The Meaning of Life in the Digital Age

The problem is not that we have technology in our lives. The problem is when it's supplanting real life. You know, the faith, the family, the friendship, the relationships that we have with our colleagues that we actually have in work in real life. That's what we actually need. That's the real problem that we have. So here's the basic rule when it comes to technology. If it substitutes for your in-person relationships, it's bad and it'll make you unhappy. It'll make you sad. If it complements your relationships, it's fine. It is a thrill to welcome back to the podcast, number one New York Times best-selling author, I wanna say, a Harvard professor of practice at both the Kennedy School and the Business School. You might know him from his Atlantic column about the meaning of life and how to live better. Arthur C. Brooks, welcome back, Arthur. Hey, Andrew, nice to see you as always. Well- You're looking well. You look like you're aging in reverse. What's the secret? I have a portrait of myself in the closet that is very haggard and worn. Right back at you, you also look great, very trim. You know, I'm living with my grandchildren now. Holy crap, good for you. It's like I didn't think that I would be changing diapers at 61, but here you are. Well, that makes you an above-average grandparent because my parents don't change ----. Yeah, it's great. Do they live in the same house, their grandchildren? No. This is the best. One of the great secrets to happiness, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. No, I'm with you. One of the things that got me into public life was you have kids, and then you realize the most important thing is having family members who want to spend time with said kids. It's one reason why I think some absurd percentage of Americans live within 50 miles of where they were born is that as soon as you have kids, you're just like, I need freaking relatives around. And I thought my family was awesome until I had kids, and I was like, where are they? Where are they? Well, hello. No one home. No, it's actually amazing. The research is super clear on this, really, really clear on this, that if you live, it's great for grandparents to be around their grandchildren. Great for the grandchildren to be around the grandparents. Great for the parents to have the grandparents proximate. So we had a big family meeting, and we said, where are you guys going to raise your kids? Because my kids got married young. My two older sons got married at 22 and 23, and started having kids at 23 and 24. Raise them Catholic, they do Catholic stuff. And so my youngest is 22 now, but she's a Marine Corps officer. But we had this big meeting. Where do you want to raise your kids? And they wanted to raise their kids where they were raised, which is Washington, D.C. And so we moved down there, and they all moved toward it. One family lives up the street, and the other family lives downstairs in my house. My daughter's at Quantico, which is not that far away. Well, congratulations. That's a dream, to be with your family as they have kids themselves. So I think of you as living in Boston because of your Harvard affiliation. Yeah, I did for a long time. Now I commute, actually. Now I'm coming up to one. I'm living there during the semester. Well, congrats, because I hear you have the most popular class in the country or something along those lines, because everyone wants to learn how to be happy. Weird, right? And live better. Yeah, I know. I mean, I... Who knew? I just thought everybody wanted to learn about supply chain management. Yeah, that was their second choice. I mean, in your case, it's so fun, Arthur, because I see your stuff all over the place, including now on YouTube. And I want to talk about your recent video on boredom that I think went super viral. But you're kind of a guru. That's not the role I aspired to. But when I was a... I'm a professor. I'm a teacher. And I dedicated my work seven years ago. I've been a behavioral scientist for decades. I mean, I got my PhD a long time ago. But seven years ago, I stopped. I was running a think tank, as you know. I was running the American Enterprise Institute. That's when you and I met, actually. Yeah, totally. During those years. And I stepped back from that, and I had a real kind of a crisis of meaning in my life. You know, what do I want to do? I was 55 years old. I had lots of years left to work, because I'm in great health. And so I actually, to figure it out, I walked the Comunidad de Santiago, which is this hundreds of miles across northern Spain. People have been doing it for 1,000 years, when they want to figure out the meaning of their lives. And I did it in silence without devices. Yeah, we'll talk about that, sure. You know, just praying and meditating. And I realized on the last day that my mission in life was to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And so I went and took a professorship at Harvard, and I've been teaching happiness ever since, and then bringing it to bigger audiences, and new media, and by traveling all over the country. It's a thrill. By writing my columns in The Atlantic and the books, and now I have this podcast, and people