You can almost save a marriage by making eye contact when you talk. So the woman gets three times as much oxytocin, but she also starves more because she needs more. One of the things that drives couples apart is that they don't look at each other in the eyes when they talk. Guys don't know this. She needs direct eye contact whenever you're talking.
Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, a best-selling author, and one of the most powerful voices in behavioral science. And he's breaking down the actual science of what makes life meaningful in his new book, and right here on the Tamson Show.
I found in my research that the number one predictor of depression and anxiety is the inability to articulate the meaning of your own life.
What do they really ask you when they ask you what is the meaning of life?
Yeah. Well, that's a big question.
If you have ever wondered whether there's an actual science behind feeling happier, behind why your life, your relationships, your choices feel like they do, good news. There is. Arthur C. Brooks is one of the world's leading experts on happiness. He is a Harvard professor, best-selling author, and internationally recognized researcher whose work has shaped how millions of people understand happiness and human connection, including myself. His upcoming book, The Meaning of Your Life, reveals how meaning is built and why understanding those forces can change the way you see your relationships, your choices, and also yourself. So, if you've been trying in any way to understand the meaning behind where you are right now in your life, I'm telling you this conversation is really going to help you get there. So, welcome to the Tamson Show, Arthur Brooks.
Thank you, Tamson. What a delight to be with you.
I'm so thrilled to have you here. I feel like I know your voice because I've listened to your books on audio many of hours.
That's right. I've, you know, I've lulled you to sleep at night with the dulcet tones of my reading my book.
No, I promise it was only daytime. Okay. It's really nice to have you here. Thank you. And I feel like we can go in a lot of different ways.
I was talking before we turned the cameras on, but you know, I read From Strength to Strength in 2022 when it was published, but it really was very pivotal as I changed careers two years ago after 30 years in journalism. So, it really showed me that it was okay to do that. It gave me permission somehow.
And I needed to do it too. So for those listeners who might not be familiar with the book From Strength to Strength and maybe some of the work that you've done, you haven't always talked about happiness, right?
No. No. On the contrary, I've done a lot of different things in my work. I'm a behavioral scientist by background, but I dedicated myself to the study of happiness when I needed to make a transition myself. And I've written books about happiness in the past, but I really dedicated myself to bringing it to bigger audiences only about seven years ago. And that was when I was stepping down from a big CEO job and I was lost.
I didn't know what to do. I mean, I needed to step away. It was time to step away, but I didn't know if there was another act.
And so, I started thinking and doing a lot of research on how people who got happier as they got older, they moved into something that was better for them, what they all had in common. There's lots of case studies out there, people who do it poorly. Yeah, there are a lot of people who are hanging on to the past and you're like, 'Oh man, he's really missing a step.' And you know, I didn't want to be that guy. And I thought I had something else to give. The research on how our brains change, how our lives change, how our personalities change, and how we can actually as super-strivers move on to the next curve of our lives and be successful and actually get happier as well. I think I cracked the code.
I wrote the book. I wrote it for you, Tamson.
You cracked it for me. It came at such a time — I mean, you know, we say things come when they need to come, but it came at such a time and I don't know that I really knew what to expect from it.
It gave me the permission I needed to feel okay and feel like I wasn't giving up by walking away from the only career I had known, aside from waiting tables. I went from waiting tables to being a news anchor. And that's what I did my whole life for 30 years. And it really gave me permission to understand why I needed to do it and how it was going to be so much more beneficial to me for sure, without feeling like I was giving up.
Well, no. Exactly. Right. And the truth of the matter is that as we get older, particularly as we move through our 40s and 50s, there's lots and lots of changes. There's neurobiological changes, but there's also psychology that goes into this. And one of the things that you find is that people move from one kind of general intelligence to another. When you're younger, when you're in your 20s and 30s, you're good at cracking the case. You're a good kind of cowboy in the way that you do your work on your own, and that's what made you really good at what you were doing as a journalist for sure. But as you get into your 40s and 50s, you find that you're a much better teacher than you've been in the past. That's called crystallized intelligence. That's pattern recognition, the ability to explain intricate topics, even science, to people. And if you found that you had a real interest in taking a scientific topic — I don't know, just hypothetically, I don't know, menopause or something.
