Your phone addiction is keeping you from achieving flow state | Arthur Brooks

0:00 A lot of people are not convinced that they're addicted to their devices. And and one of the big reasons for that is because pretty much everybody is. I mean, you go to societies around the world where there's a ubiquitous addiction. For example, in the Soviet Union before the the fall of the Iron Curtain, drinking was so incredibly common that people who are hopelessly addicted to alcohol had no idea that they were alcoholics because they, you know, it's ask a ask a fish, you know, how's the water? And he'll say, "What's water?" is what it comes down to. So, that's one of the reasons you notice when somebody's addicted to heroin because it's not that common for ordinary people. You don't notice when somebody's addicted to their phone because literally everybody is addicted to their phones. My name is Arthur Brooks. I'm a professor and a writer about the science of human happiness. My latest book is The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.

0:57 Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Bigthink is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now back to the interview. How to overcome your addiction to technology.

1:26 One of the most interesting areas of social science is that of human addiction. A and addiction is such a fascinating area of human behavior because it's based entirely on on a really great part of human life, which is our ability to learn, our ability to make progress. Our brains are designed to learn new things that make it easier for us to pass the winner and pass on our genes. and and we have neurochemicals that actually make this possible as well. We want to make sure that when we learn something that's an adaptive advantage that that we remember it and that we bank it and we learn new things after that. This makes us fit. This makes it more possible for us to find mates, for us to eat. And this is a real advantage to homo sapiens. It's one of the reasons that we're so unbelievably successful is because we learn and we have brains designed to learn. Part of this is a a neurochemical that neurom modulator that most people are familiar with called dopamine. Dopamine is often mischaracterized as a pleasure hormone. It's not. What it does is it gives you the anticipation of reward. And and and here's how it works. You learn something, you come across something, you're surprised by something that that you like and you you encode that such that the next time you think about it, you get a little spritz of dopamine in your brain and that gives you the anticipation of the reward for getting that thing again. And so you go in search of it again. If you find even more of it the second time, more dopamine, which reinforces the cycle. And this is a great thing.

2:58 This is why you would remember that there are gazels around a watering hole or berries on a bush and you're looking forward to going and getting that. The same thing as simple and as innocent today as I happen across a deli with a great roast beef sandwich and the next morning I'm thinking about that roast beef sandwich the first time my stomach growls around 11:00 in the morning and I say I'm going to go get another one of those sandwiches. The problem with that is that we found a way to to juice that dopamine system to give us even more of it. So we have more anticipation of reward and more of the reward when we get the thing that we that we want. We found neurochemical ways to increase it artificially. Now sometimes it's through drugs and alcohol. If you use cocaine or even cigarettes, you'll neurochemically enhance the amount of dopamine in your brain. If you use something like methamphetamine, you'll get about 10 times as much as you could naturally get, but all sorts of other things will do it as well. A slot machine will do it. Your iPhone will do it, as a matter of fact. And it's designed to give you the anticipation of reward to say, "I want to see what's on my notifications. I want to see if somebody actually texted me." What's going on is your brain is working the way I was supposed to. But it's been hijacked by modern technology to do that natural thing. in a unnatural way. It's entirely legitimate to say that the way that we interact with technology today is a a lot like any other addiction. It's involving the same neurochemistry in more or less the same ways. We are in point of fact addicted to tech. Here's a simple test. Put your phone away for an hour and then write down how many times you think about that phone. How many times you just reflexively reach for that phone that you want to pull out that phone. and you wonder if something is on that phone. If it's more than once every 5 minutes, you're an addict. That's just dopamine spritzing into your brain saying, "There's something there.

