Ideas - We're not machines. Why should our online world define life?

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

We gorge ourselves on the internet, smartphones, social media, information overload — all of it constantly sap us of our emotional and intellectual vitality. Authors Pico Iyer and Jonathan Haidt argue it's vital we disconnect from our addictive online world to pursue a fulfilling, and richer life. By curtailing the noise of technology, media and other worldly distractions there's space to reconnect with the things that matter. "Humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines. The only way we could begin to do that is by becoming machines ourselves," says Iyer. Pico Iyer and Jonathan Haidt were two of the marquee speakers at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. The theme this year was 'What Makes Life Good.'

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan, advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve.

Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.caver to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. So I thought I might begin with a story. Many years ago, one hot midsummer evening,

I was in my family home in the hills of California, and I saw this distant knife of orange cutting through a faraway hillside. Author, journalist and essayist Pico Ayer, speaking at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. So naturally, I went downstairs to call the FireD. apartment. When I came upstairs again, just four minutes later, it was to find that our whole house was encircled by 70-foot flames, five stories high. It was 1990, the infamous painted cave fire

in Santa Barbara. It was the worst fire in Californian history at that time. It had broken out just up the road from us, and I was caught in the middle of it for three. I grabbed my mother's aging cat. I ran out of the house. We jumped into the car. We drove down our little driveway. And when we got to the bottom, we saw that we couldn't go up and we couldn't go down. The smoke was so thick that we could hear choppers above us, but we couldn't see them. They couldn't see us. And the fire was so intense that no fire truck could get up to us. And the only The only thing that saved us was a good Samaritan who had been driving along the freeway, and he'd seen a far break-outs in the hills, and because he had a water truck, heroically,

he drove up to be of help and ended up by chance, stranded right next to our driveway. And so when we got down, it was to see him standing alone in the middle of the road with a hose. And every time a wall of flames approached from the east, he would just point the hose towards it, and it would recede. And then a wall of flames would approach from the west. He would just turn around and point the hose in that direction. For 45 minutes, we were in fact stuck right underneath our house. And so I could see the flames systematically making their way through our living room.

And then descending to my bedroom and reducing every last childhood toy and photograph and keepsake to ash. and then moving on to my office and wiping out really my next three books, which were all in handwritten notes, and in some ways, of course, wiping out my boyhood dreams of becoming a writer. When finally a fire truck could get up to us and tell us that it was safe to escape, I went straight to an all-night supermarket, I bought a toothbrush, and that was literally the only thing I had to start a new life. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. That harrowing experience and the loss that came with it led Pico Ayer to reflect on what's truly important and what living the good life really means.

The idea of the good life was one of the themes at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. You'll hear two talks from the festival in this episode. Both of them argue that at a time, when so much of the world is on fire, literally and figuratively, living well in body and mind means we have to stop throwing gasoline on those fires. And that means to stop gorging ourselves on the internet, smartphones, social media, information overloaded, the things that constantly sap us of our emotional and intellectual vitality. Pico Iyer takes inspiration from his 50 year friendship with the Dalai Lama, as well as decades of retreats with Benedictine monks in California. And my sense is that monks and nuns in every tradition are really devoting themselves with every breath to discerning what the good life is and then to living it until their final

breath. And by that, I mean, I think monks and nuns are committed to trying to live with clarity and confidence and calm in our ever more tumultuous world and also to looking for what unites us at a time that seems ever more divided. Pico Ayer has lived in Japan since 1992, and his many books include The Art of Stillness and his latest, A Flame, Learning from Silence. He started pursuing silence and stillness

in the wake of months of sleeping on the floor of a friend's home after losing his home in the wildfire. That's when another friend encouraged him to go to a retreat, so he headed north, up the coast, on California Highway 1. California Highway 1 gets narrower and emptier till you're just in this vast elemental landscape, with dry golden hills running down to the road on one side, and the great flat blue plate of the Pacific Ocean on the other. And then I came to an even narrower road, barely paved,

that snaked and twisted for two miles up to the top of a hill where the retreat has stood. And when I got out of my car, the silence was pulsing. It wasn't just the absence of noise. I think it was the presence of something, maybe just whatever I sleepwalk past in my regular life. And so I went down to my small but very comfortable room, and just at that moment, a rabbit alighted on the splintered wooden fence in my garden.

