Thank you so very much. What a delight it is for me to be with you. Amazing Parish is an organization dedicated to the reconquista of our society. You're on the front lines. You're doing what it takes in our parishes to bring people back and to keep people there. I'm not on the front lines with you. I'm behind the lines as a professor at Harvard. I'm kind of a spy, actually.
What I teach at the Harvard Business School is a subject called leadership and happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist by background, and for the past seven years at Harvard and now at Vanderbilt, which is my new assignment, I teach at a secular institution about the science of human happiness, starting with neuroscience and behavioral science, but talking to them about the things that actually matter the most. When people learn this, that I teach at a business school, and they assume it must be something business-like, supply chain management, marketing, something like that, accounting, I say, "No, I teach happiness." And they think I'm lying.
It doesn't sound like a business-like topic, but it's the ultimate business topic in the business of our lives. That's the currency that we want to accumulate. That's what everybody wants. And so therefore, that's the opportunity to bring people in for what they want and then show them what they actually need. And every single one of you knows what it is that they need. So I want to talk to you about how I bring the message of the cross and gospel of Jesus Christ to my students who don't know that that's what they need, but they do.
Now, given the fact that I think about happiness all day long, you might think that, well, my students must be the happiest kids on campus. I have 180 students enrolled in my class. It's one of the most popular electives at the Harvard Business School. I have 400 on the waiting list. I did this last spring. And there's an illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of.
And the reason is not because they're happy, but because they want to get happier. If you have heard the news, you know it's true that there's actually a happiness crisis. And what I want to tell you is that's our opportunity. We can regret that all we want. We can look at our young adult children and the students in our schools and say, "Oh, there's so much depression. There's so much anxiety." But if we don't see that as an opportunity, if we don't see that as an entrepreneurial inroad, then we're not good Catholics and we're not even good Americans, because behind every problem is truly an opportunity, and it's an opportunity to bring people what they need.
Let me start at the very beginning of what I teach, and then let's talk about the crisis that we face today, and then let's talk about how we can convert it into something great in our parishes and in our homes and our neighborhoods. And I'm going to start with a couple of graphics here, starting with a definition of happiness. Now, my first day of class, my students are there and they're ready to learn, and I say, okay, before we start, what is it that you think you're learning? What is it you think you're here to learn? And then I make them answer the question, what is happiness? I make them define it. I usually pick one or two students out of the class at random and I make them define happiness in front of their friends, whether they're ready or not. It makes them intensely unhappy.
And here's what they always say. We call this at Harvard cold calling, right? And I cold call one of them and say, define happiness. And they sputter a little bit and they say, 'Well, I mean, I'm here to learn that, Professor. I guess if I had to define it, I'd say, I can't put it into words, but I know it when I feel it. I'm good. I'm good.' Okay. Then I call on somebody else and they always say something like, "It's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love." And I say, "Oh, beautiful. Good. Good." Then somebody will say, "It's the feeling I get when I'm doing the things that I enjoy." It goes on like this until I stop them and I say, "Those are beautiful definitions. Very poetic. That's wrong."
And that's good news. I've got good news for all of us. Happiness isn't a feeling. It isn't a feeling anymore than the smell of your turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. No, no, no. The smell of the Thanksgiving dinner is evidence of dinner. Your feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness. Never go for the feeling; it's a big mistake. You need a better definition. And here's the definition I give them. By the way, if I asked you to define your Thanksgiving dinner and you're a scientist like me, here's what I would demand. Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are macronutrients. You all probably know that at this point.
Happiness works the same way. Happiness has three things. This is what you need to pursue. Don't pursue happiness. I mean, good old Tom Jefferson wrote really nicely the Declaration of Independence, but if he had taken my class, he would have talked about the pursuit of three tangible things that will truly make you happier. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three constituent parts of the happiest life. I want to talk to you briefly about each one and then tell you about the crisis of our times.
The first of these is enjoyment. Now, most people don't understand enjoyment very well. They think it's the same thing as pleasure, feeling good. But that's not the secret to happiness. Pleasure won't lead you to happiness. Pleasure will lead you to rehab. Now, there's nothing wrong with pleasure, per se. The problem is it's incomplete. You know, it's the same kind of life goal that your golden retriever would have. It's not very human in its way. And when you pursue pleasure, you generally end in ruinous ends. You know, in the '60s, the hippies used to say, "If it feels good, do it." My dad always said, "That's the end of America." You know, he was kind of right.
