3 Ways to Want Less and Be Happier

I want to talk about a particular component of happiness today, which is satisfaction. I get these momentary bursts of satisfaction, of the joy from accomplishing something, but then I'm back in the hunt. What's that all about? When you get something that gives you a whole lot of satisfaction, you know, something that you won, you're going to be implicating the dopamine system in your brain. And for you to get more satisfaction, you can't do what you used to be doing. You want satisfaction to stick around, you're going to have to do things that don't feel natural. But if you do them, life's going to get better, not because you're living in a state of nature, but because you're standing up to the state of nature and you're going to live in the moral space, the person that you want to be, not the caveman. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is your show for the science of happiness, how you can get more happiness for yourself and just as importantly, how you can become a happiness teacher by understanding the science, changing your habits, and bringing these ideas to the people that you love and anybody else who wants to listen to you. Dirty secret about this, when you're specializing in the science of happiness, everybody wants you to come to dinner because everybody wants to know more about how they can become happier, it makes you more popular, it spreads the love. So do keep watching this show. Please do keep recommending this show to your friends. We love how widely the show is spreading with respect to the popularity of what we see. It's just so gratifying because we know that what we're doing here is we're building a better world and we're doing it all of us together, the army of happiness teachers. Thank you for being with me. Continue to feedback please. Our email is officehours.arthrobrooks.com. That's displayed on the screen right now. Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on your platform of choice. Also, there's a complimentary newsletter. It's not duplicative, it's slightly different information every single week. Comes to your inbox on Monday morning for free that you can get by going to arthroprooks.com slash newsletter. Now to the theme of the day, I want to talk about a particular component of happiness today, which is satisfaction. Now let me review a little bit. If you've been watching this show, you'll know this, but if you're new to this, I want to define happiness. Most people get happiness wrong. They think it's a feeling. It's not. Happiness isn't a feeling anymore than the smell of your turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. That's a very important distinction because of happiness where just a feeling you'd be looking for it and hoping for it and sometimes getting it. It would be largely out of your control. Feelings don't exist to give you a happy day. Feelings exist to give you information about the outside world and allow you to make decisions about how you're supposed to react. Emotions are a way for you to stay alive, to survive, to pass on your genes, to maybe even thrive, but they're not there to make you endlessly happy. On the contrary, good news, happiness isn't a feeling, but if it isn't, what is it? The answer to that, well, let's keep with the metaphor. Your dinner isn't the smell of the dinner. Your dinner is a combination of three macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are the building blocks of all food that you need in both balance and abundance to be healthy, to thrive, to survive. I even talked about those macronutrients in the search for a better life in my protocols episodes, protocols for the morning, protocols in the evening, etc., etc. But that's just a metaphor right now because happiness works the same way. Happiness has three basic macronutrients. These are the things you need to understand scientifically, change your habits around, know yourself, and help other people get better at it as well. Those three macronutrients are enjoyment, meaning, and satisfaction. Enjoyment is what you need from day to day. You need to enjoy your life. Not the same thing as pleasure. I've talked about that a little bit before. I'll talk about that a lot more. I'm going to do a whole episode on how to enjoy your life more, as a matter of fact. Meaning is the why of your life. That's the most philosophical of the three macronutrients. It's arguably the one that's most in crisis today, as a matter of fact. I have a whole book coming out on how to find the meaning of your life. So stay tuned for that. But then there's satisfaction. Satisfaction. I want to talk about what it is and how to get more of it. Satisfaction. Now, satisfaction is a funny thing because we talk about it a lot without properly defining it. Here's my definition. It's the joy that you get from an accomplishment after struggle. But I want to talk about all those particular components, all those ingredients and satisfaction today so you can get more of it. Remember, you can't be a properly happy individual or as happy as you can be without getting satisfaction about your accomplishments and achievements in life. And yet it's devilishly hard to do. It's hard to do and it's especially hard to keep. So how can you find more satisfaction and how can you keep more satisfaction in your life so that you can be a happier person? During the coronavirus epidemic, which we all suffered through as well as the lockdowns, the reaction to the coronavirus epidemic, very hard for most people, I remember it was especially trying for my youngest daughter, Marina. She was still living at home at the time. My youngest daughter was a senior in high school during the heart of the epidemic court. She went to a high school in Massachusetts. We were living in one place and in the middle of the year, everything locked down and she went home. And we actually moved to a different suburb of Boston just so we could be a little bit further out and live in a leafy suburb so that we could go for walks and we weren't stuck downtown. And so she went to a new high school that she literally never visited not even once. Didn't even go to her own graduation or senior year in high school. And it was a sorry excuse for education. There was nothing good going on there. There was very little learning going on and a lot of people had the same experience. This was not unique, obviously, to me or my daughter. Very tough for teachers, very tough for students, very tough for everybody. I would come down each morning and she would be in class, in class. She was sitting behind the laptop looking kind of bummed out, math class first thing in the morning. So one morning I come down, it was in the middle of this whole thing and she was sitting in front of her laptop laughing and I said to her, honey, that doesn't look like math class. And she's muted, of course, probably her camera's off. And she says, actually, I'm not learning anything. So I'm watching a video and the YouTube algorithm delivered a video to me that is the funniest thing I've ever seen. And I said, well, what is it? And she said, I don't know. I actually don't know. It's an old man dancing like a chicken and trying to sing. So funny. And I said, well, I'd be at a cheap laugh because man, I'm