And I just looked at that rabbit as if it were a miracle. Now, in the house that had burnt down, there were rabbits all around the house, but I had never stopped or thought to look at one. And a little later, and bells began ringing by, behind me. And I really felt as if they were ringing inside of me. There was no division between inner and outer. And honestly, I can tell you I've never felt calmer or clearer or happier. And so naturally, I started going back to that place, more and more often staying for longer and longer. When the 15 retreat rooms were all full, I actually stayed with the monks in their

enclosure, because lo and behold, this was and is a Benedict. hermitage, and I'm not even a Christian, but the monks were generous enough to open their hearts and their homes to anyone, male or female, of any background or none at all. And over the 34 years, I've been returning there more than a hundred times. I've noticed two unexpected things. The first is, to this day, every time I go there, there are a thousand reasons not to go. I feel really guilty about leaving my aging mother behind. I'm worried, you know, my bosses can't get hold of me for 72 hours because there's no cell phone or internet reception there.

And as soon as I arrive, I realize that actually it's only by going there that I'll have anything creative and fresh and joyful to share with my mother or my colleagues or my friends. You know, otherwise, they're just getting my exhaustion, my distractiveness or my mumbled catch you later. And of course, they've all got on perfectly happily without me for 72 hours, probably not even noticing that I'm away. The other thing I noticed is that when we rebuilt our house in the same place where our previous house had burnt down, it sat and sits at exactly the same elevation as the monastery, 1,200 feet above the Pacific Ocean,

and it enjoys this glorious, unobstructed view over the sea and the islands in the distance. And I think anyone looking at our house would say it's the last word in tranquility and remoteness. But of course, if ever I were tempted to look at a rabbit when I'm at home, I hear the phone bringing behind me. And if ever I thought, well, maybe I could just look at the light falling on the ocean. No way, I've got a hundred emails I could be answering. And so I talk myself out of my calm and then wonder why I'm feeling so jangled. You're probably wondering at this point why I'm going on about this and about the urgency of taking a break. And I think it's partly because we all sense the world is accelerating at such a furious pace.

And my prejudice is that humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines. And I think the only way we could begin to do that is by becoming machines ourselves. and even before the age of Zoom and even before the pandemic, the average American was spending eight and a half hours every day in front of a screen, which I think means that reality has a greater capacity than ever to shock and to unsettle us. Many of you know that there's this great new field with a perfect 21st century name, interruption science. And in it, researchers have found that it takes the average person

25 minutes fully to recover her concentration after a phone call. So we're never caught up. And I think the more we try to keep up with the moment, the further we fall behind. We all know that technology has made our lives healthier, longer, richer, in some ways happier. But the one thing that technology hasn't given us is a sense of how to make wise and discerning use of our technology. And for that, we have to go offline, which is the reason why I think so many people in Silicon Valley maintain Internet Sabbaths and go completely offline every Saturday or every Sunday or even both

so that on Monday morning they'll have something fresh and unexpected to offer. It's the reason I think why Bill Gates every few months gathers a large number of books, puts them in a sack, goes off to a cabin and a remote island, and enjoys a think week to fill his head, I think also to clear his head and to prepare himself for the tumult that awaits him when he emerges. I'm guessing that everybody in this room already does something to open up space in your day and in your head. I'm guessing some of you perhaps meditate, others go for a run every day or swim or play the piano.

But I think however much we're doing, most of us can afford to do more because the weapons of mass distraction are ever more. intense. Even a hundred years ago, J.P. Morgan was giving himself two months off every year and noting that he could never achieve in 12 months what he did in 10. And again, some of you will have seen the Department of Labor survey from just two years ago, 2003, in which 79% of respondents observed they never have a minute either to rest or to think. And I think if we're stressed out and if we're thoughtless, we're not really in a position

to claim a better future and to make wise decisions. And so I came to feel that it was only by stepping away from the world that I could gather any resources to give back to the world. And I also came to notice it was only by stepping back from my life

that I could begin to see its proportions. and to begin to make sense of it, because I think so often I'm about this close to my life, and I just can't really see the larger picture in every sense. And so for myself, I decided that going on retreat would be the best investment I would ever make. And I worked out that, of course, if I go for three days every season, that comes to only 3% of all the days of my life,

but radically transforms the other 97%. And when my friends ask me, well, why are you doing this? I would say to remember what I love, to recall what really matters, and to think about how I can remain very close to both of those. And I think one way to define a good life would be to say it's one way you're always in touch with what is really essential. However, you choose to define it. Our world and our nation are more violently divided than we have ever.

ever seen them. And I think we're cut up by two things, our words and our beliefs. You believe in that religion, he believes in that one. I voted for that politician. You voted for that one. I know I'm in the right, which means you must be in the wrong. And I think part of the beauty of silence is that it lies beyond all our assumptions and our ideas. Silence is beyond discussion in every sense of that term. Silence doesn't brook argument. I think if after this session I were to engage with any one of you one-on-one in conversation,

and if we were talking about religion or politics, probably after a couple of hours we would find ourselves at odds. But if all of us in this room were to be joined in a moment of silence, I think we would be united in that place far below our theories and our theologies when we're reminded of how much we have in common. And that place that instinctively, when we're walking across the lawn, if we see somebody fall down, reaches out to help her up. We're not asking, is she Christian or Muslim, did she vote Democrat or Republican?

