Transcription
So in this book, you kind of uncovered this this similar theme on people who felt like they were stuck in in this simulation. Yeah. So there was a quote in there. I wanna read it to you.
"Life felt unreal, full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible."
I mean, does does life feel like this for so many people? Really a lot, especially for young adults. I teach graduate students at the Harvard Business School. You know? And a lot of people who watch us here at Bloomberg, they went to the Harvard Business School. And they have an experience. They remember their time as one of real life and real relationships, and and a lot of our students today are not having that experience. And the reason is because their lives are mediated by technology. When you put technology between you and the rest of the world, what happens is you get a simulated life. What I show in this book, what I show in this research is that simulation. You wake up and you look at your phone and you scroll while you eat breakfast. You go to work on Zoom. You date online, you game after work, whatever it happens to be. The truth is that you lose the sense of real life. And what that does is it changes the functioning of your brain, and you lose the most important thing in life, which is the understanding of the meaning of your life. I talk about the science behind that. Most importantly, talk about how you can fix it.
Is it that they're holding themselves up to false ideals that they're seeing online? Is it that they're dulling their ability to interact in real life because they're so used to seeing it through a screen? Is it all of the above? It's all of the above. But fundamentally, what's going on is that when you're having a real life experience, really complex emotions, which you have when you're with other people, you're using the right hemisphere of your brain, which is the why side of your brain, the meaning side of your brain. When you're on technology, you're using the left side of your brain, which is the what and how to side, the engineering side of your brain, and you can't fool your brain. You can simulate a lot. You can simulate all kinds of experiences, but you can't simulate the meaning of life. And that leads inexorably when you don't know the meaning of your life. When it feels false, you will become anxious, you will become depressed, you will become lonely, and you probably won't know why.
That's why. You mentioned earlier, how do you fix it then? Yeah. The the whole the point is that you have to live in a way that used to be ordinary and that actually isn't. Now this is a real addiction that we have. The average American looks at her or his phone 205 times a day. I have I have two phones. I noticed you have two phones there, but you you haven't looked at them the whole time we've been doing this interview. So I wanna congratulate you on that. It's only been, like, two and a half minutes, but now I have, so I've ruined it. Sorry. Continue.
But what happens is that you send your your brain activity over to the left hemisphere, and you stop doing the real work of mind wandering and thinking about questions of meaning, questions of mystery, the things that actually matter to us. You can't love somebody on the left side of your brain. You can only love somebody on the right side of your brain. Every time you look at your phone, you jar yourself out of the part that actually brings you happiness, which is obviously a big problem. Now why did we do it is because, you know, we don't like being bored. We wanna distract ourselves. So I was just reading that people are, like, so boredom averse these days Yeah. That we're not getting that quiet time in our brain to think about, people we love, things we wanna do, even the meaning of life. Yeah. So when you when you're bored and by the way, when I mean bored, it's just you're not doing something. Your brain naturally goes into the default mode network. That's what we talk about in the behavioral science world. It's a fancy way of saying that your mind wanders. We call it that because we need tenure, we have to make it fancy. But the truth is that mind wandering is really important for understanding the meaning of life. That's why you get your best ideas in the shower because the phone isn't in there for Pete's sake. But if you're looking at your phone all day long, you'll never be bored, but your life will be weirdly boring.
Know, You if you think back to your great grandfather, you know, he never came home and said to his wife, your great grandma, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today. And the reason is because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. Yeah. He he was bored a lot behind that mule, but his life wasn't boring. But if I talk to a lot of young people today, and by the way, a lot of people my age too, their life is never boring from moment to moment because they've eradicated the boredom problem, but their life is actually really boring. They don't know what they're scrolling. They don't know what they're doing on the Internet. They're just staying distracted. Life is like an airport lounge, and the meaning of your life is the flight that never takes off, and you're just kinda distracting yourself. That's the problem to solve. And you first solve it by trying to eradicate the addiction. You gotta break the grip because this is neurochemically functioning like a like a substance or behavioral addiction, and then you have to go live like your grandma. Kick that it gives you? It's a dopamine. Dopamine. Sorry. I knew that. This is why we have why you have a degree and I do not. Well, you know, it's a but the neuromodulator is very, very powerful. That mediates all addictions to be sure, and it's very easy to break. Believe it or not, the the grip of addictions over you are very easy to break with certain protocols, not using your phone intensively for the first hour of the day. I mean, you have to. The two of you have to because you're in media. You wake up and you look at the phone and say, what happened at markets? Right? But don't scroll. Don't use it to distract yourself. Never use it during meals, which you're telling your kids anyway, and never use it for the last hour before you go to bed. More than anything else, never look at it during the night. And if you do those three things, your relationship will change, and then you're able to start living differently like good old great grandpa, which was ordinary for him, but not so much for us.
