about what one's goal should be. Right, So the
way to think about that, so contentment is really important.
That's part of satisfaction with life. And so the key
thing is that all the happiest people they haven't um
and think about it kind of like the macronutrients. You know,
when you say dinner is protein, carbohydrates and fat. I mean,
it's kind of a clinical way to look at dinner.
(05:08):
It's not very romantic, but you know it's like, join
me for dinner of protein, carbohydrates and fat. It's not
that great. But the truth is, if you want to
be healthy, you need all those three things in balance
and abundance. Happiness basically as a way that we need
to understand how to enjoy our lives, you know, from
moment to moment, and which is not pleasure. It's it's
something much deeper, something much more human than than than pleasure.
(05:31):
And there's a whole science behind that. Satisfaction is is
the piece that you get when you you achieve something
that you've really worked for. That's the sense of contentment
with your life because you've met your goals. Now that
can be a curse to Yeah, we'll talk about that
later because I know I'm dying to talk to you.
Saction is a real killer, but it can be. But
(05:52):
then there's purpose and meaning and that's the that's really
the deepest of all. You know, what is my life
all about? You know how? What's the coherence? What's the
general direction of my life? Why am I alive? And
that takes a whole lot of work and a whole
lot of suffering for people to understand the answer to
that question, and nobody wants to suffer, and we don't
need to look for it. It It will, in point, in
(06:12):
fact find all of us. And so those three things altogether,
they encompassed so many things and so many skills, and
that's what's my privilege to write and teach, But I'm
curious what about our society today has made people have
this yearning to learn more, to do more. I think
if I told my parents when I was growing up, yeah,
(06:34):
you know, I want to be happy, and what can
we do to be happy? I mean, it does sound
marginally or moderately, I guess self indulgent to say to
our parents generation. I think, but what is happening right
now in the culture where people need this and they
(06:54):
want it and they're yearning for it. Yeah. A couple
of different things have happened along the way. And I
ever remember I was having a conversation with my dad.
I changed careers. I was a classical musician for a
long time in my late twenties. I knew I was
going to have to change careers and I told my
dad I was going to do and he said, what
You're successful? Things are going well, he said, He said,
why do you want to do that? And I said, Dad,
I'm not happy? And he said, what makes you so special? Right? Totally? Totally, Yeah,
(07:21):
I get it. Well, a couple of things have happened.
Number one is happiness as a science has really exploded.
And two generations ago, or even one generation ago, people
didn't realize that. They really thought it was a nice
to have, you know, good luck, live right, played by
the rules, try to get lucky, you know, when it
comes to happiness. And we actually know a lot more
than we did about that. In many ways, it follows
(07:42):
the advent of care for mental illness or for even
mood disorders, where you know, in nineteen fifty or even
nineteen sixty, people just had to suffer, and now we
know that there's a lot that you can do. The
happiness science is not trying to get you from behind
the line of scrimmage to you know, functioning adequately. It's
going for you know, people who are functioning pretty well
to to be kind of fitness, you know, junkies. There's
(08:05):
sort of people who are in good health, but they
really want to work by going to the gym and
getting better at that. Another thing that my parents generation
thought was completely crazy. Here's the other problem. That's actually
why there's been such an explosion of interest. Happiness is declining.
We've seen actually happiness and decline since about and you know,
you and I were you know, as like young adults
(08:27):
and these and and you know, in those days and
and I mean, that's pretty extraordinary that it would be
declining at a time when income is going up, when
stand of living is going up, literacy is going up,
child mortality is going down. Most indicators of what a
good life is are going in one direction, but happiness
is going in the other directions. So you've got to
ask what's actually going on and when people are I mean,
(08:49):
you don't study air unless you don't have enough of it,
and so that's a little of what's happening to I think, well,
I thought that there were a lot of things that
weren't going up. You know, a lot of people, uh
younger generation don't feel that they'll be as successful as
their perrents. They I think, worry about climate change, They
worry about sort of the economy, there's so many They
(09:12):
worry about democracy. So are these things really as good
as you say they are? Well, part of the there
is the difference between things getting better and what we're
worried about, what we're worried about the future. And the
key thing that we all know from our own lives
is things can be pretty good, but if you're in
bad shape for your happiness, you're gonna be very worried
(09:32):
about the future, and you're only going to see the
negative side of everything. So this is a lot of
what we see. Look, there are concerns, there are all
kinds of things that we need to do differently to.
We do need to work on our democracy, we do
need to work on on all sorts of social issues
to make our world better. But when people are very
fired up, and quite frankly, there are a lot of
(09:53):
people that are our age that are trying to conscript
young people as kind of child soldiers into a culture
war and kind of a baby boit more culture are
on right and left. Let's make everybody is afraid and
angry as they can possibly be. But they're they're they're
willing to join up forces like that when the when
the happiness is too low, when people are in a
good place, they're less likely to say, look, I understand
(10:14):
there's problems, but life is pretty good. And when they
say no, everything's rotten, you know we're all going to
be in trouble. You know. The truth is that young
people today they have as much opportunity and actually more
prosperity than people have ever had before. But it's hard
to see the good things when you don't actually feel
the happiness in the in life around you. Well, let's
(10:34):
talk about that. Why is happiness on the decline? If
in fact things are pretty good and and the world
is helping along and things are as good as you
say they are, why his happiness declined. It's not as
if it's great for everybody. I mean, it's like, as
they say, your results may vary in almost anything, and
(10:55):
so there's some people who truly are suffering. And so
we don't want to make minimize that. Even if things
are going in the right direction in terms of trends,
we don't you know, individuals might have been having a
hard time and there's still lots to do. So we
have to emphasize the fact that things aren't perfect and
we all have an opportunity to make things better. So
that's really good. But what happens is when things are
on balance, pretty prosperous and pretty free, but we don't
(11:18):
see it. You have to look to other kinds of forces,
and what we find is basically that we have a
world that's been kind of torqued towards these idols that
a lot of young people are falling prey to. Now
one of the great blessings of people our age, Katie,
is that there was no social media when we were young,
and that means that we didn't have the kind of
social comparison pressures, we didn't have the kind of materialistic pressures.
(11:41):
We didn't have a sense that everybody's life was great
and ours wasn't so good. But that's a broader case
of people being induced towards these idols of money and
power and pleasure and and the admiration of strangers. Whereas
the one of the great things that we find in
the in the Science of Happiness says there's really four
big habits that the happiest people have that are that
(12:04):
are not consistent with those idols, and those are faith
or a life philosophy, or something that gives you a
sense of the why of life. It doesn't have to
be your traditional religious faith. It has to be something
that's bigger than you. Family life um, and you you
decide what family life means. But these are the ties
that bind and don't break, and often you don't choose,
and God knows you wouldn't in many cases. But there
are the people who take the two am phone call
(12:26):
friendship as in real friends not deal friends, and last
but not least, it's work where you can serve others.
And our our society is pushing people away from faith, family, friends,
and work and toward a kind of self worship around money, power, pleasure,
and and fame. And those are just unhealthy things. And
that's really what explains a good deal of why it's
(12:47):
so hard to just find happiness on your own. When
we come back, did you know living in a cultural
fear actually takes a toll on our happiness? Arthur Brooks
has the to dote right after this, you say, happy
(13:13):
people love people and use things. Unhappy people use people
and love things, which is basically their values and priorities
are clearly not in the right place. Yes, that that's
you know, that's a more concise way of saying. You know,
use people, love things, money, power, pleasure, and fame. Use things,
(13:34):
love people, faith, family, friends, and work that serves other
than social media. What do you think has caused a
decline in happiness? Is it loneliness and isolation? I know
that you started writing during the pandemic. You're column for
the Atlantic. Um, you know what other factors are contributing
(13:56):
to a decline of happiness. One is a big cultural
phenomen on that's very interesting that philosophers have been writing
about for many centuries, which is that you can get
a culture of fear. Now, fear and love are the
opposite emotions. We often think that hatred and love are opposites,
but hatred is a function of fear. And we find
when we look at the neuroscience of fear, it occupies
(14:18):
it's the most it's the most prominent negative basic emotion
produced by the limbic system of the brain. Everybody has
heard of the amygdala as the part of the brain
that actually the almond shape little things on either side
of your brain in the olympic system, that they stimulate
a lot of stress hormones, fight or flight or freeze.
And what they do is they dominate all of the emotions. Well,
(14:38):
the opposite most basic positive emotion is love. Fear and
love or opposites. And you can have either polarity in
a company or or a family or a whole country.
And we've been for quite a long time and a
fear polarity in our policy, in our culture, and that's
hugely problematic. Look, you and I, I mean, we're established,
(15:00):
you know, we have our families, there's a lot that
we can rely upon. But even people our age have
been falling prey to this. Young people, on your other hand,
they're quite vulnerable to the culture of fear and what
foments it. It's it's politicians that are you know, it's interesting.
I'll tell young people, you know, you are an unwilling
soldier if you hate because somebody's trying to tell you
(15:20):
that you must hate and you must be afraid. You
know that person does not have your best interests at heart.
They're profiting. You're not. As you know, I told us
in every university campus that I go to, don't be
a willing participant in the baby boomer culture war with
canceling people you disagree with, you know, with actually weakening
the fundamentals of our democracy. You know what you're doing
(15:43):
is you're standing up for somebody else's values and you're
falling prey to this fear. So fear in our culture
is one of the biggest problems that we have, and
it's especially affects young people. Well, I would say that
that cancel culture movement was born on college campuses, not
necessarily in the baby boomer generation, where people who Uh,
(16:03):
didn't agree with you basically were I mean, where there's
not a free and fair debate on all these issues
that that you're marginalized, canceled or whatever you want to
call it, um you know, really ostracized if you have
a different point of view. So I'm not sure I
agree with this baby boomer culture war that you ascribed to. Well,
(16:25):
what I find is is, you know, sitting on a
college campus that it's largely it's a lot of people
my age that have been promoting these ideas for a
very long time. And you know, and in creating the
environment where the people who are canceling are not the
people who are actually have been promoting these theories for
a long time, and these ideas took a long time
to take root. True. We go across generations in this
(16:49):
and the you know, councel culture, which by the way,
it transcends campuses. You know, it's interesting if you're if
you're somebody with very progressive politics and you're sitting in
an evangelical church for example, can so culture is going
to come for you too. If you're you know, if
you're trying to get ahead in in very populist, republican
circles and you have more moderate conservative viewpoints, you're gonna
(17:10):
find cancel culture as well. It's just really acute on
college campuses, and most ironic because this is supposed to
be the marketplace of ideas, you know, where all you're
not supposed to feel safe on a college campus. Intellectually,
you're supposed to be like, ah, I just heard something
I really disagree with and now I'm going to engage.
