#692: Arthur C. Brooks How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More

One of the most intimate things that you can do with your partner or spouse is pray together. It's super intimate. I know couples that have been married for 25 years that will have sex together but won't pray together because it's too embarrassing to pray together—because praying together is just too intimate.

Physical fitness, for me, is a way to manage my negative affect. It's actually a happiness technique for me. It doesn't make me happier; it makes me less unhappy. That's what physical fitness will do—it will buy you less unhappiness.

When you ask people, 'What do you want your relationship to look like in 5 years?', they have kind of this magical notion of an ongoing passion, and that's the wrong goal. The right goal is what is called companionate love. You want to be best friends in 5 years.

You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more or permanently and securely by wanting less.

I was making a mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction... comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants.

One of the greatest attachments that people have in modern life is to their views and opinions. That's a real attachment. It can be as dangerous as your attachment to money or power.

Now the reason I recommend [blood occlusion training] very strongly is because the research suggests that it's very good for both strength and hypertrophy at lower weight levels. So, it saves your joints but gives you results—and that's what you need to do when you're over 40. Save the joints.

There's a big mistake that almost everybody makes about happiness... Number one, that it's the absence of unhappiness. Number two, that it's a feeling ... Number three is that we can get it. So, we can approach happiness, but we can't get there because we actually need unhappiness; and unhappiness and happiness are not opposites and can coexist.

Basically, there's a protocol in my life... Number one, understand. Number two, practice. Number three, share. And that's the protocol that works for everybody when it comes to happiness. You got to take those three steps.

Intention is fine, but attachment is bad.

Let something in your life take you to the deeper place ... Don't try to go to the deeper place—to find it randomly on your own; let someone take you ... Once people start to say, I'm ready to be taken to a deeper place, a more transcendent state, that person, that entity, will appear.

My father would explain... that there's two kinds of problems in life—there's complicated problems and there's complex problems ... Complicated problems are all the things you can solve with computational horsepower and tech. Complex problems are super easy to understand but you can never solve them.

There is a way to buy happiness, but it's not by buying stuff; it's by buying experiences, it's by buying time, and by giving it away.

Money lowers unhappiness when you move out of deprivation. That's it.

If you want your love life with your partner to get better, go away together ... Or stay home together, but turn off the phone. In other words, get an experience for the person that you love.

I would never invest in the firm of an entrepreneur who is unwilling to give her or his heart away ... If you're not willing to give your heart away, I'm not gonna put my money in your fund.

The biggest problem with dating today is we're less and less attracted to people. We're less and less attracted because they're too much like us. We need more complementarity and less compatibility.

Thomas Aquinas says there's 4 substitutes for God, which we can think of as the 4 substitutes for the real secret to happiness. They are money, power, pleasure, and fame.

No possession will do anything beyond bring you out of misery.

Everybody watching this has got to earn it. Everybody that's watching this has got to go on a quest, a vision quest, for the answers to their meaning questions. There's no other way to do it.

This is one of the single best ways to manage your negative affect is to be in the gym for an hour a day.