Arthur Brooks’ new book drops March 31. Codie Sanchez just interviewed him. And everything they discussed maps directly to why high performers drift — and how to stop.
I was listening to Codie Sanchez interview Dr. Arthur Brooks on the BigDeal podcast last week — Episode 132, “You Need To Be Bored. Here’s Why.” — and I had one of those moments where you have to pause the audio and just sit with what you heard.
Not because it was new to me.
Because someone with a Harvard chair and decades of behavioral science research was describing — in clinical, data-backed language — exactly what I’ve been coaching entrepreneurs through for years.
He just calls it something different.
With Arthur Brooks’ new book The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness dropping March 31, this conversation couldn’t be more timely. And if you’re an entrepreneur or high performer, you need to hear what he’s saying — because there’s a very good chance he’s describing you.
Brooks Says “Age of Emptiness.” I Call It Cultural Gravity.
Here’s how Brooks frames what’s happening right now. We’re living in what he calls an Age of Emptiness. Depression and anxiety have more than doubled in American adults since 2000. Social media has hijacked our attention. High achievers — the people who by every external measure have it together — are reporting some of the lowest levels of fulfillment ever recorded.
His diagnosis: we’re suffering from a cultural crisis of meaning.
I’ve been calling that Cultural Gravity — the invisible force that pulls high performers away from what actually matters and locks them into patterns of busyness, achievement, and performance that feel productive but lead nowhere meaningful.
Different language. Same villain.
The reason this matters isn’t academic. Brooks is showing us with data what I see in coaching rooms every week: the people most susceptible to this aren’t the ones who’ve given up. They’re the ones who’ve worked the hardest. The strivers. The builders. The entrepreneurs running half-million-dollar businesses who still feel like something’s missing.
Brooks even has a name for it: the Striver’s Curse. The higher your standards, the harder the fall when achievement stops delivering the feeling you were promised.
Sound familiar?
He’s Diagnosing Drift Without Calling It That
One of the most powerful concepts Brooks unpacks is what he calls “success addiction.”
His description: every time you achieve something and don’t feel what you expected, rather than questioning the strategy, you double down. You convince yourself the feeling is just around the corner. The next deal. The next milestone. The next launch.
That’s not ambition. That’s drift.
In Momentum & Mastery — and throughout the Drift to Drive framework — I define Drift as a state of complacency, reactivity, and unconscious momentum. You’re moving, but not toward anything you actually chose. You’re reacting to the pull of the environment, the algorithm, the expectations of others, the next shiny metric.
Brooks is describing the same phenomenon through a neuroscience lens: the dopamine loop of anticipation and reward, the hollowness that follows achievement, the compulsion to immediately chase the next hit rather than examine whether you’re even running the right race.
His science validates what I’ve seen practically for years: Drift isn’t laziness. It’s often disguised as hustle.
Resume Virtues vs. Eulogy Virtues — He’s Talking About Means and Ends
Brooks introduced a distinction in the Codie interview that stopped me cold: resume virtues vs. eulogy virtues.
Resume virtues are what you put on a LinkedIn profile. Revenue generated. Companies built. Titles held. These are instrumental — they’re useful for getting somewhere.
Eulogy virtues are what someone says about you when you’re gone. How you loved people. What you stood for. Whether your life meant something.
Most high performers, he argues, spend their entire lives optimizing for resume virtues while their eulogy virtues quietly atrophy.
In Momentum & Mastery, I make this same distinction as part of the Desire factor in Drift to Drive. I call them Means Goals and End Goals.
Means goals are the steps or milestones we believe will lead to what we actually want — they’re the vehicle. End goals are the real destination: the ultimate objectives tied closely to your core values and emotional fulfillment.
The danger, as I write in the book, is becoming too fixated on the vehicle rather than the actual destination. I use this illustration: if you were on a cross-country trip and your car caught fire, would you be more invested in making sure that car completed the trip — or in finding another way to get where you’re going?
Most people are standing next to a burning car, refusing to let go of the wheel.
Brooks is calling it resume vs. eulogy virtues. I call it Means vs. End Goals. We’re both pointing at the same wound — and it runs deep in high performers specifically, because their identity is often wrapped up in the vehicle, not the destination.
The Algorithm Is Engineered to Keep You Drifting
Brooks spends significant time in this episode on something most people dismiss too quickly: boredom as a signal.
His argument is counterintuitive. The more we eliminate boredom through constant stimulation — scrolling, podcasts, content, noise — the more boring our lives actually become at a deeper level. He calls it metaboredom. Life is stimulating on the surface and hollow underneath.
The algorithm, in his framing, has captured the brain. It’s not neutral technology. It’s an engineered system designed to keep you reactive, scrolling, and consuming — because your attention is the product.
This maps directly to one of the core drivers of Cultural Gravity: the environment doesn’t want you to be deliberate. The platforms, the culture, the noise — they are all optimized to keep you moving without direction. And they profit from your drift.
Brooks is saying the same thing from a behavioral science position: your brain has been captured, and the evidence is that you’re consuming more than ever and feeling less fulfilled than ever.
The solution in both frameworks isn’t willpower. It’s awareness, followed by a deliberate decision to operate differently. In Drift to Drive, that moment is the Decision — the fourth factor, and the turning point where everything changes.
Why This Matters for Entrepreneurs Specifically
Brooks’ work is reaching billionaires, Fortune 500 executives, and the most accomplished strivers on the planet. His new book The Meaning of Your Life is positioned as a response to a crisis hiding in plain sight: the most successful people in the room are often the most empty.
If you’re building a business in the $150K–$2M range and you’ve ever hit a milestone only to feel… nothing — this is the conversation you’ve been waiting for someone credible to have publicly.
The science is now on the table. The diagnosis has a name. What’s left is the work of actually breaking the pattern.
That’s where I come in.
The Bottom Line
Arthur Brooks is one of the most credible voices in behavioral science. Codie Sanchez is one of the most credible voices in entrepreneurship. The conversation they had on BigDeal Episode 132 is essentially a 60-minute diagnosis of the exact condition the Unshakeable Framework is built to address.
Brooks diagnoses it. The data backs it up. And if you listened to that episode and felt something stir — a recognition, a discomfort, a quiet voice that said that’s me — that’s not coincidence.
That’s the pattern becoming visible.
And once you can see it, you can break it.
Spencer Combs is the founder of Defiant Resources and the author of Momentum & Mastery. He coaches entrepreneurs and high performers through the Unshakeable Framework — the applied methodology behind everything discussed in this post.
📌 Listen to the full episode: BigDeal Podcast, Episode 132 — “You Need To Be Bored. Here’s Why.” with Dr. Arthur Brooks and Codie Sanchez.
📌 Arthur Brooks’ new book The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness is available March 31, 2026.