And that's it's it's especially troublesome when on a college campus.
(17:30):
We we will have this particular campus culture. But but
it's the young people that can actually solve this problem.
How do you fight against the forces of fear and hate?
Because I know that you write that happiness takes work,
right and discipline and focus. You can't expect it to
just happen. And so for us on a day to
(17:53):
day basis, how do we try to get out of
that kind of angry, enraged state that seems to be
part and parcel of our daily existence. Yeah, it's such
a great question, and and here's the good news. There's
actually a way to do this that all of us
can practice in our own lives, and we can do
it to to you know, make manifest in our country
(18:13):
and our make our world a little bit better. You know,
there's a famous um you know, Bible versus says perfect
love drives out fear. But that's an ancient idea. Five
years before that was in you know, the New Testament
of the Bible. Lao Sue, you know, the founder of
Taoist philosophy said exactly the same thing. And what they
were talking about is what we have learned as social
(18:34):
scientists and and and people in the world of neuroscience
have found that these are neutralizing factors on each other.
That fear will neutralize love, but love will neutralize fear
as well. We don't have to fight against fear. We
simply need to have more love. All right, give me
an example, because this does sound sort of woo woo
to me, Arthur like, so, so play this out in
(18:54):
real time and real life. Yeah, So this is what
I do when I go on college campuses. I say, look,
do you want to do you want to weaken the
forces of fear in your life and on your campus.
You need to make friends with somebody with whom you disagree.
You need to go on social media and say five
loving things where other people are expressing, Hey, you got
(19:15):
to go out of your way like a missionary, bringing
love on purpose, even when it's uncomfortable. And then I
take it up a notch, right, because one of the
things that you see in a fear based culture very interestingly,
people in their twenties today are a third less likely
to say they're in love than you and I did
when we were that when we were at that age
in the nineteen eighties. So so what's up with that?
(19:36):
And the answer is fear is driving out love. So
what I do is I say, Okay, do you want
to treat your life like an entrepreneur, like a real startup,
then the currency of the explosion of wealth in your
life is actually love. And that means you need to
take a risk, just like an entrepreneur does. And so
all a sign him. I was doing a graduation speech
not long ago, and I said, here's your homework. Friends,
(19:56):
you've got two weeks. You need to go tell somebody
that you you have to say I love you. And
and again, maybe it's a family member with whom you
become a strange maybe some of you're secretly in love with.
Maybe it's a friend and you just don't talk to
each other that way. If it's not uncomfortable and scary,
it's not entrepreneurial enough. And the crazy thing is I
get tons of feedback saying game changer, game changer in
(20:20):
my relationships, in my life, and in the lives of
the people that I'm touching. We need more people they're
willing to say, you know what, I love you. Well,
that's one thing to say to someone in your family
or your spouse or your friends who you don't see.
But what about someone who um is angry and mean
(20:41):
and throwing arrows and daggers into your heart? How do
you how do I do agree with you that that
comes from fear? This this anger comes from fear or hate.
But how do you neutralize that? So that's a that's
a very good question that Martin is the King answered,
and you give a very fam sermon in nineteen fifty seven.
(21:01):
So I want to turn your attention to this subject
loving your enemy. November seventeen, thank you for seven to
the Dexter Street Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama that urch DoD
that very famous sermon on on the Gospel of Matthew,
Chapter five, verse forty four. Famous one love your enemy
(21:26):
that we talked about. It is not merely an e
multiple loves, creative understanding, good wills alone. It is a
huge an individual because that's the question you're asking me, Katie,
how do you love your enemies? And here's what he said,
here's what Dr King said. Weird, right, Jesus didn't say
like your enemies, because to like is a sentimental something,
(21:48):
and there's lots of people we all don't like. Those
are the people insulting you on social media. Those are
the people who are wishing you ill. Those are people
who are unfair and uncivilized. I got it, I got
it in my If you've got them in your life,
everybody watching us or listening to us has them in
their lives. But to love is a decision, it's a commitment.
(22:08):
It's the only way that we can actually create some redemption.
So the famous philosopher Thomas Aquinas he said that to
love is to will the good of the other. He
didn't say it feel anything. You can. You cannot make
the decision to like somebody, But you can make the
decision to love somebody, because that's an action and you
have to act in a particular way. It's hard. This
(22:30):
is a hard teaching, but we're really up for it
because what you find and on all of the research
on this is when people start to act out of
love even when they don't feel it, they actually start
to do it on their own. The Dalai Lama one
time told me, you know, I asked him, how do
I love when I don't feel love? He basically told
me to fake it, fake it till you make it.
(22:52):
The Dali Llama. Look, he's the world's most respected religious
figure and he's completely full of love. If the doll
A Lama says that we can fake it till we
make it and it comes to love, I gotta believe it.
After the Break, It's Striver's Anonymous Arthur shares how to
break a striver's cycle and find a new kind of fulfillment.
(23:13):
That's right after this. I want to talk to you
about your book because as a sixty five year old
who has enjoyed some success in my life, I'm fascinated
(23:37):
about sort of how to continue to find fulfillment. And
I have the confession Arthur's I'm Katie and I'm a striver.
I know you are, and I am sort of the
quintessential person that you talk about in your book, someone
who always is looking for the next thing. And when
(23:59):
I saw you of that talking at the Aspen Ideas Festival,
I realize this is not all me. A lot of
it is sort of my brain and dopamine and adrenaline
that causes me to want more and more and more,
to keep succeeding, to keep striving, but to keep accomplishing, right,
(24:22):
And it's striving me crazy. Yeah, I know, I know,
you and me both. I mean it's like, look, you've
had this legendary career which you continue to have and
and and everybody says, look, if I could be if
I could be half as successful as Katie Kuric, i'd
automatically be happy. But here's the thing, here's the crazy thing.
Everybody thinks they want to be happy and successful, but
if they can only be one, they should be successful
(24:44):
because then the automatically be happy, and that is incorrect.
On the contrary, if you're happy, you'll feel successful and
you get both. Here's the problem with that. Our world
doesn't do that. Remember, money power pleasure fame. Money power
pleasure fame is that it's it's and if you start
to get some success, your brain changes. A little bit
of brain science and and you've heard me talk about
(25:07):
this and and it's not very complicated, but it's worth
pointing out that when people are really addicted to success,
their brain does more or less the same thing as
when they're getting addicted to gambling or methamphetamine. You become
very good at producing dopamine, which is it's called a neuromodulator.
And what dopamine does is it doesn't give you a pleasure.
It gives you anticipation of a reward. That's why when
(25:28):
people get addicted to drugs or alcohol, or gambling or
pornography or any of these bad things that get take
over people's lives and hurt them, it's because they have
all this anticipation and they get craving. Now, when people
are really successful, money, power, pleasure, fame, their brain gives
them dopamine in anticipation of those rewards. And when you
get really good at it, because I don't know, just hypothetically,
(25:49):
let's say you're Katie Kuric, Well, then guess what happens.
A little is not enough. Your threshold keeps getting more
and more and more and more. Right, the treadmill starts
going at terrifying speed. You call it the hedonic tread
now exactly right now. There's a process in the brain
called homeostasis. It's a complicated word with a simple idea.
(26:10):
That is to say, your brain resets, I'm gonna be
so happy when I get that car, I'm gonna be
so happy when I get that watch or that shirt,
of that relationship or that achievement. And then you reset
almost immediately. You think your brain tells you because mother
nature lies that you're going to actually be satisfied forever.
You're actually satisfied for a minute or maybe a week
(26:30):
or I don't know, ten days on the outside, and
then it's off to the races again. Run run, run,
run run. That's what we all have to dominate. And
people who have had a lot of success, that's great
because these are the people. I mean, look, think of
all the good things you've done for me, because I've
been watching you for your You've informed me, you've made
my life better. But that doesn't mean that along the
(26:50):
way that has made you happy. So what we all
need to do with our own kind of success addiction
And nobody's watching you right now, nobody's gonna be watching
your show, who's not a little bit of a striver.
I know your audience that we all can actually dominate
the system by not going with the flow. Your brain says,
go more, do more, hit the lever, hit the lever,
(27:11):
get the cookie. You need to stand up to that
and behave in a different way. You need to do
the opposite thing. That's what the research says, and so
that's probably what we need to talk about. Right. What
is the opposite thing. The opposite thing is not to
have more. The opposite thing is to want less. Now,
I know it sounds weird, but here's the way to
(27:31):
think about it. Satisfaction finally scratching that itch, finally being
satisfied is not doesn't just come from having more, doing more,
seeing more, getting more. It's what you have divided by
what you want. Everybody remembers a little tiny bit in
the recesses of their mind about their high school fractions,
(27:51):
and and you remember that if you've got halves divided
by wants, there's two ways to increase that number. Increase
the have or decrease the wants. Here's the deal. We
actually have the power to want less. We don't have
to become a Buddhist monk. I mean, if you want to,
that's great. You know, go study in the cave, that's fantastic,
(28:12):
or go to a you know, hill land retreat. I've
done it. I recommend it. It's fantastic, But you don't
have to do it. The key thing is to think
about your wants, to not be managed by your wants.
I have a reverse bucket list. The bucket list is
all about hals. The reverse bucket list is all about
wants and what I do on my birthday, Katie, and
(28:32):
I recommend everybody is I make a list of all
my cravings. Oh, finally be happy if I have this.
