The Life We're Looking For
Episode Stats
Summary
In the quiet moments of our lives, we can all sense that our hearts long for something, and we often don t know what that something is. We seek an answer in our phones, and while they can provide some sense of extension and fulfillment, a feeling of magic, the use of technology also comes with significant cost in individual development and interpersonal connection that we typically don t fully understand and consider. My guest today will unpack what it is we really yearn for, how technology, when misused, can direct us away from the path to fulfilling those yearnings, and how we can find true human flourishing in a world in which so much works against it.
Transcript
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Hey, this is Brett. The McKays are on vacation this week, so please enjoy this rebroadcast
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episode. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In the quiet
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moments of our lives, we can all sense that our hearts long for something. We often don't
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know what that something is. We seek an answer in our phones, and while they can provide some
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sense of extension and fulfillment, a feeling of magic, the use of technology also comes
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with significant cost in individual development and interpersonal connection that we typically
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don't fully understand and consider. My guest today will unpack what it is we really yearn
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for, how technology, when misused, can direct us away from the path to fulfilling those
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yearnings, and how we can find true human flourishing in a world in which so much works against it.
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His name is Andy Crouch, and he's the author of The Life We're Looking For, Reclaiming
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Relationship in a Technological World. Today on the show, we talk about the trade-offs you
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make when you seek magic without mastery, and how we can understand our desires better
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once we understand ourselves as heart, soul, mind, and strength complexes. We want to be
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loved and known. We discuss the difference between interactions that are personal versus
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personalized, as well as the difference between devices and instruments, and how to use your
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phone as the latter instead of the former. We enter a conversation with why Andy thinks
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we need to redesign the architecture of our relational lives and create something he calls
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households. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash crouch.
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So you've got an interesting background. You studied classics at Cornell University. It's beautiful
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And then after that, you went to divinity school at Boston University. You got your master's in
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divinity. Usually, most people, they become like a minister or they go teach. You did a
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little bit of ministering, but you've spent most of your career writing about digital technology,
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particularly its intersection with culture and faith and philosophy. I'm curious, what drew
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you to explore the humanistic side of our digital technology?
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Yeah, great question. Well, I've always loved technology, even though it wasn't the thing I
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ended up studying. It was my first love. My dad brought home one of the very first computer
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terminals. You are probably too young to know what these were, but back when there was just
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a single computer for like a whole university. And so when I was a kid, I started coding. I still
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love to code. And so I've been fascinated with this, though it wasn't my vocation. As a user,
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as a beneficiary of technology, of course, because we all are, I really got more interested in it,
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though when I tried to start understanding, honestly, what was going wrong at the same time
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as so many things were going so right. Like the iPhones just keep getting better and better and
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our tech keeps getting better and better, but people are not getting better and better. We're
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not getting happier and happier. That's become pretty clear. We're not getting healthier and
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healthier, especially in the US. So I started trying to get to the heart of, you know, what is
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technology? How has it shaped us? And it just ends up being one of the most fundamental and
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interesting questions you can ask. And as a journalist and as a writer, I'm just drawn to
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the big, important questions. And this to me is maybe the big, important question of our time for
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those of us who live in what we call the West, which is really the technological world.
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Yeah, I think this is important. I think people forget about when it comes to technology and science,
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what often happens is there's an advancement in technology.
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And then we come up with a philosophy for that technology, like how it's, how are we going to
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integrate it into our lives? And in previous, you know, centuries, there'd be decades or centuries
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between innovations. So we'd have time to figure out, okay, well, what is the printing press? How are
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we going to, what does this mean? And now like stuff's just happening constantly and we never have time
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to think about, well, how, what does this mean? What is, how are we going to incorporate this into
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our life? What place will it have in our life? So I think a lot of people would just like, okay,
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this is new. I'll use it. And they don't, we don't really think about, well, what are the second
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order, third order effects of this? Completely. And I think this is partly because of the distinctive
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thing about technology. So we have a saying in our family, cause my wife is actually a scientist.