But that doesn't mean that we don't believe in pleasure. On the contrary, we're Catholics. We love things that are blessings to us that feel good. But we know that pleasure is incomplete by itself. To turn it into a source of happiness, you need to add two things: people and memory. Pleasure plus people plus memory makes pleasure something that you can manage and it won't manage you. And it makes it permanent in your heart and in your mind. That's why it becomes enjoyment when you add those two things. And that's a source of happiness. To enjoy your life, you have pleasure plus people plus memory, and you have experiences. That's part one.
Part two is satisfaction. Now, satisfaction is a funny one because it actually requires pain. Satisfaction is the joy from an accomplishment with struggle. Only humans want to struggle. We want to pay for our accomplishments. That's how we know how sweet they are. No other animal wants to struggle for its accomplishments. My good old dog, Chucho, he didn't want to struggle for his rewards. He would eat lying down if he could. But not you. Not you. If I asked you about the good things in your life and how you got to these wonderful accomplishments and achievements, you'd tell me about hard things and sacrifices and even pain and struggle, because that's how you know that there's sweetness to it. And people say, "What a weird thing." And I say, "No, that's the most heavenly thing. That's a divine thing. On the contrary, look, our souls were earned with the pain of our Savior. That's how we're wired because we're made in God's image." That's satisfaction.
The last is the most important. The last is the meaning of life. If you're going to be a happy person, you need to enjoy your life. Yes, you need to take satisfaction with your accomplishments, but most importantly, you need to know the why of your existence. You need to know the meaning of your life. Now, for the longest time, to explain this to my students, because that's kind of an abstract concept, I would say to my students, I'm going to give you a little exam to see whether or not you do know the meaning of your life. I'm not going to ask you to define it. I'm going to see whether or not you know it at a deep philosophical level with a little exam. And here's the exam. It's a two-question exam. I've been giving this for decades. I'm going to ask you two questions and I'm going to give it to all of you right now. So I want you to work through it in your head. And if you want, you can work through it on behalf of a young person that you know and love. Okay? And the way to pass this exam, to know that you don't have a meaning crisis, is you have answers. Real answers. Not answers you'd give the press or your mom. Real answers. The way to fail this is to say those questions are unanswerable or I don't know. Okay. Ready? Question number one: Why are you alive? Couple of ways to answer that. Who created you, for example, or for what purpose, or both? Good. Second question: For what would you give your life right now happily? If you say I don't know or nothing or I don't get the question, that's a big problem. Those are, in a nutshell, about the meaning of life. I bet all of you can answer those questions. By the way, on that second question, all of you who are parents like me or grandparents like me, I know what you'd say. I got it. What else? You want to find more meaning in your life? Deepen the answer to that. Would you die for your church? Would you die for your country? Would you die for your beliefs? Dig into that question.
So, those are the questions I would ask my students to understand meaning. And for the longest time, they always passed. Well, 85% did consistently. About 15% found it perplexing, and 85% would pass this exam year after year after year. But then something started happening. It was real weird. Starting around 2008, my students started to fail that exam. Couldn't figure it out. And every year after 2008, they failed it with greater frequency. And today, 50% of my students fail that exam. They don't have answers to that question. Something happened around 2008. Almost as if a diabolical force had entered our life and society and sucked our ability to ascertain the meaning of life, to take it away from us. Can you think of anything that happened around 2008?
Yeah. It's what all of you have in your pocket right now. And some of you are looking at it and not listening to me. That's what happened. In 2007, the first smartphone was delivered. By 2009, at least half of Americans had one. Now, five out of eight billion people on the planet has one and uses it every day. If you're like the average American, you open up your smartphone and look at it 205 times a day, which is 13 times per hour, every waking hour. My friend, that's a lot. That's what happened after 2008.