want to know this stuff. And so I'm not a guru, I'm a teacher. Well, one thing I enjoy about you, Arthur, I enjoy a lot of things about you, but you access ancient sources of knowledge. And it's certainly, much of it is very spiritual. But there are all of these faith traditions and cultures that have reckoned with the great questions. You know, it's like, why are we here, and what's the meaning of life, and everything else. But you're also very, very modern, where you're using social media, and YouTube, and these new platforms to get the message out very broadly. And I do want to call attention to this video about where you said you want to be bored, essentially. And then if you're not bored, you're missing something very, very important. And the fascinating thing is that video, last I checked, had over seven million views. That's crazy, isn't it? And so I'd love to delve into, because one of the themes of your book that's coming out next year is that right now, technology is kind of intruding upon our ability to grapple with some of the bigger existential questions. Yeah, that's exactly right. So that's what my new book is about. The new book is about the meaning of life. It's called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And what I really care about is the age of emptiness. When I came back to academia, I had been gone for 11 years running this think tank. And when I left, academia was happier than ordinary life. And when I came back in 2019, it was like a plague had gone through my village. There had been a psychogenic epidemic. When you say that, I immediately just think cancel culture. Well, yeah, I mean, something had happened. That's the big mystery, is between 2008 and 2019, rates of depression on campuses had shot up by about a factor of three. Oh, your kids are sad, yeah, that's a problem. Sad, anxious, lonely, self-harming, being diagnosed with mood disorders at higher and higher and higher rates. You mean teaching a bunch of anxious, depressed teens is not super happy? Well, I found greater unhappiness. I shouldn't joke about this, because it's real. Yeah, no, and I have found greater unhappiness than I had ever seen when I had taught in academia before. So when I came back, it was a different world, and it had changed incredibly quickly. So this became kind of a Sherlock Holmes exercise for me. What happened? What happened to the kids? Exactly, I started doing forensically, working as a behavioral scientist with my background. I had to bring in a lot of the philosophy and theology into it, and the neuroscience. So I really had to retrain in a lot of the neuroscience to understand what was structurally happening. And I cracked the case. I know what was actually happening. The brains of young people, and people my age, and you're younger than me, but adults. Ah, you know, adults. Yeah, once it's over 50, it's like 50, and then. 50 plus, whatever, who's counting them? 50, and then many years, is where it goes. And what you find is that what happened is our brains have changed. We've changed the way that we use our brains. And in a nutshell, here's the problem. We have hemispherically lateralized brains. This is the work of Ian McGilchrist, who's an Oxford neuroscientist, who wrote a great book called The Master and His Emissary, that talks about hemispheric lateralization. The right side of your brain deals with complex issues of love, and mystery, and meaning, the why questions of life. The left hemisphere of your brain deals with the what and the how to, the complicated stuff, the tasks, the efficiency, the sort of. So the left would be like grocery list. Yeah. Like navigating on the way to work. Writing code. Like getting stuff down. But also scrolling YouTube. That's what your left brain is engaged in doing. The right side of your brain is dreaming, and thinking, and loving, and asking why. All the big questions. So when you think about your questions, if you can get a meaningful answer from a question in a Google search, that's a left brain question. If you can't, and a Google search would give you nothing but nonsense, it's a right brain question. AI can't answer right brain questions. AI can only answer left brain questions. Don't tell AI that, Arthur. AI will come to my house and kill me like a dog, right? Or at least AI will give you what seems like a fairly competent answer to that question. But after about four questions, after about four questions, you start to stop. AI's funny, because even with these AI avatars, even those that are avatars of me, that I've seen with my voice, and trained on millions of words that I've written, that after about four questions, it no longer passes the Turing test. Fascinating. And the reason is because it sounds like me until your brain starts to pick up the fact that it's answering right brain issues with left brain tools. And your brain won't put up with that. So any time that you're actually using left brain tools to solve right brain problems, you're gonna get sad and anxious and depressed. You're gonna get lonely and you'll feel isolated. Things won't work right in your life and you know where I'm going with this. We have become a simulated life, simulated culture. Sent between 2008, 