We're just responding to some united, shared humanity. And sometimes, I think, another definition of the good life is not what we believe, but how we act. When I met my wonderful old friend, John, yesterday after many years, he said, I think maybe the two most important things in life are silence and service. So many of my friends are more despairing and anxious than I have ever seen them. And every day, the news reminds us of the many reasons to be concerned between wars and the climate crisis, runaway technologies, tempestuous politics.

And I think all of us are essentially addressing these two central questions. How do we stay calm in this time of mounting uncertainty? And how do we remain hopeful in the midst of impermanence? And as a writer, I think part of my job is to shine a light on places of possibility and inspiration. And it struck me that my monk friends live on 900 acres. of remote wilderness in central California. So they're permanently encircled by fire and having to run for their lives.

And just a few years ago, suddenly a terrible fire broke out on the property next to theirs and nearly all the monks had to evacuate. But three stayed behind to help the firefighters try to protect their home, one of them being the prior. And every few days he would send out updates to concerned friends. And on one point he wrote, there's just smoke everywhere, and we can see pulsing lights through the mist. And there's this surge of orange behind the mountain, just 200 yards from the chapel.

But don't worry, we're maintaining our offices, we're practicing our vigils and our matins and our Vespers. Blessed Day All. He said, Blessed Day All, on the very day it looked as if he was a few. he might well lose his life and certainly lose everything he loved and cared about. And of course, that comes from his faith, but I think it speaks for a confidence that's precisely what all of us are most longing for. My monk friends tell me that joy is different from happiness. Happiness is what you feel on a beautiful day in Aspen when you're getting to be stimulated by new friends.

Joy is what you feel when everything is going wrong, and your life is surrounded by afflictions, but still you have that rock-hard confidence that ultimately something good can come of it. Many decades ago, Jung memorably said the difference between a good life and a bad life is how you walk through the fire. Our lives are not defined by what happens to us.

They're defined by what we do with what happens to us. For example, when our house burnt down, I think about a thousand of our neighbours, similarly lost their homes. Many, many to this day understandably are traumatized. But others, after the initial shock and after maybe a few months of adjustment,

realized that this might be a chance to start anew, to craft a different life, to live in a different place, to have a different kind of house, to live much more without clutter, the way perhaps they had always wanted to live. So it was exactly the same event, but of course it played out very differently

in each household. And in Kyoto, one of the first sentences I learned was, take care of the mind, and you take care of the world. But if you neglect the mind, I think you're really in trouble. 700 years ago, the wise German philosopher, Meister Eckhart, pointed out

that so long as your inner work is strong, the outer will never be puny. In other words, take care of your inner resources, your career, your relationships, your understanding of yourself, will all take care of themselves, but neglect it, and you're like a car without an engine. And so I've tried to develop various habits or practices just to try to keep myself a little clear. So I stole from a friend at Google the idea of making appointments with myself.

So every week my friend opens his calendar and he says, on Tuesday from 3pm to 4 p.m., I'll meet myself. And I think it doesn't really matter what he does in that time. Maybe he takes a walk, maybe he practices yoga, maybe he crashes out, maybe he makes notes. But I suspect it's only by meeting himself he has anything constructive and worthwhile to share in his other meetings. Another practice I try to remind myself to do is that when I'm tempted to kill time, maybe to try to restore it instead. And an example would be, for many, many years, every night in our little apartment, I was waiting for my wife to come back from work. And I never knew if it'd be 20 minutes or 70. So I would kill time.

I would go online and scroll around, though I was never looking for anything in particular. I'd turn on the TV. There is never anything to watch on Japanese TV, except Shohei Otani. And then I thought, wait a minute, why don't I just turn off the lights and listen to some music? And I was amazed, just by giving myself that break and disabling my other senses, I felt so much fresher when I heard my wife's key in the door. I slept so much better. I was so much less frazzled when I woke up the next morning.

I have made my living for 43 years now, working with the mainstream media, writing for time and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the financial times and all the other usual suspects. And I think one of the things I've learned from that is that there are only five minutes of news in every day. And I think the other 23 hours and 55 minutes are these days devoted to opinion, to speculation, to argument, to projection, maybe. This really came home to me during the pandemic. And I noticed that when I woke up, if I turned on the news, I would quickly hear that maybe a thousand people in Italy had just died of COVID-19. and the morgues in Bolivia were overflowing.

