Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it.
You're listening to The Minimalist Podcast with Joshua Fields Milburn and T .K.
Coleman, recorded live at Earthing Studios in sunny California.
Thank you, Malabama.
Hello, everybody. Today, in the studio, we are joined by Arthur Brooks, who is a professor at Harvard Business School where he teaches courses on the science of happiness.
His new book, which he co -authored with Oprah Winfrey, is called Build the Life You Want, the art and science of getting happier.
Coming up on this free public minimal episode, Collar has a question about dealing with the intense dissatisfaction he feels as he struggles to let go.
And then we've got a lightning round question about what's preventing you from being happy.
That's followed by our Right Here, Right Now segment and a listener tip, you can check out the full Maximal edition of Episode 457.
That's the full two -hour episode where we answer twice as many questions as we dive deep into several simple living segments.
That private podcast is out right now at Patreon .com slash The Minimalists.
Your support keeps our podcast 100 % advertisement free because sing along at home, y 'all, advertisements suck.
Our first question today is from anonymous divorce dude.
Hey, Minimalists, this is divorce dude in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So one and a half years after divorce, one year after moving into a new house with my boys, I'm struggling to let go, struggling to live in my new reality, trying to hold on to the way things used to be and what I used to have. But the reality is my new house is too small to hold onto everything.
How do I take steps towards embracing the life I have now and keep and curate things that fit into this new reality?
It's really hard to accept.
It's hard to start the new chapter completely.
Thank you. And, Arthur Brooks, I thought this was a great question to start with because there are several sort of implicit questions within the question.
How do I deal with this intense dissatisfaction that I feel?
I mean you can hear this dissatisfaction in his voice.
A grief, a sadness.
There's also an identity here.
He called in as divorced dude.
Now obviously that can be tongue in cheek, but also it says something about him.
So maybe we start, because in your new book you talk about how unhappiness is not the absence of happiness and happiness is not the absence of unhappiness.
Although I hear a lot of discontent with this caller.
Where do we start? So, this is really a time travel problem, that I'm hearing from divorce dude.
The human brain is the only, well, it's the only, we are the only species that's capable of traveling through time.
No other animal that we're aware of can actually imagine future and past states and live in them in the present.
And that's one of the reasons we're such an incredibly successful species.
You can rehearse things in the future, make mistakes, come back to the present and not do them.
You can go back to the past, experience things that happen.
Think of an alternative reality.
Come back up another branch and say, it would have been better.
And in so doing learn from your past mistakes.
That's where regret is so unbelievably important.
The problem is when you get stuck back there.
The problem is when your time travel gets you stuck in an alternative reality that's not right now.
There's three time periods that we work in as human beings.
There is the mindful present, there's a prospective future and the retrospective past. All of us have a tendency to spend more time than others in one of these and to a certain extent, it can become maladaptive.
A lot of people that I work with, young people, people at the Harvard Business School, they're thinking 80 % of the time about the future and they're literally missing their lives.
They're literally not living right now.
And I have to tell them that to become a little bit more minimalist, they have to leave the future alone.
They need to give up the future a little bit.
Not completely, you don't want them to, you know, not think about anything in the future and make stupid mistakes.
But what I'm hearing in Divorce Dude is that he's living too much in the past and that's the thing he actually needs to give up.
So how do you do it?
The answer is you need to think about the other time periods.
He needs to be thinking about right here, right now.
I would recommend that Divorce Dude actually get into a practice of mindfulness meditation.
That's the best thing that he's probably gonna be able to do right now because he's gonna put that retrospective pass down.
And the way to do it is to be here now is when it comes from.
I would recommend that he actually enroll himself in a course in mindfulness meditation, get some training in that.
And he might just find that all the stuff that he's hanging on to in the past might seem a little less important once he gets a little bit more disciplined about that.
You know what's interesting is letting go is not something you do.
People often ask, how do I let go of this relationship or this material possession?
and letting go of something you stopped doing, you stopped clinging to whatever that is, and then you're able to drop it.
And it sounds to me like what you're talking about here with the divorced dude is letting go of the regret.
The regret can be really useful, but it can also get in the way when you're clinging to it.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. And basically, you know, there's one thing to say, stop doing something.
It's something else to say.
Crowd that thing out.
You know, when you're in trouble in your relationship, a lot of the time if you're having quarrels with your spouse, a lot of the time, Stop fighting is usually not the right thing to do.
Start loving is the right thing to do.
You want to crowd out something that's kind of productive with something that's productive.
That's a much better strategy for life is crowding things out with something that's beautiful and good.
Don't worry about all your regret.
Don't worry about the fact that all these things happen that are holding you down.
Do something that makes you too busy to be living in the retrospective past. And that's why I recommend doing something that makes you here now.
It also helps, by the way, to have more things to look forward to.
to be thinking more about all the beautiful future you want to have with your kids going forward and thinking about all the good things that can actually happen and setting things in your own future that you're really excited about, that will help crowd out the retrospective past a little bit more as well.
As the saying goes, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Is that the right? That's the crowd out philosophy from St. Paul himself?
I love that. I got my scapular man in here today.
So, we got to go back to this nickname.