2007, when the first iPhone was delivered, 2008, 2009, social media apps are going up, 2010, 2011, 2012, dating apps are going up. The culture of the small and large screen in our life has turned our life into a simulation. We're living in the matrix. And that's a left brain life. You can't, there's one thing you can't simulate, which is the meaning of life. That's what the book's about. Thank you listeners. Please make sure to like and subscribe. And if you have any questions, send them to mailbag at andrewyang.com and we'll do our best to answer them. Thank you. Hello listeners. You like money. I like money. Let's help everyone save some money. So I started Noble Mobile, the first cell phone plan that pays you to use it less, a data dividend. That's right. It's for real. Go to noblemobile.com slash yang and find out how you can get bonus cash just for signing up. Get months for free, the whole shebang. It's awesome. Go to noblemobile.com slash yang to find out more. So take it you're not a huge fan of what my friend Hasan Minhaj calls our rectangles of sadness. And when you were doping out that the kids on campus were sad, it immediately brought me to The Anxious Generation and Jonathan Haidt's book. John's a visionary. John is a visionary. And that book came out quite recently. But I feel like you sensed this before then. I sensed this before then. And there was a body of knowledge out there that let us know, hey, these phones are messing with us, messing with our kids. I'm friends with John and he said something to me that I was like, oh, that's really smart. John was like, look, it's messing with all of us. But if you're gonna galvanize public interest around something, you focus on a zone that's completely inarguable and also has this moral impetus, which is kids, like teenage girls. It's like, hey, you can, in America in particular, be like, oh, you're allowed to fry your brain and if you're like, oh, over a certain age, yeah. But it's like, kids, it's like, you know. You shouldn't fry their brains. There's probably something wrong there. And so John, in many ways, found a sweet spot or like an opportunity, an underbelly. But it's not just the kids. It's not, here's the difference, though. And by the way, here's how this all relates to John Haidt's stuff. John Haidt's stuff, in a nutshell, is overuse of technology will make you sad and anxious. That's, you know, and it's especially social media and it's especially app-based technologies that will rob your childhood. It will make you more sad. It will make you more anxious. And it's unassailable. He's completely right. People who argue against it don't have the facts. They don't have the data. I've been looking at the same data. I'm a behavioral scientist, just like John. And his stuff is always right. If you wanna know what to think, just read John Haidt. You know, that's what it comes down to. He's right. I mean, I'm totally with you. I'm just like, Jonathan Haidt is always right. Just like, shut up, read the book, figure it out, understand. That's right. So then the question becomes, however, what is it that when you do these things and you get sad and anxious that you're missing? Because that's the question, right? I mean, what is it that you really, really want? Because you can't solve the problem unless you actually get that thing. That's that thing that's being crowded out by the technology. It's the thing that's being blocked by the technology. There is a thing that you want. You know, this is the same thing I would ask if you said, hey, man, I'm drinking all the time. I'm just like, I can't get off the sauce. I'd say, Andrew, great. Let's talk about how to get off the sauce, but let's talk about why you're drinking. Let's really talk about what it is that you want. What you want is- What are you suggesting? I don't know. And you want love. And this is the thing that people, you know, people get addicted to opiates, for example. Opiates actually is, they mimic a lot of the feelings that people have when they're in love, for example, which is one of the reasons that opiates are so- I was about to say, opiates mimic smartphones or smartphones doing opiates. Yeah, well, I mean, it's like there's a lot of dopamine involved to mechanisms, but so this is the thing. What do people actually want? And the answer is they want the meaning of life. The reason that it's actually not so bad for those of us who are older, it's not great, but it's not so bad is because we remember the before times. Yes. And so we have lives that are not entirely simulated. We have lives that are less simulated. We're less in the matrix. So help our audience for a second. Check it out. I was born in 1975. I very much- Such a kid. I remember the before times, and so I'm totally with you. Like what age range are we talking about where it's like your brain was, because I know my brain was fully formed before smartphones. I was in a committed relationship before the dating apps. You know, I was- You met your wife, not on an app. I met my wife in real life. I met her on campus at Columbia University. We were both recent graduates-ish, her more so than I, but it was very much in real life. And so there's like this layer of technology, and