I'll finally be happy. If my book sells this number
and I have or I do this thing on TV,
whatever it happens to be. Everybody's got their thing. I
get the car, I get whoever. You make a list
of all those cravings, and you say I might get
it and I might not. Easy come, easy go. That's
moved the appetite, the craving, the desire from your automatic
(28:54):
brain to your human brain to call the prefrontal cortex,
and there you can manage your cravings. If you're conscious
of them, you can manage them. It's not perfect, but
you'll be amazed at how much more satisfying you will
find ordinary life when you looking at the small things.
And look. I follow you on social media, and you
(29:16):
know you're you're putting on social media pictures from your garden.
I love that, like your flowers and your garden, Katie.
I love that it's so beautiful on Instagram that you
do that. That's you enjoying the small. Now to do
that more, you actually have to be conscious of your
worldly wants and manage them in that particular way. It's unnatural,
but we all can do it. It's interesting because you
(29:39):
talk about preparing for the second half of your life,
finding success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half
of your life is the subtitle from Strength to Strength,
And I think you posit that you really are your
most successful really by the time you're forty or say fifty,
that you have fluid into colligence then and then you
(30:02):
move to something called crystallized intelligence. Explain that Earth, because
I I know what you mean, but I think for
people who haven't read the book, explained what you mean. Yeah,
so there are two kinds of basic intelligence, and the
world tells you you get one big act. That's the
world tells you get really really good at what you do,
be really successful in what you do, and if you're lucky,
(30:24):
you can keep it going forever. You can't keep it
going forever. Now, if you're an athlete, you know that, right,
if you're you know, you're Tom Brady, maybe you can
keep going forever. But the rest of us mortals can't keep,
you know, going, And and you know, I actually have
interviewed Olympic athletes and talk to people and they're they're
very much in touch with the fact that they can't
keep going on forever. But it's still really painful. Now.
The interesting thing that the research finds is that that
(30:45):
thinking professions, knowledge professions, whether you're a doctoral lawyer, or
financial professional or an electrician or lots of things, that
you tend to get better and better and better to
your twenties and thirties and then max out and then
you you're not quite as good as you used to be.
And that's what burn out actually comes from. You know,
your dentist who suddenly, weirdly at age forty five, says,
(31:05):
I think I'm gonna take Fridays off to golf. It's like,
what the heck you loved being a dentist. It's like,
I don't know, I'm just less interested. That's because your
dentist isn't progressing and can't quite put her finger on
why she's not as good at dentist. Thank you for
a woman. Yeah, I mean, it's like, my dentist is
a woman, and she's phenomenal. Right, I don't know if
she's actually I don't think she's forty five yet. But
(31:26):
the point is, I hope she reads my book. I'm
gonna take her copy. And so this is this is
an important thing to keep our to keep our eye on,
because a lot of people start panicking at this point
and think, oh, oh no, Well, the truth is, this
is the time to celebrate because there's another intelligence that
comes in behind it that's not about hard work and
focus and and you know, living on the edge of
(31:48):
the curve, innovative capacity, working memory, all the stuff that
made you good at what you did. It's about wisdom.
It's about knowledge about how to explain ideas is how
to teach, is to go from innovator to instructor. And
everybody can do that in their own way. I've seen
you do this in your career. This is the most
interesting thing. What are you now, your teacher, this is
(32:10):
what we're doing. You're introducing your audience to big ideas
that can actually enrich them. What do you your your professor, Kuric,
you now this is You've naturally moved on to this
crystallized intelligence curve, and everybody can. There's a transformation if
you're willing to take it. The people who are unhappy
are living in the past. The people are happy, they
(32:30):
jump onto this wisdom curve. I'm gonna teach, I'm gonna
mentor I'm gonna lead teams. So if you're a sort
of entrepreneur, that's fluid intelligence. If you're a venture capitalist,
crystallized intelligence. If you're a star litigator, fluid, if you're
a managing partner, crystallized You know, I used to do
highly mathematical research papers on my fluid intelligence curve. Now
(32:53):
I write for The Atlantic and I talked to you
crystallized intelligence, and I'm happy. I'm happy or than i've
ever been because I'm on the right curve. I think
about professional athletes, I think about CEOs, I think about honestly,
President Obama, Like, how do they shift from sort of
(33:13):
being in the epicenter, the white hot center of everything,
where they have huge responsibility and all lies are on
them and then shift into a different mode without feeling
that their best years are behind them, Because I I
do think about you know, like, how do people manage that? Yeah,
(33:37):
it's very hard. The more success you have, the harder
it is. And for a couple of different reasons, you're
not quite sure that second curve is there. I mean,
you're taking it on faith from a Harvard professor. That's
one thing, actually jump in. That's something else. The second is,
you know a lot of people just love that first curve.
And the reason they like it is because they get
all these honors, They get all this they get all
(33:57):
this admiration, they get all this prestige from it. And
the more successful and famous you are, the harder it
is actually to say goodbye to those particular things. But
the happy people are actually able to make that shift.
They have the presence of mind. Now. One of the
things that makes it much easier is they tend to
be accompanied by somebody who loves them. This is one
of the things that you actually find and so whether
(34:19):
it's a best friend, whether it's a spouse, whether it's
your your adult children. You need somebody who takes you
by the hand and says, you know what, and this
is you know, my wife did this for me. My
wife Ester we even already thirty one years now, and
and and you know, she said I was retiring. It
was a CEO, you know, but I did this research
and I had to I had to stop because I
(34:39):
saw the writing was on the wall. I was not
getting better at what I was doing. And so I said,
I gotta get on the second curve. I know it's
out there. And she took me by the hand and said,
it's okay. I love you. You're the father of my
children and the love of my life. And whether you're
successful in worldly terms or not, I love you all
the same. And that is so critically important because a
lot of people were stuck on that fluid intelligence curve.
(35:01):
On that first curve, They're like, I'm nothing, I am dead.
If I'm not number one, if I'm not the striver,
if I'm not the homo economic aust you know, if
I'm not the hardest worker in the room. Right, you
need people who love you. That's really really critical. I'm
wondering though, if you're inadvertently contributing to the last acceptable
(35:23):
ism in society, and that's agis um. You know, I
know that the CEO of Target just said, I'm sixty five,
I'm not retiring UM And and I wonder if with
this second phase of life, if you're sort of saying
to the world, Arthur, you know, if you're not under fifty,
(35:44):
you you don't have fluid intelligence, you're not at the
top of your game. You need to go into this
second stage of life, and you need to leave leave,
leave the stage. I mean, do you think about that? Yeah?
I do. But you know what I actually I'm feathering
my own nest as I get older. I'm fifty eight
years old, and I want to be working for a
long time, but where I'm best suited to work. So
(36:08):
this is the key thing. Here's what I have this view, Katie.
You know, one of I look at these Silicon Valley firms,
these tech firms and social media firms and all that,
and they're making all these errors that older executives to
shake their heads like how do they make that error?
The reason is because all fluid intelligence, no crystallized intelligence.
In other words, it's all brains, no wisdom, and that's
(36:30):
a big problem because they're making all the mistakes that
that all the older guys and women they made a
thousand years ago and their careers. My view is that
we need way more people in positions of leadership or
over seventy, that's my view, using their crystallized intelligence, not
relying on their fluid intelligence. You know, that's what we need.
I think every executive team, every C suite needs somebody
(36:51):
over seventy, every marketing team, every product team, these social
media companies, they need old people who actually can say
and so my view is that no, on the contrary,
this is the permanent employment plan for us, as long
as we're actually doing it right and not trying to
live in the past. Is the way that it works.
The impetus I guess for this book was when you
(37:11):
were sitting in an airplane and you were listening to
a really sad and upsetting conversation an older gentleman talking
to his wife saying, my life is over. I kind
of wish I were dead, and you take it from there. Yeah, so,
you know, I was kind of a tender point in
my life, you know, I had been running this thing
tank in Washington, d C. It had been going really,
(37:33):
really well, but I was wondering, you know, what is
the cadence of my own life? Where am I going?
Where does this I just do it again and do
it again and do it again and then stop, and
they just hope for the best. And you know, hanging
around the house, I don't know, you know, ten years,
fifteen years from hours going to go. And I was
kind of contemplating that existentially, And when I heard this conversation,
I overheard it. Now, as a behavioral social scientist, my
(37:55):
laboratory is the overheard conversation. So for everybody watching and
listening to us right now, if you're behind me in
a Starbucks confessing that somebody broke your heart, keep your
voice down because I might write a book about it anyway.
So I I hear this conversation this couple behind me
on the plane in this key moment in my own life,
and you know, he's kind of mumbling, but here his
wife's saying, oh, don't say it would be better if
(38:16):
you were dead, And I'm like, holy moldy, I wasn't.
I'm not eavesdropping, but this is big and and and
and she's trying to console him, and he's really unconsolable
the fact that nobody cares about him, nobody's listening to him. Okay,
so we land at the air this is a night flight.
We land at the airport at our destination. Everybody stands
up and the lights go on, and and we turn around.
I wanted to see him. I just wanted to see
(38:38):
his face. And it was one of the most famous
successful men in the world. This is somebody that everybody knows.
Now why he's a hero from decades past. Is not
some controversial actor you know, or you know, politician, No, no, no,
this is this is somebody who did big things that
we all admire, and and you know it's in his
(38:58):
late eighties and and and and he's he's confessing this thing.
So we're walking out of the airplane, and the pilot,
you know how, they all stand by the cockpit door
thing thanks for flying United folks, and he stops. The
guy who's right behind me. Blowing my mind at this
point because you know, the whole model of success is wrong.
If I could be half as successful as that guy,
I'd be automatically happy over the moon, right no wrong, okay.
(39:20):
So he sees the guy, the hero on the plane
and he says, sir, you've been my hero since I
was a little boy. And I turned around and he's
beaming with pride. And I asked myself, so which is it?
Is it this one or the one half an hour ago?
And I thought to myself, our model of success and
happiness is wrong. In truth, the data are very clear
(39:42):
that people who tend to be most disappointed with their
lives after seventy and eighty are the ones who are
most successful early on. And the reason is because they
can't live up to their own standards. They're addicted to success.
And now the party's over. And they if you look,
if you don't do anything with your life, you all
know when the party's over. But boy, oh boy, if
you do a lot, you're really going to know. And
I said, I'm going in search of the secret to
(40:04):
be both successful and happy. And that's what this book is.