Well, it's a rule at our table, like, at dinnertime. Yeah. No phones. No phones. That's Yeah. That's the thing. You know the number one predictor of kids using their phones at dinner? If their parents. Mom and dad using Roll the phone in our cars. Yeah. Wrong example. We can't do that. Yeah. How do you think I'm curious. How do you think AI is gonna change the game? I mean or is that the next book?
Well, no. I mean, it's like people ask me all the time because I'm a happiness specialist. How will AI affect happiness? Yeah. And the answer, it depends on how you use it. So the brain is hemispheric. The right side is the why mystery, meaning, love, and happiness side. The left side is the how to, the what, the engineering analysis, and tech side. So AI is the ideal part of the left hemisphere of your brain. It extends the left hemisphere to answer analytic questions for you, but it's horrible for asking questions that matter. The problem is when people try to use it for their right hemisphere. These are the complex problems of love and meaning. And when you ask AI questions about friendship, about love, if you use it as a therapist, you're using it wrong. The way to use AI to get happier is to get rid of all the nonsense tasks, all the the the quotidian things that bother you and using the time that you have left over in real life and loving other people. That's how you use your brain correctly.
Are you concerned that that side of the brain that AI helps will become less astute, will start to paralyze itself because people are not forcing themselves to not only not solve complex problems, but really basic things that I feel like you could do. My friends are going, oh, I put into chat GPT. Well, we're all already seeing brain changes because of technology in general. So Can you see them, like, physically see the changes? Sure. So for example, your brain is highly synaptically plastic. In other words, your brain grows in areas that you use for particular tasks even in even in, you know, after childhood. And for example, you'll find that in the ancient times, London is a very hard city to navigate. Taxi drivers in London before the onset of GPS actually had more developed physically developed parts of their brains for navigation, and now they don't because they're using GPS. So you will see synaptic changes in the brain. However, we'll learn new skills. I'm not worried about it. It's what it comes down to. My dad was a a professional mathematician. He was a he was a a math professor, and he said, in my day, we would evaluate a logarithm manually, and you kids just plug it into a a a calculator. It's like, yeah, dad, but we're doing other stuff. That's what it comes down to. The problem is when you atrophy on the right, and that's what's happening today. When you don't use the right side of your brain, when you don't ask the questions of complexity and meaning and mystery, then you will become depressed and anxious and lonely, and that's where we are today.
Is it also that AI is not gonna challenge you? You know, there's this fallacy sometimes that, like, the easier thing is gonna make you happier, but that's not always the case. Well, that's absolutely true, but that actually speaks to another big problem of meaning. Challenge and and and hardship is central to to to the meaning of life. When you suffer, that's when your right brain is really active. And that's one of the reasons that we have a big problem today where we teach a lot of young people. If you're sad and anxious, that that means there's something wrong with you, and we have to lower that pain. Well, that's wrong. I mean, that could be a part of life. That isn't I mean, I tell my students, you know, it's like, you're you're studying at Harvard. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. It's an important part of life. And so I hope Next recruitment video coming your way from Arthur Brooks. I have a whole chapter in the book about never wasting your suffering because when you understand the nature of suffering, how you can grow from suffering, life gets richer and you find the meaning of your life.
Well, mean, are the kids gonna be okay? I mean, I I have a son who's the the age of some of your students, and then I have a daughter who's, you know, 18 going on 19 getting ready to go to that. Are they gonna be okay when it comes to you talk about loneliness? I mean, relationships, things like that. We are losing a generation right now. We absolutely are. The reason I wrote this book is because it's necessary. I wrote this book because I want people to have a way out. There this book promises that in six ways, you can find the meaning of your life in six months and change your life. Because I've seen it. I've developed this this protocol over the past five years with my graduate students at Harvard, and I wanted to get it out into a mass audience because that's actually what we need. Look. We will figure out these problems, but I don't wanna lose a generation of people in the meantime, which is why I'm talking about these ways of living alive, fully alive.
If you could give I know we have a lot of advice, and there is Yeah. A very good book with lots of it in there. I've read it. But if you could give if you give one piece of advice to our audience regardless of age about how to be happy, What would be? The the number one thing is actually breaking the grip of what's sending you what's breaking your brain, and that's putting on your phone. Not all the time. You don't have to throw it in the ocean and join a monastery unless that's your thing. But the truth is actually in strategic times during the day, when you're neurocognitively programming first thing in the morning, when you're eating your meals, and when you're loving your your spouse or partner or dog that an hour before you go to bed, just do those things. Just put down the phone. My dog hates my phone. He actually hits it with his phone. Oh, yeah. No. No. They know because they have a very developed know he hits it with his have a very developed limbic system. They've developed emotionally in parallel with us. Your dog knows you. I love that.
Alright. Arthur Brooks, thank you so much. The book is The Meaning of Your Life in stores now? It is. In stores now.