How to Enjoy Your Life

As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn, and then I would paint with my mother, and it was just bliss. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability. I remember asking her— I was probably 13 or 14 years old— how I could improve as an artist. She said, "Look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw, that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances. Then try." Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences, good experiences, even bad experiences, can be fundamentally game-changing in your well-being. One of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is that we're not here, we're not fully alive. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life, your life's going to change. Hi friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur C. Brooks. This is a show about how you can lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using actual science and ideas. This is a show that actually shows you how research can be in the public interest and indeed your interest. If you want to lift people up, if you want to help people to become their best selves, this show's for you. That's why I do it. I want to be happier. I want you to be happier. I want you to help other people to be happier. And furthermore, this is not just a self-improvement idea. This is one that's actually based in data, and that's what we'll be talking about. This is an evidence-based program about how to live your best life. Hope you've enjoyed it so far. If you do, please recommend the show to other people. Hit like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching the show. That actually helps the algorithms find other people, as a matter of fact. And I appreciate you doing that an awful lot. If you have questions or criticism or comments, we want to hear it. Leave it in the notes, leave it in the comment sections wherever you're consuming this content, or send me a note at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. Don't forget to leave a review. We want to know what you think. And once again, that's really helpful to the show so that we can continue to spread as we are bigger audiences almost every week. So thanks to you for that. Hey friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis. And I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from whole foods. That's the ideal, but it's just not manageable all the time. For that reason, I'm always looking for supplements that that can actually get me where I need to go with respect to my macronutrient profile. A bunch of my friends were telling me that David Protein is a really good source. 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I started buying David Protein bars, and now I'm pleased that they're sponsoring this show as well. So whether you're on the go or hitting the gym, if you're trying to meet your protein targets, David Protein is a good way for you to do it. That's why I'm doing it, and it's what I'm carrying when I'm on the road. So head over to davidprotein.com/Arthur. They've got a special offer for you. If you buy 4 cartons, they'll give you the 5th carton for free. You're gonna love that. And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy. You're not broken, you're meaning-starved. I talk to people all the time who are by any external measure successful. They built careers, they have families, They've checked the boxes and yet something feels off. Life feels thin, like you're going through the motions, like you're watching yourself from the outside. And here's what I want you to know. That feeling is not a personal failing. It's not ingratitude. It's not something wrong with you. It's a meaning problem and it's an epidemic. The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement and distraction. It's terrible at giving us meaning, and no amount of success will fix that. I've seen it in my research and I've seen it in my own life. That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, in a program I've developed called The Meaning of Your Life. It's not a lecture. It's not a quick fix. It's several days of real work in a small group on the questions that actually matter. If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look. I'm recording this a little bit before Mother's Day 2026. It's going to play pretty close to Mother's Day, as a matter of fact. And so you're probably thinking about mom, whether mom is still alive or not. And I hope you had a good experience growing up with your mom. I hope you love your mom. Everybody deserves to, for sure. Not everybody does. Um, I want to tell you a little story about mine, not because this is a show about Mother's Day, but because this is going to help me explain a very important phenomenon for your happiness. My mother was my late mother. She died relatively young, 73. She suffered a lot because she was very ill for most of her life. As a matter of fact, she was, however, a terrific artist. She was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and she was a terrific mixed media artist. Many people in the Pacific Northwest own her paintings. Uh, she did this to the exclusion of most other things over the course of her life. She was also an amateur violinist and pianist. So she was really into the arts and a creative soul to be sure. One of the reasons that she was so dedicated to her art, if you've