Arthur Brooks argues the attention economy hijacks human brains, prioritizing fear to suppress the right hemisphere's capacity for meaning, causing a crisis where under-35s lose the ability to find purpose. He warns that searching for God within science is futile, citing Soviet cosmonaut German Titov and noting 61% of natural scientists under 45 believe in a greater power. Drawing on Leo Tolstoy's realization that significance lies in simple acts rather than metaphysics, Brooks outlines seven pillars for well-being, urging society to stop treating humans as machines to restore coherence through faith, relationships, and managing suffering instead of eliminating it. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I'm a pretty early riser in general around six, but I was just mentioning we just got back from an Australia tour, and this jet lag has me out of whack.
I mean, there's a whole lot of research on getting up before the sun is up on how that's in ancient Vedic wisdom.
It's called the Brahma Vikhorta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time.
And now there's this new neuroscience research that shows that if you're actually doing something active while the sun is coming up, it gives you better focus and creativity the whole day.
And I think that that's what we're going to get to today.
That's what the book is about.
It's also why, although we're taping this right now in November, we're going to put this up around Christmas because I thought it would be a nice escape from some of the madness.
So there's a host of things I want to talk to you about, but I want to focus on happiness to start because I was thinking in my daily life, I'm very happy.
The people that I work with are happy.
My relationships are good, all of that.
And then there's a complete disconnect to what I see online, which is sort of misery and neurosis and endless craziness.
And I don't think that's just me.
I think that's an awful lot of people that are having this kind of disconnect between what happens online and what happens offline.
Yeah, no, the ordinary quotidian life is actually going pretty well for most people.
I mean, they have complaints for sure, complaints about the economy, complaints about politics, complaints, et cetera, plus the private stuff that people are going through all the time.
I mean, people have health problems, financial problems, relationship problems.
But for the most part, people will generally say that they're pretty happy about their way their life is going.
Now, that is different than what you actually see.
The outrage industrial complex is trying to stimulate the limbic system of the brain.
The way that you get people, you get their attention and you get their followership is by stimulating the amygdala in their brain.
So, fear, anger, this is what will actually get the attention.
And the attention economy actually is trying to hijack the way that our brains work.
And that's the reason you see such a disconnect between the ordinary life, which doesn't get your attention.
That's the point.
And then the attention that people are actually getting when they're heavily online.
And the fact that people are moving to more and more and more online is one of the explanations for why happiness is in decline.
So, what do we do about that in a time when obviously the future is going to be more online and we're just at the AI horizon and robotics and all of these things that are coming?
There's also one of the things that this new book is about, the meaning of your life, it's actually fundamentally about how our brains have been changing in the era of heavily online life.
And what it really comes down to is that you connect with other people in bonds of happiness and love.
You connect with God.
You have a sense of meaning.
The mystery of life is actually a right hemispheric phenomenon.
This comes from the work of Ian de Gilchrist, who's a neuroscientist at Oxford.
And he talks about hemispheric lateralization, which sounds really fancy, but it just means that the two sides of your brain do different things.
That's what we do in academia and tenure.
And the right side of the brain is mystery and meaning, and the left side of your brain is tasks and technology.
So the more that you're actually looking at screens and thinking about technology and reducing things to Google-able questions, the more you're forcing yourself away from the part of your brain where you can connect with other people, where you can connect in a meaningful and even mysterious way with the loved ones and the people in your life.
If Google can answer something for you, it's not going to give you a sense of your life's meaning.
But, you know, today, for example, my students, you know, their 11 p.m. dorm room conversations on Saturday night, which 30 years ago would have been like horribly pretentious, but that was wiring their brains toward meaning.
And now it's they're not even engaging, which is troublesome.
That's the first.
But then there's like five other things that you can just regularly do in your life without getting rid of your phone that will inject meaning into your life.
It just sounds an awful lot like, you know, in medieval times when the Irish monks kept the candle burning in the window.
And that's how, you know, these Christian values were propagated when it could have, when the light could have gone out.