I'm not gonna spend too much time on it, but I think about this time when I was going to like a FedEx to deliver a package, and there were a bunch of people in there, and I walked in and I saw this one guy and I said, what's up, brother?
And he says, hey, you know, another day, another dollar?
And then someone else said, another day, another dime?
And then someone else said, someone else says, oh man, another day, another nickel.
And then another person said a fake nickel.
And then we all laughed and I said, wait a minute.
we went all the way from a dollar, which isn't a lot of money, to a fake form of currency.
Can we joke about being rich?
And then we laughed about that.
It's okay to joke and say, self -defeating negative things as a joke, but if we're joking, why not joke to our own benefit?
So, I'm not gonna call you divorce dude.
I'm gonna call you moving on man.
And that's how I'm gonna trust you.
Because if we're not taking it seriously, then that means we have the freedom to play the game in a way that's empowering, right?
One thing I would say about letting go of the past is sometimes we have a hard time letting go of things because we have unfinished business in relation to those things.
And one of the best ways to help yourself let go of a past relationship or a past situation is to give yourself permission to say goodbye in a way that accords with your own values.
And I think that's a huge part of grieving.
giving yourself the space to grieve isn't just about saying, it's okay to cry or it's okay to be sad.
It's about looking at it, looking at that thing that you're letting go of and taking some time to sit with it for a moment and say, here's what it meant to me.
Here's how it shaped me.
Here's how it made me better.
Here's how it taught me.
Here's what I honestly regret.
I'm not gonna run from it in the name of getting on with my life and getting the work done, I'm gonna just spend a minute here and just be honest with myself, and for the first time, say a few things like, I wish I had been a little bit more honest in this direction.
I wish that I had been a little bit more hardworking in that direction, and although I can't do anything about that now, I can build on that in my future by making sure that in my next relationship, that I'm more of the man that I want to be.
So thank you for these things, lesson learned from these things.
All right. I can say goodbye." Imagine if when we lost loved ones to death, we had to just move on without getting to have a funeral.
That'd be a tragedy.
You want the funeral, you want the ceremony, you want the ritual, you want the opportunity to look at what you're letting go and to tell a story about what it meant to you and connect with other people about it and then you can let it go.
So maybe you're having such a hard time moving on because there's some unfinished business you have with what you're trying to let go of.
Since we're talking about the science of happiness today, I thought we'd step back for a moment because he said one thing that really stood to me in this question, moving on man said something fascinating.
He said, my new house is too small to hold on to everything.
And I would just flip that around and say, your life is too big to hold on to everything.
What happens when we try to hold on to everything?
Well, you can't do the things you need to do.
Look, you're too busy to be worrying about a lot of this stuff.
It's interesting because there's a big science of grief.
There's a big science of it.
And the neuroscience of grief is interesting because there's a neurological basis for the grief that we feel.
There's a part of your brain that's exactly designed for you to feel sadness.
Sadness is evolved.
It's an evolved trait.
You need sadness because it makes you averse to losing the people and things that you love.
And if you didn't have that, then you'd be immediately divorced, fired, and friendless, and you'd be walking across the savannah and pretty soon eaten by a tiger.
No good 250 ,000 years ago and no fun today, at very least, you'd be unsuccessful.
So you have a part of your brain this developed called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and it's literally dedicated to feeling mental pain.
You feel mental pain and you feel especially sadness in terms of grief when you're separated from somebody.
Now in 90 % of the cases, understanding your grief, trying to make sense of your grief is the right way for you to move beyond it.
But in about 10 % of the cases, it becomes chronic And you actually can't turn off that dorsal intern or your cingulate cortex. And that's when you need to crowd out your grief, need to crowd out your grief by doing a new thing.
You need a house that, yes too small for the grief but you're trying to put too much stuff in it.
And that's where you're gonna throw the other stuff away.
That's what it comes.
You've got new stuff that you're gonna put in its place and that's a good thing with respect to your mindfulness and your future, et cetera, et cetera.
And so that's what I talk with a lot of people about when they're feeling this pain.
One side note, by the way.
There's a great new body research out there that talks about the way that you can treat the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex pharmaceutical.
Okay, I'm not gonna do, I'm just getting a little scary here but this turns out to be pretty non -controversial.
For the longest time neuroscientists and in the medical profession were baffled about the way that acetaminophen Tylenol works.
Everybody knows how Advil works.
It lowers inflammation.
So it affects the way that you react to your nerve headaches.
But acetaminophen like doesn't do that.
We didn't know what it was.
Turns out, it affects the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex which you have a lot of mental pain when you have physical pain.
And so you don't feel less pain, you just care less about the pain.
Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, yeah, that's how it works.
Tylenol works not because you feel less pain, but because you care less about the pain.
Wow. Now the new experiments ask, okay, well if I'm having that mental pain in the same part of my brain, what if I take Tylenol when I'm feeling grief?
And the answer is you lower your grief.
Wow. Be careful because Tylenol is hard in the liver, you drink alcohol, you can't take Tylenol, don't take more than the, what it says on the side of the bottle.
But there's some of the experiments that show that, you know, people who've had a really, really bad breakup, if they take a course of Tylenol for three weeks, they're usually about a third less brokenhearted than the people who didn't take the Tylenol.
