Arthur Brooks, welcome to the studio.
I'm. Mark Manson, great to be with
you. Nice to meet you in person.
I'm looking forward to it. Long time fan, first time guest.
Thank you. Thank you.
So, fun fact, we're both former musicians.
Tell me more. And we both gave gave it up to
turn into annoying Internet people who tell people how to
live their lives. It's a living.
So what did you drop music specifically?
Because because I'm bringing this up because it's a
meaningful work, is a huge. Part of your framework.
So I'm, I'm curious a little bit about your story and how you
found meaning through your work. And I, I find it.
I also just selfishly find it interesting talking to another
former musician of like where the meaning was in that work and
why you dropped it and why you thought you would find it.
Somewhere else, I was unhappy. I was deeply unhappy, and part
of the reason was because I was a super striver kid.
I was one of those stage kids. I was going to be the world's
greatest French horn player. I mean, God Bless America, where
you can have this kind of ambition, right.
But. But that's what I wanted to be.
It's all I ever thought about. I had no other ambitions.
I had famous French horn players on pictures on the wall of my
bedroom as a kid. I went to every concert.
Yeah. I used to go to the Seattle.
I grew up in Seattle and I grew up.
I went to the Seattle Symphony. I had my mouthpiece in my
pocket. You know, just dreaming that,
you know, the first, the principal French horn player
would fall ill and the conductor would say, is there a French
horn player in the house or something like that?
I mean, it's, it was, yeah. I mean, and, and the problem was
it was about glory and ambition. It wasn't actually about meaning
because as a little kid, I didn't, I was meaning would be
in Co 8 at best. And so the result is like for a
lot of kid athletes, a lot of kid musicians, anybody who does
something at extremely high level from a young age, it can
become a source of frustration, not a source of meaning as you
get older. And so I've now worked in my,
you know, as a behavioral scientist, I've worked with
elite athletes who, you know, Olympic athletes and gymnasts,
you know, people who've done this from a very young age, and
they have to leave it precisely in the search for meaning.
So tell me about your experience.
Is it? Does it track?
It actually it's very similar to yours in that I, I started
playing guitar at a very young age probably 8 or 9 got pretty
good before most people, you know, by the time I was 11 or
12, I could like play Metallica songs and Nirvana songs and was
bringing my guitar to school and embracing all the kids.
And so it very much became a, a social identity, right.
It's, it's what I was rewarded for.
It's. Who you were?
Yeah, it's it my my peers saw me as as that.
I was validated as that. It's what won me street cred
with all the cool kids in school and the girls that I liked and
everything. So it very much, it was kind of
my emotional and social sustenance as an adolescent.
And then I, you know, of course, being young and naive, you don't
understand the difference between being socially rewarded
for something and actually being passionate for for that thing.
And so I assume that this was just like you, I had all these
aspirations. I was going to be the best
guitar player in the world and I was going to play in stadiums
and I was going to be have it be in a huge rock band and all this
stuff. And I started getting really
serious about it and I realized the the reality of being a
musician, which is that you spend the vast majority of your
time alone in a dark room practicing to no fanfare and
like 0 appreciation. No audience.
By anybody, you know, and as soon as I realized that and, you
know, I joined some bands and we would play these like dingy
clubs to 20 people, half of which weren't even paying
attention. And you, you start to see the
the reality of it and it was same deeply unsatisfying.
Deeply unsatisfying. And the the problem with that is
that you as a super striver kid, you wired your brain to get your
validation from outward success. And that's dangerous because,
you know, you went on to have a smash hit blockbuster book and
it's very easy for you to become that book.
Oh yeah, you're the book. Oh, you're the book guy, you
know, and and then you're like, yeah, awesome.
And, and and you get a lot of your validation from that.
So your identity actually becomes what you do as opposed
to who you are and as opposed to an actual person who wrote a
book, you become a book with a person attached.
And, and a lot of that tendency, and I've heard you talk about
this, I heard you talk about this on a recent episode where,
you know, at, at a certain point you have to do a new thing
because you're a person who needs a whole, you know, panoply
of experiences and, and you, you deserve to be able to move on.
But it's hard to move on when you're the guitar kid who became
the book guy and etcetera, etcetera.
Your brain is wired in a particular way.
There's some pretty interesting studies about that too, that
your, your brain is gonna look like, you know, somebody who got
addicted to methamphetamine before the age of 15.
You'll be really, really good at it for the rest of your life.
And once you give up the methamphetamine, you'll do a
new, a new, a new thing that substitutes for the meth.
Yeah. It's been interesting because,
yeah, a huge part of I guess what I've been going through
both personally and professionally the last couple
years is kind of that moving on from the book identity.
Because it, you know, there's this, this whole period after a
success like that where it's, you know, I'm kind of
personally, privately over it, but I'm still being rewarded for
it so much that you're, you're kind of like.
They don't want you over it. I mean they, you.
You feel stupid moving on, but it it's it's, I think it's
reached a finally reached a threshold where I'm like, you
know what, I'd rather just, you know, lose half the audience and
dudes that I'm excited about then like sit here and just keep
banging the same drum for the rest of my.
Life, Yeah, I mean, and and, you know, be ready.
I mean, if the if The Beach Boys came out and said, you know
what, tonight we're going to do all new experimental material,
the audience would be like Boo sing California girl.
And it's because the audience doesn't love The Beach Boys.
They love that thing that The Beach Boys got famous for.
And so you will experience inevitably that when you're
doing these new things that people will be really annoyed
with you because you're not doing that thing that they like
with which they have a minor relationship.
They want the subtle art. That's what they want.
Because it it it, it showed them something about it, illuminated
something about themselves and gave them a little bit of
personal power and they want more of it.
But you're like, dude, I got to do something new because I want
to be a full person. That's a very, very hard
relationship to navigate as a creator.
Yeah, for sure. To bring it back to the
meaningful work thing, you know, part of it has been looking for
something that feels meaningful enough to risk that transition,
right? You know, and meaning what, but
you're trading off meaning for a claim and and your brain doesn't
want you to do that. I mean, your brain is evolved to
to seek the admiration of strangers.
It's a very funny thing. So as a kin based hierarchical
tropical animal, Homo sapiens, there are certain things we'll
get beyond like tropical, I mean, we're sitting in a really
warm place, but you know, I live most of the time in the East
Coast, but I have a coat. So I've been able to get beyond
my basic evolution on that. But I will always be a kin based
hierarchical species. And that means I want to rise in
the hierarchy, whether I'm thinking about it or not.
And the way to do that is not with meaning, it's with acclaim.
And so you're always going to be tempted by the acclaim and trade
the meaning against it. And so some people will do that
and and spend their whole life chasing that acclaim and feeling
a real emptiness inside because at the end of the day, they
don't have the sense of meaning. And they have a lot of money and
they have a lot of power and they have a lot of the
admiration of strangers that somewhere in their place to seen
brain they wanted to get. But what they really needed to
do was to be fully conscious of it and say, I'm going to trade
away some of this acclaim even though it's going to hurt,
because I'm going to be looking for meaning.
Meaning is the only thing that will sustain you at the end of
the day. Yeah, because it sustains you
through the challenge and the struggle.
It it's interesting, You know, one of the things you talk about
quite a bit and I've written about is how, like, we're not
evolved for happiness, we're evolved for survival.
And often it's almost like our dissatisfaction with certain
things in life is an evolutionary feature, not a bug,
you know? And.
Got to stay hungry in the hunt. Yeah, it, but it's so when I
hear you describe something like that, like it's, it's, it just
makes my brain think about like, I understand why we crave
acclaim and status and social recognition, right?
