Arthur Brooks: My name is Arthur Brooks. I'm a professor and a writer about the science of human happiness. My latest book is The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Today on Big Think, we're going to talk about three big things. Number one is the fact that people have been finding their lives less meaningful. The second is what should we do to live happier lives with more meaning? What are the strategies that we can all undertake? And last but not least, the issue of addiction, especially addiction to devices.

Arthur Brooks: Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Bigthink is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now back to the interview.

Arthur Brooks: There are many hypotheses about the explosion of depression and anxiety out there, especially for young adults under 30. The one thing that nobody's in doubt about, however, is that these problems are real. The numbers just don't lie. Depression has about tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled. The question is why? People have posited that it's a problem of a different generation. That boomers wrecked everything. They made the houses expensive. They ruined the environment. And a lot of boomers will say, "No, the problem is it's the attitude and it's the the fragileness of young people today." None of those explanations really hold water. People have been complaining about different generations for thousands of years. The real reason that we actually find behind the epidemic of depression and anxiety is the answer to the question, does your life have meaning? For many years, decades, generations, the answer for almost everybody was yes. People had a strong sense of meaning in their lives. But then something happened. The percentage of the population, especially young adults, saying my life feels meaningless. It started to creep up and then and then explode. Something happened very recently, really only in the past 15 years, that made life feel meaningless. And meaninglessness, the lack of meaning in life, lies behind the explosion of depression and anxiety.

Arthur Brooks: So some people find meaning more easily than other people do. The number one predictor of your life feeling meaningful is is living your life in real life. It's relationships. It's living kind of in the old way. As a matter of fact, it wasn't that long ago that almost nobody said, "My life feels meaningless." But having distance between you and other people, or having technological mediation between you and other people, for example, having a screen between you and your friends, you and your loved ones, you and your family. Well, that changes life. It takes it from in real life to something more like, I don't know, a simulation of real life, which is exactly what a lot of young people say today. When I interview them, they'll say, "My life feels fake. It feels like something's missing. It feels like I'm living in a simulation." The old movie The Matrix actually was about a machine intelligence that kept people in simulations to take their energy. Well, we're living in the Matrix in no small part, or at least many people are. And the people who are most living in that simulation, that technological simulation that's pulling them away from other people, these are the people who are lacking meaning. These are the people who say my life feels meaningless. These are the people who are suffering the most.

Arthur Brooks: It's funny because the first thing that I ask young people who say their life feels meaningless is so are you looking for it? And not very coincidentally, the people who feel like life is meaningless, they're actually not looking for meaning either. And what this suggests to me as a social scientist is the problem isn't that meaning is impossible to find. It's that looking for meaning has gotten harder. People are not for some reason and and actually we do know the reason now. But but the mystery is why people wouldn't even look for this thing that's actually so important in their lives. So the problem actually goes one step further back. Not a lack of meaning, but a lack of the ability to look for meaning.

Arthur Brooks: There are two very famous psychologists who've specialized in understanding the meaning of meaning. What does it mean to understand the meaning of life? They're Michael F. Steager and Frank Martella, two important social psychologists. And they define meaning as really a combination of three things. Coherence, which is why things happen the way they do. Purpose, which is why I do the things that I do. And significance, which is why does my life matter? Those are the three big wise. Furthermore, Mike Steiger, the first of these psychologists, created a a survey that's very well validated. He's published a lot with it, and other psychologists have as well in the academic literature to see where people are in their meaning journey, whether they have a good sense of meaning, whether they're searching for meaning. This is the meaning in life questionnaire. I've done a lot of research with this as well and I've administered this to my students for year after year after year and seen the results as this problem has gotten worse. One dimension of meaning that you measure with the meaning in life questionnaire is the presence. How much meaning do you feel in your life? How close are you to the goal of understanding the meaning of your life? The second is search. How hard are you looking? So there's four kinds of people with respect to this meaning in life questionnaire. There are those who have a really strong sense of their life's purpose. Their presence is high and they're not looking as a result of that. These are happy home bodies. They're really good where they are. There are some who don't have a strong presence. They don't have it. They don't they don't know it. But but they're looking hard. These are hopeful wanderers. And I have a lot of students like that. And and I was a lot like that when I was in my 20s. I didn't know what my meaning in life really was, but I sure thought I could find it. And I was looking hard for it. and I was a hopeful wanderer. The third type is people who have a strong sense of life's purpose. They they they have a a strong presence of meaning in their lives, but they keep looking. They keep looking because these are natural seekers, real stvers. That's kind of me today. I have a strong sense of my life's meaning, but I'm always looking for something better. But of course, the most unfortunate people are the people who have ver a very low sense of life's meaning. They have a low presence of meaning in their lives. and they they've given up searching or they never even started in the first place. And these people are stuck. They're just stuck. They're not looking. They don't have it. They don't know what to do. And these are the people that I'm most worried about today. These are the people that I'm studying because I see the explosion in the number of people who really are stuck. They neither have a sense of presence of meaning, nor are they looking for it. And I want to know why. Of the four types, the the group that's growing most quickly, especially among young adults, are those who are stuck, those that we call lost in place. That's the number that's actually exploding. Typically, you'd find that it's 5% of the population. Well, it's it's it's multiples of that and is going up every single year. Who are these people? These are young adults who are coming of age. It's not as if older people are losing their sense of meaning, but you know, older people get older and they start to disappear from the population and they're replaced by younger people. And these younger people don't have a strong sense of the presence of meaning in their lives. Nor are they for whatever reason looking for meaning in their lives. And and that's why lost in place, that's why the stuck part of the population is exploding in number. People often ask, "How do I know that the right hemisphere of my brain is working?" The answer to that is that

Speaker: You feel things and don't know why. It's a little bit of mystery in your life. As a matter of fact, let's say that you hear a beautiful song and it chokes you up. You can't quite explain it. Maybe you have a memory of something that doesn't seem so emotional, but it makes you feel emotional. Maybe you have a conversation with somebody and it gives you a strong sensation that this is something you need to pay attention to, but you can't quite articulate what it's all about. When you have strong emotions or a strong reaction to something and you can't say exactly why. The reason for that is that your language centers are not in the right hemisphere of your brain. That you've triggered this sense of mystery and in fact meaning, coherence, purpose, significance, the things that really matter most to you. You've triggered the why side of your brain. And the why side of your brain, well, it'll really affect you in a very, very deep emotional way. When you have those sensations and you can't quite explain them, it means the right side of your brain is very active.

Speaker: Human beings have brains that are more or less the same as they have been for about 250,000 years. That's the late place period in which homo sapiens were well back then living in small bands of 30 to 50 kin-based individuals. They knew each other in real life. They saw each other every single day. They knew they were related and they stuck together. The result of it is that the human brain since then kind of works the same way. We have to know who our people are. We have to have relationships in real life. Now, to be successful at that period and and still today, you needed to be able to do two kinds of things. You needed to sort out complicated problems of how to and what how to find a gazelle and kill it somewhere around a watering hole or for that matter how to write a piece of software or operate your toaster. Just the how to and what of ordinary life. And you also needed the why part of your brain which would sort out the why would I want to do anything? Why would I want to be in relationship with other people? Why would I want to mate and have kids? Why would I want to actually feed my children and bring them up? Why would I want to do all these things? The second set of questions that I just addressed are not the complicated questions of how to and what. Those are the complex questions of why. They're not actually hard to understand, but you can't solve them because they're full of mystery and meaning. Why do I do the things that I do? Because I love my family. So, what do I do? I go and I support them. How do I do it? By figuring out how to get a gazelle. And in the modern context, it's sort of the same thing. And the brain from 250,000 years ago is still today, is supposed to integrate between these complex and complicated functions. We're supposed to ask why questions to motivate us and how to and what questions so that we can actually meet those motivations in ordinary life. You got to have both. If you didn't have one side or the other, you'd be in big trouble. And this is not just because we operate like cavemen. Still today, it's really important that you have motivations, mystery, and meaning in your life to want to do things that have significance. And you have to figure out how to actually go and do those things. If you don't have one side, if you can't do the how-to and what, you'll be helpless. You'll be a disaster. But if you don't have the why, you'll be rootless and won't have any idea why you're doing what you're doing. And you'll be depressed and lonely and anxious.

Speaker: Now, of course, what I'm talking about here is that the one side of the brain, one part of the brain is the why side is the meaning side. It's the happiness and love side. The other side is the howto and what side? the engineering side, the analysis side, the sort out the problem side. Now, there's a theory behind all of this that comes from neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization. That's just a fancy way of saying that the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain do different things. Not a very surprising idea, of course. Now, what do we know based on fMRI studies and the most cutting edge neuroscience? It's the right side of the brain that's dedicated to the why, to the mystery, the meaning, the love and the happiness, the why would I get out of bed in the morning and why do I love the people that I do? Why do I worship the divine? What is my purpose in life? The other side of the brain, the left hemisphere of the brain is the engineering side. It's the complicated problem side. It's the how do I perform my job? How do I get to work? How do I sort things out? How do I write lines of code side of my brain? and they're working together all the time, unless something interrupts the communication between the two hemispheres or even worse if something systematically shuts off one of those hemispheres, which in point of fact is what's happening today.

Speaker: It wasn't that long ago that our culture and our economy and the way that we lived was highly integrated between right and left hemispheres. But something happened about 20 years ago and even more accelerating about 15 years ago where we came to the view philosophically actually that every problem in life had a technological solution. That engineers could fix everything. That there's an app for that. That there's software that can solve these things. That there's something that we can get on our phones that will solve every problem. whether we're sad, whether we're hungry, whether we're lonely, whether we're depressed, that all of these problems can be solved with proper information and proper technology. The result of it is that we dove headlong into an economy largely driven by information, statistics, engineering, technology, apps, screens. Because we tried to solve all the problems in life. All the complex emotional mysterious meaning-based problems in life with the complicated factbased information economy and technology that we could actually get from the engineering world. Now that of course is an error because in truth the engineering side of life which is incredibly important is a left hemispheric side for solving left hemispheric problems complicated problems. For problems in the right hemisphere of the brain we don't need complicated solutions. We don't need these things at all. We need relational solutions. We need mysterious solutions. We need to solve them in the ways that people did in the old ways. Before we had a hyperengineered economy that was throwing random facts and information and data at us all day long, shoving us headlong into the left hemispheres of our brain, vacating the right side where we could actually solve these problems where we could understand the nature of life itself. Here's the thing to understand. There's kind of a conceit that there's a complicated solution to life's complex human problems, but it always leads to bigger problems. In the 19th century, philosophers talked about scientific socialism, where we could get exactly the gears of the machine of society just right so that everybody would be blissfully happy. Well, we know how that turned out. It turned into a bloody 20th century that destroyed hundreds of millions of lives. We talk about scientific public administration where that didn't destroy so many lives, but we know that that's not how things work. When we treat people through our government like a machine, people become incredibly unhappy. And frankly, it doesn't work. The version that we have over the past 15 years that's less about armies and less about government and more about the private sector and the economy and technology is something like, I don't know, social media. When social media was invented, the promise was this. It's going to solve loneliness.

