How to Find Happiness ft. Arthur Brooks

Thank you.

Thank you, and thanks to all of you. It was so wonderful to be back. For those of you who I'm meeting for the first time, I was a professor here at the Kennedy School for seven years until July 1st. So I'm, you know, I come back and I know the place like the back of my hand, but I'm an outsider now, which is really weird. But it's always wonderful and warm to be here. Truly, this is a great place, and to be part of this community as a Hauser Leader is especially meaningful. So thank you so very much for that. The book that I wrote, it came out at the end of March. "The Meaning of Your Life" is the culmination of about five years of research, but it really comes down to something that I've been noticing for a long time. I was a professor for a very long time until 2008, and then I left for 11 years, and I left to become the president of the American Enterprise Institute, which is a big think tank down in Washington, D.C., and that was completely consuming. I mean, this is, look, this is, you all know a lot about leadership. I mean, the Kennedy School is about public leadership, among other things, and when you're leading a big institution, you're not paying attention to a lot of other things. But what I wasn't seeing was that my old home, academia, was changing.

Now, academia really is my home. My father was a professor. His father was a professor. It's the family business. I grew up on a college campus. And one of the things that I knew, one of the reasons I wanted to be an academic is because academia is happier than the rest of life. It's an oasis. And sort of, this is what people my age, they think, oh, college, man. I mean, it's when I made some of my best friends. That's when I learned all these weird ideas. That's when I fell in love every Thursday. I mean, it was like... And so I went away and I ran this big organization, this big nonprofit organization, and then I retired from it. Didn't retire. I quit. 55 years old, tender age. And Doug Elmendorf, who's here, hired me to be a professor at the Kennedy School. And I came back. It's like, oh, good. I get to go back to the happy place. But it wasn't as happy as it was. It was completely different. Now, I've been studying human happiness for decades. Human happiness is my bag. And one of the things that I've been testing my students on is this idea of whether they have a meaning crisis. Why? Because happiness is not a feeling. People get that wrong all the time. If you're struggling with your happiness, probably it's because you think it's a feeling, which it isn't, any more than the smell of your dinner is your dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Don't go for feelings. Feelings are liars. Go for the macronutrients of happiness, the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness, which are enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your accomplishments, and the meaning of your life, the why of your life. And for the longest time, decades, I've had a test of meaning to see whether or not you have a meaning crisis, to see if that macronutrient is deficient. It's based on the psychological definition, which is empirically very sound, has a big literature behind it. I won't trouble you with it, but here's the test. I'll give it to you. Why not? This is a two-question exam. If you have answers to these questions, you pass. If you don't have answers, or say there aren't any answers, you fail. And that's okay, because that means now you know what to go looking for, which is good news, too. Okay, here are the two questions. Number one: why are you alive? Now, maybe it's who created you, or for what purpose, or both? You can't Google that question. It's un-Google-able. I'm not sure that's a word. It is now. And why? Because if you put that into ChatGPT, 'Hey, why am I alive?' it'll first start by kissing up to you. It'll first start by saying, 'That's a very astute question. The smartest people in history have asked that question.' And then it'll give you five examples from philosophers that mean nothing to you. Okay? You have to live with that. Sit with that. The second question is easy for people my age and harder for people my students' age, which is: for what would you die right now, happily? Right now, it's easy for me. My kids, my grandkids, totally, right? But I always press people my age: what else would you die for? Your faith? Would you die for your country? Would you die for your beliefs? Would you die for a stranger? And the more that you actually push that, the more meaning finds you. Anyway, so I've been giving this exam for ages.

And I noticed that typically with my graduate students, I've never taught undergraduates, I've only had graduate students, average age 28 for my entire academic career, that they're about 85% pass that test. 15% fail it. Okay, which is once again good news because I know what to put them on the path to. But after 2008, it turns out without me knowing it, that percentage started creeping up. By the time I came back in 2019, 50% of my students were failing that exam. And I looked at the data from a group called Monitoring the Future, which asks the question to young adults, 'Does your life feel meaningless?' And sure enough, about 15% said yes until 2008. And then it started to creep up, and now it's about 50% of young adults say, 'Yeah, my life feels meaningless.' It's almost as if something happened in 2008. It wasn't me leaving academia. It was almost as if something entered our lives. What is it? What can you think of? Something that made it harder for us to connect to other human beings. Made it harder for us to make relationships. Harder to have a real life experience of life. Something that made life into a simulation. Some of you are holding it in your hand right now. And the rest of you have it in your pockets. And some of you are not listening to me right now because you're distracted. But that's what happened. And so what I found was this profound meaning crisis provoked not by your cell phone. It's not provoked by your smartphone. It's provoked by a change in our culture, an engineering culture that basically said that there's an app for that. That there's a complicated solution to your complex life. And what that led me to, believe it or not, the great thing about being a behavioral scientist today is you have a very, very wide interdisciplinary toolkit that spans philosophy, in my case, a lot of Eastern wisdom traditions because I've done a lot of work for the last 13 years with the Tibetan Buddhist community, and very, very far into neuroscience as well. And it led me to the most interesting area of neuroscience today, which is called hemispheric lateralization.