Like there's a very clear evolutionary purpose behind that
over hundreds of thousands of years.
Where does the meaning come from?
Like, why does that matter? And then like, why?
Why did we evolve this this psychological need for a sense
of greater meaning or purpose? So that's a good question and
that's that's as old as the, you know, the free will questions
and the questions of consciousness, etcetera.
But just as a basic evolutionary biology matter, we have, you
know, two big parts of our brain that are always interacting and
competing with each other. One is the limbic system which
gives you your urges and desires and your emotions, your
feelings, and the other is your prefrontal cortex which is
helping you to make executive decisions all the time.
The the limbic system is sending information to your prefrontal
cortex. You know, I, I'm having a
negative or a positive emotion which is indicating that there's
a threat or an opportunity below my level of consciousness and I
should either avoid it or approach it.
Avoidance is like I heard a twig snap and it might be something
to think trying to eat me. Approach is I saw some berries
on a Bush or a a potential mate who's very attractive.
And so I'm going to approach that and that gives me positive
emotions that sends it to the prefrontal cortex, which sorts
out what is it? What does it mean?
What am I going to do right? And that's going on all day
long. But the prefrontal cortex is
sort of the, your antenna to the divine in its way, higher order
things than just approach and avoidance.
You know then that your limbic system is, you mean your dog has
a limbic system. It's very similar to yours.
Your dog does not have a prefrontal cortex like yours.
So we're, we're uniquely suited to this higher level of
consciousness. And when you make decisions that
are deeply unsatisfactory to your limbic system, but they're
scratching an itch in your prefrontal cortex, that's when
you're you're doing this kind of a trade off.
And your consciousness, your conscious mind, this kind of
antenna to the divine is saying you need something higher than
those berries and those mates. You need something higher than
that to sustain you, to give you something that you deeply,
deeply want. And that's the satisfaction that
comes from accomplishing something through the deferral
of gratification that comes from not pleasure, pleasure's limbic
enjoyment, which adds people in memory to your pleasure.
And especially that's meaning, that's figuring out the
coherence of your life. Only humans and understand the
through line of their lives, that's purpose, which is goals
and direction. And that's especially
significance. It's like, why does Mark?
Why is Mark alive? You know, what's the what's the
answer to that? And and and that's the reason
that only humans have these queries and and answers to those
queries are not even an answers understanding of those
particular queries is a deep, deep seated human need.
Some people would say it's just it's vestigial of the fact that
we have this big prefrontal cortex.
And so we have these weird, you know, why well, live kind of
essence questions, but I, I disagree.
I think that this is evidence of the divine.
I think this is evidence that we have a, a higher kind of
evolution, that there is a cosmic consciousness that we're
actually trying to tap into. I think that's the best evidence
that we can find that we're trying to grasp at something
that's behind our our our earthly comprehension.
OK, you're, you're getting a little bit ahead because one of
your other pillars is faith, which I want to get to that in a
second. Wrapping up the meaningful work
component. If some, let's say somebody is
just deeply like their, their career feels kind of pointless,
their hobbies are frivolous. Like they, they, they feel
complete lack of meaning in their life.
They, they want to make a big change.
They want to make a career change.
Like what, what does that process look like?
What questions should they be asking?
Themselves so I'm I'm actually writing a book right now called
The meaning of your Life and how to find it.
So I've got a lot on my mind about this and you know, when
how a book works, so you're in the process of it's half done
and, and which is like the process of death and dying, you
know, it's denial, rage, bargaining, acceptance, you
know, and so and so a lot of it's sort of disorganized and
it's in COA. But there's a lot that we know
about this to begin with, when people are feeling a lot to
feeling at a loss, a need for greater significance in their
life, a need for greater purpose and meaning in their life, but
they really don't know what to do.
There's a bunch of steps that actually are worth taking, and
it starts with understanding the impediment to that.
The problem is not your job. The problem is not your stupid
relationship with the girlfriend that you're not actually in love
with. The problem is not that you're
living with your mom. That's actually not the big
problem. The problem is you're not
accessing the part of your brain that will allow you to start
delving into questions of meaning.
And almost certainly it's because of an overuse of
technology that's almost always the case.
So there there's Are you familiar with the work of Ian
Mcgilchrist, the neuroscient, the Scottish psychiatrist and
neuroscientist? I've heard of him.
But yeah, he wrote a wonderful book called The Master and his
Emissary If when he's through California, he should do your
show because you'd really get a kick out of him.
He's a, he's a, he's one of the great neuroscientists for a
time. And he talks about the, he talks
about the hemispheric lateralization of the brain.
It was a fancy way of saying that the right and left
hemispheres do different things. Right.
Back in the old days, you'd say I'm an analytic or I'm a
creative. That's stuff's nonsense.
Stuff's been, you know, invalidated by research.
But it's true that the right side of the brain is much more
involved in big questions of meaning.
And the left side is in, in, in small questions of, you know,
technology and analysis, solving little problems.
The way your brain is supposed to work, you're supposed to
engage the right hemisphere of your brain to consider big
questions of meaning and then task the left side of your brain
to figure stuff out. The problem that we have today
is that all of our technology is forcing us into the left side of
the brain and never giving us an opportunity to to think about
the big issues. That's what's happening when
you're sitting at a traffic light in your car and you pull
out your phone to check your texts so you won't be bored even
for a second. You need to be bored a lot more.
There's a reason that your grandfather, what did he do for
a living? He was a a serial entrepreneur
actually. No kidding.
It's just thing. But you know, one thing is that
his life was a lot more boring than yours.
He had no I you know, he had no, no podcasts to listen to.
He had no earbuds. There was no social media, which
are anti boredom devices. I'm glad there's podcasts.
I'm glad that you and I get to have this conversation.
But the truth of the matter is that if a lot of people would be
bored right now doing some other thing like working out or
walking or driving and and that would actually be really, really
good for the brain. So the first thing that I
recommend to people who see have a sense of pointlessness in
their life is not move to Ireland, right, Which some
people will do. It's like I need a big change or
break up with their beloved or just go quit.
Their job is they need to start being bored more and more
systematically. And so that means Internet free
zones in your life. That means getting that that
putting down your devices more systematically.
That means doing things that will actually make you feel a
lot more bored more systematically than you
currently are. And that's actually the first
step. That's the biggest problem that
a lot of people have today. Interesting.
Yeah, I, I think the, the, the left brain, right brain thing is
really interesting. And I, I hadn't thought about
that before. You know, I, I also think part
of it too is just the, the absolute abundance of
information. Like I know one of the things
you talk about around meaning is coherence.
And it makes sense that if you just exponentially increase the
amount of information that we're exposed to, the more difficult
creating any sort of coherent narrative around our experiences
becomes. It's just like everything starts
to feel very vague and ambiguous and like here or there or
uncertain. And that that in and of itself
can create kind of a an existential crisis.
Sure. And you know, the, the, the
classic case of this is I think I'm going to go learn something.
I'm going to turn on YouTube and you spend half an hour or 45
minutes looking at shorts. Yeah, that all that does is
create absolute cognitive incoherence.
And that's obliterating meaning right there.
Much, much better for you to actually read a book, which is
also information. Or by the way, you can also
watch a video if you want. I mean, I, there are a lot of
people who don't learn very well from reading from for all sorts
of reasons. They can learn through other
mechanisms. But something that's coherent,
that's actually taking you through the arc of information
is really, really important such that you can be doing something
good that is not so scattered, that's not so chaotic in your
brain. Better yet, start that whole
exercise by being bored for half an hour.
Yeah, turn everything off. Everything off.
You know, I recommend to my students, for example, that the
first hour of the day is device free in every way.
I recommend to my students that they work out without devices,
that they not listen to anything.
