# How to Build a Life Full of Meaning and Purpose (ft. Arthur Brooks)

An episode of [SOLVED with Mark Manson](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247526593), 29 Jan 2025, 1 h 11 min.

Audio: https://claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/441/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/episode.flightcast.com/a8m3vknjpjyl2lji4m6orprc.mp3

Today, I sit down with Arthur Brooks, a renowned social scientist and happiness expert, for a deep dive into the realms of meaning, faith, and love. Our conversation takes unexpected turns as we explore the intersection of spirituality, psychology, and personal growth. From discussing the evolutionary roots of our search for meaning to examining the role of faith in modern life, this episode challenges conventional wisdom and offers fresh perspectives on age-old questions. We cover a wide range of topics, including the importance of boredom in fostering creativity, the dangers of political activism as a substitute for religion, and the keys to a successful marriage. Arthur shares insights from his work with the Dalai Lama, explains why young men are increasingly turning to religion, and offers advice on finding meaning in a world dominated by technology. Whether you're grappling with questions of faith, seeking to understand the nature of love, or simply looking for ways to live a more fulfilling life, this conversation will leave you with plenty to ponder and explore further. Arthur’s latest book with Oprah Winfrey: Build the Life You Want: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Life-You-Want-Science-ebook/dp/B0C38FCTJC All of Arthur’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Arthur-C.-Brooks/author/B001HOU7RE Arthur’s online workshop: https://www.scienceofhappier.com/ Arthur’s newsletter: https://arthurbrooks.com/newsletter Arthur’s column in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ Follow Arthur: https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ https://x.com/arthurbrooks https://www.tiktok.com/@arthurcbrooks CHAPTERS Chapters • 00:00:00 Introduction: Two Former Musicians Walk Into a Studio • 00:00:45 The Super Striver Kid: When Ambition Replaces Meaning • 00:03:38 The Identity Trap: When You Become What You Do • 00:06:36 The Evolutionary Tension: Acclaim vs. Meaning • 00:08:43 The Limbic System vs. The Prefrontal Cortex • 00:11:55 The Meaning Crisis: When Your Life Feels Pointless • 00:13:08 The Boredom Solution: Why You Need to Be Bored More • 00:15:34 Coherence vs. Chaos: The Information Abundance Problem • 00:17:19 The Default Mode Network: Where Your Best Ideas Come From • 00:18:29 Leisure as Meaning: Joseph Pieper and Structured Downtime • 00:21:50 The Rise of Religiosity: Bible Sales and the Hunger for Depth • 00:24:45 Young Men and the Meaning Crisis: Why Gender Divergence Is Happening • 00:26:28 The Domestication Problem: Men at 30 and Substance Abuse • 00:27:38 Church as the New Dating App: Why It's Getting Cool Again • 00:28:45 The Genetic Component: Why People Return to Childhood Religion • 00:30:26 Mark's Religious Journey: From Resentful Atheist to Intellectually Curious • 00:33:57 The Emotional Relationship Fallacy: Why You Don't Need Certainty • 00:35:29 Meaning Comes From Understanding, Not Answers • 00:37:10 The Tangible vs. The Abstract: Is God Like Your Wife? • 00:42:29 Neti Neti and the Via Negativa: Defining God by What It's Not • 00:43:23 Transcendence: The Secret to Happiness • 00:45:00 The Dalai Lama and the Earthrise Photo: Getting Small • 00:47:25 The I Self vs. The Me Self: Where We Spend Our Attention • 00:48:45 Childish Spirituality vs. Mature Faith: What Healthy Religion Looks Like • 00:49:46 Politics as Substitute Religion: The Dark Side of Activism • 00:50:34 Love and Contemplation: The Two Pillars of Healthy Religion • 00:52:18 Fitness Cults and Marketing Religiosity: Missing the Point • 00:53:35 Toxic Family vs. Political Schism: When to Cut People Off • 00:56:33 Dark Triad Political Activists: How to Spot a Cult Leader • 00:59:45 Virtual Cults: Why Internet Extremism Is Weaker Than You Think • 01:01:39 Startups vs. Mergers: Why Most Successful Marriages Begin Young • 01:02:20 The Hive Mind Marriage: Why Separate Bank Accounts Are Problematic • 01:04:30 Men Fall Apart Alone: The Gender Divide in Singleness • 01:05:44 Companionate…

## Transcript

[0:00] Arthur Brooks, welcome to the studio. Mark Manson, great to be with you. Nice to meet you in person. I'm looking forward to it. Long time fan. First time guest. Thank you. Thank you. So fun fact, we're both former musicians. Tell me more. And we both gave it up to turn into annoying internet people who tell people how to live their lives. It's a living. So did you drop music specifically because...
[0:24] Because I'm bringing this up because it's a meaningful work is a huge part of your framework. Yeah. So I'm curious a little bit about your story and how you found meaning through your work. And I find it – I also just selfishly find it interesting talking to another former musician of like where the meaning was in that work and why you dropped it and why you thought you would find it somewhere else. Yeah, I was unhappy.
[0:45] I was deeply unhappy. And part of the reason was because I was a super striver kid. I was one of those stage kids. I was going to be the world's greatest French horn player. I mean, God bless America where you can have this kind of ambition, right? But that's what I wanted to be. It's all I ever thought about. I had no other ambitions. I had famous French horn players on pictures on the wall of my bedroom as a kid. I went to every concert. I went to Lille. Yeah.
[1:08] I used to go to the Seattle. I grew up in Seattle. And I went to the Seattle Symphony. I had my mouthpiece in my pocket, you know, just dreaming that, you know, the first, the principal French horn player would fall ill. And the conductor would say, is there a French horn player in the house or something like that? I mean, it was, yeah. I mean, and the problem was it was about glory and ambition. It wasn't actually about meaning because as a little kid, I didn't, I was, meaning would be inchoate at best. Yeah. And so the result is like for a lot of kid athletes, a lot of kid athletes.
[1:37] musicians, anybody who does something at extremely high level from a young age, it can become a source of frustration, not a source of meaning as you get older. And so I've now worked in my, you know, as a behavioral scientist, I've worked with elite athletes who, you know, Olympic athletes, gymnasts, you know, people who've done this from a very young age and they have to leave it precisely in the search for meaning. So tell me about your experience. Is it, does it track?
[2:01] It actually, it's very similar to yours in that I, I started playing guitar at a very young age, probably eight or nine, um, got pretty good before most people, you know, by the time I was 11 or 12, I could like play Metallica songs and Nirvana songs and was bringing my guitar to school and impressing all the kids. And so it very much became a, a social identity, right? It's, it's what I was rewarded for. It's who you were.
[2:24] Yeah. My peers saw me as that. I was validated as that. It's what won me street cred with all the cool kids in school and the girls that I liked and everything. So it very much, it was kind of my emotional and social sustenance as an adolescent. And then I, of course, being young and naive, you don't understand the difference between being socially rewarded for something and actually being
[2:52] passionate for that thing. Right. And so I assume that this was just like you. I had all these aspirations. I was going to be the best guitar player in the world. And I was going to play in stadiums. And I was going to be in a huge rock band and all this stuff. And I started getting really serious about it. And I realized the –
[3:10] the reality of being a musician, which is that you spend the vast majority of your time alone in a dark room practicing to no fanfare and like zero appreciation. No audience. By anybody, you know? And as soon as I realized that, and you know, I joined some bands and we would play these like dingy clubs to 20 people, half of which weren't even paying attention. Right. You start to see the, the reality of it. And it was, it was,
[3:38] Same, deeply unsatisfying. Deeply unsatisfying. And the problem with that is that you, as a super striver kid, you wired your brain to get your validation from outward success. Right. And that's dangerous because, you know, you went on to have a smash hit blockbuster book and it's very easy for you to become that book. Oh, yeah. You're the book. Yeah. Oh, you're the book guy.