A fancy way of saying your brain has two sides to it and they do different things. Why don't they just say that? Because we got to get tenure. And what hemispheric lateralization shows us is that the right hemisphere of your brain deals with the complex problems of why, the mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness, your relationships, the things you truly care about. And the left side of your brain deals with the complicated problems of life, of how-to and what, the engineering, the efficiency, the information you didn't ask for, the GPS of your life. And you need both. I mean, this is my, I'm doing my job right now. And it's a lot of how-to and what, I'm explaining neuroscience to you right now. But it wouldn't be worth anything if I didn't have the right hemisphere of my brain saying why, why am I doing this? Because I love the Kennedy School, because I like to support my family, because I care about these ideas, and I'm going back and forth. Why? How-to, and what, and that's an integrated life. But guess what? Every time you look at your phone, which for the average American is 205 times a day, your results may vary, but they probably don't, you have actually kicked your brain activity into the left side of your brain where meaning is absent. We broke our brains, my friends. That's what happened. And a lot of people, my students, they don't remember the before times. I do. I mean, I can't get interested in Instagram. I have a million followers on Instagram and I can't get interested in it because it's boring. Because it's not engaging to my 62-year-old brain. Thank God. My grandkids are more interesting to me than my Instagram feed. But guess what? If that's what you grew up on, then the neural pathways are so fortified and so strong that that's actually the case. And that's what we face today. We have a meaning crisis, which is the number one predictor of depression and anxiety. You'll get a million explanations from the media that depression and anxiety for people under 35 has all these exogenous explanations from environmental degradation to income inequality to, by the way, be worried about those things for sure. We care about those things at the Kennedy School. That's not why people are depressed and anxious. They're depressed and anxious because their brains are broken by the way that they're engaged in an engineering culture that says there's a complicated solution to their complex needs. That there's an app to meet the love and happiness that they actually seek. And that is the age of emptiness.

So, man, when the age of emptiness is an applause line, I'm...

I'm in the zone, man. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Yeah. And I wouldn't have written a book if the answer were no. I don't write doom books. There's enough doom out there to go around. It really, the way that the book works is an explanation of the problem and proof that it exists. Then the neuroscience of how our brains are broken. Hemispheric lateralization, left, right, what's a complicated problem, what's a complex problem, how life has become a simulation, how we're living effectively in the matrix, a left-brain simulation for the right-brain cravings for love that we need. But two-thirds of this book is the solutions to it. And it's based on the best neuroscience and behavioral science literature that shows how you can activate the right hemisphere of your brain, which happened automatically. I mean, my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, he didn't have to activate the right brain. He was just like plowing the fields behind a mule with no podcast to listen to, not even mine. He was just doing his life and he was coming home. And his life, by the way, his life was super boring moment to moment, but his life overall was really interesting. The irony is for a lot of people today, there's no boredom moment to moment, but life is grindingly boring. That's the problem. I mean, that's life in the matrix, by the way. That's the plot of that movie in 1999, where a far-out, you know, super science fiction artificial intelligence was sucking the energy out of people by keeping them pacified in a simulation where they wouldn't move so we could take their energy and attention. My friends, we're in the matrix. It happened. We're in the matrix is the whole problem. And that wasn't even a thing. So what used to be the ordinary life of boredom and love and relationships and experiences in real life, your brain is made to interact with people in real life. Your brain is not made and cannot accommodate virtual experiences to the screen. They are not a substitute for the love that you want. And so the result of it is we have to live like my great-grandfather Leroy Brooks, who never came home to his wife, my great-grandmother Mary Ellen, I am sure, and said, 'Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today.' Maybe you had a panic attack. No joke, but there's a reason it's happening now and it wasn't happening then. And that's what we actually have to repair by living in a distinctly old-fashioned way.

