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, but 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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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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In the quiet moments of our lives, we can all sense that our hearts long for something,
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but we often don't know what that something is. We seek an answer in our phones, and while
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they can provide some sense of extension and fulfillment, a feeling of magic, the use of
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technology also comes with significant cost in individual development and interpersonal
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connection that we typically don't fully understand and consider. My guest today will
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unpack what it is we really yearn for, how technology, when misused, can direct us away
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from the path to fulfilling those yearnings, and how we can find true human flourishing in a world
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in which so much works against it. His name is Andy Crouch, and he's the author of The Life We're
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Looking For, Reclaiming a Relationship in a Technological World. Today on the show, we talk
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about the trade-offs you make when you seek magic without mastery, and how we can understand our
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desires better once we understand ourselves as heart, soul, mind, and strength complexes who want
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to be 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 phone
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as the latter instead of the former. We enter a conversation with why Andy thinks we need to
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redesign the architecture of our relational lives and create something he calls households.
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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 divinity.
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Usually most people, they become like a minister or they go teach. You did a little bit of ministering,
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but you've spent most of your career writing about digital technology, particularly its intersection
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with culture and faith and philosophy. I'm curious, what drew you to explore the humanistic side of our
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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 a
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single computer for like a whole university. And so when I was a kid, I started coding. I still love
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to code. And so I've been fascinated with this, though it wasn't my vocation. As a user, as a
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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 the big
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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
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science, what often happens is there's an advancement in technology. And then we come up
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with a philosophy for that technology, like how it's how we're going to integrate it into
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our lives. And in previous, you know, centuries, there'd be decades or centuries between innovations.
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So we'd have time to figure out, okay, well, what is the printing press? How are we going to,
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what does this mean? And now like stuff's just happening constantly and we never have time to
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think about, well, how, what does this mean? What is, how are we going to incorporate this into our
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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
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is easy or technology is easy. Science is hard. Science is slow. Science is challenging. Although
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the pace of scientific discovery has also accelerated, but what has really accelerated is the introduction
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of applications of science, which is what technology is that are actually very easy to
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use. So it used to be that when people invented tools, it took a long time to make those tools
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really effective for human use. But now technology is so good at insinuating itself into our lives
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because it's so easy to adopt, but you can adopt it so fast without actually thinking through what are
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we adopting? Why are we adopting it? It's also sold on two things. It's always sold on the premise of
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it's going to be, you'll be able to do something new and you won't have to do things you don't like
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to do. So you'll be able to do this. You won't have to do this, but we never talk about the other
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two things that always come with technology, which is you'll no longer be able to do something if you
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adopt this, or at least it'll get a lot harder. So it's not only going to expand what you can do,
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it's going to subtract what you can do. And it's not just that you won't have to do some things,
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but now you'll actually start to have to do things. In other words, technology has a kind of coercive
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quality. Once we introduce it into our lives, into our homes, it actually requires behaviors of us
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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 with tools,
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they entered the human story so slowly and gradually that I think societies did a better job
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kind of reflecting on what we were actually adopting and why.
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Can you give us an example of that, the promises that we get with technology and the burdens of it?
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Yeah, I think of all the reasons people get a smartphone, you know, now you'll be able to,
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why they get it for their kids, you know, now you'll be able to check on when their soccer game is.
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Like a lot of people feel like their kid needs a smartphone just to find out when soccer practices.
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And that's a really interesting example of the technology promises to expand your capabilities,
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but then it says actually now there is no other way to find out about soccer practice. So you have
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to have the thing to do this thing that people managed to do for many generations before the
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phone, but now you have to have it. It has this coercive quality. Maybe a deeper example is what's
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happened to music. I think the making of music is one of the most important things human beings do
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together and do as persons. And of course, technology about a hundred years ago made it
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possible to listen to recorded music, which is an absolutely new idea in human history. Like up to
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a hundred years ago, if you wanted music, somebody had to play. And now technology says, well, now you
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can just listen to whatever music you want. And with streaming, listen to almost any music you want,
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anytime, anywhere, and you'll no longer have to play yourself. And that sounds great. Like what's the
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downside to that? I think the downside is as your world becomes full of professionally made recorded
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music, 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 and
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all the expense and difficulty of actually learning to make music. And if you never go through that,
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you'll never be able to make music yourself. And so this technology that, that opens up the world of
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hearing music to you also closes down the possibility of making music together. Cause now we're often in
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places where no one in the room has ever practiced enough to be able to play in a way other people
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would want to listen to. And so we've traded, you know, it's a, I don't know, is it a bad trade or a
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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
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reason, I think you make it explicit. It's one of the reasons why we feel kind of this, I don't
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know, ambivalence towards our technology. And you, this is what you explore in your latest book. It's
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called the life we're looking for. Is this idea, this, this idea of trade-off, is this one of the
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big ideas that you're trying to explore in this book?