Yeah, we'll use that one.
I mean, that's a technical topic. I mean, that's a very, very intricate area of science, and you wanted to explain it to a lot of people and you found that you could with empathy and connecting with people in ways you couldn't in the past. And you couldn't understand why am I so interested in this and why am I so much better at this? It's because your crystallized intelligence was higher than it had ever been before and it was calling to you. It was time for you to actually become the professor that's inside you, to become a teacher, and that's what you are. You're a teacher now.
Thank you for that because it really was. And when people say like, how did you reinvent? And I was like, oh, I read this book, From Strength to Strength, if you haven't read it. And I really do, I have said that to a lot of people because it always is a question. And I think you said it right. There are a lot of people that can't walk away and don't feel like it's okay for them to do that because they feel like, 'Oh gosh, my best years are behind me.' But wow, when you can let go, no matter what, Adrian, but especially in midlife, if you can let go and say, 'It's okay. I'm going forward and I'm going to be even stronger.' There's something pretty incredible and attractive about that.
There is. Now, of course, it's scary because when you're doing something new, you're leaving things behind.
And there's a period that we call liminality or a liminal space in your life. And that's just a fancy way of saying the time between the things.
The 'now what' time, right?
Yeah. Exactly. And that's when you feel most insecure. That's when you feel like a little lobster that's molting and it's kind of soft and precarious and vulnerable.
And that's a hard time, but that's when you actually have your most growth. This is something I'm really interested in my research, is the time between the tides of your life.
And that's — I mean, you study hormonal changes, for example. When people are experiencing intense hormonal change, it feels really vulnerable. It feels really scary. It's really, really uncomfortable. But that's when people lean into it. They get their most personal growth for a particular reason.
And so when you start to feel yourself going into a period of tremendous change, biological change, psychological change, that's when you say, 'Aha, I'm getting a signal from the heavens that it's time to learn something new, to grow as a person.'
I think it's important for people to hear that so they don't feel like they're supposed to have it figured out during that time. And as uncomfortable as that time can be, and painful really, it's okay because you get to that other side if you, as you said, lean into it.
Totally. Totally. There's a lot of different kinds of transitions like that. Transitions between careers, transitions between marriages, transitions in your biology. Just like you talk about an awful lot in your work. These are the magic times in life. They're the most uncomfortable for a reason.
For a reason. The most. In every one of those, I see so many similarities and then so many ways it can go if you're fighting it.
I help people get through that. I help people retire. I help people when they're thinking about how is it possible to love again. And I'm so interested in that because that's when you find that people become a new sort of person and a better sort of person as well, but not if they fight it. Not if you fight it.
It's really fascinating how to do that. I want to ask you though, talk about the path that got you here.
Well, I've done a lot of different things in my own career. As a matter of fact, I started off as a classical musician all the way through my 20s. I was a professional French horn player. This is a great country, isn't it?
Do you still do it at all?
No, I don't. But I did from the time I was 9 years old and I did it until I was 31.
So for 22 years, it was kind of my whole thing. As a matter of fact, I didn't go to college until I was in my late 20s and I played in the Barcelona orchestra and had a kind of a nice classical music life, but I knew that there was something beyond that. So, the first big turning point that I had in my own life was in my late 20s when I realized I needed to do something else to support my family.
And I went to college by correspondence and I got really interested in behavioral science and science. I had no idea, but I became a behavioral scientist. I did that as an academic for 10 years and then I left to run a company for 10 years. So, I kind of go in these 10-year increments professionally. The hardest one of all, however, came in my mid-50s when it was time for me to step back from this CEO job that I had. And that was — I was really lost. I was really lost. I was really worried about that. That's what I was talking about at the very beginning of our conversation. And it's interesting because I didn't know if I could be happy because I was giving up something that was so prestigious. I was the CEO of this pretty famous organization. I wasn't as visible and famous as if I were doing the news every night on television like you, but I mean it was a big deal.
It's who you're known as.