Why? Because you'll be, you'll be
terrible. It sounds awful.
Now, I know it sounds absolutely terrible, but you'll notice a
weird thing that we've forgotten, which is that you,
you're going to come up with your best ideas when you're
working out. You're going to come up with all
these weird creative ideas that you wouldn't have had.
You literally would not have had them because you would have
chased them out of your head. It's interesting.
I tend to have really good ideas in the shower and maybe that's
why it's like the only place where I'm completely shut off.
That's the reason. No, that's, that's not maybe why
that's that's actually the reason.
Now there's some other, you know, physiological phenomena at
play, but that's really what's going on is your brain needs to
be unencumbered and and you need to go into that right side.
Also a part of the brain called the default mode network that
when it turns on your mind wanders, stuff pops into your
head. Wow.
And part of that is the sense of why.
The sense of why will actually start occurring to you without
in in an incoit way, with a in an almost ineffable way.
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Is this a bit of a high quality problem?
A first world problem? Like let's say you struggle with
a lack of meaningful work, but you're also broke and you need a
paycheck and you can't make rent next month.
Like does that. I assume that takes
prioritization over this? Or like, is this something that
you can find through other means?
You can find it through other means because one of the things
that I really hate is work life balance, Not just because I'm a
hopeless workaholic and success addicted individual, which may
or may not be true. It's it, but but because
allegedly success addicted work should be part of life and you
shouldn't have a work life balance.
But one of the things that I recommend to a lot of people who
are in circumstances where. Where work can't be as
meaningful as you would like it to be is to start treating your
leisure as a a a major source of meaning by setting goals and
priorities and focusing. So, are you familiar with the
German philosopher Joseph Peeper?
Peeper. Peeper, you know, so he's he was
a, you know, great Aristotelian and, and to Mystic philosopher
in the mid German philosopher of the mid mid 20th century.
And he wrote this very famous essay, kind of a a short book
called Leisure the Basis of Culture.
And what it was, was a guide to people structuring their
leisure. So it can be the most important
source of meaning in their life, Assuming that they were working
in a factory job that wasn't inherently meaningful.
And that means taking your leisure as seriously as you
would like, you know, a concert violinist or you know, a
professional gymnast, like super precision, you know, and
thinking about setting goals, never wasting a minute,
etcetera, etcetera. There's lots and lots of ways to
find meaning, but you have to be serious about your life and you
can't let your life happen to you.
You got to be fully alive and in it, man.
And I like that because that ties in, you know, you make that
distinction between pleasure and enjoyment.
And part of the difference is that enjoyment is about being
conscious of what you're doing and.
And absolutely, I mean, everything it's, you know, and
again, you could be so you could be so schematic about this.
You could be so kind of, you know, rigid German about this
whole thing that you don't have any downtimes, but there's just
tons of research out there that shows that people who have got
who, who rely on unstructured leisure, like I'm going to sit
on a beach and do nothing or, or even leisure travel, you know,
I'm just going to go someplace that's beautiful and gaze at the
sunset. A little of that goes a long,
long way. You really don't need very much
of that. What you need is more a
sustenance that comes, you know, meaningful experiences that are
they're just not paid, you know, and that means, you know, I'm
going to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, if you're gonna read the Bible,
I'm gonna read the Bible everyday.
I'm gonna read the whole Bible. You know, that's a, that's an
incredibly good thing to do with your leisure, right?
And I'm just going to fritter away my time on YouTube Shorts.
I'm actually going to watch this series of lectures about
Dostoevsky, you know, that kind of thing where you have these
goals and, and those are the kinds of things that will
actually those goals which have to do with direction in your
life and making progress that leads to purpose and purpose
scales up to meaning. Yeah, it's interesting because
this like the industry that we're in.
Of ideas. Ideas kind of this like weird
hybrid of philosophy, science, self help, life advice.
It's beautiful. It's a beautiful.
World, I mean, I love it. It's interesting that it's kind
of, it's blown up in this era. I mean, it makes sense, right?
Like that, it's as the world becomes more complicated and
there's more ambiguity and it's harder to create coherence
across experiences and people are online more and more.
If there are figures that are able to create that coherence
for people through philosophy, religion and and making science
accessible to the people like it makes sense that why that's so
appealing. I want to you mentioned the
Bible. There was a statistic recently
that in 2024 Bible cells Bible sales were up by 20 to 2%, which
is the largest growth in Bible cells.
Like I think since they started tracking Bible cells, other
religious texts, so non Christian religious texts were
up 12%. It's it makes you wonder are we
seeing this like sudden upsurge of religiosity?
And if so, why do you think it ties into all?
This it does. It really does.
There's a hunger for meaning. We've been, we've gone through
the early stages of the Internet mediated approach to life, which
was super entertaining. But now there's this hangover
and a whole generation of people, Gen.
Z and millennials who have grown up with the Internet, grown up
with, with screens in their pockets, growing up with social
media, have this intense hunger for something.
And the result is that we're going into a new period, which
is, this is what history has shown is you that interest in
religion, organized religion in particular, waxes and wanes.
And it tends to wax when you've gone through a period of of
intense entertainment, of kind of triviality and entertainment,
because then people find that their life is bereft of meaning
and they look for one of the great sources of meaning, which
is spiritual depth. And how do you do that?
Well, there's lots of ways to do that.
You know, this is one of the reasons that our you're you're
friends with Ryan Holiday, right?
Yeah. He's great.
And you know, his, he's talking about Marcus Aurelius,
Epictetus, Seneca and Cicero. I mean, this stuff is old
school, man. And, and there's this huge surge
of interest in, in, in Ryan Holiday's work.
Why? Because for the very same
reasons people are reading, you know, Seneca's on suicide right
now because they're, they, they, they want something deeper than
what they're actually getting the meditations of Marcus
Aurelius. So this has been around, this
text had been around for 1800 years.
And, and now people are actually discovering, it's like, I found
this new book, man. Well, that's what people are
doing with all of these, these sacred texts.
A lot of it is especially young men is what we're finding and
young men are, are demanding this.
You find that men are more likely to be practicing
religion. Men under 30 are more likely to
be practicing religion than women for the very first time.
That's fascinating. And, and this is a lot of the
appeal of Jordan Peterson, this is a lot of the appeal of a lot
of the people that are, that are, that are pointing men back
towards some, you know, fundamental truths because of
this deep hunger for meaning. Why do you think young men and
it's and we should note as well that the statistics coming out
about young women is that they're becoming much more
political. Yeah.
And so why, why, why is this divergent happening?
Do you? Think it's a good question and,
and, and one of the reasons actually might be the, the
utter. I mean, this is your bailiwick,
you know, getting back to your your roots in the dating in the
dating advice. But this is what I teach too.
I mean, this is the most popular unit of the class that I teach
at the Business School is called falling in love and staying in
love. And and what you find is when
that market becomes incredibly dysfunctional, men fall apart.
Men fall apart if there's not romantic love, men can't
function interesting because they're a mess.
They're just a mess, is the way that it's funny.
Because I feel like most people they're they're like the
stereotypes and everything about men and women is like most
people would assume that women would fall apart because like
women are stereotypically more in the romance, but.
They do better on their own. I mean, they don't do better on
their own than a couples, but they do better on their own than
men do on their own is the whole point.
And so you find traditionally that that that married men are
are married women are happier than married men, that single
women are happier than single men, that widowed women are way
happier than widowed men. Yeah, my wife's like, Yeah, so.
And. And the reason is because women
have generally social support systems outside their marriages
that are very, very strong. You find that women have more
and more friends as they get older.
Men have fewer and fewer real friends as they get older.