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She's a physicist. So she does like experimental physics and we say science is hard. Technology is
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easy or technology is easy. Science is hard. Science is slow. Science is challenging. Although the pace
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of scientific discovery has also accelerated, but what has really accelerated is the introduction
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of applications of applications of science, which is what technology is, that are actually
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very easy to use. So it used to be that when people invented tools, it took a long time to
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make those tools really effective for human use. But now technology is so good at insinuating
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itself into our lives because it's so easy to adopt, but you can adopt it so fast without actually
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thinking through what are we adopting? Why are we adopting it? It's also sold on two things. It's
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always sold on the premise of it's going to be, you'll be able to do something new and you won't have
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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
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talk about the other two things that always come with technology, which is you'll no longer be able
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to do something if you adopt this, or at least it'll get a lot harder. So it's not only going to expand
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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
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some things, but now you'll actually start to have to do things. In other words, technology has a kind
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of coercive quality. Once we introduce it into our lives, into our homes, it actually requires behaviors
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of us with, and those are often not disclosed in the sales process, you might say. So it's this
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combination of offering and coercion that we don't really have time to reflect on. Whereas
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with tools, they entered the human story so slowly and gradually that I think societies did a better
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job kind of reflecting on what we were actually adopting and why. Can you give us an example of
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that, the promises that we get with technology and the burdens of it? Yeah. I think of all the reasons
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people get a smartphone, you know, now you'll be able to, why they get it for their kids, you know,
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now you'll be able to check on when their soccer game is. Like a lot of people feel like their
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kid needs a smartphone just to find out when soccer practice is. And that's a really interesting
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example of the technology promises to expand your capabilities, but then it says actually now there
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is no other way to find out about soccer practice. So you have to have the thing to do this thing
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that people managed to do for many generations before the phone, but now you have to have it.
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It has this coercive quality. Maybe a deeper example is, is what's happened to music. I think
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the making of music is one of the most important things human beings do together and do as persons.
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And of course, technology about a hundred years ago made it possible to listen to recorded music,
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which is an absolutely new idea in human history. Like up to a hundred years ago, if you wanted music,
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somebody had to play. And now technology says, well, now you can just listen to
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whatever music you want. And with streaming, listen to almost any music you want, anytime, anywhere,
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and you'll no longer have to play yourself. And that sounds great. Like what's the downside to that?
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I think the downside is as your world becomes full of professionally made recorded music,
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it's at least less and less likely, even if not strictly speaking, less and less possible,
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it's less and less likely that you or someone you know will sit down and go through all the effort
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and all the expense and difficulty of actually learning to make music. And if you never go
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through that, you'll never be able to make music yourself. And so this technology that opens up the
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world of hearing music to you also closes down the possibility of making music together. Because
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now we're often in places where no one in the room has ever practiced enough to be able to play in
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a way other people would want to listen to. And so we've traded, you know, it's a, I don't know,
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is it a bad trade or a good trade, but it's definitely a trade. Does that make sense?
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Yeah, that makes sense. And I think this trade-off that we make with technology is part of the reason,
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I think you make it explicit. It's one of the reasons why we feel kind of this, I don't know,
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ambivalence towards our technology. And you, this is what you explore in your latest book. It's called
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The Life We're Looking For. Is this idea, this idea of trade-off, is this one of the big ideas
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that you're trying to explore in this book? Completely. In a way, it's the trade of wanting
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to do magic. Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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And that sounds like a good thing. Like, ooh, I'd like to have that. But magic is actually the way
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human beings talk about the ultimate trade. So there's this whole history of people reflecting on
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what you actually trade away when you decide to become a magician or a sorcerer or an alchemist.
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And the fundamental story of this in Western history is Goethe's poem, Dr. Faustus, about this
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magician, sorcerer, alchemist who makes a deal with the devil to acquire incredible power,
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but at the cost of his soul. And I'm not saying, well, I don't know if I'm saying that our technology
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is quite the same bargain because, of course, it is not based on pure imagination the way that
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maybe Faust was. It's based on real things in the world that we've learned how they work. And that's
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good for human beings, to learn how the world works and make use of that. But have we traded
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something away? And I think we've traded away a bunch of things of great value to human flourishing
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in the pursuit of what we thought was sufficiently advanced technology. This kind of magical world that
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works on its own, world that works without us having to do anything, without us having to become
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anything, without us having to grow or develop. And that leads to very diminished people in a very
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powerful world. And I think the powers that we've acquired have come at the expense of kind of our
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internal capability to really meaningfully be part of the world that we're in.
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Do you know where else in culture they explore this trade-off of magic? Twilight Zone.
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Yeah. We watch it a lot in our family. And it seems like every other episode is about
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that trade-off, like sort of this Faustian bargain that people are making.
