Dr Anders Hansen

The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds.

It's human attention.

And a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention.

If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realize that it's very hard.

And that's because you are not the customer of Facebook.

You are the product.

Every second that we spend on our screens is money for them.

And they had just gotten better and better and better at doing that.

And as a consequence, we spend more and more and more time on our screens.

And today for adults, it's somewhere between four to five hours.

For teenagers, it's five, perhaps even six hours.

These things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast.

And what's the consequence of that?

Well, that is that when we spend so much time on this, we don't sleep as much, we don't move as much, and we don't meet as much in real life.

And all of these things, exercise, sleep, and meeting in real life are protecting us against depressions.

So in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology.

It's not what we do online that is most important.

It's what we don't do when we are online.

Because it's so difficult.

Smartphones, they are super stimuli.