Transcription
Good morning to all of you, and what a delight it is to be here. What an honor it is for me to join you in this movement to renew our civilization, to rebuild our culture. The reason that ARK exists, and I'm a honored to be part of this movement, is because, as we all know, we face a crisis. We face a crisis in our culture and our civilization. And now many people will describe that crisis as what a politics or or one of society or one of values, and those things are true. But what I want to talk to you about today is the deep underlying crisis that we face, for which we have the solution, and that's a crisis of meaning.
Now what I do for a living is I teach at universities, at Harvard University and Vanderbilt University. I teach courses in the in in the in the science of human happiness. Now, that doesn't sound like a real thing perhaps to you, but but in point of fact, it's the ultimate business school subject because the business of life is love and happiness. And we need to know how to accumulate that scientifically. And that's what I talk about with my students. I've been teaching it for the past seven years.
Now, let me tell you something about the science of happiness. Let me define happiness. Happiness itself is a combination of enjoying your life, taking satisfaction in your accomplishments, but most importantly, knowing the meaning of your existence, the why of your life. For 7 years, I've been giving my students on the very first day of class a little quiz to see whether or not they know the meaning of their life. And I'm going to give it to you right now. Do you know the meaning of your life? You're going to know in 30 seconds.
Now, I'm going to give you a two question quiz. Here's how you pass. You have answers. Here's how you fail. You say, "Those are questions I've never thought about before." Or, "Those questions don't have answers." Here we go. The meaning of your life, which I have been giving to my students for seven years. Question number one, why are you alive? Question number two, and by the way, why are you alive? That might be who created you. It might be for what purpose? Hm. Question number two, for what would you give your life? For why would you voluntarily die right now happily? Now, once again, if you have answers to these questions, good. But if you don't, that's a problem because you'll be at loose ends. You won't know the meaning of your life. You'll be unhappy.
Now, for the longest time, my students had answers to these questions. But what I started to find some years ago is that my students started to fail this exam. They were mystified by these questions, and I couldn't figure it out. Why is it that these questions that should be self-evidently possible to answer became impossible, mystifying to my students? It turns out it wasn't just my students. I want to show you a little bit of data right now. I'm not going to bother you with too much data, but look at this graph. This is the percentage of young adults who say, "My life feels meaningless." It stayed pretty modest all the way through the 2000s, and then around 2008, 2009, something happened. It's almost like some diabolical force entered the lives of young adults, possessed their souls, sucked the meaning out of their lives, and they started to fail my quiz. More importantly, they stopped being able to see the meaning in their lives. This, my friends, as a behavioral scientist, I will tell you, is called a psychoggenic epidemic. That is an epidemic that creates misery with no biological origin. We give it a fancy name because that's how we get tenure. Okay.
Now, when I saw this, I started to notice this among a lot of people who are not my students as well. I saw this in my young adult children around 2008, 2009 up to 2015. And around then I started to see it as as my children were growing up. I have three young adult children, 28, 26, and 23. My middle son, his name is Carlos. I would give all my kids this exam, and he couldn't cope with this exam any better than my students. I noticed that he was bo kind of a combination of boredom and depression, scrolling his phone, occupied by Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, and whing away his time waiting for something to happen. Perhaps that sounds familiar to some of you. Maybe your kids, maybe maybe you.
So, what was happening here? A lot of people would look at young people today who are at loose ends and they're angry and they're activists and they're turning against our culture, turning against our values, and they'll say the problem, the problem is the culture war that's being inculcated by baby boomers and by corrupt politicians. Let me tell you the real problem behind this that was bothering my students, that's bothering some of your kids, that's bothering that was was bothering my son Carlos, that's bothering some of you. This has a biological explanation, my friends, and here it is.
Many of you know the work of the great neuroscientist at Oxford Ian McGillchrist, one of the great thinkers of our time. What his work has pointed out is all about something that we call in my field hemispheric lateralization. Fancy way of saying the brain has two hemispheres and they do different things. Let me tell you about the difference between the two hemispheres of the brain, and then I'll tell you how it affects the meaning of your life.