Now, when I saw that, I thought, hm, I wonder if it's actually just my perception and just my students. So, I went to the data. I'm not going to trouble you with very much data and not too many graphs, but I got to show you this one because this is a graph of the percentage of young adults who say, "My life feels meaningless." Take a look. That graph hovers around 15% and explodes in 2008. You know who's got it the worst? Who has it the worst? Young women, college educated. That's the people who have it the worst. Men don't have a much easier time of it. And not going to college is no defense. But the people who should be best off, young women who went to college, they're the ones getting it the worst since 2008, my friends. I could show you the data, but you know it's true. And they're the ones suffering the most. Something has hurt this group disproportionately to the rest of the population.
Now, this is not a graph that we often see. Here's the graph that we usually see. Wrong. I pushed the wrong button. Here's the graph that we usually see. This is the percentage of the young adult population that has had a major depressive episode in the past 12 months. It's the same graph. This is what we see as the crisis. But that's not the problem. Depression isn't the problem. It's what's causing the depression. It's what's causing the anxiety. It's what's causing the loneliness. And that's the lack of meaning. And what's breaking our brains and taking away that meaning is the way that we've used the technology and the way it's changed our culture.
Now, what I'm going to do in this 45 minutes that I've been blessed to give you today is I'm going to talk to you about the solution. Because if I can convince you there's a solution to this problem, you can implement it in your life and in your family's life and in your parish and in your community and with everybody that you seek. And when you solve this problem in somebody's life, it's going to change their life. And that's what we're in the business of. We are service missionaries. That's the Catholic way. I want to make you service missionaries with respect to tech. If I do my job, I'm going to put that in your hands. But before I do it, I have to explain what's going on here. I got to explain a little bit of the science because this will help you understand why this has become such a big problem over the past 20 years.
And to do that, I want to talk to you about the amazing human brain. The brain, well, it's the most complex thing that we have ever understood. It outpaces any computer or artificial intelligence we've been able to imagine. People who say artificial intelligence is going to be more powerful than the human brain. No. Wrong. That is wrong. And I'm going to tell you why. The human brain has, in parts, components and properties that resemble artificial intelligence. But in the main, it is fundamentally different because the human brain is divided into two sides. This is a theory in neuroscience called hemispheric lateralization. That's just a fancy way of saying the right hemisphere does one thing, the left hemisphere does something else. Why don't neuroscientists just say that? Because they have to get tenure.
So the two sides are doing something different. Now, if you're my age, more or less, you remember in the 1970s and 1980s, there's this whole idea that you were a right-brain person or a left-brain person. Remember that? Right-brain people were artsy and creative. Left-brain people, they were analytical and mathematical and rational, right? Turns out that was all wrong. That didn't work. That's been abandoned. Nobody believes it. But a neuroscientist at Oxford has brought back the theory. He's also a philosopher and a psychiatrist of all things. A very educated guy by the name of Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist has brought back the theory of hemispheric lateralization because he has found in his research, using very sophisticated tests with human subjects and fMRI machines, that the two sides of the brain do very different things. The right side and left side have different functions and they answer different kinds of questions. Life is all about questions and how we deal with them depends on how we use our brains.
Let me give you a diagram of the brain that's going to kind of give you an insight into what I'm about to tell you. This is a diagram of the human brain. This is not a photograph of the brain, obviously, but it's going to make my point. The left hemisphere of the brain, you think about it right here. This is the hemisphere that you use for efficiency, for information, for how-to and what questions. You're using it all day long. You use it in your job. You figured out how to get your boarding pass to get here, the GPS in your car, any little problem you're trying to solve, putting together a grocery list. It's all left hemisphere questions. Those are called complicated questions. Complicated questions, they can be really, really hard to solve, but once you solve them, they're solved, right? Those are the kinds of questions that we make our livings getting done. That's what Silicon Valley is especially good at. But those aren't all the questions in life.
The other side of the brain, the right hemisphere of the brain, if we can put that slide back up, that's the complex side. The complicated side, hard questions, but we can solve them. The complex questions are easy to understand and impossible to solve. You just have to live with them and understand them. This is not the side of efficiency. This is the side of intuition, of mystery, of love, of faith, all of that stuff that you matter, that you care about the most. Right hemisphere of your brain. That's the why side. How-to and what? Why? You got to have both. If you want to be a competent person, you got to know how to support your family and get to work and pay the rent. But you also have to know why you want to do those things. Because I want to support my family. Because I love my family. You see how it works? If you don't have any why, the how-to and what are meaningless. If you only have why, you'll be incompetent to get your life together. You need both sides of the brain. Thank God we have the two hemispheres.
