From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

by Arthur C. Brooks

Looking at a massive jade carving of the Buddha from the Qing dynasty, my guide offhandedly remarked that this was a good illustration of how the Eastern view of art differs from the Western view. “How so?” I asked. Elliptically, he answered my question with a question: “What do you think of when I ask you to imagine a work of art yet to be started?” “An empty canvas, I guess,” I responded. “Right. That’s because you Westerners see art as being created from nothing. In the East, we believe the art already exists, and our job is simply to reveal it. It is not visible because we add something, but because we take away the parts that are not the art.” While my image of unstarted art was an empty canvas, my guide told me that his was an uncarved block of jade, like the one that ultimately became the Buddha in front of us. My work of art doesn’t exist until I add images and paint. His already exists but is not visible until he takes away the stone that is not part of the sculpture within the block. That metaphor is pretty straightforward in the case of sculpture. It is harder for, say, music. But it’s not impossible. A musician from India once asked me how I could “hear the music” during a Brahms symphony. I asked what he meant; after all, with an eighty-five-piece orchestra cranking away at 100 decibels, it’s pretty hard not to hear the music. He replied that the music, in his brain, was obscured by too many people playing at the same time. This is the essential difference bet...

Vulnerability can be about little things or intensely painful personal experiences. In 2019, for example, the comedian Stephen Colbert elicited an enormous amount of public admiration when he was asked in an interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about a plane crash that killed Colbert’s father and two of his brothers when he was ten years old. Cooper had heard Colbert say previously that he had learned to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” He asked Colbert to clarify this extraordinary statement. “It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering,” replied Colbert. “I don’t want it to have happened . . . but if you are grateful for your life . . . then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.”[10] Beyond simply demonstrating incredible vulnerability, Colbert is saying that he found strength in his tragedy. The psychiatrist Victor Frankl said much the same thing in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicled in intimate detail his time imprisoned by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp.[11] “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” Frankl felt that people could fin...

“He is ready to end his life; only moral rectitude keeps him back.”[20] So wrote a close friend of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven, whose life had become a hero’s journey gone wrong. Beethoven was named after his grandfather, who lived from 1712 to 1773 and was generally considered the preeminent musician in the city of Bonn. His grandson showed the same prodigious talents from an early age: as a young man working in Vienna, Beethoven was often thought of as the artistic heir to the recently deceased Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He studied with the world-famous Joseph Haydn, as well as musical masters Antonio Salieri and Johann Albrechtsberger. It was legitimate to believe that Beethoven would be the greatest composer of his time, and one of the greatest pianists to boot. Ambitious and hardworking, by his late twenties he was already famous. For some years, however, he had been troubled by a strange buzzing and ringing in his ears. “For the last three years my hearing has grown steadily weaker,” Beethoven wrote to his doctor in 1801, when he was thirty. “In the theatre I have to get very close to the orchestra to understand the performers, and ... from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” He held out hope that his hearing problem could be remediated. But that hope was fading by the year, as it became clear to him and those around him that there was no hope of remission. Beethoven was going deaf. What fate could be crueler...

This is just an example of the age-old debate over two kinds of happiness that scholars refer to as hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry. In the quest for the professional marshmallow, I think we should seek work that is a balance of enjoyable and meaningful. At the nexus of enjoyable and meaningful is interesting. Interest is considered by many neuroscientists to be a positive primary emotion, processed in the limbic system of the brain.[26] Something that truly interests you is intensely pleasurable; it also must have meaning in order to hold your interest. Thus, “Is this work deeply interesting to me?” is a helpful litmus