Arthur Brooks on how to build a meaningful life

**Jeff Berman** (0:01)
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**Arthur Brooks** (0:57)
I believe that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle. It's how you live your life, because you are the startup.

**Jeff Berman** (1:06)
You are the startup, or as Reid Hoffman would put it, this is about the startup of you. If you're scaling a business right now, that will no doubt ring true, but Arthur Brooks isn't just talking about people literally building a company. He wants all of us to approach our personal lives as seriously as we approach our professional lives. To help us do that, Arthur just published an absolutely unputdownable, that's a word, unputdownable new book called The Meaning of Your Life. While we had him, I couldn't resist digging in to some other topics as well, like the state of capitalism in 2026

**Arthur Brooks** (1:46)
I truly believe in capitalism, but I believe we have to have capitalism with a soul. If you elevate it to your religion, look out, because you're ironically going to stop practicing capitalism, central to which is competition. Competition is what we love. Competition in markets leads to consumers actually benefiting, because they have multiple options. Competition in politics leads to democracy, and everybody hates uncontested elections, except tyrants.

**Jeff Berman** (2:19)
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, the one and only Arthur Brooks. A best selling author, Arthur led a prominent conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, for a decade. Now, he's a Harvard professor, best known for his work on the science of happiness. His new book is The Meaning of Your Life. The book and our conversation are both packed with actionable advice for living with purpose.
Arthur, welcome to Masters of Scale.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:54)
Thanks. It's great to be with you.

**Jeff Berman** (2:55)
It's terrific to be with you. There's so much to discuss with you. I'm not sure how we're going to fit it all in. We've been seeing a lot and talking a lot about a loneliness epidemic in America. I'm curious if you think that there is a meaning or purpose epidemic in America right now as well.

**Arthur Brooks** (3:11)
Yeah, I do. And the reason is because I study happiness and unhappiness. That's my stock and trade. I teach classes on the science of happiness at the Harvard Business School. And I came back to academia in 2019 after 11 years away, running a company. I came back in 2019 It was like a plague had gone through my village. When I left academia, it was happier than the rest of the world. I mean, people in college were falling in love and making friends and goofing around, partying and also having their minds blown by big ideas. And in 2019, depression had tripled, anxiety had doubled. The loneliness crisis was upon us.
And this was immediately a Sherlock Holmes problem for me as a behavioral scientist. So I use my skills forensically when I see problems. You're going to look for a blockage to well-being. And there's three channels of well-being that you're going to look at. One is enjoyment, which is not pleasure. It's pleasure plus people plus memory.
Pleasure doesn't lead you to happiness. The pursuit of pleasure leads you to rehab. But when you actually add people and memory to it, you transfer the experience of the pleasure into the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive centers of the brain where pleasures can be managed and they don't manage you. The second is satisfaction. And satisfaction is the joy from an accomplishment after struggle. The whole audience to this show is super high in satisfaction. They struggle and struggle and accomplish a lot. And they want to accomplish even more, which is why they're listening to the show, is what it comes down to. And that's really, really important. And I talk about that an awful lot. The last channel is meaning. And meaning is this idea that life has a coherence to it, life, you know, that things happen for a reason, that you do things for a reason, which is your purpose, and that your life is significant, that your life matters. And so when I see a huge depression, anxiety epidemic, a psychogenic epidemic of misery, basically, psychogenic just means lots of misery, no biological origin, I know one of those channels is blocked. So I go to the research, and I'm doing the research because that's what I do, and I find that enjoyment, sports always been, young people enjoy their lives, everybody as much as people my age. Satisfaction, especially the Harvard Business School where I teach, it's through the roof, man. They're struggling for big things, tons of satisfaction, but meaning is cratered. Meaning has cratered since about 2008 As a matter of fact, the best predictor of depression and anxiety for young adults is the answer yes to the question, does your life feel meaningless? That's the best predictor. So now the plot thickens because you have to figure out what's meaning mean, where do you find meaning, and how do you fix the problem?