Modern Life Is Designed to Leave You Empty. Here's the Antidote. | Arthur Brooks
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2026
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Six steps to reclaim your brain, find purpose, and escape the doom loop.
Arthur Brooks is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. Brooks is the author of 15 books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. His latest book is The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
In this episode we talk about:
- The three essential components of a meaningful life
- Getting comfortable with boredom
- Why we need to be asking questions that google can't answer
- The neuroscience behind "authentic love"
- Strategies for finding meaning in your work
- What Arthur means when he says "don't waste your suffering"
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:18.2 | Hey, gang, back today with another of my favorite frequent flyers on this show. |
| 0:22.5 | And we're going back to a theme that is incredibly important and highly resonant. |
| 0:26.6 | And it's this, how modern life often makes you sick. |
| 0:30.6 | The idea that we have these ancient brains that are ill-equipped for the world that our modern brains have created. |
| 0:37.0 | Specifically, in this case, we're talking about how a culture of achievement and productivity |
| 0:41.3 | and hustle porn and clout seeking and perpetual distraction can really activate the unhelpful |
| 0:48.1 | parts of your brain and make life seem empty. |
| 0:51.9 | My guest is going to talk about six ways to bring meaning back into your life, |
| 0:56.0 | or if you already have meaning, how to turn the volume up on it. Said guest is Arthur Brooks, |
| 1:01.2 | a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches |
| 1:05.0 | courses on leadership and happiness. Arthur is also the host of the weekly podcast office hours |
| 1:10.2 | with Arthur Brooks, and he's the author of 15 books, including his latest, which is called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. |
| 1:19.6 | In this conversation, we talk about the three essential components of a meaningful life, how to escape, what he calls the doom loop, getting comfortable with boredom, why we need to ask |
| 1:29.0 | questions that Google cannot answer, the neuroscience behind authentic love, strategies for finding meaning |
| 1:35.6 | in your work, what author means when he says, don't waste your suffering, and much more. |
| 1:41.4 | As we all know, one great way to generate a sense of meaning is by being part of something, |
| 1:46.3 | something larger than you, having a sense of purpose, community, and belonging. And that really is the |
| 1:51.6 | core idea around which my team and I have built our new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got |
| 1:57.8 | all sorts of stuff that a regular meditation app might have, |
| 2:01.5 | you know, guided meditations, courses, et cetera. But we also do things like live video |
| 2:06.9 | meditation sessions where you can get your questions answered from me and many, many amazing |
... |
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