Now, it turns out that we care differently about the two sides. However, let me give you an example of this. Here are the two kinds of problems. My car is a complicated problem. We can solve complicated problems based on information analysis. I don't frankly have the slightest idea how my car works. No clue, right? It breaks down. I call a mechanic. But you know what? I could figure it out by watching a bunch of YouTube videos, getting a teacher, looking at manuals, reading books. I'm a good student. I've been in school a lot of my life. I could figure out how my car works because it's a complicated problem. You know what a complex problem is? My marriage. That's a complex problem. That means I'll never solve it. I've been married 35 years.
My wife's here. She's in the front row. She knows I'm in love with her. And I'll be looking at her as I take my dying breath. My friends, I'm in love. I'm a man in love. But I'll never solve my marriage. You know, she said good luck before I went up here tonight. I love you. She does. Tonight we might have a big argument. I don't know, because my marriage is a complex, unsolvable problem. That's why I love my marriage. And I don't love my car. Because my marriage is a living, dynamic thing with two human beings, both made in God's image. My car isn't made in God's image. My car is the same every single time except when it dies on the side of the road.
You get my point that the stuff that we can sort out, that Silicon Valley helps us with, that our iPhone facilitates, that the information is pushed to us through the YouTube algorithm, all complicated stuff. You care about the mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness. It's all the right-hand side stuff. And you know where I'm going with this because every time you unlock your phone and look at it, you kick your brain over to the left-hand side. Not only does meaning elude you, you don't even ask the questions. And that's what's happening to young people today. That's what's happening to you today and to me as well. Here's my advantage. I remember the before times. And so the stuff can't quite hook me as much. You can't hook me with Instagram. It's too boring. It's not as interesting as real life. But my kids, it's not just my students that have started failing these exams. My kids, too.
We have three children, Esther and I do. 28, 26, and 23 years old. When they were in high school, at one point, we had three teenagers in the house. It was super fun, as you can imagine. And we had one in particular who was kind of our problem child. I mean, he was difficult. He got into trouble. Highly intelligent, but not highly motivated. You know, he went to a really fancy and lovely Catholic school in Potomac, Maryland called The Heights. He loved it. They were so good to him. But unfortunately, the headmaster of The Heights had me on speed dial. "Carlos got a D in math today. Carlos is failing history. Carlos didn't show up for his exams. Carlos might not graduate with his class." I finally asked her, who's from Barcelona, she's such an optimist. She says, "Well, at least we know he's not cheating, right?"
But here's the thing, my friends. He wasn't even having fun. He was just scrolling, and it was a combination of boredom and depression. And he couldn't answer those questions. When it was time to leave, when each one of our kids were 18 years old, I challenged them to write a business plan. I can do that. I'm a business school professor. Write a business plan because they're entrepreneurs in the business of life, and I'm the venture capitalist. And so I said, 'What are you going to do and where are you going to go to find the answers to those two meaning questions before I invest? Tell me.'
Well, our oldest son gave a great one and we invested right away. But Carlos came along and it was uncompelling. 'Oh, I'll go to college and maybe I'll study business and maybe I'll play some sports.' And it was just... And I said, "No, no, no." And I sent his business plan back for revisions because it wasn't up to snuff. And he was indignant with me because he quite correctly pointed out that it was his life, not my life. But I said, "No, no, because if I had had that opportunity, I would have done a different thing." See, I went to college at 18 when I wasn't ready and I goofed around and I partied a lot and I didn't take it seriously and, well, 10 months in, I was no longer in college because I was urged to pursue my excellence elsewhere by the college. So I said, 'Don't make that error.' A little bit later, I'll tell you what happened instead. Because when he wrote his new plan to find the answers to those questions, things changed.