I'm going to start taking Tylenol after meetings with Josh.
How dare you! Just put my bottle on the table.
I know. It's like news you can use.
I recommend actually more minimalist solutions to the problems, but with a little bit of pharmaceutical aid, it might not hurt.
Do you care any last words for the caller?
No, just a question for you doctor.
When Josh makes fun of Michael Jordan and the Bulls, will Tylenol help me care less about his hatred?
I don't think anything will help him care less about Michael Jordan.
If it's chronic pain, I'm not sure.
You know, when Josh keeps picking off the scab, I don't know what to say.
Moving on man, hang in there Yeah, that's all I got to say.
Yeah, hey, speaking of well, help and hanging in there.
One thing we're doing with TK is actually getting ready to launch right now is something called clutter counseling.
We have a lot of people who are struggling with letting go of something, it could be physical clutter, but quite often it's emotional clutter, it's relationship clutter, it's education clutter or information clutter.
It is calendar clutter, career clutter.
And TK can help out, he's the guy I go to when I have some sort of clutter problem in my own life, or in my own heart, or in my head.
And we're launching something called clutter counseling and with TK Coleman, you can find that at TheMinimalists .com just click Counseling at the top and you can book a session with him.
Anonymous divorce, dude, I would encourage that.
Also there's a free ebook on our website called Emotional Clutter.
You can download that right now at TheMinimalists .com slash Emotional Clutter.
And I'd love to send you a copy of Arthur Brooks's new book.
It's called, Build The Life You Want.
Malabama, before you get back to our callers.
Can you tell me what time is it?
Oh, you know what time it is.
It's time for the lightning round where we answer the Patreon community chats question of the week.
Yes, indeed. Now during the lightning round, Arthur, we each have 60 seconds to answer a question with a short, shareable minimal maxim.
You can find this episode's maxims in the show notes over at theminimalists .com slash podcast and every minimal maxim ever over at minimalmaxims .com.
We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox, including seven new maxims every Monday for free.
If you sign up for our email newsletter at theminimalists .email, we'll never send you spam or junk or certainly no advertisements but we will start your week off, with a dose of Simplicity.
TK, before we get to our pithy answers, let's hear how some of our listeners answered the question of the week, which is what?
What's preventing you from being happy right now?
What is preventing you from being happy right now is the question of the week.
What did Bethany have to say?
Okay. What's the hang up with happiness?
I'd rather choose contentment.
Aha. Okay. So I often think that if you go on the street and ask 10 people what happiness is, you'll probably get 11 different answers.
But in your book, you actually talk about the macro nutrients of happiness.
Can you walk us through that?
Yeah, sure. Happiness is like food.
What's food? Well, food is a combination of protein carbohydrates and fat.
It is. I mean, that's not a very romantic way to see your Thanksgiving dinner, but important fact is true.
You need those macronutrients in both balance and abundance.
The same thing is true for your happiness.
Your happiness is in three parts, your enjoyment of life, your satisfaction in your accomplishments, and the sense of why, about why you're on the planet.
It's enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.
And that's really how you learn how to be a happier person is by digging into each one of those three macronutrients and getting more skill in each one.
I love that. What about Richard?
What does Richard have to say?
It's difficult to be happy when I'm worrying about my age, 55, my cats, 17, wanting to finish decluttering, will I have enough time to travel to Europe?
Will I lose weight?
Am I living the way I should?
Now, I'm wondering if he means he has 17 cats or the cats are 17 years old now.
Either way impressive.
There's this element of...
I can tell him how to declutter if he's got 17 cats.
Yes, yes. Arthur, there is this element of worry here.
And on this podcast, we'll often say to worry is to pray for something bad to happen in the future.
You sort of punish yourself twice by just ruminating over something ceaselessly.
And then, of course, if it does happen, then you get punished for a second time.
What role does worry play in our happiness or our unhappiness?
Worry tends to be a maladaptive response to a source of fear.
So it's a kind of an unfocused fear.
that's how worry works.
And the answer to that is to focus it.
That's the answer about how you can actually manage your own worry.
So, fear is a response to threats in the environment.
And it stimulates a part of the brain called the amygdala, which then winds up talking through a series of complicated channels to the adrenal glands which sit over your kidneys and that spits out stress hormone.
So immediately it's epinephrine adrenaline if you're about to get run over by a car, but chronically it's cortisol that keeps you alert all the time.
a worry, aka anxiety, what's going on is you've got this little drip of cortisol because of something that's unresolved, and this kind of phantasm in the limbic system of your brain.
It might be bad, the cats might die.
The way that you actually fix that is turning fear into what it was supposed to be.
Fear is supposed to be very occasional, episodic, and intense.
That's the way fear is supposed to be, like, that's a tiger.
I'm going to run and climb that tree.
But most of the time I'm okay.
And so the way that you do that, the way that you take the unfocused fear that's giving you a drip of cortisol and bothering you.
And that drip of cortisol is the thing that's in the way of your happiness is for you to focus your fear.
What am I worried about?
My 17 cats bite the dust, what does that mean?
How likely is it? When is it gonna happen?
What will I do when that happens?
So when you focus it, then it's no longer a phantasm and then you can manage it.