I've been on it actively as someone who has a message and trying to get it out, or there was a period when I ran a business, and so I was on Facebook and all these other places. By the way, one enjoyable experience that maybe you will have in the future, changing your LinkedIn profile to presidential candidate, I recommend. That's fun to do that or to say former presidential candidate which is better? You know, I mean, I was saying it was fun to actually become a presidential candidate on your LinkedIn, but you know, former presidential candidate's fine too. Works for you. So I remember the before times to your point, and then the kind of in between point. So what generation, what age range are you referring to as like, okay, these people don't remember anything that came before the simulated- So we're talking about people who were born around the turn of the century. These are the people who don't remember the before times. So my kids were born in 1998, 2000, and 2003. We're only my children. Then the cusp then. Yeah, so these are the people who, by the time 2009, 2010 was rolling around, they were still pretty young kids. And so by their adolescence, they had phones and they had smartphones. And again, there's nothing wrong with a smartphone. You just have to use it like a tool because that's all it is. It has to be, a smartphone or any technology should be an adjunct to your left hemisphere for tasks. It shouldn't be an adjunct to your right hemisphere, which is meaning questions, mystery, and love. That's not what it should be. And if it is, then it becomes a real problem. And that's what it's been for people who are usually, we're talking right now, 30 and under, maybe a little bit older, 35 and under. These are people who don't have a meaningful memory of the before times, how this comes about. So the result of it is that they've neglected the right hemisphere of their brain and become incompetent in questions of meaning. So John's Heights stuff, which is unambiguous of all the damage that overuse of technology is doing, especially to young people, the reason it's doing such damage is because they're not examining, finding, delving into these deep meaning questions in life. Why am I alive? For what would I give my life? What am I trying to do? Why do things happen the way they do? Why is my life significant? That's all right brain stuff. And the more time you spend on your screen, the less you're gonna actually be in those spaces. I'm not much of a cook. I enjoy getting my meals. It takes a lot of consideration out. I don't like to think very much. There are a number of things I don't like to do. And when you get a factor meal, you know it's going to be tasty, healthy. Factors, chef-crafted, dietician-approved meals are ready to eat. Just heat them up in a few minutes and you will be eating fresh, healthy food in no time. My favorite is the horseradish encrusted chicken. And I have to say, you can tell the meals are healthy even as they taste great. You know that sweet spot? That's what these meals hit. Get started at factormeals.com slash yang50off and use code yang50off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code yang50off at factormeals.com slash yang50off for 50% off plus free shipping. factormeals.com slash yang50off. So you grew up Catholic. Yeah, I'm still Catholic. Yeah, you are. Didn't mean to suggest, you know. I actually didn't grow up Catholic. I grew up Protestant, but I converted as a teenager in an act of teenage rebellion. All right, so let's imagine that you were like a church. Your attendance is dwindling for a number of reasons. And then you're like, wait a minute, maybe I too should be using these modern tools. And then you start broadcasting your service on YouTube and a few people climb onto it. Maybe they substitute for in-person attendance, which is not great, but you're like, well, what am I gonna do? And there was something very noxious that someone said to me a number of years ago that stuck in my head because I couldn't get it out. I was like, oh no. Where they said that cable TV is the new religion. Because, and I was like, oh, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. But then I thought and I was like, there is like the good versus evil, there's the idols, there's the sermon. There's a lot of ingredients to it. And that ended up filling this void. Like as human beings, I think we do want to worship. We want a belief system. We want a struggle between good and evil. We want fellowship and community. There've been no societies that haven't had that, which is why there have been no documented societies that are not religious. Anthropologists can't find any societies where they didn't have organized religion. That's fascinating. Yeah, that's right, we're made to worship. Yes. So then you interject these smartphones into that mix. And then what happens? Because what you're suggesting is, look, the side of your mind that used to be pursuing these big questions is not being activated meaningfully. And so are we then transferring it to cable TV, social media tribes? There's also this parasocial relationship that people describe. And this probably happens to you. It does happen to me. And in my case, I will