So this is the world that we're living in. We're living in a left... we're right-brain divine creatures living in a left-brain world. And that's why we can't find meaning. And that's why we're unhappy. And that's, my friends, why we're stuck. I was talking to a young man as I was doing this research and, you know, I asked him to describe his day because I do a lot of interviews when I'm doing this research. I don't just crank the numbers and crunch the statistics. No, I actually talk to the humans. And I was talking to this young man, 28 years old. I said, "Describe your day." He says, "Well, I get up, you know..." I said, "What do you use for an alarm clock?" He says, "My phone, obviously." I said, "What's the first thing you do when you wake up?" He says, "I look at my phone." And then I get up and I make some coffee and I have some breakfast and I look at my phone and then I go to work, which is actually on Zoom, and I look at a screen. I say, "Do you date?" He says, "Kind of. I'm on the apps." And I talk to my friends, well, mostly on social media. And then when I'm too tired to keep going, I just watch YouTube Shorts. I wish I could do something more. And then he got kind of flat and silent and he said something that made the penny drop in my brain. He said, "You know, it feels like I'm living in a simulation of a real life, a simulation." Because he is. It is a simulation.
If you're not seeing people on real dates, if you're not having real friends, but rather mediated through the screen, if you're not at an actual workplace, but rather on the Zoom screen, if all of your entertainment and your sense of accomplishment is actually coming from something that comes through the little screen, my friends, that's not a real life. That's a fake life. Remember that old movie, The Matrix? And when I say old movie, I'm not kidding. That movie came out 27 years ago. I'm sorry to tell you, the plot of that movie was super far-out science fiction. Here was the old plot. There's an artificial intelligence out there, a machine that's controlling all of humanity. The reason it controls humanity is because it needs human energy and attention, a source of fuel. How does it keep people quiet and silent and placid to take away their energy? By giving them a simulation of a pleasant life. My friends, we're in the matrix. It happened. It happened to us. It happened to our kids. It's eating two generations of America as we speak right now.
Now, it's bad enough that this is happening, but it's even giving us an almost diabolical formula for a good life. It's lying to us. Do you want to know the formula for a good life that we get from the machine culture, from the tech culture, from the online life? Here it is. You want to be happy, do three things. Love things. Love the prestige. Love the power. Love the possessions. Do the social comparison. Love things. Use people. They're there for your gratification and your ambition. And since everything is all about you, you're God. Worship yourself. This is the dark formula of modern life and it leads exactly to the opposite of happiness. It leads to misery. That's the wrong formula. But here's the thing. The reason it's compelling is because it sounds almost right. A little bit later, I'm going to tell you why it sounds almost right. Because it's too right. Counterfeit money looks real but isn't, because it looks like real money. I'm going to tell you in a minute about how to turn this in your evangelical work in your parishes, in your communities, into the right formula. But we're not quite there yet.
Why would we do such a crazy, suicidal, self-destructive thing as to turn our lives over to the machine life, to stop using the right hemisphere of our brains? Why would we do something that makes us miserable? And the answer is this. I've studied addiction medicine and addiction science for a long time. I'm very interested in why people do self-destructive things. Here's the reason, by the way. It's because it meets a need. I talk to alcoholics and drug addicts. They want love and it feels like love in a pinch. So, why would somebody get addicted to their phone and ignore people? And the answer is because it solves a problem. What problem? Boredom. We solve the problem of boredom. We hate being bored. Homo sapiens hate being bored. You want to know why? Because it's boring.
We hate it. We're congenitally disposed, we're averse to the idea of not doing anything. When you were a kid and you'd say, "Mom, I'm bored," and she'd make you do stuff. And so you stopped saying that, but you still kept trying to occupy your mind because an unrestricted mind is troublesome and we don't like it. But you know what? Mother Nature doesn't care. For all of human history, people have been bored all the time because we need to be bored. When you're bored, a set of structures in your brain illuminate called the default mode network. That's a set of structures that kicks you into the right hemisphere of your brain through mind wandering, through flights of fancy, and for ideas about meaning. When you have nothing to distract you, you consider the meaning of your life in ways large and small. You may have noticed that you come up with some of your best ideas in a shower, right? It's because the phone isn't in there. I hope.
And it's because the default mode network kind of flickers on a little bit and a weird thing happens and you have a flight of fancy, a little bit of mind wandering, and you come up with something you hadn't come up with before and don't know why you thought about that. If you have more of that in your life, that means your brain is working the way it's supposed to, but people don't like it because it's boring. And so, we figured out a way to solve that. The way that we solve that is this. So, we solved it. What are you doing when you're sitting behind a traffic light that's going on a little bit too long? Don't lie to me. What are you doing in a supermarket checkout line that you picked the wrong one and it's going too slow? I know what you're doing because I see you. Because we're all doing that. We're all doing that all the time. And yet, that's the time that we need for our brains to work the way that they're supposed to.
