The Art of Manliness - The Life We're Looking For

00:00:00.000 Hey, this is Brett. The McKays are on vacation this week, so please enjoy this rebroadcast

00:00:04.140 episode. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

00:00:14.400 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In the quiet

00:00:18.620 moments of our lives, we can all sense that our hearts long for something. We often don't

00:00:22.880 know what that something is. We seek an answer in our phones, and while they can provide some

00:00:26.560 sense of extension and fulfillment, a feeling of magic, the use of technology also comes

00:00:30.880 with significant cost in individual development and interpersonal connection that we typically

00:00:34.880 don't fully understand and consider. My guest today will unpack what it is we really yearn

00:00:38.960 for, how technology, when misused, can direct us away from the path to fulfilling those

00:00:43.140 yearnings, and how we can find true human flourishing in a world in which so much works against it.

00:00:47.480 His name is Andy Crouch, and he's the author of The Life We're Looking For, Reclaiming

00:00:50.880 Relationship in a Technological World. Today on the show, we talk about the trade-offs you

00:00:54.460 make when you seek magic without mastery, and how we can understand our desires better

00:00:58.240 once we understand ourselves as heart, soul, mind, and strength complexes. We want to be

00:01:02.760 loved and known. We discuss the difference between interactions that are personal versus

00:01:06.400 personalized, as well as the difference between devices and instruments, and how to use your

00:01:10.340 phone as the latter instead of the former. We enter a conversation with why Andy thinks

00:01:14.320 we need to redesign the architecture of our relational lives and create something he calls

00:01:18.020 households. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash crouch.

00:01:24.460 Andy Crouch, welcome to the show.

00:01:39.700 Thank you so much. Great to be here.

00:01:41.540 So you've got an interesting background. You studied classics at Cornell University. It's beautiful

00:01:47.120 Ithaca.

00:01:47.980 Yes, it is.

00:01:49.100 And then after that, you went to divinity school at Boston University. You got your master's in

00:01:53.520 divinity. Usually, most people, they become like a minister or they go teach. You did a

00:01:58.620 little bit of ministering, but you've spent most of your career writing about digital technology,

00:02:04.380 particularly its intersection with culture and faith and philosophy. I'm curious, what drew

00:02:10.520 you to explore the humanistic side of our digital technology?

00:02:15.500 Yeah, great question. Well, I've always loved technology, even though it wasn't the thing I

00:02:19.500 ended up studying. It was my first love. My dad brought home one of the very first computer

00:02:24.980 terminals. You are probably too young to know what these were, but back when there was just

00:02:30.340 a single computer for like a whole university. And so when I was a kid, I started coding. I still

00:02:35.360 love to code. And so I've been fascinated with this, though it wasn't my vocation. As a user,

00:02:41.360 as a beneficiary of technology, of course, because we all are, I really got more interested in it,

00:02:47.720 though when I tried to start understanding, honestly, what was going wrong at the same time

00:02:53.980 as so many things were going so right. Like the iPhones just keep getting better and better and

00:02:57.880 our tech keeps getting better and better, but people are not getting better and better. We're

00:03:02.040 not getting happier and happier. That's become pretty clear. We're not getting healthier and

00:03:07.040 healthier, especially in the US. So I started trying to get to the heart of, you know, what is

00:03:13.880 technology? How has it shaped us? And it just ends up being one of the most fundamental and

00:03:17.680 interesting questions you can ask. And as a journalist and as a writer, I'm just drawn to

00:03:23.300 the big, important questions. And this to me is maybe the big, important question of our time for

00:03:28.380 those of us who live in what we call the West, which is really the technological world.

00:03:32.660 Yeah, I think this is important. I think people forget about when it comes to technology and science,

00:03:36.400 what often happens is there's an advancement in technology.

00:03:40.400 And then we come up with a philosophy for that technology, like how it's, how are we going to

00:03:45.340 integrate it into our lives? And in previous, you know, centuries, there'd be decades or centuries

00:03:52.280 between innovations. So we'd have time to figure out, okay, well, what is the printing press? How are

00:03:56.060 we going to, what does this mean? And now like stuff's just happening constantly and we never have time

00:04:01.660 to think about, well, how, what does this mean? What is, how are we going to incorporate this into

00:04:05.680 our life? What place will it have in our life? So I think a lot of people would just like, okay,

00:04:08.840 this is new. I'll use it. And they don't, we don't really think about, well, what are the second

00:04:13.140 order, third order effects of this? Completely. And I think this is partly because of the distinctive

00:04:18.280 thing about technology. So we have a saying in our family, cause my wife is actually a scientist.

00:04:22.140 She's a physicist. So she does like experimental physics and we say science is hard. Technology is

00:04:27.060 easy or technology is easy. Science is hard. Science is slow. Science is challenging. Although the pace

00:04:32.760 of scientific discovery has also accelerated, but what has really accelerated is the introduction

00:04:37.860 of applications of applications of science, which is what technology is, that are actually

00:04:42.080 very easy to use. So it used to be that when people invented tools, it took a long time to

00:04:48.640 make those tools really effective for human use. But now technology is so good at insinuating

00:04:56.420 itself into our lives because it's so easy to adopt, but you can adopt it so fast without actually

00:05:04.340 thinking through what are we adopting? Why are we adopting it? It's also sold on two things. It's

00:05:11.280 always sold on the premise of it's going to be, you'll be able to do something new and you won't have

00:05:16.360 to do things you don't like to do. So you'll be able to do this. You won't have to do this, but we never

00:05:20.580 talk about the other two things that always come with technology, which is you'll no longer be able

00:05:24.320 to do something if you adopt this, or at least it'll get a lot harder. So it's not only going to expand

00:05:28.820 what you can do, it's going to subtract what you can do. And it's not just that you won't have to do

00:05:33.920 some things, but now you'll actually start to have to do things. In other words, technology has a kind

00:05:37.840 of coercive quality. Once we introduce it into our lives, into our homes, it actually requires behaviors

00:05:44.260 of us with, and those are often not disclosed in the sales process, you might say. So it's this

00:05:52.560 combination of offering and coercion that we don't really have time to reflect on. Whereas

00:05:59.360 with tools, they entered the human story so slowly and gradually that I think societies did a better

00:06:05.100 job kind of reflecting on what we were actually adopting and why. Can you give us an example of

00:06:10.540 that, the promises that we get with technology and the burdens of it? Yeah. I think of all the reasons

00:06:18.400 people get a smartphone, you know, now you'll be able to, why they get it for their kids, you know,

00:06:22.600 now you'll be able to check on when their soccer game is. Like a lot of people feel like their

00:06:26.960 kid needs a smartphone just to find out when soccer practice is. And that's a really interesting

00:06:30.800 example of the technology promises to expand your capabilities, but then it says actually now there

00:06:35.880 is no other way to find out about soccer practice. So you have to have the thing to do this thing

00:06:42.040 that people managed to do for many generations before the phone, but now you have to have it.

