← Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel
Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel
Feeling Empty? Arthur Brooks Has a Formula for a Meaningful Life
00:29:58
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- [00:00]
A
We go back to my great grandfather, Leroy Brooks, from Olathe, Kansas, born in 1862. I obviously didn't know him, but I can tell you one thing. He never came back from work. At the end of the day, he said, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today. I wouldn't have had to write the book called the Meaning of youf Finding Purpose in an age of emptiness 100 years ago, because that's the way life was, actually. But now, you know, people are buying the book because they say, what do I do? And the answer is live like Leroy, in a way. But that requires discipline, that requires focus.
- [00:34]
B
From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is hello Monday. A few years ago, I wrote a book, maybe a lot of you remember, was the big dream of my life. And I remember that publication day came and publication day went, and I don't know exactly how I was supposed to feel about the whole thing, but I know how I did feel. Kind of blah, you know, empty. I mean, maybe you have felt this way about things that were really meaningful to you, at least outwardly. So the big successful moments, you think, isn't it supposed to feel a certain way? Arthur Brooks has a name for this. He calls it the meaning gap. It's that grand, gnawing space between how any of us think we should feel in our lives and how we actually feel now. I just love talking to Arthur about this kind of stuff because as a social scientist at Harvard, he literally studies why we feel the way we feel and what we can do to feel better. His new book is called the Meaning of youf Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And he joined me in the studio recently to break down exactly what I'm talking about, how we can find purpose and close those meaning gaps. Now, this conversation is really cool. It was recorded live originally and broadcast to premium members from our New York studio. You're gonna hear some questions from the people who were there. And if you're a LinkedIn Premium member and you wanna hear even more of it, well, you can see the extended version at the link in our show notes. Okay, here's Arthur Brooks.
- [02:15]
A
This is something that's on everybody's mind in the LinkedIn universe, but actually in. In the world, this is what we want. We want our lives to have meaning and purpose and significance. And let's go look.
- [02:26]
B
We've always wanted that. But I contend that we are at a moment where it actually feels harder than it has in the past in quite a while. To name that meaning to feel connected to that meaning. Why do you think we find ourselves here?
- [02:38]
A
Well, this is a big question that I've been dealing with for the past five years. I teach at the Harvard Business School, so a lot of the people who are watching us today, if you're from hbs, hello, you could have been. You know, the culture, it's. This is about hustle and grind. And that's been getting more so over the past few decades, especially when the tip of the spear has been technological. It's a great thing that we're able to talk to each other and talk to a lot of our friends using cutting edge technology. And thank God for LinkedIn. That's actually created a lot of careers, to be sure. But when we mediate our relationships fundamentally through zoom screens and social media, it does something to the way that we use our brains. In point of fact, neuroscientists are showing that when most of your relationships are mediated through technology, that you're using the wrong side of your brain, that you to understand the meaning of your life. And that's a big problem.
- [03:27]
B
Okay, so let me make sure that I'm understanding what you're saying here. So fundamentally underpinning this body of ideas is the idea that you have your left side of your brain and your right side of your brain. And one side of that brain is very good at identifying with the meaning.
- [03:41]
A
Right.
- [03:41]
B
And the other side of that brain's really good at the cell phone.
- [03:44]
A
Exactly right. That's exactly right. So this is the theory called hemispheric lateralization, which is a very simple idea with a very complicated name, because that's how we get tenure in my business, of course, is, you know, something like that. This actually comes from the work of Iain McGilchrist, who' an Oxford University neuroscientist and philosopher. And what he shows in his research is that the right side of your brain is where you apprehend and understand mystery, meaning, love, happiness, all the complex stuff that you'll never be able to solve, but you can live with and understand that gives your life depth. The left side of your brain is where you do the how to and what questions, not the why questions. These how to and what questions of technology and engineering and analysis and all the stuff they pay us for is really in the left side of our brain. And all the that we're doing naturally when we're on our cell phones is on the left side of the brain. And that now dominates absolutely every part of our life. The average American, and this is probably True for all of our friends here who are not in the United States looks at their smartphone 205 times a day. And that means you're shoving yourself into the left side of your brain. And you're not even the part of your brain you need to even think about the meaning of your life. No wonder life feels empty for so many people.
- [04:52]
B
I'm consumed by the how to questions and my devices only make the answers to those more obvious. Not necessarily easier, but more ob. And they make me into what I would consider to be my identity. A busy person.
