Chapter 8 Spiritual Elevation and Degradation

Chapter 8

Spiritual Elevation and Degradation

In the previous three chapters, I described a great deal of research on harms to children and adolescents caused by the phone-based childhood. But now I’d like to write less as a social scientist than as a fellow human being who has felt overwhelmed, personally and perpetually, since around 2014. It feels as if something very deep changed in the 2010s. On college campuses, there seemed to be a shift from discover mode to defend mode. In American politics, things got even stranger. I’ve been struggling to figure out: What is happening to us? How is technology changing us? Most of my research since then has been an effort to answer those questions. Along the way I have found inspiration and insight from an eclectic set of academic sources and from several ancient traditions. I think I can best convey what is happening to us by using a word rarely used in the social sciences: spirituality . The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.

In The Happiness Hypothesis , I wrote a chapter titled “Divinity with or Without God,” in which I presented my research on the moral emotions, including disgust, moral elevation, and awe. I showed that people perceive three dimensions of social space. In every society, you’ll find that people distinguish between those they feel close to and those who are more distant; that’s the horizontal dimension, the x axis in figure 8.1. Then there are those who are higher in rank or social status and who are owed deference by those who are lower. That’s the vertical dimension of hierarchy, the y axis. Many languages force people to mark those two dimensions when they speak, as in French when one must decide whether to address someone as vous or as tu .

Figure 8.1. Three dimensions of social space.

But there’s another vertical dimension, shown as the z axis coming out of the page. I called it the divinity axis because so many cultures wrote explicitly that virtuous actions bring one upward, closer to God, while base, selfish, or disgusting actions bring one downward, away from God and sometimes toward an anti-divinity such as the Devil. Whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive some people, places, actions, and objects to be sacred, pure, and elevating; other people, places, actions, and objects are disgusting, impure, and degrading (meaning, literally, “brought down a step”).

Thomas Jefferson offered a secular description of the z axis in 1771. In a letter advising a relative on what books to buy for his library, Jefferson urged the inclusion of novels and plays. He justified his advice by reflecting on the feelings one gets from great literature:

When any... act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary, when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice.

Jefferson specifically described moral elevation as the opposite of disgust. He then considered the example of a contemporary French play, and asked whether the virtues of fidelity and generosity exemplified by its hero do not

dilate [the reader’s] breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does [the reader] not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?

Jefferson’s use of the word “elevate” captures for all of us the feeling that we are lifted “up” in some way. Conversely, witnessing people behaving in petty, nasty ways, or doing physically disgusting things, triggers revulsion. We feel pulled “down” in some way. We close off and turn away. Such actions are incompatible with our elevated nature. This is how I’m using the word “spiritual.” It means that one endeavors to live more of one’s life well above zero on the z axis. Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?” Secular people can think of their own moral exemplar. (I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.)

So now I want to ask: Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward on this vertical dimension? If it is downward, then there is a cost even for those who are not anxious or depressed. If it is downward, then there is spiritual harm, for adults as well as for adolescents, even for those who think that their mental health is fine. There would also be harm to society if more people are spending more time below zero on the z axis. We would perceive a general society-wide degradation that would be hard to put into words.

In the rest of this chapter, I’ll draw on wisdom from ancient traditions and modern psychology to try to make sense of how the phone-based life affects people spiritually by blocking or counteracting six spiritual practices: shared sacredness; embodiment; stillness, silence, and focus; self-transcendence; being slow to anger, quick to forgive; and finding awe in nature.