00:06:47.120 It has this coercive quality. Maybe a deeper example is, is what's happened to music. I think

00:06:53.880 the making of music is one of the most important things human beings do together and do as persons.

00:06:59.700 And of course, technology about a hundred years ago made it possible to listen to recorded music,

00:07:06.020 which is an absolutely new idea in human history. Like up to a hundred years ago, if you wanted music,

00:07:11.480 somebody had to play. And now technology says, well, now you can just listen to

00:07:17.100 whatever music you want. And with streaming, listen to almost any music you want, anytime, anywhere,

00:07:21.980 and you'll no longer have to play yourself. And that sounds great. Like what's the downside to that?

00:07:28.520 I think the downside is as your world becomes full of professionally made recorded music,

00:07:34.220 it's at least less and less likely, even if not strictly speaking, less and less possible,

00:07:40.960 it's less and less likely that you or someone you know will sit down and go through all the effort

00:07:45.980 and all the expense and difficulty of actually learning to make music. And if you never go

00:07:50.600 through that, you'll never be able to make music yourself. And so this technology that opens up the

00:07:57.380 world of hearing music to you also closes down the possibility of making music together. Because

00:08:02.700 now we're often in places where no one in the room has ever practiced enough to be able to play in

00:08:07.440 a way other people would want to listen to. And so we've traded, you know, it's a, I don't know,

00:08:12.960 is it a bad trade or a good trade, but it's definitely a trade. Does that make sense?

00:08:17.200 Yeah, that makes sense. And I think this trade-off that we make with technology is part of the reason,

00:08:21.640 I think you make it explicit. It's one of the reasons why we feel kind of this, I don't know,

00:08:26.220 ambivalence towards our technology. And you, this is what you explore in your latest book. It's called

00:08:31.580 The Life We're Looking For. Is this idea, this idea of trade-off, is this one of the big ideas

00:08:36.760 that you're trying to explore in this book? Completely. In a way, it's the trade of wanting

00:08:41.740 to do magic. Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

00:08:49.220 And that sounds like a good thing. Like, ooh, I'd like to have that. But magic is actually the way

00:08:55.140 human beings talk about the ultimate trade. So there's this whole history of people reflecting on

00:09:01.120 what you actually trade away when you decide to become a magician or a sorcerer or an alchemist.

00:09:06.540 And the fundamental story of this in Western history is Goethe's poem, Dr. Faustus, about this

00:09:12.100 magician, sorcerer, alchemist who makes a deal with the devil to acquire incredible power,

00:09:16.700 but at the cost of his soul. And I'm not saying, well, I don't know if I'm saying that our technology

00:09:25.720 is quite the same bargain because, of course, it is not based on pure imagination the way that

00:09:31.100 maybe Faust was. It's based on real things in the world that we've learned how they work. And that's

00:09:37.040 good for human beings, to learn how the world works and make use of that. But have we traded

00:09:42.000 something away? And I think we've traded away a bunch of things of great value to human flourishing

00:09:49.100 in the pursuit of what we thought was sufficiently advanced technology. This kind of magical world that

00:09:56.080 works on its own, world that works without us having to do anything, without us having to become

00:10:01.020 anything, without us having to grow or develop. And that leads to very diminished people in a very

00:10:08.700 powerful world. And I think the powers that we've acquired have come at the expense of kind of our

00:10:14.360 internal capability to really meaningfully be part of the world that we're in.

00:10:18.620 Do you know where else in culture they explore this trade-off of magic? Twilight Zone.

00:10:25.940 Oh, totally.

00:10:27.160 Yeah. We watch it a lot in our family. And it seems like every other episode is about

00:10:31.640 that trade-off, like sort of this Faustian bargain that people are making.

00:10:35.160 Exactly. It's all over. I mean, because we just instinctively know as human beings, I think,

00:10:40.740 that there are risks in these bargains. But because we think that all technology is about is science,

00:10:46.500 basically. We're like, well, it's just STEM. It's science, technology, engineering, math. Like,

00:10:49.860 what could go wrong? But I actually think it's embedded in these much deeper kind of mysterious

00:10:55.560 forces that we modern people don't talk and think as much about, but that I think actually are still

00:11:01.520 very much there.

00:11:03.320 Well, so your book's called The Life We're Looking For. I mean, what is it that we are looking for

00:11:08.620 when we turn to technology to make our lives better? Like, what is the big thing we're looking for,

00:11:14.800 do you think?

00:11:17.220 Maybe I'll start with what we were originally looking for, which wasn't a device and wasn't

00:11:23.320 technology. I think essentially what we're looking for is a fully personal life. I begin the book by

00:11:30.160 saying the very first human quest is recognition. First of all, we're just looking for someone who

00:11:36.360 is looking for us, which is a phrase I got from the psychiatrist, Kurt Thompson. We're looking for

00:11:41.600 someone who's going to look back, who's going to regard us, pay attention to us. And in fact,

00:11:45.840 none of us make it to adulthood without parents or someone who played the role of parents gazing at us

00:11:52.060 and beholding us, interacting with us, listening to us. Because the first thing we're looking for

00:11:57.220 in a way is love, connection. And then beyond that, all the things that become possible when you feel

00:12:04.620 truly loved, you become creative in the world. You grow. We grow through the process of human

00:12:10.060 development into adult human beings who have tremendous bodily capabilities, strength, tremendous

00:12:15.020 mental capabilities, tremendous emotional range. So, we were looking for, and we still are looking for,

00:12:22.640 that kind of full human life, which I describe it as heart, soul, mind, strength, complexes designed

00:12:29.420 for love. That's who we are. What we're looking for with technology, I think, comes in when the quest

00:12:36.880 for real life fails or is frustrated in some way. It's actually really interesting to me to look at

00:12:43.020 when do people first give a toddler a screen? Because toddlers are given screens now, right?

00:12:49.380 We hand our toddlers screens. When do we do that? When they are feeling distress, basically. The first time.

00:12:55.740 Now, eventually, you give it to them so they can find out when soccer practices. But when you give

00:13:00.700 a two-year-old an iPad, it's because that two-year-old is experiencing some frustration of

00:13:05.780 being human. Maybe they're stuck in the car. Maybe they're mad at mom. Maybe they're bored, whatever.

00:13:12.100 And we're like, you know what? Here, try this. And when the toddler tries it, that magical device

00:13:17.780 responds to them in a way that other people don't as readily. That is, it pays unlimited attention to

00:13:23.980 them. It is much easier to manipulate than the real world. Toddlers get frustrated in the real

00:13:29.460 world, as do adults, because it doesn't always respond to what we want it to do. But that device

00:13:35.000 and its kind of magical virtual world is designed to just be so easy to use that even a toddler can use

00:13:41.640 it and feel very efficacious. So, what we turn to technology for is a compensating simulation

00:13:49.200 of the real powers that we want, but that are too hard or too long or difficult to acquire.

