Love People, Use Technology
I had experienced this myself when going overseas and limited use of my phone.
I used DeepSeek sparingly. I had limited mobile data. I was busy travelling throughout the day. I even used productivity apps very minimally. The productivity apps I used the most were my offline note-taking app and my diary application, and not so much my to-do list app or calendar. I took a lot of photos and spent time managing those photos, deleting them to save space and choosing my favourite ones.
But when I came back to living in Sydney, I noticed that I was using AI voice mode, image generation, YouTube, playing mobile games, and doomscrolling again. It dominated my time and led to time spent that I was not happy with.
I watched Arthur Brooks' ARC 2026 talk, "Your Phone Is Destroying Your Sense of Meaning", and many parts of his argument resonated with me.
I do agree that love and happiness are what we should be chasing in life and that they are what make life worthwhile.
Recently, after having a family, I have also come to believe that people are more important than technology. We ought to use and be grateful for technology, but we should not love it. Instead, we should love people.
He talks about more and more young people feeling lost and failing to be able to answer his "Meaning of Your Life" quiz. He asks a couple of existential questions:
- Why are you alive?
- For what would you give your life?
I thought these questions were excellent—simple yet thought-provoking.
He distinguishes between complicated and complex problems. Complicated problems are technical and have solutions, even if they are difficult—for example, building a bridge or writing software. Complex problems, on the other hand, don't have clear or final answers. Questions like "What makes a good life?", "How should society be organised?", or "Why are we alive?" are complex because they involve values, judgement, and uncertainty.
He argues that technology is changing the types of problems we are faced with, and that the lack of complex problems is contributing to a crisis of meaning.
He also mentions that, when it comes to existential questions, the act of asking the questions has value in itself, even if we never arrive at definitive answers. He doesn't go very deep on this, but I agree with it.
My reasoning is that asking these questions changes how we live. Whether we ever discover the ultimate answer to "Why are we alive?" is almost beside the point. The search itself influences our priorities, our relationships, and the kind of people we become. We should not give up hope simply because a question is difficult or may never be fully answered. Throughout history, humanity has often pursued ideas without knowing where they would lead. Sometimes we make profound discoveries, and sometimes we go down the wrong path, as happened with astrology and alchemy. But we only make progress by continuing to ask the questions.
He also explains that some of the radical behaviour we see in universities, protest movements, and other forms of activism may be evidence that young people are craving meaning and are willing to go to great lengths to satisfy that need, even if it is sometimes misguided.
So I would say to anyone: love people and use technology. Don't get those two things mixed up. I think that's one of the most important lessons I've learned.