been a, um, a listener of this program over the last few weeks, um, you'll recognize this argument. It is that when you participate in the production of beauty, you illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain and you find the meaning of your life. When my mother would wake up in the morning, she was, she was really in a lot of, really in a lot of agony. She suffered from tremendous mental health problems. And I mean, every day was a chore. It just was. And then she would come down and have a cup of decaf and because, because of her medication, she couldn't take caffeine and she would have a little breakfast and then she would head up to her studio. And life started at that moment. She was a different person. It was extraordinary. As a matter of fact, how I saw that. And she was a great artist. She was fantastic. She had excellent technique. If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, um, much to my mortification as a teenager, it actually looked like that. And it was beautiful to boot, I guess. Although once again, as a teenager, I wouldn't have been able to discern that. Now growing up, I was very interested in the arts myself. I was more of a musician. As a matter of fact, I made my living as a classical musician for many years until I was 31 years old. But I was interested in all different kinds of creativity. I wrote stories and poetry and I painted with my mother. As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn and then I would paint with my mother and it was just bliss. And I just, I loved it too. Not knowing, of course, that my little right hemisphere was fully illuminated and I was experiencing the meaning of my life. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability. I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist. And I expected her to say, do it a lot, get the reps, which certainly is true. That's not what she told me. She said, here's the reason that people can't draw. Here's the reason, because they actually never look at the thing they're trying to draw. She said, look deeply. At the thing you're trying to draw that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances, then try. So I was actually trying to draw a tree, simple thing, right? And I would look at it and try to draw the tree. Didn't look like a tree. Didn't look very good at all. Then I really stared at it. I really took in the details of what I was looking at. I was, I wasn't relying on my brain to fill in the details. I was actually observing the details, the contours, the colors, the shadows. And I drew a pretty good tree. Now here's the point of that. I was also happy when I was, I remember being really happy, not because the tree looked good, but because the whole experience was rich. What was that? It turns out that that was an experience of what we call savoring. Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences, good experiences, even bad experiences can be fundamentally game-changing in your wellbeing. And that's what I want to talk about today. In our hustle and grind culture, where everything is fast, where we're distracted constantly, one of the biggest sources, one of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is that we're not here. We're not fully alive. Now, this is not just a call for some sort of mindfulness meditation technique. This means simply savoring life as it's happening right now. I want to tell you why it's so important. And I want to tell you how you can do it in your ordinary life. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life, your life's going to change. Let's start off with some, you know, some basics of what savoring actually means. Savoring is, is to pay attention and to say, I want to be doing this right now. I want to be fully absorbed in this thing right now. That's what savoring really is. So you savor. The experience of eating a piece of chocolate. You don't just gobble it up. You actually put it in your mouth and you taste it on your tongue and you feel the texture of the chocolate and you're conscious of it. Say that's, that's smooth, that's sweet, or whatever it happens to be. That's what savoring really is all about. Or if you savor moments with your beloved before you say goodbye, you're experiencing the look in her eyes and the smell of her skin. And you're conscious of that. That's what savoring really is. Now there's been a lot of research on how that affects you psychologically, how that affects you neurophysiologically. And it's pretty interesting what researchers have come up with when you're savoring, when you're paying attention, when you're immersive, when you're here now on something neutral, positive, or perhaps even negative, I'll get to that later. Actually, it stimulates the reward processing centers in your brain, your brain's ventral striatum. There's two parts of your limbic system that principally are responsible for you feeling pleasure. One is the ventral striatum, is the other is called the ventral tegmental area. You tap those things, you know, now they're very thrifty, which means there are lots of ways to tap it. If you say, if my wife says to me, I just love you so much, it will tap these pleasure centers and I'll say joy, right? That's positive emotion. If I had a huge bump of cocaine, it would do the same thing. Because of my thrifty brain. By the way, I don't do that, but you get the point that I'm actually