The Science of Lasting Happiness with Arthur Brooks

One of the hardest things to recognize is when something that's served you really well starts to work against you. Ambition, speed, problem-solving, the ability to push harder. Those traits can create a lot of success. But my guest, Arthur Brooks, argues that as we get older, the game changes. Our advantage shifts from innovation and raw processing power towards wisdom, synthesis, and teaching. And if we keep trying to win the old way, we can end up stuck. That is just one of the ideas in this conversation today. We also get into success addiction, why satisfaction depends as much on wanting less as having more, the reverse bucket list, and how money can actually buy happiness when it creates more time, connection, or generosity. This conversation actually originally aired as episode 47 on this show almost four years ago. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about what I want more of and less of in my life. And I went back and I re-listened to this episode, and I think I took away even more now than I did the first time. So I really wanted you guys to check it out. I'm Chris Hutchins, and whether this is new to you or you've already heard it before, I really think it's worth a listen. And if you do enjoy it and you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Arthur, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted. It's going to be great. When I first read the title of this book, I thought, maybe this book is for my parents and it's not for me. Now, I've since learned that that's maybe not the case. But could you talk about who the book's for and how that's different from maybe the time of your life that it's about? Yeah, this is a book that basically says you don't have to leave your happiness up to chance as you get older. And, you know, there are people who are old who are going to read it, and there are people who want to get old, and there are people who are getting older, and that is 100% of the population. And a lot of people think, am I going to be happy when I'm old? I don't know. Hope so. Live right. Hope for the best. And this book is basically a claim based on science and talking to the happiest people and the unhappiest people as they get older that we don't have to leave our happiness up to chance. You can build a happiness 401k. Now, we all know, and you know perfectly well, because you do a lot of stuff in finance, that the sooner you start your savings, the better it's going to look when you're older. So this is about happiness in the second half of life, but it's about starting to get happier in the first half of life. I love that. I think we all want to be happy. But one thing I think it's important is, how are we defining happiness in these conversations here and in the book? That's the first thing I ask my students. I have this MBA class that I teach at Harvard Business School. And the first day of class, I go around and say, what's happiness? And they start talking about their feelings. You feel the way you feel when dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. It's the feeling of whatever. That's not right. That's like saying that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. That's not the Thanksgiving dinner. That's evidence of the Thanksgiving dinner that you can perceive. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something else. So when I look at the social scientists and people who are happy and unhappy, happiness is a combination of three. You might say they're macronutrients. Food can be defined in terms of three macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And you have to have them in balance and abundance if you're going to feel good, if you're going to have good health and feel good. Happiness has three macronutrients that you need in balance and abundance. You need enjoyment, you need satisfaction, and you need purpose. When I meet somebody who's not happy, I start looking diagnostically at these three things. And so the first practical takeaway that comes from all this theory is that if somebody's like, ah, my life isn't complete, some things are good, some things aren't, but I'm not really happy. It means there's a lack of balance in one of these things. Either you don't have enough enjoyment in your life, or you're actually not hitting goals, which means you don't have satisfaction, or you don't have a sense of purpose and direction in your life. It's one of those three things. And so that's the first place to start looking if you feel like you're not where you want to be in terms of your happiness. And is there some kind of easy way someone listening could say, well, which one is it? Is there like a quiz or a question you can ask yourself for each one of those things to figure out how you are on each one, maybe rate them? Yeah, there actually are. And that's why I write my column in The Atlantic every Thursday morning, because I'm digging into different aspects of that. And so the column in The Atlantic has got a whole bunch of quizzes. People who are kind of into it, they want to read a little bit of the underlying research. You can read more articles about that. Sometimes I'll talk about it like the Greek philosophers did. So Epicurus said happiness is all enjoyment. And the Stoics said happiness is all virtue and meaning. And the truth is we need to be both. And so I have a column about, are you more Epicurus or are you more Epictetus? And it actually has a quiz in there on how to do that. So my column on that is actually a good way to start to test yourself. Okay, we'll link to the column and maybe some of those quizzes in the show notes. One of the things I saw in the book that I thought was interesting was the reason why this shift from the beginning of your life seemed to be somewhat linked to the type of intelligence we have and how that changes over time. Fluid and crystallized intelligence. Can you walk through that for people who aren't familiar? Yeah, so this book basically has the seven habits of people who get happier as they age. And there's one thing to keep in mind that's really important that I found over the course of my research is that there's a lot of similarity in the patterns of happiness over the first part of their life. So generally speaking, adults, they kind of all pack together. And the older you get, the more that people diverge. And so you see that people after about 65 go into two groups. One gets happier and happier, and the other gets less and less and less happy. And the group that's getting less happy, paradoxically, they tend to be the strivers who work the hardest early in their lives. So you've got to look at that. That's a big mystery. That doesn't mean it has to be that way. But we need skills. That's why I have the seven skills that the happiest people later in life have so that even if you are a striver, you're not doomed. You just have to adopt these skills and do the work is what it comes down to. Everybody who is getting the hacks needs the hacks. And these are the seven hacks for all intents and purposes. That's the book. In a nutshell, that's the book. Okay, now, what's the first skill? The first skill is making sure that you're on the right success curve. A little bit of background on this. For about 100 years, psychologists have noticed that there's two types of geniuses. There's early bloomers, people who have an early appearance in their genius, like child geniuses and young entrepreneurs. And then you've got the late bloomers. And so you think of those like the Elon Musks and the Dalai Lamas. Those are the two types of geniuses out there. And one's really young and one's really old. For the longest time, we thought, well, two types of people. They got the people who do this kind of thing. People do this type of thing. Well, later, we figured out everybody has both. So that doesn't mean that I'm going to be Elon Musk or the Dalai Lama, but I have a lot of power to actually use my potential to the max. Early on, it's going to be innovative capacity, processing speed, indefatigability, my ability to go, go, go, go. Later in life, it turns out that my abilities, they migrate toward