There is, you know, I think that sometimes, but I actually have a different kind of prediction, which is that there's going to be a wholesale rebellion.
And I think that people will learn to use the technology in a way that doesn't make their life worse.
I mean, we really have a choice.
AI, for example.
I mean, AI is the next big thing.
Before it was the internet, before that was personal computing, we always have these technological revolutions.
And what happens is at the beginning, they make life worse and then they make life better.
I mean, the telephone.
And in 1895, people were predicting that nobody's going to go out of the house because of the telephone.
And when I was a kid, I'm older than you, but when I was a kid in the 70s, my mom would be like, get off the phone.
And we learned how to use these technologies for the most part.
Not everybody.
The trouble is in the breach, in the time between the between times, we could lose a whole generation, which is actually happening now for people who are 10 years younger than you and who are not falling in love.
Not falling in love.
I mean, like, what else is there to do in your 20s?
They think that if they go far enough left, they'll find the right.
You know, when you actually find tech leaders saying that you're going to get the singularity in which you're actually going to be able to define the meaning of life with quantum computing, in which we will have the heart actually is in the AI, that's completely wrong.
Your brain knows.
Your brain knows hemispheric lateralization, even if it's passing the turing test.
If you're using AI as your therapist or friend or lover, you're going to get more sad, more anxious, more lonely, and you won't know why.
And that's the big problem.
I'm afraid we're going to lose a generation of people while we're actually finding our way.
So before that, I was actually a professional classical musician.
So I made my living playing the French horn all the way through my 20s until my early 30s.
So I've changed careers a lot.
And so, you know, I was in a pure right brain world of classical music.
And just as the advent of personal computing was starting to come around.
So by the time I went to college and graduate school in my 30s, we were using computers for the first time, which is a really weird experience for me because I had no background in it.
Then when I got my PhD in the mid-1990s and became a behavioral scientist, then I was teaching.
And it was a pretty happy time from the 19, the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s where college was happier than ordinary life.
So, you know, during that period, college was happier than ordinary life.
And then I left at the end of 2008 and I went to run a big organization, run the American Enterprise Institute.
And that for 11 years.
And man, I was super all in, working 80 hours a week, and I was not paying attention to my old home.
But by the time I retired from that, my mid-50s, so 11 years later, you know, I had this, I actually went on this vision quest on what I was supposed to do with the rest of my own life because I was kind of feeling a lack of meaning, quite frankly.
And I walked the Comino de Santiago, which is that long walk across northern Spain that people have been doing for 1,100 years with a quest to understand their life's mission.
I was going to spend the rest of my life back in my home as a behavioral scientist, lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
That's what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
So I took a professorship at Harvard and I came back to academia.
So the belief is that the Catholic belief is that the information will find you when you're beaten into submission.
The reason that you walk for hundreds of miles is because you need pain.
You need to open the aperture of your awareness by no longer having your defenses, which are metaphorical in the physical defenses, but just, you know, it's body and soul.
And so you're walking and praying and walking and praying and walking and praying for days and days, and you're in pain and you're hot and you're sore.
And then you enter into Santiago de Compostela, the ancient city in northern Spain.
And the belief is that that's when your mission will find you because you're in a state of submission, ready to be found.
You know, this is an ancient Jewish and Christian belief that you need to be, that truth will find you, but you have to submit to the will of God.
You know, you can't go find the will of God.
You have to submit to the will of God, which is a very different kind of concept.
And so this is a metaphor in walking action.
It's visceral, it's physical.
I said, I'll give it a try.
You know, I did it with my wife.
She didn't want to do the full 33 days from the French border because she's like, no, because she's a sensible person.
So we did the last eight days, which was 160 kilometers.
And, you know, it's enough to, you know, you feel it.
And sure enough, on the last day, there was this.
It wasn't this burning bush.
It wasn't, I'm not a mystic.
I wish I were.
But I really felt that this truth had come to me and that I had sort of prayed and walked my way into it.
And we can open ourselves up to these states of awareness and openness.
