Ask Arthur Brooks what he does for fun and you will get a pause, a laugh, and a small confession: the question is hard for him. He has plenty of pursuits outside the office, and he says he loves his work. But in a 2026 conversation with neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, published as a short clip, Brooks suggests the word "fun" is the wrong lens entirely. The better question is what an activity enriches, and why you are doing it at all. His central claim is that leisure, the time nobody is paying you for, tells you more about your character than your job does, and that the difference between an empty evening and a meaningful one turns on purpose rather than pastime. Drawing on a framework he attributes to Aristotle and Aquinas, Brooks offers a way to sort everyday choices into two categories: those that feed what he calls animal impulse, and those that serve moral aspiration.
The clip opens on a point Huberman makes about how we read people. He notes that the way someone uses their time when nobody is paying them reflects who they actually are, and he is skeptical of the old habit of judging a person by the books on their shelf. Owning a book, as the exchange jokes, is not the same as reading it. Brooks agrees that leisure is revealing, and says it tells you something about a culture and also about a person.
That observation carries real weight. Work is structured by employers, schedules, and incentives you did not fully choose. Leisure is the zone where choice is most unconstrained, which is why it works as a kind of diagnostic. Two people can hold the same job and spend their weekends in entirely different ways, and the difference often says more about their inner lives than their résumés.
This is the hinge of Brooks's argument. He says that if someone uses leisure "to meet animal appetites," that is one thing. If they use it for personal betterment, "not career betterment, not for the compensation that actually comes from the worldly rewards," that is something else. He names four worldly rewards: money, power, pleasure, and honor. If an activity does not pay you back in one of those currencies, he argues, you are doing what he calls proper leisure, oriented toward moral aspiration. That, in his telling, is what moves you from the realm of pleasure into the realm of enjoyment, and it is the route to deeper happiness.
Notice what this does to the usual self-help advice. The problem is not that you go to the beach, or drink, or buy a house. The problem is the motive underneath. The same physical activity can sit on either side of the line depending on why you are doing it, and that is precisely why Brooks insists the activity alone cannot tell you what it is.
He is also careful about the status of the idea. "That's the theory," Brooks says, adding that the best questions come from philosophers, the structural mechanisms from neuroscience, and the testing from behavioral science. "Then of course, applying them to your life is a different kettle of fish." The framework is meant to be lived and checked, not simply admired.
Brooks draws a distinction that many readers will recognize from their own lives. Pleasure is immediate and often fades. Enjoyment is deeper and tends to last, because it draws on something beyond the sensation itself. The working test he offers is simple: what does the activity make possible afterward? An evening that leaves you more connected, more curious, or more attentive has done something a pleasant but forgettable evening has not.
He does not condemn pleasure. He treats it as a legitimate part of life that becomes a problem when it becomes the whole of leisure. The sorting question is not "Did I enjoy this?" but "What was I actually after?"
When Huberman asks him to be specific, Brooks lists three areas that he says mark proper leisure, and that show how a person is moving from pleasure toward enjoyment:
- Deepening relationships, on purpose. Brooks stresses the phrase "on purpose." His example is a weekend when he resolves not to touch his phone while with his wife, so he is fully present with her. The trip to the beach is not about lounging; it is about being on the beach with the person he loves.
- Learning something you don't need to learn. The learning is not for a credential, a promotion, or a deliverable. It is for the sake of knowing.
- Developing yourself metaphysically. Brooks describes this as spiritual, religious, or philosophical life: the pursuit of transcendence "for no other reason than the fact that you seek transcendence."
Each of these areas shares a feature: none of them pays out in money, power, pleasure, or honor in the ordinary sense. That is what makes them useful as a test. If an activity is pulling you toward one of the worldly rewards, it may still be fine, but it is probably not the kind of leisure that builds enjoyment over time.
Brooks says he finds "fun" an awkward word to answer to, because so much of what he does for pleasure is also recreational and enjoyable in its own right. He reaches instead for "enrichment," which he admits sounds a little academic. He explains that the word reshapes the question. "What do you do for fun?" invites a list of pleasant diversions. "What do you do for your own enrichment?" implies something else: that you come out of the activity better, and that something is carried forward into the other things you do, in a good way.
He illustrates the point with his own undergraduate detour. Though he was studying the sciences, he took a course in Greek mythology and loved it. He jokes that the myth of the Cyclops turns out to be partly about depth perception, a neurological fact the Greeks seem to have grasped. The story is light, but the lesson is serious: the course enriched him, and that enrichment outlasted the course.
"The word enrichment, you know, feels good." (Arthur Brooks, in conversation with Andrew Huberman, 2026)
This is where Brooks's framework becomes most practical. Take the beach trip. Brooks observes that the physical location is almost incidental. What matters is the relationship you bring to it, and what you leave with. You are not only creating memories. As he puts it, "you actually both change as a consequence of being there." Maybe in small ways, maybe large ones, but the relationship is enriched, and the beach becomes a setting rather than the point.
He applies the same logic to drinking. "When people talk about, 'Why don't you go out drinking?'" he says, "what I want to know is is it about the drinking or is it the people you're drinking with?" Brooks is open about his own choice: he does not drink, and he describes it as the right cadence for his life. He is not making a moral judgment about others who use alcohol responsibly. His point is that the stated activity does not tell you whether the evening is enriching. The people, the purpose, and the outcome do.
Brooks is candid that most plans arrive without enough information to classify. When someone says they are going to buy a beach house, he says, he does not yet know which side of the line it sits on. If the motive is social comparison, a scoreboard that makes you feel you matter, he calls that animal impulse, and describes it as your "troglodyte brain" insisting you are not good enough without the house that a colleague already has. Quite a different thing, he says, is a house built so that children and grandchildren come often. "Now I'm listening," he says. "Now I'm actually paying attention."
The practical method, then, is to ask for the reason before judging the choice. Brooks's categories give you two axes to check: is the motive pleasure or enjoyment, and is it animal impulse or moral aspiration? Most of the time, the answer is sitting underneath the activity, waiting for you to ask.
Used honestly, this test does two things. It reveals where your leisure is actually going, which may differ from where you assume it goes. And it gives you a way to redirect time without giving up pleasure altogether. Brooks never asks you to abandon the beach. He asks you to bring someone you love, or a question you want answered, or a sense of something larger than yourself.
Start with a single week and keep a plain record of how your free time is spent. For each main activity, ask Brooks's question: what reward is this paying out, and what am I bringing to it? Look for the places where you are chasing the scoreboard, and the places where you are deepening a relationship or learning for its own sake. Then try one deliberate change: a phone-free evening with someone you care about, a subject you have always wanted to understand without any reason to be tested on it, or a regular practice of reflection or prayer. The clip is short, about six minutes, but its question is a lasting one. What you do when nobody is paying you may be the most honest answer you give about what matters.