Yeah. It's actually how I saw myself. Here's the real problem: I know you look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, that's the news anchor, right?' And I would look at myself and say, 'That's the boss.' But I knew it had to actually change. Okay? So I started once again studying these people that had made these incredible transitions later in life and actually gotten happier and what they all had in common, and that's what I started to write about. Now, I didn't really intend for this to become a career in itself. I mean, it didn't, but you know, I was working on this so I could find the answer and my wife kind of found my notes.
And she has always given me the courage to make transitions in my life because I know that, you know, a hard landing is still with her.
You know, we're going to land hard together, you know, coming with me.
Yeah, that's right. I always say, if you leave me, that's okay, but you got to take me with you.
And so the result of it was that when I wrote it up into a book, a lot of people read it and it turns out a lot of people were interested in this. So your interest in menopause, for example, it was your particular interest that it turns out everybody shared and you didn't know it, and that took a leap of faith. For me it was like, what happens in your life when you know you're done with one thing but you're not done with your life and there's something else to give? How do you find that new thing? And it turns out lots and lots of people were asking that question, there was nothing else written about it.
And so that's how From Strength to Strength came about. And at the same time I was moving on to, you know, teaching, taking a teaching position at Harvard where I've been teaching the science of happiness for the past seven years. I write, you know, columns and books and I do a lot of media.
Column for The Atlantic, and I'm going to give your resume.
And it's been this unbelievable opportunity to do public education, to actually move out into the world and talk about how science can be in the interest of everybody watching us. And it's been an incredible opportunity. My second curve has actually become to be a professor in the public sphere, to bring these scientific ideas to life.
Could you have ever seen that?
No. When I was playing the French horn, I didn't see anything beyond playing the French horn. When I was a college professor, there was nothing beyond that. Now, at this point, oh yeah, maybe I'm 61. Maybe at 65 I'll go be a circus juggler or...
I was going to say a firefighter. I don't know. No, probably not.
But nothing's off the table really.
I sort of feel like nothing's off the table. There's certain things that are probably physically off the table, but...
But I feel like, I mean, at some point, I'm going to probably slow down, but it at this point is just so exciting.
And I get excited for younger people to see that because I think I never saw anything. My mom died when she was 51. So I never saw a road map beyond that, right? So 51 was kind of like, I don't know what happens next.
No cliff, right? It just stopped and it was just kind of nothing there.
And so it's been — I'm 55 now and I was like, wait, how old? 55 now and I really just, I'm more excited than I've ever been.
Exactly. And that's a big point in there, you know.
And then the question about the meaning of life and how we ask those questions. So when people ask you something, what are they really asking when they ask you what is the meaning of life?
Yeah. Well, that's a big question, but you know, that's sort of the new project. So, you know, From Strength to Strength was a book that I wrote because I really needed it.
And it's largely for people who are trying to design the second half of their own lives. This new book, The Meaning of Your Life, I'm writing it for my 28-year-old students, which is also kind of for all of us.
And the reason is because what I've found in my research is the number one predictor of depression and anxiety is the inability to be able to articulate the meaning of your own life. And this is a new problem.
This is not a problem that people were even thinking about in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. There's something going on where people have a hard time understanding, feeling, articulating, sharing the meaning of their life and it's making them horribly anxious and depressed, especially young adults, but not exclusively young adults. So, this is a book that looks at the science of how you find the meaning of your life and how to live differently in a way that's really helping me a lot and my adult kids too.
I'm sure. Were we able to articulate it better before?
We were better able to understand it before. So probably your grandparents, if you'd said, 'Grandma, what's the meaning of life?' and she'd be like, 'What are you talking about?'
But she had a really, really good understanding of what the meaning of her life was.
And so the result of it was that a lot of maladies that we have today, of really rampant what we call a psychogenic epidemic, which is just a fancy way of saying that people are suffering a lot with not a biological origin. We use fancy words in academia to get tenure.
I know I have to ask you like three times how to say it, what it means, how to spell it. I'm going to do that quite often.
But there's an epidemic of loneliness and depression and anxiety from young people that just absolutely didn't exist and is most correlated with 'my life feels meaningless.' And so it's really if your life feels meaningful, not whether or not you're able to put all the words around it. And your grandparents, they lived in a particular way that was incredibly meaningful. And so this new book talks about how we've changed our brains by accident and then how to heal our brains in the next six months. And so anybody has a real plan, kind of a six-part plan as a matter of fact, on how we can actually find the meaning of our lives. That's kind of being fully alive in an old-fashioned way is what it comes down to.