[4:02] You know, and then you're like, yeah, awesome. And you get a lot of your validation from that. So your identity actually becomes what you do as opposed to who you are. Yeah. And as opposed to an actual person who wrote a book, you become a book with a person attached. Sure. And a lot of that tendency – and I've heard you talk about this. I heard you talk about this on a recent episode where, you know –
[4:23] at a certain point, you have to do a new thing. Yes. Because you're a person who needs a whole, you know, panoply of experiences and, and you, you deserve to be able to move on, but it's hard to move on when you're the guitar kid who became the book guy and et cetera, et cetera. Your brain is wired in a particular way. There's some pretty interesting studies about that too, that your, your brain is going to look like, you know, somebody who got addicted to methamphetamine before the age of 15. Yeah.
[4:47] You'll be really, really good at it for the rest of your life. And once you give up the methamphetamine, you'll do a new thing that substitutes for the math. Yeah. Yeah. It's been interesting because, yeah, a huge part of, I guess, what I've been going through both personally and professionally in the last couple of years is kind of that moving on from the book identity. Because, you know, there's this whole period after a success like that where it's –
[5:14] You know, I'm kind of personally, privately over it, but I'm still being rewarded for it so much that you're kind of like – They don't want you over it. Yeah, you feel stupid moving on, but it's – I think it's reached a – finally reached a threshold where I'm like, you know what? I'd rather just, you know –
[5:33] lose half the audience and do something I'm excited about, then like sit here and just keep banging the same drum for the rest of my life. Yeah, I mean, and and be ready. I mean, if if the Beach Boys came out and said, you know what, tonight we're going to do all new experimental material. The audience would be like,
[5:50] sing California girl. And it's because the audience doesn't love the beach boys. They love that thing that the beach boys got famous for. And so you will experience inevitably that when you're doing these new things, that people will be really annoyed with you because you're not doing that thing that they like with which they have a minor relationship. Right. They want the subtle art. That's what they want. Cause it, it, it, they, it, it showed them something about it. It illuminated something about themselves and gave them a little bit of
[6:20] dude, I got to do something new. Yeah. Because I want to be a full person. That's a very, very hard relationship to navigate as a creator. Yeah, for sure. To bring it back to the meaningful work thing, you know, part of it has been looking for something that feels meaningful enough to,
[6:36] to risk that transition. Yes. Right? Yeah. And meaning, you're trading off meaning for a claim and your brain doesn't want you to do that. Yeah. I mean, your brain has evolved to seek the admiration of strangers. It's a very funny thing. So as a kin-based, hierarchical, tropical person,
[6:53] animal, homo sapiens, there are certain things we'll get beyond, like tropical. I mean, we're sitting in a really warm place, but, you know, I live most of the time in the East Coast, but I have a coat. So I've been able to get beyond my basic evolution on that, but I will always be a kin-based hierarchical species. And that means I want to rise in the hierarchy, whether I'm thinking about it or not. And the way to do that is not with meaning, it's with a claim.
[7:18] And so you're always going to be tempted by the acclaim and trade the meaning against it. Yeah. And so some people will do that and spend their whole life chasing that acclaim and feeling a real emptiness inside. Because at the end of the day, they don't have the sense of meaning. And they have a lot of money. And they have a lot of power. And they have a lot of the admiration of strangers that somewhere in their Pleistocene brain they wanted to get.
[7:40] But what they really needed to do was to be fully conscious of it and say, I'm going to trade away some of this acclaim, even though it's going to hurt because I'm going to be looking for meaning. Yeah. Meaning is the only thing that will sustain you at the end of the day. Yeah, because it sustains you through the challenge and the struggle. It's interesting. You know, one of the things you talk about quite a bit and I've written about is how like we're not evolved for happiness. We're evolved for survival. And often it's almost like our dissatisfaction with certain things in life is –
[8:09] an evolutionary feature, not a bug, you know, and gotta stay hungry and in the hunt. Yeah. But it's so when I hear you describe something like that, like it's, it's, it just makes my brain think about, like, I understand why we crave acclaim and status and social recognition, right? Like there's a very clear evolutionary purpose behind that over hundreds of thousands of years.
[8:32] where does the meaning come from? Like, why does that matter? And then like, why, why did we evolve this, this psychological need for a sense of greater meaning or purpose? Yeah.
[8:43] So that's a good question. And that's as old as the free will questions and the questions of consciousness, et cetera. But just as a basic evolutionary biology matter, we have two big parts of our brain that are always interacting and competing with each other. One is the limbic system, which gives you your urges and desires and your emotions, your feelings. And the other is your prefrontal cortex, which is helping you to make executive decisions all the time.
[9:07] The limbic system is sending information to your prefrontal cortex. You know, I'm having a negative or a positive emotion, which is indicating that there's a threat or an opportunity below my level of consciousness. And I should either avoid it or approach it. Avoidance is like, I heard a twig snap and it might be something trying to eat me. Approach is I saw some berries on a bush or a potential mate who's very attractive.
[9:31] And so I'm going to approach that and that gives me positive emotions. That sends it to the prefrontal cortex, which sorts out what is it? What does it mean? What am I going to do? Right. And that's going on all day long. But the prefrontal cortex is sort of the, your antenna to the divine in its way, higher order things than just...
[9:50] approach and avoidance, you know, then your limbic system is, I mean, your dog has a limbic system that's very similar to yours, right? Your dog does not have a prefrontal cortex like yours. We are, we're uniquely suited to this higher level of consciousness. And when you make decisions that are deeply unsatisfactory of your limbic system, but they're scratching an itch in your prefrontal cortex, that's when you're, you're doing this kind of a trade-off and your consciousness, your conscious mind, right?
[10:16] This kind of antenna to the divine is saying you need something higher than those berries and those mates. Yeah. You need something higher than that to sustain you, to give you something that you deeply, deeply want. And that's the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing something through the deferral of gratification that comes from.
[10:34] Not pleasure. Pleasure is limbic. Enjoyment. Yeah. Which adds people in memory to your pleasure. And especially that's meaning. That's figuring out the coherence of your life. Only humans want to understand the through line of their lives. That's purpose, which is goals and direction. And that's especially significance. It's like, why does Mark...
[10:55] Why is Mark alive? Right. You know, what's the answer to that? And that's the reason that only humans have these queries. And answers to those queries are not even an answer. Understanding of those particular queries is a deep, deep-seated human need. Hmm.
[11:10] Some people would say it's just, it's vestigial of the fact that we have this big prefrontal cortex. And so we have these weird, you know, why am I alive kind of essence questions. But I disagree. I think that this is evidence of the divine. I think this is evidence that we have a higher kind of evolution, that there is a cosmic consciousness that we're actually trying to tap into. I think that's the best evidence that we can find that we're trying to grasp at something that's beyond our earthly comprehension. Yeah.
[11:39] Okay, you're getting a little bit ahead because one of your other pillars is faith, which I want to get to that in a second. Wrapping up the meaningful work component. Yeah. If some – let's say somebody is just deeply – like they're –
[11:55] their career feels kind of pointless. Yeah. Their hobbies are frivolous. Like they, they, they feel a complete lack of meaning in their life. They want to make a big change. They want to make a career change. Like what, what does that process look like? What questions should they be asking themselves? So I'm, I'm actually writing a book right now called the meaning of your life and how to find it. So I've got a lot on my mind about this and you know, when, how a book works. So you're in the process of it's half done and, and which is like the process of death and dying.
[12:21] You know, it's denial, rage, bargaining, acceptance, you know, and so a lot of it's sort of disorganized and it's inchoate. But there's a lot that we know about this. To begin with, when people are feeling at a loss, a need for greater significance in their life, a need for greater purpose and meaning in their life, but they really don't know what to do. There's a bunch of steps that actually are worth taking.
[12:44] And it starts with understanding the impediment to that. The problem is not your job. The problem is not your stupid relationship with the girlfriend that you're not actually in love with. The problem is not that you're living with your mom. That's actually not the big problem. The problem is you're not accessing the part of your brain that will allow you to start delving into questions of meaning. And almost certainly is because of an overuse of technology. That's almost always the case.
[13:08] So there's – are you familiar with the work of Ian McGilchrist, the Scottish psychiatrist and neuroscientist? I've heard of him. Yeah. He wrote a wonderful book called The Master and His Emissary. Okay. When he's through California, he should do your show because you'd really get a kick out of it. He's one of the great neuroscientists for a time. Yeah. And he talks about the hemispheric lateralization of the brain. It was a fancy way of saying that the right and left hemispheres do different things. Right. Right.