And it was really tragic material, but I honestly felt there was nothing I could do to help those people, and it just left me feeling hopeless and powerless. And then I would look out on the brilliant summer afternoon like this, and I'd be flooded with a sense of hope and possibility, and all the ways I could be a better neighbor, and a better friend, and a better husband, and a better son. and I could positively affect the lives of the people around me.

And it made me think that every one of us has a choice every day about whether we're going to attend to what opens us up or to what cuts us up. And everything that follows will be a result of that choice. 150 years ago, the wise student of human psychology, William James, said our lives are defined by what we choose to attend to. Now, most people I realize don't have the time or resources to go on retreat every three months or maybe ever. But I think every one of us in this room probably can afford to go for a long hike on a Sunday without our cell phone. Or to put the mail away message on our email every Saturday or Sunday.

Or maybe most of all to spend just 20 minutes every morning sitting quietly without your devices. Again, just to clear your head and to prepare yourself for everything that follows. I find as soon as I go online every day, I'm basically in Times Square on New Year's Eve. And the only way I can begin to navigate that is by preparing myself. And before I go online, my mind feels like a vast open meadow through which I can explore at will. 20 minutes of every day comes to only 3% of your waking hours, but I think could have a very positive effect on the other 97%. And probably like many of you, I hear myself every now and then saying,

I don't have time. And then I step back and I realize it's as if I'm saying, I don't have time to take my medicine, or I don't have time to go to the doctor. I don't have time to be healthy. Really, I'm saying I don't have time to be happy. And I think I find in myself the strange double standard, because I devote an hour every day to walking to,

my health club and then putting in 30 minutes of somewhat intense cardiovascular exercise. If I can devote an hour every day to making sure that my body is in good working order, I surely could afford to spend that much time on my mind and my spirit and my heart. And I think the question I've been asking of myself a lot is, what do I have to bring to the ICU? Because everyone in this room, whatever you've achieved in the world, reality is going to make a house call more than once in the course of your life.

A doctor's going to come into the room wearing a dark expression or a driver is going to cross the central divider and go right towards you or you're going to lose a job or a loved one. What do we have to bring to those really, really difficult circumstances? A few years ago I was fast asleep in our little apartment

and suddenly in the dead of night the phone began to ring. So I stumbled across the darkened space and I picked it up and I heard a strange voice which was that of a nurse, telling me that my mother had just had a stroke and had been rushed into the hospital, and I was her only living relative.

So, of course, I was on the next plane over the Pacific, and I spent the next 35 days right next to my mother as she was trembling between life and death. We were in the ICU. And like anybody in that position, I was thinking, what do I have to give to help my mother in this really hard time? and, in fact, what do I have to give to help myself?

My resume was beside the point. All the books I've written, no help at all. And I thought the only thing I can bring to my mother and to myself is whatever I have in my internal resources, which I suspect I would have gathered, not by racing around from one place to the next, but from sitting quietly alone and just gathering myself. So to bring this to a merciful close, I'll go back to the far where I began.

And I mentioned how I went to sleep on a friend's floor. But before I went to sleep that evening, I asked if I could use the computer. Because again, in those long ago days, my job was to be an essayist for Time magazine. So I would write the column that appeared on the back page every few weeks. And I just had this front seat view on a major breaking. news events, the worst far in California in history. I remembered being stuck encircled by the fire for three hours, and then I remembered when we got the green light to escape, we drove through what looked to me like footage I'd seen of the Vietnam War

with houses just exploding on one side of the road, and cars reduced to huts or skeletons on the other. And I ended my piece with a haiku from the 17th century that was not well known then, but now I hear it more often, in which the poet wrote, very simply, My house burns down, I can now see better the rising moon. And many years later, I thought, my goodness, the very night on which I lost everything in the world, something in me that I think is wiser than I am, saw that not everything was lost. And that actually what initially presented itself as the calamity might in time open doors for all the doors that it had closed

and make things possible that would never have happened otherwise, which indeed proved to be the case. So whenever I take the wider perspective, if I can remember to do that, things look a little different because I would say when I look back on the course of my life, I'm amazed at how many things have improved beyond anything I could have imagined.

Where I live in Asia, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. and kind of imprisonment and suffering and oppression in the last 35 years. And I think even in this country, rights for women, for dark-skinned people like myself, for people who are a little away from the centre, have improved more than I ever would have guessed. And we all know that there's probably much more work to be done on that front.