00:13:58.740 And for relief from the distress of being heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for

00:14:03.820 love in a world that's a vulnerable place and hard to be in. And technology will take away some of

00:14:09.040 that distress and replace it with this kind of pretty easy, effortless sense of capacity and power.

00:14:15.000 Okay. I want to dig more into this. Okay. This idea of being a person. You're making this case

00:14:19.840 that we're seeking to be a person. That's the light. We're trying to develop ourselves

00:14:23.400 into a person. And you say this, I want to dig in more of this heart-soul-mind-strength

00:14:28.660 complexes. What is that? Well, it comes from one of the longest standing wisdom traditions in the

00:14:36.300 world, the Hebrew Bible. It's this idea from the Hebrew scriptures that we are meant to love. It says,

00:14:44.040 love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, Jesus of Nazareth adds, all your mind

00:14:49.340 and all your strength. And I was thinking about that, and I thought, you know, that is a very good

00:14:54.740 and very irreplaceably precise summary of the components of being a human being. In other words,

00:15:02.860 we're not a brain without a body. We're not mind without emotion, but we're not emotion without

00:15:09.660 reason. Like you can run all the permutations or combinations. We are all these things together and

00:15:16.020 they interact. So, heart is like emotion, desire, also the will that comes from the desire, the desire

00:15:23.420 to pursue something because that thing is beautiful or worthwhile. It activates our emotion and our

00:15:31.580 activity. Mind, of course, is the capacity for cognition, reason, thinking things through.

00:15:37.100 Soul is the hardest one, but I suppose it's something like depth of self. It's going down

00:15:43.700 into the very heart of who I am that makes me distinct perhaps from others and my own unique

00:15:49.000 story with all its pain and all its power. And then strength is the fact that we're embodied.

00:15:54.300 We're not disembodied mental, just mental spirits. We can't think without our bodies and our bodies

00:16:01.200 can't exist without thinking. So, this word complex kind of holds these all together and says

00:16:07.060 they can't be completely separated, but they are different from each other. And then I think to turn

00:16:13.580 it around, so much of modern life neglects one or more of these things at any given time. The thing

00:16:20.140 that's been most neglected, because we really built our computers on the model of just pure minds,

00:16:24.900 our computers are really good at the mind part of life, as it were, but they're not that good at

00:16:31.260 the strength part. And they ask very little of our strength. So, when you're sitting at a computer,

00:16:35.980 your body, which is meant to be moving in three planes through the world, is just totally idled,

00:16:41.820 totally inactivated practically. And we've designed technology and designed a modern world that very

00:16:47.540 rarely lets us bring all four of these things back into active collaboration, which would have been

00:16:54.700 just normal for human beings until the blink of an eye ago. Like most human beings, most of the time

00:17:00.240 were out in a natural world that was beautiful, activated their heart. They had a sense of soul

00:17:05.020 and connection to some transcendent reality that reflected itself in some ways in the depths of

00:17:10.280 their being. They did, of course, think their way through the world and they were acting with their

00:17:14.420 bodies. And like every day, all day, that was the human experience. And now, like how much of a

00:17:20.340 given day is that actually our experience in the technological world? A very small part of the day,

00:17:25.240 I would say, where all four of those are happening. So, we've lost something that really we almost

00:17:31.880 could have taken for granted for a very long time. Yeah, this idea of heart, soul, mind, strength

00:17:37.560 complex. You also see this with the Greeks, like Plato had his idea of like, there's three parts of us,

00:17:43.000 three parts of the soul. And then you also, I mean, C.S. Lewis kind of picked up on this as well

00:17:47.060 within the abolition of man, where mind, chest, just kind of like that, I guess that soul part,

00:17:52.740 and then the belly, right? And they all have to work together to be fully human. If you take out

00:17:56.840 one part, then you're no longer human. Okay. And so, what you're saying is that in order for these

00:18:03.100 to develop, we typically, we interact with other people, we interact with the world around us. I think

00:18:07.140 the important part of this idea of becoming human, I want to bring in another writer that I like a lot,

00:18:12.700 is Wendell Berry. He writes about being, we have to think of ourselves as creatures, right? That we

00:18:17.620 are, we are products of the earth. We are, we are bound here in temporal time. And if we try

00:18:23.920 to go beyond that, then we somehow miss out in our development. And so, you're typically the way

00:18:29.720 humans mostly develop, like you're a baby and you interact with the world, you crawl, you pick up 0.96

00:18:33.700 things, stick them in your mouth, and you're doing this with people. And you develop, and over time,

00:18:37.900 you develop into a human being, you're saying technology kind of skips some of that stuff.

00:18:43.820 And we miss out on some of that development and becoming a person.

00:18:47.320 Exactly. Because development mostly happens against resistance, right? So, part of, I think,

00:18:52.980 what Barry's getting at, and he's influenced me tremendously as well, is it's even the, you know,

00:18:59.000 part of being a creature is you go out in the world and the world's just really big compared to you.

00:19:02.860 Like, even if you just step out in the world and you just feel the smallness of being human,

00:19:07.300 then it's a kind of resistance. The world is not set up to just actualize yourself in any easy,

00:19:14.320 simple way. And so, I begin every day going outside. I just stand outdoors. Before I look

00:19:20.140 at a screen, I go out of doors. And I stand ideally out from under a, you know, a roof entirely. I get

00:19:27.540 off a porch. I stand under the sky. Some days it's raining or snowing or whatever. I still stand there.

00:19:32.640 And I just feel like my smallness, which strangely is not frightening, at least most mornings. It's

00:19:42.940 strangely grounding. But it is a kind of resistance. It says, gosh, how is little you going to make a

00:19:54.180 difference in this world? It's both an invitation and a kind of warning. And that's developmental.

00:20:00.080 Like, something happens to my mind and my heart, my soul, my strength when I start the day that way

00:20:05.200 that invites me to figure out what the next thing is, what I can do. And then, ideally, I'd be working

00:20:13.240 against certain kinds of resistance. We know that strength only develops when you, you know, push

00:20:19.100 muscles or pull muscles against resistive forces. But that's really true for the mind as well. It's

00:20:25.220 happening for me in this conversation. Like, you're asking questions that I don't know the answer to

00:20:29.380 them or in any simple way know the answer. So, I have to think my way through it. I'm feeling

00:20:33.860 resistance as I do that. Good things are happening as I'm doing that. What technology does is it makes

00:20:40.320 a lot of these things much easier. So, if I have central air conditioning in my house, I never have

00:20:46.820 to go outside and feel a difference of temperature or step out into a natural world where I'm no longer

00:20:53.980 kind of in charge of the temperature. The computer does a lot of the thinking for me. If I need to

00:20:59.360 do math, it just does the math. If I need to remember something, it just does the remembering.