[13:35] Back in the old days, you'd say, I'm an analytic or I'm a creative. That stuff's nonsense. Yeah. And that stuff's been invalidated by research. But it's true that the right side of the brain is much more involved in big questions of meaning. And the left side is in small questions of technology and analysis solving little problems. The way your brain is supposed to work is supposed to engage the right hemisphere of your brain to consider big questions of meaning and then task the left side of your brain to figure stuff out.
[14:04] Now, the problem that we have today is that all of our technology is forcing us into the left side of the brain and never giving us an opportunity to to think about the big issues. That's what's happening when you're sitting at a traffic light in your car and you pull out your phone to check your text so you won't be bored even for a second. Yeah. You need to be bored a lot more. There's a reason that your grandfather, what did he do for a living? Your granddad? He was a serial entrepreneur, actually.
[14:31] No kidding. Interesting. But you know, one thing is that his life was a lot more boring than yours. Oh, for sure. He had no eye, you know, he had no, no podcasts to listen to. He had no earbuds. There was no social media, which are anti boredom devices. Yeah.
[14:46] I'm glad there's podcasts. I'm glad that you and I get to have this conversation. But the truth of the matter is that a lot of people would be bored right now doing some other thing like working out or walking or driving. And that would actually be really, really good for their brain. So the first thing that I recommend to people who have a sense of pointlessness in their life is not move to Ireland, right? Which some people will do. It's like, I need a big change.
[15:09] Yeah. Or break up with their beloved or just go quit their job is they need to start being bored more and more systematically. And so that means internet free zones in your life. That means getting that putting down your devices more systematically. That means doing things that will actually make you feel a lot more bored, more systematically than you currently are. And that's actually the first step. That's the biggest problem that a lot of people have today. Interesting.
[15:34] Yeah, I think the left brain, right brain thing is really interesting. I hadn't thought about that before. You know, I also think part of it, too, is just the absolute abundance of information. Like, I know one of the things you talk about around meaning is coherence. Yeah. And it makes sense that if you just exponentially increase the amount of information that we're exposed to –
[15:55] the more difficult creating any sort of coherent narrative around our experiences becomes. It's just like everything starts to feel very vague and ambiguous and like here or there or uncertain. And that in and of itself can create kind of an existential crisis.
[16:12] Sure. And, you know, the classic case of this is I think I'm going to go learn something. I'm going to turn on YouTube and you spend half an hour, 45 minutes looking at shorts. Yeah, that all that does is create absolute cognitive incoherence. And that's obliterating meaning right there. Much, much better for you to actually read a book.
[16:34] which is also information. Or by the way, you can also watch a video if you want. I mean, there are a lot of people who don't learn very well from reading for all sorts of reasons. And they can learn through other mechanisms. But something that's coherent, that's actually taking you through the arc of information is really, really important such that you can be doing something that is not so scattered, that's not so chaotic in your brain. Better yet, start that whole exercise by being bored for half an hour. Yeah.
[17:02] Okay. Turn everything off. Yeah. Everything off. You know, I recommend to my students, for example, that the first hour of the day is device-free in every way. I recommend to my students that they work out without devices, that they not listen to anything. Why? Because you'll be...
[17:19] You'll be forced. It sounds awful now. I know it sounds awful. It sounds absolutely terrible. But you'll notice a weird thing that we've forgotten, which is that you're going to come up with your best ideas when you're working out. Yeah. You're going to come up with all these weird creative ideas that you wouldn't have had. You literally would not have had them because you would have chased them out of your head. It's interesting. I tend to have really good ideas in the shower. Yeah. And maybe that's why. Yeah. It's like the only place where I'm completely shut off.
[17:43] That's the reason. No, that's not maybe why. That's actually the reason. Now, there's some other physiological phenomena at play, but that's really what's going on. Yeah. Is your brain needs to be unencumbered and you need to go into that right side, also a part of the brain called the default mode network. Yeah. That when it turns on, your mind wanders, stuff pops into your head. Yeah.
[18:04] Wow. And part of that is the sense of why. The sense of why will actually start occurring to you without – in an incoite way, with a – in an almost ineffable way. Sure. Is what you'll find. Is this a bit of a high-quality problem, a first-world problem? Like let's say you struggle with a lack of meaningful work, but you're also broke and you need a paycheck and you can't make rent next month. Mm-hmm.
[18:29] Does that – I assume that takes prioritization over this or like is this something that you can find through other means? You can find it through other means because one of the things that I really hate is work-life balance. Yeah. Not just because I'm a hopeless workaholic and success-addicted individual, which may or may not be true.
[18:45] It's, but, but because allegedly work should be part of life and you shouldn't have a work life balance. But one of the things that I recommend to a lot of people who are in circumstances where, where work can't be as meaningful as you would like it to be is to start treating your leisure as a major source of meaning by setting goals and priorities and focusing. So are you familiar with the German philosopher, Joseph Pieper?
[19:11] Peeper? No. Peeper. You know, so he's he was a great Aristotelian and Thomistic philosopher in the mid German philosopher, the mid mid 20th century. And he wrote this very famous essay, kind of a short book called Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
[19:27] And what it was, was a guide to people structuring their leisure so it can be the most important source of meaning in their life, assuming that they were working in a factory job that wasn't inherently meaningful. And that means taking your leisure as seriously as you would like, you know, a concert violinist or, you know, a professional gymnast. Yeah.
[19:47] Like super precision, you know, and thinking about setting goals, never wasting a minute, et cetera, et cetera. There's lots and lots of ways to find meaning, but you have to be serious about your life and you can't let your life happen to you. Right. You got to be fully alive and in it, man. Yeah. Yeah. And I like that because that ties in, you know, you make that distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. And part of the difference is that enjoyment is about being conscious of what you're doing and –
[20:09] And absolutely. I mean, everything it's, you know, and again, you could be so, you could be so schematic about this. You could be so kind of, you know, rigid German about this whole thing that you don't have any downtimes. But there's tons of research out there that shows that people who have, who rely on unstructured leisure, like I'm going to sit on a beach and do nothing. Yeah.
[20:29] Or even leisure travel. You know, I'm just going to go someplace that's beautiful and gaze at the sunset. A little of that goes a long, long way. You really don't need very much of that. What you need is more sustenance that comes, you know, meaningful experiences that are just not paid. Yeah. You know, and that means, you know, I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to read the Bible every day. I'm going to read the whole Bible.
[20:53] You know, that's an incredibly good thing to do with your leisure, right? And I'm not going to fritter away my time on YouTube shorts. I'm actually going to watch this series of lectures about Dostoevsky. Right. You know, that kind of thing where you have these goals. And those are the kinds of things that will actually – those goals which have to do with direction in your life and making progress. That leads to purpose and purpose scales up to meaning. It's interesting because this like –
[21:19] the industry that we're in of kind of ideas, ideas, kind of this like weird hybrid of philosophy, science, self-help life advice. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful world. I mean, I love it. It's interesting that it's kind of, it's blown up in this era. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like that it's as the world becomes more complicated and there's more ambiguity and it's harder to create coherence across experiences and people are online more and more.
[21:50] if there are figures that are able to create that coherence for people through philosophy, religion, and making science accessible to the people, like it makes sense of why that's so appealing. I wanna, you mentioned the Bible. There was a statistic recently that in 2024, Bible sales were up by 22%, which is the largest growth in Bible sales, like I think since they started tracking Bible sales.
[22:17] Other religious texts, so non-Christian religious texts, were up 12%. It's –
[22:26] It makes you wonder, are we seeing this like sudden upsurge of religiosity? And if so, why do you think it ties into all this? It does. It really does. There's a hunger for meaning. We've been, we've gone through the early stages of the internet mediated approach to life, which was super entertaining. But now there's this hangover and a whole generation of people, Gen Z and millennials,
[22:48] who have grown up with the internet, grown up with screens in their pockets, grown up with social media, have this intense hunger for something. And the result is that we're going into a new period, which is – this is what history has shown, is that interest in religion, organized religion in particular, waxes and wanes. And it tends to wax when you've gone through a period of intense entertainment. Right.