- [05:03]
A
Exactly. Homo economicus, you know, working, working, working, working. Not homo sapiens anymore is what it comes down to. So the problem is that we have facilitated our way to become hyper developed in this tendency. There's nothing shoving us back. It's funny because, you know, we solved this little annoyance in life called boredom and created a major crisis and meaning, you know, if you go back, and here's the great irony, if I go back a couple of generations, we go back to my great grandfather, Leroy Olathe, Kansas, born in 1862. I obviously didn't know him, but I can tell you one thing that he never came home and said to my great grandmother, Mary Ellen, he never came back and said from work, at the end of the day, he said, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today. And the reason is because his brain was integrated between the two hemispheres, he was not flooding his HPA axis. The adrenal glands were functioning normally. And when we use our brains in this modern way, which is quite abnormal, we have a lot of maladies. Now we. Why do we do this? Because, well, Leroy Brooks life was actually pretty boring from moment to moment. His life in general was super interesting. We've figured out a way to wipe out boredom and stay busy, which is what strivers do. And everybody wants to wipe out boredom, but we use our brains wrong. And ironically, our lives get kind of boring, don't they?
- [06:21]
B
I cannot tell you. Like right now I am remembering how when I was a child, I would spend so much time in the state of just being bored. Bored at the supermarket with mom following her around, up and down the aisles, bored because there was no one around to play with after school. And like I can remember viscerally the feeling of that. I don't know that my children experience that. In the same way. I wanna go back to this big idea, this central idea that boredom is somehow a gateway back to meeting and to just point out the fact that the opposite of bored is busy and Busy is the identity of a modern professional.
- [06:58]
A
Today it is. And a lot of people who are really justifiably proud of what they're doing, they're actually terrified of idleness. They're running on a lot of fear, is the way that that works. Fear of failure, fear of having a catastrophe in their careers, fear of. And mostly fear of this idea of idleness. There's nothing that kind of scares the striver more. Strivers are very funny. I've studied strivers over the course of my career, and I talk about it a lot in this new book. They tend to have the same kind of childhood, actually. So this is going to describe a lot of very, very busy, very successful people that are watching us right now. They have great parents, but one of the things that their parents do that's not great in the parenting is that they give their kids love and attention when they do something extraordinary like bring home a really good report card or make the first chair in the orchestra or make the baseball team something extraordinary. And what your little synaptically plastic brain does. And by the way, Jesse, it's probably you and me we're talking about here too, right? Yes.
- [07:54]
B
And a lot of you out there.
- [07:55]
A
Yeah, for sure. Is that you learn this lesson that love is earned. Now, love isn't earned. Love is a free gift, freely given. Love is a grace. Anybody who makes you earn love doesn't love you. And we kind of all know that. But we're going through life as shrivers, trying to earn love. We're trying to earn love from our bosses, trying to earn love from, you know, the people that we work with, trying to earn love from our spouses. Hey, I'm gonna work a little harder. Do you love me yet? Do you love me yet? And the result of that is that idleness feels like love will stop. That's where the fear comes from.
- [08:27]
B
Yeah, I had never really distilled it to that. But this idea of sitting in the pause means that you're not doing the thing that was earning you the praise of the. That you depended on for love. This isn't supposed to be therapy, guys. I will move beyond this in just a second. But it is a sort of therapy because you're introducing this idea that if that is why boredom is threatening, well, we can address that.
- [08:50]
A
We can address that. We absolutely can. And you can't address it until you understand it. Workaholism, which is very, very common in our communities, is actually downstream from a different pathology, which is addiction to success. This feeling like you're only alive when you're winning. And that comes from this pathology early in life that love is actually ear, the desire for love that keeps us on this hedonic treadmill of experiences, of victories again and again and again. And until we understand that, if we don't understand that, we are going to use every technological means at our disposal, shove ourselves into the wrong hemisphere of our brain, and then say, why do I feel like my life is empty? Why do I feel like my achievements are actually not bringing this. That thing that I sought, I have sought all of these particular years. And then God forbid you get knocked off that treadmill because the economy changes and your job goes away. That feels like utter catastrophe because there's nothing to fall to.
- [09:46]
B
I so agree with you. I can't believe it took us 10 minutes into this conversation to get to the idea of the hedonic treadmill. I want to bring in some subscriber questions. This one comes from Alison in Washington D.C. hi, Alison. Okay, so for people in career transition or rebuilding after a setback.
