Arthur C. Brooks

And we're especially not made to live alone, which is really hard.

So people who do live alone, they need more and more in-person contact.

One of the big predictors of depression, loneliness, and anxiety is people who they work alone, they live alone, their friends are on screens, and they're mediating everything just using this left hemisphere of their brain.

It's a real problem.

Yeah, for sure.

And so what it is is that the technology has a huge role to play in this.

But there's also kind of the hustle culture.

The culture of work, work, work, work, of achievement, as opposed to a culture of relationship, that's been going on, and that exacerbates the problem that we've got of having this screen-based culture.

And so the people who are really people in their mid-20s today, they have a particular problem.

They don't remember the before times like we do.

And the before times are like, you know, we get stuck behind screens too, and that's how you knew you needed to go away and take out your book and just be with your husband and have these relationships in person.

Yeah.

A lot of people don't know, and so they think if I find the right hack, if I find the right protocol, if I find the right routine, if I find the right app, the right technology, then I'm gonna be able to solve that, but they're going deeper and deeper and deeper into the left hemisphere of their brain, and you can't get to the right by going further and further left.

The way that you get to your right is by living in a way that your grandmother would have taken for granted.

And that means doing about six things that are indicative of this life of meaning.

The first is to think more seriously about the big mysterious questions of life, the why questions of life.

And every religion does this.

It has these deep questions.

Most religions are actually based on questions, not on answers.

And this is a funny thing, Tamsen.