Arthur C. Brooks

The first set of words that come out of their mouths is this thing about meaning.

That's how...

But then when the penny really dropped for me, I was talking to this guy, 27 years old, and I said, yeah, my life feels meaningless.

He was kind of flat in his affect, right?

And I said, well, tell me about your day.

And he said, oh, you know, I get up and first thing I do is I look at my phone and then I go to work, that's on Zoom.

And then he says, and after Zoom work, after all day, you know, I look at my, you know, my dating profile and, you know, maybe I swipe right, you know, I date online and I see all my friends on social media.

And then I like to, you know, I do a lot of gaming because it gives me a sense of accomplishment.

And he's sitting there and he says this thing and boy, it really rocked my world.

He said, it feels like I'm living in a simulation

Because he is, because we are.

You remember that old movie, The Matrix?

Mm-hmm.

That was 27 years ago.

I know, I know, the time passes.

But that was way before AI.

But the plot of that movie is that there's a mechanical artificial intelligence, a supercomputer, that's running all of humanity, taking the energy and attention of humans, and it's placating them by simulating a kind of a pleasant life where they live in pods.

Oprah, we're living in the matrix and that's a problem because what that's doing is it's simulating your real life in the way that we use technology, the way that we overuse technology.

But you know the one thing you can't simulate is the meaning of your life.

That's something you gotta live in real life.