WTH: Arthur Brooks...
His new bestseller, why President Zelensky is so happy, and the role of values
We started off this week’s podcast with a question to our guest Arthur Brooks, AEI’s former president and the author of a new #1 bestseller called From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. It wasn’t about the book per se, but a tie in to the issue we’ve all been talking about day and night — Ukraine. Why, Marc asked, did Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, say this in answer to the question, “how are you.”
It's so hard to answer it. Life is as it is. My life today is wonderful. I believe that I am needed. I think that's the most important sense of life, that you are needed, that you are not just an emptiness that breathes and walks and eats something.
Stunning, no? But a life of meaning is a source of joy, even at war.
The question Arthur tackles is how to continue to live a life of meaning as one ages; when you’re on the school-dating-jobs-marriage-kids-better-jobs treadmill, it’s all about meeting and blowing through goals. But what about afterwards? We’re not going to ruin the podcast for you, but long story short, there’s good news, even if you’re not out there kicking the Russians’ asses.
Thinking about meaning isn’t just about individuals either. “Aspiration, hope and opportunity,” as Arthur says, is meant to be what a good government can facilitate. Leadership isn’t handouts, at least it shouldn’t be. Good values can define a life, but they should also define a political party and a nation. When America is at its best, it’s the land of opportunity, and it’s also a nation that understands that the world is a better place when we lead. In other words, Zelenskyy may be happy because he is needed; America is also needed, and our national purpose is fulfilled when we answer that call.
HIGHLIGHTS
AB: I don't of course know Zelenskyy and I haven't spoken to him during this terrible crisis and I'm sure there's a lot that he doesn't enjoy and I'm sure he wishes it weren't happening, be sure. [But], nobody says, "You know when I figured out my life's meaning? It was that week in Ibiza." Nobody ever says that. That's not when you find it. It's when you find your resiliency, when you feel like you're needed to humanity and when you're actually being tested. I believe him when he says that.
AB: For my research, I have interviewed emergency room nurses, I have talked to active duty members of the military, combat Marines. My own son is a foward deployed combat Marine. When is he happiest? He's happiest when he's doing stuff that sounds pretty hair-raising to me, I have to say. The reason's because that's when he's actually finding out who he is as a person. Most of us will never be challenged, will never be tried like Zelenskyy is, but in a way we should all be so lucky as to have an opportunity to be that necessary, that needed by that many number of people.
AB: This is one of the things that we forget in modern society, in modern sort of progressive culture that what we need is to have everything provided for us under the circumstances. That's exactly wrong. If you want to be depressed, have everything provided for you. If you want to depress your children, provide everything for them, protect them from safety, make sure that they're takers, make sure that they're recipients in the context of your family. The same thing is true in our culture.
AB: The Hölderlin strategy of doing everything early and then enjoying it for the rest of your life. That is completely misbegotten. It is a total misunderstanding of the dynamics of human experience. It just misunderstands the human heart.
AB: [A] society … where we say that some people are assets and everybody else should just be a recipient of largesse? This is the wrong way to build it. We need a society that's based on mutual need and work and merit and hard work and reward and earned success. This is the secret that we need.
AB: As an economist I know that I've seen lots and lots of people who do really good things and they do well, and then they die broke. They make a lot of money early on and they die broke. I said, "You needed a 401(k)." But nobody has ever written the 401(k) for happiness. What do you bank early on? How do you build your portfolio early on so that you can actually be happy earlier and actually build your happiness? What can you do so that you're happier at 75 than you were at 25? Is it just up to chance? It can't just be up to chance. I did the research over a three-year period.
AB: I wrote this book for strivers ... I mean, my plumber is an unbelievable striver. I wrote this book for my plumber. I wrote this book for bus drivers. I wrote this book for ordinary people and for people who've made a lot of money and who haven't, but everybody wants to do a lot with their life. It's got to start with a shock because the shock of the matter is that most people don't understand what it means to get older and to have unique strength that come with getting older.