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Completely. In a way it's the trade of wanting to do magic. Arthur C. Clark said,
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any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that sounds
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like a good thing. Like, Ooh, I'd like to have that. But magic is actually the way human beings
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talk about the ultimate trade. So there's this whole history of people reflecting on what do you
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actually trade away when you decide to become a magician or a sorcerer or an alchemist. And the
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fundamental story of this in Western history is Goethe's poem, Dr. Faustus, about this magician,
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sorcerer, alchemist, who makes a deal with the devil to acquire incredible power, but at the
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cost of his soul. And I'm not saying I, well, I don't know if I'm saying that our technology is
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quite the same bargain because of course it is not based on pure imagination the way that the,
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maybe Faust was. It's based on real things in the world that we've learned how they work. And
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that's good for human beings to learn how the world works and make use of that. But have we
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traded something away? And I think we, I think we've traded away a bunch of things of great value
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to human flourishing in the pursuit of what we thought was sufficiently advanced technology,
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this kind of magical world that works on its own world that works without us having to do anything,
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without us having to become anything, without us having to grow or develop. And that leads to very
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diminished people in a very powerful world. And I think the powers that we've acquired have come
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at the expense of kind of our internal capability to really meaningfully be part of the world that
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Do you know where else in culture they explore this trade-off of magic and what you, Twilight Zone.
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Yeah. Like I, we, we watched it a lot in our family and like, it seems like every other episode is
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about 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, we just instinctively know as human beings,
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I think that there are risks in these bargains, but, but because we think that all technology is
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about as science, basically we're like, well, it's just STEM and science, technology, engineering,
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math, like what could go wrong? But I actually think it's embedded in these much deeper
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kind of mysterious forces that we modern people don't talk and think as much about,
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but that I think actually are still very much there.
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Well, so your book's called The Life We're Looking For. I mean, what is it that we are
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looking for when we turn to technology to make our lives better? Like what, what is the big thing
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Hmm. 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, none of us
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make it to adulthood without parents or someone who played the role of parents gazing at us and
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beholding us, interacting with us, listening to us. Because the first thing we're looking for in a way
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is love, connection. And then beyond that, all the things that become possible when you feel truly
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loved. You become creative in the world. You grow. We grow through the process of human development
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into adult human beings who have tremendous bodily capabilities, strength, tremendous mental
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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 for
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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
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time. Now, eventually you give it to them so they can find out when soccer practice is. 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 being human.
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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 world,
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as do adults, because it doesn't always respond to what we want it to do. But that device and its
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kind of magical virtual world is designed to just be so easy to use that even a toddler can use it and
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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
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of 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. So, like what we're,
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you're making this case that we're seeking to be a person. Like that's the light. We're trying to
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develop ourselves into a person. And you say this, I like, I want to dig in more of this,
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this heart-soul-mind-strength complex. It's like, what do you, what is that?
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Well, it comes from, you know, one of the longest standing wisdom traditions in the world,
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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 reason.
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Like you can run all the permutations or combinations. We are all these things together
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and they interact. So, heart is like emotion, desire, also the will that comes from the desire,
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the desire to pursue something because that thing is beautiful or worthwhile. It activates
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our emotion and our activity. Mind, of course, is the capacity for cognition, reason, thinking things
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through. 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, we're, you know, this word complex kind of holds these all together
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and says, they can't be completely separated, but they are different from each other.
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And then I think to turn it around, so much of modern life neglects one or more of these things
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at any given time. The thing that's been most neglected, because we really built our computers
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on the model of just pure minds. Our computers are really good at the mind part of life, as it were,
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but they're not that good at the strength part. And they ask very little of our strength.
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So, when you're sitting at a computer, your body, which is meant to be moving in three planes
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through the world, is just totally idled, totally inactivated, practically. And we've designed
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technology and designed a modern world that very rarely lets us bring all four of these things
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back into active collaboration, which would have been just normal for human beings until the blink
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of an eye ago. Like, most human beings, most of the time, were out in a natural world that was
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beautiful, activated their heart. They had a sense of soul and connection to some transcendent
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reality that reflected itself in some ways in the depths of their being. They did, of course,
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think their way through the world, and they were acting with their bodies. And like, every day,
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all day, that was the human experience. And now, like, how much of a given day is that actually
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our experience in the technological world? A very small part of the day, I would say,
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where all four of those are happening. So, we've lost something that really we almost could have
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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
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us, 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 all of them have to work together to be fully human. If you take
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out one part, then you're no longer human. Okay. And so, what you're saying is that in order for
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these to develop, we typically, we interact with other people, we interact with the world around
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us. I think the important part of this idea of becoming human, I want to bring in another writer
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that I like a lot is Wendell Berry. He writes about being, we have to think of ourselves as creatures,
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right? That we are products of the earth. 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 skipped 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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Even if you just step out in the world and you just feel the smallness of being human, then
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it's a kind of resistance. The world is not set up to just actualize yourself in any
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easy, simple way. And so, I begin every day going outside. I just stand outdoors. Before I look at
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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, 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 a simple way know the answer. So, I have to think my way through it. I'm feeling resistance
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as I do that. Good things are happening as I'm doing that. What technology does is it makes a lot of
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these things much easier. So, if I have central air conditioning in my house, I never have to go outside
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and feel a difference of temperature or step out into a natural world where I'm no longer kind of in
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charge of the temperature. The computer does a lot of the thinking for me. If I need to do math, it just
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does the math. If I need to remember something, it just does the remembering. And that's useful, but it's not
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developmental. And this is, I think this is the heart of why we are so markedly lonely, anxious, and
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depressed is we've become very diminished people. And diminished people have a hard time finding
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something to do that's worthwhile in the world and have a hard time finding a way to make real
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connection with other people in the world because if everyone else has just been equally undeveloped as
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me, who am I connecting with? I'm connecting with like shadows or ciphers. And that's an exaggeration
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maybe of what's where we're at, but maybe not totally missing something that has changed is
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that we used to be in a world that just of necessity developed us. And now we're in a world that almost
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necessarily or coercively fails to develop us, just keeps us still, keeps us not engaged. And I think
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that's causing a lot of distress that's hard to surface until you really start paying attention to what
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it feels like to be us right now. All right. So human development, there's resistance, there's
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frustrations, there's friction. So when that, when we experienced that, we turned to technology and
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thinking, well, maybe this can solve that issue. And I think one of the things you talk about,
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you really hit home. I think one of the things that we're looking for as human beings, you said
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at the beginning, we're looking for recognition. We're looking for relationships with other people.