00:21:03.520 And that's useful, but it's not developmental. And this is, I think this is the heart of why we are

00:21:11.240 so markedly lonely, anxious, and depressed is we've become very diminished people. And diminished people

00:21:19.840 have a hard time finding something to do that's worthwhile in the world and have a hard time

00:21:24.360 finding a way to make real connection with other people in the world. Because if everyone else has

00:21:28.820 just been equally undeveloped as me, who am I connecting with? I'm connected with shadows or

00:21:35.880 ciphers. And that's an exaggeration maybe of where we're at, but maybe not totally missing something

00:21:43.040 that has changed is that we used to be in a world that just of necessity developed us. And now we're

00:21:48.960 in a world that almost necessarily or coercively fails to develop us, just keeps us still, keeps us

00:21:55.460 not engaged. And I think that's causing a lot of distress that's hard to surface until you really

00:22:01.600 start paying attention to what it feels like to be us right now.

00:22:05.100 All right. So human development, there's resistance, there's frustrations, there's friction.

00:22:09.100 And so when we experienced that, we turned to technology thinking, well, maybe this can solve

00:22:14.400 that issue. And I think one of the things you talk about, you really hit home. I think one of the

00:22:18.860 things that we're looking for as human beings, you said at the beginning, we're looking for

00:22:23.320 recognition. We're looking for relationships with other people. Well, sometimes, you know, making

00:22:28.020 relationships can be hard. Sometimes people don't pay attention to you.

00:22:31.560 Yeah. Sometimes, you know, I mean, pretty much all the time people misunderstand you.

00:22:35.940 They're frustrating. So we think, well, we can turn to technology.

00:22:38.740 And we get this like social media superpower. But you're making the case when we do that,

00:22:45.280 we become a little bit less human, correct? Because we're not developing it to its fullest

00:22:50.540 capacity.

00:22:51.800 And more and more fragile, less resilient, less able to handle or know how to respond when

00:22:56.980 someone doesn't get what you're saying or isn't listening, right? I mean, Sherry Turkle,

00:23:01.460 who has studied so many dimensions of how media is shaping us, she had this really interesting

00:23:07.960 series of experiments or conversations in her lab at MIT with college students who are the easy

00:23:13.380 ones to get in a lab at a college research setting. And she was trying to probe why do college students 0.71

00:23:19.820 prefer to text rather than talk with each other, right? Why would you text your friend if you could

00:23:24.680 talk with your friend? But the answer is, I think, really illuminating. The basic answer that she gets

00:23:29.800 from students as she probes this in her conversations with them is they prefer to text because when you

00:23:36.280 text, you are in control of the message you sent. So even as we're having this conversation, there's a

00:23:43.160 lot I'm not in control of. I'm not in control of what you ask. I'm not in control of how you respond.

00:23:48.220 And I don't get unlimited time to figure out how to respond. I sort of have to be in the moment and

00:23:53.240 that's vulnerable, right? But if you're texting, first of all, you've reduced the information stream

00:23:58.680 tremendously. You've gone from, you know, megabits of information over a voice connection, like we're

00:24:03.900 using terabits if we were face-to-face, like we'd be exchanging so much information in real time.

00:24:09.720 You take that all the way down to a few bytes of information at a time. That means that I can

00:24:15.460 actually look over what I'm going to send you before I send it. So I'm totally in control. I never

00:24:20.700 send a message I didn't mean to send, which happens all the time in real relationships. It's much more

00:24:26.280 likely you will get the message I want to send, but it also thins out the relationship.

00:24:31.200 And the problem is the quest for control is like directly in opposition to the quest for relationship.

00:24:39.660 The more you want to be in control of a situation, the less real relationship you have,

00:24:44.180 because relationship is risk. It is improv. It is vulnerability. And, you know, we would prefer

00:24:51.940 not to have that, but the more we opt out of that, the less we lack the very thing we were

00:24:57.400 most deeply designed for. So that trade of, well, I'll be more in control. I won't be as vulnerable.

00:25:04.440 It won't be as hard. In some ways, true, but you won't have much left once you've given up the

00:25:11.460 things that make relationships what they are. Well, the other thing that technology allows us to do

00:25:15.980 with relationships is, okay, we can control the conversation, control how we present ourselves

00:25:21.460 to others. So they like us, but we can also control like who we even interact with in the

00:25:25.360 first place. I mean, a lot of the frustration that happens with relationships, you end up with people

00:25:29.440 that you just don't even think like them and you're under, and you have to learn how to manage that

00:25:34.860 with social media or the internet. You can find people who are pretty much just like you. And you

00:25:40.900 know, as soon as I interact with them, it's going to be, it's going to be easy.

00:25:43.780 Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, easy everywhere is what technology promises. I mean, that's to me,

00:25:51.780 that's the fundamental idea is, wouldn't it be nice if life were easy? Wouldn't it be nice if

00:25:57.040 everyone pretty much had the same opinions as you do, the same style of communication as you do?

00:26:02.100 And it's such a steep trade-off to how am I going to become the kind of person who can handle

00:26:08.580 difficulty in the world, who could actually persuade others? I mean, this is a huge issue in our

00:26:13.740 world right now. How does anyone ever persuade anyone now? Because we've lost the ability to

00:26:19.180 attend to someone who genuinely sees or feels the world differently than I do, and have them come to

00:26:26.240 trust enough that I really know why they think what they think, what it feels like to be them,

00:26:31.760 and then I can offer them an alternative account of the world. And they're like, oh, actually,

00:26:35.340 that helps make sense of something that I couldn't make sense of.

00:26:37.780 But when we're siloed off from each other, and we're never encountering that real difference,

00:26:43.720 we also completely lose the ability to ever persuade someone else. And then, of course,

00:26:48.900 it just spirals into tiny little polarized tribes, rather than people who have actually done the hard

00:26:54.160 work of how do I listen well enough across some real difference that I could be part of a real

00:26:59.800 conversation? The problem is, the logic of this is ultimately, it's Narcissus's mirror, right?

00:27:05.720 Because it's interesting, I've been married for 27 years. And when my wife and I got married,

00:27:11.840 one of the things our friends said about us was, oh, Andy and Catherine are so alike.

00:27:16.480 Like, we had the same Myers-Briggs type, we had the same, there were so many ways that we were,

00:27:21.340 we seemed quite similar while we were dating and engaged. And then, like, the day we got married,

00:27:27.060 it was like a switch flipped, and we just discovered all these ways that were so different from each other.

00:27:31.180 And I never think of myself primarily these days as like my wife, even though I think if you met us,

00:27:36.660 you would probably say that on an initial encounter. But the truth is, as we get to know

00:27:41.360 any other person, we discover this is hard. This person does not see or feel what I see and feel.

00:27:48.840 There's always moments where you're like, I would rather opt out of this and go to some other

00:27:52.840 environment where I'm more in control. But the only place where you're really going to experience that

00:27:57.180 is with the infinite personalization of a screen that just mirrors back to you who you are.

