Summaries from Big Think Episode: ‘Your phone addiction is keeping you from achieving flow state’ | Arthur Brooks at 29:40
My paternal great-grandfather was Leroy Brooks, born in 1862 in 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 Leroy’s brain was working the way it was designed to work.
Now, let me give you the contrast between Leroy’s brain and our brains today. Leroy’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? 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.
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 cracked 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.”
“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?
The truth couldn’t be any more annoying. There’s no better reminder of life than death. In the age of distraction, entertaining ourselves to death, has only robbed us all of our time.
This world of techno-philosophy, makes it increasingly harder to take a less pessimistic view on matters like this. One of my favorite reminders from Brooks’ talk, is the first step: “getting mad.” Mad at companies that are able to get away with creating conditions like these for our society, mad that we’re not any closer to our loved ones because of this, mad seeing time waste away, and mad that nothing productive gets done.
After that, comes change. A truly necessary change. See Solutions.