Men lose their friendship chops. And so about 60% of 60 year old
men say their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives
say their best friend is their husband, which is a depressing
statistic. The story of unrequited
friendship is what that comes down to, and that's one of the
reasons. But, but young men in
particular, I mean, what you find is that there's one stat,
and I'm looking for the source cause I've seen this a bunch of
places and I can't remember off the top of my head, but 30 year
old or older men who've never either cohabitated or been
married have a one in three chance of a substance use
disorder. Wow, it's high.
So if men have not been domesticated by 30, they might
be undomesticable. And nobody wants that, including
the men. Yeah.
So they're looking for this deep, deep source of, of meaning
in, in terms and in a relationship with the divine is
a love relationship. They want love is what it comes
down to. They can't quite put their
finger under articulate it. Well, and it's also, it
provides, it provides a certain amount of like, I guess,
philosophical stability, community ritual into their
lives, you know, and it's also like there's, it's, let's be
honest, it's I, I, I wouldn't want to be a 18 or 19 year old
guy right now. Like it's confusing as hell.
Like what are what's acceptable, what's socially acceptable,
what's not socially acceptable? Like how are you supposed to
approach certain dating situations?
Like what's, what's OK, what's not OK?
You know, like it's. It is a confusing time.
And it's actually weirdly getting cool to go to church.
Yeah, and I, I mean, that's, it's, it's weird, but it's true,
you know, it's become. You're not kids.
It's like all the cool kids are going to.
Mess All the cool kids are at church.
Yeah, that's right. No, but it's interesting too.
You know, I'll talk to a lot of young people today who are
justifiably becoming increasingly frustrated about
dating apps, cause dating apps are.
It's a mess. A deeply problematic way.
To we've done a couple episodes on that.
It's a total. The science of dating apps and
what they actually do to your brain and the way that you
curate your choices is super is absolutely suboptimal in the way
that people are going to meet up.
And so people say we're also going to meet people.
It's like church and so, but I don't believe So what?
Go sit in the back. Admit that you don't know what
you believe. Just admit it.
You know, you don't think that somebody's going to take you
under their wing. You're interesting enough.
You're deep enough to actually be there.
You're going to find people you like.
The bottom line. It's interesting, you mentioned
in another interview I saw that there's a statistic that people
who stray away from the religion that they grew up with are, I
think, more likely to come back to it later in life or, or
they're they're increasingly, they're increasingly coming back
to it later in life. Tell me about that.
Yeah. So what you find is that people
who grew up in. Now, now part of it is the the
selection bias because people who grew up in religious
households, there is a genetic component to religiosity.
And so if you started off going to church or some House of
worship when you were a kid, it means probably you come from a
religious family, which means you probably have something in
the, in the genetic component. And that's non trivial.
And then what happens is that typically there's a work by
James Fallow, the sociologist, about the the periods of
religiosity in people's lives. You're most likely to be really
religious when you're a kid, you know, because you, you believe
relatively unquestioningly. And then young adults, they
start to fall away because of the cognitive dissonance, you
know, and all knowing and loving God who permits all this
suffering. I can't buy it.
And so they bail, right. But by the time you're in your
30s and you have kids yourself, one of the things that comes
around to your brain is that nothing makes sense.
It's a mess. I mean, life is a mess.
And lots and lots of things actually don't make sense.
And I have to walk the face of the earth without making sense
of a lot of things. Yeah.
And I don't understand everything.
There's a lot of humility that comes with having children.
You remember when your children were born?
You're like, oh, no, man. Yeah.
And. And it's messy.
Life is really, really messy. And so people accept the
messiness of not understanding things.
I remember that, you know, you know, I became, I became more
religious in my 30s. Certainly I've never been really
away. I've been, you know, had a, a
relatively religious existence. But in my 30s, I got a lot more
religious than I remember thinking.
I don't get it, but I want it. Right.
It's interesting, you know, that comment stood out to me just
because. So I grew up in a very religious
environment. I grew up in the Bible Belt in
Texas. In her evangelical home.
Not evangelicals, but went to a Christian School, Parents were
super involved in the church, mainline Protestant.
Yeah. So I was getting lots of Jesus,
like every week as a child and I hated it.
I was like very resentful from a very young age.
I. I just rebel from.
Just not into it, didn't want to have anything to do with it.
I decided I was an atheist, I think, when I was like 12 or 13
and still had to go to church for like another six years.
And so there was a period of kind of resentment.
But it's been interesting. I've noticed really in the last
five years or so, I've been coming back around to
Christianity, mostly intellectually.
And some of it is kind of what you said.
Like, it's the older I get and the more I research and read and
try to understand about the world, the more I start to
realize that, like so much of life just comes down to values.
Like what is your value system? What are your prioritizations?
Like what are you, what do you choose to make important in your
life? And those are fundamentally kind
of subjective things. And it's as the years go on, it
gets harder for me to ignore that.
Like, I very deeply and personally find that most of the
values that I care about are rooted in Christianity, both
historically, philosophically, intellectually, you know, all
the above, culturally, all the above.
And that's caused me some personal cognitive dissonance.
Because you made a commitment to being none.
Yeah, you made a commitment to it, which is a real religious
identity. Right.
And it's like I still don't really, I still don't believe,
but like there's an intellectual interest and respect that has
been emerging over the years. Well, I'm starting.
To question what does it mean to not believe?
Well, and this is the thing right.
Let me let me throw 11 more thing on to this as well.
And, you know, we can get into the loneliness epidemic and the
atomization of society and all that stuff.
But like I, you know, as I get older, it, it does as an older
male, it, it gets harder to make friendships, maintain
friendships. I remember my parents church
community growing up and I as a as a guy in my 40s now, I envy
it. I'm like, man, that would be
really nice to have, you know, like that stability, that sense
of like, they're always there. Anything goes wrong, like
somebody comes over, helps you out.
So there's there's a little bit of a little bit of envy, a
little bit of curiosity. But anyway, sorry, where were.
You going to? No, this is really this is this
is. How old are you?
I'm 40. You're 40.
That's a it's got a 0 on it man I know.
Yeah, 41 in about a month. How old are your children?
I don't have kids. Oh, you don't have kids?
OK, Is your wife religious? No.
OK. And she was she raised in a in a
secular household. No, her parents were.
She was raised Catholic, but she kind of never.
She never engaged. No.
OK. Is she curious?
She religion curious? Not so much.
Yeah. Doesn't have a doesn't have the
gene. She doesn't have the chip.
I guess not. Yeah, but you do, you do,
because that's how you were raised.
And, and so and you're an intellectual and so you're
starting to approach it intellectually.
You're starting to find the intellectual virtues of what
that is. And that's fine.
There's it's actually fine. The truth is it's impossible for
you to have the kind of emotional relationship with
faith that you thought you were supposed to have as a child.
So you were told as a child that you need to give your heart to
Jesus Christ and you're not supposed to have any doubts
'cause if you have any doubts, that's, that's evidence that
something's wrong. Well, that's not the way the
heart works. That's a, that's a, that's a
psychologically a maladaptation of the kind of any kind of
relationship, any kind of love relationship we're supposed to
have. I mean, there's no way that you
haven't doubted your love for your wife.
And you've been married for a long time and, and presumably
you're going to be, she's the last person on whom you'll,
you're, you'll, your eyes will glance as you take your dying
breath. I mean, and that's, I'll be a
very, very beautiful thing. But of course you're like, I
don't know, man. Like sometimes you're closer and
sometimes you're further away and sometimes you're like, what
does love even mean and all that?
Well, that's your relationship with God too.
That's how religion works. The problem is you have this
torqued understanding of what the emotional relationship is
supposed to be, which is either in or out, and you're not
completely in, which meant that you were out.