00:28:02.200 Because the moment you encounter another person, no matter how similar they seem to be,

00:28:06.160 you're going to encounter some deep chasms of difference that you'll have to bridge and that

00:28:11.100 will cause conflict and strain and stress. And if you opt out of that, you are ultimately opting out

00:28:18.600 of all relationship in the world. Fortunately, you know, with screens, maybe you'll be relatively

00:28:23.660 palliated, but you won't be living the life we were looking for when we started, which was to

00:28:28.720 find that other face and somehow know what it was to be known by another. That you won't get.

00:28:34.840 We're going to take a quick break for you. Words from our sponsors.

00:28:38.820 And now back to the show. I love this distinction you make in the book about personal and personalized.

00:28:44.720 Because I think this is a useful distinction because I think it's what technology does. It promises

00:28:50.200 us to have personal experience, but what we get is personalized experiences. And I love the example

00:28:57.480 that you give of those, like those robo letters you get from like real estate agents that look like

00:29:03.440 they've been written by hand.

00:29:04.580 It looks so real.

00:29:05.540 Yeah. Like, tell us, tell us about that distinction.

00:29:07.780 I mean, I got one as I was starting the book. I was thinking about this issue of, you know,

00:29:11.320 what exactly has gone wrong in our world of persons. And I got this letter that it completely

00:29:17.980 fooled me. I consider myself to be a pretty suspicious person, but I got this letter in

00:29:21.960 the mail and it looked like a, you know, a friendly, like 10th grader had written me a note. It was sort

00:29:26.540 of exuberant handwriting. And it took me like several minutes looking at the letter to realize this window

00:29:32.520 salesman had not actually written me a letter. Right. And I thought, oh, this is what technology is

00:29:38.700 getting so good at. It's getting good at simulating personal connection. Because of course, what do I

00:29:44.240 respond most deeply to? I respond to that face I'm looking for. And so now our technology, it's a very

00:29:51.780 convincing imitation of the real thing that my devices know my name, they talk to me by name, they recognize

00:29:58.800 my face. But the difference between personal and personalized is very simple. In personalized

00:30:07.260 encounters, there's not actually another person on the other side. It's a device. It's a thing. It's an

00:30:14.280 algorithm. It's a program. And yes, it very convincingly talks to you, presents itself to you

00:30:20.320 as if it knows who you are and what your unique interests and needs and so forth are. But in fact,

00:30:25.920 there's no face of another person who's paying attention to you. So it's like it both totally feeds

00:30:32.500 the hunger. And it's also like the most lonely thing in the world because this device doesn't in

00:30:37.600 fact know me or care about me or have anything to offer me other than what can benefit the system

00:30:43.160 that produced the device. And that's a very different thing from a real personal encounter

00:30:47.960 with another person who is more than the sum of a system of profit generation. Even if they are

00:30:54.020 a window salesman, if I meet a real person, there's something real that happens ideally with that

00:30:59.000 person. That's not just transaction, but a personalized world is all transaction all the

00:31:03.760 time. No, the personal. So I get this a lot with PR people who are pitching podcasts. Yes. Oh my God.

00:31:10.540 They use like the template. I can only imagine. Right. And have like, I guess there's a Brett. Yeah.

00:31:14.400 Well, no, but sometimes I think there's like a macro they use. And so they can just like

00:31:17.660 automatically, but sometimes the macro doesn't work. And it says, dear podcast host in parentheses

00:31:22.280 and dear influencer. Right. Um, cause that's, that's a perfect example of personalization,

00:31:29.580 but not personal. Uh, but then even obviously this, this personalized ethos creep into really

00:31:34.820 intimate relationships. I mean, there's apps now that can send out text messages to your spouse

00:31:39.640 to like offer affirmation or if it's their anniversary, like, uh, and people think, well,

00:31:47.340 this is good for my relationship. My wife will appreciate it, but it's like, man, it just feels

00:31:51.840 like a dark mirror episode. This is, this is not good. And the veil will eventually slip. And instead

00:31:58.020 of saying, dear Catherine, he'll say, dear spouse, dear spouse. Right. Uh, or, you know, they'll, you

00:32:04.840 won't even, she'll say thank you for sending that message. Like I didn't send a message. What message

00:32:08.540 was that again? Yes, honey. But this is like, these are our attempts at, we, we, we want personal

00:32:16.600 relationships. We were looking for that connection, but we're looking for the shortcut, but in the

00:32:20.700 process, we kind of, we, we dehumanize ourself in the process. Yes, exactly. And there just are no

00:32:29.060 shortcuts. So, you know, I talk in the book about superpowers and, and a lot of tech now sells things,

00:32:35.040 but you'll have coding superpowers, you'll have presenting superpowers, podcasting superpowers.

00:32:39.640 Fine. I mean, there's a place for, you know, the, the amazing affordances of technology and certain

00:32:44.880 kinds of work and, and all that, but there are no personhood superpowers. There's no love

00:32:51.060 superpower. There's no marriage superpower. And, and in fact, quite the opposite, the attempt to

00:32:56.980 import, you know, I mean, so to, you know, to be honest, a few moments ago, I said, how many years

00:33:02.780 have I been married? And I'm not sure I got it right. I know my wife would get it right. Right. So

00:33:07.420 I know she knows the exact number of years and I took a reasonably accurate guess. I didn't take the

00:33:13.820 time to do the math. Um, if she listened to this, she may say I got it wrong. Well, that's part of

00:33:19.500 the relationship like that for better or for worse, that's who I am. And if I, yeah, I could outsource

00:33:25.360 that to a machine and have it keep track, but then there's no, there's no additional quantum of

00:33:30.840 relationship in that there's just a facsimile of attention, but not the real thing. And so I, the,

00:33:38.840 the quest for superpowers needs to be very, very carefully constrained and kept away from

00:33:44.960 the things that matter most because in the areas where it matters most, superpowers actually cannot

00:33:50.200 help. They undermine, they distract, and they ultimately deplete the real power we need to be

00:33:56.520 human. And you end up as a twilight zone episode. That is where it doesn't, it kind of feel like

00:34:03.140 that's where we are. Um, well, another point you make in the book is we often think when we use

00:34:08.320 technology that we're the one who is working the technology, but what we often forget is that the

00:34:14.980 technology is also working on us and shaping us. Uh, how do you think our technology shapes us

00:34:22.960 unknowingly while we are using it, right? Like it's like the tool works on both ends, right?

00:34:27.180 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's always been true. I mean, you use the hammer and it acts back on your

00:34:34.200 neuromuscular system to reshape. I mean, literally your neurons reprogram, you know, to kind of expand

00:34:40.780 in a way to be able to wield that tool more and more effectively. Every moment of use in the world is

00:34:47.520 rewiring my, my neural system, my reward system. And I think that we're, you know, everybody brings up

00:34:55.520 the social dilemma film. When, when I talk about this stuff and they're like, Oh yeah, do you know

00:34:59.980 they've studied like our rewards? And yes, they sure have. And they know what makes us tick.