You want to know how much we hate boredom? Let me show you how much we hate boredom. Here's a picture from a study. This is from a paper from research that was conducted by my colleague Dan Gilbert at the Department of Psychology at Harvard. He does work on all sorts of visionary topics, among them the extent to which we will go, the length to which we will go to avoid being bored. Now, here's how the experiment works. He brings a bunch of undergraduates into his laboratory because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And he sits them in a chair with nothing to do. Nothing to do. They just sit there and there's nothing to listen to, nothing to look at. You don't get to use your phone. You have to sit there for 15 minutes. You get one option besides sitting there silently. You get a little key fob. Looks like this. Got a button on it. If you push the button, you self-administer a painful electric shock. So, you know what he's looking for. What do people prefer? Pain or boredom? Boredom or pain? And you can kind of... you know what I'm going to tell you right now. 25% of the girls shock themselves. Two-thirds of the boys shock themselves.
So, this is kind of more or less an experiment where the difference between boys and girls really shows. One guy in the experiment, I kid you not, he shocked himself 190 times. He got thrown out of the experiment because he kind of liked it. You know, that's how much we hate boredom. And so, we go to lengths to avoid it. One more point of emphasis before I clue you in on the solutions to this problem, of which there are several.
Now, each one of you has eight great-grandparents. You can do the math. Each one of you has great-great-grandparents. On average, you know the first names of two of them. Now that in and of itself is something worth pondering for a second. In three generations, my friends, you will be forgotten by your own family. Make hay. Worship God now because now is when it matters. You're alive now. Okay. You know two of their names probably. I know the name of one of my great-grandfathers, who was Leroy Brooks. Leroy Brooks was born in Thayer, Kansas in 1862. I don't know very much about him. Here's what I know. He married Marie Ellen James, who was the sheriff's daughter in Thayer, Kansas. I know that he had a long and happy marriage and he was a farmer. That's it. That's all I know about my great-grandfather. Right. But I'm going to make a supposition right now that makes my point. I promise you that Leroy Brooks, after a long day in the field, never came home to Marie Ellen and said, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." No, because his brain was working the way it was supposed to because he didn't have a phone.
The reason that we have weird new maladies. And by the way, some of you have had a panic attack. It's no fun. But it's because your hypothalamic-pituitary axis, your whole adrenal system is malfunctioning because of the overload of technological input into your brain. You're spending too much time in the left hemisphere of your brain. That's why it's happening. And here's a further thing I can suppose about Leroy. He was bored a lot, moment to moment. He was looking at the mule's butt most of the day, but he never got to the end of his life and said, "Well, that sure was a boring life," because it wasn't full of love. It was full of faith and it was full of neighbors and it was full of experiences. My students, they're never bored moment to moment, but their lives are boring. Their weeks are boring. Their months are boring. Their years are boring. They can remember nothing about what they're doing, but they're not bored any single second. How ironic indeed. How sad.
So, what do we do? What do we do? It turns out we can do a lot. Now, the prescriptions portion of what I'm going to talk about with you here today, and I want you to join me in this because I have put this together. And this is my quest. This is my mission. This is what I'm all about. But I need you with me. I need Amazing Parishes to dedicate themselves to doing just this. And for us to do this in our own lives. Number one is to start to break away from the problem. And that means raging against the machine. Now, that doesn't mean you need to throw your phone away. You're not going to. I'm not going to. Let's not fool ourselves. If you throw your phone away, you're not getting on the plane to go home. You throw your phone away, you're not getting into your bank account. That ship, my friends, has sailed.
But there are three small adjustments that you can make that will fundamentally change your outlook and your orientation toward the phone. The first really is tech-free times. And there's three that matter. Number one is the first hour of the day. Don't look at your phone in the first hour of the day. This is where your neurocognitive programming is most acute. The first hour of anything that you do over the course of the day will program the rest of your day. Now, I know you got to make sure that nothing's on fire in the London office or that your kids aren't calling to say something terrible is happening, whatever. Look at it. Nothing. Put it down. First hour. I promise you this is going to change your life. The single most important thing you can do with your phone. In a minute, I'll tell you what to do with that hour if you can.