my wisdom, not necessarily to work all night and solve problems that are brand new and innovative, but to take existing knowledge, understand what it means, combine ideas and teach them. That's what you're really good at later in life. Now, the first type of genius is called fluid intelligence. It increases naturally all the way through your 20s and through your early 30s, and it starts to decline in your late 30s and goes down really fast in your 40s. That's the reason that people are less likely to come up with some weird, big, eye-popping innovation when they're 50, much, much less so than when they're 30. When you're 30, you're at maximum innovative capacity. In your 40s, you're crystallized intelligence. That's the second type, starts to increase, which means that you get more wisdom. You have more perspective. You know more. You have a good memory. Your memory actually improves in a lot of ways, believe it or not. You can't recall Joe Smith's name. You forget that, but you remember all the important things, and you can combine them. It's like you have a vast library, and you know how to use it, as a matter of fact. One of the reasons that you forget stuff when you're older is because your library is so big that it takes time to go get a piece of information. It's not degradation. It's just the size of the library, basically. The filing system is dense. And so later on in life, people use it. They become better Scrabble players. They can actually be better at foreign languages, even though their vocabulary is no good. Their historians do half of their work, on average, after age 65 because it's pure crystallized intelligence. It's this wisdom. They're teachers. And at my university, the best teachers who get the best teaching evaluations are uniformly over 70 years old. That's crystallized intelligence. So the key thing is you've got to be on the right curve. If you're 50 or 60 years old, you're like, ah, I'm struggling to keep up with the 30-year-olds. You're doomed, man. You're doomed. You're going to feel horrible about yourself. They're going to run circles around you. But here's what you need to do. You need to school them with your wisdom. This has so much potential for rocking our world. You're on the first curve, and here's the thing. If you want to be happy and successful, you've got to jump to the second curve. You've got to go from the Elon Musk to the Dalai Lama. You've got to go from the innovator to the instructor. You might change jobs. You might not. But you've got to retool your life and what you're paying attention to and what you're trying to do. That's the first big skill of people who get happier as they age. And so if you're someone listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm in that late 20s, early 30s part of my life. I know I need to jump the curve eventually. What does that jump look like? How do I prepare for it? What should I be doing with my time? So to begin with, the tell, the big tell, the hack, is that when you're starting to see the decline, you're going to see it before anybody else does. You're going to notice that if you're starting to burn out a little bit, you're starting to be a little less interested. You're a little less inclined to stay up 16 hours to write all that code than you used to be. The reason you want to do it less is because you're not as naturally good at it as you were before. That's your tell. Ability is not the tell. Desire is always the tell. Your desire tells all always. What you like always indicates what your capacities are. And so when you're first starting, it's like, I don't know, man. This guy came to me with this great new startup idea, but I like, ah, I don't have a fire in the belly anymore. That's good. That's a good sign. That means that you're actually in liminality. You're between the curves is actually what that means. Okay, so what do you need to do? You need to learn, and you need to actually start combining knowledge. Instead of writing the book that has the big new mathematical treatise that nobody's ever come up with before, you write the book that combines everybody's best idea. Start learning about synthesis of things as opposed to the creation of brand new ideas. Synthesize things as opposed to inventing things. And that means different things in different professions. If you're a lawyer, you should start running a team of young lawyers. You should go from a cowboy to a team leader. That's a really good way to do it. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, don't come up with a big innovation. Find people who can and make them successful. That's the reason that, you know, great athletes who are unbelievable early in their careers, they're really, really good as commentators on TV. It's not just because their knees have gone out. It's the same reason that entrepreneurs who are unbelievably successful can be great in BC later. Because what they are is actually teachers. They're cultivating the next big talent. And every profession has something like this. This episode is brought to you by GELT. 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As an AllTheHacks listener, you can skip the wait list. Head to allthehacks.com slash GELT, G-E-L-T. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash GELT, G-E-L-T. This episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. It is easy to overcomplicate simple tasks, but some things really don't need to be that hard, like putting an estate plan in place. I used Trust and Will years ago, long before they were a sponsor, because it was quick, easy, and way less intimidating than it seems. In a few guided steps, we had a solid plan for what happens to our savings, how healthcare decisions get made, who'd be the guardian for the kids, and what wishes we have for them. And after our second child, it was so easy to update everything. Trust and Will offers affordable, attorney-designed estate plans online that you can create in as little as 30 minutes. Everything estate-specific, tailored to your needs, secured with bank-level encryption, and easy to share with the trusted contacts who need access. Plus, if you want expert input along the way, attorney support is available as an add-on. Trust and Will, affordable estate plans, priceless peace of mind. Go to trustandwill.com slash allthehacks and get 20% off. That's trustandwill.com slash allthehacks to get your 20% off. Trustandwill.com slash allthehacks. Are there people that kind of are household names that kind of have either done this well or poorly that kind of bring the example to life? There are a lot of historical figures that have done it poorly and well. In the book, for example, I talk about Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin is on everybody's list of greatest scientists. I mean, he changed the way that we think with his theory of natural selection, the theory of evolution, unbelievable. Well, he came up with that at age 27 when he came back from his around-the-world voyage on the Beagle collecting botanical and zoological samples. And from his late 20s, he was already the most celebrated scientist in Europe. He was rich. He was the king of the mambo, man. I mean, it was unbelievable. And he dined out on these theories for the next 30 years. He nurtured them, and he used this big innovation. Now, the problem was he got stuck when he was about 50 years old because he hadn't been a very motivated student, so he didn't learn very much math or statistics. He didn't learn German. And if you were going to be a serious scientist, you needed to know German in the late 19th century. So what happened was that his own field passed him by mathematically. There was a Czech priest and scientist named Gregor Mendel who actually was more mathematically sophisticated, and he invented the theory of genetics. And that's what Charles Darwin needed to progress in his own field. And he couldn't understand it, couldn't read it, and got stuck. And from the age of 50 until he died at 73, he never did very original work ever again. He wrote 11 more books, but he hated them all. He died feeling like a disappointment. Why? He was stuck on his first curve, Chris. He was on his fluid intelligence curve, and it doesn't have to be that way because he could have jumped onto the second curve, but he didn't know it existed, or he didn't want to do that. That's the mistake. Okay, let's get a better case study of somebody who did it right. Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived. According to a lot of people, including me, I made the first 12 years of my career as a classical musician, and Bach's my favorite composer. You know, he was unbelievable. He was the innovator of the High Baroque. Mind-blowing stuff when he was in his 20s. He was so famous, he was so great. And then music passed him by. At the age of 50, his son, he had 20 kids, by the way, so that guy was productive. His son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, invented a new style of music called the classical style, and Bach, the father, couldn't keep up. He's like, I can't write in this style. I don't know how to write in this style. His fluid intelligence was too low for him actually to keep up with the innovations of the time. So what did he do? He retooled his career as a teacher. He turned from writing original pieces of music to writing textbooks about the High Baroque. He went from doing commissions for the greatest pieces of music to writing music for the church as part of his teaching responsibilities. And he became the most beloved teacher of his time. He was jumping onto his crystallized intelligence curve. He had a studio full of students who adored him. He was known as a truly great teacher. He was working on this textbook called The Art of Fugue. He literally died mid-measure while writing one of the fugues. Today, a hundred years later, a famous composer named Felix Mendelssohn found his manuscript, and he's like, dude, you gotta hear this, to his friends. And they played it, like, this is beautiful. Today we play that textbook as a work of art. He died with his kids surrounding him and his students surrounding him and his grandkids surrounding him, and he died with love and happiness on his success curve. By the way, on his better success curve. Because dying happy is a good way to die. Yeah, so he definitely nailed skill number one. And two, he nailed it, man, he nailed it. And he was the living proof that everybody's got both. But you gotta jump when it's time to jump. You gotta have faith that it exists and you gotta have courage to make the change. And then you said you got a handful of these skills that you have to master. What's next? The skills you gotta master next are the things that make you not want to jump and the things that make it easier. So one of the key things you find about people who are really unhappy and actually can't get happier, they wind up going downward in their happiness and stuck on this fluid intelligence curve and thinking about the past and kind of pissed off because, you know, I'm not appreciated anymore and trying to hide their weaknesses and all that. They have a really bad and nasty addiction, which is something that a lot of people suffer from. It's a success addiction. Now, all addictions, they implicate a neuromodulator in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of reward. It's of anticipation. This is what gets you addicted to alcohol or cigarettes or gambling or methamphetamine. It's the dopamine that makes you want it, want it, want it. It gives you a mild burst of satisfaction and then it goes away and you want it again. We're like monkeys on cocaine, you know, where we lose our sense of proportion. We lose our sense of inhibition. We hit the lever, hit the lever, hit the lever again and again and again. Addiction's bad because dopamine can chain us. The worst kind of addiction that I see for really, really successful people, they're success addicts. You know what a lot of really, you know, the ambitious people you and I know, from a young age, their parents are like, you're special, you're a hard worker, you get A's, you always win. And they objectify their kids and the kids objectify themselves as homo economicus, as the victorious one, as the successful one, and they get the cookie of success, and they hit the lever, they get the promotion, they get the extra money, they get the adulation, they get the compliments, and they love it. It gives, literally, it stimulates dopamine in their brain. And so they hit the lever, hit the lever, hit the lever. And when they're getting better on their fluid intelligence curve, man, it's like flying with terrifying speed. It's like the monkey in front of the lever hitting the lever again and again and again and again. And then, when the hits come less frequently, it's misery, it's a dysphoria, it's literally a scarcity of dopamine in the brain. And so they chase it, chase it, chase it, chase it. And this is one of the things that distracts them from the evolution of their own strengths. Addiction makes them unable to pursue happiness. I live in Silicon Valley. So often, everyone's like, you gotta find your purpose. Whatever you're working on, it could be bigger, you could be doing more. Most of the people who I know who aren't obsessed with that seem much happier in their lives. Yet, it's still something that, even knowing that, so many people chase. The hustle culture is a cult, and it's a cult called workism, where your work is your identity, your work is your fulfillment, your work is your ego, your work is everything, and your work is your pleasure because of your success addiction and your hitting the lever. The main thing that we need to do is to establish what we call metacognition. Metacognition is very simple. The Buddhists always say, when you have feelings and urges, you need to observe those feelings and urges. Now, literally, what's going on, neurophysiologically, is that an urge or a feeling originates in the limbic system of the brain. That's the lizard brain. That's the back part of your brain that's stimulated automatically because of outside happenings. You'll be managed by that. If you're reactive and you're simply hitting the lever, if you're a cocaine monkey, you're just a limbic creature. You're like my dog, Chucho. My dog, Chucho, he's like, he sees the cookie, eats the cookie. He's highly mindful. He's not paying any positive attention or spending any time thinking about anything. He's like, cookie, eat the cookie. That's how a lot of people are who are deeply, deeply workest in that cult. The way to defeat that is by simply journaling and thinking and putting time between your impulses and your actions. The Buddhists always say, the time between action and reaction is the humanity in what we do. It's the true humanness in what we do. What's really going on here is you're moving an urge from your limbic system of your brain to your prefrontal cortex. That's the human part of your brain, the big meaty lobes behind your forehead. Once it's there, you can manage it. To be metacognitive is to say, okay, I have the urge to be successful. I feel like I'm gonna be unhappy unless I'm successful, and yet I'm not happy. You need to start journaling. That's the bottom line. Journaling, it sounds sort of wimpy and weak and kind of dumb and sentimental. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is highly neuroscientific. Journaling is the single best way to go from my dog, Chucho, to me, to my prefrontal cortex. It moves your urges into the front part of your brain, and then you can manage them. That's the single best technique for breaking these addictions, is thinking about them metacognitively. Do you need to journal that often to benefit from journaling? I actually do recommend writing down a few thoughts every day. I don't think that actually spending half an hour in the morning, half an hour at noon, half an hour at night, is probably a really great use of your time. I think it's really, really important, however, to make sure that you record what you're doing. Now, some people don't have to do this in terms of journaling. One of the great things about functioning romantic partnerships is that you can be jointly metacognitive, but you have to work every day to be talking about what's happening to you limbically, to discuss your feelings with each other. For example, when I'm feeling workist, and it's really my tendency, but left to my devices, I'm cocaine monkey all day long, I'm unhappy when I'm doing it. And I know enough about that because I'm a pretty metacognitive, pretty self-aware guy, I don't necessarily go and write in my journal. What I do is I go and I talk to my wife. I say, I got a problem, I'm doing this thing again, and we jointly metacognitively, we move it to the prefrontal cortex of my brain where I actually can manage it. So having a partner with whom you can discuss these things with confidence is arguably an even more effective way to do this. And it could be a partner, your wife or your husband, it could be a friend, I assume, or a mentor? Somebody close. It has to be somebody who actually understands you, who can do joint metacognition with you, which is to say they really want to understand what's happening to you limbically. They want to help you manage it as an executive. So they can actually function as the third lobe of your brain for you. It has to be somebody who knows you deeply. It can't be you're subordinate at work. That's not going to work at all. I want to come back to some of these other skills that you can learn, but you said something interesting when it was, okay, you could go to your partner. There are things that I think often get construed with happiness, things like love or money. Are there components of happiness? I know you talked about enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, but some of the common things I think people think of, I'm curious to get your perspective on them. So let's at least include love or romance and money and maybe other common things people think are associated with happiness and how do they fit into the picture? Sometimes they're idols and sometimes they're real. So here's the way to think about that in a very practical way. There are four things that you want that are idols and that have a little bit of a divine quality to them. They attract you. They're magnetic. You know you want them, but they're not intrinsically satisfying. Those things are money, power, pleasure, and fame. Now, all those things are good. All those things can be really good, but only when you pursue them instrumentally towards something that's more important than those things. Money's great, but if you pursue it for its own sake, it will leave you frustrated and empty. Power is the same thing. You'll become a tyrant. Pleasure is incomplete because it's entirely limbic. It'll make you a little bit more animal. You need to actually combine it with elevation and morality to make it into enjoyment, which is one of the macronutrients of happiness, and fame is literally the only idol that we pursue that you can only ever be happy in spite of. Only ever in spite of. It's super dangerous, which is why social media is making us all so crazy today because everybody can establish a little bit of local fame and they get a lot of dopamine by seeing likes and, ugh, it's awful. Okay, so those are the evil four, and they're not evil if we use them appropriately. Like anything else, wine isn't evil until you become an alcoholic, etc. So these things create addiction, and they're instrumentally, they can be okay, but intrinsically, they're the bad four. They're the idols. There's the good four. Now, here's what the four habits, let's call this the four accounts that you need to invest in every day if you want to be among the happiest people. This is what they all have in common. There's 10,000 articles of the habits of the happiest people. I've boiled the ocean down to these basic four. They all do these things every day. They practice their faith or life philosophy. You don't have to be religious. You just have something bigger than you that zooms you out on your own life. Why? Because your life is like the most boring sitcom ever with which you're obsessed. My job, my car, my money, my, ugh, it's just so boring. And yet we're obsessed with it. You need relief. You need peace. Life philosophy or faith or a spiritual practice gives you that uniquely. So it's meditation or prayer or studying the Stoics or, you know, whatever it happens to be, you've got to do your thing, and you've got to do it seriously. Second is family. The ties that bind and don't break. It's important that you not choose them but that you have them for your happiness. And God knows in many cases we wouldn't choose them. Right, Chris? And a lot of people are having a lot of trouble with their families. One in six Americans is not talking to a family member because of politics today. It's a huge problem for happiness. Unless it's a case of abuse, don't let that be you is the bottom line. The third is friendship. We have a major loneliness crisis in the United States. Vivek Murthy, our Surgeon General, and he said that the biggest public health crisis in America today is loneliness. Not the coronavirus epidemic, not opioids, not guns, no, no, no, no, no. Loneliness. The average number of close friends that somebody 30 years old has been cut in half in the past 20 years. About half of people under 30 say that no one knows them well. It's horrible for every aspect of happiness, and part of the reason for that is that everybody knows how to make deal friends, but we know less and less how to make real friends. My book talks about how to make real friends if you're incompetent because you've only had deal friends. And the last is work, and work doesn't mean working hard all night long. It doesn't mean making tons of money. It doesn't mean having prestige. It means exactly two things. Earning your success, meaning your skills meet your passions, and serving other people, the people who need you. If you earn your success, and you're serving other people, I don't care if you're an electrician or a librarian or a podcast host or a Harvard professor, you will be happy from your work, and if you don't have those things, you won't be happy from your work. Faith, family, friends, and work are the big four, are the things that we need to shoot for, and the things we need to avoid as intrinsics are money, power, pleasure, and fame. This episode is brought to you by ZocDoc. Booking a doctor's appointment is one of those things that's weirdly easy to put off. You need to find someone who takes your insurance, then you start calling around, sitting on hold, and when you finally get through, the next opening might be two months out, so it just slides down the list to another week. 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I just talk for about 20 seconds, and it shows up written out, cleaned up, and in whatever app I'm already in on my phone or computer. Two reasons it works. First, talking is faster than typing, not just in words per minute, but because typing makes me want to edit as I go, and talking lets me just flow. And second, this isn't Siri or your phone's built-in dictation. WhisperFlow cleans up the filler words, gets coworkers' names right, formats lists as lists, code as code. I can ramble, and it gives me clean text. The other thing I didn't expect, my AI prompts get noticeably better once I started talking to them, because I start including context I'd never bother to type. WhisperFlow works anywhere you'd type Gmail, Slack, Notion, Cursor, on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Try it free at whisperflow.ai slash allthehacks. That's whisperflow.ai slash allthehacks. Link's in the description. There's a book called Happy Money, which talks about using money for happiness, and one of the interesting things they say is, you know, spending money on others is actually one of the five ways they identify can make you happy. That seems to fit a little bit in work, but is it important to share happiness, to spread happiness, to give happiness in order to be happy ourselves? The way to get happier, there's an algorithm to it, believe it or not. A lot of people wish they were happier, but they're not. They're just obsessing on their unhappiness. But like anything else, you gotta do the work. And there's three steps to it. You need to understand it by doing the work and study it. Learn what the practices