But knowing that there's more work to be done shouldn't obscure or make us take for granted how much has been done already. So sometimes when the world seems overwhelming, I think maybe the best thing to do is not to be distracted by what happened six minutes ago or six days ago, but to try to slow down, to step back, to sit silently, and just to try to catch the larger picture. And as you can tell, I have found that sometimes it's only by doing nothing that you can begin to do anything at all. That was Pico Ayer, the author of The Art of Stillness, and Afflame, Learning from Silence. He was speaking at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual gathering of writers

and other thinkers and cultural figures hosted by the Aspen Institute in Colorado. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions,

like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book and eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.caps.cavers.cai. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cair to learn more.

Things at the precinct haven't been the same. I know we've been understaffed since Ellis left, but maybe today things will turn around. But now, the most unlikely fare is back on the case. Hey, Max. You miss me? The dream team is back together. guess it is. And on each other's.

Are you going to be able to keep it together on this one? I am nothing if not profesh. Wildcards. New season. Watch free on CBC Jam. Social media and its handmaiden, the smartphone, were novelties less than 20 years ago. Now, they largely define life in the 21st century, constant companions that command their attention and mediate our connections with the world.

and these powerful transformative technologies were placed in the hands of the people most vulnerable to being shaped by them. That's children and teenagers. In his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt calls it the great rewiring of childhood, literally changing the minds of young people, damaging their mental health, and stealing their ability to focus on anything else. Hence, the cell phone bans in schools in much of the world, including most Canadian provinces. Australia has gone even a step further, banning kids under 16 from social media, and it may not be the last country to ban them.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University, whose previous books include The Coddling of the American Mind. He began his talk at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival by invoking an image of trees and their roots, his analogy for developing brains. Trees are very good metaphors for neurons. They even really look like neurons, you know, with the axons and the dendrites. And so this tree, clearly, as it sent out its roots, the roots grew structured by the environment. These roots could sense where water was, and they grew out along that. Think of slow growth of organic systems. Right. Now think of the

neurons in a child's brain as that child is growing up. Is this child growing up running around in the natural world, or is this child growing up sedentary on a screen? Is that going to affect neural growth? Of course it will. We know this because look what it's doing to our bodies. Think about children going through puberty, their bones are growing and they always have a phone in their hand. I have a pinched nerve in my neck right now. I'll never know whether it's from hunching over. But this is happening to adults. It's happening to kids. Our phone-based life is literally changing our skeletons. We know that it's changing eyeballs of younger people. There's been a global increase in myopia. And it is because kids are spending so much time indoors on close

screens, not outdoors with long views. It is known that this is related to smartphone use. So it is literally changing our eyes. There are two major periods of brain growth, prenatally and the first two years, then it slows down, then it speeds up at puberty. And so if you go through puberty on a smartphone, your brain will, in a almost literal sense, grow around the smartphone. And I think that's what's happened. Our brains, especially for people born after 1995, so if you're born in 1996 or later, you're Gen Z. And for Gen Z, around the developed world, at least, I think This is what's happening. So this is the story that I tell in my book.

The central historical fact is the great rewiring of childhood, which is a tragedy in two acts. So in act one, we lose the play-based child. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. But beginning of the 1990s, a little in the 80s too, but it really accelerates in the 90s, we start thinking that if we ever take our eyes off our kids, they're going to be kidnapped.

If they go to another aisle in the supermarket, they're going to be kidnapped. So we don't give them any independence. That begins in the 1990s. But kids aren't getting depressed then. There's no change in the levels of depression and anxiety in the 90s in the early 2000s. It's not until we get to Act 2

that we really see this incredibly rapid radical change. Act 2 of the tragedy is that the phone-based childhood comes storming in in a very short period of time, just five years. Childhood changes radically. I can summarize the whole book with this sentence. We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have underprotected them online. If you care about kids, if you care about society, if you care about economic prosperity, if you care about mental health, if you care about boys, if you care about girls, this is what I think is happening.

So I've already told you just a few of the physical harms. So now let's move on to the mental illness. This is what first caught my attention when I was writing the coddling of the American mind with my friend Greg Lupianoff. That started in 2014, 2015, we could see that college students. suddenly were much more anxious and depressed, much more threat-sensitive. And since that book came out, we've gathered a lot more data. This is data from American University Health Centers. And what we see here are the rates of various disorders, the reasons why college students

walk into the counseling center. What's the complaint? And these were the rates of various things until 2010. And in all the things I'm going to show you, there's really nothing going on before 2010, and even 2011. There's no sign of a change, but then this happens. And in just a few years, things go up especially anxiety and depression. It's internalizing disorders, the things where you turn your emotions inward, you make yourself miserable, especially anything related to anxiety or depression. So at first we just thought it was college students. But then we found out that, no,

it's everybody, it's teenagers. If you were born after 1996, you were much more likely to get depressed and anxious in the early 2010s. Some of my critics say, oh, it's just that Gen Z is so comfortable talking about it. There's no stigma. That's a good thing. They're honest. That's good. But if that was the case, then we would not see changes in behavior. We would only see changes in self-report. Where you see the biggest, the most gigantic changes is whenever you zoom in on 10 to 14-year-old girls. Whatever it is that happened, it was like a missile targeting right at 10 to 14 year old girls. And so this is the number per 100,000 of 10 to 14 year old girls who, actually this is emergency room visits. They came into an emergency room for self-harm. They harmed themselves.