4:56 Go check it." Anticipation of reward. Now, again, this is not to say that you need to go to the Betty Ford Clinic. This is not saying that you need, you know, some intensive detox at a far away site in the desert. It just means that your brain has habituated itself to that and that's something you need to deal with, which you can. People often wonder is something wrong with me because I have negative emotions. And the answer is no. Quite the contrary. If you didn't have negative emotions, something is wrong with you. We are evolved for bad feelings. We're evolved for good feelings, too. Don't get me wrong. But negative emotions are more intense than positive emotions because negative emotions keep you alive. There are four negative emotions. They are anger, disgust, sadness, and fear. They exist because different subp parts of the lyic system of the brain have been evolved to produce those negative emotions. When you're feeling those things, it means your brain is working properly. Now, they can be exaggerated. Don't get me wrong, there are psychiatric conditions in which they are they are in events in life overemphasize those those negative emotions, but for most of us, these are things that we feel every day. As a matter of fact, the average American spends 16% of her or his day in predominantly intense negative emotions. Your results may vary, but if you're 16% of the day bummed out, you're normal. That doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. It means things are working correctly in your brain. You need an alarm system for things that you should probably avoid. That's normal. Now, it's interesting when we study the different parts of the lyic system of the brain that we're that we have different parts that are designed to create these terrible aversive emotions specifically and for specific reasons. I'll give you an example. There's a part of the lyic system called the dorsal anterior singulate cortex. It's dedicated to help you feel social exclusion, sadness. It lights up like a Christmas tree. If you lose somebody that you love, if somebody leaves you at the altar, if somebody that you love dies and you're feeling grief, that dorsal anterior singulate cortex is on full blast. Now, why would be evolved to feel grief or or any sadness for that matter? I hear people say, "I want to live without sadness." No, you don't. If you never had any sadness and it didn't really bother you, if it were not incredibly uncomfortable, you wouldn't do what you need to do to avoid it. You'd say everything that's on your mind. You do all kinds of things that would make people throw you out of the tribe. 250,000 years ago, that would mean that you're going to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. And you don't want that. Today, it would mean that you're fired, friendless, and divorced in about 2 weeks. Not so good for you either. Thank goodness for your dorsal anterior singulate cortex and the sadness that you hate and that you're afraid of and so you try to avoid. Okay. Now, how do we avoid it? One way that we avoid it is by having good relationships with other people. By apologizing when we hurt somebody's feelings, by going out of our way to help people feel good around us. That's the normal way to do it. Here's another way. Distracting ourselves with drugs and alcohol, with workcoholism, with technology. We distract ourselves from our negative emotions, which are completely normal, very healthy. We distract ourselves by opening up the screen, by scrolling something we're not really interested in because it captures so much of our brain activity neurocognitively. We're we're just drawn in in ways that are well, they're designed to draw us in. And in so doing, we we numb ourselves emotionally. It's a numbing device, much as a bottle of whiskey is a numbing device, much as staying 14 hours at the office because you're not very happy with your marriage is a numbing device. But the most ubiquitous of all is the device that we're looking at that's in our pockets. And that is not just not healthy. It's actively making us sicker. Now, often people tell me, and not just young people, people my age as well, they say, "Look, I I get it. I shouldn't be 12 hours a day on my screens. I get it. I get it. But, you know, there are times when I just want to veg out. You know, I want to lie in my bed or I want to sit in my comfy chair and I just want to doom scroll for 45 minutes for an hour. I want to detach from the world." Now, that sounds good, but it's very problematic for a couple of different reasons. Number one is that when you're highly engaged in information that's being thrown at you, especially on social media, which is conflictive or or which is exposing you to social comparison, you're actually unbelievably stressed out. It's actually raising your anxiety, not lowering your anxiety. What it's doing is it's detaching you.

9:40 So you're you are in fact veging but in a very very anxious stressed out way and you're not designed to relax with something that actually stresses you out. It's an unnatural way to do it. Number two is you're fueling the dopamine cycle. And when you fuel the dopamine cycle unnaturally again and again and again and again, you get something that feels like short-term relief but turns into long-term problems as sure as I'm sitting here. You know, one of the things that we find with alcohol, and this is a parallel I make a lot, alcohol, what it does very effectively, it cuts the connection between the part of your lyic system that makes you feel anger and fear, the amygdala, and your prefrontal cortex, your executive center, in which you consciously understand that you're feeling fear and anger. It you are feeling fear and anger, but you just don't know it when you drink alcohol. That's a very very short-term solution because guess what happens when you come down from the inebriation the next day for example more fear and anger than you felt the day before. You get a rebound effect which leads to escalation and that leads to addiction.