You obviously feel like this, but I went away over the summer and I read a book, like a hard book, not on my iPad, not on my Kindle, not on my — and that's what I did for my vacation. Like I read a book and I felt so whole after that, which seemed crazy to me.
I know. And you were — that's old-fashioned. And your brain was actually changing.
I felt it. I felt it. Like I came back from vacation and they were like, 'What did you do?' I was like, 'I read a book.'
I know. I know. It's like crazy.
I know. What a party. But what's happening fundamentally is that our brains are what neuroscientists call hemispherically lateralized. All that means is the two halves of the brain do different things.
The right side of your brain is more dedicated to mystery and meaning, love, happiness. The left side of your brain is technical tasks. It's the what and how-to. The right side of your brain is the why questions. It's the big why. The left side of your brain is what and how-to. And you need both. I mean, you need to go out and get food and figure out how to get to work. And the right side of your brain tells you why you'd want to do that. Like, because I have people that I love that I want to support. The problem is modern life is shoving us into the left side of the brain and making the why questions harder and harder and harder to answer. And the more time you're spending online, the more time you're spending with your devices and with your screens, the less likely you are to be even considering questions of love, happiness, mystery, and meaning in your life. And you went away on vacation and put down your devices and picked up a book and you were talking to actual humans and having eye contact like we're having right now. And it's like, why do you feel whole? Because your whole brain was working.
Actually, it's so crazy when I understand that it really does go back to as much as we say we've advanced in so many ways.
Our grandparents, they had a lot of the answers that they weren't aware that they had.
Oh, yeah. No, our brains are still — we're really in their current state about 250,000 years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene and they haven't changed very much. And we're made to live in small bands of 30 to 50 individuals.
I mean, our brains are kind of evolved for us to work properly when we're in small groups where we know each other, we talk, we look at each other in the eyes, we eat together. You know, you're gnawing on a piece of yak meat while you're talking about your day. We're not made to eat DoorDash in front of the — while you're watching Netflix. We're not made to do that. And we're especially not made to live alone, which is really hard. So, people who do live alone, they need more and more in-person contact. One of the big predictors of depression, loneliness, and anxiety is people who work alone, they live alone, their friends are on screens, and they're mediating everything just using this left hemisphere of their brain. It's a real problem.
Is it all the digital that's done this? Where do you take it back to? It didn't start in 2020, but when you went back to school and you were seeing these university students all feeling the same way and realizing that you had to talk about it.
Yeah, for sure. And so what it is is that the technology has a huge role to play in this. But there's also kind of the hustle culture, the culture of work, of achievement as opposed to a culture of relationship that's been going on and that exacerbates the problem that we've got of having this screen-based culture.
And the people who are really — people in their mid-20s today, they have a particular problem. They don't remember the before times like we do.
And the before times are like, you know, we get stuck behind screens too. And that's how you knew you needed to go away and take out your book and just be with your husband and have these relationships in person. A lot of people don't know and so they think if I find the right hack, if I find the right protocol, if I find the right routine, if I find the right app, the right technology, then I'm going to be able to solve that. But they're going deeper and deeper and deeper into the left hemisphere of their brain. And you can't get to the right by going further and further left.
So, how do you get to the right?
The way that you get to your right is by living in a way that your grandmother would have taken for granted.
And that means doing about six things that are indicative of this life of meaning. The first is to think more seriously about the big mysterious questions of life. The why questions of life.
And every religion does this. It has these deep questions. Most religions are actually based on questions, not on answers. And this is a funny thing, Tamson. Do you remember when we were kids? I'm a little older than you, but when we were kids, you remember Koko the gorilla?
Of course. Of course. I remember Koko with the little kitten.
There was a video with the kitten, right?
So, Francine Patterson, Penny Patterson was her handler.
