Arthur Brooks

And it's ordinarily what's actually happening.

I mean, I rarely meet somebody who would say, I actually would prefer not to meet anybody in real life.

I mean, there are people who are agoraphobic, for example.

There are people that have particular pathologies along these lines.

But the truth is, they feel like it's the best that they can actually get under the circumstances.

Look, when 62% of couples are forming online, then it's very hard to form.

It's increasingly hard to form a couple offline.

And if you're an exceptionally online person, or you're living in a remote location, or you came of age during COVID, which means that you don't have social skills that were wired into you at a tender age, then you're gonna struggle is what it comes down to.

But here's the thing to keep in mind.

The biggest predictor of depression and anxiety is to say, I don't know the meaning of my life or my life feels meaningless.

That's the number one predictor.

It all gets down to the fact that these pathologies, they actually follow from this sense of emptiness.

So people often say, so why has depression tripled?

Why has anxiety doubled?

Which they literally have clinically since about 2008.

Why?

And they'll say, well, because generational difficulties, because boomers wrecked the economy and created income inequality and made houses expensive or something.

They have all of these exogenous economic explanations for this stuff.

These are all wrong, is what it comes down to.

Since 2008, when life has become increasingly online, and the average American is now checking her or his phone 205 times a day, what you've done is you've shoved yourself into the wrong hemisphere of your brain, and in so doing, you haven't been able to naturally experience