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Exactly. It's all over. I mean, because we just instinctively know as human beings, I think,
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that there are risks in these bargains. But because we think that all technology is about is science,
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basically. We're like, well, it's just STEM. It's science, technology, engineering, math. Like,
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what could go wrong? But I actually think it's embedded in these much deeper kind of mysterious
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forces that we modern people don't talk and think as much about, but that I think actually are still
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Well, so your book's called The Life We're Looking For. I mean, what is it that we are looking for
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when we turn to technology to make our lives better? Like, what is the big thing we're looking for,
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Maybe I'll start with what we were originally looking for, which wasn't a device and wasn't
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technology. I think essentially what we're looking for is a fully personal life. I begin the book by
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saying the very first human quest is recognition. First of all, we're just looking for someone who
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is looking for us, which is a phrase I got from the psychiatrist, Kurt Thompson. We're looking for
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someone who's going to look back, who's going to regard us, pay attention to us. And in fact,
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none of us make it to adulthood without parents or someone who played the role of parents gazing at us
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and beholding us, interacting with us, listening to us. Because the first thing we're looking for
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in a way is love, connection. And then beyond that, all the things that become possible when you feel
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truly loved, you become creative in the world. You grow. We grow through the process of human
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development into adult human beings who have tremendous bodily capabilities, strength, tremendous
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mental capabilities, tremendous emotional range. So, we were looking for, and we still are looking for,
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that kind of full human life, which I describe it as heart, soul, mind, strength, complexes designed
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for love. That's who we are. What we're looking for with technology, I think, comes in when the quest
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for real life fails or is frustrated in some way. It's actually really interesting to me to look at
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when do people first give a toddler a screen? Because toddlers are given screens now, right?
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We hand our toddlers screens. When do we do that? When they are feeling distress, basically. The first time.
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Now, eventually, you give it to them so they can find out when soccer practices. But when you give
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a two-year-old an iPad, it's because that two-year-old is experiencing some frustration of
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being human. Maybe they're stuck in the car. Maybe they're mad at mom. Maybe they're bored, whatever.
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And we're like, you know what? Here, try this. And when the toddler tries it, that magical device
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responds to them in a way that other people don't as readily. That is, it pays unlimited attention to
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them. It is much easier to manipulate than the real world. Toddlers get frustrated in the real
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world, as do adults, because it doesn't always respond to what we want it to do. But that device
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and its kind of magical virtual world is designed to just be so easy to use that even a toddler can use
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it and feel very efficacious. So, what we turn to technology for is a compensating simulation
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of the real powers that we want, but that are too hard or too long or difficult to acquire.
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And for relief from the distress of being heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for
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love in a world that's a vulnerable place and hard to be in. And technology will take away some of
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that distress and replace it with this kind of pretty easy, effortless sense of capacity and power.
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Okay. I want to dig more into this. Okay. This idea of being a person. You're making this case
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that we're seeking to be a person. That's the light. We're trying to develop ourselves
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into a person. And you say this, I want to dig in more of this heart-soul-mind-strength
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complexes. What is that? Well, it comes from one of the longest standing wisdom traditions in the
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world, the Hebrew Bible. It's this idea from the Hebrew scriptures that we are meant to love. It says,
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love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, Jesus of Nazareth adds, all your mind
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and all your strength. And I was thinking about that, and I thought, you know, that is a very good
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and very irreplaceably precise summary of the components of being a human being. In other words,
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we're not a brain without a body. We're not mind without emotion, but we're not emotion without
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reason. Like you can run all the permutations or combinations. We are all these things together and
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they interact. So, heart is like emotion, desire, also the will that comes from the desire, the desire
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to pursue something because that thing is beautiful or worthwhile. It activates our emotion and our
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activity. Mind, of course, is the capacity for cognition, reason, thinking things through.
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Soul is the hardest one, but I suppose it's something like depth of self. It's going down
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into the very heart of who I am that makes me distinct perhaps from others and my own unique
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story with all its pain and all its power. And then strength is the fact that we're embodied.
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We're not disembodied mental, just mental spirits. We can't think without our bodies and our bodies
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can't exist without thinking. So, this word complex kind of holds these all together and says
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they can't be completely separated, but they are different from each other. And then I think to turn
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it around, so much of modern life neglects one or more of these things at any given time. The thing
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that's been most neglected, because we really built our computers on the model of just pure minds,
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our computers are really good at the mind part of life, as it were, but they're not that good at
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the strength part. And they ask very little of our strength. So, when you're sitting at a computer,
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your body, which is meant to be moving in three planes through the world, is just totally idled,
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totally inactivated practically. And we've designed technology and designed a modern world that very
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rarely lets us bring all four of these things back into active collaboration, which would have been
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just normal for human beings until the blink of an eye ago. Like most human beings, most of the time
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were out in a natural world that was beautiful, activated their heart. They had a sense of soul
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and connection to some transcendent reality that reflected itself in some ways in the depths of
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their being. They did, of course, think their way through the world and they were acting with their
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bodies. And like every day, all day, that was the human experience. And now, like how much of a
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given day is that actually our experience in the technological world? A very small part of the day,
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I would say, where all four of those are happening. So, we've lost something that really we almost
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could have taken for granted for a very long time. Yeah, this idea of heart, soul, mind, strength
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complex. You also see this with the Greeks, like Plato had his idea of like, there's three parts of us,
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three parts of the soul. And then you also, I mean, C.S. Lewis kind of picked up on this as well
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within the abolition of man, where mind, chest, just kind of like that, I guess that soul part,
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and then the belly, right? And they all have to work together to be fully human. If you take out
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one part, then you're no longer human. Okay. And so, what you're saying is that in order for these
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to develop, we typically, we interact with other people, we interact with the world around us. I think
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the important part of this idea of becoming human, I want to bring in another writer that I like a lot,
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is Wendell Berry. He writes about being, we have to think of ourselves as creatures, right? That we
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are, we are products of the earth. We are, we are bound here in temporal time. And if we try
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to go beyond that, then we somehow miss out in our development. And so, you're typically the way
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humans mostly develop, like you're a baby and you interact with the world, you crawl, you pick up
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things, stick them in your mouth, and you're doing this with people. And you develop, and over time,
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you develop into a human being, you're saying technology kind of skips some of that stuff.