are. Now you can do it by talking to your grandmother. You can do it by reading my column. You can do it by lots and lots of ways, but you gotta do the work. The second is you gotta practice it. You gotta apply it. You can't read just a book about golf and become a better golfer. You gotta get out there and golf. And so you need to take the applications that all of us in this field are talking about and practice them in your life. Do your gratitude list. Do your forgiveness exercise. I have millions of exercises that I give to my students that I publish in my columns. But you gotta do the application, and then you gotta share it. This is the most beautiful thing of all. Why? Because you gotta make it metacognitive. The best way to make something metacognitive is to teach it. Why? Because you can't teach something limbically. You can only teach something from the executive center of your brain because you have to be able to articulate the idea. And so if you wanna get happier, you really have to understand it and manage it. And the best way to do it is to teach it. And teaching is just another form of sharing. So understand, apply, share. That's your happiness algorithm. And is sharing more telling people about how they can be happy or trying to make people happy through enjoyment? Ordinarily, it's both, but I actually strongly recommend showing your cards. So one of the ways that my students, and I've got this class, I've got 180 MBA students in my happiness class. And so I say one of the ways they can get final credit for the class instead of writing the exam, they can set up their own happiness class for students who didn't get in. And so what do they do? They take my PowerPoint slides, they take my name off, they put their name on. They put together their own syllabus, and they videotape the class as they turn the whole thing in. What am I doing? And they're becoming totally metacognitive in everything that we've talked about. They will never forget these technologies once they teach them. So here's the great thing about happiness, the most beautiful thing. Write it all down, make your slides, discuss it at dinner. Or talk about it and say, basically, I heard Chris Hutchins' podcast, which I love because it's a great podcast, and he had this guy who teaches at Harvard talking about the science of happiness. Here's the thing he said, I guarantee you there will not be a peep. It's great to be a happiness professor because suffice it to say that it piques people's interest. So the other one that you just mentioned in the good four that I think I want to spend a minute on is with faith. So you mentioned that it's not just organized religion, but I think so often someone might listen to this and think, those two must be the same thing. It's not for me. I'm kind of scared of this. But I hear it and I'm like, gosh, you're telling me that the people that are the happiest have these four things. How does someone who's maybe organized religion isn't a part of their life but wants to bring faith into their life in the happiness sense? How would someone get started? There are lots and lots of ways to do that. And so the two ways that I recommend, if you're uncomfortable with traditional religion and or prayer, I recommend that you start a secular meditation practice because meditation is highly concentrating. It actually will bring you to mindfulness and at the same time can zoom you out on the experience of your own life. It concentrates you on the experience of your own life and it zooms you out on the experience of your own life simultaneously. It's a very, very effective practice for doing that. And it's also extremely satisfying and it can help you to rebalance your hormone profile. All kinds of good stuff. Start with the Brothers Karamazov. Why? Because this is a study in human transcendence. That's really what it is. Read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Read The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Read The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. All of these things are hugely available to us and they'll blow your mind. If you're doing half an hour a day of that deep wisdom reading, you just won't be the same. Now, at some point, you might want to experiment with the religion of your youth because that stuff is unbelievable. I'm a Catholic and the Catholic philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, he's the reason that we read Aristotle today. Before him, nobody read Aristotle. Aristotle was lost. And he said, no, no, no. Hey guys, this is the best thing ever. And you understand Aristotle in this brand new way. Whether you're religious or not, read The Confessions of St. Augustine. It's just amazing a study in human psychology about the stirrings of the human heart. This stuff is so good. By the way, even if you're not, completely not religious at all, read the Bible because it's the most culturally inflecting and impactful book ever written. So just to understand what's going on in society, it's a good idea to read the most impactful book that's ever been read in society. Believe it or don't believe it, you can actually think that God was behind the writing of it or not behind the writing of it. It's just, your mind will be blown. You'll experience day-to-day life in a completely different way. And that's really what it's all about because you need relief from the reality show of Chris Hutchins' life. And does that mean that practicing faith could just be reading these deep ideas? Like that is actually a method for that aspect of happiness. Yeah, what I recommend is reading them in a very, very deep way. Slow down and read two pages. Underline those two pages and take notes. And then take 15 minutes and think deeply about what those ideas mean in the context of your day-to-day life. That's what the ancient philosophers called Lectio Divina. Divine reading. In other words, it's to let the reading ideas seep into your soul. And it's a very powerful cognitive technique for reading in such a way that it really will change your perspective. So yeah, I just read Man's Search for Meaning today. I read the writings of Seneca this week. It's like, get out of here. You didn't. Read one page and then we'll talk because it's so full of wisdom. I want to see the underlined. I want to see the highlighting. I want to see your notes. And then I want you to tell me what that actually did to change your way of thinking and your change of way of behaving today. That's Lectio Divina. Wow. It's not audible at 2x. No, no. You know, that is so Silicon Valley, man. That is so absolutely true. Is that I'm reading to harvest information so that I can use it for money, power, pleasure, and fame. Hugely problematic. We got way off track. And I think if we were to try to come back, the next thing that's kind of a skill that you would talk about would be about using the science of satisfaction. Am I bringing us to the right place? The science of satisfaction really is back to dopamine. You know, it's the success addict is the one who keeps hitting the lever because they think they're going to get satisfaction. And Mick Jagger sang I Don't Get No Satisfaction, which is a super famous song. It's the third most popular rock and roll song of all time. The reason is because it has a message that people can really relate to. I try and I try and I try and consumer culture and sex and all that, but I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is you can get satisfaction, but you can't keep no satisfaction because dopamine won't let you. Here's the concept for the moment. You know, every five minutes we cycle through some really heavy thing here. I love this conversation, by the way. You're fast, man. So the concept is homeostasis. Homeostasis is the natural tendency of the brain to return all physical and mental processes to equilibrium. So, for example, you get on the treadmill in the morning and you're running and to get your heart rate up to 160, you step off. 15 minutes later, your heart rate is back down to what it's supposed to be, like 80 or 70 or whatever it happens to be. If it didn't, you'd die. Homeostasis returns you to baseline. It also returns