1: Arthur Brooks, the author and Harvard Happiness Professor, arrived in his hometown of Seattle just before midnight.
The taxi ride from the airport to downtown Seattle passed by the huge Boeing Field plant, where the aircraft manufacturer parks many of its planes.
“Sometimes, when I was a kid, my dad would take me there to look at them from outside the fence. I marveled at how incredible these enormous machines were,” Arthur writes in his new book The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
That night, from the taxi window, he saw a new 787 jet gleaming beneath the lights of an open hangar.
“The driver, a Pakistani man about my age, remarked how much he admired the aircraft,” Arthur recalls, “and I asked if he minded stopping for a while, so that we could really take it in.”
So that’s what they did.
“We leaned against his car, chatting. He told me his view that science seemed to be solving every problem in life,” he remembers. “He’d just read that in twenty years, we would be able to upload our brains into a huge cloud storage site and live forever without our bodies.”
Arthur asked his new friend how he felt about this possibility.
The taxi driver thought for a moment, and then said, “It wouldn’t be me at all because no one can upload my soul.”
Arthur writes: “In other words, he didn’t believe that the transcendent meaning of his selfhood could ever be preserved digitally. He was an everyday Neo from The Matrix. I loved the wisdom of that.”
Arthur connects the driver’s insight to a larger lesson:
“The spark of inspiration about how to live a full life depends on the fact that it doesn’t go on forever, so we must make the most of it.
“And the mystery of faith is that divinity cannot be proven or disproven—as though it were a complicated problem—but must be embraced as a complex, mysterious proposition about the human condition, a supernatural love that transcends earthly evidence, the digital preservation of the soul, or even the ability to explain.”
2: Earlier this week, you learned how Arthur distinguishes between two kinds of challenges: complex and complicated.
Complex challenges are simple to grasp, but you can’t really solve them. Love, faith, and understanding other people are good examples.
Complicated problems are tough to figure out, but you can ultimately solve them. For example, learning a new language, changing a tire, or picking a vacation spot.
In the framework Arthur is exploring, complex challenges are associated with the right hemisphere of the brain, while complicated problems are associated with the left.
“We have a left brain hemisphere for a reason,” Arthur observes, “and it has led to miraculous human ingenuity, making all our lives longer and healthier.”
But Arthur sees a problem. A big one.
Arthur believes there is a “mismatch between our right-brain need for meaning and the left-brain bias of the world we’ve made, which encourages us to seek technological solutions to most of the challenges in life.”
These days, both work and life are treated like complicated left-brain problems.
“This eats away at happiness by degrading the ability to seek and experience the questions of life’s meaning—the mysteries comprehended in the dark matter of an increasingly dormant right hemisphere.”
The result? “This makes life boring and raises depression and anxiety,” Arthur explains.
“This is where the vicious cycle starts. To alleviate the boredom and self-anesthetize from sadness and anxiety, people turn to their devices, making things worse.
“This is the meaning doom loop,” he notes. “Distraction with easy, addictive technology; a lack of the sense of meaning; feelings of emptiness; numbing with even more use of our addictive devices.”
This doom loop isn’t something new, nor is it only about technology.
“It’s the same with almost all addictions,” Arthur states. “For example, when people are bored and unhappy, they often drink too much or take recreational drugs.
“The trouble is that abusing drugs and alcohol tends to crowd out your other interests and isolate you from your family and friends, making your boredom and unhappiness worse—so you drink and drug even more.”
You can see this cycle playing out all around you.
“Thousands of parents intuitively know it is a problem,” he writes, “when they witness their adolescent kids catatonically staring at their devices for hours at a time, neglecting human interaction.
“Doom loops,” Arthur notes, “feed on themselves, accelerate, and at some point explode.”
He argues that it is not a coincidence that the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and that in 2008 there was a sudden upsurge in people saying “My life feels meaningless” and a sharp increase in symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Since then, we’ve seen an explosion “of the fastest-growing companies in world history,” Arthur writes, “left-brain behemoths that today can make the whole stock market tank.
“Meanwhile, millions of people were spending hours a day on their devices instead of in person in the company of others.
“Technology was mediating human interactions more than ever before,” he observes, “and a whole generation had been raised to adolescence and adulthood without building human bonds the old-fashioned way, in real life.
“Our world, and each of our lives, quite suddenly became overwhelmingly technocratic, sucking millions into the simulation.”
Some estimates suggest that human knowledge is doubling every twelve months.
“But let’s clarify that,” Arthur suggests. “Complicated knowledge is doubling every twelve months. Complex knowledge, which must be lived in real time and can’t be discovered or stored by computers, is not increasing at all.”
The big takeaway?
“This asymmetry,” he writes, “explains why we’re bombarded with ingenious solutions to age-old problems but never seem to make progress toward greater happiness.
“In fact, it’s the reverse: We are losing our sense of life’s meaning faster and faster.”
3: So what can you do? Should you just get rid of technology?
“In some parts of our lives, that is true,” Arthur comments. “In a sane world, for example, with competent political leaders who had just a tiny bit of courage, there would be no phones in any schools, from the beginning of the day until the end (especially during lunch, when social interaction occurs).”
But abandoning technology altogether isn’t realistic—or necessary.
“I am not an antitech Luddite at all,” he says, “I have every device known to mankind, and use them in ways that have made my professional life better and easier.
“I love what personal computing power—including the computer in my pocket right now—has done to help me solve the complicated problems in my work. The solutions I want don’t reside in turning back the clock.”
But the solutions you seek are not likely to be found in technology alone.
“Some in the entrepreneurial world,” Arthur notes, “have concluded that the emptiness of modern life indicates that the complicated solutions simply haven’t gone far enough.
“At some utopian point, they believe we will finally crack the meaning code scientifically to manipulate with certainty both life and death, happiness and sadness, love and loneliness.
“The simulation will become perfect,” he writes. “It will give us the friends we want and the love we crave, and all will be well. Your AI boyfriend will be better than the flesh-and-blood kind who forgets your birthday.”
But Arthur believes something essential is missing from that vision.
There is a better solution, Arthur believes. You can “declare your independence from the simulation that has increasingly occupied so many lives, provoking the doom loop that has kept life’s meaning at a distance.”
The goal isn’t to escape modern life. It’s to experience more of real life.
“Instead, to escape,” he writes, “you must put the complicated parts of life in their proper place, unlearning a bunch of bad habits that have made the search for meaning frustrating and fruitless.
“Then you need to give your attention to skills that can develop your capacity to find meaning in the mysterious spaces of life.
“That is about how to live, day to day,” Arthur explains, “with an open mind and an open heart so you can take on the complex and the unknown as they come at you, and meet them with a spirit of love, courage, and adventure.”
In future RiseWithDrews, we will explore explore how to reclaim the mystery of real life—through love, beauty, faith, and experiences that technology can never fully replicate.
More tomorrow!
Reflection: Where in your life has technology made things easier but perhaps less meaningful?
Action: Choose one activity today that you’d normally do through a screen. Experience it in person instead, whether that’s a conversation, a walk, or simply sitting quietly with your though