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Well, sometimes, you know, making relationships can be hard. Sometimes people don't pay attention to you.
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Sometimes. 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 and we get this like social media
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superpower, but you're making the case when we do that, we become a little bit less human,
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correct? Because we're not developing it to its fullest capacity. And more and more fragile,
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less resilient, less able to handle or know how to respond when someone doesn't get what you're
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saying or isn't listening, right? I mean, Sherry Turkle, who has studied so many dimensions of
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how media is shaping us, she had this really interesting series of kind of experiments or
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conversations in her lab at MIT with college students who are the easy ones to get in a lab
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at a college research setting. And she was trying to probe why do college students prefer to text
00:23:13.580
rather than talk with each other, right? Why would you text your friend if you could talk with your
00:23:17.840
friend? But the answer is, I think, really illuminating. The basic answer that she gets
00:23:22.480
from students as she probes this in her conversations with them is they prefer to text
00:23:28.080
because when you text, you are in control of the message you sent. So even as we're having this
00:23:34.960
conversation, there's a lot I'm not in control of. I'm not in control of what you ask. I'm not in
00:23:39.920
control of how you respond. And I don't get unlimited time to figure out how to respond. I sort of have
00:23:44.300
to be in the moment, and that's vulnerable, right? But if you're texting, first of all,
00:23:49.820
you've reduced the information stream tremendously. You've gone from megabits of information over a
00:23:55.660
voice connection, like we're using terabits if we were face-to-face. We'd be exchanging so much
00:24:00.960
information in real time. You take that all the way down to a few bytes of information at a time.
00:24:06.160
That means that I can actually look over what I'm going to send you before I send it.
00:24:10.880
So I'm totally in control. I never send a message I didn't mean to send, which happens all the time
00:24:16.540
in real relationships. It's much more likely you will get the message I want to send, but it also
00:24:21.580
thins out the relationship. And the problem is the quest for control is like directly
00:24:27.620
in opposition to the quest for relationship. The more you want to be in control of a situation,
00:24:35.000
the less real relationship you have, because relationship is risk. It is improv. It is
00:24:41.080
vulnerability. And, you know, we would prefer not to have that. But the more we opt out of that,
00:24:47.620
the less we lack the very thing we were most deeply designed for. So that trade of, well,
00:24:55.280
I'll be more in control. I won't be as vulnerable. It won't be as hard. In some ways, true. But you won't
00:25:01.380
have much left once you've given up the things that make relationships what they are.
00:25:06.900
Well, the other thing that technology allows us to do with relationships is, okay, we can control
00:25:10.960
the conversation. We can control how we present ourselves to others so they like us. But we can
00:25:15.960
also control like who we even interact with in the first place. I mean, a lot of the frustration that
00:25:20.380
happens with relationships, you end up with people that you just don't even think like them.
00:25:24.520
And you have to learn how to manage that. With social media or the internet, you can find people
00:25:30.380
who are pretty much just like you. And you know, as soon as they interact with them, it's going to be
00:25:35.320
easy. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, easy everywhere is what technology promises. I mean,
00:25:43.620
that's, to me, that's the fundamental idea is, wouldn't it be nice if life were easy? Wouldn't it be
00:25:49.300
nice if everyone pretty much had the same opinions as you do, the same style of communication as you do?
00:25:54.520
And it's such a steep trade-off to how am I going to become the kind of person who can handle
00:26:01.240
difficulty in the world, who could actually persuade others? I mean, this is a huge issue
00:26:06.120
in our world right now. How does anyone ever persuade anyone now? Because we've lost the ability
00:26:11.620
to attend to someone who genuinely sees or feels the world differently than I do, and have them come
00:26:18.740
to trust enough that I really know why they think what they think, what it feels like to be them,
00:26:24.420
and then I can offer them an alternative account of the world. And they're like, oh, actually,
00:26:28.020
that helps make sense of something that I couldn't make sense of. But when we're siloed off from each
00:26:32.960
other, and we're never encountering that real difference, we also completely lose the ability
00:26:38.120
to ever persuade someone else. And then, of course, it just spirals into tiny little polarized tribes,
00:26:44.960
rather than people who have actually done the hard work of, how do I listen well enough
00:26:48.960
across some real difference that I could be part of a real conversation?
00:26:53.760
The problem is, the logic of this is ultimately, it's Narcissus's mirror, right? Because
00:26:58.820
it's interesting. I've been married for 27 years. And when my wife and I got married,
00:27:04.400
one of the things our friends said about us was, oh, Andy and Catherine are so alike.
00:27:09.240
Like, we had the same Myers-Briggs type, we had the same, there were so many ways that we were,
00:27:14.020
we seemed quite similar while we were dating and engaged. And then, like, the day we got married,
00:27:19.740
it was like a switch flipped, and we just discovered all these ways that were so different from each
00:27:23.620
other. And I never think of myself primarily these days as like my wife, even though I think if you
00:27:28.960
met us, you would probably say that on an initial encounter. But the truth is, as we get to know
00:27:34.040
any other person, we discover, this is hard. This person does not see or feel what I see and feel.