[23:13] of kind of triviality and entertainment because then people find that their life is bereft of meaning and they look for one of the great sources of meaning, which is spiritual depth. Yeah. And how do you do that? Well, there's lots of ways to do that. You know, this is one of the reasons that are, you're friends with Ryan Holiday, right? Yeah. Yeah. He's great. Yeah.
[23:30] And, you know, he's talking about Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and Cicero. I mean, this stuff is old school, man. And there's this huge surge of interest in Ryan Holiday's work. Why? Because for the very same reasons. People are reading, you know, Seneca's on suicide right now because they want something deeper than what they're actually getting. The meditations of Marcus Aurelius. This has been around. This text has been around for 1,800 years.
[23:59] And now people are actually discovering it. It's like, I found this new book, man. Yeah. Well, that's what people are doing with all of these sacred texts. A lot of it is especially young men is what we're finding. And young men are demanding this. You find that men are more likely to be practicing religion. Men under 30 are more likely to be practicing religion than women for the very first time. That's fascinating. And this is a lot of the appeal of Jordan Peterson. Yeah.
[24:24] This is a lot of the appeal of a lot of the people that are pointing men back towards some fundamental truths because of this deep hunger for meaning. Why do you think young men – and we should note as well that the statistics coming out about young women is that they are becoming much more political. Yeah. And so why is this divergence happening these days?
[24:45] It's a good question. And, and, and one of the reasons actually might be that, I mean, this is your bailiwick, you know, getting back to your, your roots and the dating, and the dating advice. But this is what I teach too. I mean, this is the most popular unit of the class that I teach at the business school is called falling in love and staying in love. And, and what you find is when that market becomes incredibly dysfunctional, men fall apart. Men fall apart. If there's not romantic love, men can't function. Interesting. Because they're a mess. Yeah.
[25:13] Yeah. They're just a mess is the way that this works. It's funny because I feel like most people, they're like the stereotypes and everything about men and women is like most people would assume that women would fall apart because like women are stereotypically more into romance.
[25:27] They do better on their own. I mean, they don't do better on their own than in couples, but they do better on their own than men do on their own is the whole point. And so you find traditionally that married men are – married women are happier than married men, that single women are happier than single men, that widowed women are way happier than widowed men. Yeah. My wife's like –
[25:49] Huh? Yeah. Yeah. So, and the reason is because women have generally social support systems outside their marriages that are very, very strong. Right. You find that women have more and more friends as they get older. Men have fewer and fewer real friends as they get older. Men lose their friendship chops. Yeah. And so about 60% of 60 year old men say their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Yeah.
[26:13] Which is a depressing statistic. The story of unrequited friendship is what that comes down to. And that's one of the reasons. But young men in particular, I mean, what you find is that there's one stat, and I'm looking for the source because I've seen this a bunch of places and I can't remember off the top of my head. But...
[26:28] 30 year old or older men who've never either cohabitated or been married have a one in three chance of a substance use disorder. Wow. It's high. Wow. So if men have not been domesticated by 30, they might be undomesticable. And nobody wants that, including the men.
[26:45] Yeah. So they're looking for this deep source of meaning in terms – a relationship with the divine is a love relationship. They want love is what it comes down to. They can't quite put their finger under articulated. Well, and it's also – it provides a certain amount of like, I guess, philosophical stability, community, understanding.
[27:10] ritual into their lives, you know? And it's also like, there's, it's, let's be honest. It's, I wouldn't want to be a 18 or 19 year old guy right now. Like it's confusing as hell. Like what are, what's acceptable? What's socially acceptable? What's not socially acceptable? Like, how are you supposed to approach certain dating situations? Like what's, what's okay? What's not okay. You know, like it's, it is a confusing time. And it's actually weirdly, um, getting cool to go to church.
[27:38] Yeah. And I mean, that's, it's, it's weird, but it's true. You know, it's become that kids. It's like all the cool kids are going to mass. All the cool kids are at church. Yeah, that's right. No, but it's interesting too. And I'll talk to a lot of young people today who are justifiably becoming increasingly frustrated about dating apps because dating apps are, it's a mess, a deeply problematic way. We've done a couple episodes on that. It's a total
[28:05] The science of dating apps and what they actually do to your brain and the way that you curate your choices is absolutely suboptimal in the way that people are going to meet up. And so people say, well, we're also going to meet people. It's like church.
[28:16] Yeah. And so, but I don't believe. So what? Yeah. Go sit in the back. Yeah. Admit that you don't know what you believe. Just admit it. Yeah. You know, you don't think that somebody's going to take you under their wing. You're interesting enough. You're deep enough to actually be there. You're going to find people you like. Yeah. That's the bottom line. It's interesting. You mentioned in another interview I saw that there's a statistic that people who stray away from the religion that they grew up with are –
[28:45] I think more likely to come back to it later in life or, or they're, they're increasingly, they're increasingly coming back to it later in life. Yeah. Tell me about that. Yeah. So what you find is that people who grew up in now, now part of it is the selection bias because people who grew up in religious households, there is a genetic component to religiosity. Yeah. And so if you started off going to,
[29:06] church or some house of worship when you were a kid, it means probably you come from a religious family, which means you probably have something in the genetic component and that is non-trivial. And then what happens is that typically there's a work by James Fallow, the sociologist, about the periods of religiosity in people's lives. You're most likely to be really religious when you're a kid, you know, because you believe relatively unquestioningly. Right.
[29:29] They start to fall away because of the cognitive dissonance. You know, an all-knowing and loving God who permits all this suffering, I can't buy it. And so they bail, right? But by the time you're in your 30s and you have kids yourself, one of the things that comes around to your brain is that nothing makes sense.
[29:49] I mean, life is a mess and lots and lots of things actually don't make sense. And I have to walk the face of the earth without making sense of a lot of things. Yeah. And I don't understand everything. There's a lot of humility that comes with having children. You remember when your children were born and you're like,
[30:04] Oh, no, man. Yeah. And it's messy. Life is really, really messy. And so people accept the messiness of not understanding things. I remember that, you know, I became more religious in my 30s. Certainly, I've never been really away. I've been, you know, had a relatively religious existence. But in my 30s, I got a lot more religious. And I remember thinking –
[30:26] I don't get it, but I want it. Right. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, that comment stood out to me just because – so I grew up in a very religious environment. I grew up in the Bible Belt in Texas. In an evangelical home? Not evangelicals, but went to a Christian school. Parents were super involved in the church. Mainline Protestant? Yeah. So I was getting lots of Jesus, like –
[30:48] every week as a child. And I hated it. I was like very resentful from a very young age. I just... You're a rebel from a... I was just not into it. Didn't want to have anything to do with it. I decided I was an atheist, I think, when I was like 12 or 13. And still had to go to church for like another six years. And so there was a period of kind of resentment. But it's been interesting. I've noticed really in the last five years or so, I've been...
[31:16] coming back around to Christianity, mostly intellectually. And some of it is kind of what you said, like it's the older I get and the more I research and read and try to understand about the world, the more I start to realize that like,
[31:32] so much of life just comes down to values. Like, what is your value system? What are your prioritizations? Like, what do you choose to make important in your life? And those are fundamentally kind of subjective things. And as the years go on, it gets harder for me to ignore that, like, I very deeply and personally find that most of the values that I care about
[31:54] are rooted in Christianity, both historically, philosophically, intellectually, you know, all the above, culturally, all the above. And that's caused me some personal cognitive dissonance. Because you made a commitment to being none. Yeah. You made a commitment to it, which is a real religious identity.
[32:11] Right. And it's like, I still don't really, I still don't believe, but like there's an intellectual interest and respect that has been emerging over the years. Well, you're starting to question what does it mean to not believe? Well, and- This is the thing, right? Let me throw one more thing onto this as well. And, you know, we can get into-
[32:31] the loneliness epidemic and the atomization of society and all that stuff. But like, I, you know, as I get older, uh, it, it does as an older male, it, it gets harder to make friendships, maintain friendships. Um,
[32:46] I remember my parents' church community growing up. And I, as a, as a guy in my forties now, I envy it. I'm like, man, that would be really nice to have, you know, like that stability, that sense of like, they're always there. Anything goes wrong. Like somebody comes over, helps you out. Um, so there's, there's a little bit of a, um.