00:35:04.560 But I actually think the deeper layer of this is not the, not the designed interventions,

00:35:10.360 like the, the ways that the algorithms really are calculated to keep you clicking. That is true.

00:35:15.060 It's more the whole premise that, that my life should get easier to me. That's, that's actually

00:35:24.120 how technology is acting on me. It's, it's making me shrink from risk, shrink from productive effort

00:35:31.580 and always want a shortcut. And my brain gets very itchy and uncomfortable when I can't find the

00:35:39.720 shortcut. The thing is that all creativity and generativity happens. If you like persist in that

00:35:47.020 discomfort of not being able to find the shortcut, the shortcut never is truly generative. It's always

00:35:53.540 imitative and, and repetitive. If I want to do something really new, whether a new thought or,

00:36:01.320 or just like learn a new motion with my body that I haven't learned yet. I'm a, I'm a pianist. I play

00:36:06.640 the piano, have trained pretty seriously as that. And when I sit down to practice, if I want to learn

00:36:11.320 something really tricky, you know, with one or both hands, I have to push through that itchy sense that

00:36:17.240 says, wouldn't you rather do something easy? Wouldn't you rather just play something you already know,

00:36:20.680 or for that matter, just press play and listen to somebody else play it. And it's only if I press

00:36:25.720 through the resistance and the desire for a shortcut, do I come to ultimately a kind of mastery of a new

00:36:34.320 thing. And our technology is just constantly training us. Don't bother with the hard thing,

00:36:41.340 choose the easy thing. And that, in that way, it's so different from tools, which are, they're not easy

00:36:46.180 to use. Like even a simple tool, like a hammer, not, not easy at all. And as you use it, it doesn't

00:36:52.100 like train you to decline in ability. It trains you to increase. But I think that the way we've

00:36:58.160 designed a lot of our devices, they kind of train, train us to decrease and to, to just wait for the

00:37:03.160 shortcut to happen, wait for the magic to happen rather than actually figure out how to exert ourselves

00:37:08.060 in new and creative ways in the world. Well, I want to dig into this. You make this,

00:37:12.020 you're not like a Luddite, right? Like you think technology can be life enhancing and life

00:37:18.000 affirming as opposed to life negating. And I like this distinction you make, the type of technology

00:37:22.980 that can enhance our life. You make this distinction between devices and instruments.

00:37:29.020 What are the differences between the two? Yeah. I'm so glad you brought this up because it is so

00:37:32.520 important. This is not an anti-technology book. I'm not anti-technology. I use a lot of technology,

00:37:37.340 but, but I do want us to totally reframe what we're looking for and read is ultimately redesign.

00:37:42.020 The whole stack I think of technology needs to be redesigned from devices, which basically do

00:37:47.620 everything we've been talking about. They kind of replace and displace human engagement and effort.

00:37:52.080 But then there's this other kind of thing we make often using very sophisticated understanding of the

00:37:57.460 world from science and so forth, and very high tech that we call instruments. And I think the three

00:38:03.140 ways I see that word used a lot are medical instruments, scientific instruments, and maybe most

00:38:09.900 richly musical instruments. And an instrument can be very, very complex at the technical level that is

00:38:17.980 highly, you know, complicated device in one way, but it fully engages a person, ideally with heart, soul,

00:38:25.680 mind, and strength all at once. So, you know, I, I grew up playing a Steinway grand piano, which is already

00:38:31.580 an industrial thing. It's a, it couldn't have been made before the modern era. There's a lot of industrial

00:38:36.860 technology and even an acoustic grand piano, but then often I'm in settings where I'm playing a digital

00:38:42.540 piano, which is all silicon and, you know, it's, it's all computational technology, but because of

00:38:49.080 the way it's designed, it doesn't play itself. There's no little triangle where you just, you know,

00:38:54.020 press play. It's designed to actually be played by a musician. And in fact, the digital thing can,

00:39:01.280 in certain ways call forth new creative acts that the acoustic thing could not because there's new

00:39:07.960 layers of interface and possibility built into the thing, but only if a human being uses it with skill.

00:39:14.920 So an instrument is a kind of technology that fully, uh, involves us and keeps developing us. That is,

00:39:23.660 as I keep using it, I am growing, I'm developing, I'm not getting kind of cut out of the loop. I'm not

00:39:29.860 taking shortcuts. I'm growing, I'm contributing and the instruments helping to kind of channel and

00:39:36.180 amplify that. I think we could go back almost literally like, so I don't want to roll back to

00:39:43.200 a hundred years and not have technology anymore. I wish we could roll back a hundred years and say,

00:39:47.520 Hey scientists, as you're figuring this stuff out, give us instruments, not devices, but instead we

00:39:52.940 wanted magic. Right. But I think we could have said, no, no, we want all instruments. Like you're going to

00:39:58.260 design a computational interface that will give us great powers of math and memory. Okay. That's fine.

00:40:02.420 But we've got to stay moving in the world. No, no screens because screens pin you to one place

00:40:07.600 just for the convenience of the computer. You're not there for your own convenience. You're there

00:40:11.120 because that's the only way we figured out how to build an interface. But what if we built a different

00:40:15.120 kind of interface where you can move through the world the way people always did when they had

00:40:18.920 real work to do or hard thinking to do, they'd get out and move around. Why not build a thinking

00:40:24.600 instrument, you know, a different kind of computer. And we could go through almost every kind of domain

00:40:29.660 of technology and redesign it to be much more instrument-like and much less device-like.

00:40:34.660 Okay. So let's, for people who are listening, how could they know if they're using a device,

00:40:38.620 if it like does work for them, it doesn't require any skill, you're probably using a device.

00:40:43.520 Yep. Yep. And you're using an instrument. If you feel like more alive at the end, like,

00:40:49.260 like there's a crescendo of involvement. And if you've become something different at the end,

00:40:54.980 whereas the device, you feel often there's a great surge. Like when you're exercising these

00:40:59.680 superpowers, it sort of feels very pleasurable. But then at the end, you feel kind of depleted.

00:41:04.820 I just was talking to a mom who lets her kid have two hours a week, a weekend on screens like video

00:41:10.860 games, which is low. I mean, and good for her. And it's hard to hold the line as a parent.

00:41:15.800 And she said something really interesting. She said, you know, my, my son is so eager to get

00:41:19.920 to the video games for the two hours a weekend, but he sometimes at the end says, mom, I feel like

00:41:24.440 trash at the end. Like that's his word for the feeling at the end of using the thing.

00:41:29.740 And I've never felt that on a bicycle. I've never felt that playing a piano or a digital piano.

00:41:35.500 I've never felt that when I've had a really good session, like coding on a computer where I'm really

00:41:39.860 thinking through a problem and coming up with a solution. But we know that feeling like, Ooh,

00:41:44.400 I feel like trash instruments don't make you feel like trash. They make you feel I'm more fully

00:41:48.900 alive and I'm actually able to let it go. That's the other interesting thing. Often the superpowers

00:41:53.540 are very sticky. Like we don't want to let go. And the instrument is sort of very free. You,

00:41:59.620 you pick up the hammer, you work hard for a while, then you're willing to lay it down. You're not

00:42:03.820 compulsive about it. You're not addicted to it. Dependent on it.