lonely too. So I came around to the other side of the laptop to look at this thing she's looking at, which is what is the old man dancing like a chicken and trying to sing? It was Mick Jagger. And she didn't know he was because kids these days, right? And you know what he was singing, right? It was, I can't get no satisfaction. It was a pretty recent concert 2017 or 2018. And so he was like 100. And it was an amazing performance. I mean, the guy is just he's a phenom how much energy the guy has. But I mean, sure enough, it was quite chicken like, I have to say, the concert, they were panning the crowd and it was all a bunch of people my age, sort of like these late boomers or early Gen X people and they're all kind of doing this, you know, and it's like, and my daughter says, do you people like this? And you people, right? And I took umbrage of that. But it gave me an opportunity to actually explain something to my sweet little girl about behavioral science, which is my stock and trade. And by the way, which is now her stock and trade, she's actually in the military these days. She's an officer in Marine Corps since graduating from college, but she studied psychology and neuroscience in college because she's so interested in as well, chip off the old block. And I said, honey, it's actually not this song, which is a pretty ordinary song, maybe even mediocre. It's what he's singing. Listen to the words, I can't get no satisfaction, but I try and I try and I try, but I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is that he's wrong. If you couldn't get no satisfaction, you wouldn't try. You're not stupid. The problem is, and what he should be singing is I can't keep no satisfaction, but I try and I try. I get these momentary bursts of satisfaction of the joy from accomplishing something, but then I'm back in the hunt. What's that all about? What is actually that phenomenon of trying and struggling for something and maybe sometimes getting it and the fact that I don't actually get sweetness from it if I don't struggle, but then after I do finally get it, it doesn't last? Why does that happen? How is that part of the human search for greater happiness? That's what I really want to explain today, because I want to talk about when you delay your gratification, how sweet things actually get, and how important it is for you to make sacrifices. But then I want to talk about the satisfaction that you get, how it won't be evanescent, how it actually can stick around, if you know a couple of tricks on how to make satisfaction endure. That's what we really want. If you do the things that I'm talking about here, I promise you that your life's going to get sweeter. Now, the reason let's talk about to begin with about why it's so important that you struggle, why sacrifice is so critically important. We don't value things very much when we don't work for them, because a lot of how we gauge the value of something has to do with what we're paying for it. This is one of the reasons that, for example, that when you give people things for free, they tend to misuse them. And it's a very funny thing, and almost everybody knows that. And so that's why even nonprofit organizations, when they have a service they're going to give to people, they want some nominal amount of sacrifice so that people actually use the service or good properly. That's just how human beings are wired. When my students, they take my exams at the university, it's very easy to cheat on my exams. But if you cheat on my exams, I'm going to give you an A, there's no satisfaction that comes from that. On the contrary, you don't care about it as much. If you study all night, even though it's just an A, I mean, it's not that significant for your life, you get a lot of sweetness from getting a return on that effort. The effort is just as important as the reward per se. Only humans, only homo sapiens actually want that struggle. Now, we try to teach our kids the importance of the struggle all the time. You know, juniors in the back of the car, if you're a parent coming back from little league practice and he's whining, it's like 4.30 in the afternoon, he's whining and he wants ice cream. The bastard, Dairy Queen, like, I want ice cream. And mommy or daddy says, no, you can't. And juniors says, why? And mom and dad say, because it'll spoil your dinner. And juniors says, so what? And then mom and dad lie. They, it's not that it won't spoil dinner, but here's the explanation, it's actually not the real explanation. They'll say, it's not good for you. You need a nutritious dinner. It's not the reason. What they want is for juniors to learn a lesson, which is if a junior comes to dinner hungry, dinner's better. And then juniors, a little prefrontal cortex gets wired up to know that good things come to those who wait. Better things come to those who wait more. And then they study harder and they work harder to get into a better school or, you know, take a better major in college or work to get a better job by delaying their gratification. By postponing their rewards. That's a lesson that they'll learn. Why? Because that way they'll get more satisfaction when good things come and then they'll actually be happier. See, you as a parent, if you're a parent and if you're not, you will be probably, you're a good neuroscientist. You're trying to wire little juniors' brain to understand that good things come to those who wait. There's tons of research on this, by the way. It's absolutely true. The famous old marshmallow experiment where, you know, some kids were able to wait to eat a marshmallow and they got a second marshmallow as a reward and they went on to have better lives. I'll explain that in greater detail at some point in this show, no doubt. But suffice it to say, the good things do come to those who wait and that the suffering is actually part of the sweetness. Important lesson here in life, folks, if you actually are trying to get rid of your suffering when it comes to your, you know, the work and the delay of your gratifications, you're actually going to have a worse life. That's what it comes down to. You need to be comfortable with that. If you were being honest with Junior in the back of the car and he says, how come I can't have the ice cream? If you're honest, you'd say, because I want you to suffer. It doesn't sound good. But that's actually literally what's going on because you want Junior to have a happier life. Okay, that's a kind of a mystery, because, you know, my dog, I had a dog for a long time named Chucho, good boy. He died, but, you know, he had a good long life. Chucho was a lovely dog, but he never wanted to delay his gratifications. He would eat lying down. He was so lazy because he didn't have a prefrontal cortex that was 30% of his brain by weight. He was unable to actually process these complex human emotions like me. He was also incapable of having complex experiences of happiness, like satisfaction that we're talking about. Okay, so lesson number one here is if you want to experience more satisfaction, get more comfortable suffering. Get more comfortable sacrifice. Get more comfortable with struggle. It's an important lesson, isn't it? But there's another lesson that's even a deeper lesson if you want to get more satisfaction in your