trying to make. So when you savor, you will actually stimulate that ventral striatum, that part of your brain that, and there's interesting research on that, that of course, as always, I'm going to put into the show notes. This is a paper called Savoring the Past: Positive Memories Evoke Values Representation in the Striatum from Neuron, which is a terrific journal, neuroscience journal. So all you have to do to do that is to pay attention and say, I want to be paying attention to this. I like paying attention to this. And then really look like I was looking at that tree that day. You can even savor completely ordinary things. Like right now I am walking to the post office. That's the essence of what the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, of course, one of the most famous Buddhists in the world. A Theravada Buddhist monk, Vietnamese, when he wrote his famous classic, The Miracle of Mindfulness, which starts off with this, just an explanation, this description of washing the dishes. When I'm washing the dishes, I should be fully present in the act of washing the dishes. What he's saying is savor washing the dishes. Don't rush through it. Be fully present. Be saying, this is what I'm doing now. I like the fact that I'm savoring this. I like the fact that I'm fully present. And that will stimulate— once again, I'm here to tell you that's going to stimulate your pleasure centers. You're going to get pleasure from washing the dishes, but only if you savor washing the dishes. The second thing that it does, this is an interesting study from 2022, is it lowers symptoms of depression and increases higher levels of reported happiness. Probably that's related to the first effect that I talked about, because when you, when you stimulate the parts of the limbic system that elicit the feelings of joy, that's not consistent with the, the, the affective pain that we actually get, which is the activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a different part of the limbic system. And third, it leads to these higher levels of reported happiness in, in not in looking at people's brains, but just asking for people's experiences. There's one study where researchers asked human subjects to record the frequency and intensity of their daily positive experiences. Half of the subjects in these experiments were asked to savor, savor their events in their lives, to be fully present, to be paying attention. And they found that these subjects were significantly happier after the experiment than those who were not given any specific instructions. In other words, if I just remind you to be fully present, you're going to be happier. You're going to enjoy your life more. This is especially clear for people who experience— here's our, here's the irony— for people who experience fewer positive events. In other words, if you're living a life that is tough and you're going through a really tough time right now, and you savor the moments that you like, you know, this, all of us go through these things, really stressed out or really, really too busy. But there's going to be a moment like, you know, sun coming through the clouds a little bit. You stop and you say, oh yeah. Sunshine on my face and you savor it. That will have a disproportionately joyful impact on you. The less good there is, the more good you get. That's one of the benefits of savoring. It also leads to happier memories later on, which is interesting that the more that you savor the present, the more you're going to remember the present when it becomes the past, because you lay down more intense memories in the hippocampus of your brain. The episodic memories are actually more distinct when you savor them. It makes perfect sense. Doesn't it? You remember the things where it feels like time slowed down because you were fully present. By the way, this is one of the reasons that when, when you're in the middle of a car accident, it feels like time slows down because you're laying down hugely complex memory tracks in those moments. You're savoring the experience of getting T-boned by a semi or something, which, you know, not so great, I suppose. Actually more on that later, because I want to tell you how negative events can be savored. Much to your advantage as well, but we're not there yet. So savor more, have happier memories later. Now, this is important. This one's really important to me personally. I'll tell you why. I don't have very many happy memories. It's not like I had some trauma, some terrible childhood, but I don't have happy memories. I just don't. I don't like remembering the past. I don't like looking at childhood photo albums. I don't like it. I don't like looking at old videos. Just bugs me. It bothers me. It makes me uncomfortable to do that. I mean, I practically don't drive looking in the rearview mirror. I'm a dangerous driver, but I mean, I go through life, not looking in the rearview mirrors through the windshield of the car. It's just for some reason, that's how I'm wired. I don't like talking about the good old days. And so it's hard for me to keep up with my old friends as a matter of fact, because just past, I don't know. I mean, I have this one set of really, really happy memories. When somebody says, what are your happiest memories from childhood? They're all the same thing. I used to go down to the Oregon coast with my Aunt Marie and Lincoln City. Lincoln