you emotionally to baseline. Something really great happens to you. Your book is a bestseller. Congratulations. One week from now, you're not going to feel a thing. Why? Because you can't stay on that high forever. You'd die. In ancient times, you'd be like, I found some tasty berries on a bush and I'm going to be permanently happy while the saber-toothed tiger sneaks up behind you and eats you from lunch. You need to have emotions to guide your behavior, but you've got to go back to the baseline to be ready for the next set of circumstances. That's the reason you can't keep satisfaction in life. You hit the lever and you think it'll stay forever and it doesn't. It stays for a minute or a day or if it's something really, really great, a week or a month. So the science of satisfaction says you can't keep it and so therefore, you shouldn't tie your bliss to the idea that you can by running from thing to thing to thing. And the happiest old people have got this figured out. The happiest old people are no longer chained to the happiness wheel. We call it the hedonic treadmill where you run and run and run and the thing is running against you and there's a little evil guy in the corner turning up the speed and after a while, you're running out of fear because if you stop on a treadmill, boom, face plant. This is the very important thing that old people figure out and they step off the hedonic treadmill. Is the hedonic treadmill similar to the concept of keeping up with the Joneses in our financial or cultural lives? It's related. That's actually a phenomenon called social comparison. And social comparison, you know, the great philosopher, President Theodore Roosevelt called social comparison the thief of joy. Unambiguously, social comparison will wipe out your happiness. It will mow down your joy. That's the reason that social media is a misery machine and you're getting a fake version of somebody else's life which you're comparing to the terrible version of your own life. Meanwhile, you're posting a fake version of your life. B.S. That's not right. And so the result of it is it's all fake, fictional social comparison and it makes you miserable. So the hedonic treadmill is bad enough. Lard on social comparison on top of that and misery is in the future. One of the things you just said, you said people when they're old that are the most happy have gotten off the treadmill. And I know you have a lot of opinions on bucket lists. I interviewed a guy named Ben Nemton a few months ago who has written a lot about bucket lists and his inspiration was talking or reading research of people who on their deathbed said one of their regrets was not living the life they wanted to. And he has through plenty of conversations come to the conclusion that part of the reason people don't do the things they want is because they never take the time to write it down, write down how they want to get there and life just gets in the way so they don't do the things they care about. And so his answer was I think people should create a list not just a bungee jump in New Zealand but things in their life, in their relationships in their family with their health and write it down as a bucket list. And I know you have some strong opinions about bucket lists so I'd love to hear your perspective on all that. There's a lot that's right that you just said but we have to be really careful. Bucket lists as we usually understand them are metastatically stupid and misery provoking. I want to make a million dollars. I want to publish a self-help book. I want people to have these basically money power pleasure honor bucket list items. Those are bad for you because what they do is they lower your satisfaction. They increase your attachment. They increase your craving and it grows around you like kudzu. Your satisfaction is not a function of what you have. Your satisfaction is a function of what you have divided by what you want. Your have's divided by your wants. Don't have a have's management strategy with a bunch of trivial bucket list items. Have a wants management strategy of decreasing your worldly wants and your satisfaction will grow. That's the reverse bucket list. The reverse bucket list is to make it a list of all of the kind of tacky cravings. I want the admiration of these strangers and I want this kind of car and I want this glamorous vacation. Write it all down. Great. Write it all down and then say I detach myself from this. I officially no longer care about this. The right thing in the bucket list that you're talking about that actually makes a lot of sense. Faith, family, friends and work that serve other people. Make a bucket list of those things. So the love that I want to have, the relationship I want to have with my adult children, the relationship I want to establish with my parents and learn about them before they die. Those are family items for example. The deep friendships that I want to migrate all my deal friends to real friends because this is one of the great sources of unhappiness and loneliness. That's a bucket list item is real friends. That's actually meritorious. It's actually seeing how I can do work that truly serves other people who need me. I want to go on a spiritual journey. That's a bucket list item that's really meritorious. So those are the things that actually should stay in the bucket and everything else should come right out. So it's less about not having a bucket list and more about calling it down to the things that will matter. And then it sounds like you and Ben at least would share that having them written down somewhere and talking about what you can do this week, this day to make progress towards them is a valuable exercise. It's just not a valuable exercise if there's 300 things that include all kinds of crazy wants. Sure. Bunchie jumping in the Mekong Delta. No. Getting to know my father better. Yes. That's actually right. So I think that he and I would agree to a very, very large extent. A bucket list is not a bucket list is not a bucket list. If you're filling your life with unsatisfied trivialities, all that's going to happen is you're going to wind up being less satisfied and unhappier than you were before. This episode is brought to you by Quince. We've got a trip to Italy on the books and I'm using it as a forcing function to upgrade some of my wardrobe. For almost everything from dress shirts to polos to swimsuits, Quince is where I keep going. They're all about fewer, better pieces, premium materials built to last, designed to become the ones you reach for day after day. And what's even better is the price. Everything at Quince ends up 50 to 80 percent less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. You're paying for the quality but not the brand markup. The best part is that the same model also applies well beyond clothes. We just picked up two accent chairs for our living room from Quince and they've completely changed our space. It is wild how Quince has now become a go-to source for almost everything we need in our home. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash all the hacks. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash all the hacks. Thank you for being here today. You can find all the links, promo codes, and discounts from all our partners at allthehacks.com slash deals. They're all brands I love and use so please consider supporting those who support us. There's been a common conversation about experiences. You know, like money should buy experiences because experiences is, you know, the way to fulfill yourself and be satisfied and be happy. But I think a little bit of what you just said contradicts that concept. There's a lot of research on this and I have two colleagues at Harvard Business School, Ashley Williams and Mike Norton. They're kind of the leading experts on how to buy happiness. You can classify it in different ways. Some people say five, some people say six. There's really four things you can do with happiness. You can buy stuff, you can buy time, you can buy experiences and you can give it away. Those are kind of the big four ways that you can use money. Now what everybody wants to do for their satisfaction is they want to buy stuff because they think that's the most tangible but that's not right. Let me tell you a story. So I've been married 30 years and 29 years ago I was having this great big blowout unbelievably bitter argument with my new wife and we were arguing about how to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, ironically, and here was the deal. My wife's from Barcelona and she's all about vacation and going to the beach and I'm a thrifty practical American and we had zero money and so I thought we should buy a couch to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I was a musician and we had just moved to the States from Spain and she didn't speak English and she was working a minimum wage job and it was brutal and so this is the argument. Beach, couch, beach, couch, beach, couch, right? And finally we compromised and went to the beach and that's why I've been married 30 years but that's not my point. The key thing to remember is that we were talking about that a couple of years ago and we got a couch. That was like 7 couches ago or something and I don't even remember the couch but I can tell you everything we did on that beach vacation because we were in love and experiencing it together. Here's the main mistake that people make. They think that physical things are permanent and experiences are evanescent. It's exactly the opposite. If you experience something with somebody you love it's permanent but if you get a thing you'll forget it and not care about it and it'll be out on the curb of your emotions almost immediately. Buying stuff seems permanent and it will give you the satisfaction and you're wrong. Your brain is lying to you and there's all kinds of evolutionary reasons why your brain is lying to you. You need to go to the other three but you got to do it in the right way. Buying experiences is great but you have to do that with someone you love. Maybe the person that you love and you want to know better is you by the way and if you really want to go to the Cambodian temples by yourself because you're actually trying to get in touch with something spiritually that's great. Fantastic, right? But it has to be for a reason and the reason has to do with experiences and improvement of a particular relationship. Second is buying time. Buying time means paying somebody to do something you don't want to do. Now not everybody listening to us can do that because they don't have enough money but if you can why would you pay somebody to cut your yard so you have more time to do something you do want with someone you love. If you do it so you can watch something stupid on Netflix all you did is waste your time and your money and that's not so great. The last is giving it away but giving it away to a cause that you love and has to serve your values. You see what I'm talking about here Chris. It's love and then love and then love. You want to turn your money into happiness it has to be based on love. So I heard you say not to watch something on Netflix. Would it be fair to say unless you watch something on Netflix that's stupid with someone you love then it's okay? Precisely. You got it. You're A plus student. Anything I'm not supposed to do as long as I do it with someone I love then I can get around the rules. You know this is the reason that neglecting your loved ones while scrolling social media is such a terrible terrible thing for your happiness because you're doing two things at once. Number one is you're numbing yourself with just a little shot of inadequate dopamine and your foregoing love. This is crazy. It's crazy plus crazy. Yeah so that's an interesting point. I have to assume that technology has made a lot of building happiness in our lives difficult because of distraction or social comparison. Is there anything it's done to make happiness easier? So here's the key thing about technology. It always over promises and under delivers. And I'm not a Luddite. On the contrary. I mean I think this stuff is really great. Anything that substitutes for love will make you unhappier. Anything that compliments your love will make you happier. All of the technologies what do they promise? You know whether it's social media whether it's Facebook or Tinder or whatever it happens to be it promises you more love. And that's why you want it. I'm going to connect with people. I'm going to get social contact. I'm going to meet people. Phenomenal. It looks really really great. But almost inevitably it actually crowds out true human experience. The experience of getting to know somebody to share your heart with somebody. Now there's a lot of neurophysiology to this. So for example there's a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone in the brain called oxytocin. This is intensely pleasurable that we get in response to eye contact and touch with other people. When people are really really lonely they do exactly the opposite of what they should do. Instead of going someplace and talking to somebody in person they scroll social media which gives you no oxytocin and makes you lonelier. Social media is the junk food of social life. And apps for dating what they do is they crowd out the experience of meeting somebody de novo. They also have another big problem which is that they don't give you enough complementarity with other people and they overload on compatibility. So this is a problem with how technology works. So here's the way to judge technology. Is it a complement to my relationships my real in-person human loving relationships or is it a substitute for those relationships? If it's the latter it's bad for you. I want to jump to one last section which was about turning weakness into strength. Yeah I know that's a scary one man. That's a scary one but this is a skill that all happy old people have in common that's really hard for young people to absorb. And once again what's this book all about? This is the happiness 401k meaning that these are the kinds of investments we need to start making at 25 or 45 or 65 so that they'll pay off later. So it's very important to understand these things from the very beginning. Old people all know that what's really off-putting is saying that you don't have strengths and being defensive about your weaknesses. I could come and be wearing an obvious toupee right now and I'd be like I think it looks pretty natural and you'd be like that thing looks like a bird's nest are you kidding me? And it would be ridiculous and it would be a sign of defensiveness and insecurity and that's the problem because life tells you if you've got a weakness you should not share it you should defend yourself against it you should hide it as a matter of fact and that's actually a huge mistake. The reason is because what we need is human connection and your weaknesses connect you with other people we're all weak. We have meritorious things too you have good things about you that people admire and that's magnetic too to be sure but if you really want to relate to somebody you've got to lead with the ways that you are like other people and that's what old people do. I was a musician for a long time and it really hurt my hearing because it was very loud playing in a symphony orchestra and now I don't have hearing aids but I'm getting a little deaf quite frankly and I'm in lecture and these kids they freaking whisper I mean you can't hear a word they're saying and so I asked my colleague one of my colleagues what do I do? And he's like you say hey I'm 57 I'm deaf speak up and it's hilarious they all laugh and they can actually relate to you and they like you better and they speak louder. So you see what I'm saying right? The connection is human frailty and this is what we need to do the most winsome people are non-defensive about their humanity they're not hiding things they know what they do well and they know what they do poorly and it's all good. Yeah you said in the book negative emotions make us more effective in our day-to-day activities? Without negative emotions and experiences we don't learn and when we don't learn we don't find meaning and purpose. So when people are trying to go from happy feeling to happy feeling and they're trying to force unhappiness