Second is meal times. Don't look at your phone or even have the phone at the table during meal times because it interrupts the flow of a neuropeptide in your brain called oxytocin. Many of you have heard of this. Also known as the love molecule. Homo sapiens evolved from Pleistocene times, the Middle Pleistocene, to actually bond with each other by making eye contact while we eat. Sitting around the campfire with our kin talking about our day. Having a phone on the table interrupts that neuropeptide that connects you to your kin. The last is the last hour of the day, the hour before you go to sleep. Almost everybody knows that sleep architecture is ruined by blue light, which you get from the screen on your phone. That interrupts the functioning of your pineal gland, so your natural melatonin is not produced. All that stuff that you probably already know about. More importantly, it interrupts the relationships of the people that you live with and care about the most. You know, the saddest image I have in my mind is a couple that's married and is lying in bed looking at their phones before they go to sleep. That sacred time that God gave you with your soulmate. Spend it looking into each other's eyes. Read each other to sleep. Read the Song of Songs. Your marriage will never be the same. That's the three times. You do these three times, I promise you, your life's about to change.
Second, tech-free zones. No phones in the bedroom. Obviously, because you're not looking at it before and after you get up, but also not during the night. Plug it in downstairs. Another tech-free zone. And I need you with me on this. No phones in any classroom, kindergarten through PhD. The sad truth is that 28 states today have unfettered access for their students to cell phones. My friends, that's child abuse. You're leaders in your communities. You need to demand that. I realize that Catholic schools are better, but the Catholic schools are not perfect. And all of us are citizens in this country and we have to stand up for the kids who are not going to the Catholic schools. We got to fight for this one because this is ruining a generation of Americans.
And last but not least is the whole question that everybody's talking about with AI. Do read the Pope's latest encyclical. Strong recommend on that one. I got to read it a little bit early because Father Mike and I, we got to write the foreword and the afterword for Ascension Press. It's a beautiful document. Here's his point. AI should make us more human, not less. Here's how. A little bit of neuroscience. You already learned it. If you're using it to expand your left hemisphere to answer how-to and what questions, good. If you're using it for your right hemisphere to connect you to other people, to be your friend or to have the girlfriend experience, or God forbid, to be your therapist, you're doing it wrong. And your brain will know the difference. You'll be sad, you'll be anxious, you'll be lonely, you'll be depressed. That's how we use it in a way that makes us more human.
Second, make boredom great again. Great-grandpa Leroy, he didn't have to do anything about this. He just had to go about his day. But this is not ordinary. This is completely extraordinary these days. How do you do that? By introducing lack of distraction into your life. Working out a couple of days a week without headphones. You're saying, "Hey, Arthur, what are you talking about, man? I'm just trying to get through it." Try it. You're going to love it. You're going to start being more social with other people in the gym or you'll be thinking about the big ideas like an hour-long shower. You're going to have ideas that you can't believe that you had. Drive in silence. The war at the office, the war at home. You need a zone of peace. Maybe that's your commute. Find time where you're undistracted. And best of all is that first hour, that first hour without your phone.
I'm hoping very dearly that soon we will be able to talk about Blessed Fulton Sheen. I think we will. Yeah. Some of you involved in that effort. Thank you for doing that. Fulton Sheen touched so many people with his work. You know, he was the Bishop Barron of the 1950s and 1960s, right? He touched so many people through modern means of communication. And one of the things that he did with his ministry was to introduce the idea of the holy hour. Many of you, many of you clergy and religious, but many of you lay people as well, you have a holy hour for the first hour of the day is dedicated to God. You're not looking at your phone during that hour. You can't actually do the holy hour when you're looking at the little screen. The holy hour can be done by actually taking that first hour and dedicating it, perhaps during a walk for that first hour. I tell my students all the time, get up a half hour before dawn. That has specific neurochemical properties. If you get up before the dawn and walk outside without your devices, pray as the sun comes up. You'll never go back. You're going to love what you find.