Speaker: Well, here's the thing. Social media is a complicated problem of algorithms and technology. Loneliness is a complex human problem. When you try to solve a complex problem with a complicated solution, it gets worse. It's no surprise to me as a social scientist that every additional hour per day that you spend on social media, the lonier you get. We have a series of complex holes in our psyche —

Speaker: We want to fill our minds, in our hearts. We want to fill them, but we can't fill them with these complicated plugs that come from information, engineering, technology, analysis, devices, and screens. It can't be done. And the more we try, the worse the problem gets. If you ever wonder, how often am I turning on the left hemisphere of my brain and turning off the right? Well, just ask yourself, how often do you look at your phone? If you're like the average American, you're looking at your phone 205 times a day. That's 13 times per hour. That's every five minutes or so. And you know perfectly that there are times when it's a lot more often than that. If you're in a supermarket checkout line, look at everybody around you and yourself. Everybody's on a screen. Are you behind a traffic light that's lasting a little bit too long? Out comes the phone. The truth of the matter is that any opportunity for the right hemisphere of your brain to turn on to give you mind wandering and flights of fancy and thoughts of meaning, you're going to turn it off. You're going to go right to the left hemisphere of your brain by opening up your phone and being bombarded by information that you did not ask for.

Speaker: The fact that we've become so adept at turning off the right hemisphere of the brain, turning on the left, the fact that in any given moment when we experience the slightest amount of boredom that we go right to our screens, it's had the net effect of making it impossible for us to be bored at all. I mean, nobody likes to be bored. Boredom is well it's boring. People don't like it. But the truth of the matter is that we are designed biologically to be bored a lot. There's a set of structures in our brains called the default mode network. It turns on when you're undistracted. When you're bored, that's the set of structures that we need for right hemispheric activity because it leads to our minds wandering to asking questions that are inside our hearts and inside our minds and not just coming from our phones. This is what gives us the capacity to ask the meaning questions in the first place.

Speaker: Now you got to ask yourself why would I do this? Why would I turn off my ability to be bored and therefore become less and less and less adept at being bored in the first place? And the answer is because we solved the problem of boredom with technology. We didn't like it and so we fixed it. But like so many problems in human life, we fix little problems and create major crises. We have analgesic drugs to wipe out pain, and that's great. But of course, we make them more and more and more powerful. And this year, 100,000 people will die of opiate painkiller overdoses. We create major crises constantly to solve little problems. The way that we use devices to wipe out boredom is a absolute case in point.

Speaker: There's wonderful research that actually comes from my university where people are put into boredom experiments. You bring undergraduates into a lab. They'll do anything for 20 bucks. And you set them in a chair where they have nothing to do for 15 minutes. I mean, nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, just 15 minutes, complete silence. They have one thing that they can do besides wait there patiently. They have a little key fob with a button on it. And if they push the button, they self-administer a painful electric shock. What the researchers want to know is what do people prefer? Boredom or shocks? Now you can imagine how this turns out. It's a question that practically answers itself in modern life. 25% of the women actually shock themselves. Twothirds of the guys shock themselves. Maybe this is more of an experiment of the difference between men and women. I don't know. But the bottom line is that a lot of people prefer shocks to being bored. In the experiment, by the way, one guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. He got thrown out of the experiment. The point is, we would prefer pain. And we figured out how to get that pain. It's the supercomputer in your pocket. That's your shocking device. Open it up. Get a bunch of information you didn't ask for. Look for notifications on your social media that will not edify you, you don't care about. Maybe look for a little bit of conflict that you weren't expecting. This is just you in the experiment because you want to keep that default mode network off so you don't experience the slightest amount of boredom.

Speaker: And as the years go by, we get worse and worse and worse and we escalate more and more on the technology. The problem gets worse. Now, there's another problem with boredom, especially when we actually don't know how to deal with boredom. It's highly correlated with addictive behaviors. I look a lot at the psychology of the addiction to substances and behaviors, drugs and alcohol and gambling. And one of the best predictors is being bored. Another is being anxious. Anxious people. Bored people. Bored and anxious people. These are people who are really at risk for drinking too much, for using too much drugs, for gambling to excess, because they're actually trying to distract themselves from ordinary life. They don't want to be alone in their heads because it's too anxiety-provoking or it's just frankly too boring.

Speaker: Well, what's happened is our inability to actually face up to a little bit of boredom while waiting at a light or in the supermarket checkout line or anything else has made it such that when we have the slightest amount, we have to actually use our devices to chase away that boredom, which makes the addiction worse. And this puts us into kind of a doom loop. A doom loop in which a little bit of boredom. The devices go on. The devices make it harder for us to deal with boredom. So, we use our devices more and that escalates the behavior and pretty soon before we know it, that's all we're doing. We're not alive in real life. We're not seeing the things around us. We don't notice anything else. We're simply trying to distract ourselves almost 24 hours a day or at least every waking hour.

Speaker: You know the engineering culture, the culture of hustle and grind and efficiency and technology. This is nothing new. I mean this has been going on for a long time all the way through the 20th century really since the advent of the industrial revolution as a matter of fact. And so you got to ask why did it suddenly explode after 2008? It wasn't just this particular device the small screen in our pockets. It was something bigger than that. And what it really was was something that we actually see in all sorts of natural and technological symptoms. You know, if you're looking at the spread of a virus, well, it'll kind of incubate and incubate and grow slowly and suddenly it'll explode, right? And there's an idea, a political idea, and a few people will have it and then it'll spread a little bit and it'll feel like it just comes out of nowhere. Now, why is that? And the answer is what we might call the Campbell effect.

Speaker: The Campbell effect actually comes from this character in The Sun Also Rises, the great novel by Ernest Hemingway, Mike Campbell. He's a drunk and he's broke. He's bankrupt and he's asked by somebody else. It's like, "How'd you go broke?" And he says, "Little by little and then all of a sudden." That's how things actually happen. That's how things happen in life. You know, nobody's marriage suddenly just breaks apart. Most people, this is one of the things that I study, they don't get along and they don't get along and they work on it as best that they can and then suddenly they can't stand it anymore and they get a divorce and people say it came out of nowhere. It doesn't come out of nowhere. Our device addiction and the explosion of meaninglessness didn't come out of nowhere. It brewed and it bubbled and it cooked and it rose little by little and then we had a few outsized innovations and boom.

Speaker: There's a common argument when there's a problem that the way to solve the problem is by doing the thing that appears to be problematic just a little bit more until it solves the problem. I hear this a lot. You know, if you find that spending a lot of government money leads to…

Speaker: social problems, you just need a little bit more government money. Just a little bit more and then we'll be okay. That's the kind of argument that people will make. But they make it in all sorts of ways. You know, people will who are deeply deeply addicted to alcohol. They they they they deep down they think there's enough alcohol out there and at some point I will have had enough. I've studied people who make vast amounts of money. The first thing that a a billionaire says after earning her or his first billion is, "It didn't feel the way I thought it was going to. I guess I need another billion." This is also known as the hedonic treadmill. Run, run, run, run, run. But if it turns out that something is creating a problem, it's very rare that more of it is going to solve that problem. It it makes perfect sense. But of course, we we sort of forget that. There's an expression that's apppropo in this situation. It's if you're in a hole, stop digging. And that's exactly the situation we are in with technology.

Speaker: Look, there are some utopians and I'm not anti-technology on the contrary. I've got every device known to man. But technology, true utopians believe that we're going to hit some sort of a singularity, that there's going to be the killer app that's going to sort everything out. I get it. I get it. Yeah. Too much screen time and it's it's making your kids depressed and it it's making you not care about your life and it's ruining your marriage because it's pulling you away from your spouse. But sooner or later, the tech is going to be so unbelievably good that every problem is going to be solved and we won't be lonely anymore. you're going to have the perfect partner in AI. You're going to have the perfect therapist in the app that's going to solve this for you. That's wrong. And the reason it's wrong is because the neuroscience is wrong. That's not the way that the brain works. You can't solve the right brain's problems by getting more leftbrain solutions. You can't get there. The truth is, you actually can't get to down by going further up.

Speaker: Now, one solution to this problem that I hear all the time is throw your phone in the ocean. Get rid of it all, man. I mean, go live in the woods. Now, to begin with, that's completely implausible. That's just not going to happen. The ship has sailed. But furthermore, it's a bad idea because the truth of the matter is that human ingenuity is is improving human life all the time. We live longer. We live better. We have greater economic growth. We're meeting our caloric needs. Life is better because of the way that we've solved so many complicated problems. The solution is not less technology. It's using technology appropriately. It's not overengineering the parts of our lives that don't need to be overengineered. It means actually attending to the right hemisphere of our brain, the complexity, the the mystery, the meaning, the love and the happiness by actually being in relation in love in the ways that we actually need and not polluting that right hemisphere of our brain with more of these left hemispheric solutions. I'm not anti-technology. I don't think any of us should be anti-technology. On the contrary, it just means that we need to understand how technology works, how it should work, and where we should not be using it as much as where we should be using it.

Speaker: Now, a lot of what I know about this actually comes from leftbrain technology. It actually comes from the study of neuroscience in which we're dealing in facts and technology and analysis and science. It's really great. I love that for sure. But I don't let it turn into a religion, per se. I have a real religion. I don't turn it into love per se because I have real love in my life and I have to have boundaries between these kinds of solutions to inform me of the things that are really important to me for my understanding of life and and my work and actually being part of that life and living that life and and enjoying my work and having relationships that will enrich it and and make me want to do it in the first place.

Speaker: Chapter 2, the five essential elements of happiness.

Speaker: We are meaningbased creatures. And by that I mean that we are evolved to understand the meaning of our lives through the way that we would live an ordinary life by interacting with other people, by falling in love, by having conflict, by by wondering about the the great beyond. maybe trying to ponder the essence of our existence. All of these things are central to finding meaning and that was just normal before we were completely distracted all the time. Before we were we were shoved headlong into the left hemisphere of our brains. The right hemisphere was working normally and and nobody had to think about it. That's one of the reasons that if I went back 50 years, maybe 30 years and said, "Are you having a meaning crisis?" People would say, "What are you, some sort of French intellectual?" Of course not. That means nothing to me. I mean, it was only Jean Paul Sartra smoking a filterless cigarette in a Parisian cafe that would be asking these deep philosophical questions. They were not relevant to most people's lives.

