Arthur Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you’ve mentioned in one of your books, and I quote, “We Brookses die fairly young.” How does that influence your quest for happiness? One of the biggest mistakes that I think that we make in the new science of longevity is the notion that if we could actually take the death date out of our lives, that we would live happier, better lives. I think that’s wrong because you and I as economists understand the importance of scarcity. How scarcity actually gives you the ability to savor things. Scarcity is actually central to savoring, as a matter of fact. One of the things that’s pretty interesting in the literature that I’ve seen—as a behavioral economist, I read mostly psychology, of course—is that you tend to look at the lifespan of the same gender parent and then make discounting decisions in your own life on the basis of that. My dad, as an academic, just like me, he retired at 62, got sick pretty quickly after that, stopped working because he couldn’t, and then died at 66. I feel like the clock is ticking. The result is that my work, I’m savoring it in a different way. I’m making sure that I’m doing things. I’m answering questions that I think are important. The result is I like it better now than I ever did. Maybe it’s better when savoring isn’t an illusion, that you’re actually going to live to 94 and not die when your Dad did. Is there something to the notion that the real meaning of life is to have a fairly mentally thin existence, not too much introspection, a la Marc Andreessen? People who have high meanings of life, they’re facing death, or they’re in Ukraine, they’re confronting the Russian monster, and so on. Isn’t meaning for life, in a way, quite overrated?…

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