Yeah. No, it's a good point. It's a good point. I mean, I wouldn't have much credibility if I were a barber. Let that sink in. Anyway, so I actually, you know, it's one of the great things about behavioral science is you study what you need, right? If I were a physicist, I wouldn't, you know, study what I needed because we all need more or less the same things when it comes to the laws of physical science. But in behavioral science, you can study the thing that's actually most lacking in your life. It's, the old joke is, it's not research, it's me-search, what it comes down to. And what happened was I had a very interesting experience when I was leaving the think tank and coming here, which is what am I going to dedicate my research activity to? And I had this very fundamentally, you know, very profound emotional experience. I overheard a conversation on a plane where there was a couple behind me on a plane very late at night, so it was dark and I couldn't see them, but I could hear them. And I could tell by their voices it was a man and a woman. I assumed they were a couple. I could tell by their voices they were elderly. And the man's voice was a little muffled, sort of mumbling, but his wife's voice was very penetrating and coming right through the seats. So I heard this one-sided conversation. It was like... and then she said, 'Oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead.' Now, I'm not indiscreet, overhearing people's conversations. But I have to tell you, as a behavioral scientist, my laboratory is your overheard conversations. So if you're telling somebody in the Starbucks line behind me that somebody has just broken your heart, keep your voice down. That could be my next book. So I hear this going on and on, and he talks forlornly, and she says, 'It's not true that nobody remembers you. Nobody cares about you.' And I got into my head, you know, that this must be just some guy who never lived up to his own ambitions. He wasn't Anthony Foxx. He wasn't doing the things he... Look, I mean, people would dream to have your career,