00:27:41.420
There's always moments where you're like, I would rather opt out of this and go to some other
00:27:45.520
environment where I'm more in control. But the only place where you're really going to experience that
00:27:49.840
is with the infinite personalization of a screen that just mirrors back to you who you are.
00:27:54.880
Because the moment you encounter another person, no matter how similar they seem to be,
00:27:58.820
you're going to encounter some deep chasms of difference that you'll have to bridge and that will
00:28:03.920
cause conflict and strain and stress. And if you opt out of that, you are ultimately opting out of
00:28:11.440
all relationship in the world. Fortunately, you know, with screens, maybe you'll be relatively
00:28:16.340
palliated. But you won't be living the life we were looking for when we started, which was to find
00:28:21.600
that other face and somehow know what it was to be known by another. That you won't get.
00:28:26.780
But we're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:28:33.300
I love this distinction you make in the book about personal and personalized.
00:28:38.320
Because I think this is a useful distinction because I think it's what technology does. It
00:28:42.300
promises us to have personal experience, but what we get is personalized experiences.
00:28:47.800
And I love the example that you give of those, like those robo letters you get from like real
00:28:54.500
estate agents that look like they've been written by hand.
00:28:58.220
Yeah. Like, tell us, tell us about that distinction.
00:29:00.440
I mean, I got one as I was starting the book, I was thinking about this issue of, you know,
00:29:04.060
what exactly has gone wrong in our world of persons. And I got this letter that it completely fooled
00:29:10.960
me. I consider myself to be a pretty suspicious person, but I got this letter in the mail and it looks
00:29:15.560
like a, you know, a friendly, like 10th grader had written me a note. It was sort of exuberant
00:29:19.900
handwriting. And it took me like several minutes looking at the letter to realize this window salesman
00:29:25.740
had not actually written me a letter. Right. And I thought, oh, this is what technology is getting
00:29:31.540
so good at. It's getting good at simulating personal connection. Because of course, what do I
00:29:36.920
respond most deeply to? I respond to that face I'm looking for. And so now our technology,
00:29:42.360
it's a very convincing imitation of the real thing that my devices know my name. They talk to me by
00:29:50.440
name. They recognize my face. But the difference between personal and personalized is very simple.
00:29:58.980
In personalized encounters, there's not actually another person on the other side. It's, it's a
00:30:05.320
device. It's a thing. It's an algorithm. It's a program. And yes, it, it very convincingly talks to
00:30:12.040
you, presents itself to you as if it knows who you are and what your unique interests and needs and so
00:30:16.720
forth are. But in fact, there's no face of another person who's paying attention to you. So it's like
00:30:23.580
it both totally feeds the hunger. And it's also like the most lonely thing in the world because this
00:30:29.040
device doesn't in fact know me or care about me or have anything to offer me other than what can
00:30:34.860
benefit the system that produced the device. And that's a very different thing from a real personal
00:30:40.220
encounter with another person who is more than the sum of a system of profit generation. Even if they
00:30:46.540
are a window salesman, if I meet a real person, there's something real that happens ideally with
00:30:51.500
that person. That's not just transaction, but a personalized world is all transaction all the
00:30:56.440
time. No, the personal. So I get this a lot with PR people who are pitching podcasts. Yes. Oh my God.
00:31:03.180
They use like the template. I can only imagine. Right. And have like, I guess there's a Brett.
00:31:06.620
Yeah. Well, no, but sometimes I think there's like a macro they use. And so they can just like
00:31:10.340
automatically, but sometimes the macro doesn't work. And it says, dear podcast host in parentheses
00:31:14.940
and dear influencer. Right. Um, cause that's, that's a perfect example of personalization,
00:31:22.260
but not personal. Uh, but then even obviously this, this personalized ethos creep into really
00:31:27.480
intimate relationships. I mean, there's apps now that can send out text messages to your spouse
00:31:32.320
to like offer affirmation or if it's their anniversary, like, uh, and people think, well,
00:31:40.000
this is good for my relationship. My wife will appreciate it, but it's like, man, it just feels
00:31:44.520
like a dark mirror episode. This is, this is not good. And the veil will eventually slip. And
00:31:50.280
instead of saying, dear Catherine, he'll say, dear spouse, dear spouse. Right. Uh, or, you know,
00:31:57.040
they'll, you'll, you won't even, she'll say, thank you for sending that message. Like I didn't send
00:32:00.160
a message. What message was that again? Yes, honey. But this is like, these are our attempts
00:32:06.460
at, we, we, we want personal relationships where we're looking for that connection, but
00:32:11.960
we're looking for the shortcut. But in the process, we kind of, we, we dehumanize ourself
00:32:17.100
in the process. Yes, exactly. And there just are no shortcuts. So, you know, I talk in the book
00:32:23.520
about superpowers and, and a lot of tech now sells things, but you'll have coding superpowers.
00:32:29.440
Presenting superpowers, podcasting superpowers. Fine. I mean, there's a place for, you know,
00:32:34.780
the, the amazing affordances of technology and certain kinds of work and all that, but there
00:32:39.880
are no personhood superpowers. There's no love superpower. There's no marriage superpower.