10:47 It also leads to an inability for your brain to work the way it's supposed to naturally when you do have actual threats and impairs your ability to feel pleasure in the ways that you should as well. Same thing is happening with our devices. We don't feel pleasure the way that we should and we cut off our ability to feel the emotions that we're designed to feel. It's bad for you. There's a huge literature on on how people recover from addictions. People have been addicted for a long long time. And so we've had plenty of time to figure out how to how to cope with it. One thing that we know is it's not easy. It's not simple. It's not as straightforward as snapping your fingers and saying, "Oh yeah, I shouldn't drink a fifth of whiskey a day. Silly me." and just stop it. It's harder than that because your brain is captured. Your dopamineergic cycle is is actually working and it's impaired in such a way that that you've become dependent on that. Now, what we do know from from the the behavioral science on addiction is that breaking free from addictions is absolutely possible, but it requires three basic parts. Number one is you got to get mad. You got to get tired of this thing. You have to become resentful and that that something has captured your brain and has taken over your life and you need to have the spirit of the rebel. That's why they often talk in in in the in in the literature on drug and alcohol addiction, you got to hit rock bottom. What does hit rock bottom mean? It doesn't necessarily mean that you're sleeping in a gutter, that you're getting in car crashes, that you're getting in bar fights. It means that you've had it and you're not going to take it anymore. The second step is detoxing. Is actually understanding that there are brain processes involved. That this is a biological phenomenon and and dealing with it as such. Is actually changing your behavior in such a way that you're going to interrupt the brain the way that your brain works. The cycles of activity in your brain that are keeping you addicted. And then the hard part comes. Part three is you got to live in a different way. You know, if you're hanging out with a bunch of drunks, you got to get new friends is what it comes down to.

12:54 If you're working in a job that keeps you chained to your desk 16 hours a day, you got to go on the job market and do something else for a living. You have to change your circumstances. And in so doing, you need to become comfortable with the thing that was making you most uncomfortable with. And I'm going to tell you right now what it was. It was you. The problem isn't that you were trying to go someplace else. The problem is you were trying to escape from inside your own head. And you need to become comfortable with with boredom. I teach the science of happiness and and it might sound like I'm just going to say studies show studies show studies show. But that's not it at all. When you're studying human happiness, you you got to start with the best questions. And the best questions never come from behavioral scientists like me. They don't. They come from philosophers and theologians and the wisdom tradition. The big questions of life, which means I'm reading philosophers all the time. I'm asking my students to actually read philosophers to get the right questions before we can go to the neuroscience and the behavioral science in the first place.

13:50 So since I do that, one of the questions that a lot of my students ask me is, you know, professor, who's your favorite philosopher? maybe Aristotle was so great. I don't know, maybe throw in a little bit of Thomas Aquinus. Got to love that. Yeah, I do. I love all that stuff. But my favorite philosopher hands down is an American from the 19th century from the 1840s. That's Ralph Waldo Emerson, the really the most American philosopher, because he talked about the spirit of self-reliance, what it actually means to rebel against the things that are holding you down. It's like a tall glass of cold water on a hot summer's day, as far as I'm concerned, because we all need to rebel against a lot of things. You know, we're we especially need to rebel against ourselves when we're chained by our technology. And Ralph Aldo Emerson writing in 1841, his most famous essay, self-reliance, talks about exactly how to do it, even though there wasn't even the shadow of an iPhone in his pocket. Nonetheless, he had the philosophy that we can all still use today. Emerson's philosophy has a lot of different parts to it and and I write about it extensively, but but really what it comes down to is this. If we want to be free, we need to be honest.

15:05 And and and that doesn't mean, you know, going and telling mom everything you did when you were a kid that you're ashamed of. Do that. Fine. It means being honest with yourself. To get off the sauce. If you're drinking too much alcohol, you need to get honest with yourself that you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing and you're ashamed of it and you don't like it and you want to stop and you've been lying to yourself all this time and thinking that it's going to be okay. And you you finally drink enough that you'll just lose the urge to do so. You know that's a lie. you know that you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing and you feel rotten about yourself, admit it. Be honest with yourself. Emerson talks about the fact that everybody needs a radical honesty in their lives, in all parts of their lives. And it's hard. It's hard to do. I mean, there's a ton of behavioral science literature, even research I've participated in myself that shows that we don't know ourselves very well. And the main reason is because we lie to ourselves all day long. We got these biases that make us feel better about ourselves, you know. Yeah. You know, it's like I think to myself, yeah, Arthur Brooks, he's a guy with good hair. You know, I can kind of I'm bald. It's time for me to actually suck it up and be honest with myself. Now, that's an easy one. You know what's not an easy one? My personal faults, my foibless, the ways that I'm actually insincere, the way that my personality isn't what I want it to be. And Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Be honest with yourself." Because when you do that, then you're actually able to think for yourself.