- [10:03]
A
Right.
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B
How do you find meaning when the identity you built, your work around is effectively gone?
- [10:07]
A
Yeah. No, and that actually we have to recognize that that identity, which is built around your career, wasn't a true identity. That was a false, that was a hollow identity to begin with. And this is an opportunity. When it turns out that your entire ego, your entire sense of self, has been hanging on a two dimensional cardboard cutout of you, it's good to know earlier than later. It really is. Because this will not sustain you at the end of your life. Your career will not keep you warm at night. Your career will not be by your bedside as you're taking your dying breath, this is just not the case. This is not a stable identity is what it comes down. So what I recommend to everybody when they have a pause in their career, whether it's invited or uninvited, and this is super normal. This is one of the things that Bruce Fieler calls a life quake. You know, he talks about your life and transitions and it feels uniquely unfortunate to everybody, but it's actually very, very normal. And the way that you have to readdress this to reframe this, this is an opportunity for me to understand myself. Now, there's a philosopher that tells you how to do it. Okay. This is the practical moment. That's Josef pieper, the great 20th century German philosopher who wrote a book called Leisure, the Basis of. Okay, now, he defined leisure as not chilling out. And so for everybody in LinkedIn going to the beach is like, okay for two hours and it's like, I'm feeling idle. Nobody will love me anymore. I get it. Me too. Right? But he talked about leisure as an opportunity to increase the depth of your soul and improve yourself as a person, to understand yourself deeply. Doing things that people don't actually pay you for. And there's three silos to work on. If you get a pause in your career, treat it as an opportunity for spiritual deepening, for relationship deepening, and for learning. For learning something actually new. Treat it like something unbelievably serious. That's what he called leisure. As a matter of fact, a lot of people believe they have one career trajectory and they actually don't. Now, there's a great psychological literature on the four types of careers. There are four types of careers based on four different psychological profiles. And we all think that there's one. I mean, my university thinks that you go from one job to the next, you change every three or four years. So you can go up the chain and up the chain and up the. That's not how most people actually treat their career. Careers. There are four types. Now, there's a couple of types that don't characterize very many people on LinkedIn. One is transitory, where you're just like, I don't know, I'm going to be a barista in Portland, Maine for a little while. Then I'm going to fall in love maybe and move to San Diego and run a surf shop. That's a transitory career where you work. You don't work to live or you work to live, not you don't live to work. Another is a kind of old school, like your grandfather, who had an expert career, which was a 2% raise every year. It wasn't very hard. It was completely. Had a good work, life balance, et cetera. I did the same thing for 40 years. My dad taught at the same college for 42 years, for example. And that's completely different than my career. The two types that most LinkedIn folks are gonna fall into is the linear career, which is the one I presupposed at the very beginning. And almost all people who find that they're burning out weirdly after seven to 12 years, it's because they're not that they are a spiral. A spiral actually has a bunch of miniature careers of their own design. Their brains work in such a way that they're gonna find meaning if every seven to they take it down to the studs and start again. They funge the stuff that they were good at and learned for the last one into the new one. And by the way, this might have incredibly different design. It might be right after college I'm gonna work on Wall street and then I'm gonna step back to part time work. So I'm gonna raise my kids for seven to 12 years and then I'm gonna go into the nonprofit sector doing this cool new social enterprise. And then I think I'm gonna teach. And then after that, maybe I'll go back into business again. And that series of miniature careers protects against a lot of the grief that comes. This was taken away from me, maybe even I took it away from myself. And I don't know why.
- [13:58]
B
So that is the spiral, that is the spiritual. That's the spiral category. And I would say that that is the category that this moment calls us to, this economic moment calls us to, this cultural moment calls us to.
- [14:09]
A
And a lot of people watching us today. I hope you felt seen for the first time in your career cause your spirals and you maybe didn't know it.
- [14:16]
B
Okay, another question, this one comes from Daniel in the uk. I've got this question too. Daniel. How do we manage and prioritize the avalanche of alerts, podcasts, we should listen to blog posts, emails, et cetera. You and I both tell people to listen to our podcast, of course. How do we actually manage all the information flying at us?