Well, that's wrong. The bottom line is that you can
develop an absolutely solid intellectual framework for
wanting to pray, for wanting to read your Bible, for wanting to
explore this part of you a little bit.
Recognizing that I don't know what I'm going to believe in
five years. I don't know what I'm going to
believe in five months, but I'm going to sit in the back and see
if I remember something, if something actually speaks to me
and and I'm going to be honest about the fact that I get it,
but there's something, there's something there that I don't
quite understand. So here's this is how meaning
works. Meaning is based on not a bunch
of answers. The problem with a lot of church
activity is it's giving you a bunch of answers, but that's not
how meaning works. Meaning doesn't come from
answers. It comes from understanding.
It comes from the most important questions in the universe about
which you gain little by little, an understanding that you can't
quite articulate. And by the way, that's your
marriage too, right? So I'm like, Mark, tell me why
you love your wife. I mean, anything you say sounds
stupid. Anything you say sounds trivial.
Yeah, I mean, I could give you a whole list of.
And anything that you would say about love for God would sound
trivial and make you more of an atheist.
Sure, but if you're experiencing the divine light in your own
way, you might gain an ineffable understanding of a relationship
that you can't quite articulate, and that's what you're yearning
for. So not to turn this into a
podcast about religion. Ben Marks.
Religion. Too late.
Yeah, my religious conversion. Can you believe the subtle art
that all he was doing was trying to bring the guy?
I was trying to bring the host back to church.
The missionary shows. I know.
Looks like you had no idea you thought I was a scientist.
So my wife is she's a, a tangible person.
She's there. I can see her.
I can touch her. I can talk to her.
I can feel her. God is this abstract, ephemeral.
And as an atheist, I could argue an imagined concept, right And
sure. Yeah, right.
And I could have, I could develop that same relationship
of love and doubt with this kind of abstract concept in my mind
and enjoy all the psychological benefits of it.
But it's still an intangible thing.
It's not, it's not like my wife that I can see touch or hug or
whatever. But the essence of your wife is
non tangible. This is really important.
You love your wife for things that have nothing to do with the
delicious dinner she's going to prepare for you this evening.
Well, she's a really good cook. I think we figured out why Mark
got married. Yeah, well, you asked me why I
love her so. It's like.
Because she's a good kid. No, but the, the, the essence of
love is truly ineffable is the way that this works.
Now, the way that most people who are truly religious define
love on Earth is as a similacrum for divine love, that you really
only understand divine love because of the model that you
get on earth. Look, we're visceral creatures
with bodies, you know, and, and we're not divine.
We're not spirits, we're not some sort of weird gnostic
thing. We're we're actually human
beings. We're animals that happen to
have incredibly well developed prefrontal cortices that that
are kind of an intended of something because we're grasping
for something. Maybe it's an illusion, you
know, maybe it's an absolute illusion that, you know,
consciousness doesn't exist, that free will is is totally
fake. The whole maybe, maybe that's
the case, but most of us don't think that.
We don't feel that. So is your argument that the the
same way that loving and having faith in God would be an
abstract concept in my mind, that even though my wife exists
in the physical world, my relationship with her is an
abstract concept? In my mind, that's my point.
That's my point. And then, and then there's,
there's way, way, way more similarity between your love for
the divine and your love for your wife, because love is love
and love is something that goes way beyond, as far as we know,
any other creature can experience.
Because it has something to do fundamentally with this abstract
notion of consciousness that that we don't quite get and that
we can't quite identify. And it's the realm of
philosophers and not neuroscientists at this point
because we we know there's consciousness, but we can't
identify it. We can't find it, we can't
define it. It's almost as if there were a
cosmic consciousness out there that we're tapping into and that
we're sharing when we have love for each other as friends and as
family members and especially as romantic partners because that's
the most intense kind of love that we can actually have.
So many religious couples believe that their that their
marriage is an antenna to God and that only it's like you got
to put in two keys to launch the nuclear missiles.
And that's what marriage is. It's 2 keys.
And then when you do that, that's when you actually get,
that's when you fundamentally can be completed in your
relationship with the divine. Yeah, I like that metaphor of
the two keys. Yeah.
And I mean, and I'm on board to the point.
Like, you know, one of the things I've both experienced and
expressed and written about is how like it when you really are
in a truly loving relationship, it is the the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts for sure, by orders of magnitude.
Like, and it is indescribable. Like it's.
It's divine. It feels divine.
But then what is divine like? That's the thing.
And that's the thing, because there's no answer to that
question. Define for me the.
That's the. Problem and there's there's no
answer, there's only understanding.
And understanding only comes from living it.
Understanding it only comes from sitting in it.
It's the same thing. So most of the monastic
traditions around the world, and, you know, I do a lot of
work with the Tibetan Buddhists, for example.
And in the, in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic tradition,
the, the, the, the monks are trained by being posed questions
that don't have answers. Yeah.
And they're supposed to break their brains.
It's like this Zen cones. Like Zen cones for example.
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
And it sounds like an absurd question, except that exploring
it and inevitably leads you to an understanding that there is
no answer because the question itself, the concept of one hand
clapping, is an illusion, and that it only becomes a reality
when you add a second hand, which is to say that our life as
an individual is an illusion. Mark is an illusion.
In the absence of Mark's wife, she's the second hand clapping
when it becomes a reality. I mean, it kind of explains it,
but really what it is is an understanding of the phenomenon.
And that's how that's how the divine works.
That's how religious experiences work.
That's how love works is that you actually have to understand
it without being able to explain it.
Well, yeah, it's, it's in some ways it is.
I used I, I was a big fan of a, a guy named Ken Wilber.
I don't know if you've read his stuff, but he had he had a term
where he said it was trans rational, where it was like to
the act of defining itself like you lose it, right?
So it's like it, it is anything. Anything that is definable, it
is not. That yeah, that's so that's and
that's yeah. The in in Sanskrit the the
expression is neti, neti. And neti means not this, not
this. And that's the in, in, in, in
classic ancient Catholic theology that's called the via
negativa, where you're trying to define the divine by defining
what it's by eliminating what it's not, right?
Saint Augustine said. If you think you understand God,
you don't. Yeah.
Which is really, really paradoxical.
Which is, which is like a Zen con.
But it makes sense. It does.
It actually makes sense. And that.
And so the search for meaning is a search to sit with possibly
the sources of meaning and doing your best.
Yeah. And and then opening yourself up
to to being free for a moment of just for being free for a moment
of your disbelief. Yeah.
Hey Mark here, and I just want to let you know about my weekly
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You can sign up over at markmanson.net.
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Lessterriblethatsmarkmanson.net and sign up for your next
breakthrough. So let's bring this back to
let's ground this again. How do does this sort of
experience or understanding of the divine or some faith in the
divine, how does this help us here and now day-to-day
understanding our lives, being OK with our lives?
Where, where is that connection? So that that the connection is
the transcendent. So one of the pillars of one of
the practices that people have who tend to have happiest lives
is faith. But faith, by faith I don't mean
my faith. I have chosen to practice my
faith as a Catholic. It's really important to me.
But as a scientist, I can tell you that transcending yourself
is the one of the great secrets to happiness.
So if you're spending all day long in the psychodrama of
Mark's life, you know, Mark's breakfast and his commute, which
is a walk up Ocean Park, which is not that bad, but you know,
and his money and his show and his sponsors and the future.
And, you know, it's just, dude, it's so boring.
You know the psychodrama is unbelievable.
My psychodrama's awesome. My psychodrama's like, I want
more of it, but you know, but my psychodrama's like the same
episode of Better Call Saul over and over and over again, which
the first time is funny and the second time is turgid and the
third time is torture. And, and you know, I was the
star in all my dreams last night.