life, which is that your satisfaction when you get it, it doesn't hang around. It doesn't stay around. That's that I can't keep no satisfaction phenomenon. And that's what I really want to focus on today is that that second even bigger mystery of why it is that Mother Nature tells us if we get that thing that we worked so hard for that we'll be happy and it's going to give us satisfaction, happiness through satisfaction is going to hang around forever and ever and ever and ever and it never does. Why is that? Maybe you're the kind of person where people around you, they say you're never happy. What that really means is that your satisfaction wears off quickly. How can you defeat that? Well, to understand that phenomenon of not being able to keep satisfaction where you buy something and the new car smells and satisfying very quickly where you have a relationship and it seems to get old kind of quickly, you thought it was going to be great is never as good as you think. Why you're always kind of disappointed by everything. That's the lack of satisfaction keeping it. How can you actually get beyond that? And the first thing that we need to do to get beyond that is to understand exactly why it happens and you already know that it's biology. Is another wrong with your character? You're not just some sort of ingrate, although you probably are too, me too. We've discussed the neurobiology of ingratitude in past episodes, but we have a specific neurobiological tendency to be unable to maintain satisfaction, to keep satisfaction. And understand this, I need to explain a little bit about, well, dopamine. Dopamine is a neuromodulator in the brain that is all about liking and learning and wanting. Now, I'm going to put into the show notes a whole bunch of interesting articles and even some books about dopamine. The most important book about dopamine that was written recently was Anna Lemke's book. She teaches that at Stanford Medical School and she wrote a book called Dopamine Nation. That really explains how the whole neurobiological process of dopamine works. But there's a lot of others. One of my favorite that talks about dopamine and how we learn from it is by Judith Grisel called Never Enough, the Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction. It talks about how this learning neuromodulator, how we learn how to do stuff that actually can ruin our lives. And I'm going to get back to satisfaction here in a second, but the first thing I need to talk about is actually how addiction and learning and wanting and liking are all implicated in this process of dopamine, having a big influence on our whole lives. Now, dopamine once again is a neurochemical and what it does is it's produced such that we can learn new skills that are rewarding to us. So you're an ancient human 250,000 years ago in the early place to see and you're living in a band of 30 to 50 individuals. Your job is a hunter. You go out one morning and you think, I'm going to go over there. I've never been over to there and looking for a new source of food and over there, it turns out this new hunting ground that you've never experienced before, perhaps because you just moved into a new area. You find a watering hole that you never knew was there and there's a bunch of gazelles around it. Oh, awesome. Love me, some gazelles. And it gives you this neurochemical reward, makes you so happy because that's a source of food and maybe a spear one and you take it home and you're a big hero and everybody thinks you're the king of the troglodyte mambo and man, that's awesome. Well, what happens is the next time you go hunting in a few days later is when you think about that watering hole, you get little spritz of dopamine in your brain, which is a reward. It's actually anticipation of reward. Like I want to feel good again. I want to feel rewarded again. And that's anticipation of reward comes that little spritz of dopamine and it makes it, it impels you to go out to that watering hole again. Now, something happens when you get to that watering hole a second time. Let's say in scenario number one, there's no gazelles this time. But what happens is your dopamine tanks, it goes down below what it was before. And that makes you feel like not only is there no reward, you don't even anticipate there being a reward. There's not even something good to look forward to. And that's a penalty so that you'll learn not to come back again. Your brain is teaching you through this reward system. Now, scenario number two, there's exactly the same number of gazelles around you found the first time. And that's kind of the normal amount of dopamine. You're like, huh, good, good, good. Scenario number three, more gazelles, twice as many gazelles, your brain goes, it's just popping, lit up. You get an extra shot of dopamine, which gives you this unbelievable sense of reward, making you like it even more, giving you an incentive to go back even more often. Why? Because you want to reinforce these patterns of things that are going to be good for you, whether it's getting mates or finding food or today in modern society, getting power or money or Instagram followers or whatever your thing is, when you learn that something is a way for you to succeed more, you're going to get this dopamine and you're going to get the cycle of learning and unlearning and wanting and disliking. And all that's going to be doing is training you and training you and training you with a sense of reward. Now, this of course leads to most of the addictions that we face today. Many, many things will spike your dopamine in your system, cigarettes, but alcohol, gambling, the substance that tends to have this most dramatic effect on dopamine is methamphetamine, which will increase your dopamine by about 1000%, giving you this enormous learning cycle. Like, I want it so much, that's what leads to craving. And by the way, when you accustom yourself to super physiological doses of dopamine, your brain will accommodate it, meaning that when you have normal experiences, your brain will consider that to be a failure. And that's one of the reasons that you get into this addiction cycle, that just to feel normal with respect to dopamine, you have to continue to use a drug and to get you for you, you have to use more and more and more and more, which is escalation. You get the idea that I'm talking about here, this is all neurophysiological on this. Okay, now the same principle works with respect to our emotions. When you get something that gives you a whole lot of satisfaction, something that you won, you're going to be implicating the dopamine system in your brain. And for you to get more satisfaction, you can't do what you used to be doing, because your brain is accustomed to the higher dose of dopamine. And so the result of that is that altogether, that when you're trying to do something that you really want to do and you achieve something, that you're going to get that reward, but that reward is going to go away really quickly, because your brain goes back into what neuroscientists call homeostasis, it goes back to where it's supposed to be. You're not going to stay in an elevated state all the time, because you'd be insane if you're in an elevated state with respect to the dopamine all the time. And when it