AB: The world tells you, work hard, play by the rules, get better at what you do 10,000 hours and you'll be able to enjoy that kind of success for the rest of your life. It simply isn't true.
AB: The basic notion … comes from a big body of social science and neuroscience on fluid versus crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is what you get better at with your 20s and 30s where you work hard, you're able to focus. It's when people actually do their startup enterprises or get better at their jobs. They're indefatigable. They can solve problems. They're the star litigator. They're a young hotshot. If you work hard, you can be in almost any profession. The problem is that what you see is that people do that and then early 40s to mid-40s people start saying, "I don't know what it is, but I'm feeling kind of burnt out. I don't like it as much as I used to." The reason for that is not because you're getting tired of what you did. The reason is because what you were doing is getting harder because you peaked in your fluid intelligence.
AB: The good news, and this is the good news portion of the science part of the book is that there's a second success curve behind it called crystallized intelligence, literally a different form of human intelligence that is not your innovation and your focus curve. It's your wisdom and understanding curve. That increases in your 40s and 50s and it goes up in your 60s and stays high in your 70s and 80s. This is your true success curve and something that tends to go underutilized.
AB: If you remember The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there was this thing called the Babel fish that you put in your ear that translates obscure languages into languages that you can use. I'm the Babel fish for academic research for other people. Why? Because I have crystallized intelligence. The fluid intelligence was my ability to write mathematical theory. Now I have the crystallized intelligence where I can look at the stuff that other people are writing, tell the story and translate it into things that people actually understand. This is the difference between being a theoretical mathematician and being an actual historian. We have to know a lot and know how to use it. Everybody can do that.
AB: Most people who are listening to this podcast or who are reading the book, they say, "I'm not afraid of death." Only 20% of people are really, you might say, morbidly afraid of death. They have a neurotic fear of death. Most people don't have this issue at all. My point is here that everybody's got their own version of their fear of death. I talk to my students. I teach MBA students at the Harvard Business School, and they're really afraid of failure.
AB: I talk to other people who are afraid of being forgotten. I talk to other people who are afraid of irrelevance. Everybody has their death fear because each one of these things is a fear of death. It's just your own version of the death problem. I went back to the research.
AB: Ernest Becker, he wrote this very famous book in the 60s that introduced a whole field called Terror Management therapy, Terror Management Theory, where talks about people are terrified of something and they deal with it in all these different ways. Largely, they deal with it by avoiding it. That's the wrong thing to do. The reason is because your fears, when they're unmanaged, they live in a part of your brain called the limbic system.
AB: This is the ancient lizard part of your brain. I mean, Dany, your German shepherd has a limbic system, just like you do. And your dog is great, but the fact is your dog is reactive. Look at the biscuit, eat the biscuit. Don't think about the biscuit. That's because it's all limbic. You get stimuli, you act according to stimuli. Little kids are really limbic. You're always saying, "Use your words."
AB: What you're saying is actually use your human brain, not your German shepherd brain to kids. This is what you're telling them. What we can do uniquely as cognizant individuals who are well developed and emotionally balanced is that we can actually take these feelings, these fears, these appetites, urges, these inclinations from the limbic system and move them to the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the big meaty lobes behind our forehead. There, we can understand them and only then can we manage our feelings so that they don't manage us. This is a chapter, not about death. It's a chapter about what troubles you and to say, "I'm not going to let that thing manage me anymore." This is what all older people have in common who are happy. They know how to manage the thing that bothers them.
AB: There are certain ambitions that are really healthy and there are other ambitions that are not healthy. The unhealthy ambitions per se are money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four idols. If these are your ambitions, they lead to unremitting dissatisfaction, a moment of bliss and a lifetime of wanting. That has a lot to do with the neurophysiology of how satisfaction is obtained. You get these things, it's like hitting the lever, getting the cookie and that your dopamine actually starts responds only to getting more, more, more, more of these worldly things.