Look at your fears, lean into your fears.
And when you do that, they'll become what your neurophysiology wanted them to be in the first place, and you can cope with that, trust me.
Maybe we talk for a second about this misconception about I'll be happy as soon as I'm not unhappy.
Yeah, that's wrong.
Because happiness and unhappiness are not incompatible.
A lot of young people today have the mistaken philosophy of trying to avoid unhappiness.
And when you try to avoid your unhappiness, ironically you avoid your own happiness.
The reason for that is that, that life requires difficulty.
Life requires struggle, the satisfaction that we get in our accomplishments, it requires that we have pain and suffering.
Your suffering is unbelievably sacred.
We believe that, right TK?
Suffering is sacred.
And if you don't understand it, you don't live with it, all you're going to be doing is running away from the experiences that can fulfill you with a whole lot of pain along the way.
And you will, trust me on this, when you avoid your unhappiness, you will also avoid your happiness.
Can we step back for a second and talk about those three ingredients.
Maybe go into detail.
So let's start with enjoyment.
Tell me about enjoyment.
Enjoyment is often confused with pleasure.
Right, because when I hear that, I'm like, oh, if I just get more, more, more, and it turns into hedonism.
That's not what you associate with happiness.
That's not what we need at all.
No, no. So pleasure is an animal phenomenon.
It stimulates a part of the brain, the limbic system that indicates to you that something's good for passing on your genes or getting calories or mates or, you know, something like that.
I mean it's every animal can get pleasure and humans can get it as well.
Everybody who, I mean, we've all known people whose life strategy is maximizing pleasure, it never ends well, does it?
And the reason for that is not because pleasure is bad, but because it's inherently incomplete.
You'll hit the pleasure lever, again and again, and again, and again, monomaniacally.
The way to lead, the way to give yourself greater happiness is not to get rid of pleasure, but to complete pleasure, and the way you complete it is by adding two ingredients, people and memory.
Then you deliver the experience of the pleasure to your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain, that bumper of tissue right behind your forehead, the C -suite of your brain, and then it becomes permanent.
So here's the way to think about it.
Don't get rid of pleasure.
But if something can give you pleasure and it might be addictive, which most pleasurable things can be, if you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.
And, and again, there's certain things that are not addictive, like walking in the woods or saying your prayers and they're pleasurable, okay?
But anything you're doing from gambling to particular other activities that can be monomaniacal to drugs and alcohol, if you're doing it alone, there's a problem, You're stopping too early, add people in memory, then it will become a source of enjoyment and that will add your happiness.
What about satisfaction?
I wrote an essay about how to be satisfied.
We actually read it on this podcast a few years ago.
Oh nice. And I really enjoyed that.
But maybe you could break down satisfaction for us.
Satisfaction has a super strong minimalist element to it.
It's so incredibly important.
And it starts with the definition.
Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle.
Humans wanna struggle.
Humans want achievements, but only when they're hard. If my students cheat to get an A on the exam no satisfaction, but if they study really hard look, it's an exam who cares?
But if they work hard for it, that's what actually brings the satisfaction and that's what actually brings the joy.
So we need to learn how to defer our gratification.
We need to learn to be comfortable with struggle and sacrifice because only then do we get the joy that comes from being a productive human being is a way that that works.
Now that's a strange thing.
That's the reason you tell your kids don't eat before dinner.
Not because it's bad for you, but because you want your kid to be hungry for dinner so that your child will get satisfaction from dinner.
You want her to suffer.
You don't say that, but you want her to suffer by being a little bit hungry because then dinner's awesome.
So I shouldn't be telling my daughter, who's 11, that I want her to suffer?
You don't lead with that.
It's meaningful suffering, not arbitrary suffering.
It's not arbitrary suffering, it's suffering for a reason because you're teaching her that good things come to those who wait for a reason.
But then the minimalism comes in because we have this cognitive error that we make over and over again, which is that we think that satisfaction is going to last forever.
Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction.
That's wrong. You can't keep no satisfaction.
And you think you will, and that's why you try and you try and you try.
And the only way for you to get satisfaction that lasts is to rewire the matrix.
See, your brain says satisfaction will stick around if you get everything that you want.
And that's wrong because Mother Nature just wants you to stay in the hunt, man.
But you're gonna reset.
You're gonna reset because you have to reset.
That's how you survive is by resetting, getting ready for the next thing.
But Mother Nature says, no, no, no, you get that car and you're gonna love it forever.
And if you don't love it forever, it means you needed another car and you get on this treadmill, right?
So the way to hack that matrix is to remember that your real satisfaction is your half is divided by your wants.
So you can work on the numerator all day long, but that's inefficient and very impermanent.
But if you start working on the denominator, you don't need to have more.
You need to want less.
Yeah. That's not have less, that's want less.
And once you start working on that denominator, once you go from your bucket list to your reverse bucket list, once you start going from adding brush strokes to your canvas to chipping away the jade to find the beautiful statue within by having less inflamed desires and thinking about your desires.
Like I want to want less.
That then, then, then hold you, mold you.
Then your satisfaction starts to grow and it keeps sticking around and life really changes.