does, you're going to say, I want it again, but you're not going to just want it again, you're going to want more of that experience that you had. Think about it in your own life. If you have a success at work right now, and it's the same success that you had three years ago, that means you're not making progress and you're going to feel like a loser. The real, the reason is because of the wanting and learning and liking cycle that has all bound up in your neurochemistry. The fact that it goes away and then you run for more, it goes away and you run for more, that's called the hedonic treadmill. I want to feel good, and so I run and I run and I run and I run, but as much as I run, that thing is moving against me because my dopamine is going back to where it was, and so I want more dopamine, and so I keep running and running and running, but then I have to run faster and faster and faster and faster, and then pretty soon I'm running out of fear, because if you turn off the treadmill, what you face plant, man, that's actually dangerous, at least the metaphor is dangerous. And you see exactly what I'm talking about here, how this basically conspires in modern life to give you a sense that there's satisfaction that's always greater someplace in the future, and you can never get it, and you're sacrificing and you're working and, well, you can't get no satisfaction, it's good old mix saying, or at least you can't keep no satisfaction. And that's the problem, that's the problem. It's not just I need to get more, it means I need to continuously get more, and I need to never, never, never get less. There's a whole bunch of interesting research on how painful it is to get less than you expect, and especially how painful it is to have less than you used to have. Two guys actually won the Nobel Prize, well, one of them died, so he didn't get the Nobel Prize, but it was for work that these two guys did together, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They did work on what's called prospect theory that compares the boosts that we get in euphoria to gaining something to the penalty, the cognitive, the emotional penalty that we get from having the same amount less. And it turns out that there's much greater pain than there is reward. For the same amount of loss, we have a lot more pain than upside down we have in reward for getting the same amount. We hate loss even more than we love gain. And that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Because in ancient times, a loss is life-threatening. A gain is nice to have, but a loss is really life-threatening. You starve a lot faster than you can actually put on fat. So that's an important way for us to understand this way that we're wired and this fear of less. And this is a real happiness problem. When you put it all together, this whole idea that we want satisfaction because it's a component of happiness, and we struggle for it, and we struggle for it, and we get it momentarily, and we don't keep it, and then we're wracked by fear of losing the source of satisfaction, this really bedevils a good life and is baked into the genome. You might think, well, that sucks. That's lousy. Why does Mother Nature do that? And I have an answer to that. She doesn't care. Mother Nature doesn't care. She doesn't care if you're happy. She just wants you in the hunt, man. She just wants you running, running, running, running, running, running, why? Because keeping you in the hunt is what keeps you surviving, passing on your genes, living another day. It's interesting because a lot of people make this mistake of thinking that if I follow my urges, that I'll be happier. That's completely wrong. Mother Nature wants you to propagate your genes for sure and wants you to survive so that you can do so. That's the reason your ancestors did certain things in your life today, quite frankly. That's kind of how it all works, as a matter of fact. But what she doesn't care about is actually if you're happy along the way, evolution doesn't select on your happiness. And so if you think that following your impulses is going to lead you to bliss, well, you're wrong and you're going to wind up with the same life goals as a squirrel or something, and that's not so great. You need to detach yourself from this misapprehension that following your urges is going to lead to happiness, and you need to do things consciously that will lead you to happiness, like figuring out your satisfaction and standing up to a lot of your impulses. Animal impulses are only one part of humanity, of human life. There's also moral aspirations that are bigger than your animal impulses. And that's a lot about what I want to talk about now, is understanding these mother nature's urges that she bakes into you that make it so hard for you to keep your satisfaction. You want satisfaction that sticks around, you're going to have to do things that don't feel natural. But if you do them, life's going to get better, not because you're living in a state of nature, but because you're standing up to the state of nature and you're going to live in the moral space, the person that you want to be, not the caveman, the inner caveman inside you. What is this actually going to mean? What is this actually going to mean? And again, there's so much stuff out there that talks that really proves these points that I'm trying to make with respect to evolutionary biology and psychology. I'll put a pretty interesting report called Why Do We Overconsume? Another Why Do We Buy What We Buy? All of these things that actually show that we're impelled to do all these weird things that actually don't make us feel a lot better, but Mother Nature thinks that it's going to help us to live a little bit longer. And this is a philosopher who's been talking about this forever. Arthur Schopenhauer once said, wealth is like seawater. The more we drink, the thirstier we become. And the same is true of fame. You want satisfaction, you think you're going to get it, but you have it for a second and it's not good enough and you keep running the air terrified of losing it and on and on and on and on. Okay. So what are we going to do about that? Are we doomed in earthly life at last, at least, to an existence of continual dissatisfaction? Well, some people, by the way, would say that that's exactly right, that there is only one place where there's permanent satisfaction and the fact that we're dissatisfied chronically on the earthly realm is the reason that we speak spiritual bliss and the afterlife. That's central to a lot of major religions is that our hunger for satisfaction that lasts is actual evidence of heaven. That's one of the how a lot of intellectuals and the Christian, Muslim and Hindu traditions have actually talked about the afterlife, that when you hunger for something, it's evidence of the existence of the object of your hunger. The fact that you're thirsty and crave water is proof of the existence of water, for example, and the fact that you're dissatisfied chronically is proof that there is permanent satisfaction. Where? Heaven. I mean, that's a very, very common philosophical and theological, almost a proof of God for a lot of people. I hunger for the existence of the divine that shows that the divine exists and they're all finding the permanent