say, it's generally very warm and lovely. And I'm sure it is for you too when someone meets you. When you teach happiness, you don't have that many haters. Yeah, yeah, they come up to you and be like, that column really made a difference. Your book changed my life. Your point is they know you. It's weird that they know your wife's name. They know that kind of stuff. And that's normal because there is a parasocial element to it, which is pretty innocent. And it can be pretty innocuous. I mean, my parents knew Walter Cronkite, for example. I mean, they felt like they actually knew him because he was in there. I was thinking they actually did know him. But no, they didn't. He was in their living room. And so that kind of parasocial relationship is actually just fine. The problem is when you don't have adequate real social relationships. The problem is not that we have technology in our lives. The problem is when it's supplanting real life. You know, the faith, the family, the friendship, the relationships with our colleagues that we actually have in work in real life. That's what we actually need. The problem is that we don't have any spaces that are not disintermediated and shoved right into the left hemisphere of the brain. That's the real problem that we have. So here's the basic rule when it comes to technology. Please. If it substitutes for your in-person relationships, it's bad and it'll make you unhappy. It'll make you sad. If it complements your relationships, it's fine. So for example, I mean, AI is great if it helps you to do menial tasks, freeze up your time, and you spend that time with the people you love. AI is horrible for you if you try to convince yourself that it can be your lover or your friend or your therapist. You mean AI friend slash lover, not good? Not good, not good. But you know, the whole idea that people need 12 friends and they only have three, so the other nine are gonna come from AI. No, they're not. It will pass the Turing test for a few minutes and after that, you're gonna feel sad and lonely and anxious because you're not using your brain the way it was evolved to be used. I mean, it's like, we've been involved over 250,000 years as Homo sapiens to be highly social in-person creatures. We have brain chemistry that actually, that is stimulated by eye contact and touch. You know, the fact is you and I could do this conversation over Zoom, it's not as good. I agree with that. Because you and I have oxytocin, we're friends and we're looking at each other and we actually have a connection is the way that this works. This is the reason that Zoom work isn't as good. It's not as effective as the way that this works. And you know, if we don't actually get our minds around this then we're gonna be going down the path of trying to change our brains in a way that we can't accommodate with respect to evolution. And we're gonna lose a generation of Americans and people around the world who will be suffering from mental illness and frankly, not know why. This podcast is sponsored by Helix Sleep. I have been a proud, happy Helix Sleep customer for years now because my mattress just keeps on giving. I've always been someone who thought, you know what? You should invest in a proper mattress because you're on your back or your belly or your side for eight hours a night. So I ordered an Ultra Dawn firm mattress and it has been a game changer. I've had it for gosh, now years and I'm telling you total transformation. Go to helixsleep.com slash yang for 25% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com slash yang for 25% off site wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. 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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com slash yang to get three extra months free. Go to expressvpn.com slash yang right now to learn more. I've seen something of a culture shift or a zeitgeist shift, though I do wanna be real and you're real when you talk about your use of these tools. So you're like, look, I'm on my phone, but here are some rules. Don't sleep with it in your room. Take a break from it. Last hour at night, first hour in the morning. These are the three things. This is that it shouldn't be in the room, shouldn't sleep with it. It's a big problem. It's not your alarm clock. Look, there's, I can get $5 on Amazon. I mean, it's so seriously, and it should be in a different floor of the house if you have multiple floors, if you ever live in a flat in New York. Ooh, I like that one. I like that. Put it in a closet. I plug mine into the closet in a different floor of the house. It might as well be in a locked, timed safe. There's no chance I'm looking at that. Last hour of the day, first hour of the morning. You need to start well. You need to program. The first hour of the day is the most important hour of the day. You should be up before sun up. You should see the sunrise, and you should not have your phone out before the sun rises. That's what, these are sort of the basic set of rules. You should never have it during meals. People actually get oxytocin, a neuropeptide of human bonding, when they eat and have eye contact. And if you even have the phone face down on the table, it'll