Spiritual Practices

The social psychologist David DeSteno published a book in 2021 with the provocative title How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion . [1] In his book, DeSteno reviewed psychological research on the efficacy of spiritual practices such as meditation, prayer, confession, and atonement rituals. Though researchers have not found evidence that prayer works to change outcomes in the world, such as curing a child of cancer, DeSteno found that there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being. The mechanism often involves reducing self-focus and selfishness, which prepares a person to merge with or be open to something beyond the self. When communities engage in these practices together, and especially when they move together in synchrony, they increase cohesion and trust, which means that they also reduce anomie and loneliness. [2]

Looking at these six practices can help us see what many of us have lost as we have entwined our lives more fully with our digital assistants. These practices point us to ways to improve our own lives, and those of children and adolescents too. These are practices that all of us can do, whether we are religious or not, to flourish and connect in our age of anxiety and fragmentation. In fact, they may be more important for those who are not religious and don’t get exposure to these practices inside a faith community.

1. Shared Sacredness

Durkheim argued that Homo sapiens could just as well be called Homo duplex , or two-level man, for we exist on two very different levels. We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the “profane,” which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people “up,” temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predominate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church; think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca; think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Evidence that these two levels are available to everyone, even outside a religious context, can be found in the ways that fans of sports teams use similar techniques to bind themselves together before a game with pep rallies, the singing of fight songs, and shared consciousness alteration (usually from alcohol), along with a variety of quasi-religious rituals, superstitions, and body markings. [3] It is a thrill to be one of thousands of fans in a stadium, all singing and stomping in unison after each goal or touchdown. Durkheim called this state of energized communion “collective effervescence.”

This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong communities don’t just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide. In contrast, transient networks of disembodied users, interacting asynchronously, just can’t cohere the way human communities have from time immemorial. People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive.

To enable their adherents to share collective experiences, religions mark off certain times (such as the Sabbath and holy days), places (shrines, churches, temples), and objects (the cross, the Bible, the Qur’an) as sacred. They are separate from the profane world; the faithful must protect them from desecration. The Hebrew word for holiness ( kadosh ) literally means “set apart,” or “separated.”

But what happens when social life becomes virtual and everyone interacts through screens? Everything collapses into an undifferentiated blur. There is no consensual space—at least not any kind that feels real to human minds that evolved to navigate the three dimensions of planet Earth. In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule. [4]

In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.

We could create healthier environments for ourselves and our children if we could reconnect with the rhythms of the calendar and of our communities. This might include taking part in regular religious services or joining other groups organized for a moral, charitable, or spiritual purpose. It could include establishing family rituals such as a digital Sabbath (one day per week with reduced or no digital technology, combined with enjoyable in-person activities) or marking holidays together consistently, ideally with other families. All such practices would endow time and space with some of the social meaning they have lost.

2. Embodiment

Once time and space are structured for sacredness, rituals can proceed, and rituals require bodies in motion. Prayer or meditation can be silent and motionless, but religions usually prescribe some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional and adds to its symbolism. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate themselves toward Mecca, Sufis have “whirling dervishes,” and Jews “daven,” which involves praying out loud while moving or rocking in a certain way. Congregations sing and dance together, which opens their hearts to each other and to God. [5] DeSteno notes that synchronous movement during religious rituals is not only very common; it is also an experimentally validated technique for enhancing feelings of communion, similarity, and trust, which means it makes a group of disparate individuals feel as though they have merged into one. [6]

Anyone who participated in a Zoom-based wedding, funeral, or religious service during the COVID pandemic knows how much is lost when rituals go virtual. Humans evolved to be religious by being together and moving together. The Great Rewiring reduced synchronous physical movement—indeed all physical movement—and then COVID lockdowns reduced it further still.

Perhaps the most important embodied activity that binds people together is eating. Most major holy days and rites of passage involve a feast, or at least a shared meal, often with foods specific for that day or ritual. Imagine how you’d feel if you were an American and someone in your family said on Thanksgiving that he was feeling hungry so he was going to take his portion of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce now, an hour before dinner, and eat it alone in another room. Then he’d come back and sit with the family while they ate. No. The assembled family and friends must share the food, and this is among the most widespread of human customs: People who “break bread” together have a bond. [7] The simple act of eating together, especially from the same plate or serving dish, strengthens that bond and reduces the likelihood of conflict. This is one deficiency the virtual world can never overcome, no matter how good VR gets.