You know, that's what a lot of people are trying to do in the use of hallucinogens, which is a lot of this modern research, right?
So probably neurobiologically, the way that the research will go when it marries up, when we triangulate to the hemispheric lateralization research, they're not married up yet.
There's all the hallucinogen stuff, and then there's the hemispheric lateralization stuff.
When they meet, it'll probably be that some forms of hallucinogen therapy are enhancing the activity in the right hemisphere of your brain.
And so therefore, you're opening up that aperture manually by doing this.
The unearned part, I'm hip to that totally, right?
What I worry about is what we don't know about the long-term effects of using hallucinogens.
There is at least some preliminary suggestive evidence that if you have any psychosis in your family, don't touch it.
Don't touch cannabis.
I mean, stay away from alcohol if you've got trouble with psychosis in your family because psychosis is highly heritable.
And so, you know, I have a lot of mental illness in my family and I've dodged the bullet, but I don't want to roll the dice.
I don't want to roll the dice on this.
I mean, life is short.
I'm 61 years old.
I don't know how many years I have left in my career using my noggin.
I'm an idea guy.
The last thing that I need is to go bonkers because I wanted to do an ayahuasca experience someplace in the jungle.
But the whole, you know, Cold plunging, not to get off topic, but the whole point is that we don't really know the long-term effects of stimulating the HPA access.
I mean, maybe extra cortisol, which gives you feel wonderful with the dopamine, et cetera, et cetera, it might age you.
I just don't know.
I'm not confident enough yet.
And I'm even more scared of what hallucinogens would do to open up the right hemisphere of my brain.
Some people have had miraculous effects, but there are non-trivial numbers of cases where it's been catastrophic.
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What do you think of the amount of these types of conversations?
Not this specifically, because we're kind of going broad at this, but that when everyone, especially young people, open up Instagram, every day it's you got to eat this way, you got to do the cold punch, you got to do the sauna.
Like there's some other version of the way the internet seems to be going now where the overload, it's not just the overload of neurosis, it's the overload of trying to get yourself right in a way that I think is also having a stress.
So I actually don't want to do much politics with you, but I am curious, what do you make of how everything you've talked about here translates to our political sort of paralysis or obsession that we're all in right now?
But then there's the weather problems in happiness, which are the downdrafts, the micro bursts, the things that have forced us down.
didn't come back up, which was the way the technology changed in 2007, 2008, 2009, which was the advent of the small screen in everybody's lives, which was catastrophic for the way that it was used, leading to the things we've talked about.
It was the crisis of polarization, which is we're basically in an environment where politics has been co-opted in the political parties by activists, where activism has taken over politics.
And that happens very regularly, very and periodically, but very regularly.
It's like kind of cycle of 50-year cycle where politics becomes an activist thing, where academia becomes an activist thing as opposed to an inquiry thing, right?
And then last but not least was COVID, which was the catastrophe that was a reaction to COVID.
And they do the thing even though they hate the thing.
And the reason is because the cycle of wanting, learning, and craving, which has everything to do with dopamine, the neuromodulator dopamine, where you learn to scratch that little itch and you have a craving to scratch that little itch, but you know, your moral aspiration as a human being is to not have to scratch that itch.
My animal impulse is to scratch the itch of politics, but my moral aspiration is to be above that itch.
And so people are like, I hate it, but let's talk politics.
I actually have my own tequila sitting behind me over there, but I'm not, but I'm never, but I'm never an abusive drinker at all.
And one of the things that I've realized over the last couple of years is I never drink when I'm unhappy.
So, you know, in all the movies, when you see somebody, they're pissed off, some bad business deal, and they pour the whiskey and they sit there alone.
I never do that.
I never drink alone or I'm depressed.
To me, it's whatever.
You could say a social lubricant or whatever if I'm with people that I love.
I love, you know, my ancestors are from Norway, but they came here for a reason, Dave, which is that, you know, they wanted to start a farm and live an entrepreneurial life.
I mean, you'll be able to change your consciousness doing this because any really strong thing like this, you're affecting your biochemistry.