16:32 When you're honest with yourself, then you're able to think for yourself. You're able to go against the crowd. The crowd will tell you anything that you want to hear. Basically, you'll surround yourself with yes men and sickopants who'll tell you all is well. You're not drinking too much. You drink like everybody else. That's cuz your friends are drunks. What we need to do after we're honest with ourselves is to be is to is to really think as individuals. and and and that's hard because the truth of the matter is that once you start forming your own opinions, I don't know, maybe you're on a college campus and everybody is is is protesting against this one thing and you're like, I don't want to do that. I disagree with that. Well, you're going to lose friends. And you know, one of the places you can lose friends the most is on the internet, on social media. Have a a weird contrary opinion on the internet and watch how many friends that you actually lose. So critically important that you actually think for yourself. And then step three, go your own way. Once you're thinking for yourself, walk by yourself if you need to walk away. You know, it's so it's so amazing. You know, I've talked to in the context of what we're discussing here and addiction to tech. You know, I've talked to students in my own classes and I said, "What would happen if you just like got rid of your social media accounts? You became invisible on social media.

17:50 It makes them panic because that that would mean that I'm not going to be able to distract myself. That means I'm going need to be honest with myself and confront myself with my own life. I'm going to need to think for myself as opposed to being in an echo chamber. What's going on around me? And and then most subversive all of most countercultural of all. I got to be alone in the global internet commons. Nobody's alone. But when they do it, they say, "I'm free. I'm free. I feel like I've taken out my horse and ridden into the western frontier. Is it lonely? Yep, it is lonely. It's hard, as a matter of fact. But there's a bracing quality to it. There's a goodness to it. And and that's the essence, as far as I'm concerned, of the philosophy of what we actually need to rebel today. The good news about tech addiction is that it's actually easier to break than many chemical addictions. The truth is that many people have and so can you. Now, it's harder if you don't remember the before times. It turns out it's much easier for people my age to break tech addictions because my brain was almost completely formed before there were devices in my life. And so, there are a lot of things that people find just uber addictive that I don't even find especially attractive. It's hard for me. It would be very hard for me to spend an hour on Instagram because it just wouldn't be as interesting to me as it would be for somebody whose brain was formed in the era of Instagram, for example. But everybody, including people who are born after 2008, can absolutely do this.

19:18 And what it comes down to is a certain set of protocols that I'll break into three categories. Number one is tech-free times. Number two is techfree zones. And the third is tech fasts. And just with these basic protocols, which are not that hard, they're not simple, but they're not that hard, you can reorient yourself toward technology. You can have a different relationship with your devices, and your and your I promise you, your life is really going to change. Now, the tech-free times are really only three-fold. It's the first hour of the day, and and that's when your neurocognitive programming is most important. you set the tone for the day. And you know, there's all kinds of literature out there that shows that if you have a a bad habit, a tick or something, if you can control it in the first hour, you probably will have control over it over the rest of the day. But if you give into it in the first hour, that's it for the day. There's a lot of literature that actually shows that this is the case. It's also true when it comes to the way that you used your devices. Now, some people have to, you know, if you're a doctor or a journalist or something, you got to make sure nothing's on fire. So you open up your phone when you need to and and just check your email and your text and then put it down for the rest of the hour. Just that first hour of the day. No scrolling, no reading the news, no social media because your neurocognitive programming should be life in real life. Go for a walk outside, watch the sun come up, work out without devices, which is something that I just regularly do. Well, and by the way, there's a reason for that. that ignites the default mode network in your brain.

20:50 Kind of like taking a shower, which is when you get your best ideas, it's because the phone isn't in there. So, using that first hour to actually come alive. Second is meal time. Homo sapiens are designed to get a lot of a neuropeptide called oxytocin when we have eye contact with our kin while we're putting pieces of yak meat in our mouths around a campfire. That's how the ancient humans were designed. That's how we knew who a kin was. This is with the bonding neurochemistry would when it would when it would occur. There are even studies showing that if you have your phone face down on the table while you're having a meal that you'll look at it and every time you notice it, you'll wonder if there are notifications or something on your phone and that will interrupt your neuropeptide exchange. That will cut off your oxytocin flow which will make it harder for you to bond to other people. Third is the last hour of the day. Now, most people watching this, they already know that screens are not good before you go to bed. What what does the blue light do? The blue light, it interferes with the proper functioning of your pineal gland. So, you don't get enough or you know the proper level of natural melatonin, which wrecks your sleep architecture. Everybody knows that. So, you can get some fancy blue blocking glasses and keep looking at your phone. Better yet, don't look at your phone because you get the side benefit. If you don't live alone, you live with other people. you'll be focused on them. And what we're supposed to do as we're getting ready to sleep is be with the people that we actually love. Giving us a sense of connection, giving us a sense of harmony. These are the three times. First hour of the day, meal time. Last hour of the day, watch your life change. Second is tech-free zones. That means literal places where you don't have devices. And you get used to it. And I promise you, you'll get used to this really, really fast. The first is the bedroom. Now, obviously, if you're not looking at your phone for the last hour of the day or the first hour of the day, you shouldn't look at it between those times. So, don't have your phone in the bedroom. Now, that's hard for a lot of people.