- [14:35]
A
Yeah. The truth is that we have a tendency to let it encroach on every part of our life that isn't work. You have to recognize that the constant stimulus, the text messages, the email messages, the podcasts, you need to listen to all the things that people are recommending. This goes into a slot in your day that actually is dedicated to either communication or learning and that has a particular part in your life, not to manage you, but to enrich you. That's why you actually have to schedule it in the same way that you do everything else. It can't actually suck all the oxygen out of every moment when you're not actually just doing your day to day job.
- [15:09]
B
I feel like a lot of us are nodding. We agree with you. And yet it is actually so challenging to figure out a set of rules around how we manage these devices to let the good parts in while not allowing them to.
- [15:20]
A
And that means we need protocols, quite frankly. I mean, it's like busy people need protocols. I have a six part protocol that I do every single day and it is not just about work, it's about the way that I take care of my health the way I take care of my spirit and the way that I'm. Look, I'm a scientist and so this is how I kind of think about things like that. But busy people have to do this. You have to program the things that you love and that you need and not just programming in your job.
- [15:43]
B
So, you know, we have to ask now, right? What is the six power protocol? I mean, in 30 seconds or less.
- [15:47]
A
Yeah, for sure. So I get up at 4:30, and again, don't turn off the podcast right now. This is not. But for me, this is part of the Brahma Mukurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time. Getting up before dawn so you can experience the dawn. Very good for the brain, very good for productivity and for mood management. Then the first thing I do is I work out for an hour seven days a week, and I gotta do that. I'm 61 and it's very important. Your 60s are either gonna be a decade of your highest performance or a decade of decline. And it matters how you treat your body mostly. And you're great. Okay, then. I actually, I'm traditionally religious, I'm Catholic. I go to mass every morning after that, and only then do I take caffeine. And the reason is because caffeine should be used nootropically and not to wake you up. That way it interacts with A2A adenosine to make you more creative and give you more concentration. I eat a high protein bolus and then I get four hours of continuous creativity on the basis of that. I can actually work for four hours with concentration, which is twice as much as I could if I were leaving things up to chance.
- [16:46]
B
And so you do this every day?
- [16:47]
A
Yeah, I do this every day now when I'm in New York, where we are right now, I can't go to mass right after I work out because the churches aren't doing it in the way that they do when I'm at home. It's all go in the afternoon. So I don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
- [16:58]
B
I want you to say that again because anybody who just heard 4:30 in the morning and thought, well, that'll never be me, needs to be.
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A
Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. What I'm talking about is the protocols per se, that actually use the best ideas based in science. And by the way, anybody can actually just Google this. I did a podcast that walks them through the six protocol. Build it your way, but don't leave it up to chance. Don't leave your life up to chance.
- [17:23]
B
I love that. I want to turn our attention now to a deeper sense of purpose. A lot of what we're talking about so far is how we pull our attention away from the things that bring us meaning. Let's talk about how we actually develop meaning and the deeper sense of purpose. You know, I did a lot of rereading the pre event comments and what I saw were a lot of people that actually I felt pretty connected to. People who are high functioning, accomplished people like you. They lead teams, they hit numbers, they get promotions, and yet when they achieve that success, it's not really satisfying. And I'm curious why it is that it's the highest achievers that hits hardest.
- [18:04]
A
Yeah, because you know, there's an old saying, woe be to the person whose dreams come true. They inevitably find they had the wrong dreams. See, most people don't have the problem that strivers on LinkedIn have because their dreams aren't coming true professionally. When you hit those things that you want, it turns out you didn't want the right things. And Aristotle talked about this. I mean, the great philosophers Thomas Aquinas said that we're beguiled by four idols and there's only four. He's actually very, very astute social science, given the fact that it was in the 13th century. He said money, power, pleasure and fame. And fame also means adoration or prestige or admired by the right people, whatever it comes down to. It doesn't mean Internet famous necessarily. And when you look for those things and you get those things, you'll realize that those are at best intermediary goals, intermediate goals toward what we really wanted, which is love, love of the divine, love of our families, deep friendship, real friends, not deal friends. And then being able in our work, which is what you and I have talked about several times, to earn our success and to serve other people. And so it's a question of goals is what it comes down to. But when people arrive, they experience what we in behavioral science called the arrival fallacy. We think that we're making progress toward these worldly goals. And progress is awesome. You know, progress feels so good, you can give up all the things you don't like to eat. As long as the scale goes down that day, it's so rewarding. But when you get to your goal weight, for example, if you're on a very stringent diet, your reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Which is why diets don't work that's the arrival fallacy of feeling. Ah, I made it. And this is why Olympic athletes often fall into a clinical depression when they win the gold, because they thought that they would be permanently happy and they're not.
