Arthur C. Brooks compares social media to drugs and argues we need strict device rules: no screens the first hour after waking, while eating, or before bed. He says the real fix is asking un-Googleable questions about purpose and meaning, the kind that engage deep conversation about God, death, and love.
There's evidence that's overwhelming that technology is highly addictive. Social media is addictive, as are screens, just like drugs and alcohol. So what do we need? We need the discipline that would come from any other activity. It's actually quite simple. I teach this all the time in my classes to my students. I talk about the neurocognitive programming of not using your device for the first hour of the day. The important neurochemicals that you get by not using your devices as you eat. The importance to your relationships as you don't use them in the last hour before you go to sleep. We need to have that kind of discipline. Second, we need to live in an old-fashioned way, more like my great-grandfather Leroy. Things that he would have taken for granted. For example, asking the big questions that can't be Googled. Questions that don't have clear answers. Look, why are you alive, or for what will you give your life, are not Googleable questions, and that's how you know they're questions of meaning. And when you simply ask bigger questions, you open up the right hemisphere of your brain. The questions that don't have answers are the really human questions. That means deep conversations without devices, talking about God, and death and love. And on love, this is what else could have been taken for granted and no longer is.