I mean, it was just, it's left to your devices.
Mother Nature wants you to focus on yourself and to get peace and
perspective. You need to stand in awe of the
universe and get little. The Dalai Lama told me this
story. Really interesting.
I've been, I've been writing and working with the Dalai Lama for
the last 12 years. Great privilege in my life.
And he told me just in his last visit, Rich Roland, Rainn Wilson
and I and a bunch of us, we went to Dharamsala to do this
conference with the Dalai Lama And, and, and during that
conference, when I was talking to him, he said that he saw this
photograph in 1969 that was that changed his life.
I was like Dalai Lama. What could the photograph be?
It turns out it was that famous photograph of the Earth taken
from the orbit of the moon. Oh, yeah.
You know that thing where the Earth is?
This is blue and beautiful. And he said he saw that picture.
And he said, that's me. I'm so small.
I'm so grateful. That's transcendence.
And there's two really two ways to transcend. 1 is to transcend
by serving other people in the spirit of love, getting outside
yourself. It's the I self looking at the
world in in love and admiration as instantiated in the way that
you serve. And the other is to to transcend
vertically where you're looking for something that's that's
divine, something that's bigger than you.
And again, maybe that means studying the Stoics and living
according to their principles even as an atheist, which the
Stoic philosophers themselves weren't.
But you can be. Maybe that's walking in nature
for an hour before dawn without devices.
Maybe that's studying the fugues of Bach.
Maybe that's a starting of a pasta in a meditation practice
with seriousness. And maybe that's going to Mass
every day. But you need something.
You need some sort of transcendence.
There's some dimension, you know, whether it's, it's funny,
'cause I remember taking an astronomy course in undergrad
and it was, I loved it was my favorite course I've ever taken
in my life. For philosophical reasons.
And it's for exactly this reason I I would leave the classroom
feeling so small and insignificant and just being in
like pure awe and wonder of the universe.
It was beautiful. And it was incredible.
So it's like there's a physical dimension.
There's you. You mentioned the Stoics and I
think there's something, there's something profound this and I
think, you know, the traditional religions tie into this as well.
It's like when there is a tradition or a school of thought
that is literally lasted for millennia.
It also makes you feel so insignificant.
It's like, wow, all of my problems like this.
This guy was a Roman emperor 2000 years ago and he can
perfectly address like my bullshit that I'm struggling
with today. Like again, it makes you feel so
small, if so insignificant. And and then you, you mentioned
the, you know, going to mass that feels like a, a, a like
contemplating the unknown or the, the, the things that cannot
be understood. I'm sitting in awe.
I'm sitting in awe and it's the I'm, I'm the not the me.
You know the difference between the I self and the me self.
This is a very William James concept.
The I self is I'm observing the world.
The me self is I'm observing me. And we spend tons of time in the
me self that's looking in the mirror, or for that matter,
looking at social media. The I self is standing in awe
of, of creation, of the divine, of my love of others, of what's
going on outside me. And we need that regularly.
We just need more of that. You touched briefly earlier, you
kind of apply implied or assumed.
You assume correctly that you know a lot of a lot of the
Christians I grew up around it. It's what I would call kind of
a, a childish relationship with God.
It's like it's it's all or nothing, it's right or wrong,
black and white. The guy in the sky.
Guy in the sky, he's watching everything.
You know, he bald, he cares. He cares.
You know whether my my car broke down last week or not.
You. Know finding a parking place.
Yeah, exactly. So there's kind of that version
before we went live, we talked about in California a little bit
and my audience has heard me rant about California plenty of
times, but there's kind of they're.
Still here, which you know, it's like it's a revealed preference.
Yes, it is a revealed preference, but it's I I would
argue that there is an an immature form of spirituality
out here, which is kind of like the the bullshit weakened
meditation retreat that you know is quote UN quote so deep, so
profound. But really they're they're just
obsessing. They're in their me self,
They're just obsessing about themselves the entire time.
So I'm curious, like how would you define a a healthy and
transcendent spirituality that gives us that proper dose of, of
meaning in our lives? And then like, where does it
turn unhealthy and how? That's a good question.
I mean, of course, that's a huge topic that people have talked
about an awful lot. But and there's lots of
substitute religions. Politics is a substitute
religion. And, you know, the, the whole,
you know, all of the political activism that we see today on
both sides of the spectrum, or a substitute for people actually
having a sense of the transcendent.
And that's why, you know, with the secret handshakes and
esoteric language and the good and evil and the cancel culture
and there's these people are devils and these people are
angels and. It's like witch hunts.
It's really, really religious, but except the problem is
there's no divinity, there's no goodness, there's no cosmic love
in it. All there is is the starchy,
nasty parts of of religion. It's just all it.
All it is is the rules, which is one of the reasons that it that
activism, it tends to increase mental illness.
It tends to increase depression and anxiety, especially for
people under 30. If you substitute some sort of
activist cause for a healthy spirituality, you're probably
going to wind up depressed and anxious is the way.
And and it all kind of makes sense of the way that this
works. The, what we find in, in a lot
of religious activity is that really, really healthy religious
activity has a, some characteristics in common.
Number one is it, it's based in love.
It's based in love, love for the divine, love for each other and,
and love cause love conquers all and love is one of the great.
Love is the nuclear fuel of happiness.
And so if you have a religion that basically says God is love,
for example, you're on the right track.
You know, depending on what you're talking about.
And, and this isn't, by the way, this isn't both the karmic and
the Abrahamic religions. So I'm speaking exclusively
about my own. The second is that it has
technique that's really healthy, that has contemplative tradition
to it. It has something that you can
actually do to practice it. And, and, and, and so practicing
it, you can center yourself around the divine love, around
the concept of love. And so there's prayer there or
there's meditation. There's some sort of a
contemplative tradition. And so look for these kind of
things, you know, Do you get that from Soul Cycle?
I don't know, man. I'm not.
I'm. Not, you know, I'm.
Not not to cast aspersions, but the whole point is either they
have a contemplative tradition or they have depth or they have
some sort of a concept of depth. And in the worst cases, if
you're, you know, political activism is your religion that
has neither a contemplative tradition nor love, in which
case is the fast road to feeling like garbage is what how that
comes about. But that's, you know, when you
start to lose the love, be suspicious.
Yeah. And when there's nothing that
you can actually do to practice it in a serious way, that that's
when you should probably run the other direction.
Yeah, I think the those are good.
Framework. Good criteria at least, right?
Yeah, You know, it makes sense to me and it it is interesting.
You know, you mentioned politics.
I think there's, there's, you're seeing, there's a certain
religiosity that's starting to emerge in, I would say
marketing, you know, so if you look at a lot of like fitness
movements, nutritional movements, Oh yeah, lifestyle,
even brands like Apple or Nike, you know, like there's a lot of
there's, there's, there's kind of a quasi religious component.
Yeah, that's really the contemplative stuff.
And so, you know, with a lot of the, you know, the fitness
things you're supposed to do, things that are very, very hard
and acetic as if they were religious activities, you know,
you're supposed to. It's like walking on your knees
all the way to the basilica or something like that.
But that's, that's just some weird exercise regime that
you're doing that's that gives you almost puts you into a
trance in some way. Because we want that.
We actually want that. But we don't want the, you know,
the messy one sided conversations and that all the
rules. Well, and it, there's almost
like there's a little bit of a fallacy going on, which is that
because meaning and spirituality sustains you during suffering,
It's almost like people assume like, well, if I just suffer a
lot, then I'll get to experience all the meaning and
spirituality. And it's like, well, it doesn't
work and. You're missing the point.