22:48 I have students who say, "Professor, that's how I wake up. It's with my phone." And I say, "I have this new fangled new invention. It's called the alarm clock. It's incredible. You can get one for five bucks on Amazon. It's great. Your phone should not be next to your bed. I recommend having it in a different room, locked up in a closet, plugged in someplace else, and you simply don't see it. Now, here's the good news. After 6 or 7 weeks, you won't even want to look at it if you do have it at your bedside. So, if I'm traveling and I don't have my alarm clock, I can have my phone there. I will not look at it at night because I'm out of the habit. The second tech-free zone is the classroom. There shouldn't be a school from kindergarten through PhD that allows phones at any time during the school day, especially during lunch. And it's crazy that they still have more than half the states in the United States that allow unfettered access to phones.

23:39 That's simply a lack of courage and knowledge at this point. It's insanity. I understand it. I mean, what happens is that students hate it at the beginning and and so their parents freak out and they convince themselves that it's a it's a danger. It's a security risk. And so they call the principal, who calls the superintendent, who calls the governor. I don't know. The bottom line is this is a lack of political and and moral will and this should get done now. We have the technology to get all phones out of all schools at all levels. Last but not least is tech fasts.

24:10 I recommend 96 hours a year. That's just 4 days. I take a spiritual retreat. I go away and I pray and meditate for 4 days in complete silence with no devices. And it's it's a miracle. The first day you're screaming in your head, where's my phone? The second day you're calming down. The third day you're saying, "I understand this tranquility." The fourth day you say, "I wish it were all year round." If you're not religious, find a secular way to do it. But the bottom line is that you need a 4-day tech fast per year if you can possibly manage it. And you probably can.

24:45 There are a few other ways that we can change the odds in our favor with respect to the technology and the dopamine. One of the biggest problems is that the design of the technology in the in the portable devices is that they they're bugging us. They're trying to get our attention and and when they can get our attention, what that does is that stimulates dopamine to give us the anticipation of reward which fuels the wanting, l learning, liking, craving addiction cycles in our brains.

25:12 The way that you can interrupt that is by getting rid of things that that that touch you. Look, it's bad enough that you think of the phone on your own. It's even worse when the phone is thinking of you. It's trying to remind you of itself. So, the best way to do that is to turn off your notifications. There's one notification that should be on your phone and that's when your mother is calling. That's it. Or that person, whoever it happens to be. But everything else, you don't need notifications for really anything else. I know it's convenient. I really, really got it. But the truth of the matter is that mostly what it's doing is it's stimulating your dopamine.

25:44 There's another way that the devices will will will will really capture your brain in full, which is making sure that it's it's audio and visual and visual in the the most intense way possible, which is in color in really really high definition while giving you all sorts of of sounds that are designed to hook your brain maximally across the different cortices of your brain for the different senses. I mean, if they could make you smell it, they would is the bottom line.

26:12 So turn down the fidelity of of the sensory experience that you're getting. And the best way to do that is with your strongest sense, which is your sight. Now, the occipital lobe of your brain, which functions, it's the whole back of your head, basically, is is dedicated to sight. And and we're really attuned to color. Color is unbelievably important for homo sapiens. It's how we decide between all kinds of things. We can tell if somebody likes us because they flush a little bit.

26:36 We can tell if a piece of fruit is ripe and ready to eat. we can tell if something is probably going to poison us often by color as well as by smell. So, one of the ways that you can actually get less hooked by social media or any screenbased technology is by turning off the color and turning it to black and white. Sounds like such a little thing, right? But you'll be amazed that when when your screen is black and white, you will care less about your screen and you will look at it less.