Psychology is just biology in every case.
Anyway, so we're on this decades, right?
Don't trust any studies that compare countries with happiness.
But there's a lot of research that comes from David Blancheflower at Dartmouth, where he looks at pretty much every place in the world and finds there's this U curve of happiness.
Now, the way that it works is that most people think they're going to get happier through their 30s and 40s.
They get unhappier, but we know why.
It's not actually an unhappiness problem.
It's a trade-off between the macronutrient components of happiness.
Your enjoyment of life usually falls from your 20s to 30s and 30s to 40s, but your meaning rises.
Meaning is a long-term happiness play, and enjoyment is a short-term happiness play.
Does it also depend on how people define enjoyment?
I mean, if your enjoyment is just that I can go out every night or I can just do whatever I want all the time, that well, obviously that's going to dip in your 30s.
You, on the other hand, what it means is that your meaning is going to explode, especially in your early 50s all the way till 70.
You know, if you don't have mood disorders that are untreated, if you don't have alcohol or drug abuse that's untreated, your meaning, your life's going to get so much better in your 50s and 60s.
It's phenomenal is the way that this is going to work.
Plus the fact that you're kind of an outlier because you've been conscious of your life getting better in your 30s and 40s.
But for all the people watching us who are like, yeah, I don't know, man, I thought I was going to be way happier when I got the job and the raise and the promotion and the money and the marriage and the kids and the white picket fence.
Yeah, because of genetics and because of the things that you did early in life, it really matters how you live in your 40s and 50s to how you're going to be living in your 60s and 70s and 80s.
I work a lot with Peter Tia, who's, you know, he's not my doctor, but we've done stuff on his show before and we share ideas a lot because I'm working on the on the I have a physiological approach to human happiness, right?
And he, and he uses that stuff an awful lot because he wants overall medicine 3.0.
What's what are the things that you can do such in your marginal decade?
And so I study a lot of this stuff and it really matters the decisions that you're making, but it's never too late to actually start getting happier and getting healthier and doing a lot of the things right.
And the great thing about the internet is that you're not going to find meaning by all these protocols, but you're going to learn a lot.
I mean, it's this information that was secret in the old days just isn't secret anymore.
Those are the four big physical things to be thinking about.
Diet is making sure that your macronutrient profile is not insane.
You're not eating like an 11-year-old is what it comes down to.
Mostly in the United States is not getting too many highly dosemic carbohydrates and getting enough protein.
And anybody who doesn't is not paying attention to the fact that you need to be eating a higher protein diet as you get older is just not paying attention.
Watch one podcast by Gabrielle Lyon or Peter Attia or Andrew Huberman or whatever, and you're going to actually learn this.
I knew I mean this sounds insane, but I knew a girl that I grew up with who thought she was being attacked by demons at night because she was waking up with burn marks.
And it was because she was an alcoholic who was smoking cigarettes, I mean literally, and she was kind of getting attacked, right in order.
It turns out right, she was talking about, you know, monsters with tails, exactly.
That are something I talk an awful lot about in my work and my columns and my writing etc.
And you can get very granular on that.
Those are the big things.
But then there's the big three that are not the diet and exercise, smoking and drinking.
Number one is constant learning.
You got, the way that you keep your brain alive is by learning learning learning, learning.
You don't have to be a you know, keep going to Harvard Extension, but you should be reading and you should be learning the way that you learn.
A lot of guys don't learn very well by reading, but you know, this is where you and I are teachers fundamentally, where this is this incredible blessing of the teaching space.
Don't fritter away your internet time on on dumb nonsense.
Do things where you're actually learning, which is super important, and learn for the rest of your life.
Every day, you should be spending at least an hour.
You're anesthetizing yeah, and you all know I mean, it's like people.
It's like, am I learning or anesthetizing?
And let's just and you know yeah, you know, if i'm actually scrolling because i'm trying, i'm bored, or i'm scrolling because I was stressed and i'm actually trying to feel better, that's a problem.