- [19:53]
B
It is being in progress with a sense of purpose that delivers us a continual sense of meaning.
- [19:59]
A
That's right.
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B
Can you walk us through the distinction that you draw between searching for meaning and having it, since this is a lot of what we're talking about.
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A
Yeah. In this book there's a little test at the beginning that people can take to kind of situate themselves in the map of meaning. If you're looking for the meaning of your life, you better know where you are if you're trying to end up someplace, to be sure. And there's two dimensions that psychologists talk about. The presence of meaning, in other words, how much do you feel it? And the search for meaning. How hard are you looking? And ideally you'll be, you know, find a huge presence of meaning and you're not spending too much time searching. That's kind of the happy homebody. That's not LinkedIn users, you know, even if they have a strong sense of meaning, presence is high. They're still gonna be searching because you're seekers, which is great. I admire that. Me too, by the way, is what it comes down to. But the truth is that about half of the population has strong sense of the presence of meaning and half don't. This is very context dependent, whether or not they're seekers or not. And so are you a seeker? Are you not a seeker? Should you be seeking? Less is what it comes down to. So this test actually sort of shows you, situates you so you understand yourself, how much you found it, how much you're looking. The people I really want to stimulate have a low sense and aren't seeking. These are the people that I really want to sort of kick into the seeking process, which is why I wrote the book.
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B
Right. They just. The actual feeling of that is sort of like dead inside.
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A
It's like there's nothing out there. It's sort of Nietzsche in its way. You know, it's like, I don't know, man. It's like there's no essence to life, there's only existence. So you might as well have a good time and stop looking.
- [21:29]
B
Yeah, well, look. Looking presupposes that you have some feeling of agency that you get to do the choosing. And I wanna talk a little bit about like the idea of a calling because I think that, you know, a lot of our audience and myself, we wrestle with the ide that like, we don't always get to choose the actual work for pay work that we do. Right. We often have to take what's available and we often have to do what we're told to do in many contexts.
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A
We all do, actually.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I don't know anybody who's completely free.
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B
Can you like retrofit a calling into the work that you have or do you have to shake things up as you.
- [22:09]
A
Well, we have to understand what calling actually means. Calling feels like what you're meant to do. That's what it comes down to. The word meaning is in that what am I meant to do? My students ask me this all the time. I mean, My students are 28 years old on average. They're MBA students at Harvard. They want to grow up and be a lot of the people who are watching us right now with fabulous careers and they think that that's what they're meant to do and they've got another thing coming because that's not what it comes down to. What you're meant to do is really based on two qualities of your career or job at any given time. Number one is the feeling like you are creating value with your life and value the lives of other people that's earning your success. And you have to be acknowledged and rewarded for value that you're creating. Which is why merit based systems are great. And tenure based systems, trust me, as an academic, are not great for morale and loyalty based systems are the worst, like if you kiss up to the boss. And the second aspect of a calling is service is believing that you're needed. The essence of dignity is to be needed. Which is why you treat your kids as an asset to develop. That's. They're very. I mean, you're. And my kids are very expensive.
- [23:09]
B
Yes. Right.
- [23:10]
A
Actually, my kids are off the payroll. Your kids are still on the payroll, but you treat them as assets to develop and not liabilities to manage. They play different roles in the P and L than somebody who you're trying to get off the books at some point.
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B
Yes, that's actually a great metaphor.
- [23:23]
A
It's what it comes down to. But service to others means that you're needed by somebody. So that's what to look for and that's what to manufacture. Even if the current job isn't the be all and end all isn't what you were hoping it was actually going to be, how to make it into more of a calling is to look for how can I create value? And how Can I serve others? People that will feel more like a calling all day long.
- [23:44]
B
I love that, particularly the service aspect of it. Okay, this question comes from Satya in Canada. For someone who is competent in their field but searching for more meaning, what's a question we should ask ourselves to discern whether we're moving toward a true calling or just chasing comfort?
- [24:01]
A
Okay, let's get to. We were talking about this a little bit before the podcast. How do you know? And it turns out you've got almost anybody who's past 25 and certainly past 45 or 50 has the data to know the answer to this question. And so this is the question that people ask me all the time. I have these opportunities. Which one should I take? Here's how you know it's based on your gut. So you have three gut based knowledge sources. When you're looking at an opportunity, here's what they are. There's excitement, there's fear, and there's deadness. And we all know how that feels. You know, when. If somebody says I love you and you feel dead inside, that's deadness. If somebody says I want you to come and be the president of this company and you feel dead inside and you know it's a good opportunity, but it just. Deadness. Those are the three feelings.