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And we miss out on some of that development and becoming a person.
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Exactly. Because development mostly happens against resistance, right? So, part of, I think,
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what Barry's getting at, and he's influenced me tremendously as well, is it's even the, you know,
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part of being a creature is you go out in the world and the world's just really big compared to you.
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Like, even if you just step out in the world and you just feel the smallness of being human,
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then it's a kind of resistance. The world is not set up to just actualize yourself in any easy,
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simple way. And so, I begin every day going outside. I just stand outdoors. Before I look
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at a screen, I go out of doors. And I stand ideally out from under a, you know, a roof entirely. I get
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off a porch. I stand under the sky. Some days it's raining or snowing or whatever. I still stand there.
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And I just feel like my smallness, which strangely is not frightening, at least most mornings. It's
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strangely grounding. But it is a kind of resistance. It says, gosh, how is little you going to make a
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difference in this world? It's both an invitation and a kind of warning. And that's developmental.
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Like, something happens to my mind and my heart, my soul, my strength when I start the day that way
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that invites me to figure out what the next thing is, what I can do. And then, ideally, I'd be working
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against certain kinds of resistance. We know that strength only develops when you, you know, push
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muscles or pull muscles against resistive forces. But that's really true for the mind as well. It's
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happening for me in this conversation. Like, you're asking questions that I don't know the answer to
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them or in any simple way know the answer. So, I have to think my way through it. I'm feeling
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resistance as I do that. Good things are happening as I'm doing that. What technology does is it makes
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a lot of these things much easier. So, if I have central air conditioning in my house, I never have
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to go outside and feel a difference of temperature or step out into a natural world where I'm no longer
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kind of in charge of the temperature. The computer does a lot of the thinking for me. If I need to
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do math, it just does the math. If I need to remember something, it just does the remembering.
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And that's useful, but it's not developmental. And this is, I think this is the heart of why we are
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so markedly lonely, anxious, and depressed is we've become very diminished people. And diminished people
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have a hard time finding something to do that's worthwhile in the world and have a hard time
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finding a way to make real connection with other people in the world. Because if everyone else has
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just been equally undeveloped as me, who am I connecting with? I'm connected with shadows or
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ciphers. And that's an exaggeration maybe of where we're at, but maybe not totally missing something
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that has changed is that we used to be in a world that just of necessity developed us. And now we're
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in a world that almost necessarily or coercively fails to develop us, just keeps us still, keeps us
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not engaged. And I think that's causing a lot of distress that's hard to surface until you really
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start paying attention to what it feels like to be us right now.
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All right. So human development, there's resistance, there's frustrations, there's friction.
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And so when we experienced that, we turned to technology thinking, well, maybe this can solve
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that issue. And I think one of the things you talk about, you really hit home. I think one of the
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things that we're looking for as human beings, you said at the beginning, we're looking for
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recognition. We're looking for relationships with other people. Well, sometimes, you know, making
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relationships can be hard. Sometimes people don't pay attention to you.
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Yeah. Sometimes, you know, I mean, pretty much all the time people misunderstand you.
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They're frustrating. So we think, well, we can turn to technology.
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And we get this like social media superpower. But you're making the case when we do that,
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we become a little bit less human, correct? Because we're not developing it to its fullest
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And more and more fragile, less resilient, less able to handle or know how to respond when
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someone doesn't get what you're saying or isn't listening, right? I mean, Sherry Turkle,
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who has studied so many dimensions of how media is shaping us, she had this really interesting
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series of experiments or conversations in her lab at MIT with college students who are the easy
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ones to get in a lab at a college research setting. And she was trying to probe why do college students
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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
00:29:05.540
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,
00:42:30.760
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
00:44:11.460
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.
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.
00:53:38.360
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,
00:53:47.420
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
00:54:19.380
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.
00:54:57.020
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
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00:55:25.960
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As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind
00:55:53.560
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