And so the rates were very low. This is not something that 10 to 14-year-old girls used to do. And then we get into this period. At 10 to 14-year-old girls, now they cut themselves as much as 16-year-old girls used to 20 years ago. And what really sort of grabbed me and made me realize I have to drop my other work. I was writing a book on what social media is doing to democracy. What made me realize, no, that's actually not so important compared to this, was when we discovered it's not just the U.S. These are the parts of the world where we have good longitudinal data, and we find it everywhere. Eastern Europe is a little different for complicated reasons, but across the developed Western world, we find the same patterns that I've been showing you.

It's as though someone somewhere turned on a light switch, and all of a sudden, teenage girls started cutting themselves and getting committed to psychiatric emergency wards. Why is this happening? With a similar pattern around the world, same timing. Why? If this was just America, everyone would have their theory. People would blame it on Obama, probably. Or they would, you know, in 2012, there was the Newtown massacre. There was a horrible school shooting, and after that, all our kids had these terrifying lockdown drills.

So it was just America. There's so many things. You know, correlation doesn't prove causation. There's so many things. But the fact that it happened all over the Western world means it wasn't Obama or Newtown. What was it? Here's my theory. No one else has even proposed an alternative.

I keep looking. I keep asking. No one can come up with an explanation for why it happened at the same time in the same way in so many countries. other than the Great Rewiring Theory. So let me illustrate it for you. Well, let's see. Raise your hand if you were born between 1981 and 1995. Okay, so you're all millennials.

And what that means is that you went through puberty in the 1990s or the early 2000s. And you probably had this phone. Right. It was a, okay, this was millennials' world. It was a communication tool. You use it to call or text your friends or your friends. family. So there was no attention economy in your pocket, just communication. But what if you were born in the year 2000? What happened? Well, you start going through puberty around 2012, 2013,

and you go through puberty on a smartphone, because even though it comes out in 2007, it's only 2012, 2013. It's right there that everyone's rushing onto it. That's also the year that Facebook buys Instagram, and they don't change it at first, but the marketing, the attention, So that's when 10 to 14-year-old girls start not gossiping and talking in small groups, but posting and commenting. And because this thing is always in your pocket, the entire world can get to you. Companies can market to you. Everyone can interrupt you. And so now we have an attention economy in which these children were not the customers.

They weren't paying anything. They were the product. And the customers were advertisers who were paying meta to get as much of their attention as they could extract. So I call it the great rewiring, but it's really, you know, visually to convey what was childhood like? And it used to be full of adventures and risk. And a lot of you remember, you know, if an extraterrestrial shows up in your neighborhood, you and your friends, you put him in a basket, you have adventures, it's just what we did. But what is childhood now? It's very solitary. And if you're a boy, you literally cannot go over to your friend's house. If you want to play

with your friends. You have to go home to your controller, your headset, your avatar, and then you can play with your friends. And we have a lot of data on time use. You see time with friends used to be very high for young people, and it begins dropping in the 2000s. As soon as they get their smartphones, they spend less and less time with each other. It's now down to about 50 minutes a day outside of school on average. But even that 50 minutes includes this. So there's just not much time that they're interacting with each other face-to-face anymore. These devices are too seductive. They are designed by geniuses with degrees in psychology

who studied behaviorism and know exactly the optimum timing pattern for dopamine stimulation to create maximum addiction. So that's why it's happening. Now, let me tell you what I think is the biggest cost. When I started writing the book, I thought it was going to be all about social media for girls and anxiety depression, because that's what's clearest in the data. But what I've discovered since the book came out is that that is not the largest damage.

There's a much bigger one, which I believe is attention fragmentation, the destruction of the human ability to pay attention, to think, to read books, to focus. Because this isn't just hitting 20 or 30 percent of our kids, the way mental illness is. This is hitting almost all of us, including us adults. So a year and a half ago, Derek Thompson, a wonderful journalist of The Atlantic, wrote this article. It sure looks like the phones are making students dumber. And he was writing this because test scores were coming in. This is America's report card.

And what you see here is that we made progress slow. It's not huge increases, but we literally made our students better educated from 1970 through 2012. And this is despite strong headwinds, like the decline of marriage and all kinds of of other obstacles, but we did it. Our educational system actually got slowly and gradually better until 2012. And then this happens. Now, this graph gets everyone's attention because all the news around it was, look at the COVID drop.