City, Oregon. And it's funny because those of you who've been a longtime viewer of the show, you know that I'm great friends with Rainn Wilson, the actor, and his wife grew up going to the Oregon coast in the exact same places as me. And we reminisce about that actually, which is sweet and really good. But generally I don't like it. I don't like that. And what I've learned from the literature, this is how I try to engineer my own life is by using the research to live better is right now what I'm trying to do with my life is savor more now because I want better memories. I don't want to be the kind of guy that can't remember the past in a positive way. So why is it hard? Why don't we naturally do it? If this were such a great thing, then we'd be savoring everything all the time and life would be sweet, right? Well, it's hard because we're not evolved to savor anything. We're evolved to rush through everything and pay attention to the negative. That's what we're designed to do. Now, why? You as a viewer of the show, you know that I rely a lot on evolutionary biological and psychological arguments and, and because they're compelling and because they're ordinarily right. We have brains that were designed in more or less their current form, something like 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene era. And that was a dangerous time to be Homo sapiens. You know, you had to pay attention a lot or you're going to be a wild animal's lunch. There was no law. Somebody could come and, you know, take your buffalo jerky and animal skins and, you know, kill you summarily if you're not paying attention. So we have more brain space dedicated to negative emotions than positive emotions. That's what gives us what we call the negativity bias in our lives. Negativity bias means that life isn't that great all the time, but it, it, we're more likely to get to tomorrow. We're more likely to survive the night. That makes perfect evolutionary sense that your suspicious, nervous inner troglodyte is trying to survive and pass on your genes. So you're not a saber-toothed tiger's lunch, but that negativity bias is now maladapted. It's basically an error that we would do that, that we would not savor, but rather that we would be suspicious and vigilant and trying to get into the future as quickly as possible. That's a survival tactic that doesn't actually lead us to happiness. One quick note, Mother Nature, who did that, doesn't care if we're happy. That is an important thing to keep in mind. Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes. But that's why we have a wonderful prefrontal cortex so that we have decisions. We can make conscious decisions, not just to live according to our animal impulses, but to live up to our moral aspirations. That's the beautiful thing about being human, that even though I have a negativity bias, I can override it with my consciousness. And that's what we're talking about here. Savoring is rebelling against yourself. And oh, how freeing that is, isn't it? To stand up. Your worst impulses. It's an error because a negative disposition, it's maladaptive today because the negative disposition makes us error-prone in our predictions. You're always going to overpredict the worst. You're going to be, you're going to assume the worst all the time. And that's a heck of a way to live. And it lowers our quality of life to be sure. Of course, lots of interesting work on this, by the way, I'll put in a great article in the notes titled The Brain is Adaptive, Not Triune: How the Brain Responds to Threat, Challenge, and Change. And that's in Psychology, Therapy, and Psychomatics. It's a nice article. So savoring is the secret to greater happiness, but it doesn't come naturally. How are you going to savor your life more? And that's what I want to tell you now. What are the techniques for actually savoring more? What are the techniques for overriding your negativity bias, your tendency to rush into the future, to not pay attention and savor the ordinary moments of your life that you actually need? And I'm going to give you 3 ways to do it. 3 ways that you can savor your life more. Number 1, technique number 1 for savoring your life. Do it in all 3 time zones. Okay. Now, what do I mean by that? I don't mean literal time zones. I'm talking about savoring the past, savoring the present, and savoring the future. This comes from the work of the psychologist Fred Bryant, who created something called the Savoring Beliefs Inventory, which asks people to talk about their tendency to seek and enjoy positive experiences and memories. And so how does he talk about it? Richness of reminiscence. In other words, what do I need to do as somebody who struggles with the past is think back to the past and think what was good about that. And you know what? I just did that at the opening of the show, didn't I? I mean, I could have talked about the fact that my mom was sad all the time. It seemed to me as a little kid, sometimes she wasn't sad all the time. She was painting beautiful paintings and those were moments of bliss for her. And I remembered that on purpose. Why? Because I was savoring the memory of me savoring the present. This recursive structure created by time travel in the prefrontal cortex. It's a miracle, isn't it? Able to edit my memory in this particular way, in a positive way. Richness of reminiscence is doing exactly that, is to savor the past on