Our World says that productivity is the goal of life, and accomplishments give us meaning. And if that’s true then we have to find constant ways to improve and increase efficiency. Technology is the tool to help us get to that goal. Our culture believes and lives as though technology will solve all our problems. Our devotion to technology, however, allows us to continue living in ways that we were never designed to live.
The truth is, of course, that technology does makes us more efficient. You can maximize your time through techniques, devices, and tools. You can become more productive if you use the right tools and evaluate things with the right metrics. With email on your phone, for example, you can work from anywhere and accomplish little tasks in a moment, even when away from your desk. You can email your customers while standing in line at the store, or waiting to board your airplane, or sitting on the toilet. You can shoot a quick text while on vacation and it hardly feels like you’re working because it takes 30 seconds. Tools make us efficient and productive.
But what’s interesting about our use of technology is that it has made us even less social and it has taken away even more of our time. That’s the nature of techniques: often culture creates problems and then invents techniques to solve those problems, but in the process it eats away at our lives. Alan Noble explains it this way:
To cope with the inhumanity of our society, we develop newer and better techniques, which, being based on a false anthropology, only extend that inhumanity in new ways, requiring further coping techniques.
Technology serves to keep up the allusion that we can live in an inhuman culture. We can accomplish all that society says we must if we have the right tools. And so we keep going, we use techniques to meet unrealistic expectations of life. But these techniques create new problems, because ultimately we weren’t designed to live this way, and therefore we need techniques for the problems created by techniques.
Take your computer as one example of this phenomenon. Your computer allows you to accomplish amazing things. I love technology and am immensely grateful for it. What are some of the things we are able to do through our computers? We can stay in contact with people far away through email, zoom calls, and social media. We can shop quickly and efficiently, finding what we need at reasonable prices. We can keep up to date on news happening around the world. We can type up documents, like blog posts, with relative ease and convenance. We can do massive amounts of research in very short amount of time. And AI has only enhanced that capability. But as a result of our use of this technology we are discovering all sorts of problems too. The blue light is affecting our eyes quite negatively. People are developing problems in their wrists from typing and holding phones. The increased sedentary lifestyle arising from constant computer use has generated problems with spines, necks, and weight gain. In addition, we have discovered that cell phone use has become an addictive habit. We can’t seem to put our phones down, and people experience distress when unable to check social media, email, or text messages. And all of this technology use affects our relationships too, as we have seen a decrease in socialization with the advancement of social media.
So, what do we do? We create techniques to help us with these problems. We have techniques to help us keep living in inhuman ways. All the while we neglect the people around us. We settle for social media “friends” instead of true friends. We settle for sharing our deepest wounds on the internet with people who give us platitudes, instead of asking true friends to bear our burdens with us. We settle for text messages instead of face to face conversations where human contact adds layers of meaningful connection to our interactions. We convince ourselves that we have connection because of our technology, when in reality we don’t even know what we are missing.
Our technological advances often keep us from asking more significant questions. Questions like: is this the healthiest way to live? Am I too dependent on technology? Is there more to life than productivity? What should be the overarching goal of my life? What gives worth and value to a human being? Technology keeps us distracted, efficient, and productive…and lonely.
God created us to be in relationship. He created us to find meaning through social connection. “It is not good for man to be alone” is a sentence that gets to the heart of our design and purpose. Technology allows us to live in ways that are contrary to our design and God’s intent, but such living will eat away at our souls in time.
I am not anti-technology, nor anti social media. I love many of these tools and use them willingly. I am recognizing, however, the ways in which many of our techniques keep us from seeing our social problems. I am recognizing the ways in which they contribute to our loneliness epidemic. Technology can be a wonderful gift when used appropriately and with restraint. It can lead us deeper into isolation, however, if we are not careful.
For further study read Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Downers Grove: IVP, 2021.
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