Look what COVID did. COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. But the drop didn't start in 2020. It started in 2012. Now, if we dig deeper into the data, we see even more evidence that this is not COVID. So some experts predicted a post-COVID recovery, and if we look, this is where you break up the data, this is just the math scores for eighth graders, and if you look at the top, the students who score best, the top 20 or 25 percent on these tests, they do show a small post-COVID bounce.

You can see that. Scores went down when schools were closed, but now they're back for a couple of years. They're getting a little better, a bit of a post-COVID recovery. But what happens to the bottom 50 percent? they started dropping around 2015. They started dropping as soon as everything moved on to smartphones. Oh, and the Chromebooks and the iPads, constant, constant distraction. The very best students can resist the distraction, but most students, the majority of students, cannot.

And they began dropping after 2015 or so. We see the same pattern when we look at reading scores. But once again, we see that on the top, we don't really see a decline, but on the bottom half of the country, we see a decline that wipes out 50 years of progress. Fifty years of educational gains, gone. And it's not just us. This is PISA, the program for international scholastic assessment. So this is sort of the Globes report card.

And once again, we see no trend in scores before 2010, and then scores drop all over the world. This is what began to freak me out and get me talking in these terms like math, destruction of human capital. This is the mass destruction of human capital. Now, why is this happening? It's kind of obvious. To learn, you have to pay attention. If you're watching TikTok video games and porn all day in class, you're probably not going to learn a lot of math. And the number of interruptions that everyone gets, but especially teens, is in the hundreds

per day, and about a quarter of them come during school. It's also caught our attention. we university professors who have been assigning reading for decades, we now find our students are having a lot of trouble reading books, even at the elite schools. I talked about this with my students. I teach a course at NYU Stern called Flourishing. And one of my students said, yeah, it's true. She said, I open a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.

And so again, the ability to read a book, executive function, the ability to decide you're going to stay on something, even though you know that there are other more interesting things elsewhere, that is a crucial skill, especially in an advanced economy. We're training people for careers that are going to require them to focus, and we're destroying the ability to focus. Now, what then sort of upped my worry about this another level was this article a few months ago,

where John Byrne Murdoch brought together a few studies. This is the monitoring the future study one I showed you earlier, but I didn't realize this, nestled within that, there's a bunch of questions about how hard it is for you to think. And so in the past 30 days, what percentage of the time have you had a difficulty thinking or concentrating? And there's a slight rise from 1990 to 2010. And how often have you had trouble learning new things? No rise at all.

And then this happens. Now, this is self-report saying that they have a lot of trouble thinking. I think we should listen to them. Everyone is noticing it. But what Byrne Murdoch did was he found this study that I, I hadn't heard of, where they actually gave adults math problems, and they scored them, and they've been doing this for a long time. And they gave them several pages of text to read, and then they had to answer questions about it. And what this graph shows is the percentage

who were functionally illiterate or enumerate. What you see is that in the U.S., it was about 18% of American adults couldn't answer simple questions about a few pages of text. But no change before 2012. And then this happens. So all around the world, or at least where we test here, adults are literally less able to solve math problems. They are literally less able to read a few pages. As Bern Murdoch put it, we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se and more at a broader erosion in the human capacity for mental focus and application. Once again, a gigantic destruction of human capital and human potential, hitting potentially all human beings,

not just those born after 1995. So this is what has me incredibly alarmed. We are literally getting stupider at the exact time that our machines are getting much, much smarter. We're kind of giving up. I mean, team humanity is kind of saying, we concede, you guys take it. Another thing I've learned since writing the book, I've learned a lot more about what's happening to boys.

So here's the basic contrast. For girls, the story really does center on social media. That is just devastating. It takes all the worst parts about being a girl in middle school and quadruple then. That's what life on social media does to girls. The evidence of this link is very clear. So this is what I thought was the main story of the book. And that is the main story, I believe, for girls. There's a lot of other stuff going on elsewhere, but this is the main place to look. For boys, it wasn't so clear. I was thinking, well, is it going to be video games?

Do video games do the bad things to boys equivalent? And some, definitely, but it's not as focal. It took me a while to realize this. But the key for boys is everything. Everything that these companies can now do to our boys to grab their dopamine circuits. Every way that they can possibly put our boys on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule is being done to them.