00:42:06.980 Yeah. You're not constantly hammering things. I just got to keep hammering. I'm bored. I just

00:42:11.440 going to hammer. I'm waiting in line. I'm going to, I'm going to hammer.

00:42:16.340 Exactly. Right. And yet you can be really good with it and love doing it, but without compulsion.

00:42:22.440 And like that world is, is just waiting for us. If we asked for that instead of the magic,

00:42:28.800 but we asked for the magic.

00:42:30.760 Well, so, I mean, I think everyone's got a device in their pockets, the smartphone.

00:42:34.440 Is it possible, you think, to pound your smartphone device into a, into an instrument?

00:42:43.340 Totally. And this is actually, to me, the hopeful thing about the, the glowing rectangles is, you

00:42:49.480 know, so to be super geeky right now, a computer is just a Turing complete universal machine,

00:42:56.100 which basically means it can be, it can represent any state of the world you ask it to

00:43:00.580 or nearly Turing complete. And, and that just means like, these things can be the ultimate

00:43:06.820 device. We can ask them just to do all magic all the time, or they can be the ultimate instrument.

00:43:11.200 So what I've tried to do with my, with my smartphone is discipline myself. And it does

00:43:16.960 take practice and certain kinds of habits and certain kinds of rhythms, but, but that every

00:43:21.420 time I pick it up, it's to use it as an instrument, not as a device. So I'm not using it to distract

00:43:26.360 myself. I'm trying not to use it to soothe myself when I'm anxious or upset when I'm bored. I don't

00:43:33.600 take it out because I know if I'm bored, I'm likely to just use it to like assuage the boredom.

00:43:39.360 So I pick it up when I need to attend to a person through the medium of a text message or call or email

00:43:46.120 when I need to learn something about the world. And I don't do this perfectly, but, but I have shifted

00:43:51.880 dramatically since I started really trying to pay attention to this. I'd say like I used to be 80%

00:43:57.500 device, 20% instrument. And now I think it's 80% instrument and it, and it feels way less compulsive.

00:44:02.680 I feel the weight of it in my pocket, much less. I leave it behind more often without anxiety

00:44:08.060 because it's no longer that magical thing.

00:44:11.460 No, I mean, I, I, I stayed at a monastery a couple of years ago and I come to find out,

00:44:17.020 I learned that monks use computers, but, but they treat it. It's like a tool. It's like,

00:44:22.380 it's just like, it's, it's like a shovel. They just like, well, I got to get on here to

00:44:26.480 upload this thing for whatever. And then they're done and that's it. And then like to, yeah,

00:44:32.340 to them, it's just another shovel. It's a hammer. Exactly. Nothing more. Exactly. It's,

00:44:37.020 and it's totally possible to rewire your brain and, and instincts. It's just hard and also very hard to

00:44:46.180 do. It's not an accident that you found that in a monastery because it's hard to do without a

00:44:50.140 community of people who are pursuing this together and who, and also have a better life to live

00:44:55.900 beyond the screen. You know, if you are really isolated and kind of your best option is the

00:45:01.920 screen, it's really hard to turn that into an instrument only. It's easier when you're part of a,

00:45:07.700 an intentional community that's actually pursuing something different.

00:45:10.740 Well, so, you know, big argument in the book, the big thing we're looking for is relationships and

00:45:14.660 connections. And we think we can get that through a digital devices, but then we come up empty

00:45:19.000 handed. We find out actually makes us feel, we make that Faustian bargain, right? We become less

00:45:24.560 human in a way. But then you say, if we, if we want to, if we want that human connection that we're,

00:45:29.360 we're craving, you argue, we've got to find that in households. What's a household and how is it

00:45:34.820 different from a family or like a small group, like a CrossFit gym or something like that?

00:45:39.280 Yeah, ultimately. So there's a redesign that needs to happen with the tech itself,

00:45:43.340 but there's also a kind of social architecture redesign that I think we need, which is you're

00:45:49.100 only going to find the life that you're looking for with other people in an extended, durable way,

00:45:57.980 which almost always means some version of living under the same roof or very close to it. You've got

00:46:04.300 to be proximate enough to other people for long enough that you overcome the inherent kind of

00:46:11.100 superficiality of our relationships and the transactional nature of our relationships and

00:46:17.360 in our world. And you go beyond that to something that is just deeper and more lasting. Now that can

00:46:24.780 happen in family to some extent. Some people are fortunate to marry and have children. And for a

00:46:30.240 season of life, you can have that with, you know, what we call a nuclear family. But I've really become

00:46:35.160 convinced that's totally inadequate for several reasons. One is I've had the very disturbing

00:46:39.220 experience of discovering that the children grow up and leave, which happened to me now.

00:46:43.140 So I have two amazing young adult children who I love dearly, who probably for very good reasons

00:46:49.120 are now moving into the world and they're going to form their own households and their own families.

00:46:53.640 And so that's a very temporary thing. As intense as child rearing is, for those of us who get to do it,

00:46:58.400 it's a temporary thing. But the other thing is more generally, like the reality is many people in our

00:47:03.380 world may not marry or marriages end for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes tragically, it's just a truth.

00:47:11.340 And we need a kind of community that's bigger than just that nuclear unit. It needs to be ideally more

00:47:17.940 intergenerational, more stages of life, more different conditions of life in a way. But it needs to be

00:47:25.860 almost literally under a roof. So I lived for my first four years out of college with four or five

00:47:34.620 other men, depending on the year, in a single house. We had one bank account for those years.

00:47:40.460 We each had our own lives and jobs. But we took that common life very seriously. We weren't monks.

00:47:46.500 But for a season, we lived with a kind of intentionality of life. And it was like one of the

00:47:51.280 most beneficial, formative experiences of my life. And then when my wife and I got married,

00:47:56.160 instead of just moving into a single unit kind of living situation, we lived for many years with

00:48:02.140 other people. And I think this is a missing piece in rebuilding a social world that actually has room

00:48:11.120 for the kind of relationships we're craving. Because we live such atomized individual lives,

00:48:16.260 even when we're coupled. A couple is not a big enough unit to keep personhood going.

00:48:24.440 So in the book, I'm kind of inviting us to rethink. There's other patterns from other times and places

00:48:29.740 where people lived in much more complex dwelling units. And ultimately, we need to kind of rebuild

00:48:35.800 our world to make that possible for more people.

00:48:39.160 Well, the thing is, there's people out there in Silicon Valley that, well, this is a problem.