satisfaction that I desire. And it's again and again, you find it in the Psalms, you find it all throughout the Bible and almost all the holy books. Okay, now that's not what I'm going to argue here today though. You decide whether or not you believe that. I'm going to argue today that there's actually a way right here and now for you to get satisfaction that lasts and not to be on the hedonic treadmill, for you to get off the hedonic treadmill. Okay? And here's the key. The key for you to get satisfaction that lasts is not for you to have more all the time, more what? More power, more pleasure, more money, more honor, more Instagram followers, more relationships, more, more, more, more. Nope. It's not to have more, it's to want less. Now, what does that mean? For a long time, I used to travel to Taiwan every year for work that I had. I used to run a think tank in Washington DC and we had great friends in Taiwan in the government of Taiwan. Taiwan's in a tough neighborhood as everybody knows. And so I would go and I would talk about policy and, you know, defense policy and economics, et cetera. But every time I went, I used to meet with the president of Taiwan. The president of Taiwan would always say, before you leave, make sure you visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which is the world's greatest collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world. It was brought across the Taiwan Straits during the revolution in 1948, 49 in there. And this incredible collection of Chinese art and artifacts that go back 8,000 years to the early Neolithic period all the way to the present. And it's pots and portraits and art and history. It's an incredible collection. It's a very well-known collection. It's so vast that you need tons of time to see it. And I never did. I never had time. I had to go home. And one time I finally figured, you know, I got to see this thing, but I only have two hours. And so I did. What you should always do when you're going to go see a museum collection, you only have two hours. Don't just walk through it because you won't absorb anything except like the snack bar. Don't do that. Hire a guide and give them this instruction. Say, I want to understand 10 things deeply. And I want to understand the history and the provenance and the techniques behind this art or whatever it is. That's what I want. You choose. Get a real expert. And you'll have a great experience. So that's what I did. This art historian who also had a philosophical background was taking me through the National Palace Museum. And we were stopped in front of this sculpture, this jade sculpture, two ton jade sculpture, green and shiny. And it was the relief of a Chinese village. It was carved so beautifully. I asked the guide, I said, you know, even if I'd never been to China, Taiwan, if I'd never been to the East, I would know that this is not Western art. How does my brain know that? Kind of a weird question, right? But it's a question that a behavioral scientist would ask. And he said, I remember, he said, it's because of the philosophy of Chinese versus Western art. Oh, interesting. I said, what is it? He says, you, as a Westerner, you have a different concept. For example, he said, when I say a work of art yet to be started, what image pops into your head? And I said, oh, an empty canvas. He said, yeah, that's right. He said, that's because you think of a work of art as immaculately conceived as coming out of the artist's mind, and that more brushstrokes means the art is coming into existence. More means more art. More paint means more art. He said, for me, when you say a work of art yet to be started, I think of an uncut block of jade. Why? Because for me, taking away the jade exposes the art. The work of art already exists, and I have to take away the rock that's not the art. And then he said something that blew my mind. He said, and that's also how you Westerners see your lives. You think that you're not complete until you have more. We think that we're not complete until we have less. He said, you're adding brushstrokes and adding brushstrokes to your life. But if you're a successful person, moderately successful person, by about 45, the canvas is full, and your life's not getting better, and you get really frustrated, and all you Westerners are all frustrated all the time. It's like, I thought I was going to be happy if I finally got a boat. And it's weird, and you find out this weird thing that you can't quite explain, that the only day the boat really made you happy is the day you sold the boat. Well, what the heck? He says, the reason is because, especially in the second half of your life, happiness comes when you're a block of jade and you're chipping it away. Because you're exposing the true work of art, which is the happy version of you that's inside the block of jade. Chip, chip, chip. You want to know how to have a happy life? This is what blew my mind on that day in that museum. You need to chip away until you find the true you. Now, why am I telling you this? Why did I tell you this story, the stemwinder? It's because that's the secret to satisfaction that lasts. That's the secret to not having more, having more, having more, having more. It's wanting less, is chipping away jade. Think about it this way. Satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want, halves divided by wants. You've probably been working your whole life on the numerator, having more, more, more, more, more. That's super inefficient and doesn't last. Now work the denominator. Remember your high school fractions. When you make the denominator smaller, the number goes up. By wanting less, your satisfaction will rise. It's more efficient and more permanent. That's what we're really talking about. How to want less. You want more satisfaction in your life? Learn how to want less. Now, of course, that's not so easy, is it? You can blame culture, capitalism for this, but not. I've been all over the world and so have many of you. I was in the former Soviet countries before the fall of the Iron Curtain. I've never seen so much selfishness in my life. The idea of have more, have more, have more, there's not about capitalism. Capitalism facilitates that in a lot of cases, but it's not a problem of culture or the economy. The problem is mother nature because remember in the Pleistocene, mother nature said, you want to survive and pass on your genes, you need to accumulate more stuff, more animal skins, and buffalo jerky, and flints, and keep them in your cave, and get a bigger cave, and let's see if you can get more mates, and more, more, more, more, more, right? You need more. That will give you greater happiness, but she was lying. It wasn't about happiness. It was about survival, and that's what you're still laboring under. That's why you always work the numerator and never cursed you to work the denominator. But if you have a religion, your religion teaches, change the denominator. I don't care what your religion is, it's teaching you, change the denominator. And if you're not religious, but you're interested in philosophy, all the good philosophies say that as well. If you, like my friend Ryan Holiday, has been on the show, if you like Stoicism, it's work the denominator. It's like there's one thing