Yeah, you're missing the point. You've actually taken.
It's the old. Where's the beef?
Yeah, you know. Yeah.
All right. So you mentioned earlier that
love, romantic love, is is a a a worldly representation of the
the divine. At its best, it.
Is at its best. At its worst, it's not.
Yeah, yeah. It's actually one of my
questions here because you know, in your, you've got this
framework of the, the four pillars and one of them is
family. And I I've written here, what if
your family is toxic as fuck? Yeah, I know.
No, no, I know. And that's a huge problem.
But a lot of people will ascribe toxicity to basic disagreements.
Things they don't like. Yeah, the things they don't like
and, you know, the schisms happened.
One in six Americans is not speaking to a family member
today because of politics. That's just insanity.
That's that's so crazy. There's only one reason to have
schism, which is abuse. And differences of opinion just
aren't abuse, you know, And what happens is that when a
difference of opinion becomes a form of abuse, it means that
that politics has become your religion.
That's a, that's a tell that religion is taking on the divine
characteristics that you're actually hungry for.
And, and that's a, a very, a very unfortunate situation we
see more and more of. But when you have a really toxic
family relationship, some people they have, they, they just don't
get that. And, and it's a pity, but not
everybody can get all the good things in life, in which case
you need to reassemble family relationships in a different
way, which you absolutely can. I yeah, I mean, I, I always,
this question comes up a lot in my audience.
And I bet one of the things, and I, I agree there's a lot of
statistics around people like cutting off parents, cutting off
family members, often for frivolous reasons.
And, and it's, you know, I always reiterate that like, that
should be the last resort. It's there's so many things you
can manage the exposure of a relationship.
Like if there's certain things, if I have a family member who's
toxic or generates a lot of conflict and drama in a certain
area, it's like you can create kind of boundaries of like, OK,
I don't engage in that conversation with this family
member or I, I set expectations of like, OK, I'm only going to
visit this person for this amount of time.
And if these things start happening, I'm going to leave.
You know, like there's, there's so many ways to like tactical
ways to manage a familial relationship that doesn't just
involve cutting them off entirely.
And it's like I especially young people, I don't think they
appreciate like you only get one mom, you only get one dad, you
only get one of each of your siblings.
Like it's friends are going to come and go.
Political movements are going to come and go, cultural trends are
going to come and go. But your family is, is always
your family. And, and if you just throw it
out for no good reason, I mean you that that's a lot of
valuable time that you're, you're, you're wasting.
Yeah, anybody who's telling you for ideological reasons to cut
off a family member is a dark triad who is trying to conscript
you into their war. They're trying to manipulate you
and they don't care what of how much of your happiness and love
that they sacrifice they. Want power?
And that's step one of a cult, right?
Don't they say that right? It's like step one of creating a
cult is you cut people off from their friends and family.
Political activists, particularly today, this part in
the in the political cycle. There's a lot of research on
this. As you can imagine, political
activists are disproportionately dark triads.
So you've talked about dark triads on the on the show
before, right? OK, so it's, it's a combination
of three personality characteristics, which is
narcissism, Machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy.
It's all about me. I'm willing to hurt you and I
feel no remorse about it. And above average on those 3
characteristics, that's one in 14 of the population, about 7%
of the population, according to Scott Berry Kaufman, your
neighbor here in Santa Monica. He's been on the show.
Yeah, he's fantastic. And he's the, he's sort of the
king of the dark. He's not a dark triad himself.
No, no, he's the king of the of. He's the real world's leading
expert on this. And what we find in the research
is that political activists today are disproportionately
dark triads. Now, you would not date 1.
You would not hire 1. You certainly would try not to
work for a while. One, don't vote for one.
Don't follow them. Don't follow them.
Don't give them your votes or your attention.
Certainly don't sign up for their crazy brand of of you
know, a righteous world ideology on your college campus.
These people are they will hurt you.
It's really important because what they're selling you is is
cult like behavior based around political or social ideology.
How do you spot 1 though? Because they can be very
charismatic and. Number one is their pitch to you
is that you're a victim, even though you didn't know it is
that people have been hurting you even though you didn't
realize it. The real, the real, the reason
that you weren't to grieve before is because you're under a
false consciousness. This is the beginning of what
Dark Triad political activists always say.
Second, you need a different friend group.
You need a different group of people.
It's people that you loved. You were loving them for the
wrong reasons. You need to start to see the
scales need to fall from your eyes.
You need to see them for the first time.
They start to put put barriers between you and your friends or
between you and your family. That's the second thing that
they typically see. Third is they start to demand
more of you than you than you would normally want to give more
of your affection, more of your time, more of your attention.
That's what they want from you. These are the characteristics of
that You're being kind of sucked into a dark triad political
cult, a political activist moment.
And again, you're not get you'll be able to recognize it on the
other side, your brother who is, you know, in some weird Internet
chat room or following some, you know, kind of extreme bro on the
Internet. You know that that's what's
happening to him, happening to you too, you know, and so, but
the fact that it's your such and such studies professor at
college, that doesn't mean that that person is not just as much
of a dark triad as the as the guy on the Internet who's
sucking in your brother. It's crazy because I, you know,
I coming back to the technology aspect, like I just think it's,
it's enabled this stuff so much more like it's, it's almost like
we're scaling cult formation across all different vectors and
dimensions. And I don't really know other
than just like educating people and trying to inoculate them to
to these like make them aware of these cultural tendencies, like
I don't know what else we can do.
Well, the good news is that if you're in a virtual cult, it's
not a strong one. Yeah, it's not as strong as if
you were actually literally living in a commune.
Those things are really hard to break free of.
That's when you need the deprogrammers who throw you in
the back of a car and there's like, you can't unlock it.
And the whole those famous stories from the 70s, I mean,
when I was a little kid, they were kidnapping people's
children and there was this huge paranoia, but everybody was
actually joining a cult. And then, you know, the Internet
activity really is extreme and it's very easy to access and
it's dangerous, but it's the the relationship is not as as
profound because anything that's actually not in person
inculcates a love between people that's weaker.
So that's the the the good news is, the bad news is that all
the, you know, all the ways that the Internet is mediating love
relationships and making them weaker and us more lonely is
also less likely to suck us in and ruin our lives permanently.
It's all empty calories in both directions.
Pretty much. Pretty much, yeah.
The last thing I want to touch on that relates to
relationships. You have a.
Deep conversation, man. I know I just, I love this.
This completely went in a direction I was not
anticipating. Let's see how many, how many,
how many listeners we get, you know, based on the not that we
care about that. Yeah, right.
It's like, let's just watch the let's refresh and watch the
numbers like. A monkey on cocaine?
Yeah, yeah. Well we are both former
musicians and both fame and accolade starved success whores
so. All I want is the admiration of
strangers. Is that too much to ask?
Just the insatiable desire for approval.
Do you love me yet? Does the world love me yet?
We need to do another podcast. You have this great analogy
which you said successful, successful marriages are like
startups and not mergers. Why is that?
You need to, to a very large extent, you need to grow up
together because it's actually hard.
You know, in, in the industrial organization literature, mergers
typically are unsuccessful. It's a pretty small minority of
mergers between companies that winds up being a commercial
success. They always look like a good
idea and they typically aren't for lots of reasons.
It's hard to, it's hard to merge cultures.
It's hard to figure out who's going to be the boss and what
party's going to be subservient, etcetera.
And when 2 are established, those are the questions you have
to answer. And the same thing is true when
people are unduly established as individuals.
Now that doesn't mean that people, when they get married at
35 and they both have successful careers that they're going to
have an unsuccessful marriage. It's just harder is the bottom
line. And there's lots of tells.
