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The Meaning of Your Life: When Science Runs Out of Answers 3. · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: I came to this book expecting comfort. I got arithmetic.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. Meaning equals coherence
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: plus purpose plus significance. Then a test, 10 statements on
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  Speaker 1: a 7-point scale, and a score at the end. Then
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  Speaker 1: four types of seeker, each with a name, so you
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  Speaker 1: can locate yourself on the map before you have taken
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  Speaker 1: a single step. Then six practices. It is a lot
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  Speaker 1: of math for a book about mystery. And the math
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  Speaker 1: is deliberate, which is what makes the book worth an episode.
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  Speaker 1: The man who wrote it spends 300 pages arguing that
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  Speaker 1: modern life has trained us to treat everything as a
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  Speaker 1: problem with a solution. And that meaning dies inside that
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  Speaker 1: very habit. Then he hands you a scoring sheet. So
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  Speaker 1: the question this book raises, whether or not it means to,
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  Speaker 1: is easy to say and hard to answer. Can you
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  Speaker 1: be walked step by step out of a life that
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  Speaker 1: is nothing but steps? The book is The Meaning of
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  Speaker 1: Your Life by Arthur C. Brooks. It came out this
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  Speaker 1: spring and went straight to number one on the bestseller lists,
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  Speaker 1: and it is still climbing on the sales charts months later.
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  Speaker 1: Brooks was never supposed to be the person writing it.
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  Speaker 1: At 19, he dropped out of college to play the
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  Speaker 1: French horn for a living. He toured with a brass
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  Speaker 1: quintet for six years, then took a chair in a
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  Speaker 1: city orchestra in Spain, and somewhere inside that orchestra, he
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  Speaker 1: had what he calls a quarter-life crisis. After a doctorate
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  Speaker 1: and a decade running a policy institute, he ended up
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  Speaker 1: in a classroom, teaching the science of happiness to some
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  Speaker 1: of the most ambitious young people in the country. He
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  Speaker 1: calls his own research me-search, and the joke is accurate.
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  Speaker 1: This is a book about strivers written by a lifelong striver,
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  Speaker 1: and you can feel it on every page. The patient
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  Speaker 1: wrote the diagnosis. He starts with Tolstoy. At 51, a
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  Speaker 1: novelist with two of the most admired novels ever published
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  Speaker 1: behind him was reached, celebrated, and so deep in private
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  Speaker 1: despair that he wanted to die. He tried philosophy and
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  Speaker 1: he tried science, and neither one gave him a reason
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  Speaker 1: to stay. Brooks tells the story because of what happened next.
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  Speaker 1: Tolstoy kept looking, and eventually he found something to lie for.
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  Speaker 1: The lesson Brooks draws from it is almost statistical. The
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  Speaker 1: best predictor of finding meaning, he says, is searching for it.
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  Speaker 1: That claim is built into the test he gives you.
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  Speaker 1: The questionnaire borrowed from the psychologist who designed it measures
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  Speaker 1: two separate things. How much meaning you feel you already
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  Speaker 1: have and how hard you are looking for more. Cross
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  Speaker 1: the two and you get his four types. People lost
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  Speaker 1: in place with little meaning and no search underway. Hopeful
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  Speaker 1: wanderers short on meaning but still looking happy homebodies. Settled
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  Speaker 1: enough to stop and relentless seekers who have meaning and
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  Speaker 1: want more of it anyway. Brooks puts himself in that
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  Speaker 1: last group, which tells you something about the author and
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  Speaker 1: something about the book he was always going to write.
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  Speaker 1: Then comes the modern version. Brooks interviewed people who were
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  Speaker 1: winning by every outside measure, and one of them gave
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  Speaker 1: him the image the whole book is built on. Life,
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  Speaker 1: this person said, felt like a simulation. cardboard probes where
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  Speaker 1: the real furniture should be accomplishments that looked it right
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  Speaker 1: in a photograph and weighed nothing in a hand. Brooks
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  Speaker 1: heard versions of that again and again, and he concluded
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  Speaker 1: that what had gone missing was the one thing a
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  Speaker 1: simulation can never produce. Strivers, he finds, usually do fine
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  Speaker 1: on the first two terms of his happiness equation. They
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  Speaker 1: enjoy plenty, and they collect satisfaction like trophies on a shelf.
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  Speaker 1: The term that collapses is the third. As for why
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  Speaker 1: this is happening now, his answer is neurological, or at
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  Speaker 1: least it is dressed that way. Drawing on the psychiatrist,
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  Speaker 1: Ian McGilchrist, he argues that the brain's two hemispheres attend
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  Speaker 1: to the world in different ways. The left takes things
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  Speaker 1: apart in order to solve them, and it wants the
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  Speaker 1: answer immediately. The right holds what cannot be held, love, beauty,
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  Speaker 1: the divine, and the question of why any of it matters.