you take away from that, it's work the denominator is what comes from that, wanting less. So this is not some newfangled communal hippie idea. This has been going in the moral aspiration part and against the animal impulse part of humanity, and it has been forever. We just conveniently forgot it. Okay, so this is a practical show. I need to teach you how to want less. So the whole point is how to get more satisfaction in life, so you can be happier. But the practical point is how to want less. And this is where a bunch of techniques really come to bear that you can use starting today. Okay, number one, number one, how to want less. Stop trying to be a prince and start trying to be a sage. Now, what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you two stories about two princes. Prince number one is St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is known today as the greatest philosopher of medieval times. He was born to a princely family in a castle in central Italy. He was born to be a noble, absolutely. But he had zero interest in that. He turned out to be kind of a weird dude. And what he was supposed to do is, given the place that he had in the birth order of his family, he was expected to become actually a monk, but becoming a monk in those days, a Benedictine monk, he would have been made the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Monacocino. And that sounds like wanting less, but no, no, no, no. This was an incredibly socially prestigious position. It would have set him up for life to be somebody of just complete social admiration and wanting for nothing. But as I said, he was kind of a weird dude. Thomas Aquinas didn't want that. He wanted to join this new order of monks called the Dominican Order, where St. Dominic very recently before has started his emendicant order, an order of poppers that would beg. Just they would walk barefoot. They would, they would go days without eating, and they would beg for everything that they actually had. Now, this was an embarrassment to his family. His family was so against this, because they, no member of this family, no Quino family, Aquinas, was going to be a popper. This wasn't going to happen. And they actually locked him in a castle until he would reconsider and try to tempt him. At one point, they actually, they hired a prostitute and who went into the castle, and he was so righteous that he chased her out of the castle with a fireplace poker, at least according to, according to legend. And then they finally relented. He became a Dominican and then a professor and a philosopher, and he lived a life of poverty. And he taught that to be a sage working the denominator once was the great secret. A prince is an enumerator, sage is the denominator. Second case is, of course, Lord Buddha, Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, who was born a prince in the sixth century BC. He lacked for absolutely nothing. And his father, after his mother's death, his father wanted to protect him from all of the wants of the world. He never saw anything. He never saw sickness. He never saw death. He never saw poverty. He finally snuck out and saw all these things, which sort of scarred him and made him want to understand how these things could actually exist in the world. And he wanted a quest to do so. And the rest, as they say, is history. He wound up, after a series of adventures, contemplating the nature of life's suffering under the Bodhi tree. That's where he came up with the eight-fold path of Buddhism, where the noble truth that life is suffering, actually dukkha in Sanskrit, which is that noble truth that life is suffering that you've probably heard about in Buddhism. The best translation is that life is dissatisfaction, just like what we're talking about here. You can't get or keep no satisfaction, sang the Lord Buddha, more or less. And the result of that is that he became a sage, understand through the eight-fold path, as opposed to being a prince, therein actually making it possible for him to find what he was looking for. Satisfaction does not lie in attaining high status and holding on to it for dear life, but in helping other people. That's what it comes down to. The prince lives the high life. The sage brings people to enlightenment. So talking about what we're talking about right here, the point of this show is to bring other people to greater bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. This is step one in wanting less and getting satisfaction that stays around is the point of what we're actually trying to do in this show. Fellow sages, former princes, let's get after it. Step two, make a reverse bucket list. I know you have a bucket list. We all have a bucket list. That's where on your birthday you list all your cravings and desires and ambitions. You write them down. You think of the things you're going to do this year or this decade or whatever happens to be, and you imagine yourself being so deeply gratified, satisfied by having all these experiences and attaining these things and achieving all these wonderful things and it's supposed to motivate you. Well, the truth of the matter is all that's doing is that it engorges the denominator in your satisfaction fraction, and that's problematic. I wrote a bucket list on my 40th birthday and it was very ambitious. It was professionally very ambitious. I wish I'd put all the stuff that I should have had on it like my relationship with God and my relationship with my wife and with my kids, but no, no. I'm a weak man. I was just putting who I was going to see and the things I was going to do and the success I was going to enjoy. I found that bucket list on my 50th birthday 10 years later and I was significantly unhappier when I was 50 than when I was 40. And I thought to myself, I need a different kind of list. So I created in my 50s a reverse bucket list so I could go from haves to wants. Then on my birthday during that period, I would make a list of all my cravings and desires and attachments. Not that I'm ashamed of them. I'm not because they're not untoward. They're not immoral. I don't think. But I don't want to be managed by my wants anymore. So I would make my bucket list on my birthday and then I would cross these things out. Easy come, easy go. Easy come, easy go. So I would not be attached to these things. That's the reverse bucket list. And now I'm free on my 60th birthday, which is about a year and a half ago, I made a reverse bucket list. And I realized my great attachments and my 60th birthday, this is in May of 2024. That was an election year was I think my attachments were to my opinions, you know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, he wrote that opinions are some of our worst attachments. And that's true. Hey, I mean, it's like in modern society, we're encouraged to hold on to our opinions like, you know, jewels, gold. And if somebody gets between you and your opinions, man, you're going to fight for dear life, you're going to cancel your friends. And one in six Americans is not talking to a family member or close friend today because of politics. I thought, man, I need, I need fewer political opinions because I need more friends. So I wrote down my eight strongest political opinions and I crossed them out. Not because I don't