27:03 There's a wonderful body of social psychology by Mikai Chiket Mikai, the great social psychologist. He invented the idea of flow, the flow state. Most people have experienced this. When you're involved immersively in something and hours turn to minutes, you lose track of time. It's intensely pleasurable. You get into this kind of almost hypnotic state in which you're able to do things that are hard but not too hard and they're not boring. It's almost like a state of Buddhist meditation. People want this and it's really one of the great sources of happiness. When you have your sense of calling, you get that. As a matter of fact, the trouble is it's getting harder.

27:49 One of the reasons that happiness has been in decline, especially for young adults, is because they're less likely to attain a a flow state. To get into a flow state, you need to be fully immersed in something. You need to be concentrated on something. Now, not anything. You can't just like focus on something that you hate. That's not going to work unless you are really really adept as a, you know, if you're a yogi maybe. But for the rest of us, it has to be something that you're truly interested in. The problem is that what technology has created staying in the the category of Buddhist thinking, it's given us the the monkey mind. The monkey mind is that in which the mind is is a monkey that's jumping from tree to tree that can't stay in one particular location that you can't you can't get a bead on it. It's always jumping around. And everybody watching me, you know how it feels to have the monkey mind. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. I'm distracted.

28:41 When you're addicted to tech, it's not just that you have a flow state and you're knocked into the monkey mind by the evil exterior. You're doing it to yourself. You're turning on five things. You're constantly multitasking because you have a hard time distinguishing between immersion and the dreaded boredom that you become completely averse to. Here's the thing about immersion. Here's the thing about flow. You got to get a little bored before you get into it. But if you can't get a little bored because you've lost your ability, your the fortitude to actually do that because you've you haven't felt that way in days, months, years, you'll never get into that state. And the moment that you start to feel a little bored, that could lead to something blissful, could lead to a divine experience. That's when you turn on the podcast and scroll the the social media and read something and do something else and you know where it goes. You're a monkey jumping around from tree to tree. I don't know that much about my greatgrandparents. I know some of their names.

29:48 My paternal great-grandfather was Leroy Brooks, born in 1862 in tha Kansas. And Leroy married the sheriff's daughter, Mary Ellen. And he was a farmer like a lot of people in those days. Now, I don't know much more about him than that, but I'm going to make a supposition. I'm going to imagine that Leroy never came home from work and said, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." And there's a reason. Because all Leroyy's brain was working the way it was designed to work.

30:23 Now, let me give you the contrast between Leroyy's brain and our brains today. Leroyy's life behind that mule was pretty boring moment to moment. I mean, hours a day looking at a mule's butt. How great is that? Pretty boring moment to moment. But I promise you, at the end of his life when he was taking his dying breath, he wasn't saying, "What a boring life that was." Because it wasn't a boring life. It was a real life. Now, let's think about us. We're not bored. We're not bored moment to moment. On the contrary, we've wiped out boredom moment to moment. We crack the case. We look at the phone. We scroll the social media. We listen to the podcast. We wipe out every moment of boredom. But when you do that all day, be honest with yourself. How interesting is your life? I bet it's grindingly boring. And if you're spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind the screen and checking your phone 205 times a day, you're in danger of getting to the end of your life saying, "Well, that was pretty boring because I was never bored." If you want to know the stakes here, think about your eulogy and what you want people to say about you. Think about what you want to think about yourself at the end of your days. How do you want to look back on your life? Now, compare it to how you're spending your life right now. I dare say that if you're like the average American, checking your phone 205 times a day, spending somewhere between 4 and 9 hours on your screens, small and large, if you were honest and you got to the end of your life right now, you'd say, "I spent a lot of time online." But one thing you wouldn't say is, "I sure wish I'd spent more time online." You'd say, "I wish I'd spent more time with my loved ones, with my friends, with my family, getting to know people, having real life experiences." That's what you'd say, right? Well, that's what to go do. That's the argument for this. I know breaking a tech addiction is hard.

32:27 I get it. It's hard for me, too. And the younger you are, the harder it is. But those are the stakes. What are you going to say when you come to the end of your days? It was really boring cuz I wiped out boredom. Well, and and I could have done even even better if I spent even more time on Instagram. I don't think so. I think you're going to want to have had deeper relationships and love, been fully and passionately alive in the world. So, you got to get after it now.

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