It's the book that I needed in my life. I
wrote it for you to um, I'm actually writing a
book right now about the things I wish I knew
when I was twenty five, which is the science of happiness.
For the young striver that's coming next. But I didn't
get that book because that book hadn't been written yet.
And I and I've really lived according to it. And
(40:25):
you can be successful and happy, but you can't leave
it up to chance. I mean, mother nature is not
going to take you in that direction. And so what
do you think the guy sitting behind you in the
airplane did wrong? What he was doing was he was
reliving past glory and wishing that he could keep that
alive forever. And it turns out that's very common. In
(40:46):
the book, I talked about the case of Charles Darwin,
you know, the great naturalist, and everybody knows what a hero,
what a great figure he was. He buried at Westminster
Abbey because he's such a national hero. He died an
unhappy man, and the reason is because he kind of
got to the end of his fluid intelligence. He wanted
to stay on that curve. He never moved curves, and
he spent the last twenty five years of his life
(41:08):
kind of regretting the fact that he couldn't make any
more progress, and he didn't enjoy his research, and he
felt kind of washed up and kind of like a loser.
Charles Darwin, one of the greatest naturalist scientists who's ever lived,
died unhappy for the same reason that so many people do.
If I could talk to any of these people, I
would talk about the structure of the brain that how
(41:30):
that the fluid intelligence goes to the crystallized intelligence, and
happiness is right in front of them if they're willing
to grab it and change their own lives. How do
they recognize or how does anyone recognize when it's time
to jump to the second curve that your fluid intelligence
is drying up and you need to go for the
crystallized intelligence and you need to make that shift not
(41:54):
only in your head, but in your heart and your
habits to begin with. It's a really good idea to
to understand this before you need it, right, And not
all of us do. I mean, it's not all of
us have been able to have that, But you know
everybody's listening to us who's thirty and as a striver
and you know who you are right to start thinking,
I'm doing this right now, and I'm in this is
(42:15):
a great party. But what only the crystallized version of
what I'm good at? What might it look like just
to kind of visualize a little bit because twenty years
from now you might want to be thinking about that.
You don't have to change careers necessarily, although that's not
out of the question either, But what might it look like?
What's your flight of fancy? What would give you joy
to think about? This? Really a crystallized kind of kind
(42:36):
of skill, that's number one. But the key thing is
that that that that that people need to they'll see
that they're that the fluid intelligences decline way before anybody
else does, and the tell is burnout. That's the tell.
You know, when people start saying, I used to like
this more than I than I do. Now this used
to excite me more than it does now, that means
(42:58):
you're not making progress. People are wired for progress. Human
beings get no pleasure from the status quo. We're not
wired for It's very interesting, you know. One of the
things that I've studied is is you know diets, diets
have a failure rate, right, I mean, what industry can
continue to exist? It exists on hope, not results. Now,
(43:19):
here's the thing. Dieting is pretty easy, but keeping weight
off is near impossible. The reason is because you're perfectly
willing to forego the food that you love as long
as the CD is going down, because you know that
the happiness from the scale going down is higher than
the unhappiness from not eating scones or donuts or something
like that. But then when you reach your goal weight,
(43:39):
the reward is you never get to eat ever again
what you like. That's not a very nice reward, and
so people abandon the diet. That's all about progress. People
love progress, but the status quo is terrible. So you're
gonna notice, you know, maybe whatever happens to be, I
like it less. That's when it's time to start thinking
about the second curve. That's when it's trying to start
(44:02):
thinking about the reverse bucket list. So you're not adding adding,
adding adding, that's when it start. It's time to actually
think about who's going to hold me by the hand,
who is in part of my root system. That's when
it's time to start thinking what are the friendships that
I actually need? What are the spiritual relationships that I
can actually cultivate? And if you do these things, so
(44:22):
I wrote the book, this could be the greatest, most
joyful adventure in life. This is the best time of life.
But if you don't do it. It's like walking through
a forest at night with no guide and no flashlight.
What are things every person can do to kind of
have a a more fulfilling, purposeful life, that that has
(44:44):
more love than fear, and that that that can just
sort of feed you in a way, the all with
all the right things and not all the wrong things. Yeah,
the couple of things to keep in mind the f
is that all these things that I write, all these
things that I teach, that I'm privileged to be able
to talk to you about, all these things are accessible
(45:07):
to everybody. You don't need to be a nerd with
the PHDU teaches at Harvard to actually learn about these ideas.
I write about this in the Atlantic because I want
to bring these ideas to millions of people in relatively
non technical terms. You don't have to be a technical
specialist to understand that. But you've got to do the work.
Wishing is not enough. Just wishing you were happier, we'll
make you unhappier because you'll focus on your unhappiness. But
(45:29):
if you do the work that's habits, not hacks, committing
yourself to living in a better way, in a newer way.
This is magic. That's part one. Part two is this,
You've got to practice these things. You can't just learn
about these You gotta practice these things in your life.
You get, I get. I can teach you that gratitude
is one of the greatest tricks. But it's not enough
(45:50):
for to be a trick. It's got to be a
way of life. And so practice these things and and
committing yourself to doing it is like going to the gym,
not once, it's going to the gym five days a week,
or alorities a week, or whatever happens to be, and
then you start to see a transformation. You enjoy it
and will last but not least, You've got to share
these ideas. Look, we've talked about a whole bunch of
science and very accessible terms. Here's what I would wish
(46:11):
that will really help a lot of people who are
watching us to make these ideas come to life. Find
three people that you love and and if you need
to watch our our conversation again and take notes and
go teach these things. You know what that'll do is
it will move them from an impression to the executive
center of your brain. You know, becoming a teacher is
(46:31):
the best possible way to absorb ideas. My father was
a mathematician. He said, I only understood math when I
had taught calculus fifty times, you know. And the truth is,
we can all be happiness teachers. And the more that
we are bringing these secrets in a spirit of love
and sisterhood and brotherhood to everybody we possibly can, the
happier we're going to get. In other words, understand practice
(46:54):
and share. A lot of this is in the book.
You talk about living in the present, but that takes
this a plant, you know, and I think you say,
someone said we shouldn't be called homo sapiens, we should
be called homo prospective. That means we're always in the
future and we're not really present right now. Yeah, exactly.
And that takes, you know, take it takes a little
(47:15):
bit of effort. There's a whole mindfulness meditation movement going
on out there, but it really isn't that complicated. You
gotta you have to be alive now, you know, when
you're washing the dishes, say I'm washing the dishes now,
don't distract yourself from everything. When you're on the train,
look out the window and actually be on the train
at that particular moment. That's the real magic of mindfulness
(47:36):
that I've found, and it's really quite transformed my life.
Katie's when I found because I saw theoretically in the
literature is gonna make me happier, And now I do it.
I go on these walks for an hour with no devices,
and I smell the morning air and I stopped when
I look at flowers. I'm telling you, I mean, it's
just it sounds so dumb. I'm a fifty eight year
old man, I should know this at this point. It's
(47:57):
just the best. When I read about that, I also thought, yes,
I want to live in the moment, but I also
want to care about the future. I want to be
a concerned citizen who is focused on helping people preserve
the planet. So how do those things work in tandem.
You're much better at actually thinking clearly about a better
(48:20):
future when you're fully present right now. The reason is
because your love relationships blossom, you appreciate the things that
you're actually seeing. You don't have a full appreciation for
the people and the things around you unless you're fully
mindful right now, and as such, you won't be able
to create a future. You will be able to envision
a future that actually is better than the status quo.
Here's the best news about being here now. It makes
(48:42):
you better in the future as well. A big thank
you to my guests Arthur C. Brooks. You can find
many of his happiness insights at The Atlantic and go
check out his book From Strength to Strength to start
living your best life now. Next Question with Katie Kurik
(49:07):
is a production of I Heart Media and Katie Curic Media.
The executive producers Army, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The
supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements and
Adriana Fasio. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements.
For more information about today's episode, or to sign up
(49:27):
for my morning newsletter, wake Up Call, go to Katie
Currek dot com. You can also find me at Katie
Curic on Instagram and all my social media channels. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric, and this is next question. Today.
We're going to be exploring happiness because we seem to
be obsessed with that as a culture. Just look to
hire ed. Some of the most elite universities tout courses
on happiness, the science of it, the value of it,
the history and future of it. There are podcasts about happiness,
(00:21):
whole genres of earnest TV shows built to temporarily evoke it.
I'm looking at you, Ted Lasso. Why are we all
so smitten with happiness? Is it because the world is burning,
because we're doom scrolling, because the internet makes us want
what we can't have. Let's find out. My guest today
is none other than happiness expert and one of those
(00:44):
aforementioned happiness scholars, Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur also writes a
regular column for The Atlantic on happiness, and his most
recent book is called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success,
Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second half of Life.
Here's our conversation, with all due respect, Arthur, what makes you?
(01:09):
What what makes you qualified? And what makes you an
expert on happiness? Yeah? So, I I am a PhD
social scientist and I have studied behavioral economics and as
social psychological principles my entire career. I started off by
studying beauty and why people admire things, why people love
and are attracted to beauty. Later I was studying philanthropy
(01:32):
and sharitable giving, why people voluntarily serve other people, And
I kept finding that in those two areas, the tap
root was happiness. The tap root was trying to live
a better life. And so I thought to myself as
I as I got to the middle part of my career,
you know, I'm going to study the main thing, the
main thing that everybody wants. You know, I have the
(01:52):
I have the skills to look at these things. You know,
I'm trained and applied statistics and all of these things
that people suffer through and they're getting their PhDs. But
it's very easy to get kind of stuck, you know,
studying marginal things. And when I started talking about the
science of happiness, which there really is a huge science.
I'm really bringing in the neuroscience and the social science
(02:12):
and the philosophy of happiness, and and using my academic
skills to bring these things together, I found everybody wanted
to know more. And this is the magic part of
the Katie. You know, we're all we all have skills,
you know, we've all worked hard to be good at
what we're doing. The real question for us in our
careers is the why. And I got to the point
in my life when I said, you know what, the
(02:33):
why of my career is to lift people up and
bring them together. And the way that I can do
that is using my knowledge and my skills to help
them pursue their happiness. And so I decided I was
going to do that for the rest of my life.