00:32:46.360
And, and in fact, quite the opposite, the attempt to import, you know, I mean, so to, you know,
00:32:53.120
to be honest, a few moments ago, I said, how many years have I been married? And I'm not sure
00:32:57.180
I got it right. I know my wife would get it right. Right. So I know she knows the exact number of
00:33:02.340
years and I took a reasonably accurate guess. I didn't take the time to do the math. Um, if she
00:33:08.560
listened to this, she may say, I got it wrong. Well, that's part of the relationship like that
00:33:13.800
for better or for worse, that's who I am. And if I, yeah, I could outsource that to a machine
00:33:18.840
and have it keep track, but then there's no, there's no additional quantum of relationship
00:33:24.040
in that. There's just a facsimile of attention, but not the real thing. And so I, the, the quest
00:33:32.200
for superpowers needs to be very, very carefully constrained and kept away from the things that
00:33:38.300
matter most, because in the areas where it matters most, superpowers actually cannot help.
00:33:43.220
They undermine, they distract, and they ultimately deplete the real power we need to be human.
00:33:52.640
That is where it doesn't, it kind of feel like that's where we are.
00:33:57.320
Um, well, another point you make in the book is we often think when we use technology that
00:34:01.840
we're the one who is working the technology, but what we often forget is that the technology
00:34:08.220
is also working on us and shaping us. Uh, how do you think our technology shapes us unknowingly
00:34:16.440
while we are using it? Right. Like it's like the tool works on both ends, right?
00:34:19.860
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's always been true. I mean, you use the hammer and it acts back on your
00:34:26.860
neuromuscular system to reshape. I mean, literally your neurons reprogram, you know, to kind of expand
00:34:33.480
in a way to be able to wield that tool more and more effectively. Every moment of use in the world
00:34:39.940
is rewiring my, my neural system, my reward system. And I think that we're, you know, everybody brings
00:34:47.980
up the social dilemma film when, when I talk about this stuff and they're like, oh yeah, do you know
00:34:52.640
they've studied like our rewards? And yes, they sure have. And they know what makes us tick.
00:34:56.840
But I actually think the deeper layer of this is not the, not the designed interventions,
00:35:03.040
like the, the ways that the algorithms really are calculated to keep you clicking. That is true.
00:35:07.600
It's more the whole premise that, that my life should get easier to me. That's, that's actually
00:35:16.800
how technology is acting on me. It's, it's making me shrink from risk, shrink from productive effort
00:35:24.260
and always want a shortcut. And my brain gets very itchy and uncomfortable when I can't find the
00:35:32.380
shortcut. The thing is that all creativity and generativity happens. If you like persist in that
00:35:39.700
discomfort of not being able to find the shortcut, the shortcut never is truly generative. It's always
00:35:46.240
imitative and, and repetitive. If I want to do something really new, whether a new thought or,
00:35:53.860
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
00:35:59.320
the piano, have trained pretty seriously as that. And when I sit down to practice, if I want to learn
00:36:04.000
something really tricky, you know, with one or both hands, I have to push through that itchy sense that
00:36:09.920
says, wouldn't you rather do something easy? Wouldn't you rather just play something you already
00:36:12.920
know, or for that matter, just press play and listen to somebody else play it. And it's only if I
00:36:17.980
press through the resistance and the desire for a shortcut, do I come to ultimately a kind of mastery
00:36:26.500
of a new thing. And our technology is just constantly training us. Don't bother with the hard thing,
00:36:34.020
choose the easy thing. And that, in that way, it's so different from tools, which are, they're not easy
00:36:38.860
to use. Like even a simple tool, like a hammer, not, not easy at all. And as you use it, it doesn't
00:36:44.760
like train you to decline inability, it trains you to increase. But I think that the way we've
00:36:50.840
designed a lot of our devices, they kind of train, train us to decrease and to, to just wait for the
00:36:55.840
shortcut to happen, wait for the magic to happen, rather than actually figure out how to exert
00:37:00.200
ourselves in new and creative ways in the world. Well, I want to dig into this. You make this,
00:37:04.760
you're not like a Luddite, right? Like you think technology can be life enhancing and life affirming
00:37:11.280
as opposed to life negating. And I like this distinction you make, the type of technology
00:37:15.660
that can enhance our life. You make this distinction between devices and instruments.
00:37:21.720
What are the differences between the two? Yeah. I'm so glad you brought this up because
00:37:24.740
it is so important. This is not an anti-technology book. I'm not anti-technology. I use a lot of
00:37:28.820
technology, but, but I do want us to totally reframe what we're looking for and read is ultimately
00:37:34.140
redesign the whole stack. I think of technology needs to be redesigned from devices, which basically
00:37:39.920
do everything we've been talking about. They kind of replace and displace human engagement and effort.
00:37:44.680
But then there's this other kind of thing we make often using very sophisticated understanding of
00:37:50.040
the world from science and so forth and very high tech that we call instruments. And I think the three
00:37:55.820
ways I see that word used a lot are medical instruments, scientific instruments, and maybe most
00:38:02.580
richly musical instruments. And an instrument can be very, very complex at the technical level.
00:38:09.920
That is highly, you know, complicated device in one way, but it fully engages a person, ideally
00:38:17.300
with heart, soul, mind, and strength all at once. So, you know, I, I grew up playing a Steinway grand
00:38:23.420
piano, which is already an industrial thing. It's a, it couldn't have been made before the modern era.
00:38:28.420
There's a lot of industrial technology and even a acoustic grand piano, but then often I'm in settings
00:38:34.160
where I'm playing a digital piano, which is all silicon and, you know, it's, it's all computational
00:38:39.000
technology. But because of the way it's designed, it doesn't play itself. There's no little triangle
00:38:45.400
where you just press play. It's designed to actually be played by a musician. And in fact, the digital
00:38:53.220
thing can in certain ways call forth new creative acts that the acoustic thing could not because there's
00:39:00.280
new layers of interface and possibility built into the thing, but only if a human being uses it with
00:39:06.740
skill. So an instrument is a kind of technology that fully involves us and keeps developing us.