Koko the gorilla, for those of you who are watching us who are not 61. For those of you who haven't heard of Koko,
kids these days — Koko the gorilla was a lowland Ugandan gorilla, female gorilla born in captivity, lived to a ripe old age of 46,
but did this incredible thing from her handler, Penny Patterson, taught her a thousand words in sign language. And everybody thought, well, this blurs the line between Homo sapiens and non-human primates. But it didn't at all because there's one thing that Koko the gorilla never did. She never asked a single question. The essence of true humanity is not answering questions. That's why AI is not human. That's why Google's not human. It's asking questions. The asking, the asking, that's what makes us who we are. So, if you want to actually start to get into the meaning of your life, to open up the right hemisphere of your brain, into the dark consciousness, the mystery, start asking deep questions that don't have answers.
What are they? What are some of the questions?
Why are you alive? Like, who created you and for what reason?
For what would you give your life right now?
Right now. Happily give your life right now.
These are hard to articulate. You know what?
Yeah. Why do you love your husband?
And almost anything you say, it's like it trivializes it.
It does. It doesn't feel big enough.
Because he's good to me. No. I mean, like, so is your third-grade teacher, you know? I mean, it's no.
But those are questions that you go, I don't have a good — but I have an answer, but I don't, but I do, but I don't.
Exactly. Right. And so one of the things that's really, really useful is that when you have people over to your house and it's just not that fun.
It's just like that. And the reason is because you never go deep.
Right. And the times when people do come over and you didn't even know them very well and you're like, that was so satisfying.
The reason is because you went deep into the right hemispheres of your brain. So here's the way to do it when you're having a dinner party with somebody. It's like, tonight we're going to go deep or we're going to go home. Okay.
And then by about 15 minutes in, here's the topic of conversation.
What are you most afraid of?
No. I mean, bring it on. Bring it on. I mean, this is life.
Otherwise, you're talking about the weather and where you're going tomorrow.
And Junior had sailing lessons. It's like, I don't care. I don't care. I don't care about your vacation unless something big happened to your soul on vacation. Then I want to know all about it.
You're so right, though. And those are the moments you remember. Otherwise, I've found myself saying this recently, like I feel like I've had this conversation 50 times, you know, if I'm — because I have. And so then, you know, when you say why don't you like small talk? I'm like, because I have it all memorized, right?
Totally. Totally. So the big questions. And you in particular, I mean, you were in the public eye. I mean, you were the queen of small talk.
The queen of how many cocktail parties did you suffer through?
For sure. So that's number one, is asking big questions. This will really open it up. Then there's a series of experiences that people took for granted that people are really not doing as much anymore. Number one is falling in love.
Falling in love. Romantic love anymore.
Well, part of the reason is because we're turning off the right hemisphere of our brains. We're trying to solve love. You know, the left side of the brain does all the complicated stuff. Okay? The complicated problems.
Like what? Like something, getting to work, solving a task, turning on the computer, figuring out an algorithm, inventing an app.
Right. The right side of your brain is the complex stuff, and that's different. Complex means easy to understand conceptually, and impossible to solve. You just have to live complex problems. Okay?
Your toaster is complicated.
That's why you love your cat.
The most complex thing in my life is my marriage.
It's very complex. I mean, I'm married to a Spaniard, so that man, that's complex.
Probably. We've been married 34 years. And it's complex, which means that I understand love. I understand she loves me. I understand. But I can't solve my marriage. It's unsolvable. It's only livable.
These are the things. And the thing about romantic love is that it's the most unsolvable thing that you have to live. And the more you try to solve it with, you know, technology, you're trying to solve it, the further away you're going to get from it. And that's why you got to give your heart away. That's why you need to have your heart broken.
It's so hard to tell somebody young that, but that is the way it is, right?
That's the way it is. And you know, that's one of the things that we find because suffering is one of the great secrets to meaning, is what we actually find. And so the more that you actually allow yourself to go into the deep space of unanswerable questions of cosmic love — I'm an old romantic, but the only reason is because it's great.
Oh yeah. I mean, it's the life and life, and there's less and less and less of that.
Not allowing yourself to fall in love is a huge problem.
Or trying to solve love with technology, for example.