distract you and cut your oxytocin, so you will bond less. And so these are the rules. Never, from an hour before you go to bed until an hour after you get up, there is no phone in your life and not during meals. And if you just do that, you'll be fine. Now, there's tech-free zones as well. You know, there's public policy. You and I are policy wonks. There shouldn't be a single classroom from kindergarten through PhD in the world where a phone is allowed. And by the way, during the whole day, especially lunch is the most important time when you shouldn't actually have phones. You should lock them up at the beginning of the day and not give them back till the end of the day. And then we need tech-free, we need tech fasts over the course of the year. Everybody should take at least four days a year away from their devices. Ooh, I want to hear this. So four days a year, all at once or broken up is fine? All at once. All at once? All at once. And you could take multiple days during the year as well, but four days, and part of the reason for that- Four days in sequence. In sequence. So not, you know, I take a, I do a spiritual retreat in December every year because I'm a traditionally religious person, but there are lots and lots of secular versions of that. The first day, it'll be like, you know, lost children screaming in your head. Where's my phone? They'll be saying. By the second day, you'll start to calm down. By the third day, you're going to love it. By the fourth day, you're going to say, I wish this were 40 days long. You're right. Your life will change. Wow. Well, so I will say for people who know me well, I do sleep with my phone in another room, not in a different floor because I live in a New York apartment, et cetera, et cetera. I do. You don't have to live this way, Andrew. You don't have to live this way. I do take breaks throughout the day. I do try and get away from it for an hour before I go to bed, so these things are all good. I do try to eat meals without it. The morning thing I do not do, where when I pop up, I do confess, like checking my phone is the first thing that I do. It's easy to do, particularly if you're looking at, you're waiting for something and you want to make sure nothing was on fire. Yeah, yeah, right. That's my, so that's like a. It's like once a month. A debit on my part, but it is true. I mean, what's really, you know, like what really needs me at like 7.30 a.m. I mean, I sort of like wake up and see what happened. You wake up at 7.30? Seven, 6.30, I don't know, it varies. I mean, my kids are out the door by 7.30, so that's like the latest I would wake up. We can talk about that, too, because there's a ton of research. Is that too late? It sounds like it. Well, there's a whole neuroscience literature on getting up before dawn. And, you know, 7 o'clock in the wintertime is before dawn, but even during the summer. So I get up at 4.30 every day. It's hard, it's hard. It's really, because I'm not naturally, you know, that much of a morning lark chronotype. But I get up, I work out first thing, I go to mass every day, which, you know, different strokes for different folks. Something that actually centers the soul and is transcendent. And all of that before I'm significantly on any amount of devices. And boy, it's really changed my life. Yeah, that's like two or three hours apiece. Yeah, that's right. Now, I'm not going the whole two or three hours without the device. I try to go the whole first. And sometimes I slip because I got something going on. But the truth is that you need to take care of your brain. You have to take care of your brain. And the first hour of the day, the more you're in the right hemisphere of the brain, the more mystery and meaning will be in your life. Well, holy cow. Arthur, you know the word I'd use for you, my friend? Wise. You're very wise. Also there, philosophical. Anytime I get any time with you, I learn a ton. If someone wants to follow up, I mean, you have this book coming out next March. But if anyone wants to follow your column, your writings, it sounds like now you do it all. What's the best way for them to do it? On Stop Shopping is my website, arthurbrooks.com, just like it sounds. That'll give the column, that'll give the, it has an archive of columns. It has a whole bunch of self-tests on your personality types. Wow. And pathologies and advantages and all the social science stuff that people really like. It'll give you links to all my podcasts and whatever book is in the pipeline and all the stuff that I'm thinking about. It even has reading lists of the books that I'm working on, I'm reading of other people. Well, fan-freaking-tastic, arthurbrooks.com. And we're gonna have you back to talk about your book because I can't wait to find out about The Meaning of Life. You already know The Meaning of Life. Is The Meaning of Life running for president? Oh, I hope not because then, you know, then- I said running, not winning. You know what I mean, but that would still mean I'd be running right now for tomorrow. Well, do it again, you'll have my vote. Oh, thank you, man, that means a lot. Thank you for having me. Thank you for making me and a lot of other people not just happier, but wiser.