Speaker: But here's the thing, things become relevant when they're scarce. Even if we never thought about them before, if the air in this room started to dissipate, I would become incredibly conscious of it very quickly and it would become a big problem. Now, meaning in ordinary life is like an atmosphere that's losing its oxygen. That's what's happening with our use of technology and our overengineered culture. It's become incredibly scarce. So, what do we need to do? We could turn back the clock. I suppose some people have proposed that. I don't believe it's going to happen. I don't even want it to happen. Instead, what we need to do is to live in ways that people used to take for granted. We need to live like my greatgrandfather, like my father, like I did before the advent of the way that we use technology today to do the things that came ordinarily to us, but that are actually quite extraordinary today.

Speaker: People want to find the meaning of their lives because they want to be happy. Meaning and happiness are related to each other. And and here's how they're related. Happiness is not a feeling. Feelings and happiness are related. Like the smell of your turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner. The smell of the turkey is evidence of the Thanksgiving dinner. Your happy feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something more tangible. And just like your Thanksgiving dinner, by the way, it has three macronutrients. Your Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Your happiness is a combination of the macronutrients, enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your accomplishments and achievements, and the meaning of your life. Those are the three macronutrients. Those are the things that people who are really happy that have high levels of well-being, they have in common, that they're good at those things. They pursue those things. They know how to get those things. They enjoy their life a lot. They take a lot of satisfaction in what they do every day. And and they know the meaning of their lives. Those are the things that we need to pay attention to.

Speaker: Now, as a happiness scientist, when I see a big change in happiness for the worse, or I see a big group of people that have a low level of happiness, I know that one of those things is missing. I know that one or more of those macronutrients is not in abundance. So, I started looking for it. Now, when I started looking at young adults under 30 and seeing this incredible happiness crisis that we've seen, which is obvious when you look at the statistics on depression and anxiety, that one or more of those macronutrients is blocked. Is it enjoyment? Nope. There's no evidence that young adults enjoy their lives anymore than anybody at any other time. Do they take less satisfaction in their accomplishments? Not my students. Some of my students who are really suffering, they have the highest level of satisfaction because they're doing all kinds of cool stuff all the time, way more than most young people did when I was that age. So that's not it either. It's meaning. That's when you look at the survey literature, you find that

Speaker: More and more people say, "My life feels meaningless. I don't know what I'm meant to do. My life and my relationships don't have a meaningful feeling to them. I feel like I'm living in a simulation and not really digging in in my life," which is the essence of not finding meaning. So this is how it all hangs together. Sadness and anxiety, which are exploding, they are a lack of happiness in people's lives. Happiness is enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning, and meaning is falling apart. That's the problem that we need to deal with today by living in a different way.

Speaker: Every philosophical and religious tradition, they do things differently, of course, but one of the things that they all have in common is that they're supposed to help us find meaning in our lives. I mean, why would you read Socrates and Aristotle and Plato if you weren't trying to find the deep meaning of things? That was kind of the gig for philosophers and for everybody in wisdom traditions and theologians all throughout time. It's really all about meaning. Now, where it gets interesting is the similarities between the approach of most of these traditions. One of the things that virtually every philosophical and religious tradition of note has in common is that they encourage us to find meaning through what the ancient Greeks called aporeia. This is puzzles, open-ended questions, questions that don't have answers.

Speaker: Now, here's how it relates to what we're talking about here. People ask questions all day long and put them into Google or into chat GPT, right? But these are not meaning questions because they're not open-ended. I defy anybody watching me right now to put into chat GPT, "What would I give my life for?" You'll get back garbage. You'll get back nonsense. It'll start by kissing up to you. It'll say, "Well, that's a very intelligent question. That's the kind of question that philosophers have asked forever." And it'll give you seven examples of answers that people have given before. It will not tell you what you've given your life for because it can't. It's not a meaning question.

Speaker: Aporeia in every tradition, starting with the ancient Greeks, probably before the ancient Greeks, and in every religious tradition, is to ask questions that don't have clear answers. Why? Why would this lead to meaning? You already know why. Because so doing you illuminate activity in the right hemisphere of your brain. The why side of your brain, the mystery and meaning side of your brain, is actually stimulated by asking the type of questions that don't have clear and precise answers that you can get from googling something. That's really, really important. Now, what did the ancient Greeks do and what does virtually every tradition today still do? It asks you to ponder questions, and through the pondering you will come to understanding beyond your ability to articulate it.

Speaker: I'll give you an example from another tradition. The Zen Buddhists will actually train junior monks using something called koans. Koans are just riddles. Here's an example of a koan. A junior monk is walking down a trail in the woods by himself. He sees coming toward him on the trail a senior monk. He asks the senior monk, "Where are you going?" The senior monk says, "I do not know." The junior monk says, "Well, how will you know when you get there?" He says, "I'll know when I get there because not knowing is the most intimate type of knowledge." Now what that does is it asks you to understand the nature of not knowing and how it actually is a kind of knowing, which doesn't make sense. It feels like nonsense. And yet the right hemisphere of your brain says there is something in not knowing, that it's a deep form of knowing, and purposely not knowing something. And sitting in the not knowing is a form of knowing. You feel it, don't you? And you can't articulate exactly what that means and why. But that feeling of "I get it. I kind of get it." That's the right hemisphere of your brain working. And that's how it's supposed to be. That's how these traditions actually work.

Speaker: You can go live in a Zen Buddhist monastery. I suppose you can try to join some sort of a club where aporeia is the practice of the day, like the ancient Greeks. Or you can just start asking these deep questions. Here's what I recommend. If you come over to my house for dinner, there's not going to be any phones. There's not going to be any phones at the table. And I'm going to ask you questions like this. What are you most afraid of? Bring it on. And I want to know, are you afraid that you won't be loved? Are you afraid of death? Why? And you're not going to be able to articulate it exactly because these are right-hand side questions. And I'm not doing it just because I'm a professor of this stuff. I'm doing it because I want to know the meaning of my life.

Speaker: This is school, these types of questions. Now, here's how you know. If you can put it into Google, if you can put it into Claude or Gemini, and you can get information that's meaningful and makes sense to answer that question, it's not the right kind of question. It really is the kind of question that relates to the definition of meaning itself. Meaning is three big why questions. Why do things happen the way that they do? Which is coherence. Now you can answer that with respect to the mind of God or with the working of science, or if you reject both of those things, maybe with a conspiracy theory. I don't know. The second big why question is why am I doing the stuff that I'm doing? That's purpose. How do I know that I'm making progress in my life? What are my goals and direction? Why am I doing the things that I'm doing? And last but not least is why does my life matter? That's the love question. That's significance.

Speaker: Think about those questions. Think about those things with the people that you love. Go deep. Watch meaning appear. Now, the problem with meaning questions, with the big wise or coherence, purpose, and significance, or any of the big meaning questions of life, is that they don't have answers. The reason is because they're largely mediated by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the complex side of the brain. Complex problems don't have distinct solutions. Complex problems simply have an understanding. You live with complex problems. My car is complicated. I don't know how it works, but I could figure it out. I have the brain power to get the education to understand once and for all how my car works. My marriage is complex. It's a right-hand side thing. I've been married 35 years. I will never solve my marriage. I never will. Which is why I love my marriage. I don't know if my wife's going to be mad at me this afternoon. I don't know if we're going to have a conflict because I'll never solve it. There's no algorithm. There's no app for that. And that's the thing with these big why questions of life. They're complex. They're mysterious. And that's what makes them meaningful. It's also makes them scary and frustrating.

Speaker: In a world in which something you can't neatly tie up with a bow, in which you can't actually come to a solution once and for all, we reject those things. Then we're averse to, we're allergic to the meaning questions of life, precisely because we can't answer them the same way that we would, "How does my car work?" One of the most complex phenomena in every person's life, and also one of the phenomena that brings the most meaning, not coincidentally, is falling in love and staying in love. Human romantic love is a deeply complex phenomenon. It's something that we write songs about but we can't quite completely apprehend. It's nothing that can ever be solved, which is why it feels so incredibly mysterious and meaningful to us. And it's why it's something that almost everybody wants. You know, when people lose a spouse at 80 years old, they're liable to fall in love with somebody new at 82 because we want that. We get a sense of meaning in life from that. There are other ways as well, but this is one of the most powerful of all. It just turns on the right hemisphere of our brains. It makes us feel meaning when somebody is in love with us and when we're in love with somebody.

Speaker: The problem is that in an era of complicated problems that have neatly tied up engineering solutions, we've tried to bring to bear technology to solve the problem of romantic love. And we've made it harder, even impossible, even invisible and absent in the lives of a lot of young people today. There are data that come from Gene Twangi at San Diego State University and Jonathan Height at the Stern School at New York University that people are falling in love less than they ever have before. People in their 20s today are less likely to be married, less likely to live together, less likely to have sex, less likely to say they're in love than ever before. Why? There's more technology that makes it easier for us to have contact with and to know more people than ever before. It should be easier than it ever was, but it's not. And the reason is, well, you already know the reason. Falling in love is right hemispheric and the technology that is matching us up with other people is largely left hemispheric. It's a mismatch. It's taking a complex problem and trying to solve it with a complicated solution.

Speaker: Dating apps are getting better, and I'm very confident that they're going to be excellent compared to what they are today. I'm involved in some of the projects to make dating apps better. But the one way they're not going to get better is if we substitute for the complex experience of knowing each other in real life with an algorithm that tries to match us with respect to demographics and tastes and opinions.

Speaker: When people fall in love, they feel like they're possessed. They feel like they're not themselves. And the truth is that they aren't themselves. You know, you can do brain scans on people falling in love and they look remarkably similar to people who are addicted to methamphetamine. I mean, their brains are working in a very funny way. There's a neurochemical hurricane going on in the brains of people who are falling in love. Now, there's a reason for that. It's not because it's something bad like getting addicted to meth. It's because it's something good. It's bonding us to another person, ideally someone to whom you're completely unrelated biologically, and making that person your kin extremely fast. So, you better have some serious action going on inside your head so that you can do that. And we do.

Speaker: Here's the way that it works. The way that people start to fall in love starts with attraction. Now, even people who are really sophisticated and they say that, look, it's, you know, love is blind. You know, we don't care. Yeah. Right? The truth of the matter is that we want to be attractive to each other. And the reason is because when somebody is potentially a mate, they're just attractive and the way that they look, the way they sound, the way that they smell, that stimulates sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen. Both men and women have both. Men have more testosterone, less estrogen. Women have more estrogen, less testosterone to be sure. But we both need both actually be attracted to. That's the ignition of falling in love.