Now this is not obviously an actual picture of the human brain. This is a picture that's that's that's designed to illustrate a very important point. The left hemisphere of your brain is the part that deals with complicated problems of things and information. It's the how-to and what of life. It's what made it possible for you to get from your hotel to this conference. It what makes it possible for you to figure out what to do all day, how to earn your living. It tells you almost anything technical. Now, the world is full of complicated problems. The engineers in life are occupied with solving complicated problems. That's what makes us competent and rich is complicated problems in the left hemisphere of our brain.
Now that's different than the right hemisphere of the brain, which is dedicated to the complex problems. That's not the same thing. Complex problems are easy to understand and impossible to solve. Love, meaning, mystery, faith, those are complex problems dealt with in the right hemisphere of the brain. The why of life. Life needs both hemispheres. You need to know why you're doing things, and then you need to know how to do them. You need to know why you love the people that you do, and then you need to go out and figure out how to support your family. That's how the brain is supposed to work.
Now, to give you an example of this, a left hemispheric problem in my life is my car. I own a car. I don't know how it works. I haven't the slightest idea. Perhaps I open up the hood on the car. You folks call it the bonnet. And it has, as far as I could tell, it could have a an on-off switch inside. I haven't the slightest idea, but I could figure it out. I could watch YouTube videos or read a book or or get a teacher, and I could figure out how my complicated car works. I could solve the problem. On the right side of my brain, I have other problems that matter a lot more to me. My marriage is a complex problem. I will never solve my marriage. I've been married happily 35 years, and it's still not solved. My wife is in Barcelona right now, and uh I talked to her before I came out, and she said, "Good luck in London." And she meant it. But when I'm done, I might call her, and she might be incredibly angry with me. I don't know. Now, to be sure, she is Spanish, and that's a complex problem in and of itself. But my point is this. That's why I love my marriage and I don't love my car, because I love complex things of love and meaning and hope and mystery. I don't love complicated things like information and stuff.
Now, you know where I'm going with this, don't you? Our life has been changed. And I started to see the effects of my meaning quiz in 2008 and 2009. What happened in 2008 and 2009? This happened in 2008 and 2009. When you look at your phone, which the average American does 205 times a day, you push your activity to the left hemisphere of your brain, away from mystery and meaning and to information and things. We are living a left hemispheric existence, but we crave right hemispheric meaning, and it's ruining our lives.
Now, most of us here, we're a little old. Not all of you. I see a few young folks here, but anybody my age, I remember the before times. My kids don't. My son Carlos didn't. He grew up with a small screen. So, what's the result of that? What's the result of that? If you grow up in it, the answer is this. You crave the right hemispheric experiences of love and meaning in your life. But all you get, you get a left hemispheric simulation of that. That old movie, The Matrix, you remember that? Let me sadden you right now. That movie is 27 years old. The plot of that movie was science fiction. That an artificial intelligence subjugated humanity, used human energy, and kept people in a pleasant simulation so that they would be still and plant. My friends, we're in the matrix. Our kids are in the simulation. We're in the simulation, a left hemispheric simulation of a right hemisphere life.
I ask my students, "How did you spend your day?" I woke up. My phone is my alarm clock. I scrolled my phone over breakfast. I went to work on Zoom. I dated on the apps. I saw my friends on social media. I watched YouTube shorts. And I went to bed. That is not a real life. Now, what's the problem with that? You know what you want in life. You have lots of things good, but what you want is in real life love. What you want is deep faith in the transcendent, in the divine, in God. And that's absent in the 205 checks in the left hemisphere of your brain, being pushed by your devices to the information and things of life. And what that does is that creates a formula for life. If you want to know the problem that young people have today, it's that they have a mistaken, a counterfeit formula for a good life. Here it is. The left hemisphere life formula for happiness. Love things. Use people. Worship yourself. That's life online, my friends. And that is utterly beereft of meaning. When you take meaning out of people's lives, what do they do? They cry out. They want something more. They can't stand it. They're unhappy. And so they'll turn to anything offered to them as a source of meaning, whether it's healthy or not.
I live on a college campus. I teach students all day long. You know what it's been like on college campuses. You regret the activism every bit as much as I do. This is what it looks like. That, my friends, is a search for meaning. We can denigrate young people as much as we want. We can denounce them for their ridiculous activism and outlandish views, but all we're doing is blaming the victim. Now, I get it. I don't like it. It's misguided. It's problematic. But we need to attack the root of the problem and not just the symptoms that we see in modern activism and anger today.
