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AB Arthur Brooks Arthur Brooks Helping Millions Live Happier Lives | #1 NYT Best-Selling Author | Vanderbilt Professor | Columnist with The Free Press

“It's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want. And the denominator is more important, because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this Epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise.”

The Daily Stoic · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“It's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want. And the denominator is more important, because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this Epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise.” — Arthur Brooks, The Daily Stoic

Context

Talking with Ryan Holiday about Epicurus, Brooks dismisses the idea that satisfaction comes from having more and offers his own formula for it.

Transcript

The Daily Stoic Around 00:52 into the episode
Arthur Brooks

The human brain, the prefrontal cortex, is designed for you to time travel retrospectively, prospectively, and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now.

Ryan Holiday

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Arthur Brooks

Your animal impulse tells you that it's it's about what you have and having more, which is the Gulf Stream, et cetera, which leads to ruin, absolute personal. Talk anything else, just personal ruin because you can never have enough. It's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want. And the denominator is more important because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this Epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise, or enjoyment in this particular case. But of course, asymptotically, it doesn't work. Right.

Ryan Holiday

You can't go to wanting nothing. Yeah.

Arthur Brooks

Because if you want nothing, well, I mean, wanting for nothing, I suppose. That's heaven, I guess.

Ryan Holiday

Right.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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