Do you think happiness is the wrong word for what
we're all searching for? Because it can be so fleeting
and so elusive, and I'm not sure if it is
(02:57):
even accurate in terms of what you talk about in
your book, right, Yeah, I know. So that's actually that's
the first issue that I raised in my class. I
teach a class in the Science of Happiness at the
Harvard Business School and I have a hundred eight students
in about four hundred on the waiting list. I mean,
it's it's a class that obviously, hey, kids free candy.
(03:17):
I mean they I mean, happiness is something that they
think they want. And one of the the ways that
I reasons I use the word happiness is to bring
people in. And then when we're talking with more precision,
we boil it down a little bit more So on
the first day of class, I say, Okay, you spent
all your elective points to get into the happiness class.
You obviously must know what it is. So what is
it in a cold column, which is you know? You
go out and see you Okay, you know what's happiness?
(03:40):
And they'll say, that's the feeling I get when you know,
I see my family and Thanksgiving or something, and I'll
talk about their feelings, and I say, no, that's not right.
That's like saying that your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell
of the turkey. You wouldn't say that. I mean that
the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner,
and your feelings of happiness are evidence and stuff, something deeper,
(04:01):
more profound, a real phenomenon that you can study and
practice and share. And then we start to develop the
idea and the truth is that happiness is really a
combination of three things, as a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction,
and purpose. Those are the big three things that people
are looking for and the truth is you need all
kinds of experiences and emotions, You even need unhappiness to
(04:24):
get those things. You need a full life, fully alive,
and and the science actually brings out all those ideas.
So you're right, we got to get people's attention. But
happiness is a much deeper phenomenon than just hey, I
feel happy. I think of words like contentment, fulfillment, and
inner peace, even as happneyed as that phrases, when I
(04:47):
think about what one's goal should be. Right, So the
way to think about that, so contentment is really important.
That's part of satisfaction with life. And so the key
thing is that all the happiest people they haven't um
and think about it kind of like the macronutrients. You know,
when you say dinner is protein, carbohydrates and fat. I mean,
it's kind of a clinical way to look at dinner.
(05:08):
It's not very romantic, but you know it's like, join
me for dinner of protein, carbohydrates and fat. It's not
that great. But the truth is, if you want to
be healthy, you need all those three things in balance
and abundance. Happiness basically as a way that we need
to understand how to enjoy our lives, you know, from
moment to moment, and which is not pleasure. It's it's
something much deeper, something much more human than than than pleasure.
(05:31):
And there's a whole science behind that. Satisfaction is is
the piece that you get when you you achieve something
that you've really worked for. That's the sense of contentment
with your life because you've met your goals. Now that
can be a curse to Yeah, we'll talk about that
later because I know I'm dying to talk to you.
Saction is a real killer, but it can be. But
(05:52):
then there's purpose and meaning and that's the that's really
the deepest of all. You know, what is my life
all about? You know how? What's the coherence? What's the
general direction of my life? Why am I alive? And
that takes a whole lot of work and a whole
lot of suffering for people to understand the answer to
that question, and nobody wants to suffer, and we don't
need to look for it. It It will, in point, in
(06:12):
fact find all of us. And so those three things altogether,
they encompassed so many things and so many skills, and
that's what's my privilege to write and teach, But I'm
curious what about our society today has made people have
this yearning to learn more, to do more. I think
if I told my parents when I was growing up, yeah,
(06:34):
you know, I want to be happy, and what can
we do to be happy? I mean, it does sound
marginally or moderately, I guess self indulgent to say to
our parents generation. I think, but what is happening right
now in the culture where people need this and they
(06:54):
want it and they're yearning for it. Yeah. A couple
of different things have happened along the way. And I
ever remember I was having a conversation with my dad.
I changed careers. I was a classical musician for a
long time in my late twenties. I knew I was
going to have to change careers and I told my
dad I was going to do and he said, what
You're successful? Things are going well, he said, He said,
why do you want to do that? And I said, Dad,
I'm not happy? And he said, what makes you so special? Right? Totally? Totally, Yeah,
(07:21):
I get it. Well, a couple of things have happened.
Number one is happiness as a science has really exploded.
And two generations ago, or even one generation ago, people
didn't realize that. They really thought it was a nice
to have, you know, good luck, live right, played by
the rules, try to get lucky, you know, when it
comes to happiness. And we actually know a lot more
than we did about that. In many ways, it follows
(07:42):
the advent of care for mental illness or for even
mood disorders, where you know, in nineteen fifty or even
nineteen sixty, people just had to suffer, and now we
know that there's a lot that you can do. The
happiness science is not trying to get you from behind
the line of scrimmage to you know, functioning adequately. It's
going for you know, people who are functioning pretty well
to to be kind of fitness, you know, junkies. There's
(08:05):
sort of people who are in good health, but they
really want to work by going to the gym and
getting better at that. Another thing that my parents generation
thought was completely crazy. Here's the other problem. That's actually
why there's been such an explosion of interest. Happiness is declining.
We've seen actually happiness and decline since about and you know,
you and I were you know, as like young adults
(08:27):
and these and and you know, in those days and
and I mean, that's pretty extraordinary that it would be
declining at a time when income is going up, when
stand of living is going up, literacy is going up,
child mortality is going down. Most indicators of what a
good life is are going in one direction, but happiness
is going in the other directions. So you've got to
ask what's actually going on and when people are I mean,
(08:49):
you don't study air unless you don't have enough of it,
and so that's a little of what's happening to I think, well,
I thought that there were a lot of things that
weren't going up. You know, a lot of people, uh
younger generation don't feel that they'll be as successful as
their perrents. They I think, worry about climate change, They
worry about sort of the economy, there's so many They
(09:12):
worry about democracy. So are these things really as good
as you say they are? Well, part of the there
is the difference between things getting better and what we're
worried about, what we're worried about the future. And the
key thing that we all know from our own lives
is things can be pretty good, but if you're in
bad shape for your happiness, you're gonna be very worried
(09:32):
about the future, and you're only going to see the
negative side of everything. So this is a lot of
what we see. Look, there are concerns, there are all
kinds of things that we need to do differently to.
We do need to work on our democracy, we do
need to work on on all sorts of social issues
to make our world better. But when people are very
fired up, and quite frankly, there are a lot of
(09:53):
people that are our age that are trying to conscript
young people as kind of child soldiers into a culture
war and kind of a baby boit more culture are
on right and left. Let's make everybody is afraid and
angry as they can possibly be. But they're they're they're
willing to join up forces like that when the when
the happiness is too low, when people are in a
good place, they're less likely to say, look, I understand
(10:14):
there's problems, but life is pretty good. And when they
say no, everything's rotten, you know we're all going to
be in trouble. You know. The truth is that young
people today they have as much opportunity and actually more
prosperity than people have ever had before. But it's hard
to see the good things when you don't actually feel
the happiness in the in life around you. Well, let's
(10:34):
talk about that. Why is happiness on the decline? If
in fact things are pretty good and and the world
is helping along and things are as good as you
say they are, why his happiness declined. It's not as
if it's great for everybody. I mean, it's like, as
they say, your results may vary in almost anything, and
(10:55):
so there's some people who truly are suffering. And so
we don't want to make minimize that. Even if things
are going in the right direction in terms of trends,
we don't you know, individuals might have been having a
hard time and there's still lots to do. So we
have to emphasize the fact that things aren't perfect and
we all have an opportunity to make things better. So
that's really good. But what happens is when things are
on balance, pretty prosperous and pretty free, but we don't
(11:18):
see it. You have to look to other kinds of forces,
and what we find is basically that we have a
world that's been kind of torqued towards these idols that
a lot of young people are falling prey to. Now
one of the great blessings of people our age, Katie,
is that there was no social media when we were young,
and that means that we didn't have the kind of
social comparison pressures, we didn't have the kind of materialistic pressures.
(11:41):
We didn't have a sense that everybody's life was great
and ours wasn't so good. But that's a broader case
of people being induced towards these idols of money and
power and pleasure and and the admiration of strangers. Whereas
the one of the great things that we find in
the in the Science of Happiness says there's really four
big habits that the happiest people have that are that
(12:04):
are not consistent with those idols, and those are faith
or a life philosophy, or something that gives you a
sense of the why of life. It doesn't have to
be your traditional religious faith. It has to be something
that's bigger than you. Family life um, and you you
decide what family life means. But these are the ties
that bind and don't break, and often you don't choose,
and God knows you wouldn't in many cases. But there
are the people who take the two am phone call
(12:26):
friendship as in real friends not deal friends, and last
but not least, it's work where you can serve others.
And our our society is pushing people away from faith, family, friends,
and work and toward a kind of self worship around money, power, pleasure,
and and fame. And those are just unhealthy things. And
that's really what explains a good deal of why it's
(12:47):
so hard to just find happiness on your own. When
we come back, did you know living in a cultural
fear actually takes a toll on our happiness? Arthur Brooks
has the to dote right after this, you say, happy
(13:13):
people love people and use things. Unhappy people use people
and love things, which is basically their values and priorities
are clearly not in the right place. Yes, that that's
you know, that's a more concise way of saying. You know,
use people, love things, money, power, pleasure, and fame. Use things,
(13:34):
love people, faith, family, friends, and work that serves other
than social media. What do you think has caused a
decline in happiness? Is it loneliness and isolation? I know
that you started writing during the pandemic. You're column for
the Atlantic. Um, you know what other factors are contributing
(13:56):
to a decline of happiness. One is a big cultural
phenomen on that's very interesting that philosophers have been writing
about for many centuries, which is that you can get
a culture of fear. Now, fear and love are the
opposite emotions. We often think that hatred and love are opposites,
but hatred is a function of fear. And we find
when we look at the neuroscience of fear, it occupies
(14:18):
it's the most it's the most prominent negative basic emotion
produced by the limbic system of the brain. Everybody has
heard of the amygdala as the part of the brain
that actually the almond shape little things on either side
of your brain in the olympic system, that they stimulate
a lot of stress hormones, fight or flight or freeze.