out of their life paradoxically they're actually avoiding their happiness because they're not getting sufficient meaning and purpose. That doesn't mean we should go looking for suffering but suffering's going to find us and we need to find ways to experience it and learn from it. Is that an indirect argument against being eternally optimistic? I'll share it's a common argument in our household is like circumstance arises you can think of glass half full glass half empty my wife and I often take different sides of that and it's a little frustrating and I read that line about negative emotions and I thought maybe sometimes you should take glass half empty maybe it's better? Well you know it's absolutely the case so my great mentor and friend Martin Seligman he talks about rational optimism but what he's really talking about is hope. People often use them synonymously but optimism is really just a prediction that everything will be okay. Hope there's nothing unrealistic about it it's the idea that something can be done to improve the situation and I can do it. It's hugely empowering there's always a reason for hope. Hope is a theological virtue in Christianity and Judaism. I mean hope is a good thing it's a good way to be it'll make you happier and it's a virtuous way to be as well. It's better to be realistic and to do what's appropriate and to do so with hope so that's the distinction that I would make. Alright so I got a few rapid fire things before we wrap up. One is I know you have talked in the past about how you had this amazing job and then you kind of thought about happiness and you decided to quit and I think a circumstance I find a lot of people in at least you know talking to people in their 20s and 30s they're working a job they don't love it but they know that for some reason sticking it out for a little bit of time maybe not forever will bring something whether it's they'll hit their bonus six months from now and that'll give them some comfort with their financial situation or they'll get that promotion and I'm curious if you think is the answer that sometimes yes that's the case or is the answer always you should probably cut bait as soon as you feel like it's not a good idea? Well it really depends on the circumstances. I know all kinds of cases where couples are not getting along but they want their marriage to work. You need to think ahead about exactly what the circumstances are and whether or not you know something can be fixed and it's perfectly legitimate to suffer through circumstances you don't like in the moment because there's a greater prize. It's also the case that quitting a job every time you don't like it is a lost opportunity for you to prosper. It's a lost opportunity for you to grow as well too. The biggest mistake I see for young people and this is a very practical thing that I tell my students is if you quit a job like your first job out of college usually within 18 months you're probably making an error because you're incapable of learning to like it when you change jobs and careers and cities all at the same time. That is the same cognitive and emotional impact as immediate family member dying. So what happens is people are like congratulations but you're actually grieving because there's so much change in your life. You tend to cross the cables in your mind and you think that the change per se the grief that you're feeling is because you made an incorrect decision. That's wrong. And so there are all kinds of ways to stay the course. Now that doesn't mean you should be like I hate this job my life sucks but 25 years from now I'm going to get a pension so I'm going to stick with it. That's an error. Alright so next thing you've lived in a lot of places I'll give you the freedom to pick anywhere you've lived and tell people if they're going to that place what's a kind of off the beaten recommendation for a meal a drink and something to do. My favorite city in the world is Barcelona which has been my second home for the past 35 years. That's where I got married that's where I played in the symphony orchestra I consider that my own home and it's the city that I actually know best. So where are you going to eat? Any place. It's Barcelona it's one of the foodie capitals of the world. You go to a bar and you eat some bar food and you're going to be like this is the best thing I've ever had. What are you going to drink? I don't know I don't drink at all but live it up that's all I can say it's Barcelona and what are you going to see as a tourist? Oh man throw a dart the place is unbelievable. You can go to the Roman ruins you can go to the Sagrada Familia you can go to the ancient Romanesque churches you can look at the Gothic cathedrals holy cow it's just like a living walking museum of everything from modernism all the way back to prehistoric times and so go to Barcelona everybody if you haven't been to Barcelona yet you're barely living. I have been for only a few days but it's on the list to go back. There's a story you opened the book with that I know in a lot of interviews you started with but I figure we should end on it which is your situation on an airplane that kind of inspired you to write the book. The great thing about being a social scientist is that the world is my laboratory and all the research is actually me-search. That's actually the dirty secret of being a happiness specialist and every time I start on a brand new project it usually comes because I have an experience that really affects me and that's actually where the story started. Eight years ago or so I was on a flight night flight from L.A. to Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. and I heard a couple talking behind me on the plane. I could hear them it sounded like a married couple a man and a woman and they sounded old. Their voices were elderly and I couldn't quite make out the husband's words but I can tell by his wife's comments that this was serious business. She was consoling him and saying oh it's not true that it would be better if you were dead. It's not true that people don't love you and respect you that everybody's forgotten you. It's like this went on for 20 minutes and it was just it was brutal. So their flight finally ends and you know they turn on the lights and I'm kind of curious and I'm thinking you know look I'm a student of human behavior this is probably somebody who's disappointed with his life because he didn't live up to his own dreams and I stood up and turned around and it was one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody who's achieved 10 times what I will in my life. I would die to be this guy so it seems and if I did I'd dine out on my success for the rest of my life. His feats of heroism are decades in the past but still he's rich he's famous he's got it all. I thought something's up here this is no insurance policy that what the world tells you that you get successful and you can bank it and enjoy it for the rest of your life that's a lie that's an obvious lie so what's the deal? Is he an outlier or is he typical? Are the strivers the ones who tend to suffer or does he just have some mood disorder? And that's what started this investigation on what we can all do to invest in our happiness later in life that came up with a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today was that poor man on the plane and I still look him up I pray for him I hope for the best that's all I can say I for one am fortunate you had that experience because it led you to all this research led you to the book I think I'll be a happier person in the future because of it so thank you where can anyone here other than by the book follow up with what you're doing and stay in touch? I have a column every week in the Atlantic called How to Build a Life every Thursday morning in the Atlantic and if you want to see just all the different essays and books and things that I write about happiness and even learn about my classes at Harvard if you go to ArthurBrooks.com all the information's there perfect we'll link to everything in the show notes and thank you so much for being here thank you Chris thanks for what you're doing you're making me happy too