On the other hand, it's like I want to learn about a thing, make a list of the nine things that you wish you knew more about and then go looking for information on it books and videos and podcasts and it's humble, it's a total adventure right, because it's the.
It's the scrolling in and of itself that's keeping the aperture closed.
You know like.
It's like you used to meet a friend at a restaurant and if you know, before cell phones, you'd have to wait outside and just stand there and people watch and your brain could be open.
How worried are you that we've already drugged probably two generations of kids so that they can kind of never get through that because they're 20 years into being put on ADHD medication and all the other stuff?
But the whole point is that with boys in particular, they tend to be highly kinetic and they're not learners in the same way that's really efficient with respect to kind of the industrial education system where everybody goes in all the same age in groups of 30, quietly sitting in front of a teacher.
It's like one of my boys, my son Carlos, he was not that kind of learner.
He loves to know stuff, but he, you know, and so the first thing they said is, I don't know, I don't know.
It's like, I think he's got some attention deficit.
And the thing with everybody watching us was a son with attention deficit disorder.
And what they find interesting, ADHD kids, they have to have the super strength of the liability is they can't focus as well as you and I can on stuff that's actually literally boring.
What they're really good at is finding the things that they find interesting, and they have better than average attention for the things that they find interesting.
So my son Carlos became a sniper.
He was a scout sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Marines 3.5 out of Camp Pendleton.
And he would sit for three hours in 110-degree heat in the desert in a bush behind the scope of a rifle with a tarantula walking across him and be like, yeah, super interesting.
And the result is he's unbelievably successful after he's gotten out of the Marine Corps, everything he touches, because he knows to go to the part of that thing that he finds interesting.
I mean, ADHD kids have an incredible gift, but we have to work as parents and as educators to figure out that gift and deploy it in a certain way that's to all of our advantage.
So is that just a function of a broken education system that you just, you know, if everyone's going to public school and you got 30 kids in a class and you've got two kids that are like that, but you're trying to keep everybody at the desk?
Again, the left brain world that we're all working ourselves into is made manifest over the past hundred years in the way that we turn, we mechanistically treat human beings.
If you're turning people into machines and treating them as not individuals, as human individuals with a soul, you're a left-brained person.
And you're looking at life as a series of things, not as a bunch of people.
And that's a lot of what we've done.
We have a Bismarckian late 19th century education system, which before that, you wouldn't say, let's take kids in groups of 30 and they're going to go all with the same age people, joink, join, join, all the way through, all studying the same thing at the same time, in the same way.
One thing we're very good about that I also learned from Jordan Peterson is we try to exhaust them by the end of the day so that when they go to bed, they're ready to go to bed.
Like it's not a fight to go to bed.
Let's just keep them.
Like right now it's a little cooler in Miami.
We were out building a fire last night at like 8.30 p.m. because it's fun, but also because it was like, let's just keep them as energetic as possible.
And then the second they're done, they'll look at us and be like, I'm tired.
So let me ask you something that's actually quite applicable to what I've been going through in the, what I'm seeing in the internet world, you know, which there's a portion of the internet right now that is just laced with conspiracy theories and just sort of an endless rabbit hole of insanity.
And I think there's a lot of reasons for that.
Mainstream media has failed us.
The algorithms, you know, boost this type of stuff.
But I think it's doing something very dangerous to people's brains.
Does that sound kind of right to you?
And what would you say is the best way to get someone out of when they've gone down this crazy rabbit hole and you see it sort of infecting their entire life?
The reason for depression and anxiety exploding for people under 35 years old is that their brains are rewired to not find meaning and they want meaning.
It's not just that the screen is creating the problem.
The screen is actually making it impossible for them to get what they want.
There's always something behind it.
And that's the meaning crisis.
Meaning is part of happiness.
It's the most important macronutrient of happiness.
Without it, you die.
And they can't find meaning.
Now, what's meaning?
Meaning has really three parts to it: it's significance, I matter to somebody, it's purpose, I have something to do, and it's coherence.
Things happen for a reason.