[33:09] A little bit of envy, a little bit of curiosity, but anyway, sorry. What were you going to say? No, this is really, this is, this is, how old are you? I'm 40. You're 40. That's a, it's got a zero on it, man. I know. Yeah. 41 in about a month. How old are your children? I don't have kids. Oh, you don't have kids. Okay. Is your wife religious? No. Okay. And she, was she raised in a, in a secular household? No.
[33:29] Uh, no, her parents were, she was raised Catholic, but she kind of never. She never engaged? No. Okay. Is she curious? She religion curious? Not so much. Yeah. Didn't have a, didn't have the gene. She doesn't have the chip. I guess not. Yeah. But you do. Yeah. You do because that's how you were raised. And, and so, and you're an intellectual. And so you're starting to approach it intellectually. You're starting to find the intellectual virtues of what that is. And that's fine. There's, that's actually fine. The truth is.
[33:57] It's impossible for you to have the kind of emotional relationship with faith that you thought you were supposed to have as a child. Yeah. So you were told as a child that you need to give your heart to Jesus Christ and you're not supposed to have any doubts because if you have any doubts, that's evidence that something's wrong. Right.
[34:16] Well, that's not the way the heart works. Yeah. That's a, that's, that's a psychologically a maladaptation of the kind of any kind of relationship, any kind of love relationship we're supposed to have. I mean, there's no way that you haven't doubted your love for your wife and you've been married for a long time. And, and presumably you're going to be, she's the last person on whom you'll, you'll,
[34:35] Your eyes will glance as you take your dying breath. Yeah. I mean, and that's a very, very beautiful thing. But of course, you're like, I don't know, man. Sometimes you're closer and sometimes you're further away. Sure. And sometimes you're like, what does love even mean? And all that. Well, that's your relationship with God too. Yeah. That's how religion works. The problem is you have this torqued understanding of what the emotional relationship is supposed to be, which is either in or out. Right. Right.
[35:01] And you're not completely in, which meant that you were out. Well, that's wrong. Yeah. The bottom line is that you can develop an absolutely solid intellectual framework for wanting to pray, for wanting to read your Bible, for wanting to explore this part of you a little bit, recognizing that I don't know what I'm going to believe in five years. I don't know what I'm going to believe in five months, but I'm going to sit in the back and see if I remember something, if something actually speaks to me.
[35:29] Yeah. And I'm going to be honest about the fact that I get it. Yeah. But there's something there that I don't quite understand. So here's, this is how meaning works. Meaning is based on not a bunch of answers. The problem with a lot of church activity is it's giving you a bunch of answers. Yeah. But that's not how meaning works. Meaning doesn't come from answers. It comes from understanding.
[35:53] It comes from the most important questions in the universe about which you gain little by little an understanding that you can't quite articulate. And by the way, that's your marriage too. Right. If I'm like, Mark, tell me why you love your wife. I mean. Anything you say sounds stupid. Yeah.
[36:15] Anything you say sounds trivial. Yeah. I mean, I could give you a whole list of whatever. And anything that you would say about love for God would sound trivial and make you more of an atheist. Sure. But if you're experiencing the divine light in your own way, you might gain an ineffable understanding of a relationship that you can't quite articulate. Right. And that's what you're yearning for. So...
[36:39] Not to turn this into a podcast about religion. About Mark's religion? Too late. Yeah, my religious conversion. I was like, can you believe the subtle art that all he was doing was trying to bring the host back to church? The missionary shows up. I know. That's like, you had no idea. You thought I was a scientist.
[36:55] So my wife is, she's a tangible person. She's there. I can see her. I can touch her. I can talk to her. I can feel her. God is this abstract ephemeral person.
[37:10] And as an atheist, I can argue an imagined concept, right? And sure, yeah. And you have your right. Right. And I could have, I could develop that same relationship of love and doubt with this kind of abstract concept in my mind. Right. And enjoy all the psychological benefits of it. But it's still an intangible thing. It's not, it's not like my wife that I can see or touch or hug or whatever. But the essence of your wife is not tangible.
[37:39] This is really important. You love your wife for things that have nothing to do with the delicious dinner she's going to prepare for you this evening. Well, she's a really good cook. I think we figured out why Mark got married. Yeah. Well, you asked me why I love her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, because she's a good cook. No, but the essence of love is truly ineffable is the way that this works. Now, the way that most people who are truly religious define love on earth is as –
[38:08] a simulacrum for divine love that you really only understand divine love because of the model that you get on earth. Look, we're visceral creatures with bodies, you know, and, and we're not divine. We're not spirits. We're not some sort of weird Gnostic thing. We're, we're actually human beings. We're animals that happen to have incredibly well-developed prefrontal cortices that, that are kind of an intended as something because we're grasping for something. Maybe it's an illusion.
[38:35] You know, maybe it's an absolute illusion that, you know, consciousness doesn't exist, that free will is totally fake. Maybe that's the case. But most of us don't think that. We don't feel that. So is your argument that the same way that loving and having faith in God would be an abstract concept in my mind, that even though my wife exists in the physical world, my relationship with her is an abstract concept in my mind?
[39:00] That's my point. That's my point. And then there's way, way, way more similarity between your love for the divine and your love for your wife. Okay. Because love is love. And love is something that goes way beyond, as far as we know, any other creature can experience. Because it has something to do fundamentally with this abstract notion of consciousness.
[39:21] That we don't quite get. Yeah. And that we can't quite identify as the realm of philosophers and not neuroscientists at this point, because we know there's consciousness, but we can't identify it. We can't find it. We can't define it. It's almost as if there were a cosmic consciousness out there that we're tapping into and that we're sharing when we have love for each other as friends and as family members.
[39:42] And especially as romantic partners, because that's the most intense kind of love that we can actually have. That's why many religious couples believe that their marriage is an antenna to God. And that only – it's like you got to put in two keys to launch the nuclear missiles. Yeah. And that's what marriage is. It's two keys. Yeah. And then when you do that, that's when you actually get – that's when you fundamentally can be completed in your relationship with the divine. Yeah.
[40:08] I like that metaphor of the two keys. Yeah. And I mean, and I'm on board to the point, like, you know, one of the things I've both experienced and expressed and written about is how, like, it, when you really are in a truly loving relationship, it is the, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For sure. By orders of magnitude. Absolutely. Like, and it's, and it is indescribable. Like, it's, um. It's divine. It feels divine.
[40:34] But then what is divine? Like that's the thing. And that's the thing because there's no answer to that question. Define for me the divide. That's the problem. Yeah. And there's no answer. There's only understanding. Yeah. And understanding only comes from living it. Yeah. Understanding it only comes from sitting in it.
[40:50] It's the same thing. So most of the monastic traditions around the world, and I do a lot of work with the Tibetan Buddhists, for example. Okay. And in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic tradition, the monks are trained by being posed questions that don't have answers. Yeah. And they're supposed to break their brains. It's like Zen koans. Like Zen koans, for example. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Right. And it sounds like an absurd question, except that –
[41:18] Exploring it inevitably leads you to an understanding that there is no answer because the question itself, the concept of one hand clapping is an illusion. Right. And that it only becomes a reality when you add a second hand.
[41:35] which is to say that our life as an individual is an illusion. Mark is an illusion in the absence of Mark's wife. She's the second hand clapping when it becomes a reality. I mean, that kind of explains it, but really what it is is an understanding of the phenomenon. And that's how the divine works. That's how religious experiences work. That's how love works, is that you actually have to understand it without being able to explain it. Right.
[42:03] Well, yeah, it's – in some ways it is – I was a big fan of a guy named Ken Wilber. I don't know if you've read his stuff. But he had a term where he said it was transrational where it was like to – the act of defining itself, like you lose it, right? So it's like it is anything that is definable, it is not that.