Speaker: Now the next stage of falling in love comes relatively quickly — days or weeks — where that's the feeling of anticipation and euphoria where you really want to be around a person. You want to be around the person. It's the person and not just the looks. And this actually involves two neurotransmitters. One is norepinephrine which is actually a stress hormone produced in the adrenal glands. And then there's dopamine, which is something that we talk about in the process of all addictions and wanting and learning and liking. What norepinephrine does, it gives you a sense of euphoria when you're exposed to that person or even potentially when you think about that person. A text comes in, ding, and you say, "Is it her?" That sense of euphoria — it's just a text. You give it a lot of significance. The dopamine gives you a sense of anticipation of reward. Once again, it's going to be great when I see that person. Why? Because you're starting to neurochemically bond to the other person who's going to become your kin. It has to be very intense to do that.

Speaker: The third step, which comes later, this is kind of the dark side of falling in love actually because it involves a deep dip in serotonin and neuroscientists disagree about why this actually happens. It might be because of stress hormones which will suppress serotonin. But another hypothesis that I find really plausible and quite compelling is the idea that serotonin dips because when it does it makes you ruminate. So rumination in depression — sad rumination — is one of the key signs of clinical depression and that occurs — I mean one of the markers of that is low levels of serotonin in the synapse. This is one of the reasons that people will take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So you have more serotonin in the synapse and you tend to ruminate and your sadness less. "I'm so stupid. My life is so meaningless," etc., etc. Well, one of the characteristics of falling in love in this third stage is ruminating on the other person, thinking about them. Thinking about it was like, was that last text that she sent me? What did it say? It was only three words. It was, "Are you up?" But what did it really mean? Did it mean something more significant than that? Did she really care if I was asleep? Or was she wondering if wouldn't it be nice if you came over to my house — and what you're doing is you're ruminating because you're bonding to the other person. You're neurochemically fusing with the other person. Ideally, if you're ruminating on each other, this is taking you to a very, very deep level. This is one of the reasons that clinical depression and falling in love at this stage are quite similar as a matter of fact.

Speaker: Now, what are you trying to get to? Ultimately what you want is to bond to each other as a kind of kin as I mentioned before and that's associated with the production of oxytocin also known as the love molecule. It's a binding neuropeptide that functions as a hormone. Oxytocin is like "this is my person" and it has a cousin that's vasopressin and vasopressin is "I will defend this person." That's family. That's what it comes down to. When you have a baby and you have eye contact with your newborn baby, there's just oxytocin flowing that's bonding you — and when you fall in love with somebody and you've gone through the whole cycle and you become kin with one another and you want to get married now. Then this oxytocin saying "this is my person now and forever." We're like wood ducks or Canada geese. We're going to be monogamous now and forever. It doesn't always work out that way, but that's what you feel. And that's what you're supposed to feel, which is why you're willing to go up to the altar and say, "Till the day I die, baby. Till the day I die." That's what oxytocin is supposed to make you feel. And that's the process that we actually go through. We are made neurochemically to love each other romantically and to pair bond one to one forever if we can.

Speaker: When I first started studying romantic love, I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing. It's a miracle, as a matter of fact. But I had this one nagging question. What about people who don't have it? You know, I don't know, priests and nuns, people who don't find the one, people whose spouse dies and they never pair up with somebody else. There are a lot of people out there who are single for sure. Does this just mean they're out of luck? Well, there's an answer to that. And that answer actually comes from a great study that was undertaken by researchers at Harvard University. It's called the Harvard Study of Adult Development that looks at people over an 85 year period. And it looks at how they live their lives to predict whether they were healthy and happy when they were old. It's kind of like a crystal ball. And some of it's pretty obvious. Smoking, drinking, exercise, diet, learning, dealing with your problems. But number one on a walk was love. And there were two types of love that gave people the deep mystery and meaning in life when they were old. Number one was sure enough romantic love, ideally in a lifelong marriage if that was…

Speaker: But the other type was deep, deep friendship, deep, deep platonic friendship. That this gave a sense of mystery and meaning as well, and deep, deep happiness as well. So here's the bottom line. A lifelong marriage is great if you can get it, but if you can't, lifelong friendship or deep, deep friendship, an understanding of one person to another, two souls, the perfect friendship that Aristotle talked about where you have a common love of other things and you walk together shoulder to shoulder into the future. You know, that kind of useless but beautiful friendship that you can have with another person that brings it too. It turns out that's another path.

Speaker: One of the ways that people commonly find meaning and always have is what's called transcendence. And that means to transcend yourself. Look, mother nature puts you into a psycho drama of your own life where you're the star. My money, my car, my food, my television shows, my lunch, my me me. It's just so boring. It's completely tedious. And yet we're obsessed with it, with the quotidian details of our lives. I noticed at one point that at my university the most popular undergraduate class is astronomy, introduction to astronomy, and they line up out the door for this astronomy class. And I didn't know why because they're not astronomers. They're English majors and classics majors. And so I asked one of the students at one point, I said, so why do you all love the astronomy class so much? And she said, "I actually don't know, but it's Thursday mornings at 9:00 and when I go into class, inevitably I'm all stressed out because I had a big argument with my mom and I think I might be breaking up with my boyfriend and I'm not doing so well in a class." And an hour and a half later, I come out and I say, "I'm a speck on a speck on a speck and I'm at peace. I'm at peace because I can see myself from the vantage point of things that are bigger than me." That's transcendence.

Speaker: Now, there are a lot of ways to get that kind of transcendence, but here's how you don't get it. By looking in the mirror. Literally looking in the mirror or figuratively by looking at your notifications on social media. The problem with modern tech is it's a big mirror on ourselves and it makes transcendence impossible. It brings us down to the base level of our lives. It makes life profoundly grindingly boring because it's all about these little things that what do I, what am I eating and what supplements am I using and are my biceps big enough and it's just tedious and it makes it impossible for us to get the peace and perspective that we actually need to use our brains properly and to understand the meaning of life, for the meaning of life to find us. So one of the great things that people do who have a lot of meaning in their lives is they go out and they find ways to transcend. They have ways to transcend themselves. Now one way is to look upward at things that are greater than we are and stand in awe. And the other way is to look outward to people who are not ourselves. Those are the two forms of transcendence.

Speaker: Vertical transcendence is typically practiced through religious faith. For example, I'm a traditionally religious person. I'm a Catholic and I actually go to mass every day and one of the reasons that I do that is that I need to transcend myself. I need to get away from myself. I need the peace and perspective that I actually get. I also happen to believe that these ideas are true but the transcendence per se is central to my pursuit of meaning and therefore to the happiness that I have in my life. Other people get that through a vipassana meditation practice or studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach or walking for an hour before dawn without devices or studying the stoic philosophers. There are lots of ways to do that but you need something. Another way is to look outward toward other people and to serve other people without any self-interest at all. This is a very beautiful thing and it's an incredibly well-studied thing where people understand their lives better when they're serving other people, when they have a sense of being needed. They have a certain kind of bliss that they can't describe in any other way. The great social psychologist Rhett Diesner, he talks about moral elevation when you serve other people and you feel kind of a warmth in your chest and almost an otherworldliness.

Speaker: That otherworldliness, that's right hemispheric activity. And that's the transcendence that we need. But we have to figure out a way to do that. So I spend a lot of time with my students talking about how do you find your faith? How do you learn how to meditate? How do you get into activities that serve other people and are not just all about you? That's a lot of what I spend my time teaching. When people are looking for transcendence, many of them have a background with a traditional religion. And so it's a natural place for them to look is the faith of their youth or maybe they're just interested in religion. The barrier that a lot of them have to that, however, is they don't feel it. You know, it's like I just don't know if I don't really feel it. And so it's sort of hypocritical. What am I supposed to go to a house of worship when I don't feel it? We live in an age of feelings and authenticity. But remember, feelings are just activity of the limbic system. There's a system of alarms that tell you about threats and opportunities. Feelings are liars, man. This is just the workings of your brain at any given moment. Feelings are not authentic or true to anything that's metaphysically important. Anything that with respect to the way that you want to design your life, that's a big misapprehension that we've been told and that we've told ourselves.

Speaker: So, what do I tell my students if they're actually looking for a way to understand faith, maybe incorporate it into their lives? Fundamentally the experience that people have of a religious faith has three parts to it. One is indeed the feeling that you have. A second is the beliefs that you hold quite consciously. And the third is the decisions that you make to actually practice that faith. Because a faith that's completely not practiced is not much of a faith at all. And one that's bereft of belief, there's not much there either. And you want to feel something sometimes at least. Here's the problem. A lot of people think that even if they agree with that, that they can't have a religious faith unless they first feel it and then they come to believe it and only then to be authentic with themselves would they practice it. It turns out that's exactly the wrong order.

Speaker: If you want any sort of religion in your life, it's the same way as if you wanted to stay married in your life. Anybody who's been married for any length of time knows that it doesn't go with respect to what you feel at any given moment. I've been married 35 years. If it were just about feelings, I wouldn't have been married 35 minutes because that's probably when we had our first argument. On the contrary, you start not with feelings. You start with practicing. I practice my marriage every single day. I don't go home and say, "Honey, I've been loyal to you 99% of the time." That's also known as failure. I practice it 100% of the time. Most of the time, I believe in my marriage, and some of the time, I feel it. That's the way that these relationships actually work. If they want to give you a sense of transcendence, this is also true in religion. Figure out something that you're going to practice or at least try something and practice it. It's okay. What will happen is that you will come to believe it some of the time, maybe even a lot of the time, and then occasionally you'll feel it and then it'll be good enough.

Speaker: One of the things that young people say to me a lot is with respect to work and their career, they want to know what they're meant to do. I don't know what I'm meant to do. And that's a meaning question. Obviously, it has the word meaning in it. What am I meant to do? To a very large extent, that's also the quest for calling. Your calling is what you're meant to do. It's this kind of cosmic…

Speaker: That mysterious thing that you feel like if you happen across it, then you know the angels will come into your life and there will be the sound of harps and you'll know—it's not like that. But calling is a real thing, and calling truly is important with respect to the meaning of life. Now when I say that, I don't mean a job, because a calling can be raising your children. A calling can be volunteer work. A calling can be something that you do with family and friends. It has to be something generative, something beautiful, something that creates value whether they pay you or not. And that's the most important thing that we need to talk about. How are you supposed to create value that's unique to the way that you find meaning in your life? That's what calling is.

