Better Than Real Life

The Secret Science Addicting Kids to Screens—And How to Save Childhood

De: Richard Freed

Narrado por: Richard Freed

In the 1990s at Stanford University, a science was created to have digital machines use psychology to control humans. This science, called “persuasive design,” is now employed by Silicon Valley to addict kids to social media, video games, online videos, and smartphones. Yet virtually no one—including parents and even health experts—know that persuasive design exists.

Better Than Real Life is the story of the unknown science used by tech corporations to pull a generation of kids away from family, school, the outdoors, and other essential real-world experiences to live their lives staring at screens. World-leading brain scientists target kids’ DNA to convince them that living their lives on social media, video games, and other screens is “better than real life.” Not just more entertaining, but experienced deep down in kids’ souls that using a particular screen fulfills their life’s purpose. The result is a nation of girls suffering from epidemic levels of depression and suicidality, while boys turn away from school and are put at risk for video game addiction.

Dr. Freed is a child and adolescent psychologist who has a leading role in exposing the addictive science hiding behind our kids’ screens. His insights on persuasive design’s transformative impact on childhood are featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. He lives in Walnut Creek, California, and is the proud father of two daughters.

Better Than Real Life illustrates how parents, educators, health care providers, and others who care for youth have an important role in protecting our kids from addictive screens. And it gives you the power to give your kids the happy, healthy, and successful childhood they need.

©2025 Richard Freed (P)2025 Richard Freed

Oddly Captivating,

I picked up Better Than Real Life because I’ve been watching what screens are doing to children—especially teenagers—and wanted something that went beyond the usual hand-wringing. In that respect, the book delivers. There is enough research, testimony, and Silicon Valley insider material here to get anyone started on the topic. Freeman clearly understands the way the tech world designs for compulsion, and the book connects many dots about how “attention engineering” has quietly become the business model for everything children touch online.

But I have to mention the one thing that completely dominates the audiobook experience: the narration. I have never heard anything like it. Instead of reading sentences, the narrator breaks the text into these sharp, staccato fragments—almost like the left side of a newspaper column was lifted out and read straight downward. Words. Short phrases. Pauses. More fragments. Like reading through broken glass. Almost nothing sounds like a complete sentence. At first I thought it was an error in the recording. Then I wondered if it was a stylistic choice. Either way, it takes some getting used to.

Oddly enough, once the shock wears off, the style does become interesting. It forces you to think about the information instead of letting it wash over you. Or imagine a tsunami of margin notes. But it also means you can never quite settle into a story rhythm. You’re always catching up, stitching the fragments back into meaning. I can’t say if that was intentional by the producer or a quirk of the narrator — it could be breaking new ground, it might even be brilliant. And it becomes part of the book whether you want it to or not.

What kept me listening, though, was the subject itself. Freeman describes something that many parents and teachers feel but have trouble articulating: that Silicon Valley didn’t just stumble into addicting children to screens — they refined it, optimized it, and then exported it globally. And in the middle of all of this, it’s teenage girls who often paid the sharpest price. The book touches (sometimes indirectly, but unmistakably) on the rise of anxiety, body-image issues, late-night doom-scrolling, self-harm ideation, and the way a phone can quietly become a teenager’s entire world… and their captor.

Freeman doesn’t sensationalize it, but he doesn’t soften it either. You hear story after story—young girls who weren’t sleeping, who were comparing themselves endlessly to invisible online standards, who were being manipulated by algorithms that had no interest in their well-being. When you put all the pieces together, it becomes a blunt picture: these platforms were designed to capture their attention, and in many cases, they captured far more than that.

So in the end, the audiobook is an unusual experience. The narration is strange, sometimes frustrating, sometimes oddly compelling. But the content is important. And if you can push through the choppy delivery, you’ll come away with a clearer understanding of what is really happening to children in a world where the brightest engineers dedicate their talent to keeping kids online, no matter the cost.

Strange narration, powerful message — carrying the imperative that childhood be defended.