And one of the things that I find really encouraging is that the dating apps, which have been really a problem because more and more people — I mean, you have to be on dating apps to meet people. 62% of long-term relationships start on dating apps today. But more and more people say they don't like the outcomes on the app. So, they're getting more lonely and they're less likely to find a real attraction on the apps. The dating apps are more and more trying to not optimize time in app, but time in person. And that's a really good thing because that's really where it comes from, is time in person where we're neurobiologically linked. Remember that we're supposed to, you know, eye contact, it's everything. Touch and eye contact are everything.
It's a really interesting thing that I talk about with young couples, and I work with young couples a lot. My wife and I actually work with young couples together. And there's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin. You've probably heard of it. Oxytocin is also known as the love molecule, the molecule of bonding. Women have three times as much oxytocin as men.
One of the best ways that you can get oxytocin is direct eye contact with the person you're in love with. It's like an oxytocin pump.
For the woman or for both?
For both. But so the woman gets three times as much oxytocin, but she also starves more because she needs more. One of the things that drives couples apart is that they don't look at each other in the eyes when they talk. Guys don't know this. She needs direct eye contact whenever you're talking. You can almost save a marriage by making eye contact when you talk. Your wife will stray from you emotionally because you're not looking at her in the eyes and she's not getting oxytocin and she doesn't know what's wrong. And that's an example of the complexity that's hard to explain that you actually have to experience.
Men need touch more.
So one of the things that men need because they have more of this vasopressin, which is another neuropeptide that's of defense and loyalty and the warrior spirit and I would fight a tiger for you.
That's when you're walking down the street with your husband and you hook your arm into his. Oh man, he melts.
He's the king. He's the king.
So men, you touch. No matter what kind of touch, back scratch, touch of hair, whatever it is.
It's mostly that it's like, yeah, it's cuddling, but it's mostly just the hand-holding, really, really important to men.
It's like having his arm around you. Really important in sort of the masculine sort of touch.
My husband's going to be so happy tonight. I'm going to like link arms for sure.
Walk away like the king.
These are two things that I recommend to every couple because it actually gets us more toward the experience of the complexity that comes from romantic love. More eye contact and more touch. ABT, always be touching. Always be touching, but always when you're talking, always be making eye contact.
It's funny. Eye contact. I feel like every once in a while, I look up and I realize I haven't even looked at my husband to have a conversation because my head's been in the phone. It really is.
It's a bad habit. I haven't seen you in a while. I know that night before you go to sleep, go to bed about 10 minutes earlier. Read to each other.
Reading to each other has an almost narcotic effect. I recommend love poetry.
Really? What do you read?
My wife will read me Pablo Neruda. I mean, it's like the great Chilean love poet. But the Psalms.
The Song of Songs, you know, and it's just something lovely.
I'm going to try this for like a week and I'm going to tell you what happens.
Yeah, for sure. And then for the last five minutes, look at each other in the eyes while you're holding hands.
That makes all the difference.
I'm going to sleep so much better.
Oh, yeah. For sure. For sure. You're holding his hand. He's looking you in the eye. We need this. We need this. We need this. And these are the kinds of deep, complex links that lead us to a sense, even if you can't articulate it, of life's meaning.
Do we need to have love to have a meaningful life? And does it always have to be romantic love?
No. But it's easiest with romantic love and for most people that is the case. There are many people who don't find their soulmates or they have a failed first big relationship or whatever it happens to be, and they can actually — you can get a lot of this through friendship, particularly women.
Yeah. Women through deep, deep, deep, deep friendship can get most of the benefits that we get from this.
The ideal combination is a great marriage and great friendships and a great friend. But the truth is that if you can't have both, you need at least one. You need at least one.
I guess I think a lot of women feel like they have to follow these timelines and feel like they're behind when it comes to these romantic relationships. So then they get in something that's maybe not the right relationship, but they're just hoping to find something that has meaning.
That's a problem because that's a fear of future regret. That's actually a psychological problem and it's a fallacy because if you're trying to rule out future regret by doing something that isn't right, you will get real regret.
Yeah, I know. I've had that one, too. Like, I'm running out of time, so I'm going to make this the best that it can actually be.
I don't recommend marrying somebody you're not in love with. I don't recommend that unless you're in an arranged marriage in a traditional culture and your parents are completely sure that once you know each other, you're going to be in love. Those actually work pretty well, weirdly. Because your parents have very low divorce and dissolution rates and your parents really know. They're like, 'Yeah, they're going to really love each other.'