Speaker: Now, I've studied it for years with respect to professions. And you know, I wanted to know, do people find more calling when they make more money or less? It turns out that's irrelevant. Do people feel more calling or less when they have an education? That's irrelevant, too. That washes out in the statistical analysis. What matters is two factors. Number one is when you feel like you're earning your success. You feel like you're creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people. You're recognized and acknowledged for the value that you're creating. You're earning your success. And number two is that you're serving somebody. You're serving somebody who actually needs you. You're needed. That's what it comes down to. I know people who have jobs they don't particularly like, but they feel that they're a calling because they're creating value and they're needed. That's what it comes down to.

Speaker: Now, ideally, you like it, too. And so, I do a whole lot of work on how to enjoy, because once again, meaning and enjoyment are different macronutrients of happiness. And so, you ideally will get lots of meaning from your work, but also lots of enjoyment from your work. But those are different problems as it turns out. And so, I have to work on those two dimensions separately. But for the meaning part, it's all about earning success and serving other people.

Speaker: Now, the careers that tend to have a lot of meaning, they tend to be intrinsic in their satisfaction. And that's a distinction with extrinsic in their satisfaction. I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I'm really not. Intrinsic means that there's a sense of meaning that comes from what you're doing inherently that's completely apart from what they do to compensate you. Extrinsic means that the motivation for what you're doing is coming from, you know, pay and benefits and prestige, for example, or the power that it actually brings to you. Most careers have both to a certain extent. It's great when they do, to be sure. But intrinsic motivation is way more important than extrinsic motivation. If you don't feel like you're creating value inherently, but you're getting paid lots of money, you're not going to feel like you have a calling. You just aren't. It's not going to be giving you a sense of meaning in your life.

Speaker: Callings are careers that are full of intrinsic motivation, intrinsic value. These are a subjective career because they can come in almost anything. You, you know, you might be putting on roofs on houses, and it might be teaching classes for me. It's subjective. There's nothing that people can say on the outside. The stuff that comes extrinsically with pay and benefits and power and fame, that's objective because people can measure it from the outside. What you want is intrinsic satisfaction from a subjective career.

Speaker: Now that also means a career path, which is really important. Um, a lot of what we teach in our society today in our economy and our culture is that a good career is highly linear. It's one thing after another thing and you jump from one thing to another because it's fancier, it pays better, it has more power, whatever it happens to be. But the truth of the matter is that a subjective career that's intrinsically motivated is largely a spiral for a lot of people where it's of your own imagination. And that might mean after college I'm going to work for four or five years. And then I'm going to take seven or eight years and work part-time because I'm raising my children. Then I'm going to go back and work full-time again by doing something different. And it all coheres inside my head because it's all part of my calling itself.

Speaker: So what I'm saying is that we need to be paying attention to earning success and we need to be paying attention to serving other people and build it our own way, because ultimately a sense of meaning is a very personal thing. And if we're taking cues from this book or that class or this school or that counselor, I'm sorry, it's not likely to actually fit into the career that has the most meaning and it truly is a calling for each one of us.

Speaker: Young people get a lot of bad advice about their careers, and a lot of the worst advice that I hear actually is at their graduation. I've done a lot of graduation speeches and so I've heard a lot of graduation speeches as well. And um, usually it's like one of two pieces of advice. Number one is, you know, you're all going out into the world, go do something that's really fun and you'll never work a day in your life. Now, that speaker is probably a, you know, a billionaire cardboard box magnet who's so severely workaholic that he's had three heart attacks and two divorces before the age of 40. So, careful who you're taking advice from, but it's bad advice on his face as well because that's not—has no depth to it. The second piece of advice that you get is from, you know, somebody usually a politician who will say, "My generation screwed up the whole world. So it's all up to you guys, you know, go save the world. No pressure, right?" Bad advice, too, because that's not something that—that's basically saying sacrifice yourself. Be a martyr for the whole world. And neither one of those things actually gives you a sense of meaning through necessarily earning your success and serving other people.

Speaker: I have found in my research that the best way to predict earning your success and serving other people and something that will give you long-term longevity to what you're trying to do in your spiral career is looking for the thing that grips you the most. Looking for the thing that's actually most interesting to you. You will create the most value when it's most interesting. Now there are a lot of cases where people are not super interested in their jobs and I don't give people the advice quit on the first day that it's boring—on the contrary, because everything is boring from time to time. But the truth of the matter is that weirdly—and this has actually been shown in a lot of studies—that when you're serving other people as much as you possibly can, when you're transcending yourself laterally toward other people, that weirdly, mysteriously, your job almost always gets more interesting.

Speaker: One of the most efficacious ways to illuminate the right hand side of your brain such that you can experience meaning is by exposing yourself to beauty. Beauty is a largely right hemispheric experience. This is one of the reasons that people will hear a beautiful melody and cry. If you really like poetry, you can't quite describe it, but the way that the poet puts the words together, it chokes you up. It gives you an emotional response to something. And the fact that it's ineffable—it's beyond your ability to describe what just happened to you—means it's a right hemispheric experience. It's deep and mysterious. Beauty is critically important for understanding meaning in life. But there's a problem, and this compounds the problem of shoving ourselves into the left hemispheres of our brain. The technologically mediated world is not beautiful. It just isn't. Now there are some pretty objective and persuasive studies in my opinion that show that, for example, as we become more technologically adroit and our world has become more engineered, that music has actually gotten less beautiful. We know for sure that natural beauty is rarer. If the average 12-year-old spends 4 to 7 minutes outside—which according to John Haidt is the case—then they're largely…

Speaker: You're going to be experiencing the great outdoors through a screen. You don't go to Yosemite and see El Capitan. You see it on your screen saver. And I'm sorry, your brain knows the difference. That's not passing the touring test of actual beauty that will illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain. On the contrary, you know perfectly that it's just a representation of something beautiful, which is also not beautiful. The truth of the matter is that you need to experience something in real life to capture it in all of its magnitude.

Speaker: Then we come to the scarcest area of beauty of all in our modern culture, which I believe is moral beauty. There's a lot of literature that shows that when people are exposed to acts of moral beauty, when they witness people giving of themselves in magnificent and heroic ways, it's just this ineffable experience, this deep experience that gives them a sense of meaning in their lives. You know, when people learned about Mother Teresa, for example, she was an unknown nun working in the slums in Kolkata. But when the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge inadvertently made her famous, why did people get so interested in this nun in Kolkata? It's because understanding something about her life made their life feel meaningful. You know, people would read a book about Mother Teresa or see her in a documentary and they would burst into tears at the beauty of what she was doing. Why? Because they were finding meaning in their own lives.

Speaker: One of my favorite studies that talks about beauty is called Nine Beautiful Things. And what it asked participants in the study to do was to write down nine beautiful things over a 7-day period and contemplate those things. And three of those things were natural beauty. Three of those things were moral beauty, you know, the beauty of other people. And three of those things were beauty in general. Write them down and think about those things. And what the researchers wanted to know was how it affected the people that were contemplating those nine beautiful things. And sure enough, when people were contemplating these nine beautiful things, their life just felt deeper. Their life felt richer. Their life felt like it had more purpose, more significance. They understood their lives better. The truth of the matter is that that helped them understand the meaning of their own lives.

Speaker: There's a mystery in my field about why people are so drawn toward moral ugliness. And in a way it really isn't much of a mystery. We have a negativity bias built into us by evolution. The truth is that we notice negative things more than positive things. Many neuroscientists believe that we have more brain tissue dedicated to negative emotions than to positive emotions. Why? Because it's important that negative things get our attention faster than positive things. Positive things are nice to have. Negative things will take your life if you're not careful. So, we're evolved to pay attention to things that make us fearful and angry and disgusted and sad. Those things literally grab our attention. That's why we're so fascinated by negative things in life today. They stimulate us in a way. We don't always turn away from them. On the contrary, we might actually turn toward them because of this negativity bias that we have. But that's a bad habit. There's plenty of bad things that will get our attention that we should pay attention to because it's important for our safety and security. But there's a lot out there that we turn into kind of a form of perverse entertainment, which is a use of our brains in a way that mother nature really, I dare say, never anticipated.

Speaker: On the internet, you can find all kinds of ugliness. In the modern entertainment economy, you can as well. And we find some pretty alarming trends. You find that the main consumers of real crime drama are women under 30. A huge majority of the people who are watching the slash-them-and-murder-them mysteries documentaries that are proliferating across the streamers on television are young women who have never experienced these things but treat this as a form of entertainment. These are not coincidentally the same people who are most likely to be sad and anxious and lonely and depressed. We find on the male side, they're most attracted to internet trolling, to insulting and getting into conflict with other people on the internet, especially on social media sites after news articles — that this is something that predominates at that area. This kind of aggressive trollery that we see as well. These things are not innocuous. On the contrary, you're being polluted by these things. If you're involved in trollery or just sitting on the sidelines looking at it and eating popcorn, that's bad for you. The research is very clear. You will be more anxious. You will be more angry and you will be more depressed because it's affecting your brain. Similarly, if every night you settle down after a long day at work to have a pint of Haagen-Dazs and watch murderers on Netflix, well, that's bad for you as well. This is neurocognitive programming. You need something that's actually more transcendent that will elevate you.

Speaker: As a matter of fact, I realize that this is not something that people always want to hear because they want something that gives them a sense of escapism and relief, but your brain is tricking you and technology is fooling you as well. The first noble truth of Buddhism, called dukkha in Sanskrit, is that life is suffering. It's a characteristic of life. Most people treat that as a bug, not a feature of life, and think, "Wouldn't it be great if I can set my life up in just the right way where I could get rid of my suffering?" Well, you can't. And if you could, you shouldn't because you'd be in danger. The truth of the matter is that negative emotions are part of your alarm system. Negative emotions tell you that there are threats in the world around you. They're supposed to be aversive, suffering in this way. Painful emotions exist to keep you alive. If you didn't feel fear, for example, you wouldn't jump out of the way of an oncoming car and you'd be dead in a week, most probably. You need bad feelings. Bad feelings are an alarm system to keep you alive. Negative experiences are also important, more important, as a matter of fact, because these are the source of learning and growth.

Speaker: I've asked people for years, how did you understand the meaning of your life and your resilience? How did you understand what made you who you are as a person? They don't talk about that week at the beach in Hawaii or going away with their parents to Disneyland as children. They talk about when my mother passed away and I didn't know what I was going to do. When I fell in love with somebody and they left me. When my business went bankrupt. When I got tossed out of school. They tell me about hard things. They tell me about difficult experiences as a source of their learning and their growth as people.

Speaker: Now, the greatest injustice I think we perpetrated on young adults today is telling them that when they're feeling sad and anxious that there's something wrong with them. On the contrary, I tell my students, look, you're getting a master's degree. If you're not feeling sad and lonely and anxious, sometimes you need therapy 'cause you're doing a hard thing and you're...