Many spiritual practices are amplified by bodies in motion and in proximity. When everything is done on a screen, and perhaps done alone in your bedroom, you cannot activate the neural circuits that evolved along with spiritual practice, [8] so it is much more difficult to enter Durkheim’s realm of the sacred. A healthier way to live would be to seek out more in-person communal events, especially those that feel as though there is an elevated or moral purpose and that involve some synchronous movement, such as religious services, or live concerts for some musicians with devoted followings. Especially in the years after COVID, many of us would benefit from changing habits adopted during the pandemic and not always choosing the easy, remote option.

Sports are not exactly spiritual, but playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations. Research consistently shows that teens who play team sports are happier than those who don’t. [9] Humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.

3. Stillness, Silence, and Focus

Bodies aren’t always in motion during spiritual practices; some practices use stillness, although even being still is physically intense. Meditation traditions prescribe how to sit, breathe, and visualize the body. The Buddha followed the “eightfold noble path” to enlightenment. The eighth element, interacting with all the others, is samadhi , often translated as “meditative absorption.” Without training, the mind flits around like a jumping monkey. With our multiscreen, multitasking lives, the monkey jumps even more frantically, as with Johann Hari’s godson. One of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha is that we can train our minds.

Meditation helps to calm the monkey mind. Over time, the nature of conscious experience changes, even when one is not meditating. Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brains in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality. That’s a sign that they have come to live in the openness of discover mode, rather than in the guardedness of defend mode. [10]

This is why many religions have monasteries and monks. Those seeking spiritual growth are well served by separating themselves from the noise and complexity of human interactions, with their incessant words and profane concerns. When people practice silence in the company of equally silent companions, they promote quiet reflection and inner work, which confers mental health benefits. Focusing your attention and meditating have been found to reduce depression and anxiety. [11] You don’t need to become a monk or join a monastery; many ordinary people gain these benefits by taking a vow of silence for a day, a week, or more as they join with others on meditation retreats. Even brief sessions of mindfulness meditation—10 minutes each day—have been found to reduce irritability, negative emotions, and stress from external pressures. [12] In fact, mindfulness practices, originating in the spiritual realm, have now been routinely introduced into psychiatric and medical practice with growing empirical evidence to support their efficacy. [13]

The Buddha described samadhi as a state of “mental unity.” He said, “When you gain samadhi , the mind is not scattered, just as those who protect themselves from floods guard the levee.” [14] Smartphones and social media smash the levee, flood consciousness with alerts and triviality, fill the ears with sounds, fragment attention, and scatter consciousness. [15] The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation, [16] or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.

4. Transcending the Self

Think about your last spiritual experience, perhaps a moment of awe in nature, or a moment of moral elevation or inspiration from witnessing an act of moral beauty. Did you feel more self-conscious at that moment, or less?

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people think of me . These brain structures are so often active together that they are collectively called the default mode network (DMN), meaning it is what the brain is usually doing, except in the special times when it is not. [17]

We might call it the profane mode network. Research has found that the DMN is less active when people engage in a variety of spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer, and the use of psychedelic drugs (in supportive settings) such as psilocybin, which is the class of drugs the world’s indigenous religions most widely use. [18] In his 2023 book, Awe , the social psychologist Dacher Keltner wrote,

As our default self vanishes, other studies have shown, awe shifts us from a competitive, dog-eat-dog mindset to perceive that we are part of networks of more interdependent, collaborating individuals. We sense that we are part of a chapter in the history of a family, a community, a culture. An ecosystem. [19]

When the DMN is quieter, we are better able to deeply connect to something beyond ourselves. What does social media do to the DMN? A social media “platform” is, almost by definition, a place that is all about you. You stand on the platform and post content to influence how others perceive you. It is almost perfectly designed to crank up the DMN to maximum and pin it there. That’s not healthy for any of us, and it’s even worse for adolescents. [20]

The Buddhist and Taoist traditions wrote extensively about the obstacles our egos throw up on the path to enlightenment. Our consciousness gets jerked around by profane concerns. In the Tao Te Ching, a foundational Taoist text from the fourth century BCE, we find this:

Bedevilments arising in the mind are ideas of self and others, ideas of glory and ignominy, ideas of gain and loss, ideas of right and wrong, ideas of profit and honor, ideas of superiority. These are dust on the pedestal of the spirit, preventing freedom.

Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers . Many users may believe that the implicit carrots and sticks built into platforms like Instagram don’t affect them, but it’s hard not to be affected unconsciously. Unfortunately, most young people become heavy users of social media during the sensitive period for cultural learning, which runs from roughly age 9 to 15. [21]

To experience more self-transcendence, we need to turn down the things in our lives that activate the profane mode network and bind us tightly to our egos, such as time on social media. We need to seek out conditions and activities that have the opposite effect, as most spiritual practices do, including prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and for some people psychedelic drugs, which are increasingly found to be effective treatments for anxiety and depression. [22]

5. Be Slow to Anger, Quick to Forgive

The Tao Te Ching lists “ideas of right and wrong” as a bedevilment. In my 35 years of studying moral psychology, I have come to see this as one of humanity’s greatest problems: We are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive. We are also hypocrites who judge others harshly while automatically justifying our own bad behavior. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount,

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. [23]

Jesus was not telling us to avoid judging others entirely; he was warning us to judge thoughtfully, and to beware of using different standards for others than we use for ourselves. In the next verse he says, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?” [24] He urges us to fix ourselves first, before we criticize anyone else.

Social media trains us to do the opposite. It encourages us to make rapid public judgments with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize, no knowledge of the context in which they acted, and no awareness that we have often done the very thing for which we are publicly shaming them.

The Buddhist and Hindu traditions go even further, urging us to forswear judgment entirely. Here is one of the deepest insights ever attained into the psychology of morality, from the eighth-century Chinese Zen master Seng-ts’an:

The Perfect Way is only difficult

for those who pick and choose;

Do not like, do not dislike;

all will then be clear.

Make a hairbreadth difference,

and Heaven and Earth are set apart;

If you want the truth to stand clear before you,

never be for or against.

The struggle between “for” and “against”

is the mind’s worst disease. [25]

We can’t follow Seng-ts’an’s advice literally; we can’t avoid making moral distinctions and judgments entirely. (Indeed, monotheistic religions are full of moral distinctions and judgments.) But I believe his point was that the mind, left to its own devices, evaluates everything immediately, which shapes what we think next, making it harder for us to find the truth. This insight is the foundation of the first principle of moral psychology, which I laid out in The Righteous Mind : Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. In other words, we have an immediate gut feeling about an event, and then we make up a story after the fact to justify our rapid judgment—often a story that paints us in a good light.

The world’s major religions advise us to turn down the judgmentalism and turn up the forgiveness. In the Torah, God commands the Israelites, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.” [26] Thousands of years later, Martin Luther King Jr. used the power of forgiveness, as developed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, to inspire those in the civil rights movement to act in elevated ways that would win hearts and minds:

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. [27]

Of course, religion has at times motivated people to be cruel, racist, and genocidal. Religious practitioners, like all people, are often hypocrites. Nonetheless, religious injunctions to be slower to judge and quicker to forgive are good for maintaining relationships and improving mental health. Social media trains people to do the opposite: Judge quickly and publicly, lest ye be judged for not judging whoever it is that we are all condemning today. Don’t forgive, or your team will attack you as a traitor.

From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind. Spiritual practices and virtues, such as forgiveness, grace, and love, are a cure. As Buddha put it:

In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate.

Only love dispels hate. This is the law,

Ancient and inexhaustible.

You too shall pass away.