hold these opinions, I do, but because I don't want to be attached to these opinions. I don't want to adjudicate my relationships on the basis of the opinions. I want more love. And it set me free. It set me free. So what's on your reverse bucket list? What is actually not serving you anymore? What are the haves, the ambitions, the desires, the motivations that you once had that you want to put on your reverse bucket list that you need to cross out this year? Watch yourself be free. Watch your denominator fall and your satisfaction rise. And last but not least is number three, which is you need to get smaller, not larger. The numerator is all about getting bigger, having more, having more, having more. Why? Because what you have is a metaphor for you. It's a metaphor for the size of you, the dimensions of your personage and that in the way that other people see you, more money means a bigger you, means a grander you, and and you count your own self worth. You count your personhood a lot of times in terms of how big you are. But getting smaller is really the right way to go. And to get smaller, what you need to do, you need to stop focusing on you so very, very much. But that's hard to do in the past and past episodes, I've called that getting into the I self instead of the me self. The me self is me, me, me, me, me. The I self is one of which you're looking out toward the world and maybe noticing certain things. Now that's the essence, of course, of the whole philosophical and psychological idea of mindfulness is not time traveling all the time, but being here now and noticing what's going on around you. My colleague at Harvard, Ellen Langer, psychologist, she wrote a book called mindfulness 25 years ago, they talked about just noticing the world. But here's what I'm going to suggest to you. If you want to actually get greater satisfaction, you want that you want it to hang around. If you want to want less, notice more right now. I always remember that I had this very close friend, somebody I love so much. And he was a very anxious guy. He was somebody I played music with for a long time. He's a wonderful person, but a very anxious guy, very involved in little problems in the world that would stress him out a lot. And then when he was in his 40s, he got really sick. He went to the doctor and he didn't, the doctor just gave him a few months to live like sick sick. And he went for some emergency surgery. It was kind of like a Hail Mary, a surgery, and it worked. The doctor told him, however, he said, this is a wolf at the door. This is sooner or later, this is going to kill you. But not now. Now this is weird, right? Because we all kind of have a wolf at the door, every single one of us, the wolf at the door, something's going to kill you. Not now. Almost certainly not today. And we all should live this way. But when the doctor actually said that to my friend, it completely changed his life. It completely changed his life. He suddenly started paying attention to what was right in front of him, as opposed to worrying about all that dumb stuff that he'd been experiencing his whole life. And during this period, and by the way, he got to live 30 years. He didn't die old, but he didn't die as a kid either. He didn't die as a young, delaged guy. He got 30 years. And every year of those 30 years, he lived like it was his last year. And the way that he did that is the point that I'm trying to make right now. I mean, is there kind of a nostrum, live like it's your last day? No, no, but here's how you do it. That's all that matters, how you do it. By getting smaller and noticing little things, that's what he did. He became a specialist in noticing little things. I was at his house one time in Maryland. And I just love this. He had this flower in his garden. And it was like, it was like a very unremarkable flower. Kind of looked like that, like this flower. And I said, and he said, I love that. It was my favorite flower. And I said, why? It's kind of unremarkable. He said, oh, oh, you want to know why? Oh, we just wait. And so, it was summertime. So it was like 9.30 at night. We were just hanging out. We had a cookout. We were goofing around, just laughing. He says, oh, yeah, here, come over here, come over here, back to the flower. And he said, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. And I said, what? What? Well, he said, look at the flower. Look at the flower. I was looking at the flower. And suddenly, it opens up. He says, this happens every night at this time. I don't remember what the flower was called. I should remember as I could tell you, but in the show notes, maybe. And he said, this is, this is what it's all about, man. This is what it's all about. And I remember that because I got to see this flower open. And I would have missed it if I was just thinking about next year, next decade, or if I just wasn't there, if I was just thinking furthermore, even worse, I was just thinking about myself. And I was thinking about my, about my, about, I was just like, I want more. I want more. I want more. So I can have more. So I can have more. So I can have more. And that moment, I was actually happy. And that moment, I actually achieved satisfaction. I achieved that satisfaction because my beloved friend, he helped me to get small, to help me see a little thing in which there was an extraordinary miracle. Right in front of you, there's a flower. It's about to open. You wait, are you ready? Or are you thinking about something about yourself and next year? And what you want to have more of, you can do that. But it actually takes a little bit of work. None of these things is easy. Self mastery isn't easy. Standing up to Mother Nature, not easy. But that's the point, isn't it? Having satisfaction that lasts is doing hard things. The ultimate hard thing is not just delaying your gratification, not eating that marshmallow. That's just the beginning. Then it's actually making it hang around by doing the harder part. Which is actually paying attention to your wants and not just your haves. The three ways to do that are the Prince to the Sage, the reverse bucket list, and becoming dimensionally the right kind of person, which is smaller, not larger. Then up to Mother Nature, she'll squeal about it. But trust me, the satisfaction you'll achieve is going to be what you truly desire. That's something that will sustain you now and for the rest of your life. Question time. I've got a couple of really nice questions today. The first is actually from Anonymous. It came in asking about this person's kids, about screen use in their kids. She's basically asking about her kids who seem to be really, really obsessed with the screen. How do you help them to find joy when they have no idea that it seems at least that joy is even conceivable or could exist in the absence of the little screen? They're looking at their phones all day long. Her kids, her relatively young adolescent kids. This is a very, very common lament. There's really three things that we need to do. Number one, if you want to get your kids off the screens, you need to get off the screens. I know lots of people say, my kids look at their phones even during dinner. It's because you are probably. The truth is that they don't actually see you during family time