Speaker: doing it on purpose. Now, now I get it.

Speaker: It can be too much. It can be exaggerated. It can rise to the level of a psychiatric disorder and and and thank God for treatment and analysis and medication which has saved the lives of people in my family. But the idea that being sad and anxious is evidence of a pathology of being broken. No, it's evidence of being alive. And only when we understand in real life experiences that are aversive will we truly tap into one of the greatest sources of meaning in life. life itself. Suffering is sacred and we need to start treating it as such.

Speaker: People have been arguing about the persistence of pain and suffering in life for the longest time. The first is the idea that we're mismatched to the current environment. That, you know, we're made to be noble savages of some type. You know, we should go back to 250,000 years ago and live in the tribe. That's how we should actually live. and bands of 30 to 50 individuals and then we'd be running naked and free and everything would be great. That's nonsense, by the way. You know, if you want to find people really really really stressed out, go back 250,000 years ago cuz life was pretty nasty, brutous, and short.

Speaker: Another is this idea that we need negative emotions as an alarm system. That actually has a lot of credence to it and a lot of neuroscientific backing. The truth of the matter is that your negative emotions are an alarm system and they're supposed to be uncomfortable. They're supposed to be terrible so that you will be paying attention to something that's a threat to your well-being, maybe your safety, and you can avoid it. And that's a really good thing. Your four emotions that are negative are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. And all of them exist and have evolved neurohysiologically into different parts of your lyic system to produce those emotions on purpose as a way to keep you alive. So that is a very plausible hypothesis. I think it's actually unimpeachable as a matter of fact.

Speaker: And the last is that you need suffering because suffering is part of what makes life meaningful and good and makes you effective as a person. It gives you learning and growth. Now some of this literature is pretty interesting. It comes from for example the work on great artists. We all know that artists tend to be temperamental and many are depressive as a matter of fact. Well, one of the ways that we can link the sadness and anxiety of artists with productive output is by looking at what they write and then looking at what they're doing while they're writing. For example, the great maybe the greatest classical composer who ever lived, Ludvig Bombbeto, um he was a prolific letter writer and he suffered a lot by the way. I mean, he was going deaf when he was pretty young man. He lived to 56 years old. He was profoundly deaf near the end of his life and was writing um so deaf that he could only imagine what his music sounded like. He would hold a pencil in his teeth and connect it to the soundboard on his piano so that the vibrations would enter his cranium and he would get an idea and his friends thought that he was going to commit suicide. It was horrible. He was a letter writer to everybody talking about how sad he was, how afraid he was about his future. What social scientists have found is that in his deaths is when his greatest compositions appeared. That he was turning his pain into beauty. He was turning his pain into meaning in a very very profound way.

Speaker: Now I'm not Beethoven. I'm not. But I do know that creative activity is correlated with a lot of activity in something called the vententralateral prefrontal cortex which is also correlated with ruminative sadness. And so you can't pull these things apart is what it comes down to. A meaningful life is one that actually has suffering.

Speaker: Now, there's another area of the literature that's really worth paying attention to, which is the literature on pain, straight up pain. People who specialize in treating back pain, one of the things that it'll tell you, and I know this firsthand because my back hurts, is that if you baby it, it will get worse. In other words, the best approach to back pain is one where you treat it logically without medication that's going to hurt you. You also exercise a lot and you accept the fact that your back hurts. Those are the three parts to treating back pain. The same thing is true with the pain in your life is normal. It's a normal functioning of your lyic system. You don't try to avoid it. Here's the formula on turning pain into meaning. And this relates pain to suffering. Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance to pain. And that's either physical pain or or psychological pain, emotional pain. Suffering is your pain multiplied by your resistance to pain.

Speaker: Now, when you feel pain, which you will because you're a human being walking on the earth, and you're supposed to, and that's evidence that you're alive, congratulations. You have two choices. You can try to eliminate the pain or you can lower your resistance to the pain. every major religion, most philosophies teach non-resistance. Why? Because they know that eliminating pain only goes so far and once you push it too far, it becomes a bad thing. It makes it harder for you understand the meaning of your life. Here's how you know if you're in the right zone. Here's what you find from the, you know, the great and enlightened. Here's what I saw in the life of my beloved mother-in-law when she was bedridden near the end of her life in tremendous pain. Her pain was high, but her suffering was low because her resistance was low. That's how to think about it. Something happens to you and it's tremendously painful. You can try to eliminate it. You can try to ignore it. You can try to mute it. You can try to numb it. Or you can say, "Bring it on. Bring it on." Watch your suffering fall and your meaning rise. Even if your pain is high, that's the mark of an elite athlete of meaning.

Speaker: In ordinary life today, we're used to one and done solutions to our problems. This is one of the reasons that internet influencers are so unbelievably popular because they're telling you if you take this pill or this potion or do this exercise or or or or do this one thing in your relationship that it's going to change everything. This is one of the reasons that the most popular form of internet teasing is to say the one weird trick that will lower your blood pressure because we want one and done. Now the biggest problem facing us today for our happiness is the lack of meaning. It is what lies behind the explosion the epidemic of depression and anxiety. We want that meaning. And so therefore, we want something that's going to give us this meaning in life. That doesn't work. The truth is that most of the other things don't work for your blood pressure, your relationships, or your biceps either. Those are lies. You're being tricked.

Speaker: The good news is this. We know the way for you to find the meaning of your life. And here's even better news. It's a project that's a really fun project that you get to work on for the rest of your life. This is an assignment to live a meaningful life step by step by step. You know what this is? This is a pilgrimage. This is where you're walking toward a goal and as you walk you make progress and you feel more alive and you feel life is more meaningful and who knows you get 70, 80, 90 years to do it. How wonderful is that? The best news of the day is that there's not a quick fix for this. The best news for the day is that there is a fix for this. That's a life worth living. And the way that we do that is by digging into the parts of our lives that are in real life, that are motivated by love, that seek not just the physical things, but the metaphysical things as well. We have a guide book for doing it. I've tried to make my book a guide book for doing it, but all of the great and ancient texts are the guide book for doing this. What we have to do is to divorce ourselves from the illusion from the false lure that there is a way to distract ourselves and that suddenly at some point there will be a flash of lightning and

Speaker: We'll all feel better.

Speaker: Wrong. We need to put down the devices most of the time that are leading us into this false way of thinking. We need to take up an old style way of life as opposed to the one-and-done solution. And by the way, other people will know we're on that path, too. They'll say, "What are you doing that's different?" And you'll say, "I'm on a pilgrimage toward finding the meaning of my life." And every day it becomes more apparent to me. And every day I have more happiness. I have more joy. And I want to share it with you.

Speaker: One of the most interesting areas of social science is that of human addiction. And addiction is such a fascinating area of human behavior because it's based entirely on a really great part of human life, which is our ability to learn, our ability to make progress. Our brains are designed to learn new things that make it easier for us to pass the winner and pass on our genes. And we have neurochemicals that actually make this possible as well. We want to make sure that when we learn something that's an adaptive advantage that we remember it and that we bank it and we learn new things after that. This makes us fit. This makes it more possible for us to find mates, for us to eat. And this is a real advantage to homo sapiens. It's one of the reasons that we're so unbelievably successful is because we learn and we have brains designed to learn.

Speaker: Part of this is a neurochemical, a neuromodulator that most people are familiar with called dopamine. Dopamine is often mischaracterized as a pleasure hormone. It's not. What it does is it gives you the anticipation of reward. And here's how it works. You learn something, you come across something, you're surprised by something that you like, and you encode that such that the next time you think about it, you get a little spritz of dopamine in your brain, and that gives you the anticipation of the reward for getting that thing again. And so you go in search of it again. If you find even more of it the second time, more dopamine, which reinforces the cycle. And this is a great thing. And this is why you would remember that there are gazelles around a watering hole or berries on a bush and you're looking forward to going and getting that. The same thing as simple and as innocent today as I happen across a deli with a great roast beef sandwich and the next morning I'm thinking about that roast beef sandwich the first time my stomach growls around 11:00 in the morning and I say I'm going to go get another one of those sandwiches.

Speaker: The problem with that is that we found a way to juice that dopamine system to give us even more of it. So we have more anticipation of reward and more of the reward when we get the thing that we want. We found neurochemical ways to increase it artificially. Now sometimes it's through drugs and alcohol. If you use cocaine or even cigarettes, you'll neurochemically enhance the amount of dopamine in your brain. If you use something like methamphetamine, you'll get about 10 times as much as you could naturally get, but all sorts of other things will do it as well. A slot machine will do it. Your iPhone will do it, as a matter of fact. And it's designed to give you the anticipation of reward to say, "I want to see what's on my notifications. I want to see if somebody actually texted me." What's going on is your brain is working the way it was supposed to, but it's been hijacked by modern technology to do that natural thing in an unnatural way. It's entirely legitimate to say that the way that we interact with technology today is a lot like any other addiction. It's involving the same neurochemistry in more or less the same ways. We are in point of fact addicted to tech.

Speaker: A lot of people are not convinced that they're addicted to their devices. And one of the big reasons for that is because pretty much everybody is. I mean, you go to societies around the world where there's a ubiquitous addiction. For example, in the Soviet Union before the fall of the Iron Curtain, drinking was so incredibly common that people who were hopelessly addicted to alcohol had no idea that they were alcoholics because they, you know, it's ask a fish, you know, how's the water? And he'll say, "What's water?" is what it comes down to. So, that's one of the reasons you notice when somebody's addicted to heroin because it's not that common for ordinary people. You don't notice when somebody's addicted to their phone because literally everybody is addicted to their phones. But here's the way for us to understand whether or not it's captured our brains. Does it make us do the things that addictive things do to our brains? Does it give us a sense of withdrawal? Do we use it compulsively? If somebody takes it away or you think that you can't get access to you, do you think about it again and again and again and again?

Speaker: Here's a simple test. Put your phone away for an hour and then write down how many times you think about that phone. How many times you just reflexively reach for that phone that you want to pull out that phone. You wonder if something is on that phone. If it's more than once every 5 minutes, you're an addict. That's just dopamine spritzing into your brain saying there's something there. Go check it. Anticipation of reward. Now again, this is not to say that you need to go to the Betty Ford Clinic. This is not saying that you need, you know, some intensive detox at a far away site in the desert. It just means that your brain has habituated itself to that and that's something you need to deal with, which you can.