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  Speaker 1: Modern life, Brooks says, has handed almost everything to the left.
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  Speaker 1: Work arrives as a least of discrete problems, and leisure
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  Speaker 1: arrives as a feed. That produces what he calls the
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  Speaker 1: doom loop. You spend the day on problems with clear answers.
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  Speaker 1: You come home bored and hollow. You pick up the phone,
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  Speaker 1: the scrolling numbs the hollowness for a while, and then
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  Speaker 1: it comes back with guilt layered and on top. So
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  Speaker 1: you pick up the phone again. The people most caught
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  Speaker 1: in this loop, Brooks notices, are often the most capable
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  Speaker 1: people he knows. He has students who will put millions
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  Speaker 1: of dollars at risk to start a company without a
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  Speaker 1: flicker of fear, and were terrified of asking someone out
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  Speaker 1: to dinner. That detail does more work than any brain
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  Speaker 1: skin in the book. It describes a generation that is
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  Speaker 1: brave about everything measurable and frightened of everything that is not.
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  Speaker 1: The rest of the book is the cure, and here
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  Speaker 1: the method shows. Brooks asks you to practice boredom on purpose,
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  Speaker 1: to sit without the phone until the discomfort fades and
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  Speaker 1: something else starts to surface. He asks you to pose
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  Speaker 1: questions no search engine can answer and then to stay
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  Speaker 1: with them for a while. He sends you toward romantic love,
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  Speaker 1: which he calls the most reliable door into the right hemisphere,
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  Speaker 1: and toward friendship, music, open country, and work done for
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  Speaker 1: something other than money. He even tells you how to
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  Speaker 1: go back to a house of worship if you have
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  Speaker 1: drifted away. Leave the phone in the car, take a
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  Speaker 1: seat at the back, listen, and let your soul get
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  Speaker 1: on with its work. On love, he offers a story
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  Speaker 1: of his own. He fell for the woman who became
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  Speaker 1: his wife in Spain before he could speak her language,
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  Speaker 1: and he treats that out as evidence. The most important
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  Speaker 1: connection of his life started in a place where words
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  Speaker 1: had not yet arrived, which is close to his whole
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  Speaker 1: theory of the right hemisphere in a single courtship. None
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  Speaker 1: of this is foolish. Most of it is what your
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  Speaker 1: grandparents did without needing a book to tell them. And
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  Speaker 1: Brooks says so himself, which is the most disarming thing
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  Speaker 1: about him. He knows the curry's old. He's only trying
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  Speaker 1: to get you to take it. So, Brooks has given
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  Speaker 1: you the diagnosis and a set of practices to answer it.
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  Speaker 1: What he has not yet told you is whether a
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  Speaker 1: questionnaire can carry you to a place no questionnaire can measure.
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  Speaker 1: And then the final page is do something the rest
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  Speaker 1: of the book never prepares you for. Brooks writes about
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  Speaker 1: walking the Camino de Santiago, the old pilgrim road across
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  Speaker 1: northern Spain, years before this book existed. It was the
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  Speaker 1: walk that pointed him toward the study of happiness in
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  Speaker 1: the first place. And the lesson he brings back from
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  Speaker 1: that road quietly contradicts the lesson he took from Tolstoy.
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  Speaker 1: On the road, he says, meaning, found him. He did
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  Speaker 1: not find it. Stay with that for a moment, because
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  Speaker 1: it is a reversal. 300 pages earlier, the best predictor
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  Speaker 1: of meaning was looking for it. Now, meaning is something
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  Speaker 1: that arrives when you loosen your grip on the map.
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  Speaker 1: Brooks puts both claims in the same book and never
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  Speaker 1: reconciles them. I don't think he can. The gap between
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  Speaker 1: them is where the book actually lives. There is a
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  Speaker 1: lecture from Milnov's Sensitive Statute that explains why. Max Weber
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  Speaker 1: stood in front of a room of students and told them,
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  Speaker 1: more or less, that its science could not give them
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  Speaker 1: what they wanted from it. To make the point, he
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  Speaker 1: borrowed a voice. He quoted Tolstoy, the same Tolstoy who
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  Speaker 1: opens this book, saying that science is meaningless because it
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  Speaker 1: cannot answer the only question that matters to us. What
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  Speaker 1: shall we do? And how shall we live? Weber accepted
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  Speaker 1: the charge. Science can tell you how to reach a goal,
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  Speaker 1: he said. It cannot tell you which goal deserves your life.
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  Speaker 1: Read Brooks against that lecture and his strategy comes into focus.