But still, you don't assume that. And okay, they finished, and I went back to work on my laptop, and we landed at Dallas airport about an hour later, and the lights went on. We all stood up, and I wanted to get a look, and it was one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody that literally every single person in here knows. Not personally. This guy's a hero for what he did in public life decades ago. And I heard him, he's rich, he's famous, he's beloved, telling his wife he might as well be dead. And I thought to myself, I don't want to be this. And so I went home and I told my wife, Esther, I said, 'Honey, I overheard this conversation.' She said, 'Who was it?' And I told her. She said, 'Huh?' I said, 'Yeah, huh? I don't want to have that conversation with you in 40 years. I don't want that.' And she said, 'So figure it out, man. Figure it out.' And I said, 'What do you mean figure it out?' She says, 'Don't you have a PhD? Why don't you use it for something helpful to you?' And she had a good point. And so I dedicated myself to actually figuring it out because I was bad at it. I'm a complete striver. You know, I've spent my whole life just simply trying to, you know, earn the admiration of strangers for my work, which is completely pathetic. And by the way, an exercise in futility. And so I set to work using a method which everybody knows works. If there's a hard problem that you want to crack and it requires a whole lot of knowledge and learning, here's how you learn it and keep it and apply it in your life. You need to learn the science. You need to practice and change your habits, and you need to teach other people. That's how you learn golf. That's, by the way, over at HMS in the medical school. If you want to become a surgeon, you know what the method is? Watch one, do one, teach one, because that's how you learn anything. You want to learn how to golf, learn about golfing, golf, and teach somebody to golf. My father, I saw him lecturing. My father was a mathematics professor, most brilliant man I ever knew. And I saw him giving off the cuff with no notes a 90-minute lecture in advanced calculus. It was like watching Jascha Heifetz play the violin. And I was old enough to respect it and be amazed by it. And afterward I said, 'How did you learn that?' He said, 'I learned the science. I did a million problems and I taught it 40 times.' So I said, 'All right. All right. I got it. If I actually want to become a happier person, I need to learn the science of happiness and create a method behind it. By the way, I needed to retrain in neuroscience, which I fundamentally have done over the past seven years. I need to write a lot about it and commit myself to changing my life, and I need to teach it, which is what I've dedicated myself to doing.' And my happiness, according to the best metrics available, which I give to my students every semester, has risen over the past seven years by 60%. My friends, it's sticky and it works with the right kind of commitment. So the answer to your question, I'm sorry it was long-winded, is yeah, I'm a lot happier. I'm a lot happier, and I'm not going to be the man on the plane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, I wish I could say yes. But fundamentally, this is not a sociological construct. It's a psychological set of constructs, which is the unit level. We're each responsible for the startup of our own lives. That's what we're responsible for. Now, a lot of us, look, my PhD is in public policy analysis. I worked for years at the RAND Corporation. I was president of the American Enterprise Institute. I taught at the world's greatest policy school. I wish policy could solve the unhappiness problem. But it can't. And the reason for that is actually I racked my brain. What are the happiness policies? And people have written books about this. They're utterly uncompelling. More parks. I don't know. Right. Good. Parks are great. But it doesn't work. I mean, I've got the data on that. Almost everything that people do, the happiness indices don't budge very much. Be like Denmark. So I went to Denmark. I went to Denmark and I actually made a movie, and in the movie I interviewed the Danish speaker of the house, right? Danish speaker of the house, democratic socialist, very different than my own personal ideology, but the guy was good. And I said, 'Sir, what are the policies that you use to make Denmark the happiest, or whatever you believe?' Second, all those indices of world happiness are all nonsense, but the second happiest country in the world, or whatever, what's the secret? He said, 'Oh no, there's no policy that can make people happier.' I said, 'So what's going on here?' He said, 'Policy can only eliminate sources of unhappiness.' This is a very important insight, right? Here's what we can do at the Kennedy School: we can eliminate barriers to happiness, we can eliminate sources of unhappiness. But happiness per se is built on the foundation of the entrepreneurship of each individual's lives, and that comes down to one single thing, which is love. That's what it comes down to. I want to make it easier for people to love. I want to make it easier for people to know each other, but I actually can't instantiate love in people's lives through public policy. If there were a, you know, a cabinet secretary for love, I would head for the hills. That's the scariest thing I've ever heard. I don't want that. But what I can do once again is to eliminate these big barriers. And I think that's a very, very noble thing. And I think that's where the big policy conversation needs to lie. How do we eliminate the barriers to unhappiness? Is it with more regulation of predatory industries and the more leveling of economic outcomes? Or is it getting out of the way of people so we have the true opportunity society that people actually have envisioned since the founders? These are legitimate areas of disagreement, but they really should be about how can we get out of people's way so that they can love better and live better, and then their happiness can truly be more in their own hands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I advise lots of leaders, lots of politicians, lots of people in public life, and they don't come to me to say what are the best policies for happiness. They come to me because they're not happy. It's tough. It's tough. I remember one time I wrote a column. I had a column for five years in The Atlantic. Now it's at a place called The Free Press. So I've been writing a weekly column for a long time. And I wrote one about a bunch of literature that I had read because I'm always reading the academic literature to see what I'm going to write about next. And I found this interesting set of articles about the emotions that leaders feel when they become a chief executive or the equivalent of a chief executive, maybe a cabinet secretary. And everybody thinks, you know, man, if I got that job, that gig in the corner office, and you think to yourself, how am I going to feel? Good. Nobody says miserable. Nobody says, 'I sure hope I can get promoted to CEO so I can be angry and lonely all the time.' No, that's not what you think. Unfortunately, those are the two prominent emotions that people feel when they're promoted to CEO or the equivalent of running a big organization. The two most salient emotions are negatively valenced. They are fundamentally anger and loneliness. Anger because you have less control than you thought and you're getting basically thrown about and everybody's mad at you and telling you to do things that you can't do. And lonely because all your friends back in the ranks, they're like, 'Anthony, it's like cabinet secretary, mayor, I can't, you know, he might, I don't want him evaluating me.' That literally, Conan and Deaton down at Princeton, they did a study that showed the unhappiest moments in people's day, you know, the unhappiest moment in the average worker's day is time spent with her or his boss. It's like it's misery to hang out with somebody who's evaluating you. It's not because they don't like the boss, but because we don't like to be bossed. That's a normal human thing. But we need to be bossed and we need bosses. And so the point of all of that is that as public leaders, what you aspire to be will not bring you the happiness that you imagine, which means that you need to be better at happiness. It's urgently important that you actually pay attention to what will actually bring happiness in your life. And what will bring happiness in your life are the habits of the people who have the most enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. The three macronutrients they are, by the way, your faith or life philosophy, your family life, real friendships, not deal friendships. And you know the difference between real and deal when it comes to friends, right? Leaders have tons of deal friends. Tons of deal friends. Not very many real friends. And they actually are dedicating their work to service and the feeling of earning their own success so they can get proper amounts of satisfaction. And that's what it comes down to. And so when I'm working with leaders, this is what I'm working with. I want to make sure that they have a proper 401k plan that's properly diversified with respect to their happiness. And a lot of time it's just all work, all work, all work, all work. I'm like, 'Okay, let's talk about your spiritual life.' I wind up with leaders always talking about spirituality all the time. You know, I've talked about this.

I talk about their family lives. No, no, no. How's your marriage? No fooling. You can't marginalize that. I talk to them about their friendships. Who are your best friends? Who are the 20 people you spend the most time with every week? Write them down. Then put Rs and Ds after their name. That does not mean Republican and Democrat. That's real and deal. And that's actually the inventory that I go through. You must put your own oxygen mask on first before you assist others around you.

Yeah.

Because you know it, you've been there.

Super lonely. What was, by the way, what was lonelier? Being the mayor of Charlotte or being the cabinet secretary?