00:39:16.020
That is, as I keep using it, I am growing, I'm developing, I'm not getting kind of cut out of
00:39:21.700
the loop. I'm not taking shortcuts. I'm growing, I'm contributing, and the instrument's helping to kind
00:39:27.900
of channel and amplify that. I think we could go back almost literally like, so I don't want to roll
00:39:35.540
back to a hundred years and not have technology anymore. I wish we could roll back a hundred years
00:39:39.460
and say, Hey, scientists, as you're figuring this stuff out, give us instruments, not devices.
00:39:44.620
But instead we wanted magic. Right. But I think we could have said, no, no, we want all instruments.
00:39:50.200
Like you're going to design a computational interface that will give us great powers of math memory.
00:39:54.260
Okay. That's fine. But we've got to stay moving in the world. No screens because screens pin you to
00:39:59.560
one place just for the convenience of the computer. You're not there for your own convenience. You're
00:40:03.700
there because that's the only way we figured out how to build an interface. But what if we built a
00:40:07.580
different kind of interface where you can move through the world the way people always did when
00:40:11.260
they had real work to do or hard thinking to do, they'd get out and move around. Why not build a
00:40:16.840
thinking instrument, you know, a different kind of computer. And we could go through almost every
00:40:21.740
kind of domain of technology and redesign it to be much more instrument-like and much less device-like.
00:40:27.320
Okay. So let's, uh, for people who are listening, how could they know if they're using a device,
00:40:31.300
if it like does work for them and doesn't require any skill, you're probably using a device.
00:40:35.980
Yep. Yep. And you're using an instrument. If you feel like more alive at the end, like,
00:40:42.080
like there's a crescendo of involvement. And if you've become something different at the end,
00:40:47.160
whereas the device, you feel often there's a great surge. Like when you're exercising these
00:40:52.340
superpowers, it sort of feels very pleasurable. But then at the end, you feel kind of depleted.
00:40:57.520
I just was talking with a mom who lets her kid have two hours a week, a weekend on screens,
00:41:03.080
like video games, which is low. I mean, and good for her. And it's hard to hold the line as a parent.
00:41:08.740
And she said something really interesting. She said, you know, my, my son is so eager to get to the
00:41:12.840
video games for the two hours a weekend. But he sometimes at the end says, mom, I feel like trash
00:41:17.700
at the end. Like that's his word for the feeling at the end of using the thing.
00:41:22.700
And I've never felt that on a bicycle. I've never felt that playing a piano or a digital piano. I've
00:41:28.400
never felt that when I've had a really good session, like coding on a computer where I'm really thinking
00:41:32.900
through a problem and coming up with a solution. But we know that feeling like, Ooh, I feel like trash
00:41:38.040
instruments. Don't make you feel like trash. They make you feel I'm more fully alive. And I'm
00:41:42.440
actually able to let it go. That's the other interesting thing. Often the superpowers are
00:41:46.400
very sticky. Like we don't want to let go. And the instrument is sort of very free. You,
00:41:52.300
you pick up the hammer, you work hard for a while, then you're willing to lay it down.
00:41:56.120
You're not compulsive about it. You're not addicted to it. Dependent on it.
00:41:59.600
Yeah. You're not constantly hammering things. I just got to keep hammering. I'm bored. I just
00:42:04.120
going to hammer. I'm waiting in line. I'm going to, I'm going to hammer.
00:42:07.900
Exactly. Right. And yet you can be really good with it and, and love doing it, but without
00:42:14.080
compulsion. And like that world is, is just waiting for us. If we asked for that instead
00:42:23.420
Well, so, I mean, I think everyone's got a device in their pockets, the smartphone.
00:42:27.840
Is it possible, you think, to pound your smartphone device into a, into an instrument?
00:42:35.220
Totally. And this is actually, to me, the, the hopeful thing about the, the glowing rectangles
00:42:41.320
is, you know, so to be super geeky right now, a computer is just a Turing complete universal
00:42:48.340
machine, which basically means it can be, it can represent any state of the world you ask
00:42:52.920
it to or nearly Turing complete. And, and that just means like these things can be the ultimate
00:42:59.500
device. We can ask them just to do all magic all the time, or they can be the ultimate
00:43:03.420
instrument. So what I've tried to do with my, with my smartphone is discipline myself and
00:43:09.260
it does take practice and certain kinds of habits and certain kinds of rhythms, but, but
00:43:13.540
that every time I pick it up, it's to use it as an instrument, not as a device. So I'm not
00:43:18.040
using it to distract myself. I'm trying not to use it to soothe myself when I'm anxious or
00:43:23.620
upset. When I'm bored, I don't take it out because I know if I'm bored, I'm likely to just
00:43:28.880
use it to like assuage the boredom. So I pick it up when I need to attend to a person through
00:43:36.120
the medium of a text message or call or email, when I need to learn something about the world.
00:43:41.560
And I don't do this perfectly, but, but I have shifted dramatically since I started really trying
00:43:46.840
to pay attention to this. I'd say like, I used to be 80% device, 20% instrument. And now I think
00:43:52.180
it's 80% instrument and it, and it feels way less compulsive. I feel the weight of it in my pocket,
00:43:57.400
much less. I leave it behind more often without anxiety because it's no longer that magical thing.