This is really fascinating because we often talk about things like needing less depending on others less, but that often leads to the same game of trying to accumulate more so that you would depend on other people less or you need them less.
But wanting less, meaning that there are a number of things that I want that give me joy and I'm going to make a spiritual practice of the art of reducing that number, that's offering up your wants.
Give me an example of how that might look like, how that might look.
So there's practical ways to do it.
And there's lots of metaphors for kind of how that works.
But think about what your desires are, what your cravings and desires actually are.
We inflame those things.
We empower those things constantly.
That's how the bucket list works.
I mean, we're taught to become more motivated by feeding our desires and cravings.
You take them, you empty the bucket list and you write something down on a piece of paper on your birthday, and then you say, I'm gonna have this and here's what it's gonna feel like.
I'm gonna consume that.
And here's how I'm gonna feel about myself.
I'm gonna meet that person.
I'm gonna be so awesome.
And kind of makes you feel like a loser.
But it motivates you to be more ambitious.
I have a reverse bucket list where on my birthday, I take my, I got cravings and desires just like anybody else.
I'm an older guy now.
I'm 60 years old, but I'm telling you it doesn't go away because I'm still a human being.
And I put my cravings and desires and I list them and then I cross them out one by one.
Not because I don't have them but because I will not be managed by them.
The way that I manage by my wants is by saying that will not manage me.
I've delivered the craving to my prefrontal cortex where I'm, as we say in my business metacognitively managing my limbic system.
And it's amazing. It sets you free.
Of course, you have these desires.
You're a human being.
You're an organism.
You're built with these things but they don't have to manage you, no, no. And if you do these techniques like this, you are managing your wants, you will want less.
And what I'm hearing from you is that it is possible to get everything that you ever wanted, but still be miserable, because the wants continue to pile on.
You'll never get ahead of your wants.
You'll never get ahead of your wants.
If you don't manage your wants, they will run out ahead of you.
They will sprawl like the suburbs of Atlanta.
They will never stop.
If you're in Tennessee, still driving trying to find the end of your wants, you never will.
So we talked about these first two ingredients here.
You've got the enjoyment, you have satisfaction.
It seems to me that most mammals also experience enjoyment and satisfaction, but there's this other ingredient purpose that maybe makes us uniquely human.
Yeah, meaning, meaning, this is the big one.
And, you know, when I'm looking at the data on the explosion of anxiety and depression, especially among late adolescents and young adults, and has everything to do with the lack of meaning.
And there's a whole big new neuroscience literature about why people feel less meaning, why people have less of a sense of meaning.
And the number one reason is they're not looking.
I have data go back, and they go back all the way to the 1960s and ask college students, this is a UCLA data, what is your job in college?
What are you trying to achieve in college?
89 % said the number one thing was finding my sense of meaning in life in 1965, today it's under 50%.
People are just looking for life's meaning less.
Now, why? Because they're distracted.
Literally, they're working on the wrong side of their brains.
The right hemisphere of your brain is where you actually find you look for and find the essence of meaning of your life.
We're distracted systematically by the technocracy that's cluttered up our lives that moves us, literally moves us to the left hemispheres of our brain.
The right side of your brain is dedicated to the big questions, the why questions, the meaning questions.
The left side of your brain governs the what questions, the distraction questions, the tech questions, the stuff questions.
Modern world is pushing us all on the left side of our brains.
And we don't know how to get back over to the other side.
And so we're not looking for questions of meaning.
And that's why we're depressed.
Because without meaning, you're not gonna be happy.
So one of the tactics that many people have used to try to get people to maybe spend a little less time on the cell phones or on the devices is to say, Hey, think about meaning, but you're saying no, it's the opposite problem.
They can't think about meaning because they're addicted to these or because we are addicted to these things.
So how do you get out of that, catch 22?
To begin with, you should listen to the minimalist podcast and start doing the things that the guys say on the show, which is to clutter it up less so that you can get over to the right side of the brain.
You're not gonna get there as long as you're looking at your device all day long.
You're just not, because you're gonna be stuck literally in the wrong hemisphere of your brain and the complicated questions as opposed to the complex questions.
The right side is complex, which is to say simple to understand, impossible to solve.
Give me a complicated question and then give me a complex one.
Complicated question is how do you design a jet engine?
With enough horsepower, you can dominate that and it doesn't change and it's solved forever.
A complex question is how do I fall in love?
Oh, that's so good.
How do I, how do I win a football game?
I understand falling in love.
I get it but I don't know how to do it.
How do I win a war?
I get it, we win, they lose.
They run away, how do I do it?
I don't know, it's very complicated, it's very messy.
What does it mean to be in love?
I get it, I get it, how do I do it?
And so, a dating app is complicated, a relationship is complex. Your toaster is complicated, your cat is complex. That's why you love the cat and not the toaster.
Something that Josh and I talk about a lot is how you get this sense that when you go on social media, that everyone's following a certain kind of script with the questions they ask and the topics they debate.
Even when we disagree and argue and appear to be thinking critically, we're playing by the rule of only thinking critically about a certain set of topics.
It's like there are six or seven things that you have the permission to debate or discuss right now.
And if you step outside of that, you cease to be relevant.
But man, in that ceasing to be relevant, There's the space for something new.