AB: Your grandmother told you this, your grandmother says money doesn't buy happiness. She's absolutely right. All it does is it lowers the sources of unhappiness. [inaudible 00:35:13] things that bring real happiness are really simple. They're relationships and love and the closeness that we have from authentic friendship and serving other people and there's a whole list of those things in your happiness portfolio.
AB: What I recommend in the book is to get off this idea of on your birthday, making a list of your sticky cravings for these inadequate things like money, power, pleasure, and fame, and actually start thinking more about the things that can bring you lasting and stable happiness, which come from love, they come from things you want to do with other people. They're not on the typical bucket list.
AB: There's no bungee jumping from the Mekong Delta or finally getting to the Antarctica and living there during the winter because I've always wanted to do it. Those kinds of experiences that are just achievements and they're involved with social comparison and they're a marker to you that you are a successful person in economic terms, that's inadequate. All it'll do is it'll lead to dissatisfaction. The reason for this is simple. Your satisfaction is not a function of what you have.
AB: Am I out of the fight? Have I retired from ideology? The answer is no. By the way we talk about foreign policy, the reason I listen to this podcast is because for 10 years, Dany, you and I were fighting shoulder to shoulder, you and I were the management of the American Enterprise Institute. I remember many times I would write you an email saying, "Hey, Dany, what do I think about X?"
AB: I love you and miss you as a person, but the respect that I have because you're sort of my super ego on foreign policy, by which I don't mean what's the right way to execute foreign policy, but what is the right manifestation of my Arthur Brooks values as manifested in foreign policy? That's critically important. That's actually what I'm doing today.
AB: It's interesting, when we look at what does the American conservative ideology ... By which I mean, not conservatism in the modern context, I really mean the American ideology. This was something that was largely formed between the Civil War and the First World War that was kind of the self-improvement movement.
AB: After the Civil War, any fancy smart person would say that, "Look, we survived the Civil War, but the republic is not going to stand forever. Clearly, this is not something that can be pasted back together again." What saved the United States was this idea that everybody's life is an individual enterprise. This is when the Mormons were coming across in their hand carts and the temperance movement and Andrew Carnegie was writing the gospel of wealth and founding 2,509 English-speaking libraries for the ordinary person and Dale Carnegie starts writing How to Win Friends and Influence People. People make fun of all of this stuff, but this stuff is real.
Arthur Brooks: There's no other movement of aspiration, of hope and opportunity in the world for the riffraff that are the Pletkas and Brookses and Thiessens. The United States is a great country because we had an openness and a bigness of heart to see that we could be great because we needed your riffraff-y ancestors to come and help make us great, to live their opportunity, to live the love for each other. Now we need to reflect that love back to the rest of the world and back to each other to hold us up in these bonds of dignity.
AB: The happiness movement, the science of happiness is the American understanding of what life is supposed to be. It should be manifest in public policy. It should be manifest in politics. We should be able to reflect these ideas, not just the neuroscience of the limbic system, we need to take the moral purpose of this and re-inject this into American politics. That if I do my job over the next 10 years, this will have actual public policy and political implications to it.
AB: I'm doing the bench science of the resurgence of true American greatness as it has been conceived in the past and can be conceived in the future. All I can say is, I sure hope it works because that's the country I want to live in. I want to live in a country where we see the world and ourselves and our role in the world, the way that you're talking about it every day on this great podcast.
Find the full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
“What the Second-Happiest People Get Right,” by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic, 3/31/22)
“Choose Enjoyment Over Pleasure,” by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic, 3/24/22)
“Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us,” by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic, 3/17/22)
“From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life,” by Arthur C. Brooks (Next Big Idea Club, 4/1/22)
“Russia-Ukraine an ‘opportunity’ for Biden to stand up for American values, Harvard professor says,” (Fox News, 2/24/22)
“Arthur Brooks on cracking the code to happiness in the second half of life,” (NPR, All Things Considered, 2/15/22)
“Arthur C. Brooks Releases FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life,” (Cision PR Newswire, 2/15/22)