00:44:04.160
No. I mean, I, I stayed at a monastery a couple of years ago and I come to find out,
00:44:09.720
I learned that monks use computers, but, but they treat it. It's like a tool. It's like,
00:44:15.060
it's just like, it's, it's like a shovel. They just like, well, I got to get on here to
00:44:19.160
upload this thing for whatever. And then they're done and that's it. And then to, yeah, to them,
00:44:25.260
it's just another shovel. It's a hammer. Exactly. Nothing more. Exactly. It's, and it's
00:44:30.060
totally possible to rewire your brain and, and instincts. It's just hard. And also very hard to
00:44:38.860
do. It's not an accident that you found that a monastery because it's hard to do without a
00:44:42.820
community of people who are pursuing this together and who, and also have a better life to live
00:44:48.580
beyond the screen. You know, if you are really isolated and kind of your best option is the
00:44:54.600
screen, it's really hard to turn that into an instrument only. It's easier when you're part of
00:45:00.180
a, an intentional community that's actually pursuing something different.
00:45:03.820
Well, so, you know, big argument in the book, the big thing we're looking for is relationships and
00:45:07.340
connections. And we think we can get that through our digital devices, but then we come up empty
00:45:11.660
handed. We find out actually makes us feel, we make that Faustian bargain, right? We become less human
00:45:17.540
in a way. But then you say, if we, if we want to, if we want that human connection that we're,
00:45:22.040
we're craving, you argue, we've got to find that in households. What's a household and how is it
00:45:27.500
different from a family or like a small group, like a CrossFit gym or something like that?
00:45:31.960
Yeah. Ultimately, so there's a redesign that needs to happen with the tech itself, but there's also a
00:45:36.800
kind of social architecture redesign that I think we need, which is you're only going to find the life
00:45:43.560
that you're looking for with other people in an extended, durable way, which almost always means
00:45:52.500
some version of living under the same roof or very close to it. You've got to be proximate enough to
00:45:58.360
other people for long enough that you overcome the inherent kind of superficiality of our relationships
00:46:06.260
and the transactional nature of our relationships and in our world. And you go beyond that to
00:46:12.880
something that is just deeper and more lasting. Now that can happen in family to some extent. Some
00:46:20.080
people are fortunate to marry and have children. And for a season of life, you can have that with,
00:46:24.560
you know, what we call a nuclear family. But I've really become convinced that's totally inadequate
00:46:29.240
for several reasons. One is I've had the very disturbing experience of discovering that the
00:46:33.180
children grow up and leave, which happened to me now. So I have two amazing young adult children
00:46:38.560
who I love dearly, who probably for very good reasons are now moving into the world and they're
00:46:43.600
going to form their own households and their own families. And so that's a very temporary thing.
00:46:48.100
As intense as child rearing is, for those of us who get to do it, it's a temporary thing.
00:46:52.460
But the other thing is more generally, like the reality is many people in our world may not marry
00:46:57.180
and marriages end for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes tragically, it's just a truth.
00:47:04.020
And we need a kind of community that's bigger than just that nuclear unit. It needs to be ideally
00:47:10.320
more intergenerational, more stages of life, more different conditions of life in a way.
00:47:17.020
But it needs to be almost literally under a roof. So I lived for my first four years out of college with
00:47:26.100
four or five other men, depending on the year, in a single house. We had one bank account for those
00:47:32.380
years. We each had our own lives and jobs. But we took that common life very seriously. We weren't
00:47:38.300
monks. But for a season, we lived with a kind of intentionality of life. And it was like one of the
00:47:43.960
most beneficial, formative experiences of my life. And then when my wife and I got married, instead of
00:47:49.400
just moving into a single unit kind of living situation, we lived for many years with other people.
00:47:56.100
And I think this is a missing piece in rebuilding a social world that actually has room for the kind
00:48:04.240
of relationships we're craving. Because we live such atomized individual lives, even when we're
00:48:10.080
coupled. A couple is not a big enough unit to keep personhood going. So in the book, I'm kind of
00:48:18.720
inviting us to rethink. There's other patterns from other times and places where people lived in much
00:48:23.600
much more complex dwelling units. And ultimately, we need to kind of rebuild our world to make that
00:48:31.840
Well, the thing is, there's people out there like Silicon Valley. Well, this is a problem. Like
00:48:35.860
people need households. So we're going to develop an app where you can sign up and you can like,
00:48:43.060
I mean, I mean, you can make the case a lot of these like co-working things like WeWork.
00:48:46.500
That's what they're trying to do. But like you said, it's a simulation. It's like, it's not the
00:48:55.000
It's a simulation because of another kind of layer here, which we haven't talked a whole lot about,
00:48:59.300
but it's the way the technological world is all built on usefulness and productivity.
00:49:03.580
So, you know, WeWork was, was and is a beautiful idea and, and a lot better space to work than many
00:49:11.780
places, but it's all built on one slice of your life, which is your working life. And once you're
00:49:17.360
not generating money to pay the monthly dues or fees or whatever, you're not part of that community.
00:49:22.860
Same with CrossFit actually, which I'm a big believer in gyms and boxes and, you know, whatever
00:49:28.820
community you build for your fitness, but what happens when you're too old to participate or
00:49:35.200
you become disabled in a way that you can't really, you know, do the workout of the day.