Oh yeah, for sure. And that you start by clearing the decks.
You start by getting rid of the toasters.
You know, you start by a psych, fewer toasters, fewer toasters.
Why? Because I have to be able to find my way back across the corpus colosseum into the right hemisphere of my brain.
I got to get over that.
And then once you do, it's a protocol for looking.
Let's talk about that.
Oh, yeah, and this is where it gets really beautiful.
And I worked on this for years.
So philosophers and psychologists say there's kind of three parts.
Meaning, coherence, why do things happen the way they do?
Purpose, what are the goals and direction of my life?
And significance, why does my life matter?
Those are the three questions you gotta answer.
Now, the easiest way to do it is traditional religious practice, which answers all three.
The coherence question God made the world.
That the goals and direction, get into heaven, right?
Significance, what's the significance of my life?
I'm a beloved child of God and he loves me, right?
Right? So that's exactly what religion is designed to answer.
If you're not traditionally religious, then you have to wire it differently, but you still can find the answer to your satisfaction, but not if you don't look.
Okay, so what do you look for?
There are two questions to ask and to look for the answers to.
This is what to search for.
How do you find the meaning of life?
Sit in the mouth of the cave and ask the guru?
Okay, okay, great, great, great.
Okay, ask and look for the answers to these questions, but you have to do it, you have to be quiet.
You have to be uncluttered.
You gotta turn the world off to do this.
Number one, why am I alive?
Why am I alive? And that might mean who created me and it might mean what am I alive to do, or both.
And second, for what would I be willing to die happily right now?
The answer is all in all or nothing, there's a problem.
but that's good news because now you know what you need to go looking for.
The answers to those two questions.
Why am I alive? And for what would I delightedly be willing to die right now?
For what would I give my life right now?
Go looking just, and the process of looking for the answers to those questions is de facto, looking for the meaning of your life.
And hopefully it's not, I'd be willing to die for my toaster.
Well, hey man, different strokes but I've never heard that.
Let's do a couple more here at Malabama.
C had a comment about the question of the week, Like what's preventing you from being happy right now?
I'd like to say that I am happy most of the time, but every now and then I think about how divided the country is and how everyone is so reactive about things, and it makes me sad.
I wish everyone could lighten up and laugh more.
Well, as Arthur has already talked about sadness is natural, but quite often we outsource our happiness or at least attempt to.
I'm going to hand you the keys to my heart and now you get to decide whether or not I'm happy or sad.
But really it's me, ultimately, when he was deciding my reaction.
You talk about in the book, choosing a different emotion, can you elaborate on that?
I mean, we think that our emotions are given to us as the only appropriate response to an aggressive situation.
And point of fact, there's a lot that we could do.
There's a lot, you know, when you're feeling sad, a perfectly appropriate emotion many times is humor.
You know, a guy I pat round with is Rainn Wilson.
You've heard of him, he was the Dwight in the office.
And I asked him one time, why are so many of you guys, Your comedian is, why are you so depressed?
And he's like, is there something about comedy that makes you depressed?
He said, no, you got it backwards.
He said, it's sadness that makes you into a comedian.
Because you learn when you're a little kid if you're kind of naturally funny, that when you're feeling this overwhelming sadness and you make a joke, you feel better and everybody else laughs and they feel better too.
That's a substitute emotion.
That's basically the way that that works and that's important.
We can do a lot of that by the way.
There's a ton that we can do.
Here's a substitute way that you can deal with the division in the world.
Like I hear this constantly.
I sit on a college campus, man.
I see polarization.
I see cancellation.
I see trouble all the time.
That's an opportunity if you take it.
Matthew 544, TK. Love your enemies.
Pray for those that persecute you.
You know, what does that mean?
That it mean, oh, you're such a strong moral person.
No, no, no, no, I don't care if you're not religious at all.
When you see hatred and polarization, that's your opportunity to go running toward it in a spirit of love because you decided to do that.
That's a substitute emotion that will change your life and maybe somebody else's as well.
And that's a conscious decision.
I can't just say, oh, you know what?
I feel anger toward this person.
Let me just pick up some joy.
Yeah, now love is not a feeling, love is a decision.
Love, according to Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval philosopher is to will the good of the other as other.
He didn't say anything about feeling to go to the other.
I mean, I don't like my enemies.
I don't like them all but I've decided to love them.
And when I act out of that decision to love them, it changes me, I feel better.
It might change them.
And despite the polarization in the country, I actually am happy in that moment.
You know, it's interesting.
One of the implications of what you're saying is these questions land so differently when we make them personal.
It's fun to ask what's wrong with the world and why is everyone losing their mind.
But what about me? Why am I losing my mind?
Why is nobody healthy?
Why am I not as healthy as I need to be?
Why is everybody so distracted?
Why do I succumb to distractions more than I want to?
And why am I also worried so much about their distraction when I too am distracted?
No, it's just much easier to say, I wish the world were better and when it is, then I'll be happy.
It's something else entirely to say, I actually, I have one area where I have managerial control and it's me and inside myself.
And so in a way our reactions to the events around us shape our happiness, not the other way around.
It's not the event shapes my happiness or my discontent.
It's my reaction to those things.