[42:29] Yeah, that's so – and that's – yeah, in Sanskrit, the expression is neti, neti. And neti means not this, not this. And that's the – in classic ancient Catholic theology, that's called the via negativa, where you're trying to define the divine by defining what it's – by eliminating what it's not. Right. St. Augustine said, if you think you understand God, you don't. Yeah. Yeah.
[42:59] Which is really, really paradoxical. Which is like a Zen Cohen. But it makes sense. It does. It actually makes sense. And so the search for meaning is a search to sit with possibly the sources of meaning and doing your best. And then opening yourself up to being free for a moment of just for being free for a moment of your disbelief.
[43:23] So let's bring this back to, let's ground this again. How does this sort of experience or understanding of the divine or some faith in the divine, how does this help us here and now, day to day, understanding our lives, being okay with our lives? Where is that connection? So the connection is the transcendent. So one of the pillars of one of the practices that people have who tend to have happiest lives is,
[43:52] is faith. But faith by faith, I don't mean my faith. I have chosen to practice my faith as a Catholic. It's really important to me. But as a scientist, I can tell you that transcending yourself is one of the great secrets to happiness. So if you're spending all day long in the psychodrama of Mark's life, you know, Mark's breakfast and his commute, which is a walk up
[44:15] Ocean Park, which is not that bad, but you know, and his money and his show and his sponsors and the future. And, you know, it's just, dude, it's so boring. You know, the psychodrama is my psychodramas.
[44:30] Awesome. I was like, I want more of it. But, you know, my psychodrama is like the same episode of Better Call Saul over and over and over again, which the first time is funny and the second time is turgid and the third time is torture. Yeah. And, you know, I was the star in all my dreams last night. I mean, it was just, it's left to your devices. Mother Nature wants you to focus on yourself. And to get peace and perspective, you need to stand in awe of the universe and get little. The Dalai Lama told me this story really interesting because I've been writing and working with the Dalai Lama for the last 12 years. Great privilege in my life.
[45:00] And he told me just in this last visit, Rich Roll and Rainn Wilson and I and a bunch of us, we went to Dharamsala to do this conference with the Dalai Lama. And during that conference, when I was talking to him, he said that he saw this photograph in 1969 that changed his life. I was like, the Dalai Lama, what could the photograph be? It turns out it was that famous photograph of the earth taken from the orbit of the moon. Oh, yeah. You know that thing where the earth is this blue and beautiful. Yeah.
[45:29] And he said, he saw that picture and he said, that's me. I'm so small. I'm so grateful. That's transcendence. Yeah. And there's really two ways to transcend. One is to transcend by serving other people in a spirit of love, getting outside yourself. It's the I self.
[45:47] looking at the world in love and admiration as instantiated in the way that you serve. And the other is to transcend vertically, where you're looking for something that's divine, something that's bigger than you. And again, maybe that means studying the Stoics and living according to their principles, even as an atheist, which the Stoic philosophers themselves weren't, but you can be. Maybe that's...
[46:11] Walking in nature for an hour before dawn without devices. Maybe that's studying the fugues of Bach. Maybe that's starting a Vipassana meditation practice with seriousness. And maybe that's going to mass every day. Right. But you need something. You need some sort of transcendence. There's some dimension, you know, whether it's – it's funny because I remember taking an astronomy course in undergrad and it was –
[46:36] I loved it. It was my favorite course I've ever taken in my life. For philosophical reasons. And it's for exactly this reason. I would leave the classroom feeling so small and insignificant and just being in like pure awe and wonder of the universe. It's beautiful. It was incredible. So it's like there's a physical dimension. There's you mentioned the Stoics. And I think there's something there's something profound this. And I think, you know, the traditional religions tie into this as well. It's like when there is a tradition or a school of thought that is literally lasted for millennia. Yeah.
[47:05] it also makes you feel so insignificant. It's like, wow, all of my problems, like this guy was a Roman emperor 2,000 years ago, and he can perfectly address, like, my bullshit that I'm struggling with today. Like, again, it makes you feel so small. Oh, yeah. It's so insignificant. And then you mentioned the...
[47:25] you know, going to mass, that feels like a, like contemplating the unknown or the things that cannot be understood. I'm sitting in awe. Yeah. I'm sitting in awe and it's the, I'm the, not the me, you know the difference between the I self and the me self. This is a very William James concept. The I self is I'm observing the world. The me self is I'm observing me. Yeah. And we spend tons of time in the me self. That's looking in the mirror or for that matter, looking at social media.
[47:55] The I self is standing in awe of creation, of the divine, of my love of others, of what's going on outside me. And we need that regularly. We just need more of that. Yeah. You touched briefly earlier. You kind of implied or assumed, you assume correctly, that a lot of the Christians I grew up around, it's what I would call kind of a –
[48:22] childish relationship with god it's like it's it's all or nothing it's right or wrong black and white the guy in the sky guy in the sky he's watching everything beard you know he's bald uh he cares he cares you know whether my my car broke down last week or not you know finding a parking place yeah exactly um so there's kind of that version
[48:45] Before we went live, we talked about California a little bit. And my audience has heard me rant about California plenty of times. But there's kind of a... But you're still here, which, you know, it's like a revealed preference. Yes, it is a revealed preference. But I would argue that there is an immature form of spirituality out here, which is kind of like the...
[49:04] The bullshit weekend meditation retreat that, you know, is quote unquote so deep, so profound, but really they're just obsessing. They're in their me self. They're just obsessing about themselves the entire time. So I'm curious, like how would you define a healthy and transcendent spirituality that gives us that –
[49:21] proper dose of, of meaning in our lives? And then like, where does it turn unhealthy? Yeah. And how? That's a good question. I mean, of course, that's a huge topic that people have talked about an awful lot, but, um, and there's lots of substitute religions. Politics is a substitute religion. And you know, the, the whole, you know, all of the political activism that we see today on both sides of the spectrum are a substitute for people actually having a sense of the transcendent.
[49:46] And that's why, you know, with the secret handshakes and esoteric language and the good and evil and the cancel culture and there's these people are devils and these people are angels and it's like witch hunts. It's really, really religious, but except the problem is there's no divinity. There's no.
[50:03] Goodness. There's no cosmic love in it. All there is is the starchy, nasty parts of religion. It's just all it is is the rules, which is one of the reasons that it that activism, it tends to increase mental illness. It tends to increase depression and anxiety, especially for people under 30. If you substitute.
[50:24] some sort of activist cause for a healthy spirituality, you're probably going to wind up depressed and anxious. Yeah. Is the way, and it all kind of makes sense of the way that this works.
[50:34] What we find in a lot of religious activity is that really, really healthy religious activity has some characteristics in common. Number one is it's based in love. It's based in love. Love for the divine, love for each other. Right. And love because love conquers all and love is one of the great – love is the nuclear fuel of happiness.
[50:54] And so if you have a religion that basically says God is love, for example, you're on the right track, you know, depending on what you're talking about. And this isn't, by the way, this isn't both the karmic and the Abrahamic religions. So I'm speaking exclusively about my own. The second is that it has technique that's really healthy, that has contemplative tradition to it. It has something that you can actually do to practice it. Yeah.
[51:17] And so practicing it, you can center yourself around the divine love, around the concept of love. And so there's prayer or there's meditation. There's some sort of a contemplative tradition. And so look for these kind of things. You know, do you get that from soul cycle?
[51:34] I don't know, man. That's my religion. I'm not, you know, not to cast aspersions, but the whole point is either they have a contemplative tradition or they have depth. Yeah. Or they have some sort of a concept of depth. And in the worst cases, if you're, you know.
[51:49] political activism is your religion that has neither a contemplative tradition nor love. Right. In which case is the fast road to feeling like garbage is how that comes about. But that's, you know, when you start to lose the love, be suspicious. Yeah. And when there's nothing that you can actually do to practice it in a serious way, that's when you should probably run the other direction. Yeah. I think those are good frameworks. Good criteria at least, right? Yeah. No, it makes sense to me. And it is interesting. You know, you mentioned politics. I think there's, there's,
[52:18] You're seeing – there's a certain religiosity that's starting to emerge in, I would say, marketing. Yeah. So if you look at a lot of like fitness movements, nutritional movements. Oh, yeah. Lifestyle – even brands like Apple or Nike. You know, like there's a lot of – there's kind of a –
[52:38] quasi-religious component. Yeah. That's really the contemplative stuff. And so, you know, with a lot of the, you know, the fitness things, you're supposed to do things that are very, very hard and ascetic as if they were religious activities. Right. You know, you're supposed to, it's like walking on your knees all the way to the Basilica or something like that. But that's, that's just some weird exercise regime that you're doing. That's, that gives you, almost puts you into a trance in some way. Yeah. Because we want that. We actually want that.