Knowing this, how can you quarrel? [28]

6. Find Awe in Nature

It is impossible to overstate the role that the grandeur of nature has played in human spirituality. Psalm 19 sings out, “The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 describing the effects of that handiwork when he walks in a forest:

In the woods... these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign.... Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. [29]

In 2003, Dacher Keltner and I published a review paper on the emotion of awe in which we argued that awe is triggered by two simultaneous perceptions: first, that what you are looking at is vast in some way, and, second, that you can’t fit it into your existing mental structures. [30] That combination seems to trigger a feeling in people of being small in a profoundly pleasurable—although sometimes also fearful—way. Awe opens us to changing our beliefs, allegiances, and behaviors.

Dacher went on to become the preeminent scientist studying awe. He and his students collected thousands of accounts of awe experiences from people around the world and sorted them into the eight most common categories, which he calls the “eight wonders of life.” They are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand understanding dawns).

Awe can be triggered in many ways, but the beauty of nature is among the most reliable and accessible methods. After hearing Dacher in a podcast conversation [31] describe the “awe walks” he took while grieving his brother’s death from cancer, I decided to add a session on awe and beauty to the undergraduate Flourishing class that I teach at New York University. I told my students to listen to the podcast and then take a walk, slowly, anywhere outside, during which they must not take out their phones. The written reflections they turned in for that week’s homework were among the most beautiful I’ve seen in my 30 years as a professor.

Some students simply walked slowly through the streets of Greenwich Village, around NYU, noticing for the first time the architectural flourishes (visual design) on 19th-century buildings that they had passed many times. But the most powerful reports came from those who walked through parks. One student, Yi-Mei, began her awe walk in Washington Square Park, which is the green heart of the NYU campus. It was a perfect April day when the cherry trees were in full bloom:

I was so overwhelmed with how beautiful the park seemed in the spring that I took time sitting on a bench contemplating its beauty and finding moral delight and affection toward the people that I see walking around, smiling at each of them as they look at me.

She was so inspired by this new experience in a familiar park that she then went up to New York’s Central Park, which she did not need to do to complete the assignment. There she was dazzled by the reflections of sunlight on a small lake, “as if there were sparkles sprinkled on it as decoration, and on the trees. To me, it was as if everything came to life.”

Several students wrote that before their awe walks, they rarely took the time to absorb the beauty of the world around them. Washington Square Park is among the most beautiful urban parks in the United States, and NYU students walk through it often, yet many hadn’t truly seen it before.

Many of the students suffer from anxiety, and several found that natural beauty was an effective treatment. Here is Yi-Mei again:

It felt as if the experience of beauty and awe made me more generous and drawn into the present. The petty concerns of the past suddenly felt dull, and to worry about the future felt unnecessary because of how secure and calm I felt now. It was like I was experiencing a stretch of time and saying to myself and my anxiety that “everything will be OK.” There was also a swarming feeling of happiness and simply wanting to connect with and talk to people.

In a 2023 review paper, Dacher and a colleague listed five ways that awe improves well-being: Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.” [32] Yi-Mei experienced them all during her quiet walk through two parks.

Humans evolved in nature. Our sense of beauty evolved to attract us to environments in which our ancestors thrived, such as grasslands with trees and water, where herbivores are plentiful, or the ocean’s edge, with its rich marine resources. The great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson said that humans are “biophilic,” by which he meant that humans have “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” [33] This is why people travel to wondrous natural destinations. It’s why the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park the way it is, with fields, woods, lakes, and a small zoo where my children delighted in feeding sheep and goats. It’s why children love to explore the woods and turn over rocks, to see what they’ll find crawling underneath. This is also why spending time in beautiful natural settings reduces anxiety in those suffering from anxiety disorders. [34] It’s like coming back home.

Yet one of the hallmarks of the Great Rewiring is that children and adolescents now spend far less time outside, and when they are outside, they are often looking at or thinking about their phones. If they encounter something beautiful, such as sunlight reflected on water, or cherry blossoms wafting on gentle spring breezes, their first instinct is to take a photograph or video, perhaps to post somewhere. Few are open to losing themselves in the moment as Yi-Mei did.