00:49:39.980
And how does that community touch all the other aspects of your life? This is where a household
00:49:44.260
is sort of indispensable because it's the one integrated environment where you're known in
00:49:48.660
all your facets as a person, rather than only being there as long as you make sense transactionally
00:49:56.640
No, that makes sense. And I think the other thing people might be tempted to do, so, okay,
00:50:02.700
I want to, I want to develop more household, right? In my life. And again, they'll turn to
00:50:07.340
technology. They think, well, I can like, we can start this group text with, you know, people
00:50:11.500
and they, it could help, but it's probably not going to do, it's not, it's going to require
00:50:17.340
you to, like you said, do some rejiggering of your social structure in your life. And that's
00:50:25.600
Yeah. Cause this is where there's just not any superpowers for the thing we most want,
00:50:30.680
which is being known. You know, one way to put it is there's just a whole involuntary layer to
00:50:38.300
being known. There's all the things my housemates see in me and about me that I never intended for
00:50:45.380
them to see. And that I might not even know about myself. And sometimes that'll cause real conflict
00:50:50.100
and they'll push back and complain or criticize or, or, or just maybe more lovingly intervene and
00:50:56.500
say, do you realize you're really anxious about this? Or do you realize you've been really depressed
00:51:00.200
for the last four nights and haven't done anything except lie on the couch? Like I'm never going to
00:51:04.140
put that in a text message. Honestly, I'm just not going to choose to disclose that. So we have to
00:51:09.560
live in environments where we can't help, but be known an environment where like, if you fall asleep
00:51:15.780
and stay asleep for a long time, someone will come check on you. Like you're never going to,
00:51:19.700
if you have a cardiac arrest, you know, you're not going to text your friends and say, Hey, by the way,
00:51:24.400
I'm incapacitated right now. Like you need a place where people will notice. We haven't seen him for a
00:51:30.160
while. What's going on. And that level of being known that goes beyond the, what I volunteer or what
00:51:36.760
I would willingly offer is actually the essence of being known. But how many of us have places where that
00:51:43.160
happens regularly? Not enough. I would say. No, I've, I've seen that in my own life,
00:51:47.920
not just like this household thing, but in small groups, like what I consider my communities,
00:51:51.760
I belong to. There's always this moment where people are like, wow, you know, we need to connect
00:51:56.020
more. There's like not enough camaraderie. And so they'll like, well, we'll do this like group chat
00:52:01.600
or we'll do discord and this will be the thing. And then nothing ever changes. And, and then I don't
00:52:08.380
know, it's, it's frustrating. Cause I think, cause I think a lot of people think like, Oh, this is,
00:52:12.300
yo, this will be it. This is going to be the thing that fixes it. And it's like, no, it's not. It's,
00:52:17.000
it's not going to be that. The thing that would fix it like short of, you know, moving in together,
00:52:21.540
which I recommend or giving each other keys to your house. Like there's steps we can take,
00:52:25.020
like, you know, Catherine and I have given, there's like five people who have a key to our
00:52:29.160
house who didn't a couple of years ago. Cause we no longer live under one roof with other people,
00:52:33.060
but we were like, we need to invite other people close enough that they could kind of let
00:52:36.620
themselves in when, when they want to. But for that group, rather than the discord of the group chat,
00:52:41.500
I think the only thing that would approximate is, is go on. The old word would be a pilgrimage
00:52:46.160
together. That is go somewhere hard, long for an extended period of time. And the relationships
00:52:51.740
would change. The connection would go way deeper because you'd get that involuntary quality of this
00:52:57.060
extended time where other people see you without filters, not at your best in often in challenging
00:53:03.720
or adverse circumstances in some ways. And what gets forged in those, that kind of travel,
00:53:09.240
that kind of pilgrimage journey is incredibly powerful. But in some ways we need a group of
00:53:15.320
people. We're doing that pilgrimage of life with, you know, where we are, not just on special
00:53:20.040
occasions, but you know, a pilgrimage would do it in a way that a group chat. Well,
00:53:24.600
I think that you've got to still manage expectations. There's not going to be a lot
00:53:28.220
of people who are going to want to do that pilgrimage. It's true. There'll be, there's
00:53:32.000
going to be people who say, Oh yeah, I would definitely be down for that. But then when it
00:53:35.620
finally comes to like, put your chips on the table and I know I have my, it's cost. Yeah. My wife,
00:53:40.580
I got stuff I got to do and they'll find some reason not to go. But I think when you do find
00:53:44.720
people who want to do that, like you got to just embrace it, like embrace those people.
00:53:49.060
Yes. Those are the people. Those are the people. And, and we, a lot of people will resist it because
00:53:56.380
it is costly and it's, it's also scary. And so, you know, people will find reasons not to do things
00:54:04.040
that are scary, but the good stuff is always found on the other side of that.
00:54:08.440
Well, Andy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:54:12.060
I can learn a little more about me at my website. It just feels so self-promotional to even say
00:54:19.160
things like this, but andycrouch.com with a dash, andycrouch.com. But I also work for an
00:54:24.240
organization called Praxis and we actually help people build ventures and businesses that,
00:54:28.200
that work on this stuff. And we have a whole section on the book at praxislabs.org, labs like
00:54:33.740
laboratory, praxislabs.org slash life will give you a lot more, not just about the book, but how you
00:54:40.360
could actually build new ventures for profit, nonprofit along these lines.
00:54:44.900
Fantastic. Well, andycrouch, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:54:49.680
My guest today was andycrouch. He's the author of the book, The Life We're Looking For. It's
00:54:53.000
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at
00:54:56.520
his website, andy-crouch.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash crouch,
00:55:01.480
where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:55:10.360
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:55:15.040
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00:55:18.640
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