purpose by paying attention to the positive parts. And by the way, the editing of memory is a very interesting area of research. You know, you can say, oh yeah, you know, Thanksgiving of, you know, 1996. That's when, you know, you know, Uncle Chet, he, you know, got so drunk and he barfed in the front yard and went and beat up the neighbor. There was something good that happened that day too, probably. I'm just going to guess. Second time zone is the present, and that's the degree of conscious enjoyment. That's really kind of the main focus of what we're talking about here. Savoring the present, being here fully, thinking about the good that is in this, the experience, the full experience. You know, that's, that's the, that full experience has almost theological overtones. The great Catholic Saint Irenaeus of the 2nd century, his most famous quote is that the glory of God is a man fully alive. And to be fully alive is to be fully present. Why? Because only in the present can you love. You can't love in a different time. You can't love in the past or love in the future. Love is now. If you're not here now, you're not loving. By the way, important for your relationships. Why should you savor your marriage? Because she needs love. And so do you. And then here's the third time zone, the future. And that's something to look forward to. That's keenness of anticipation. Now that could, this, a little of this can go a long way. According to Marty Seligman, at University of Pennsylvania, the average Homo sapiens spends 30 to 50% of the time thinking about the future because it's incredibly adaptive. You practice future scenarios, see the dangers, come back to the present, and don't choose those routes and those paths into the future. That's how we, that's why human beings are so awesome is because we're able to make mistakes in our minds and not make them in real life. And so the average person is literally 30 to 50% of the time in the future, but the average striver, and I'm looking at you, and I'm kind of looking in the mirror, spends something like 80% of their time in the future. These are estimates. Your results may vary, as they say in the commercials. But if you're 80% of your time in the future and it's all castles in the sky, this can go a long way. But if you're the kind of person who lives with a little bit of dread, then thinking about things that you can look forward to is all about the savoring of the future. So you got to figure out Is that your challenge or not? If it's not your challenge, good. If it is, that's what to do. You don't have to really choose. I recommend that you choose all three, but I do recommend that you think once again, as I'm emphasizing here, that one of these things is harder for you. And that's what you should actually work on. If you have a hard time being here now, then present savoring is important. If you have a hard time in the past, you need to edit your memories. That's me. If you have a hard time actually getting out of the future, right? Or if you have a hard time actually not being in the future because you have so much dread, then that's what you need to is to find something to look forward to. What do you need to do? What's your challenge? What's the time zone in which you need to savor? Go do that. That's number 1. Number 2 is to expand your repertoire of savoring techniques. This is great stuff from, from Arthur C. Brooks, where psychologists found 4 savoring techniques that were really, really effective. So here's your savoring chops. Here's what, here's how we're going to put it together. Number 1 is what they call behavioral display, which means Expressing positive emotion with nonverbal behaviors. Here's the deal. Smile, even if you don't feel it. I think I've mentioned it on the show before, the Duchenne smile, which is the only smile that's actually associated with true human happiness. It involves two sets of muscles in the face, the zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi muscles. You can actually simulate that by holding a pencil in your teeth like this. I'm kind of like, ah, because happiness is seen in the eyes and not in the mouth. That's the Duchenne smile that was invented. That was, no, that was named, discovered and named by a physiologist named Duchenne because he wanted the happy smile to be named after himself, of course. But you can do that by the way. I mean, you can put the pencil in your molars and go grin in the mirror that way. You'll, you'll fool your brain. You'll be happier because of this behavioral display, because of what you're doing. This is a, this is actually a savoring technique in its own way. Smile more, pretend you're happier. Go act happier. Behavioral display is number one way to savor. When you're doing something, behave with joy. Second is be present, which is mindfully focusing on the pleasant experience. And what that means is saying to yourself, I am doing this thing. I am sitting on the train looking out at a beautiful seascape. If that's what it is. Being present means actually saying the thing to yourself because you want to bring it from your subconscious into your prefrontal cortex, into your you know, consciousness where you're really thinking about something. And the way to do that is by saying it. And it's, it's really unbelievably effective. There's a famous piece of avant-garde music from the 1970s by a French composer named Alvin