That coherence, when people don't have meaning in their lives, is the reason that they grab onto conspiracies.
Conspiratorial thinking is a way to find coherence.
Is it some version of we can't separate like what would be the grand conspiracy, the endless sort of thing that's that everyone's always going for?
It's just this crazy thing out there versus that systems just kind of don't work.
People have all these selective pressures.
Like that's what COVID seems to be.
It's not, I do think that there were probably some strings being pulled and WHO.
There might be some, but that it might just be like a bunch of people who were over their skis in what they were doing, who had all sorts of, you know, Fauci had all sorts of pressures.
But that's this, that's what people crave is coherence because what they want is meaning because what they want is happiness.
And if you don't have something that provides coherence in a healthy way, like God or science, or in my case, God and science, you're going to grasp onto something that some person on the internet is telling you actually explains everything because your brain doesn't work right unless you have a sense of coherence.
A clock spring is going to come bursting forth from your forehead if you don't have a sense of coherence.
Do you ever find that the, I mean, this is sort of the age-old question, but that the God and science portion of these things, do they come into conflict in your mind anymore?
So I sat at the knee of a great man, you know, a great man who really loved the Lord and who really loved science.
And so our dinner time conversations were math problems.
You know, that's what we'd be talking about.
But we were, but every night before I went to sleep, he was on his knees next to my bed, bowing before the Lord.
This had a huge impact on a little dude.
There was something bigger than my dad.
Something bigger than my dad.
There's something, there's a lot of stuff he didn't know because of the science part, which he always said, this is a mystery.
And there were things that were bigger metaphysically than my dad.
And so that really wired into me an important concept, which is that there's the creator in the creation, and you can't find the creator in the creation.
If you're looking to science to find God, it's an exercise in futility.
And if you can't find God in science, it's not evidence of absence.
It's not, it doesn't mean that God is absent.
On the contrary, if you're an art historian and you specialize in Picasso, you need to know two things, you know, exhaustively.
You need to know about Picasso's paintings and you need to know about Picasso.
I don't care how long you stare at Picasso's paintings, Wernicke, you're not going to find evidence of Picasso the man in there.
You know, when German Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth, a Russian cosmonaut, was asked, what did, you know, being in space, what did it do to your atheism?
When you explain that and you give me some of those stats, I mean, is that the odd part that people seem to think these things are so at odds with each other?
And I think actually, I think because growing up Jewish, it wasn't really at odds in a weird way, because the Jewish mind tends to be scientific in some sense.
And then there's this long history there also.
So it never was at odds.
So I find it a little strange that so many people have this weird.
But he wanted at 51 to kill himself because he said his life had no meaning.
And he couldn't find it in working harder.
He couldn't find it in his ambition.
He couldn't find it in his wealth.
And so he went to science and he couldn't find it in his science.
And so finally, at wit's end, Tolstoy, as he tells it, goes out to this little village.
It's like someplace in Siberia, someplace.
He goes to some little village.
And it was just these simple people who were illiterate.
And what they did was they pushed the plow and they had dinner and they had these little parties and dances and they went to church.
They went to Eastern Orthodox liturgy and they loved the Lord and they prayed their prayer ropes.
And he said, that was it.
He said, that was it.
It was in the simple things of life.
And he wrote, it's interesting, in Anna Karenina, you know, he writes about the secondary, there's two stories going on.
There's Anna Karenina and her, you know, her travails.
And there's Levin, Konstantin Levin, who's this secondary story that's going on.
And Levin ends the novel and Levin can't find meaning and Levin can't find meaning.
Finally, Levin gives up and goes back to his farm.
And he just loves his wife and he loves his kids and he loves his employees and he raises the wheat and he dies happy.
And so the whole point is, and he worships God.
And so the whole point is, even Tolstoy found that when he stopped trying to find what he was looking for, the metaphysical truth in the left brain realities, what he was saying is only when he opened up the right could he appreciate the left and did his life have meaning?
And so if you're looking for it on the left and you're not going to find it, the meaning will elude you and you'll chase your tail for the rest of your life.