[53:05] But we don't want the, you know, the messy one-sided conversations and all the rules. Well, there's almost like there's a little bit of a fallacy going on, which is that because meaning and spirituality sustains you during suffering, it's almost like people assume like, well, if I just suffer a lot, then I'll get to experience all the meaning and spirituality. And it's like, well, it doesn't work in reverse. You're missing the point. Yeah. You're missing the point. You've actually taken, it's the old, where's the beef? Yeah. You know? Yeah. All right. So.
[53:35] You mentioned earlier that love, romantic love is a worldly representation of the divine. At its best it is. At its best. At its worst it's not. Yeah, yeah. It's actually one of my questions here because, you know, you've got this framework of the four pillars and one of them is family. And I've written here, what if your family is toxic as fuck? Yeah, I know. Yeah.
[54:00] No, no, I know. And that's a huge problem. But a lot of people will ascribe toxicity to basic disagreement. Just things they don't like. Yeah, to things that they don't like. And, you know, the schisms happen because one in six Americans not speaking to a family member today because of politics. That's just insanity. That's so crazy. There's only one reason to have schism, which is abuse. Yeah. And differences of opinion just aren't abuse. Yeah.
[54:24] And what happens is that when a difference of opinion becomes a form of abuse, it means that politics has become your religion. That's a tell that religion has taken on the divine characteristics that you're actually hungry for. And that's a very unfortunate situation we see more and more of. But when you have a really toxic family relationship, some people, they just don't get that. And it's a pity.
[54:47] Not everybody can get all the good things in life, in which case you need to reassemble family relationships in a different way. Yeah. Which you absolutely can. Yeah. I mean, I always – this question comes up a lot in my audience. I bet. Yeah.
[55:00] One of the things, and I agree, there's a lot of statistics around people like cutting off parents, cutting off family members, uh, often for frivolous reasons. And, and it's, you know, I always reiterate that like, that should be the last resort. It's, there's so many things you can manage the exposure of a relationship. Like if there's certain things, if I have a family member who's, uh, uh,
[55:24] toxic or generates a lot of conflict and drama in a certain area, it's like you can create kind of boundaries of like, okay, I don't engage in that conversation with this family member. Or I set expectations of like, okay, I'm only going to visit this person for this amount of time. And if these things start happening, I'm going to leave. There's so many ways to, like tactical ways to manage a familial relationship that doesn't just
[55:50] involve cutting them off entirely. And it's like, I, especially young people, I don't think they appreciate like, you only get one mom, you only get one dad, you only get one of each of your siblings. Like it's friends are going to come and go. Political movements are going to come and go. Cultural trends are going to come and go, but your family is, is always your family. And if you
[56:17] I mean, that's a lot of valuable time that you're wasting. Yeah. Anybody who's telling you for ideological reasons to cut off a family member is a dark triad who is trying to conscript you into their war.
[56:33] Yeah. They're trying to manipulate you and they don't care what of how much of your happiness and love that they sacrifice. Yeah. They want power. And that's step one of a cult, right? Yeah. Don't they say that? That's right. It's like step one of creating a cult is you cut people off from their friends and family. Political activists, particularly today, in this part in the political cycle, there's a lot of research on this, as you can imagine. Political activists are disproportionately dark triads. So you've talked about dark triads on the show before, right? Yeah, it's come up.
[56:58] Okay, so it's a combination of three personality characteristics, which is narcissism, Machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy. It's all about me. I'm willing to hurt you, and I feel no remorse about it. Yeah. They're above average on those three characteristics. That's 1 in 14 of the population, about 7% of the population, according to Scott Berry Kaufman, your neighbor here in Santa Monica. He's been on the show, yeah. He's fantastic. And he's sort of the king of the dark triad. He's not a dark triad himself. No, no. He's the king of the world's leading expert on this. Yeah.
[57:27] And what we find in the research is that political activists today are disproportionately dark triads. Now, you would not date one. You would not hire one. You certainly would try not to work for one. Don't vote for one. Don't fall.
[57:42] Follow them. Don't follow them. Don't give them your votes or your attention. Certainly don't sign up for their crazy brand of, you know, a righteous world ideology on your college campus. These people, they will hurt you. It's really important because what they're selling you is cult-like behavior based around political or social ideology. How do you spot one, though? Because they can be very charismatic and...
[58:08] seductive. Number one is their pitch to you is that you're a victim. Okay. Even though you didn't know it is that people have been hurting you, even though you didn't realize it. The real, the real, the reason that you weren't aggrieved before is because you were under a false consciousness. This is the beginning of what dark triad political activists always say. Second,
[58:27] You need a different friend group. You need a different group of people. Those people that you loved, you were loving them for the wrong reasons. You need to start to see – the scales need to fall from your eyes. You need to see them for the first time. They start to put barriers between you and your friends or between you and your family. That's the second thing that they typically see. Third is they start to demand more of you than you would normally want to give.
[58:50] More of your affection, more of your time, more of your attention. That's what they want from you. These are the characteristics of that you're being kind of sucked into a dark triad political cult, a political activist movement. And again, you're not – you'll be able to recognize it on the other side. Your brother who's, you know, in some weird internet chat room or following some kind of extreme bro on the internet, you know that that's what's happening to him. Yeah.
[59:15] happening to you too. Yeah. You know, and so, but the fact that it's your such and such studies professor at college, that doesn't mean that that person is not just as much of a dark triad. Right. As the, as the guy in the internet is sucking in your brother. Yeah. It's crazy because I, you know, I coming back to the technology aspect, like I just think it's, it's enabled this stuff so much more. Like it's, it's almost like we're scaling cult
[59:45] I don't really know other than just like educating people and trying to inoculate them to these, like make them aware of these cultural tendencies. Like I don't know what else we can do. Well, the good news is that if you're in a virtual cult, it's not a strong one. Yeah. It's not as strong as if you were actually literally living in a commune. Yeah. Those things are really hard to break free of. And that's when you need the deprogrammers who, you know, throw you in the back of a car and there's like, you can't unlock it. And the whole thing, those famous stories from the seventies.
[1:00:15] They were kidnapping people's children and there was this huge paranoia, but everybody was actually joining a cult. And, you know, the Internet activity really is extreme and it's very easy to access and it's dangerous. But the relationship is not as profound because anything that's actually not in person inculcates a love between people that's weaker.
[1:00:37] Yeah. So that's the, the, the good news is the bad news. Right. Is that all the, you know, all the ways that the internet is mediating love relationships and making them weaker and us more lonely is also less likely to suck us in and ruin our lives. Yeah. Permanently. It's all empty calories in both directions. Pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Um.
[1:00:56] Last thing I want to touch on that relates to relationships. You have a deep conversation, man. I know. I just love this. It's completely went in a direction I was not anticipating. Let's see how many, how many, how many listeners we get, you know, based on that. Not that we care about that. Yeah. Right. Let's just watch the, let's refresh and watch the numbers. Like a monkey on cocaine. Yeah.
[1:01:20] Well, we are both former musicians and both fame and accolade starved success whores. All I want is the admiration of strangers. Is that too much to ask? Just an insatiable desire for approval. Do you love me yet? Does the world love it yet? We need to do another podcast. Yeah.
[1:01:39] Um, you have this great analogy, which you said, uh, successful, successful marriages are like startups and not mergers. Yeah. Why is that? You need to, to a very large extent, you need to grow up together because it's actually hard. You know, in, in the industrial organizational literature, mergers typically are unsuccessful. Mm hmm.
[1:01:58] It's a pretty small minority of mergers between companies that winds up being a commercial success. They always look like a good idea and they typically aren't for lots of reasons. It's hard to merge cultures. It's hard to figure out who's going to be the boss and what party is going to be subservient, etc. And when two are established, those are the questions you have to answer. And the same thing is true when people are unduly established as individuals. Now, that doesn't mean...
