The Daily Routine Guaranteed To Destroy Your Life - Arthur Brooks
CChris Williamson
Mental HealthManagementAdult Education
Transcript
00:00:00Let's say that you're going to design a life for someone to have as little meaning in it as
00:00:03possible. What would that consist of? It would start by waking up when the sun is warm,
00:00:11you know, making sure you don't start your day like before dawn. Make sure you start your day
00:00:15kind of when you get up. Make sure that if you have an alarm clock, there's your phone.
00:00:21Look at your phone before you roll out of bed, right? Then make sure that the first thing that
00:00:25you do is eat a bunch of, you know, highly processed foods, high in sugar. Make sure you
00:00:30get your coffee in the first five minutes. So you get a big dose of caffeine and make sure that you're
00:00:35looking and scrolling on your phone while you're eating your first meal. That's a really important
00:00:40thing to do. Make sure that your whole first hour is neurocognitively programmed to be on the screen.
00:00:46Then make sure that you have a remote job. It's very important that you go to work back in your
00:00:51bedroom and you look at a screen and you look at a screen all day long so that your colleagues are
00:00:55kind of squares on the Zoom screen and you see them sometimes in the clients and et cetera, et cetera.
00:01:01And you don't actually know where anybody lives. You don't have a relationship with anybody, right?
00:01:05It's actually better if you don't see anybody the whole day, as a matter of fact. Now, if you're
00:01:09going to date, make sure that it's swipe right, swipe left, swipe left. And so that you're only
00:01:14getting a two-dimensional understanding of the person that you might want to fall in love with as well.
00:01:17Like no multidimensional, multisensory understanding of who the person is. Make sure you can't smell
00:01:24that person, right? I mean, that's really important because, you know, the olfactory bulb does all
00:01:29kinds of meaning-related things in the brain. So make sure you rule that out, right? And make sure
00:01:33that on your own dating profile, you're lying a lot. That's important too, right? Then let's make sure
00:01:39that for fun, that you're spending sort of the evening not doing anything of real importance. I mean,
00:01:46you're not working on a big project, you're not going out and seeing people, that you're kind
00:01:49of staying in and scrolling and watching YouTube shorts. And if you're doing something that's
00:01:56kind of competitive and achievement-oriented, make sure that it's gaming. Make sure that, you know,
00:02:00it's really oriented toward that. So it's kind of writing your life in disappearing ink.
00:02:05And then go to bed. Make sure you didn't do any exercise. Important not to do any exercise at all,
00:02:09right? And then repeat times where N equals any number that you can conceive of. So that you're
00:02:21never bored. You're never bored. But your life is grindingly boring. See, here's the key. If you want
00:02:28your life to have no meaning, make sure that there's no boredom moment to moment, but that day to day and
00:02:33week to week and month to month, life is boring. That's what you're actually going for. As opposed,
00:02:39if you want your life to be really meaningful, make sure you got plenty of boredom moment to moment.
00:02:44And then your life won't be boring at all.
00:02:47Isn't that a strange paradox?
00:02:48It is. I mean, my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, he was born in Olathe, Kansas. He married the
00:02:56sheriff's daughter. John Jaynes was the sheriff. Was strung up by Quantrill's raiders during the
00:03:02Civil War. I kid you not. This is Americana in my family, Chris. And he married Mary Ellen in Olathe,
00:03:09Kansas. And that's pretty much what I know about him. But I'm going to make a prediction about good
00:03:14little Leroy. He never came home to Mary Ellen and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the
00:03:20mule today. Because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. I promise you that his life
00:03:28behind the mule, looking at a mule's butt, was pretty boring moment to moment. But he was not
00:03:33bored. His life wasn't boring because he was living a real life. But a lot of people today who have
00:03:40figured out a way by checking the screen and living online and living the hustle and grind culture
00:03:45that's been engineered out of Silicon Valley and various other places around the world, Hyderabad and
00:03:51wherever you want, that not being bored from moment to moment gives them the most boring lives possible.
00:03:58Is it the case that ambitious people are particularly susceptible, vulnerable to meaninglessness?
00:04:05So, asking for a friend, right?
00:04:08Of course. Of course.
00:04:11Me too. I'm like a senior version of you, man. Except you're not going to be bald.
00:04:18That's true. I'm going to have to lose a lot of hair.
00:04:20You're going to have to lose a lot of hair. I know. If I had your hair, I'd be President
00:04:22of the United States right now.
00:04:23I think you would.