And what they do is they dominate all of the emotions. Well,
(14:38):
the opposite most basic positive emotion is love. Fear and
love or opposites. And you can have either polarity in
a company or or a family or a whole country.
And we've been for quite a long time and a
fear polarity in our policy, in our culture, and that's
hugely problematic. Look, you and I, I mean, we're established,
(15:00):
you know, we have our families, there's a lot that
we can rely upon. But even people our age have
been falling prey to this. Young people, on your other hand,
they're quite vulnerable to the culture of fear and what
foments it. It's it's politicians that are you know, it's interesting.
I'll tell young people, you know, you are an unwilling
soldier if you hate because somebody's trying to tell you
(15:20):
that you must hate and you must be afraid. You
know that person does not have your best interests at heart.
They're profiting. You're not. As you know, I told us
in every university campus that I go to, don't be
a willing participant in the baby boomer culture war with
canceling people you disagree with, you know, with actually weakening
the fundamentals of our democracy. You know what you're doing
(15:43):
is you're standing up for somebody else's values and you're
falling prey to this fear. So fear in our culture
is one of the biggest problems that we have, and
it's especially affects young people. Well, I would say that
that cancel culture movement was born on college campuses, not
necessarily in the baby boomer generation, where people who Uh,
(16:03):
didn't agree with you basically were I mean, where there's
not a free and fair debate on all these issues
that that you're marginalized, canceled or whatever you want to
call it, um you know, really ostracized if you have
a different point of view. So I'm not sure I
agree with this baby boomer culture war that you ascribed to. Well,
(16:25):
what I find is is, you know, sitting on a
college campus that it's largely it's a lot of people
my age that have been promoting these ideas for a
very long time. And you know, and in creating the
environment where the people who are canceling are not the
people who are actually have been promoting these theories for
a long time, and these ideas took a long time
to take root. True. We go across generations in this
(16:49):
and the you know, councel culture, which by the way,
it transcends campuses. You know, it's interesting if you're if
you're somebody with very progressive politics and you're sitting in
an evangelical church for example, can so culture is going
to come for you too. If you're you know, if
you're trying to get ahead in in very populist, republican
circles and you have more moderate conservative viewpoints, you're gonna
(17:10):
find cancel culture as well. It's just really acute on
college campuses, and most ironic because this is supposed to
be the marketplace of ideas, you know, where all you're
not supposed to feel safe on a college campus. Intellectually,
you're supposed to be like, ah, I just heard something
I really disagree with and now I'm going to engage.
And that's it's it's especially troublesome when on a college campus.
(17:30):
We we will have this particular campus culture. But but
it's the young people that can actually solve this problem.
How do you fight against the forces of fear and hate?
Because I know that you write that happiness takes work,
right and discipline and focus. You can't expect it to
just happen. And so for us on a day to
(17:53):
day basis, how do we try to get out of
that kind of angry, enraged state that seems to be
part and parcel of our daily existence. Yeah, it's such
a great question, and and here's the good news. There's
actually a way to do this that all of us
can practice in our own lives, and we can do
it to to you know, make manifest in our country
(18:13):
and our make our world a little bit better. You know,
there's a famous um you know, Bible versus says perfect
love drives out fear. But that's an ancient idea. Five
years before that was in you know, the New Testament
of the Bible. Lao Sue, you know, the founder of
Taoist philosophy said exactly the same thing. And what they
were talking about is what we have learned as social
(18:34):
scientists and and and people in the world of neuroscience
have found that these are neutralizing factors on each other.
That fear will neutralize love, but love will neutralize fear
as well. We don't have to fight against fear. We
simply need to have more love. All right, give me
an example, because this does sound sort of woo woo
to me, Arthur like, so, so play this out in
(18:54):
real time and real life. Yeah, So this is what
I do when I go on college campuses. I say, look,
do you want to do you want to weaken the
forces of fear in your life and on your campus.
You need to make friends with somebody with whom you disagree.
You need to go on social media and say five
loving things where other people are expressing, Hey, you got
(19:15):
to go out of your way like a missionary, bringing
love on purpose, even when it's uncomfortable. And then I
take it up a notch, right, because one of the
things that you see in a fear based culture very interestingly,
people in their twenties today are a third less likely
to say they're in love than you and I did
when we were that when we were at that age
in the nineteen eighties. So so what's up with that?
(19:36):
And the answer is fear is driving out love. So
what I do is I say, Okay, do you want
to treat your life like an entrepreneur, like a real startup,
then the currency of the explosion of wealth in your
life is actually love. And that means you need to
take a risk, just like an entrepreneur does. And so
all a sign him. I was doing a graduation speech
not long ago, and I said, here's your homework. Friends,
(19:56):
you've got two weeks. You need to go tell somebody
that you you have to say I love you. And
and again, maybe it's a family member with whom you
become a strange maybe some of you're secretly in love with.
Maybe it's a friend and you just don't talk to
each other that way. If it's not uncomfortable and scary,
it's not entrepreneurial enough. And the crazy thing is I
get tons of feedback saying game changer, game changer in
(20:20):
my relationships, in my life, and in the lives of
the people that I'm touching. We need more people they're
willing to say, you know what, I love you. Well,
that's one thing to say to someone in your family
or your spouse or your friends who you don't see.
But what about someone who um is angry and mean
(20:41):
and throwing arrows and daggers into your heart? How do
you how do I do agree with you that that
comes from fear? This this anger comes from fear or hate.
But how do you neutralize that? So that's a that's
a very good question that Martin is the King answered,
and you give a very fam sermon in nineteen fifty seven.
(21:01):
So I want to turn your attention to this subject
loving your enemy. November seventeen, thank you for seven to
the Dexter Street Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama that urch DoD
that very famous sermon on on the Gospel of Matthew,
Chapter five, verse forty four. Famous one love your enemy
(21:26):
that we talked about. It is not merely an e
multiple loves, creative understanding, good wills alone. It is a
huge an individual because that's the question you're asking me, Katie,
how do you love your enemies? And here's what he said,
here's what Dr King said. Weird, right, Jesus didn't say
like your enemies, because to like is a sentimental something,
(21:48):
and there's lots of people we all don't like. Those
are the people insulting you on social media. Those are
the people who are wishing you ill. Those are people
who are unfair and uncivilized. I got it, I got
it in my If you've got them in your life,
everybody watching us or listening to us has them in
their lives. But to love is a decision, it's a commitment.
(22:08):
It's the only way that we can actually create some redemption.
So the famous philosopher Thomas Aquinas he said that to
love is to will the good of the other. He
didn't say it feel anything. You can. You cannot make
the decision to like somebody, But you can make the
decision to love somebody, because that's an action and you
have to act in a particular way. It's hard. This
(22:30):
is a hard teaching, but we're really up for it
because what you find and on all of the research
on this is when people start to act out of
love even when they don't feel it, they actually start
to do it on their own. The Dalai Lama one
time told me, you know, I asked him, how do
I love when I don't feel love? He basically told
me to fake it, fake it till you make it.
(22:52):
The Dali Llama. Look, he's the world's most respected religious
figure and he's completely full of love. If the doll
A Lama says that we can fake it till we
make it and it comes to love, I gotta believe it.
After the Break, It's Striver's Anonymous Arthur shares how to
break a striver's cycle and find a new kind of fulfillment.
(23:13):
That's right after this. I want to talk to you
about your book because as a sixty five year old
who has enjoyed some success in my life, I'm fascinated
(23:37):
about sort of how to continue to find fulfillment. And
I have the confession Arthur's I'm Katie and I'm a striver.
I know you are, and I am sort of the
quintessential person that you talk about in your book, someone
who always is looking for the next thing. And when
(23:59):
I saw you of that talking at the Aspen Ideas Festival,
I realize this is not all me. A lot of
it is sort of my brain and dopamine and adrenaline
that causes me to want more and more and more,
to keep succeeding, to keep striving, but to keep accomplishing, right,
(24:22):
And it's striving me crazy. Yeah, I know, I know,
you and me both. I mean it's like, look, you've
had this legendary career which you continue to have and
and and everybody says, look, if I could be if
I could be half as successful as Katie Kuric, i'd
automatically be happy. But here's the thing, here's the crazy thing.
Everybody thinks they want to be happy and successful, but
if they can only be one, they should be successful
(24:44):
because then the automatically be happy, and that is incorrect.
On the contrary, if you're happy, you'll feel successful and
you get both. Here's the problem with that. Our world
doesn't do that. Remember, money power pleasure fame. Money power
pleasure fame is that it's it's and if you start
to get some success, your brain changes. A little bit
of brain science and and you've heard me talk about
(25:07):
this and and it's not very complicated, but it's worth
pointing out that when people are really addicted to success,
their brain does more or less the same thing as
when they're getting addicted to gambling or methamphetamine. You become
very good at producing dopamine, which is it's called a neuromodulator.
And what dopamine does is it doesn't give you a pleasure.
It gives you anticipation of a reward. That's why when
(25:28):
people get addicted to drugs or alcohol, or gambling or
pornography or any of these bad things that get take
over people's lives and hurt them, it's because they have
all this anticipation and they get craving. Now, when people
are really successful, money, power, pleasure, fame, their brain gives
them dopamine in anticipation of those rewards. And when you
get really good at it, because I don't know, just hypothetically,
(25:49):
let's say you're Katie Kuric, Well, then guess what happens.
A little is not enough. Your threshold keeps getting more
and more and more and more. Right, the treadmill starts
going at terrifying speed. You call it the hedonic tread
now exactly right now. There's a process in the brain
called homeostasis. It's a complicated word with a simple idea.
(26:10):
That is to say, your brain resets, I'm gonna be
so happy when I get that car, I'm gonna be
so happy when I get that watch or that shirt,
of that relationship or that achievement. And then you reset
almost immediately. You think your brain tells you because mother
nature lies that you're going to actually be satisfied forever.