Let's do a couple more.
DeLorean had a statement for us.
It's 104 degrees outside and it's really hard not to feel exiled to the indoors.
I think there's a quote about snow that says if you choose not to find joy in the snow You will be in a bad mood, but you will still have snow it applies to heat and really many other situations I'm choosing to watch the hummingbirds and birds through the window while I longingly wait for the Sun to sink behind the trees Two hours to go where's this person up in oh hi, maybe 104 degrees the other day and I'll tell you this that if your happiness this depends on the weather.
Your happiness is probably gonna melt away and it's one of those things that yes, of course there's seasonal affective disorder, that there are actual biological reasons that we tend to get depressed as human beings but talk to me about the weather affecting our happiness.
That's one of the things you hear more and more often.
Yeah, no, I hear that a lot and some of it's sort of ideological or political.
A lot of people say, I can't be happy in the hot weather because that's evidence of the changing climate and that's people destroying the earth and how can I not be anxious when the next generation, I can't even bring kids into the world without, and that is a way of manifesting your own sense of anxieties.
Putting them onto the world looking for as we say, exogenous sources of anger, exogenous sources of misery.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
Everybody I talked to who is truly unhappy because of the weather, they're simply displacing the sources of their anxiety and misery on something that's, it seems sort of plausible is the way that that actually works.
I don't like hot weather, especially.
I grew up in Seattle, Washington.
It was never hot there.
I remember one time as a kid, I got up to a hundred degrees.
I'm like, this is unbelievable.
This is like Saudi Arabia or something.
But then I learned a very interesting thing, which is that we are a tropical species, Homo sapiens are a tropical species.
We're actually adapted to live in places This is like Massachusetts or Washington, D .C.
because we developed incredible new technologies called coats.
And we're in our state of nature when we're actually in these relatively extreme climates is the way that that works.
And thinking about ourselves in our ancestral past is a pretty interesting adventure, I have to say.
And so one of the things that I started to do is I would go outside more when it's hot.
I would actually go hiking when it's hot and say I want to sweat.
I want to see what it's like.
I want to think what it was like for my place to seen ancestors.
I want to dig it a little bit." And it actually changed my point of view and I don't love heat, but I can deal with it a lot better than I used to.
And you can find satisfaction within it because you're doing something that's difficult and there's some sort of reward within that.
Well played, Joshua.
How about you listeners?
What's preventing you from being happy right now?
Let us know in the comments.
Okay, TK give me something pithy, what's preventing you from being happy right now?
For me, mine is measure less, live more.
I think it's totally cool to take inventory of things to step back and say hey, am I living my life the way I want to live?
Am I feeling the way that I feel?
But then I think of Osseous Lewis who says that a man who stays awake, trying to measure how quickly he's falling asleep is likely to remain awake all night.
And I think we can obsess over how good I am feeling that we forget that in order to be happy, we have to go beyond the emotional sensation that I'm having in the moment.
what am I living for?
Why am I here? And this is why I like Dr. Arthur's formula here in asking those key questions.
You know, Arthur, I have a contentious relationship with expectations because we all have expectations at some point, but I also realize that every disappointment in my life is a byproduct of my expectations.
Can you talk about the role of expectations in our unhappiness?
Yeah, well, we set up the future because we're looking into the future a lot and we build a kind of a complicated edifice going forward about the way things are supposed to turn out.
And we were forget that there's a whole lot of variability and the way things that can actually happen.
And so why? Because this is the way the human brain is wired.
You build this castle in the sky supposed to look a particular way, things are supposed to happen with great certitude and when they don't, it can be pretty disappointing that way.
But to remember that the future is not a complicated formula that you've put together, It's complex using the terms that we talked about a minute ago.
I'll give you an example of this how to think about our own lives in a real life example.
So from public policy, as a matter of fact, during the first Gulf War in 1990, president George H .W.
Bush, he was trying to figure out whether or not to go into Iraq.
And the Joint Chiefs of Staff ran all these very complicated projections of the future using the most sophisticated technology to simulate what would happen.
And they said, don't do it.
It's gonna be 20 to 30 ,000 American dead soldiers.
He was like, oh, that's bad.
But he thought, I don't know, it doesn't sound right.
It doesn't sound right.
So he made the order all by himself to do this and 200, 219 casualties on the American side, not 20 to 30 ,000.
What happened? The answer is that they were projecting using complicated computer simulations of the Gulf war, were calibrating those simulations using Vietnam war data.
And what they got wrong, was that they were simulating the idea that when the enemy was actually under fire, that they would fight to the last man like the Viet Cong had.
And it turns out that the Iraqi military was so completely disheartened that they were literally surrendering to unarmed drones.
They were so easy to knock over because they were ready to go.
And that was this wrong parameter.
That's what we do. This is what we do Joshua in our own lives.
See the war is complex. The simulation is complicated.
We set up that simulation of the future.
It's gonna go like this and go like this and go like this and go like this.
And then it doesn't because there's all kinds of variability.
We made wrong assumptions.
And then when those things don't happen, the way that we projected it like that sucks.
That sucks. It can happen the way that we project.
We're just doing the best that we can.
So he say, okay here's my best case.