Lucier called I Am Sitting in a Room. And the whole thing is just, I am sitting in a room and he talks about sitting in the room. It's just like studying, savoring, and over and over and over and over again. I thought how silly. And now I'm thinking, I kind of like it. So say what you're doing to yourself. That's number 2. Number 3 is capitalizing, which means talking about and celebrating positive experiences with others. So don't just say it to yourself, say it to other people. Talk about the experience that you're actually having. Notice things to other people, which makes this even more conscious, even more concrete, even more permanent. And last but not least is what they call positive mental time travel. Which is once again, vivid reminiscence or anticipation of positive events. Just what I talked about in the last one. So those are your 4 techniques, your repertoire for savoring. Number 3, I want to talk about how all this works for me. Right. Okay. So this is kind of how I'll put it together. I promised you 3, it's actually 2, but now I'm going to talk about how I'm trying to do this in my own life. Here's how I do it. I use the research that I'm talking about by starting my morning with a quick reflection on 2 or 3 things that I'm looking forward to. Right. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing that I do is I say a prayer. That's how I start my day. At some point in the show, I'll give you my daily prayer. If you're interested, put it in the notes. If you are, if you're not, say don't do that. Okay. But then I reflect on 2 or 3 things I'm really looking forward to. And for me, it'll be my morning workout routine. I just, I want to do it, man. I'm just super grateful to wake up and to be able to go down to the gym, even when I'm tired. Getting to do this podcast. Having dinner with my wife, whatever it's going to be, whatever that day is going to bring, just kind of looking ahead a little bit and savoring that. I imagine each of these events vividly for a few seconds. And I make an effort to smile when I'm doing it because what am I doing? I'm neurocognitively programming myself to savor that thing, to remember it more, to imprint it in a positive way so that the episodic memory of that event, when it actually becomes the past, will be positively valenced. Boy, there was a lot of jargon in that last sentence. Forgive me for that. And then finally, before I go to bed, I think back vividly on each one of these experiences when it is now a memory with a sense of gratitude. And I'll express that gratitude with whoever I'm with. And it's almost always with my wife. Look, when I'm going to sleep is either with my wife or I'm alone. Now I screw this up. I failed to carry this out because my caveman limbic system wants to hijack the process and wants me to worry about somebody looting my cave and stealing my jerky. And animal skins. And so I start again and that's how I try to live. So far so good. One last note. I promised you I was going to talk about savoring bad things too. The research focuses entirely on savoring pleasant events and experiences, but there are difficult parts of your life. And if you savor them correctly, these can be unbelievably enriching as well. And here's why I recommend you do that. Here's how you savor the bad. I've mentioned this briefly, but I want to bring it up again in the show. I keep a failure journal. Look, everybody has a lot of failure in their life, disappointment in their life. Lots of things are happening you don't like. When something bothers me, I write it down. Now, sometimes I keep it electronically and sometimes I keep it in pencil and paper. It's actually better in pencil and paper. You're more likely to remember it. But I leave two blank lines under each entry. And I come back to the first one after a month. I go back and I read the thing that bothered me. It might be something stupid, right? It might be something kind of important, but I come back and I say after a month after that first blank line, and I write down what I learned in the intervening period, thanks to that bad experience. There's always something. It might be, you know, I thought that the argument that I had with somebody I care about, which really bummed me out. I thought it was going to bum me out for a long time, but I actually stopped thinking about it almost immediately and didn't hurt the relationship. I learned that. How interesting. Then after another month, I'll go back to the second blank line that I left after the entry, read it again and read the thing I learned and then write something positive, something good that happened as a result of the experience. I might say we ended up making amends and our friendship was actually stronger as a result of that. A good thing happened as a result of our ability to make amends, which, which deepened our relationship. Now, trust me, if you give it a bit of thought, you'll have something worthwhile to say about almost negative, any negative event. You're not going to say I'm glad it happened, but you might, and you're going to get benefit from learning and benefit in creating a more positively valenced memory from that, which is a form of savoring of something negative, which will add depth to your life, learning to your life, growth to your life. And that's something that makes every minute of your life worthwhile. Let's finish with a couple of questions. Um, this comes from Eugene Zhao. Thanks for the email. How should someone earlier in their career think about intentionally maintaining and investing in relationships when so much of the feedback and momentum is pulling them toward work? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Eugene, we're all strivers, aren't we? Workaholics. I get it. And the answer to that is actually the work of Josef Pieper. I've done a podcast before on the importance of leisure. Josef Pieper said that there's 3 kinds of leisure. They do not include chilling on the beach. Because I tell you, fellow strivers, you go to the beach and like the first couple of hours you'd be like, this is awesome. It's so nice and warm. By the 3rd hour, you're like, I want to go back to work. I want to go back to work. Why? Because your monkey mind is going to be back in the office or in front of your laptop or wherever it is. This is how you're wired. I get it. Josef Pieper, the German philosopher, said that you should engage your leisure, which is defined as generative, positive activity for which they don't pay you. That's leisure. 3 kinds of things: deepening yourself spiritually, deepening your relationships, and learning something deeply. That's the 3 things to do. And so that's actually how to think about that, how to not go back with your monkey mind to the office is because you're dedicating yourself to something that's meaningful under these circumstances. And you need that kind of leisure. William Page writes in to the office hours email address. How would a person raised in a non-religious family choose a religion? To begin your recommendation, to start first practicing? That's good. That's good. I mean, it's funny because it almost sounds like, oh man, there's just so many choices out there. It's like going to the supermarket and deciding what kind of breakfast cereal. And William, I know that's not what you mean, but you know, look, it's a, it's a, it's a huge world out there, right? The most important thing that you're telling me is that you want something, that you know there's something deeper and that you're looking for something. Here's the algorithm. Start by reading, then start by observing. Like a front row seat, and then start by practicing a little and only then start believing. And last but not least, maybe start feeling. That's the way to think about it. And a lot of people, when they're, when they're looking for, they know they need some sort of a faith or life philosophy, at least, or coherent spirituality. They say, oh, I got to, I'm going to feel something. No, no, no, no. That's the wrong way to think about it. Feelings are just the activity of your limbic system. That's not how you should pursue your marriage either, is by saying, I got to feel it all the time. You're going to end up divorced. No, no. It's really all about finding something that you can practice every day, believe a lot, and occasionally feel. That's your marriage. And that's your, the religion that you'll actually find if that's what you're in the market for. And the way to do that is by doing the work, is by learning, which is by reading and then observing, because it's not enough just to read. You have to observe and then actually experimenting with practice. From there, belief will come and occasionally feeling as well. Good luck on your journey. Last but not least, and I don't know how to pronounce this one. I'm sorry, Maciej Buzuk. Close enough. In your research and experience, what is the most important— what is the most important for someone in a situation of high competence, genuine contribution, but a persistent inability to translate inner value into outer reward? Now, this sounds an awful lot like you've got an adolescent kid who is unbelievably smart. I'm just guessing here. Unbelievably smart, really, really creative, but not posting, like in school and in life, not maybe launching as a young adult. And the answer to that is fundamentally to help that person, even if it's you, to find calling. And the way to find calling is the two questions of meaning. This is the meaning exam that I've talked about on the show before. Think deeply about this. Where do I need to go? And what do I need to do to find the answers to the two questions? Why am I alive? And for what would I die? Why am I alive? And for what would I die? Maybe that's who created you. Maybe it's what you're on earth to do. And most importantly, for what would you give your life? What are you going to do? Where are you going to go? What are you going to read? Who are you going to ask? What experiences are you going to have so you can find the answers to those two questions? When you do, what you will find is your calling. That's what you're supposed to be doing. And that will solve the problem of high competence and low performance virtually always. We're done. Um, let me know your thoughts at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and, and leave a comment. We want to hear it. Negative, positive. We like it all. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, the other platforms. There's all kinds of content over there that's in shorter form, but it will reward your scrolling as opposed to frittering away your time. I promise. Order The Meaning of Your Life, my new book, to learn more about all the topics I'm talking about here. And, and last but not least, um, Happy Mother's Day. See you next week.