on screens. They're less likely to be on the screens. And you justifiably can't ask them to do so if you're actually checking your phone all the time. You need to put boundaries around your own device use if you're going to do that. Second is actually having boundaries around device use. I mean, having specific boundaries around device use. And that's tech-free times and tech-free zones. You don't want that is let's go back to, we'll put here a link back to the episode on phone use, which is a very popular episode of the podcast on how to beat a phone addiction. But that means rules. And that's what parents are there for. You don't give in to absolutely everything unless you're kind of a crummy parent, which I've been sometimes, but I've tried not to be. Nobody's perfect. But one of the rules should be no phone for the first hour. When you get up, one, no phone for the last hour before you go to bed, no phone in the bedroom and no phone during meal time is the way that that works. No phone in the bedroom is a tech-free zone. Another should be a public policy in America and around the world where there's not one phone in one classroom from the beginning of the day, kindergarten for the last day of your PhD. That is so common sense. That's what my friend Jonathan Hyde has been talking about forever. And that's the best public policy. And it's only the fact that we have a bunch of lily-livered policymakers that we can't actually get that done. So go fight for that. The whole bottom line of this is that you need to exert more parental control because through that little screen, there's all sorts of predations. And it's relatively straightforward where somebody, you don't have to get rid of it forever, you don't have to throw it in the ocean, but you actually can put restrictions around it such that the grip of the addictions can be broken along the lines of what we're talking about right now. Thanks for that question. Good luck. Anonymous, another anonymous. We've got a lot of anonymity on our correspondents here today. And this is a really interesting one. I'm a student and I was recently diagnosed with something called Mind Body Syndrome, which can be extremely challenging and at times disabling. Do you have insights or approaches that might help someone like me better navigate and cope with this kind of mind body pain? Now, mind body syndrome is also known as tension myositis syndrome. And it's a really difficult thing that is a source of a lot of controversy among medical professionals. But the whole point is that there's tangible, identifiable physical pain that just doesn't have an identifiable biological cause. Can you imagine how, it's not just the pain that's frustrating. It's the lack of ability to recognize the cause of it that's got to just drive you around the bend. I'm super sympathetic to this. And it is a pretty common thing. And commensurate going to the doctor, it's all in your head. Thank you very much, Doc. Really appreciate that. In the meantime, my back is killing me or whatever it is. And a lot of people are suffering from this and it's not well understood. There might come a time when there probably will come a time at which we'll catch up and research to this tension myositis syndrome, what the biological cause is, because there is one. We just, it's not that it doesn't exist. We don't know what it is. It's kind of like what astronomers call dark matter. That's all the stuff that we know is out there, but we don't know what it is. So we just give it this no name, kind of is how this works. So what do you do in the meantime? That's really the question. What do you do in the meantime? There's a lot of research on dealing with pain that can't be mitigated under traditional circumstances. Number one, the problem is trying to eliminate it. So the Buddhists always say that suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance. There are two ways that you can suffer more with more physical pain or with more resistance. One way to suffer less in spite of pain is to lower the level of resistance. And that is very neurocognitively sound, that idea. The way to do this in a lot of schools that are dealing with pain in new and innovative ways starts with acknowledgement. Yeah, I'm in pain. I have pain. My life has pain in it. And this is not just for somebody dealing with mind-body syndrome with this tension, myocytus syndrome. This is for anybody because a lot of people, I mean, I have a lower back pain because of a structural issue. And I'm going to have lower back pain for the rest of my life. I am. It's not disabling. It's not. But if I don't acknowledge it, if I say, I got to get rid of it, it'll become a singular obsession for me and lower my quality of life. It starts with actually acknowledging that pain is actually normal. It's part of evidence that I'm alive. If you get to 61 like me, you can have pain. I mean, you just are, unless you're dead. I don't like the alternative. Second is acceptance. Acceptance of that fact as opposed to fighting it all the time. Remember, suffering equals pain times resistance. And last but not least is gratitude of the fact that there are so many other things that I have that make my life wonderful that are not my pain is actually focusing on my sources of gratitude as opposed to resentment and suffering or once again, a form of resistance, which are increasing suffering. There's a whole bunch of different ways to think about this and very specific psychological schools on how to do this. So I'm going to put in the show notes a column that I wrote in the Atlantic about pain and about the danger it is to try to eliminate pain. And it walks psychologically through these ideas on how you can stop focusing on something that's inherently unproductive and live a better life as a result. Well, that's where we are on the show. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it's, I mean, it was pretty thick today. I realized both scientifically, but also philosophically, I hope it's been useful to you. It's changed my life. A lot of the things that we've talked about here, probably you could sense that. Let me know your thoughts. OfficeHours at arthurbricks.com is that you can reach us. You can also leave a comment on any of the places where you get this podcast. Please like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Let the algorithms do their work to help other people find this. And please recommend this to a friend. If you're getting a lot out of it, tell them that this is a show that you find useful to your life and they might to theirs. Follow me on social media, on Instagram, LinkedIn, other platforms. You'll find all kinds of content that's actually known on this show. Do subscribe to my newsletter. Every Monday morning, that newsletter is going to give you stuff that you're not actually not hearing here as well. And just for fun, if you want to read a bunch of essays, besides my Atlantic column every Thursday morning, how to build a life, you can actually read the happiness files, 33 chapters, individual lessons on living a happier life, maybe one before sleep each night, however you want to use it, one way or the other. I hope you get happier. And if you are, make sure you pass on that love to other people and I'll see you next week.