Here's my best guess.
Now I'm gonna let the future happen.
The way it's supposed to happen.
I'm gonna let go. And that's the thing with expectations.
You can have a guess about something but clinging to that expectation is actually what makes me disappointed.
This is an important minimalist concept.
It is not letting go of the past, but letting go of the future.
You ready? Yes. Yeah, so letting go of the future.
In fact, the next segment we have is called right here, right now.
It's about some of that's going on in the life of the minimalists.
And we talk about living right here, right now.
And what does that mean?
Yeah, occasionally we're gonna glance in the rear view.
We'll look at the past. The occasionally we'll look at the, off to the distance, the horizon and see the future.
But if we do that too much, we forsake what's going on.
Oh yeah. Right here in front of us.
So we got a bunch more callers, I'd like to get to, but first real quick for right here, right now, here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. A new month is right around the corner, which means it's time to uncover your pre -existing happiness, you know, the enjoyment and purpose that is hiding beneath all of that clutter.
You can play our 30 day minimalism game for free.
You can download the free calendar over theminimalists .com slash game.
You can see how to play.
Basically, it's about what you're talking about.
You partner up with someone because decluttering is boring.
It's hard to find a lot of purpose and getting rid of the access shoes or jeans or furniture that's in your home but what you can do is partner up with someone make it a little bit more fun.
And so we started the 30 day minimalism game.
We've had tens of thousands of people let go.
Most people don't know where to start.
So, it's just start anywhere.
Day 1, you get rid of one item.
Oh, nice. Second day of the month, two items. Third day of the month, three items. You start to build that muscle.
You get that momentum that you need.
And by the 15th day of the month, you're like, oh crap.
I have to give her 15 things a day and then tomorrow, I have to get rid of 16 things and it becomes gradually more difficult.
The beginning of the month, you partner up with someone, you bet whatever you want.
$1, a nice home cooked meal, tickets to a game, concert, whatever.
Whoever goes the longest wins.
If you both make it to the end of the month, you've both won because you've gotten rid of about 500 items and that's a really good start.
So you can play right now, thereminimalists .com slash game.
Also, if you're a Patreon subscriber, you can share your photos and experiences and our brand new minimalism game community chat thread.
Alright, Malaben. What else you got for us?
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Hi minimalists. This is Claudia in Santa Barbara, Patreon subscriber, and very long time listener to the podcast. I wanted to share with you my listener tip that I like to call the Thrift Store Challenge.
I use this tip on myself, and friends, family, or whoever I'm working with to declutter.
I take whatever stuff that we are dealing with and I will lay it out on a nice uncluttered surface like a dining table or kitchen counters.
and then I have the person or myself pretend that we are in a thrift store and the items there are for sale.
And it's also a great time to explain the sunk cost fallacy and the endowment effect because people seem to always think that their stuff is worth more than it actually is.
Being a lifetime thrift store, I am very aware of actual resale prices.
So that is a good thing to be able to throw out there.
Anyway, normally, everything ends up going straight to the thrift store.
If they haven't chosen the item as something that they would actually purchase, then it's no longer a keeper and goes right into a box and straight to the thrift store.
So that has worked great for me, and I hope it will help someone else.
I wanted to say that you guys got me through the very hardest years of my life and I am so very grateful to you for that.
Thank you. Bye. Baliya, thank you so much for that thrifty comment.
For anyone else who has a listener tip or insight about this episode, or any other episode, leave a comment on Patreon or YouTube or better yet, send a voice memo to podcast at the Minimal lists dot com so we can feature your voice on the show.
All right. That's the first 35 percent of episode 457.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full maximal edition with Arthur Brooks, which includes answers to a bunch more questions questions, like, is my anxiety caused by having too much or too little?
How is my obsession with being right, my self righteousness?
How is that making me unhappy?
Why is it harder to be intentional in America's culture of over -consumption.
Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on The Minimalist Private Podcast. We also have an outstanding home tour for one of our listeners this week over on Patreon.
Just visit Patreon .com slash The Minimalist or click the link down in the description to subscribe and get your personal link so that our weekly maximal episodes play in your favorite podcast app.
You also gain access to all of our podcast archives, all the way back to episode 001.
By the way, Patreon is now offering free trials, so if you'd like to test -drive our private podcast, you can join for seven days for free.
Big thanks to Arthur Brooks for joining us today.
Check out his new book.
It's called, Build the Life You Want.
You can also check out his website, arthurbrokes .com and his column at the Atlantic.
We'll put a link to all of that in the show notes.
And that is our minimal episode for today.
Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space.
on behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, Malabama, post -production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, A .B.
Yenzi, we got Savvy D over here, oh, Buehler is in the studio today.
Oh, yeah! She designed this beautiful studio space, we'll put a link to her as well, if you wanna follow her on Instagram, you're still on Instagram.
Yeah, it's just at Buehler, we'll put a link to that in the show.
She's the only one with a real name.
Yeah, just like Madonna, though, it's just at Buehler, right?
Anyway, if you leave here with just one message, My name's Joshua Fields Millburn.
If you leave here with just one message, let it be this, love people and use things because the opposite certainly won't make you happy.
Much love y 'all. Thanks for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Peace. Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it