00:48:42.980 Like people need households. So we're going to develop an app where you can sign up

00:48:48.400 and you can, like, I mean, I mean, you can make the case, a lot of these like co-working things,

00:48:53.200 like WeWork. That's what they're trying to do. But like you said, it's a simulation. It's like,

00:49:00.440 it's not, it's not the real deal. It's a simulation because of another kind of layer here,

00:49:05.220 which we haven't talked a whole lot about, but it's, it's the way the technological world is all

00:49:09.280 built on usefulness and productivity. So, you know, WeWork was, it was and is a beautiful idea

00:49:16.500 and, and a lot better space to work than many places, but it's all built on one slice of your

00:49:22.940 life, which is your working life. And once you're not generating money to pay the monthly dues or fees

00:49:27.980 or whatever, you're not part of that community. Same with CrossFit actually, which I'm a big believer

00:49:32.900 in gyms and boxes and, you know, whatever community you build for your fitness. But what

00:49:39.480 happens when you're too old to participate or you become disabled in a way that you can't really,

00:49:45.240 you know, do the workout of the day. And how does that community touch all the other aspects of your

00:49:50.300 life? This is where a household is sort of indispensable because it's the one integrated

00:49:54.420 environment where you're known in all your facets as a person, rather than only being there as long as

00:50:00.380 you make sense transactionally for that system. Does that make sense?

00:50:04.620 No, that makes sense. And I think the other thing people might be tempted to do. So, okay,

00:50:10.020 I want to, I want to develop more household right in my life. And again, they'll turn to technology. 0.98

00:50:15.220 They think, well, I can like, we can start this group text with, you know, people and they, it could

00:50:20.580 help, but it's probably not going to do, it's not, it's going to require you to, like you said,

00:50:26.600 do some rejiggering of your social structure in your life. And that's something that a device can't

00:50:32.040 do. Yeah. Cause this is where there's just not any superpowers for the thing we most want, which is

00:50:38.440 being known. You know, one way to put it is there's just a whole involuntary layer to being known.

00:50:47.040 There's all the things my housemates see in me and about me that I never intended for them to see,

00:50:53.200 and that I might not even know about myself. And sometimes that'll cause real conflict and

00:50:57.700 they'll push back and complain or criticize or, or, or just maybe more lovingly intervene and say,

00:51:04.000 do you realize you're really anxious about this? Or do you realize you've been really depressed for

00:51:07.680 the last four nights and haven't done anything except lie on the couch? Like I'm never going to

00:51:11.480 put that in a text message. Honestly, I'm just not going to choose to disclose that. So we have to

00:51:16.880 live in environments where we can't help, but be known an environment where like, if you fall asleep,

00:51:23.100 and stay asleep for a long time, someone will come check on you. Like you're never going to,

00:51:27.040 if you have a cardiac arrest, you know, you're not going to text your friends and say, Hey,

00:51:31.100 by the way, I'm incapacitated right now. Like you need a place where people will notice. We haven't

00:51:36.960 seen him for a while. What's going on. And that level of being known that goes beyond the, what I

00:51:42.640 volunteer or what I would willingly offer is actually the essence of being known. But how many of us have

00:51:49.460 places where that happens regularly? Not enough. I would say.

00:51:53.440 No, I've, I've seen that in my own life, not just like this household thing, but in, you know,

00:51:57.260 small groups, like what I consider my communities I belong to. There's always this moment where

00:52:01.720 people are like, wow, you know, we need to connect more. There's like not enough camaraderie.

00:52:05.380 And so they'll like, well, we'll do this like group chat or we'll do discord and this will be

00:52:11.000 the thing. And then nothing ever changes. And, and then, I don't know. It's, it's frustrating.

00:52:17.180 Cause I think, cause I think a lot of people think like, Oh, this is, yo, this will be it. This is

00:52:20.920 going to be the thing that fixes it. And it's like, no, it's not, it's, it's not going to be that.

00:52:25.760 The thing that would fix it like short of, you know, moving in together, which I recommend or

00:52:29.980 giving each other keys to your house. Like there's steps we can take. Like, you know,

00:52:33.300 Catherine and I have given, there's like five people who have a key to our house who didn't

00:52:37.080 a couple of years ago. Cause we no longer live under one roof with other people, but we were

00:52:40.680 like, we need to invite other people close enough that they could kind of let themselves in when,

00:52:44.880 when they want to. But for that group, rather than the discord or the group chat, I think the

00:52:49.280 only thing that would approximate is, is go on the old word would be a pilgrimage together. That is

00:52:54.280 go somewhere hard, long for an extended period of time. And the relationships would change.

00:52:59.700 The connection would go way deeper because you'd get that involuntary quality of this extended time

00:53:05.520 where other people see you without filters, not at your best in often in challenging or adverse

00:53:11.640 circumstances in some ways. And what gets forged in those, that kind of travel, that kind of

00:53:17.120 pilgrimage journey is incredibly powerful. But in some ways we need a group of people who are doing

00:53:23.200 that pilgrimage of life with, you know, where we are not just on special occasions, but you know,

00:53:28.860 a pilgrimage would do it in a way that a group chat won't.

00:53:32.580 And I think that you've got to still manage expectations. There's not going to be a lot

00:53:35.540 of people who are going to want to do that pilgrimage.

00:53:37.780 It's true.

00:53:38.360 There'll be, there's going to be people who say, oh yeah, I would definitely be down for that. But

00:53:41.920 then when it finally comes to like, put your chips on the table and I know I have my,

00:53:46.560 it's cost.

00:53:47.420 Yeah. My wife, I got stuff I got to do and they'll find some reason not to go. But I think when you do

00:53:51.820 find people who want to do that, like you got to just embrace it, like embrace those people.

00:53:56.380 Yes. Those are the people. Those are the people. And, and we, a lot of people will resist it

00:54:03.300 because it is costly and it's, it's also scary. And so, you know, people will find reasons not to

00:54:10.980 do things that are scary, but the good stuff is always found on the other side of that.

00:54:15.780 Well, Andy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:54:18.900 and your work?

00:54:19.380 I can learn a little more about me at my website. It just feels so self-promotional to even say

00:54:26.480 things like this, but andycrouch.com with a dash, andycrouch.com. But I also work for an

00:54:31.560 organization called Praxis and we actually help people build ventures and businesses that work

00:54:36.020 on this stuff. And we have a whole section on the book at praxislabs.org, labs like laboratory,

00:54:42.340 praxislabs.org slash life will give you a lot more, not just about the book, but how you could

00:54:47.800 actually build new ventures for profit, nonprofit along these lines.

00:54:52.220 Fantastic. Well, andycrouch, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:54:54.540 Thank you so much. This was great.

00:54:57.020 My guest today was andycrouch. He's the author of the book, The Life We're Looking For. It's

00:55:00.320 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at

00:55:03.840 his website, andy-crouch.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash crouch, where you find

00:55:09.240 links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

00:55:17.800 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website

00:55:22.220 at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written

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00:55:50.420 As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind

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The Art of Manliness - April 20, 2022

The Life We're Looking For

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