I mean, there's a problem if you have separate bank accounts,
that typically is problematic and it because it means that you
want that kind of financial autonomy and economics in, in,
in, in a society, in a community, in a neighborhood, in
a family and in a couple is cultural.
You know what what you do with your money is an expression of
your values, always has been, always will be.
And so that's one of the examples of things that actually
make it harder because of a lack of trust and a demand for
actually not being a hive mind. The happiest marriages are a
hive mind. It's like, it's us, it's us.
What do we think about this, You know, And that's a very
beautiful thing. And that's just harder to do.
It's harder to do so the startup marriages and an immature
startup typically is not successful.
So you're getting married at 17, it's going to be hard because
you don't have enough experience, you're not mature
enough, You're not you're not synaptically developed enough.
Quite frankly, the, the, the connection between your limbic
system and prefrontal cortex is not complete in human females
until age 21 and human males till, you know, like 70.
So you, you, you tougher, you know, this explains problems
anyway, so, and So what you find is that sort of mid 20s until
early 30s is the sweet spot for, for startup marriages that look
like, you know, partners to an entrepreneurial endeavour.
Yeah. And then you kind of can't
remember before you were a hive mind.
Yeah, you. It's kind of a sweet spot of
like you've had enough life experiences and you've developed
enough individually to be mature enough to handle it, but you
and. You've made mistakes.
And you've made mistakes, but you also haven't built such a
identity that is like completely self-sufficient and and.
Self-sustaining, trying to merge.
And then of course there's there are acquisitions and hostile
takeovers, which are usually not the best models or even less so.
I feel like you could do you could do a whole nerdy book on
this. Yeah, you know, you're an
economist and you're talking about marriage.
This is what this is what comes out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I mean, marriage is you
mentioned earlier, but marriage is, is highly correlated with
levels of happiness. Like why is that?
It, it part of the reason is because people don't, most
people don't do that well alone. Now, women do better than men.
So women who are, who are, who are not, who never marry do
better than men who are, who don't marry.
There's just so much substance abuse and there's just so much,
you know, men by themselves. It's kind of bad things happen.
It's pathology tends to follow in the wake of men by
themselves. And, you know, there are ways to
do that. You can live in community if
you're belong to a, you know, a religious group or something
under the circumstances. But what you find is that men
just just they, they tend to be emotionally sort of on the rocks
when they when they don't have that women do a little bit
better. But both sexist.
I mean, for the longest time there was all this research that
suggested that that women are happier when they're single than
when they're married. That's actually wrong.
That's been invalidated. That's been that's never been
replicated in any meaningful way.
The best stuff on this is by a guy named Brad Wilcox.
Have you had him on the show? Oh, you'd love him.
He he runs the Institute for Family Studies, University of
Virginia. And he's a super interesting guy
about the benefits of marriage and the cognitive benefits of
marriage, the emotional benefits of marriage.
But it's just easier not to walk alone is the way that this
works. And you know, the happiest
marriages are those characterized.
But what we call companionate love, not passionate love.
I mean, passionate love is at the very beginning when you're
actually bonding to each other, when you're neurochemically
bonding to each other. But you want what do you want to
get to within five years is best friendship.
And you know, best friendship is a magical thing, man.
And, and you get to live with your best friend, your best,
it's your best, it's who you get to watch TV with every night.
It's. And that's and they've got your
back on literally everything. Yeah, I mean, it's like no
matter how much you're screwing up to the world and how much
they think you're a complete goofball, yeah, they're still
going to defend you. Yeah, because that's your
because and you're not competing with each other.
This is this is one of the problems of the merger marriage.
There tends to be competitions like I stayed with Junior
yesterday, you have to stay with Junior.
That's poison, and that's just completely toxic.
I call that the scorecard, which is yeah, it's like as soon as if
you have any scorecard in the relationship, like.
You're doomed. Yeah, it's just like 5050
marriages. They turn into 00 marriages
typically. And and, and a startup is 100
hundred marriage. And and that's it's not perfect
and it's hard and you have to work on it all the time.
And there, there are times when you're closer and times when
you're further apart. But you know, I've been married
33 years and I'm going to be married to the day I die because
I'm assuming I'm going to die first because fair is fair.
And, and, and it's the one thing I can really, really count on.
Yeah, it's the one thing I can absolutely count on.
Now, one of the things that makes it easier to have this
marriage is actually a spiritual journey together.
That's really part of Companion at Love, where you're kind of
Lewis and Clark. So you're trying to convert me?
Looking for the Pacific. And it's like, let's read this
thing together, right? Let's, let's you know.
I don't know. Neither of us knows.
Yeah, let's go listen to that crazy thing together.
But I This is why I love the startup analogy is because you,
you really do grow into something that neither of you
expect right over the years. Oh yeah.
And it is, it's exciting, it's thrilling.
Sometimes it's terrifying, but it is like you do both
completely end up becoming completely different people than
either of you expected at the beginning.
And that, that is the joy of it together.
And giving yourself completely to a journey that becomes
unpredictable and unexpected, but at least you've got somebody
who's got you by the hand and is going to love you no matter
what. I mean, when you think about
this, and I was listening to your to the the New Year's
episode and you were talking about 2025 and Mark Manson's
going to do less sort of old school subtle art stuff.
That's going to be hard, man. That's going to be hard for you
because once again, there's meaning and there's a claim and
and a claim is instantiated and things like, you know,
sponsorships and money. And you're going to question
your decisions about trying to do some new things all the time.
But there's one person who's going to be in your corner.
That's your wife. And she's going to be yeah, do
it totally. But but what if we make less
money? She's like, I don't care because
I bet she doesn't care. And that's, and there's
literally one person out there for that and it's really great.
Yeah, it's, it's, it can't be I, I can't.
It's funny too, because I was, I was never someone who was, who's
big on traditional family values growing up and marriage
completely blindsided me as being possibly the most positive
thing I've ever done with my life.
And, and I was not expecting that.
Like it just it like hit me pretty soon after we got engaged
and I was just like, this is incredible.
Like this level of commitment, the the permanence of it, all of
the the exact things that I feared when I was young and
single are actually the benefits.
And I just never understood that.
That's really, really, that's an incredibly important point that
you're making right now. My wife didn't believe in
marriage when I met her. I don't believe in marriage
because she's, you know, she's in Barcelona and from a hard red
atheist family. And, and, you know, none of her
siblings ever got married. They were sort of serially
monogamous. And, you know, her dad took off
when she was a little kid and moved in with somebody else.
And, you know, just this modern way of living and, and when I
met her and I was really in love and I moved to Barcelona without
speaking the language and I took a job in Barcelona because I
figured I could probably close that deal.
It took me two years to convince her that marriage is a good idea
and we should actually get married.
But so everybody starts from a different place on this, but
they're it's very rare. I mean, a lot of people have bad
marriages and they don't work out.
And that's misery. And I get that.
But the overwhelming majority opinion on this is that it's a
really very beautiful and a very good thing.
It is and it's also it's I just want to note because this I see
the statistic continue to pop up everywhere and it drives me
insane. The 50% of marriages that end in
divorce. That is a vastly outdated
statistic, way outdated. That has not been true in.
The 70s. Yeah, that hasn't been true in
50 years. It's actually it's it's much
closer to like 2530%. 2530% and in certain demographic pockets
that are going to could be the Subtle Art listeners, it's more
like 15%. The odds are on your side that
you're going to have a happy marriage and it's going to be a
permanent marriage. Do it.
Arthur Brooks, thank you so much.
Thank you. The Subtle Art I'm Not Giving a
Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie.
It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer
and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we
will see you next week.