- [24:48]
B
Yeah.
- [24:49]
A
Here's the ideal that you're looking for. 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness. As close to that as you can get. You can't choose always. But you don't want something that's really smart on paper. That's 25% deadness. You don't want something that's 0% fear. Why do we want these proportions? You want a lot of excitement for the obvious reason. You want about 20% fear because less than that and you're gonna be bored in two years. Sure, I have the data on that, but everybody knows it's true. And it means a 20% chance of the actual possibility of failure. Or you're not gonna be in the game and you're not gonna learn and grow and it's not gonna actually meet your expectations. And zero percent deadness. And then when you're in a job, how do you know when to quit? Quit if you can. And the answer is because those proportions are diverging too much. The deadness is creeping up. The fear is going down is what it comes down to.
- [25:42]
B
It's not just at the outset that needs to be where you are in order to. That's the zone to realize meaning in your experience. If you're that Satya, you have a formula. Okay, so here's something that I want to understand. The people in our audience, we've done the work. A lot of us have journaling practices. We meditate, we read every framework. We're very invested over here. We're not uninformed. Your prescription at the end of the book is almost deliberately simple, right? Love deeply, serve others, embrace beauty, suffer wisely. So this doesn't feel new, why are we still learning this lesson?
- [26:21]
A
It's interesting because I mentioned my old great grandpa Leroy. What was normal for him no longer is. Today we need to live something like an old fashioned life. But that takes effort because we don't do that automatically is what it comes down to. The fact is that we are pushed continuously out of the parts of the brain that we actually need, out of the practices that we require for us to understand the meaning of our life. So I wouldn't have had to write the book called the Meaning of youf Finding Purpose in an age of emptiness 100 years ago, because that's the way life was actually. But now people are buying the book because they say, what do I do? And the answer is live like Leroy in a way. But that requires discipline, that requires focus, that requires protocols in a weird way. And all the people who are watching us right now, who are super ultra connected, who can wind up being absolutely automatized by the technology that can become subject to or subjugated to the machines they need to break free on purpose and live in this particular way to understand the nature of their suffering, as opposed to trying to avoid it through distraction by falling in love in real life, as opposed to simply trying to do electronically mediated courting and all the things that we actually do that suck the life and meaning out of life.
- [27:40]
B
So if progress feels like it should be, that we have managed to figure out how to avoid suffering, we're missing the fact that it is our suffering that is the gateway to our humanity.
- [27:50]
A
There's so much truth in exactly how you beautifully put it. And even more neuroscientifically, the work of Richard Davidson at University of Wisconsin shows that the right hemisphere of the brain media mediates suffering, which is the same part of the brain that mediates meaning. Which is why I could ask anybody who's watching us right now, when did you find the deepest meaning of your life? Think through a time in your life when you found that. Nobody says that week at the beach in Florida. They say it was when my mother died. It was when I lost my business and I survived. People will tell me about terrible times in their life when meaning visited them because they couldn't avoid the suffering and they submitted to it. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain. The Dalai Lama taught me that formula, that suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance. If you spend all of your energy trying to eradicate your pain, you will actually never find meaning because that comes from. I mean, eradicate some pain. I'll take a Tylenol if I need to, sure. But I try to spend more of my time trying to lower my resistance to pain such that even if my pain is high, my suffering is not.
- [28:55]
B
That was Arthur Brooks. If you haven't already, check out his latest book. It's called the Meaning of youf Life. And if you're a premium member and you want to see the full version of this conversation, well, it's linked in the show notes, so check it out. I'm Jessi Hempel and this is hello Monday. Thanks for joining us. I'll be right back here in the studio again next week. Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn news the show. The show is produced by Rachel Karp, Ava Ahmad Begi and Adam Yates. Sarah Storm is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Asaf Gidron. The show is mixed by Tim Boland. Our theme music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Mikayla Greer is a friend of the show forever, as is Victoria Taylor. Kyle Ranson Walsh is editor at large of Editorial Graphics. Dave Pond is head of production and creative operations. Courtney Koop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jesse Hempel. This is hello Monday. See you next week.