And while you pray or when you're doing your holy hour, well, that brings up the next thing, which is to ask bigger questions. Here's the funny thing about that exam I gave you. That two-question exam. Just doing that exam will introduce meaning to your life because asking philosophical questions has to use the right hemisphere. We often say that machines are more human because they can answer more questions. That's exactly wrong. Monkeys can answer questions. We've trained gorillas to learn a thousand words and answer rudimentary questions. There's nothing human about answering questions. You know what's human? Asking questions. The nature of asking big questions and pondering them. This is the divine within embodied in that act. But many of us never ask these questions at all. These are questions, my friends, you can't Google. Ask ChatGPT, "Why am I alive?" You'll get a bunch of garbage. It'll start by complimenting you on how smart you are. And then it'll give you five answers that philosophers have said throughout history and you'll be left with nothing. This is something to understand and something to live with. This is what all of the great orders of priests and religious have done, is to subject people to the deepest questions to ponder. Why? Because when you ask these questions, then your right hemisphere will illuminate and then you can have a connection to God.
Which is my next suggestion. See, I promised you at the very beginning I was going to say the problem that we're having today, it's not woe is me. God puts these things in our lives because these are opportunities for us. You see, misery, that's your opportunity to bring light and truth always and everywhere. That has always been true since Christ walked the earth and is never truer than it is today. When I'm nearing the end of my class at the business school, I have a whole lecture dedicated to opening the soul. And by the end of the semester, they're ready because they know how the brain works and they want it. The single act that will illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain to experience the meaning of your life is to connect yourself transcendentally to your creator. And this is what I find again and again. And you found it too, by the way. You've probably been going to Mass since you were a little kid. And you go to Mass every week. Some of us, we go every day. Same thing every day. People who don't go to Mass are always like, "Doesn't it change? Aren't you getting bored?" Say, "I don't know. It's a weird thing. I want it to be the same thing every day." And you know, when you're in Mass, here's a weird thing, too. You don't even want to check your phone unless the homily is really long, right? It's like, I wonder if anybody's emailing me up here.
And that's because your brain is working the way it's supposed to. When you're having a link to your relationship with the Lord, the right hemisphere of your brain is fully illuminated. I promise this to my students and they find it again and again. And more and more I find that they go back to the faith of their youth. A lot of my students grew up Catholic and a lot of them wandered away and they want to find what they're looking for. And this is my point. Bring them in with what they think they want and then show them what they actually need. And more and more of them will tell me after your class, "I don't know what happened, but I went back to church. I actually found that it gave me what I had been looking for this entire time." This is our way to help people understand that their brains are broken and there's a way to heal. And the way to heal the best, the fastest, the most permanently is by giving up their brains and their hearts to the Lord and Savior that they know is the truth and light and the happiness that they seek.
And last of all, last but not least, is the formula I promised you. See, the world gives you that false formula, that counterfeit formula, a formula that doesn't really satisfy, but it sounds almost right. You know why it sounds almost right? Because the verbs and the nouns are all right. They're just out of order. The right formula for the right hemisphere to find the meaning of your life, to give you what you seek, is this. There's nothing wrong. Get the slide up here. There's nothing wrong with things. You know, we're not Gnostics. We're not denying everything exists in the world. We're grateful for the material world. It's so wonderful. You know, there are all kinds of weird religions out there that will tell you to deny all physical things. No, no, no, no. On the contrary, be grateful for all the beautiful things. Be grateful for the fact that we have air conditioning and we're together in a room in a beautiful hotel and you got here on an airplane fast and it was safe. These are things to be grateful for.
Use things, but don't love them. Don't love your car. Love is reserved for your fellow human beings, for your brothers and sisters, only people. And last but not least, you're not God. Thank God for that. Worship the one true God. This is the formula that will, 10 times out of 10, move you to the right hemisphere of your brain. Show you the meaning of your life. No, allow the meaning of your life to find you, which will then be illuminated in the way that you live, the way that you lift yourself up. It'll make people say, "What are you doing? I want it." And that's the opportunity, my friends, that we need. The world needs meaning. Which means the world needs the Lord. You have that opportunity by living it in your life and sharing the truth. And this time of crisis is the best time we could possibly live in. That makes an Amazing Parish, but that makes an amazing country, an amazing world. God bless you and thank you.