So it begins with the video games. And we know from people in the industry, they literally design them to be addictive. They literally do everything they can to keep the boys on the games that they don't go to the competitors game. So it starts with the video games. Now, I don't want to say, I mean,

almost all kids and especially boys play video games. I'm not saying don't let your kids play video games. But two or three hours a day, every day, that's a lot of stimulation of the dopamine circuits, which means that the brain downregulates those neurons so that it now takes more stimulation to get you up to feeling normal, which is why for boys who spend their day on this,

everything off-screen is now more boring than it was 20 years ago. It's harder to pay attention to the real world. But it just starts there, then it moves on to porn, it moves on. I'm now looking at, you know, e-cigarettes, vaping, marijuana pens, so many of our young men in particular, are dosing themselves with things that stimulate dopamine, not for doing anything important in the world, not for doing anything hard,

but just for triggering your dopamine neurons. It feels good. And then it goes on. As they get a little older, it becomes sports betting. My God, sports used to be a positive pastime for boys. Now it's just another profit center for a bunch of companies. And even investing, when our boys are old enough to open investment accounts, it's all gamified.

The net effect, in states that legalize sports betting, the number of bankruptcies goes way up. This is especially crippling for young men. And so we're raising a generation of boys who can't concentrate, can't focus, and won't be able to accumulate money. How are they going to do in the modern economy? How are they going to find a spouse? This, I think, is the story for boys. And I didn't even touch yet on the extremism, the manosphere, the recruitment online. into extremist and violent and hateful ways of being.

So that concludes the darkest part of our tour. Now, here's the amazing thing. Have you ever seen a major problem that could be solved for almost no money, and it's totally bipartisan? No, you haven't. This is it. And here's the key. The key is that we're all stuck in a series of collective action problems.

The reason we had to give our kids a phone in fifth or sixth grade is because they say, mom, I'm the only one. Everyone else has an iPhone. I'm being left out, and that pulls at our heartstrings, and we give in. And the companies know this, and they play on it. And so the way out of a collective action problem is collectively, if you try to escape by yourself, you can do it. And some heroic parents are doing it,

and they're putting a cost on their kids, which in the long run is good for the kids, but the kids have to pay the cost. But if you're not alone, if you've got five other families doing it with you, or if you've got your whole school, then it's easy to escape. So here are the four norms. I'll run through them. The first is no smartphone before high school. I'm not saying that it's perfectly safe in ninth grade. What I'm saying is this is a bright line. How about we just draw a bright line and we say middle school hands off? Middle school is the toughest period. Let them get through middle school in the real world with each other. And then we'll work. worry about helping high school kids control usage. But we can't expect 10-year-olds to do this. So before then, give a flip phone, a basic phone watch, but there must be no internet.

What I'm coming to see, I didn't know this when I wrote the book, iPad turns out to be just as bad. It's not quite as portable, but it does all the same stuff. And 40% of our two-year-olds now have their own iPad, according to one survey. It's an amazingly powerful digital pacifier, just like opium. But we don't give open. to our kids to stop them from whining. We give them iPads. A laptop, you're going to have to give at some point or access to a computer, I should say. It's not as addictive. It's really the touch screen is the worst of the worst. So there's a lot more to say about laptops, but it's really the touchscreens to keep your eye on also video game consoles. The second norm that we need to break out of a collective

action trap is no social media before 16. If a bunch of people in your fifth grade class are getting Instagram and they're talking about you, the pull to get on is very, very strong. And of course, all our kids could open fake accounts without us ever knowing. So the companies have put us in an impossible situation. We literally cannot raise our kids the way we want. It is just not possible unless you literally keep them away from the internet. So what we need, I was assuming we'd have to do this as a norm because I thought we'll never raise the age, you know, by law. So I proposed as a norm that we all hold out and not let them open accounts until they're 16, let them get through early puberty. Yes, they'll miss out on some things.

But if they spend five hours a day on social media, they'll miss out on a lot more. The third norm is phone-free schools, which is going gangbusters. It's going so well. It's really stunning the way behavior improves and happiness improves. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. There are all kinds of ways to give your kids more independence, especially the let-grow experience. It basically it encourages kids to do something on their own with your permission, but not. with you. And so to conclude, we're starting a movement. I mean, mothers around the world have started lots of organizations. Our mission is to reverse the two acts of the tragedy, give kids

back a childhood in the real world. Every single state is at least considering legislation along some of these norms. 11 or 12 states have already enacted fully phone-free schools. So it's happening around the country and around the world. Parents, especially mothers, are organizing. Ron just announced he's going to push for raising the age for social media in Europe. And if the EU won't do it, he'll do it in France. Brazil's schools are all phone-free. So it's been amazing to watch this happening. And so I hope you'll join us.

But really, together, we can reclaim childhood in the real world. Thank you. Jonathan Haidt, the author of the best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, speaking at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Special thanks to John Purvez and the Aspen Institute. Institute. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.cai.com. And you can find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. Technical production Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.