You're actually satisfied for a minute or maybe a week
(26:30):
or I don't know, ten days on the outside, and
then it's off to the races again. Run run, run,
run run. That's what we all have to dominate. And
people who have had a lot of success, that's great
because these are the people. I mean, look, think of
all the good things you've done for me, because I've
been watching you for your You've informed me, you've made
my life better. But that doesn't mean that along the
(26:50):
way that has made you happy. So what we all
need to do with our own kind of success addiction
And nobody's watching you right now, nobody's gonna be watching
your show, who's not a little bit of a striver.
I know your audience that we all can actually dominate
the system by not going with the flow. Your brain says,
go more, do more, hit the lever, hit the lever,
(27:11):
get the cookie. You need to stand up to that
and behave in a different way. You need to do
the opposite thing. That's what the research says, and so
that's probably what we need to talk about. Right. What
is the opposite thing. The opposite thing is not to
have more. The opposite thing is to want less. Now,
I know it sounds weird, but here's the way to
(27:31):
think about it. Satisfaction finally scratching that itch, finally being
satisfied is not doesn't just come from having more, doing more,
seeing more, getting more. It's what you have divided by
what you want. Everybody remembers a little tiny bit in
the recesses of their mind about their high school fractions,
(27:51):
and and you remember that if you've got halves divided
by wants, there's two ways to increase that number. Increase
the have or decrease the wants. Here's the deal. We
actually have the power to want less. We don't have
to become a Buddhist monk. I mean, if you want to,
that's great. You know, go study in the cave, that's fantastic,
(28:12):
or go to a you know, hill land retreat. I've
done it. I recommend it. It's fantastic, But you don't
have to do it. The key thing is to think
about your wants, to not be managed by your wants.
I have a reverse bucket list. The bucket list is
all about hals. The reverse bucket list is all about
wants and what I do on my birthday, Katie, and
(28:32):
I recommend everybody is I make a list of all
my cravings. Oh, finally be happy if I have this.
I'll finally be happy. If my book sells this number
and I have or I do this thing on TV,
whatever it happens to be. Everybody's got their thing. I
get the car, I get whoever. You make a list
of all those cravings, and you say I might get
it and I might not. Easy come, easy go. That's
moved the appetite, the craving, the desire from your automatic
(28:54):
brain to your human brain to call the prefrontal cortex,
and there you can manage your cravings. If you're conscious
of them, you can manage them. It's not perfect, but
you'll be amazed at how much more satisfying you will
find ordinary life when you looking at the small things.
And look. I follow you on social media, and you
(29:16):
know you're you're putting on social media pictures from your garden.
I love that, like your flowers and your garden, Katie.
I love that it's so beautiful on Instagram that you
do that. That's you enjoying the small. Now to do
that more, you actually have to be conscious of your
worldly wants and manage them in that particular way. It's unnatural,
but we all can do it. It's interesting because you
(29:39):
talk about preparing for the second half of your life,
finding success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half
of your life is the subtitle from Strength to Strength,
And I think you posit that you really are your
most successful really by the time you're forty or say fifty,
that you have fluid into colligence then and then you
(30:02):
move to something called crystallized intelligence. Explain that Earth, because
I I know what you mean, but I think for
people who haven't read the book, explained what you mean. Yeah,
so there are two kinds of basic intelligence, and the
world tells you you get one big act. That's the
world tells you get really really good at what you do,
be really successful in what you do, and if you're lucky,
(30:24):
you can keep it going forever. You can't keep it
going forever. Now, if you're an athlete, you know that, right,
if you're you know, you're Tom Brady, maybe you can
keep going forever. But the rest of us mortals can't keep,
you know, going, And and you know, I actually have
interviewed Olympic athletes and talk to people and they're they're
very much in touch with the fact that they can't
keep going on forever. But it's still really painful. Now.
The interesting thing that the research finds is that that
(30:45):
thinking professions, knowledge professions, whether you're a doctoral lawyer, or
financial professional or an electrician or lots of things, that
you tend to get better and better and better to
your twenties and thirties and then max out and then
you you're not quite as good as you used to be.
And that's what burn out actually comes from. You know,
your dentist who suddenly, weirdly at age forty five, says,
(31:05):
I think I'm gonna take Fridays off to golf. It's like,
what the heck you loved being a dentist. It's like,
I don't know, I'm just less interested. That's because your
dentist isn't progressing and can't quite put her finger on
why she's not as good at dentist. Thank you for
a woman. Yeah, I mean, it's like, my dentist is
a woman, and she's phenomenal. Right, I don't know if
she's actually I don't think she's forty five yet. But
(31:26):
the point is, I hope she reads my book. I'm
gonna take her copy. And so this is this is
an important thing to keep our to keep our eye on,
because a lot of people start panicking at this point
and think, oh, oh no, Well, the truth is, this
is the time to celebrate because there's another intelligence that
comes in behind it that's not about hard work and
focus and and you know, living on the edge of
(31:48):
the curve, innovative capacity, working memory, all the stuff that
made you good at what you did. It's about wisdom.
It's about knowledge about how to explain ideas is how
to teach, is to go from innovator to instructor. And
everybody can do that in their own way. I've seen
you do this in your career. This is the most
interesting thing. What are you now, your teacher, this is
(32:10):
what we're doing. You're introducing your audience to big ideas
that can actually enrich them. What do you your your professor, Kuric,
you now this is You've naturally moved on to this
crystallized intelligence curve, and everybody can. There's a transformation if
you're willing to take it. The people who are unhappy
are living in the past. The people are happy, they
(32:30):
jump onto this wisdom curve. I'm gonna teach, I'm gonna
mentor I'm gonna lead teams. So if you're a sort
of entrepreneur, that's fluid intelligence. If you're a venture capitalist,
crystallized intelligence. If you're a star litigator, fluid, if you're
a managing partner, crystallized You know, I used to do
highly mathematical research papers on my fluid intelligence curve. Now
(32:53):
I write for The Atlantic and I talked to you
crystallized intelligence, and I'm happy. I'm happy or than i've
ever been because I'm on the right curve. I think
about professional athletes, I think about CEOs, I think about honestly,
President Obama, Like, how do they shift from sort of
(33:13):
being in the epicenter, the white hot center of everything,
where they have huge responsibility and all lies are on
them and then shift into a different mode without feeling
that their best years are behind them, Because I I
do think about you know, like, how do people manage that? Yeah,
(33:37):
it's very hard. The more success you have, the harder
it is. And for a couple of different reasons, you're
not quite sure that second curve is there. I mean,
you're taking it on faith from a Harvard professor. That's
one thing, actually jump in. That's something else. The second is,
you know a lot of people just love that first curve.
And the reason they like it is because they get
all these honors, They get all this they get all
(33:57):
this admiration, they get all this prestige from it. And
the more successful and famous you are, the harder it
is actually to say goodbye to those particular things. But
the happy people are actually able to make that shift.
They have the presence of mind. Now. One of the
things that makes it much easier is they tend to
be accompanied by somebody who loves them. This is one
of the things that you actually find and so whether
(34:19):
it's a best friend, whether it's a spouse, whether it's
your your adult children. You need somebody who takes you
by the hand and says, you know what, and this
is you know, my wife did this for me. My
wife Ester we even already thirty one years now, and
and and you know, she said I was retiring. It
was a CEO, you know, but I did this research
and I had to I had to stop because I
(34:39):
saw the writing was on the wall. I was not
getting better at what I was doing. And so I said,
I gotta get on the second curve. I know it's
out there. And she took me by the hand and said,
it's okay. I love you. You're the father of my
children and the love of my life. And whether you're
successful in worldly terms or not, I love you all
the same. And that is so critically important because a
lot of people were stuck on that fluid intelligence curve.
(35:01):
On that first curve, They're like, I'm nothing, I am dead.
If I'm not number one, if I'm not the striver,
if I'm not the homo economic aust you know, if
I'm not the hardest worker in the room. Right, you
need people who love you. That's really really critical. I'm
wondering though, if you're inadvertently contributing to the last acceptable
(35:23):
ism in society, and that's agis um. You know, I
know that the CEO of Target just said, I'm sixty five,
I'm not retiring UM And and I wonder if with
this second phase of life, if you're sort of saying
to the world, Arthur, you know, if you're not under fifty,
(35:44):
you you don't have fluid intelligence, you're not at the
top of your game. You need to go into this
second stage of life, and you need to leave leave,
leave the stage. I mean, do you think about that? Yeah?
I do. But you know what I actually I'm feathering
my own nest as I get older. I'm fifty eight
years old, and I want to be working for a
long time, but where I'm best suited to work. So
(36:08):
this is the key thing. Here's what I have this view, Katie.
You know, one of I look at these Silicon Valley firms,
these tech firms and social media firms and all that,
and they're making all these errors that older executives to
shake their heads like how do they make that error?
The reason is because all fluid intelligence, no crystallized intelligence.
In other words, it's all brains, no wisdom, and that's
(36:30):
a big problem because they're making all the mistakes that
that all the older guys and women they made a
thousand years ago and their careers. My view is that
we need way more people in positions of leadership or
over seventy, that's my view, using their crystallized intelligence, not
relying on their fluid intelligence. You know, that's what we need.
I think every executive team, every C suite needs somebody
(36:51):
over seventy, every marketing team, every product team, these social
media companies, they need old people who actually can say
and so my view is that no, on the contrary,
this is the permanent employment plan for us, as long
as we're actually doing it right and not trying to
live in the past. Is the way that it works.
The impetus I guess for this book was when you
(37:11):
were sitting in an airplane and you were listening to
a really sad and upsetting conversation an older gentleman talking
to his wife saying, my life is over. I kind
of wish I were dead, and you take it from there. Yeah, so,
you know, I was kind of a tender point in
my life, you know, I had been running this thing
tank in Washington, d C. It had been going really,
(37:33):
really well, but I was wondering, you know, what is
the cadence of my own life? Where am I going?
Where does this I just do it again and do
it again and do it again and then stop, and
they just hope for the best. And you know, hanging
around the house, I don't know, you know, ten years,
fifteen years from hours going to go. And I was
kind of contemplating that existentially, And when I heard this conversation,
I overheard it. Now, as a behavioral social scientist, my
(37:55):
laboratory is the overheard conversation. So for everybody watching and
listening to us right now, if you're behind me in
a Starbucks confessing that somebody broke your heart, keep your
voice down because I might write a book about it anyway.
