Arthur C. Brooks and Andrew Huberman discuss what makes free time meaningful. True leisure, Brooks argues, isn't about money, power, pleasure, or honor, but about moral aspiration through three things: deepening relationships, learning for its own sake, and cultivating spiritual life. They show how to tell the difference between activities that just feel good and ones that actually enrich you.
how you use your time when nobody's paying you. That's because he says that's what reflects who you actually are.
That's why I never liked the, oh, you can tell by the books on somebody's shelf, because books on somebody's shelf doesn't mean they actually read those books. Exactly.
Firstly, they own those books.
So this thing about leisure is fascinating.
Yeah, leisure is really interesting. It's like that, that tells you what you need to know about a culture, but also about a person in a way. And so if you find somebody who's using the leisure time to meet animal appetites, That's one thing. If they're actually using it for personal betterment, for personal betterment, not career betterment, not for the compensation that actually comes from the worldly rewards. There's 4 worldly rewards: money, power, pleasure, and honor. And if you're doing something such that it doesn't reward you in one of those areas, that actually comes from Aristotle and Aquinas, et cetera, then you're actually doing what he would call proper leisure. You're doing proper leisure toward moral aspiration, which is ultimately the most rewarding thing.
Yeah.
That's ultimately what will take you from the world of pleasure into the world of enjoyment and give you greater happiness. That's the theory. And it's actually been verified a lot in a lot of these ideas. The best questions, they come from the philosophers, and then the structural mechanisms come from neuroscience, and then the testing of these ideas comes from the behavioral sciences, right? The experiments, et cetera. Then, of course, applying them to your life is a different kettle of fish. And so what he says is that there's kind of 3 areas that make proper leisure and ultimate enjoyment. You want me to tell you the 3? Please, yeah.
Okay.
Number 1 is deepening relationships on purpose, man. I mean, on purpose. And so leisure is this weekend, I'm envisioning myself not touching my phone while I'm with my wife, right? Deepening my relationship, being fully present for my wife. And I'm gonna go someplace not because I wanna chill on the beach, but because I wanna be on the beach with the love of my life. So deepening relationships on purpose with a real focus on that. The second is learning something you don't need to learn. And the third is actually developing yourself metaphysically, is your spiritual, your religious life, or your philosophical life. It's to transcend what's going on here for no other reason than the fact that you seek transcendence. Those are the 3 areas of proper leisure.
Mm-hmm.
And that's how he would say, I know that you're going from pleasure to enjoyment. That's how I know Based on what you're doing, even though you don't have to.
I love this. I'll tell you several of the reasons why I love it. One is people from time to time will say, what do you do for fun?
Yeah, I know.
It's a very difficult question for me to answer because people—
'Cause your work is fun, by the way.
My work is so much fun.
I know.
Like, I'm reading this book about sunlight and how the dermatology world is revising their understanding about sun and skin cancer, and I'm loving that. I love my dog. I mean, I could list it off, but I just, say those things to just get people to think about what they enjoy doing. But the word that keeps coming up in my mind, because I have a hard time with the fun thing, because, yeah, I do other things that are purely recreational, is this word enrichment. I mean, it sounds kind of like somebody's trying to be an academic when they say, what do you do for enrichment? It's not as natural a question these days as, what do you do for fun? It's like, what do you do for your own enrichment? It reshapes the question a little bit.
Mm-hmm.
Because the implication is it's not just about immediate pleasure, which fun kind of falls into the group of pleasure.
It's about personal excellence. Yeah.
Like, you come out of it better, not just for having experienced whatever it was the activity was, but there's something carried forward into other things that you do, and in a good way. And so the word enrichment feels good. It's the reason why, even though I was in the sciences as an undergraduate, I decided to take a course in Greek mythology and loved it. Love, love, loved it.
That was leisure.
And it turns out it was neuroscience, too. Years later, we talk about the myth of the Cyclops is all about anger, and it has everything to do with the lack of depth perception that when you have one eye versus two eyes, it turns out the Greeks really understood stereopsis and depth perception. There, I couldn't help myself. In any case—
That's interesting.
So this notion of enrichment, and I love that in the example you gave of going to the beach with a friend or with a spouse or someone else you care about, It's not about your own experience of it. You said, not just because you want to be there, but because you're actually there. That's a physical grounds for creating something else. So it's not really about the beach. It's about what you leave the beach with.
That's right.
And it's not just memories of the beach. You actually both change as a consequence of being there, maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways. But you've enriched the relationship. And so the beach becomes incidental.
When people talk about wanting to go out drinking, what I wanna know is, is it about the drinking or is it the people you're drinking with? That's what it comes down to. Now, I strongly recommend that people reconsider that decision. I mean, I've heard you, 2 drinks a week is the safe level. I've got it, Andrew, I've got it.
Yeah, more than that's probably not a good idea for most people.
Well, I'm at zero, you know?
Okay, same.
I'm a non-drinker because it's the right cadence for my life. But, you know, people who do use alcohol responsibly, I'm not, like, I wish I were a person who could use alcohol responsibly. I'm not, right? No, and I don't use it at all. But when people say, I'm going to go out drinking, I mean, I don't know if that's pleasure or enjoyment. I don't know if that's animal impulse or moral aspiration. I need more information. I need to know the reason for that. When people are talking about getting a beach house, I'm going to get a beach house, I don't know whether or not that's animal impulse towards social comparison, toward actually a scoreboard effect so I can actually feel like I mean something. That's all animal impulse. All it is, that's just like your troglodyte brain. brain, actually saying you're not good enough unless you have a beach house like old Bill over there at the office, right? But on the other hand, if you tell me it's like, I got to create bait so that my kids and grandkids are here a lot, okay, now I'm listening. Now I'm actually paying attention. And so a lot of things that people will say, I need a little bit more information such that I can categorize it in the right way, whether or not we're on the right side, we're on the animal impulse side of the moral aspiration side, whether we're on the pleasure side or the enjoyment side, whether it's actually going to bring happiness.