Speaker: People often wonder, is something wrong with me because I have negative emotions. And the answer is no. Quite the contrary. If you didn't have negative emotions, something is wrong with you. We are evolved for bad feelings. Evolved for good feelings too, don't get me wrong. But negative emotions are more intense than positive emotions because negative emotions keep you alive. There are four negative emotions. They are anger, disgust, sadness, and fear. They exist because different subparts of the limbic system of the brain have been evolved to produce those negative emotions. When you're feeling those things, it means your brain is working properly. Now, they can be exaggerated. Don't get me wrong. There are psychiatric conditions in which events in life overemphasize those negative emotions. But for most of us, these are things that we feel every day. As a matter of fact, the average American spends 16% of his or her day in predominantly intense negative emotions. Your results may vary, but if you're 16% of the day bummed out, you're normal. That doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. It means things are working correctly in your brain. You need an alarm system for things that you should probably avoid. That's normal.

Speaker: Now, it's interesting when we study the different parts of the limbic system of the brain that we have different parts that are designed to create these terrible aversive emotions specifically and for specific reasons. I'll give you an example. There's a part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. It's dedicated to help you feel social exclusion, sadness. It lights up like a Christmas tree. If you lose somebody that you love, if somebody leaves you at the altar, if somebody that you love dies and you're feeling grief, that dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is on full blast. Now, why would we be evolved to feel grief or any sadness for that matter? I hear people say, "I want to live without sadness." No, you don't. If you never had any sadness and it didn't really bother you, if it were not incredibly uncomfortable, you wouldn't do what you need to do to avoid it. You'd say everything that's on your mind. You'd do all kinds of things that would make people throw you out of the tribe. 250,000 years ago, that would mean that you're going to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. And you don't want that. Today, it would mean that you're fired, friendless, and divorced in about 2 weeks. Not so good for you either. Thank goodness for your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the sadness that...

Speaker: Now, how do we avoid it? One way that we avoid it is by having good relationships with other people. By apologizing when we hurt somebody's feelings, by going out of our way to help people feel good around us. That's the normal way to do it. Here's another way. Distracting ourselves with drugs and alcohol, with workcoholism, with technology. We distract ourselves from our negative emotions, which are completely normal, very healthy. We distract ourselves by opening up the screen, by scrolling something we're not really interested in because it captures so much of our brain activity. Neurocognitively, we're just drawn in in ways that are, well, they're designed to draw us in. And in so doing, we numb ourselves emotionally. It's a numbing device, much as a bottle of whiskey is a numbing device, much as staying 14 hours at the office because you're not very happy with your marriage is a numbing device. But the most ubiquitous of all is the device that we're looking at that's in our pockets. And that is not just not healthy. It's actively making us sicker.

Speaker: Now, often people tell me, and not just young people, people my age as well, they say, "Look, I get it. I shouldn't be 12 hours a day on my screens. I get it. I get it. But, you know, there are times when I just want to veg out. You know, I want to lie in my bed or I want to sit in my comfy chair and I just want to doom scroll for 45 minutes for an hour. I want to detach from the world." Now, that sounds good, but it's very problematic for a couple of different reasons. Number one is that when you're highly engaged in information that's being thrown at you, especially on social media, which is conflictive or which is exposing you to social comparison, you're actually unbelievably stressed out. It's actually raising your anxiety, not lowering your anxiety. What it's doing is it's detaching you. So you are in fact veging but in a very very anxious stressed out way and you're not designed to relax with something that actually stresses you out. It's an unnatural way to do it. Number two is you're fueling the dopamine cycle. And when you fuel the dopamine cycle unnaturally again and again and again and again, you get something that feels like short-term relief but turns into long-term problems as sure as I'm sitting here.

Speaker: You know, one of the things that we find with alcohol, and this is a parallel I make a lot, alcohol, what it does very effectively, it cuts the connection between the part of your limbic system that makes you feel anger and fear, the amygdala, and your prefrontal cortex, your executive center, in which you consciously understand that you're feeling fear and anger. You are feeling fear and anger, but you just don't know it when you drink alcohol. That's a very very short-term solution because guess what happens when you come down from the inebriation the next day for example? More fear and anger than you felt the day before. You get a rebound effect which leads to escalation and that leads to addiction. It also leads to an inability for your brain to work the way it's supposed to naturally when you do have actual threats and impairs your ability to feel pleasure in the ways that you should as well. Same thing is happening with our devices. We don't feel pleasure the way that we should and we cut off our ability to feel the emotions that we're designed to feel. It's bad for you.

Speaker: There's a huge literature on how people recover from addictions. People have been addicted for a long long time. And so we've had plenty of time to figure out how to cope with it. One thing that we know is it's not easy. It's not simple. It's not as straightforward as snapping your fingers and saying, "Oh yeah, I shouldn't drink a fifth of whiskey a day. Silly me." and just stop it. It's harder than that because your brain is captured. Your dopaminergic cycle is actually working and it's impaired in such a way that you've become dependent on that. Now, what we do know from the behavioral science on addiction is that breaking free from addictions is absolutely possible, but it requires three basic parts. Number one is you got to get mad. You got to get tired of this thing. You have to become resentful that something has captured your brain, has taken over your life and you need to have the spirit of the rebel. That's why they often talk in the literature on drug and alcohol addiction. You got to hit rock bottom. What does hit rock bottom mean? It doesn't necessarily mean that you're sleeping in a gutter, that you're getting in car crashes, that you're getting in bar fights. It means that you've had it and you're not going to take it anymore. The second step is detoxing. Is actually understanding that there are brain processes involved. That this is a biological phenomenon and dealing with it as such. Is actually changing your behavior in such a way that you're going to interrupt the brain the way that your brain works. The cycles of activity in your brain that are keeping you addicted. And then the hard part comes. Part three is you got to live in a different way. You know, if you're hanging out with a bunch of drunks, you got to get new friends is what it comes down to. If you're working in a job that keeps you chained to your desk 16 hours a day, you got to go in the job market and do something else for a living. You have to change your circumstances. And in so doing, you need to become comfortable with the thing that was making you most uncomfortable with. And I'm going to tell you right now what it was. It was you. The problem isn't that you were trying to go someplace else. The problem is you were trying to escape from inside your own head. And you need to become comfortable with boredom.

Speaker: I teach the science of happiness and it might sound like I'm just going to say studies show, studies show, studies show. But that's not it at all. When you're studying human happiness, you got to start with the best questions. And the best questions never come from behavioral scientists like me. They don't. They come from philosophers and theologians and the wisdom tradition, the big questions of life, which means I'm reading philosophers all the time. I'm asking my students to actually read philosophers to get the right questions before we can go to the neuroscience and the behavioral science in the first place. So since I do that, one of the questions that a lot of my students ask me is, you know, professor, who's your favorite philosopher? Ah, maybe Aristotle was so great. I don't know, maybe throw in a little bit of Thomas Aquinas. Got to love that. Yeah, I do. I love all that stuff. But my favorite philosopher hands down is an American from the 19th century from the 1840s. This Ralph Waldo Emerson, the really the most American philosopher, because he talked about the spirit of self-reliance, what it actually means to rebel against the things that are holding you down. It's like a tall glass of cold water on a hot summer's day, as far as I'm concerned, because we all need to rebel against a lot of things. You know, we especially need to rebel against ourselves when we're chained by our technology. And Ralph Waldo Emerson writing in 1841, his most famous essay, Self-Reliance, talks about exactly how to do it, even though there wasn't even the shadow of an iPhone in his pocket. Nonetheless, he had the philosophy that we can all still use today. Emerson's philosophy has a lot of different parts to it and I write about it extensively, but really what it comes down to is this. If we want to be free, we need to be honest. And that doesn't mean, you know, going and telling mom everything you did when you were a kid that you're ashamed of. Do that. Fine. It means being honest with yourself. To get off the sauce. If you're drinking too much alcohol, you need to get honest with yourself that you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing and you're ashamed of it and you don't like it and you want to stop and you've been lying to yourself all this time and thinking that it's going to be okay. And you finally drink enough that you'll just lose...

Arthur Brooks: The urge to do so. You know that's a lie. You know that you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing and you feel rotten about yourself, admit it. Be honest with yourself. Emerson talks about the fact that everybody needs a radical honesty in their lives, in all parts of their lives. And it's hard. It's hard to do. I mean, there's a ton of behavioral science literature, even research I participated in myself that shows that we don't know ourselves very well. And the main reason is because we lie to ourselves all day long. We got these biases that make us feel better about ourselves, you know. Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: You know, it's like I think to myself, yeah, Arthur Brooks, he's a guy with good hair. You know, I can kind of I'm bald. It's time for me to actually suck it up and be honest with myself. Now, that's an easy one. You know what's not an easy one? My personal faults, my foibless, the ways that I'm actually insincere, the way that my personality isn't what I want it to be. And Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Be honest with yourself." Because when you do that, then you're actually able to think for yourself. When you're honest with yourself, then you're able to think for yourself. You're able to go against the crowd. The crowd will tell you anything that you want to hear. Basically, you'll surround yourself with yes men and sickopants will tell you all is well. You're not drinking too much. You drink like everybody else. That's cuz your friends are drunks. What we need to do after we're honest with ourselves is to be is to really think as individuals. And and and that's hard because the truth of the matter is that once you start forming your own opinions, I don't know, maybe you're on a college campus and everybody is is is protesting against this one thing and you're like, I don't want to do that. I disagree with that. Well, you're going to lose friends. And you know, one of the places you can lose friends the most is on the internet, on social media. Have a a weird contrary opinion on the internet and watch how many friends that you actually lose. So critically important that you actually think for yourself.

Arthur Brooks: And then step three, go your own way. Once you're thinking for yourself, walk by yourself if you need to walk away. You know, it's so it's so amazing. You know, I've talked to in the context of what we're discussing here in addiction to tech. You know, I've talked to students in my own classes and I said, "Well, what would happen if you just like got rid of your social media accounts? You became invisible on social media. It makes them panic because that that would mean that I'm not going to be able to distract myself. That means I'm going need to be honest with myself and confront myself with my own life. I'm going need to think for myself as opposed to being in an echo chamber. What's going on around me? And and then most subversive at all of all, most countercultural of all. I got to be alone in the global internet commons. Nobody's alone. But when they do it, they say, "I'm free. I'm free. I feel like I've taken out my horse and ridden into the western frontier. Is it lonely? Yep, it is lonely. It's hard, as a matter of fact. But there's a bracing quality to it. There's a goodness to it. And and that's the essence, as far as I'm concerned, of the philosophy of what we actually need to rebel today.