00:04:26Yes and no. So one of the problems that really ambitious people have is that they don't know
00:04:34how to live with themselves. So ambition, striving, busyness is really a way that people anesthetize
00:04:43themselves because they're very, very uncomfortable. So, you know, I'll give you an example. One time I was
00:04:46talking to a great friend of mine who traveled constantly for work, constantly for work. And his
00:04:52wife was just in his grill. It's just like he had kids and she says that I miss you. And you always,
00:04:59every year you tell me that this year is going to be different. And I realized getting to know this
00:05:04guy really, really well, the problem wasn't that his job made him travel too much. The problem was
00:05:10he didn't want to be home. He didn't want to be home. He wanted to be distracted because his life
00:05:16stressed him out so much. This is what it's like to be a striver is like having this unbelievably chaotic
00:05:23life. And you need to distract yourself all the time. And so sometimes your ambition will be
00:05:28distracting you. Sometimes your success will be distracting you. Sometimes just your overriding
00:05:32need to be special or to be applauded by others is your way to distract yourself from all the things
00:05:38that are actually going on, all the storms and things inside your head, right? And when you have a
00:05:44down moment, then you panic. And that's when the screen comes out or for that matter, that's when
00:05:49alcohol and drugs come out. There's very interesting data from the OECD that show that above average,
00:05:54busier than average people are above average risk in alcohol and alcohol abuse. So you don't think,
00:06:01you think of somebody who's an alcohol abuser as an alcoholic as somebody who's down and out,
00:06:05you know, you know, a bum, right? No, it's more likely to be an investment banker. It's more likely
00:06:10to be a wealthy, successful podcaster. And the reason is because successful strivers anesthetize
00:06:17themselves with drugs and alcohol, with pornography, with screens, with anything that will actually
00:06:22make you like, don't leave me alone in here, man. I don't want to be alone in there, which is why
00:06:28they're strivers in the first place. How often do you think people are pursuing goals because they
00:06:32genuinely want them versus because they want approval?
00:06:36So everybody pursues goals because human beings, homo sapiens, only get satisfaction in their life
00:06:43when they're making progress. It's that satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment, of making progress
00:06:49toward an accomplishment with struggle. That's what satisfaction is all about. That's why goals are
00:06:55incredibly important and struggle and pain are incredibly important. That's what it comes down to.
00:06:59These are the two things to teach your kids is have goals, accomplish stuff and struggle and don't be
00:07:07afraid of pain. Those are the things that you teach your kids and they'll get a lot of satisfaction.
00:07:10Satisfaction is one of the macro nutrients of happiness, to be sure. The trouble with that is
00:07:14that if it's somebody like you, highly intelligent, super hardworking, unbelievably energetic, then you
00:07:21can actually start fooling yourself into thinking it's actually not about making the progress and the
00:07:25struggle and the hustle and grind of life itself. It's actually about if I finally get that thing,
00:07:31then it's going to be okay. When I finally get that thing. So, you know, I've, I've, I've worked with
00:07:37Olympic athletes and, and, and it's funny because you'll often, they think they're alone in their
00:07:44struggles and you'll say, did you, when you won that goal, were you depressed afterward? They'll be like,
00:07:48how'd you know? Like, cause it's always true.
00:07:50Every other gold medalist. It's literally called gold medalist syndrome.
00:07:53Yeah. It's called gold medalist. And, and what it is, it's all in, in, in my field in behavioral
00:07:57science is called the arrival fallacy. And the arrival fallacy is just like, I, I, I, I got to get
00:08:02there. And when I get there, I'm going to feel that thing. Now, what was the thing I'm going to feel?
00:08:05And this gets back to your question. I'm going to feel like I'm worthy. I'm going to feel like I'm
00:08:10something. I'm going to feel like I'm special. I'm finally going to feel like I'm special. And you
00:08:16don't, and you don't. And that's the problem. That's what a big part of the survivor's curse.
00:08:21You know, what's fascinating about the arrival fallacy? No, one's ever been able to make it
00:08:26popular. So the concept, yes. Yeah. Correct. Has tell me the most well-known book on the arrival
00:08:32fallacy that points it out. Exactly. Yeah, I know. Fucking. So I was on my way out to Australia,
00:08:37texting Mark Manson about this. And I was explaining one of the problems I was trying to navigate with
00:08:42the show, this live show that I was doing. And one of them is that a good bit of it is kind of
00:08:46about the arrival fallacy. It's a PG version because I'm aware that it's chronically the most
00:08:51unsexy topic to ever talk about. Yeah. And his response was, good luck. I've tried to talk about
00:08:56this publicly and every single time it's fallen flat. I know. It's not just not mimetic that people
00:09:02don't want to talk about it. It's not just mimetic neutral that people will accept it.
00:09:07And maybe bring it up or maybe not. It's actively anti-mimetic. People don't want to hear it and
00:09:13won't tell their friends about it. It is. No, I know. I know. It feels, saying to people that
00:09:20are still climbing, which everybody is, the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you
00:09:25think it's going to be. Feels like you're sucking the gas out of their fuel tank while they're still
00:09:30on the way up. It's like you as a fat person saying to someone who's starving, well, food's not that
00:09:35nice in any case. And it's an unteachable lesson. And the only way that you can learn it is by getting
00:09:40there. And because the alternative to this with the arrival fallacy is that every successful person
00:09:47ever in history has been inducted into some kind of cult that pulls the ladder up after them where
00:09:54everybody gets the same memo, which is, so I know that you, all of the problems that you had,
00:09:58all of the internal voids, your feeling of insufficiency, the chip on your shoulder from when
00:10:02you were a child, your desperate desire for validation from random humans on the internet.
00:10:06I know that all of that was fixed when you got the 30,000 square foot house, but we need to tell the
00:10:12poors that that's not the case. So you now are a part of this elite group of people that are trying
00:10:18to sigh up everybody else into not trying to strive for it. That's the alternative, which is,
00:10:23or is it more likely that that's just the sense that the gold medalists got? And that's not to say
00:10:29that it's everyone, but it does seem to be a pretty big cohort, way more than the people that are
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