Here's actually what they do. This is interesting.
When we choose our mates, we choose too much compatibility.
We choose people who are too much like us.
And yeah. Yeah. It's like on dating apps, for example. You want somebody who, you know, likes the same kind of music and votes for the same politicians and, you know, thinks that Austin is cool and they like to eat Sriracha or whatever, right? And what you're getting is your sibling, which is not — it's not hot. What you need is enough compatibility with values and then a lot of complementarity.
And if your parents — how do you look for that? How do you look for —
That's the problem. If somebody chooses for you, they find complementarity because they know.
And so that's why matchmakers are so effective.
Matchmakers get enough compatibility and a lot of complementarity where you complete each other.
That's an old-school matchmaker thing. But we're horrible matchmakers for ourselves because we're very narcissistic.
Oh, that's so — we look in the mirror and say, 'That's what I want.' But that's not what you want. That's not what you want.
So what do you tell somebody who's listening now that's like, 'Okay, I'm 20-something. I'm still looking for the person I want to be with. I've tried the dating apps. They're awful. I don't want to swipe any which way anymore. And I don't have anyone to stare at every night when I'm in bed.'
So ask that. That means that that's when you put out, you know, an all-points bulletin to your friends, your family, to everybody else to say, I want you to find the best person you can possibly find for me. I'm willing to take a chance on people that you think are really great for me. And again, you're going to — they're going to kiss a lot of frogs.
But that's part of the deal. You kiss a lot of frogs. What your friends and family are not going to find for you is what we call the dark triad, which is somebody who's very high in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy, who has psychopathic traits. That's — Tamson said that's 7% of the population.
Yeah. Let's just call that for everybody watching. That's your first husband.
Well, you're actually right.
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of that. And women find this unbelievably seductive because guys who are very narcissistic, Machiavellian, meaning they're willing to hurt you, and they're psychopathic — not like axe murderers, but they're pretty remorseless and unempathetic — they prey on women who really, really, really want to fall in love. And when people are setting you up, they're not going to do that. They know when somebody's a weirdo.
You don't because you're blind to it.
So what do you do to avoid that? Well, to begin with, you have some bad experiences and you get some battle scars is what it comes down to. And then you start thinking, you think retrospectively about what went wrong in your relationship. So that's a very important thing to keep in mind, is to do a little bit of a — to look back on it forensically and say, what am I not looking for this time? And there's actually a syndrome called philophobia, not with an H. Hemophilia is a blood disorder. Philophobia is a fear of falling in love. And there's a small minority of women, but considerable enough, who fall in love super easily.
They fall in love too fast and that's going through a neurochemical process in their brains of the sex hormones followed by the dopamine and norepinephrine followed by serotonin drops and then just all these chemical changes in their brain that go too quickly and they actually have to self-manage in a way because they know their particular tendencies. These are just walking targets for dark triad men.
Yep. And you know, I always say like there's a four-season in my mind. Like you better go through a year. I want to see somebody during their holiday break. I want to see somebody in the summertime when I really feel like you talk to their mom.
I want to see all of it. I want to see everything because if not, you miss blips on the radar. And I guess being — having gone through a divorce myself, a bad divorce, I see those blips. Yeah. I had one of the —
Yeah. No, that's the key thing. And so all of this is knowledge. All of this is experience. Now, here's the interesting thing to keep in mind.
Those terrible experiences are not something to bury or to be avoided because that suffering itself and all suffering is the next source of meaning.
And this is a big problem that young people have today is they're trying to avoid suffering. They're being told that sadness, that to be anxious is evidence that something's wrong with you. And that's actually not correct. I mean, it can be exaggerated. It can be a psychiatric problem that actually needs to be treated for sure. But if you're not sad and anxious,
I know. Especially now. Yeah.
So what do you recommend? Is it going through that pain or uncomfortableness? I mean, is that the third area of it?
Is to actually understand it and be thinking about what it is, what it actually is that I'm experiencing as opposed to trying to avoid that. And so my students, I make them say, 'My suffering is sacred. My suffering is my teacher. Today is going to be a day that has some very beautiful and fun things. I'm grateful for that. It's also going to have some difficult things, maybe some really hard things. And I'm grateful for that, too.'