One can certainly feel some kinds of awe while using a smartphone. Indeed, you can watch endless YouTube videos about people who performed heroic deeds (moral beauty). You can find the most extraordinary photos and videos ever taken of the world’s most beautiful places. These experiences are valuable. But as we’ve seen before, our phones drown us in quantity while reducing quality. You watch a morally elevating short video, feel moved, and then scroll to the next short video, in which someone is angry about something. You see a photo of Victoria Falls, taken from a drone that gives you a better view than you could ever get in person, and yet, because the entire image is displayed on a screen the size of your hand, and because you did no work to get to the falls, it’s just not going to trigger as much awe as you’d get from hiking up to a much smaller waterfall yourself.

If we want awe to play a larger and more beneficial role in our lives, we need to make space for it. As a result of doing my own awe walk the same week my students did them, I now take my AirPods out of my ears when I’m walking in any park or natural setting. I no longer try to cram in as many audiobooks and podcasts, at 1.5 times normal speed, as my brain can receive. As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas. Without phones.

The God-Shaped Hole

Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph often paraphrased as “there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart.” [35] I believe he was right. In The Righteous Mind , I drew on the writings of Charles Darwin and the biologist David Sloan Wilson [36] to explain how natural selection might have carved that hole: Humanity went through a long period of what is known as multilevel selection in which groups competed with groups, while at the same time individuals competed with individuals within each group. The most cohesive groups won, and humans evolved—by both biological and cultural evolution—an adaptation that made their groups even more cohesive: religiosity (including both the fear and the love of gods).

Many of my religious friends disagree about the origin of our God-shaped hole; they believe that the hole is there because we are God’s creations and we long for our creator. But although we disagree about its origins, we agree about its implications: There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.

It matters what we expose ourselves to. On this the ancients universally agree. Here is Buddha: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.” [37] And here is Marcus Aurelius: “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.” [38]

In a phone-based life, we are exposed to an extraordinary amount of content, much of it chosen by algorithms and pushed to us via notifications that interrupt whatever we were doing. It’s too much, and a lot of it pulls us downward on the divinity dimension. If we want to spend most of our lives above zero on that dimension, we need to take back control of our inputs. We need to take back control of our lives.

In Sum

When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up—elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labeled divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled downward, or degraded.

A phone-based life generally pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice, some of which have been shown to improve happiness, well-being, trust, and group cohesion, according to researchers such as David DeSteno. I described six such practices.

First, émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.

Second, religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with others. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual world is, by definition, disembodied, and most of its activities are conducted asynchronously.

Third, many religions and spiritual practices use stillness, silence, and meditation to calm the “jumping monkey” of ordinary consciousness and open the heart to others, God, or enlightenment. Meditation has been shown to promote well-being, even brief regular meditation in fully secular contexts. The phone-based life, in contrast, is a never-ending series of notifications, alerts, and distractions, fragmenting consciousness and training us to fill every moment of consciousness with something from our phones.

Fourth, a defining feature of spirituality is self-transcendence. There is a network of brain structures (the default mode network) that becomes less active during moments of self-transcendence, as if it were the neural basis of profane consciousness. Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding, and social standing. It is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence.

Fifth, most religions urge us to be less judgmental, but social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before possible in human history. Religions advise us to be slower to anger and quicker to forgive, but social media encourages the opposite.

Sixth, the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and easily accessible routes to experiencing awe, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress. A simple walk in a natural setting can cause self-transcendence, especially if one pays close attention and is not attending to a phone. Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z because it counteracts the anxiety and self-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood.

There is a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart. Or, at least, many people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation. A phone-based life often fills that hole with trivial and degrading content. The ancients advised us to be more deliberate in choosing what we expose ourselves to.

This concludes part 3, in which I laid out the harms of a phone-based childhood (and of a phone-based adulthood). Now we’re ready to talk about what we can do about it, in part 4. I’ll show that we can change things if we act together.