Arthur Brooks: The good news about tech addiction is that it's actually easier to break than many chemical addictions. The truth is that many people have and so can you. Now, it's harder if you don't remember the before times. It turns out it's much easier for people my age to break tech addictions because my brain was almost completely formed before there were devices in my life. And so, there are a lot of things that people find just uber addictive that I don't even find especially attractive. It's hard for me. It would be very hard for me to spend an hour on Instagram because it just wouldn't be as interesting to me as it would be for somebody whose brain was formed in the era of Instagram for example. But everybody, including people who are born after 2008, can absolutely do this. And what it comes down to is a certain set of protocols that I'll break into three categories. Number one is tech-free times. Number two is techfree zones. And the third is tech fasts. And just with these basic protocols, which are not that hard, they're not simple, but they're not that hard. You can reorient yourself toward technology. You can have a different relationship with your devices, and your and your I promise you, your life is really going to change.

Arthur Brooks: Now, the tech-free times are really only three-fold. It's the first hour of the day, and and that's when your neurocognitive programming is most important. you set the tone for the day. And you know, there's all kinds of literature out there that shows that if you have a a bad habit, a tick or something, if you can control it in the first hour, you probably will have control over it over the rest of the day. But if you give into it in the first hour, that's it for the day. There's a lot of literature that actually shows that this is the case. It's also true when it comes to the way that you used your devices. Now, some people have to, you know, if you're a doctor or a journalist or something, you got to make sure nothing's on fire. So you open up your phone when you need to and and just check your email and your text and then put it down for the rest of the hour. Just that first hour of the day. No scrolling, no reading the news, no social media because your neurocognitive programming should be life in real life. Go for a walk outside, watch the sun come up, work out without devices, which is something that I just regularly do. Well, and by the way, there's a reason for that. that ignites the default mode network in your brain. Kind of like taking a shower, which is when you get your best ideas, it's because the phone isn't in there. So, using that first hour to actually come alive.

Arthur Brooks: Second is meal time. Homo sapiens are designed to get a lot of a neuropeptide called oxytocin when we have eye contact with our kin while we're putting pieces of yak meat in our mouths around a campfire. That's how the ancient humans were designed. That's how we knew who a kin was. This is where the bonding neurochemistry would when it would when it would occur. There are even studies showing that if you have your phone face down on the table while you're having a meal that you'll look at it and every time you notice it, you'll wonder if there are notifications or something on your phone and that will interrupt your neuropeptide exchange. That will cut off your oxytocin flow which will make it harder for you to bond to other people.

Arthur Brooks: Third is the last hour of the day. Now most people watching this they already know that screens are not good before you go to bed. What what does the blue light do? The blue light it interferes with the proper functioning of your pineal gland. So you don't get enough or you know the proper level of natural melatonin which wrecks your sleep architecture. Everybody knows that. So you can get some fancy blue blocking glasses and keep looking at your phone. Better yet, don't look at your phone because you get the side benefit. If you don't live alone, you live with other people. you'll be focused on them. And what we're supposed to do as we're getting ready to sleep is be with the people that we actually love. Giving us a sense of connection, giving us a sense of harmony. These are the three times. First hour of the day, meal time. Last hour of the day, watch your life change.

Arthur Brooks: Second is tech-free zones. That means literal places where you don't have devices and you get used to it. And I promise you, you'll get used to this really, really fast. The first is the bedroom. Now, obviously, if you're not looking at your phone for the last hour of the day or the first hour of the day, you shouldn't look at it between those times. So, don't have your phone in the bedroom. Now, that's hard for a lot of people. I have students who say, "Professor, that's how I wake up. It's with my phone." And I say, "I have this new fangled new invention. It's called the alarm clock. It's incredible. You can get one"

Speaker: for five bucks on Amazon. It's great. Your phone should not be next to your bed. I recommend having it in a different room, locked up in a closet, plugged in someplace else, and you simply don't see it. Now, here's the good news. After 6 or 7 weeks, you won't even want to look at it if you do have it at your bedside. So, if I'm traveling and I don't have my alarm clock, I can have my phone there. I will not look at it at night because I'm out of the habit.

Speaker: The second tech-free zone is the classroom. There shouldn't be a school from kindergarten through PhD that allows phones at any time during the school day, especially during lunch. And it's crazy that they still have more than half the states in the United States that allow unfettered access to phones. That's simply a lack of courage and knowledge at this point. It's insanity. I understand it. I mean, what happens is that students hate it at the beginning and so their parents freak out and they convince themselves that it's a danger. It's a security risk. And so they call the principal, who calls the superintendent, who calls the governor. I don't know. The bottom line is this is a lack of political and moral will and this should get done now. We have the technology to get all phones out of all schools at all levels.

Speaker: Last but not least is tech fasts. I recommend 96 hours a year. It's just 4 days. I take a spiritual retreat. I go away and I pray and meditate for 4 days in complete silence with no devices. And it's a miracle. The first day you're screaming in your head, where's my phone? The second day you're calming down. The third day you're saying, "I understand this tranquility." The fourth day you say, "I wish it were all year round." If you're not religious, find a secular way to do it. But the bottom line is that you need a 4-day tech fast per year if you can possibly manage it. And you probably can.

Speaker: There are a few other ways that we can change the odds in our favor with respect to the technology and the dopamine. One of the biggest problems is that the design of the technology in the portable devices is that they're bugging us. They're trying to get our attention. And when they can get our attention, what that does is that stimulates dopamine to give us the anticipation of reward, which fuels the wanting, learning, liking, craving, addiction cycles in our brains. The way that you can interrupt that is by getting rid of things that touch you. Look, it's bad enough that you think of the phone on your own. It's even worse when the phone is thinking of you. It's trying to remind you of itself. So, the best way to do that is to turn off your notifications. There's one notification that should be on your phone and that's when your mother is calling. That's it. Or that person, whoever it happens to be. But everything else, you don't need notifications for really anything else. I know it's convenient. I really, really got it. But the truth of the matter is that mostly what it's doing is it's stimulating your dopamine.

Speaker: There's another way that the devices will really capture your brain in full, which is making sure that it's audio and visual in the most intense way possible, which is in color in really high definition while giving you all sorts of sounds that are designed to hook your brain maximally across the different cortices of your brain for the different senses. I mean, if they could make you smell it, they would is the bottom line. So turn down the fidelity of the sensory experience that you're getting. And the best way to do that is with your strongest sense, which is your sight. Now, the occipital lobe of your brain, which functions, it's the whole back of your head, basically, is dedicated to sight. And we're really attuned to color. Color is unbelievably important for homo sapiens. It's how we decide between all kinds of things. We can tell if somebody likes us because they flush a little bit. We can tell if a piece of fruit is ripe and ready to eat. We can tell if something is probably going to poison us often by color as well as by smell. So, one of the ways that you can actually get less hooked by social media or any screen-based technology is by turning off the color and turning it to black and white. Sounds like such a little thing, right? But you'll be amazed that when your screen is black and white, you will care less about your screen and you will look at it less.

Speaker: There's a wonderful body of social psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the great social psychologist. He invented the idea of flow, the flow state. Most people have experienced this. When you're involved immersively in something and hours turn to minutes, you lose track of time. It's intensely pleasurable. You get into this kind of almost hypnotic state in which you're able to do things that are hard but not too hard and they're not boring. It's almost like a state of Buddhist meditation. People want this and it's really one of the great sources of happiness. When you have your sense of calling, you get that. As a matter of fact, the trouble is it's getting harder. One of the reasons that happiness has been in decline, especially for young adults, is because they're less likely to attain a flow state. To get into a flow state, you need to be fully immersed in something. You need to be concentrated on something. Now, not anything. You can't just like focus on something that you hate. That's not going to work unless you are really really adept as a, you know, if you're a yogi maybe. But for the rest of us, it has to be something that you're truly interested in. The problem is that what technology has created, staying in the category of Buddhist thinking, it's given us the monkey mind. The monkey mind is that in which the mind is a monkey that's jumping from tree to tree that can't stay in one particular location that you can't get a bead on it. It's always jumping around. And everybody watching me, you know how it feels to have the monkey mind. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. I'm distracted. When you're addicted to tech, it's not just that you have a flow state and you're knocked into the monkey mind by the evil exterior. You're doing it to yourself. You're turning on five things. You're constantly multitasking because you have a hard time distinguishing between immersion and the dreaded boredom that you become completely averse to. Here's the thing about immersion. Here's the thing about flow. You got to get a little bored before you get into it. But if you can't get a little bored because you've lost your ability, your fortitude to actually do that because you haven't felt that way in days, months, years, you'll never get into that state. And the moment that you start to feel a little bored, that could lead to something blissful, could lead to a divine experience. That's when you turn on the podcast and scroll the social media and read something and do something else and you know where it goes. You're a monkey jumping around from tree to tree.

Speaker: I don't know that much about my great-grandparents. I know some of their names. My paternal great-grandfather was Leroy Brooks, born in 1862 in THA, Kansas. And Leroy married the sheriff's daughter, Mary Ellen. And he was a farmer like a lot of people in those days. Now, I don't know much more about him than that, but I'm going to make a supposition. I'm going to imagine that Leroy never came home from work and said, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." And there's a reason. Because all Leroy's brain was working the way it was designed to work. Now, let me give you the contrast between Leroy's brain and our brains today. Leroy's life behind that mule was pretty boring moment to moment. I mean, hours a day looking at a mule's butt, how great is that? Pretty boring moment to moment. But I promise you at the end of his life when he was taking his dying breath, he wasn't saying, "What a boring life that was." Because it wasn't a boring life. It was a real life. Now, let's think about us. We're not bored. We're not bored moment to moment. On the contrary, we've wiped out boredom moment to moment.

Speaker: We crack the case. We look at the phone. We scroll the social media. We listen to the podcast. We wipe out every moment of boredom. But when you do that all day, be honest with yourself. How interesting is your life? I bet it's grindingly boring. And if you're spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind the screen and checking your phone 205 times a day, you're in danger of getting to the end of your life saying, "Well, that was pretty boring because I was never bored." If you want to know the stakes here, think about your eulogy and what you want people to say about you. Think about what you want to think about yourself at the end of your days. How do you want to look back on your life now compared to how you're spending your life right now? I dare say that if you're like the average American, checking your phone 205 times a day, spending somewhere between four and nine hours on your screens, small and large, if you were honest and you got to the end of your life right now, you'd say, "I spent a lot of time online." But one thing you wouldn't say is, "I sure wish I'd spent more time online." You'd say, "I wish I'd spent more time with my loved ones, with my friends, with my family, getting to know people, having real life experiences." That's what you'd say, right? Well, that's what to go do. That's the argument for this. I know breaking a tech addiction is hard. I get it. It's hard for me, too. And the younger you are, the harder it is. But those are the stakes. What are you going to say when you come to the end of your days? It was really boring because I wiped out boredom. Well, and and I could have done even even better if I spent even more time on Instagram. I don't think so. I think you're going to want to have had deeper relationships and love, been fully and passionately alive in the world. So, you got to get after it now.

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