So I I hear this conversation this couple behind me
on the plane in this key moment in my own life,
and you know, he's kind of mumbling, but here his
wife's saying, oh, don't say it would be better if
(38:16):
you were dead, And I'm like, holy moldy, I wasn't.
I'm not eavesdropping, but this is big and and and
and she's trying to console him, and he's really unconsolable
the fact that nobody cares about him, nobody's listening to him. Okay,
so we land at the air this is a night flight.
We land at the airport at our destination. Everybody stands
up and the lights go on, and and we turn around.
I wanted to see him. I just wanted to see
(38:38):
his face. And it was one of the most famous
successful men in the world. This is somebody that everybody knows.
Now why he's a hero from decades past. Is not
some controversial actor you know, or you know, politician, No, no, no,
this is this is somebody who did big things that
we all admire, and and you know it's in his
(38:58):
late eighties and and and and he's he's confessing this thing.
So we're walking out of the airplane, and the pilot,
you know how, they all stand by the cockpit door
thing thanks for flying United folks, and he stops. The
guy who's right behind me. Blowing my mind at this
point because you know, the whole model of success is wrong.
If I could be half as successful as that guy,
I'd be automatically happy over the moon, right no wrong, okay.
(39:20):
So he sees the guy, the hero on the plane
and he says, sir, you've been my hero since I
was a little boy. And I turned around and he's
beaming with pride. And I asked myself, so which is it?
Is it this one or the one half an hour ago?
And I thought to myself, our model of success and
happiness is wrong. In truth, the data are very clear
(39:42):
that people who tend to be most disappointed with their
lives after seventy and eighty are the ones who are
most successful early on. And the reason is because they
can't live up to their own standards. They're addicted to success.
And now the party's over. And they if you look,
if you don't do anything with your life, you all
know when the party's over. But boy, oh boy, if
you do a lot, you're really going to know. And
I said, I'm going in search of the secret to
(40:04):
be both successful and happy. And that's what this book is.
It's the book that I needed in my life. I
wrote it for you to um, I'm actually writing a
book right now about the things I wish I knew
when I was twenty five, which is the science of happiness.
For the young striver that's coming next. But I didn't
get that book because that book hadn't been written yet.
And I and I've really lived according to it. And
(40:25):
you can be successful and happy, but you can't leave
it up to chance. I mean, mother nature is not
going to take you in that direction. And so what
do you think the guy sitting behind you in the
airplane did wrong? What he was doing was he was
reliving past glory and wishing that he could keep that
alive forever. And it turns out that's very common. In
(40:46):
the book, I talked about the case of Charles Darwin,
you know, the great naturalist, and everybody knows what a hero,
what a great figure he was. He buried at Westminster
Abbey because he's such a national hero. He died an
unhappy man, and the reason is because he kind of
got to the end of his fluid intelligence. He wanted
to stay on that curve. He never moved curves, and
he spent the last twenty five years of his life
(41:08):
kind of regretting the fact that he couldn't make any
more progress, and he didn't enjoy his research, and he
felt kind of washed up and kind of like a loser.
Charles Darwin, one of the greatest naturalist scientists who's ever lived,
died unhappy for the same reason that so many people do.
If I could talk to any of these people, I
would talk about the structure of the brain that how
(41:30):
that the fluid intelligence goes to the crystallized intelligence, and
happiness is right in front of them if they're willing
to grab it and change their own lives. How do
they recognize or how does anyone recognize when it's time
to jump to the second curve that your fluid intelligence
is drying up and you need to go for the
crystallized intelligence and you need to make that shift not
(41:54):
only in your head, but in your heart and your
habits to begin with. It's a really good idea to
to understand this before you need it, right, And not
all of us do. I mean, it's not all of
us have been able to have that, But you know
everybody's listening to us who's thirty and as a striver
and you know who you are right to start thinking,
I'm doing this right now, and I'm in this is
(42:15):
a great party. But what only the crystallized version of
what I'm good at? What might it look like just
to kind of visualize a little bit because twenty years
from now you might want to be thinking about that.
You don't have to change careers necessarily, although that's not
out of the question either, But what might it look like?
What's your flight of fancy? What would give you joy
to think about? This? Really a crystallized kind of kind
(42:36):
of skill, that's number one. But the key thing is
that that that that that people need to they'll see
that they're that the fluid intelligences decline way before anybody
else does, and the tell is burnout. That's the tell.
You know, when people start saying, I used to like
this more than I than I do. Now this used
to excite me more than it does now, that means
(42:58):
you're not making progress. People are wired for progress. Human
beings get no pleasure from the status quo. We're not
wired for It's very interesting, you know. One of the
things that I've studied is is you know diets, diets
have a failure rate, right, I mean, what industry can
continue to exist? It exists on hope, not results. Now,
(43:19):
here's the thing. Dieting is pretty easy, but keeping weight
off is near impossible. The reason is because you're perfectly
willing to forego the food that you love as long
as the CD is going down, because you know that
the happiness from the scale going down is higher than
the unhappiness from not eating scones or donuts or something
like that. But then when you reach your goal weight,
(43:39):
the reward is you never get to eat ever again
what you like. That's not a very nice reward, and
so people abandon the diet. That's all about progress. People
love progress, but the status quo is terrible. So you're
gonna notice, you know, maybe whatever happens to be, I
like it less. That's when it's time to start thinking
about the second curve. That's when it's trying to start
(44:02):
thinking about the reverse bucket list. So you're not adding adding,
adding adding, that's when it start. It's time to actually
think about who's going to hold me by the hand,
who is in part of my root system. That's when
it's time to start thinking what are the friendships that
I actually need? What are the spiritual relationships that I
can actually cultivate? And if you do these things, so
(44:22):
I wrote the book, this could be the greatest, most
joyful adventure in life. This is the best time of life.
But if you don't do it. It's like walking through
a forest at night with no guide and no flashlight.
What are things every person can do to kind of
have a a more fulfilling, purposeful life, that that has
(44:44):
more love than fear, and that that that can just
sort of feed you in a way, the all with
all the right things and not all the wrong things. Yeah,
the couple of things to keep in mind the f
is that all these things that I write, all these
things that I teach, that I'm privileged to be able
to talk to you about, all these things are accessible
(45:07):
to everybody. You don't need to be a nerd with
the PHDU teaches at Harvard to actually learn about these ideas.
I write about this in the Atlantic because I want
to bring these ideas to millions of people in relatively
non technical terms. You don't have to be a technical
specialist to understand that. But you've got to do the work.
Wishing is not enough. Just wishing you were happier, we'll
make you unhappier because you'll focus on your unhappiness. But
(45:29):
if you do the work that's habits, not hacks, committing
yourself to living in a better way, in a newer way.
This is magic. That's part one. Part two is this,
You've got to practice these things. You can't just learn
about these You gotta practice these things in your life.
You get, I get. I can teach you that gratitude
is one of the greatest tricks. But it's not enough
(45:50):
for to be a trick. It's got to be a
way of life. And so practice these things and and
committing yourself to doing it is like going to the gym,
not once, it's going to the gym five days a week,
or alorities a week, or whatever happens to be, and
then you start to see a transformation. You enjoy it
and will last but not least, You've got to share
these ideas. Look, we've talked about a whole bunch of
science and very accessible terms. Here's what I would wish
(46:11):
that will really help a lot of people who are
watching us to make these ideas come to life. Find
three people that you love and and if you need
to watch our our conversation again and take notes and
go teach these things. You know what that'll do is
it will move them from an impression to the executive
center of your brain. You know, becoming a teacher is
(46:31):
the best possible way to absorb ideas. My father was
a mathematician. He said, I only understood math when I
had taught calculus fifty times, you know. And the truth is,
we can all be happiness teachers. And the more that
we are bringing these secrets in a spirit of love
and sisterhood and brotherhood to everybody we possibly can, the
happier we're going to get. In other words, understand practice
(46:54):
and share. A lot of this is in the book.
You talk about living in the present, but that takes
this a plant, you know, and I think you say,
someone said we shouldn't be called homo sapiens, we should
be called homo prospective. That means we're always in the
future and we're not really present right now. Yeah, exactly.
And that takes, you know, take it takes a little
(47:15):
bit of effort. There's a whole mindfulness meditation movement going
on out there, but it really isn't that complicated. You
gotta you have to be alive now, you know, when
you're washing the dishes, say I'm washing the dishes now,
don't distract yourself from everything. When you're on the train,
look out the window and actually be on the train
at that particular moment. That's the real magic of mindfulness
(47:36):
that I've found, and it's really quite transformed my life.
Katie's when I found because I saw theoretically in the
literature is gonna make me happier, And now I do it.
I go on these walks for an hour with no devices,
and I smell the morning air and I stopped when
I look at flowers. I'm telling you, I mean, it's
just it sounds so dumb. I'm a fifty eight year
old man, I should know this at this point. It's
(47:57):
just the best. When I read about that, I also thought, yes,
I want to live in the moment, but I also
want to care about the future. I want to be
a concerned citizen who is focused on helping people preserve
the planet. So how do those things work in tandem.
You're much better at actually thinking clearly about a better
(48:20):
future when you're fully present right now. The reason is
because your love relationships blossom, you appreciate the things that
you're actually seeing. You don't have a full appreciation for
the people and the things around you unless you're fully
mindful right now, and as such, you won't be able
to create a future. You will be able to envision
a future that actually is better than the status quo.
Here's the best news about being here now. It makes
(48:42):
you better in the future as well. A big thank
you to my guests Arthur C. Brooks. You can find
many of his happiness insights at The Atlantic and go
check out his book From Strength to Strength to start
living your best life now. Next Question with Katie Kurik
(49:07):
is a production of I Heart Media and Katie Curic Media.
The executive producers Army, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The
supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements and
Adriana Fasio. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements.
For more information about today's episode, or to sign up
(49:27):
for my morning newsletter, wake Up Call, go to Katie
Currek dot com. You can also find me at Katie
Curic on Instagram and all my social media channels. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Host
Katie Couric
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