[1:02:20] That people, when they get married at 35 and they both have successful careers, that they're going to have an unsuccessful marriage. It's just harder is the bottom line. And there's lots of tells. I mean, there's a problem if you have separate bank accounts that typically is problematic because it means that you want that kind of financial autonomy and economics in a society, in a community, in a neighborhood, in a family, and in a couple is cultural.
[1:02:47] You know what you do with your money is an expression of your values. Always has been, always will be. And so that's one of the examples of things that actually make it harder because of a lack of trust and a demand for actually not being a hive mind. The happiest marriages are a hive mind. It's like, it's us. Yeah. It's us. What do we think about this? Yeah. And that's a very beautiful thing. And that's just harder to do. Yeah. It's harder to do. So the startup marriages...
[1:03:12] And an immature startup typically is not successful. So you're getting married at 17. It's going to be hard because you don't have enough experience. You're not mature enough. You're not synaptically developed enough, quite frankly. The connection between your limbic system and prefrontal cortex is not complete in human females until age 21.
[1:03:31] And human males till, you know, like 70. Yeah. So you didn't talk. If never. This explains problems. And so what you find is that sort of mid-20s until early 30s is the sweet spot for startup marriages that look like, you know, partners to an entrepreneurial endeavor. Yeah. And then you kind of can't remember before you were a hive mind.
[1:03:54] Yeah, it's kind of a sweet spot of like you've had enough life experiences and you've developed enough individually to be mature enough to handle it. And you've made mistakes. And you've made mistakes. And you've learned, yeah. But you also haven't built such an identity that is –
[1:04:09] like completely self-sufficient and, and self-sustaining. Yeah. And you're not trying to merge. And then of course there's, there are acquisitions and hostile takeovers, which are usually not the best models or even less. So I feel like you could do, you could do a whole nerdy book on this. Yeah. You know, you're an economist and you're talking about marriage.
[1:04:30] This is what, this is what comes out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, marriage is, you mentioned earlier, but marriage is, is highly correlated with levels of happiness. Like, why is that? It, it, part of the reason is because people don't, most people don't do that well alone. Now, women do better than men. Right. So women who are, who are, who are not, who never marry do better than men who are, who don't marry. There's just so much substance abuse and there's just so much, you know, men by themselves, it's kind of bad things happen.
[1:04:59] It's pathology tends to follow in the wake of men by themselves. And, you know, there are ways to do that. You can live in community if you belong to a religious group or something under the circumstances. But what you find is that men just they tend to be emotionally sort of on the rocks when they don't have that. Women do a little bit better, but both sexes. I mean, for the longest time, there was all this research that suggested that women are happier when they're single than when they're married. That's actually wrong. That's been invalidated.
[1:05:26] That's been, that's never been replicated in any meaningful way. The best stuff on this is by a guy named Brad Wilcox. Have you had him on the show? No. Oh, you'd love him. He runs the Institute for Family Studies, University of Virginia. Okay. And he's a super interesting guy about the benefits of marriage and the cognitive benefits of marriage, emotional benefits of marriage. But it's just...
[1:05:44] easier not to walk alone is the way that this works. And you know, the happiest marriages are those characterized by what we call companionate love. Not passionate love. I mean, passionate love is at the very beginning when you're actually bonding to each other, when you're neurochemically bonding to each other. But what do you wanna get to within five years is best friendship. And you know, best friendship is a magical thing, man. And you get to live with your best friend, your best, it's your best, you get to watch TV with every night.
[1:06:12] And they've got your back on literally everything. Yeah. I mean, it's like no matter how much you're screwing up to the world and how much they think you're a complete goofball, they're still going to defend you. Yeah. Because that's your, because, and you're not competing with each other. This is, this is one of the problems with the merger marriage. There tends to be competition. Like I stayed with junior yesterday. You have to stay with junior. That's poison. Yeah. And that's just completely toxic. I call that the scorecard, which is, it's like, as soon as, if you have any scorecard in the relationship, like.
[1:06:40] You're doomed. Yeah. It's over. It's just like 50-50 marriages. Yeah. They turn into zero-zero marriages. Right. Typically. Right. And a startup is a 100-100 marriage. Yeah. And that's – it's not perfect and it's hard and you have to work on it all the time. And there are times when you're closer and times when you're further apart. Yeah.
[1:06:59] But, you know, I've been married 33 years and I'm going to be married to the day I die. Cause I'm assuming I'm going to die first because fair is fair. Yeah. And, and, and it's the one thing I can really, really count on. Yeah. It's the one thing I can absolutely count on. Now, one of the things that makes it easier to have this marriage is actually a spiritual journey together. That's really part of companion at love where you're kind of Lewis and Clark.
[1:07:25] So you're trying to convert me. Looking for the Pacific. And it's like, let's read this thing together, right? Let's, you know, I don't know. Neither of us knows. Yeah. Let's go listen to that crazy thing together. But this is why I love the startup analogy is because you really do grow into something that neither of you expect. Right. Over the years. Oh, yeah.
[1:07:45] And it is – it's exciting. It's thrilling. Sometimes it's terrifying. But it is like you do both completely end up becoming completely different people than either of you expected at the beginning. And that is the joy of it together. And giving yourself completely to a journey that becomes unpredictable and unexpected. But at least you've got somebody who's got you by the hand. Yeah. And is going to love you no matter what. Yeah. I mean, when you think about this – and I was listening to your – to the New Year's episode and you were talking about 2025.
[1:08:15] Mark Manson's going to do less sort of old school, subtle art stuff. Right. That's going to be hard, man. Yeah. That's going to be hard for you because once again, there's meaning and there's a claim and a claim is instantiated in things like, you know, sponsorships and money. And you're going to question your decisions about trying to do some new things all the time. But there's one person who's going to be in your corner. Right.
[1:08:38] Yeah. And that's your wife. Yeah. And she's going to be, yeah, do it totally. Yeah. But what if we make less money? She's like, I don't care. Yeah. Because I bet she doesn't care. Yeah. And that's – and there's literally one person out there for that. Right. And it's really great. Yeah. It can't be – I can't – it's funny too because I was –
[1:08:59] I was never someone who was big on traditional family values growing up and marriage completely blindsided me as being possibly the most positive thing I've ever done with my life. And, um, and I was not expecting that. Like it just, it like hit me, uh, pretty soon after we got engaged and I was just like, this is incredible. Like this level of commitment.
[1:09:22] The permanence of it. Yeah. All of the exact things that I feared when I was young and single are actually the benefits. Totally. And I just never understood that. That's really, really – that's an incredibly important point. Yeah. That you're making right now. My wife didn't believe in marriage when I met her. Yeah. I don't believe in marriage because she's in Barcelona and from a hard-read atheist family and –
[1:09:46] And none of her siblings ever got married. They were sort of serially monogamous. Right. And her dad took off when she was a little kid and moved in with somebody else. And it's just this modern way of living. And when I met her and I was really in love and I moved to Barcelona without speaking the language. And I took a job in Barcelona because I figured I could probably close that deal.
[1:10:13] It took me two years to convince her that marriage is a good idea and that we should actually get married. But so everybody starts from a different place on this, but it's very rare. I mean, a lot of people have bad marriages and they don't work out and that's misery. And I get that. But the overwhelming majority opinion on this is that it's a really very beautiful and a very good thing.
[1:10:34] It is. And it's also, it's, uh, I just want to note, cause this, I see this statistic continue to pop up everywhere and it drives me insane. The 50% of marriages that end in divorce, that is a vastly outdated statistic. Way outdated. That has not been true. Welcome to the seventies.
[1:10:49] Yeah, that hasn't been true in 50 years. It's actually – it's much closer to like 25%, 30%. 25%, 30%. And in certain demographic pockets that are going to be the subtle art listeners, it's more like 15%. Yeah. The odds are on your side that you're going to have a happy marriage and it's going to be a permanent marriage. Right. Do it.
[1:11:07] Arthur Brooks. Thank you so much. Thank you. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Burney. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.

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