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  Speaker 1: He is a social scientist and he respects the line
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  Speaker 1: Weber drew. He never tells you what your life means.
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  Speaker 1: What he hands you is the form of meaning, coherence, purpose, significance.
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  Speaker 1: Three boxes that any life can feel. Two psychologists built
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  Speaker 1: that definition, so it could be measured, and measurability is
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  Speaker 1: its strength. It is also its weakness. A Christian magazine
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  Speaker 1: reviewing the book pointed out that a cult can tick
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  Speaker 1: every one of those boxes, and so can a political fanaticism.
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  Speaker 1: The form is empty, and that emptiness is exactly what
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  Speaker 1: lets a believer and an atheist take the same test.
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  Speaker 1: The brain science has a similar problem. McGilchrist's argument in
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  Speaker 1: his own enormous book, is about two ways of paying attention,
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  Speaker 1: both running all the time, one of them slowly crowding
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  Speaker 1: out the other across centuries of Western history. It is
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  Speaker 1: a cultural argument with a neurological spine. In Brooks's hands,
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  Speaker 1: it becomes closer to a dial, a right hemisphere you
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  Speaker 1: can switch on with a morning routine and a phone
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  Speaker 1: left in another room. I don't think that does the
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  Speaker 1: book much harm, because the advice would be good with
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  Speaker 1: or without the anatomy. But the anatomy is what makes
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  Speaker 1: it sound like science. And here the science is persuading
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  Speaker 1: more than it is proving. Which brings back the obvious charge.
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  Speaker 1: A book that diagnoses our addiction to procedure prescribes a procedure.
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  Speaker 1: It looks like a contradiction. And for a good stretch
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  Speaker 1: of my reading, I was convinced that it was one.
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  Speaker 1: Then I thought about the road Brooks walked it. Pilgrims
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  Speaker 1: have been walking to Santiago for more than a thousand years,
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  Speaker 1: and for most of the modern revival of that road,
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  Speaker 1: they have been guided by yellow arrows. A parish priest
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  Speaker 1: started painting them in the 1980s, on stones and on
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  Speaker 1: the corners of barns. They are pure procedure. Turn here.
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  Speaker 1: Keep straight. Nobody has ever mistaken an arrow for the walk.
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  Speaker 1: and almost nobody walks it without them. Every serious tradition
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  Speaker 1: works this way. The liturgy, the rosary, the fixed hours
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  Speaker 1: of prayer, the pilgrimage itself, all of them are steps
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  Speaker 1: handed to people so that something which is not a
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  Speaker 1: step can happen to them. Brooks is a practicing Catholic,
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  Speaker 1: and he knows this better than most. Seen that way,
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  Speaker 1: his equations are arrows and the contradiction starts to look
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  Speaker 1: like the oldest arrangement there is. Except for one thing,
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  Speaker 1: the arrows on that road point somewhere. Follow them long enough,
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  Speaker 1: and you arrive at a cathedral, and the cathedral makes
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  Speaker 1: a claim about what your life is for. Brooks paints
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  Speaker 1: the arrows and leaves the destination blank. He has a
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  Speaker 1: cathedral of his own, and he is open about it.
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  Speaker 1: He believes God exists and has a plan for him.
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  Speaker 1: But in the method he gives you, he keeps that
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  Speaker 1: belief out of the way, so that anyone can follow
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  Speaker 1: the arrows. It is a generous choice. It may also
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  Speaker 1: be why the book has to end the way it does,
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  Speaker 1: with meaning that finds you because a road with no
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  Speaker 1: destination can only promise that something will meet you somewhere
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: along it. If you like books at this speed, one
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  Speaker 1: at a time, and argued with along the way, follow
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  Speaker 1: the book brief project. Another one is already open on
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  Speaker 1: the desk. When Brooks finished to the Camino, he did
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  Speaker 1: something revealing. He wrote down the meaning of his own
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  Speaker 1: life in a single sentence. A promise to lift people
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  Speaker 1: up and bring them together with science and ideas as
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  Speaker 1: his tools. There is no equation in it. No score
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  Speaker 1: and no plus signs. It reads like something that happened
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  Speaker 1: to him on a road. The book gives you the
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  Speaker 1: arithmetic and keeps that sentence for itself. Maybe that is
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  Speaker 1: the right order. You do the math until the math
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  Speaker 1: runs out, and whatever is left over is yours to write.
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  Speaker 1: Or maybe arrows that point nowhere in particular can only
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  Speaker 1: take you as far as the arrows go. Brooks walked
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  Speaker 1: into a cathedral. What he leaves you with is whether
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  Speaker 1: you can walk to one he chose not to name.