Because through that, I'm going to learn and grow. So, all I can say is bring it on.
What do you do? Do you actually sit in it? Do you actually have people sit in it? So, an example of suffering.
An example of suffering is almost — there's little suffering, there's big suffering. And this is inevitable, by the way. So my students will ask, 'So professor, do I need to go looking for suffering?' And I say, 'Don't worry, it'll find you. It'll find you.' I mean, every 18 months on average you have a big transition in your life. Ordinarily it's not something that you initiated, so therefore it's unwelcome. And every five years or so — this is from the work of Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions — you probably know Bruce, right? I love the book. He's fantastic. That you have something that feels pretty catastrophic as a matter of fact. So these things are going to happen with relative regularity and to say, 'I am ready for this. I am courageous about this.' You know, this is something that's going to be really hard for me, but I know that in 90% of the cases or more, I'm going to come out of it stronger than I was going in. So, I'm going to get a head start on being okay with this.
How do you get the head start?
By actually deciding to have a head start as opposed to listening to the propaganda and sort of the therapy industrial complex out there that says that you're pathological if you're suffering.
That you've got something broken if you're suffering.
I mean, it's funny because, you know, people my age often think something's wrong with me. My back hurts. I was like, you're 61. Of course your back hurts. It's the most normal thing. You know what would be really weird is if your back didn't hurt.
Why do we think that nowadays? Why do we try to avoid suffering so much?
We try to avoid suffering because we have a culture that tells us that all suffering can be avoided.
Yes. And you know, grandma knew that suffering couldn't be avoided and so she lived with suffering and that suffering ironically itself became a source of meaning in her life as she went through growth and change.
That's what — and understood what part of life she was in versus trying to go back to the 20s.
Yeah. Totally. And so not to mention the fact that we have a youth-obsessed culture when it comes to physical suffering that says, 'Well, there's got to be a way I can turn back the clock, you know, with this alteration, that alteration, you know, this exercise program, this filter on my Instagram, you know, at least people can think that I'm a lot younger than I am.' And all that does is it makes it impossible for you to grow and change at an appropriate rate and understand the nature of the suffering that you're experiencing, whether it's horrible suffering or just normal suffering. That's your teacher. It's a source of meaning.
Do you think we're starting to remove the narrative of best years are behind us, youth-obsessed culture? Are we making a dent at all in that?
I sort of think so. Although part of that is probably in your community and mine.
More than in the overall culture. Look, there's a reason that people are watching your show. There's a reason that hundreds of thousands, millions of people are watching your show. These are people like, 'Look, I've had enough.'
And I want to be part of a community that accepts me for who I am.
No, I want to accept me for who I am. And I wrote a book called From Strength to Strength: Finding Purpose in the Second Half of Life. I mean, so I've got second half of lifers who are like, 'Yeah, bring it on, man. Bring it on. Bring on the suffering.' Yeah, for sure. Bring all of it on because that's actually part of the adventure. I think in the culture in general, we still have a lot more work to do. I think you and I need to expand our communities a lot more and to reach down much more into women and men in their 20s and 30s to help them understand that what they're going to experience is something you need to prepare yourselves for and to celebrate it in advance.
Your new book is getting you ready to have From Strength to Strength, but until you do the first part. Okay. So it's a six step, it's a six pillars, would you call it?
Asking questions and falling in love and suffering.
Yes. More to go. Okay, what's our next one?
The next one is what I call transcendence. And you might think of it as like spirituality or religion, but it's actually something more than that. It's standing in awe of something bigger than you to transcend yourself. All transcendent experiences, whether spiritual, religious experiences or even serving other people, these really excite the right hemisphere of the brain because you're getting away from yourself. This intense focus on me, me, me, me. Like Tamson is so boring. Life is so boring when you're with yourself all day long. It's like me, my roommate is me. I mean, it's just like we have this psychodrama. Mother nature puts us into the psychodrama of the intense scrutiny of ourselves.
And I understand why mother nature does that, but she doesn't care if we're happy at all.
She just wants us to survive and pass on our genes.