So, how are we going to do it? Because that's really what you came for is solutions. Arc is about solutions. So, let me tell you what we need to do in three steps based on the science of how to get back into the right side of your brain and how we can bring that to other people.
Number one, rage. Rage against the machine. To kind of misquote good old Dylan Thomas, huh? How do we do that? Well, personally, we need to do this ourselves. You need to do this. I promise you, you I mean, every one of you are addicted to your devices. It's almost impossible that you're not unless you're a Carthusian monk. So, so what do you do? Well, that the the data are clear. The science is settled. First hour of the day, meal times, last hour of the day, neurocognitive programming in real life. The science is very clear that you don't have to throw your phone in the ocean. You just need a new relationship with it. But but it's it goes beyond that. ARC is all about changing society. So what can we do for policies on this? Well, something we need something with young people today. Let me start with this. Here's a controversial proposal. No devices in any school from kindergarten through PhD. We need a new relationship with a technology that's subjugating us. I am not of the view that engineers and technologists are trying to ruin our lives. But we have a mis and disordered relationship with these devices, and it is child abuse if we don't start standing up to this. And if you want a better culture, solve this.
Second is this. Second is this. We need to go deeper in what we even talk about. Those questions I gave you. When my students start asking those questions, why am I alive and for what would I give my life? The aperture of meaning opens and meaning starts to find them. Why? Because these are meaning questions. And asking the questions is the essence of the meaning of life. You'll recognize this photo. It's of a famous gorilla who was taught to answer many, many questions. And a lot of people thought that that blurred the line between between primates and non and homo sapiens. That's wrong. You know, the essence of humanity, it's not answering questions. It's not information. It's asking questions. What makes you human is asking questions. That's the difference. When you ask a question that you can't Google, that's a right hemispheric experience. And again, that's what you did in college when you didn't have a smartphone after a party at 11:30 at night on a Saturday and your pretentious conversations with your friends. You were understanding the meaning of your life, which is exactly what people aren't doing today.
When I introduced this to my students, their life changes. When I introduced this to my my son, his life started to change. I sent him off when he was 18 and I said, "Son, don't waste your time at the university." Mostly I was saying, "Don't waste my money at the university." I said, "Go find the answers to these questions." And so he did without his phone. He worked on a farm for a year and a half, a wheat farm in Grangeville, Idaho, 16 hours a day, $11 an hour. Then my son made the ultimate power meaning move. He joined the US Marine Corps. My son. Yeah. And he did a dangerous job. He was a scout sniper. That's an elite unit of the US Marine Corps. Scary job for me, I have to tell you. Not for him. He's a knucklehead. But but scary for me. He would disappear for weeks at a time. And I would say, "Where were you?" He'd say, "I can't tell you, but it was hot." which might mean London for all I know. But when he came out at 23 years old after his service, he was a man with answers to his questions. By the way, you will know them by their fruits. You know how somebody has meaning? This is how they live. At 23, he was married with a son. That is a transgressive act. Now he's 26 and has two sons and his lovely wife and him. They say that they want to have six. >> Huh? Yeah. But more importantly, my son is answers to his questions. Let me tell you what they are. Carlos, why are you alive? Because God made me to serve others. Carlos, for what would you give your life? He said, easy question. I signed a contract with a government for that one. I would give my life for my family and for my friends and for the Christian faith, for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America and our allies.
Last but not least is this. I gave you the counterfeit formula that the world is telling our young people. That counterfeit formula is is is love things, use people, and worship yourself. Here's the right formula. See, here's the thing. The dark forces in the world, they'll make counterfeit things look real because they're so close to the truth. Here's the right force where you give your heart away. Use things with abundance and gratitude. Use things. Understand markets. Use energy. Use it with gratitude. That's good. But don't love it. Love is designated in real life for people. The people in front of you, the people around you, the people under your roof, everybody through the way that you earned your daily bread. And last but not least, reserve your worship for what deserves worship. And that's God alone.
These are our values. This is what we stand for. If we have a proper ordering with the technology around us, if we have a proper ordering with the people around us, and if we teach these simple things, we can unbreak our brains. And in so doing that, we will know the meaning in our lives and teach people the meaning in theirs. God bless you and thank you for your commitment.