Note: Adapted from a public lecture delivered at Regent College in July 2019, this article originally appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of CRUX.¹

My most recent book, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place,²  has been read by quite a few families in the past two years. Of course, this is gratifying for an author. But I fear that it has ruined my reputation for an entire generation of children—those who are, say, currently nine to twelve years old.

Not long after the book was published, I stayed with friends in St. Louis, Missouri. Their whole family had read the book early on. In a delightful gesture, their children had decided to make a welcome banner for me. The words were simple: “Welcome, Andy Crouch.” But it was their illustration that caught my attention: a close facsimile of the cover of The Tech-Wise Family, with a rather significant alteration. The actual book cover image shows a volume knob inscribed with a simple icon of a house, suggesting that we might want to “turn down the volume” on technology in our homes. But the children of this family had created a new cover image: a tablet something like Apple’s iPad, with a big red X drawn through it.

There is nothing in my book that says we should ban iPads—although I do encourage parents to radically limit screen use of any kind before “double digits,” ten years old or so. But clearly the message these kids had taken away was that this book’s theme was “Ban the iPad.” For the rising generation, I fear this is how I’ll be remembered: as the writer of that red anti-technology book.

In fact, I love technology, a love affair that really began when I was the age of those children. My father, who taught at Syracuse University during my childhood, brought home one of the first computer terminals in the 1970s to connect to the university’s mainframe. I’ve loved coding ever since. Just this year I got around to learning Python, one of the most widely used languages at the moment, in order to contribute some code for our team’s daily work at Praxis. I love the intellectual, but also the aesthetic, work of precisely specifying how to get a computational device to do what we want it to do, efficiently, over and over.

And yet, we are in a time of rising ambivalence about technology. I love it—but sometimes I love it too much. Kids love it—yet we sense that sometimes they love it too much. As do parents. What exactly, we have begun to wonder, are we introducing into our lives—into the most intimate and formative parts of our lives? What is technology doing to us?

While my book is largely about family life, in this talk I want to explore another very important part of human life: the work we do, and our rest from our work. How is this rhythm of work and rest being shaped by the devices we’ve introduced?

***

It would be helpful to clarify what I mean by the word technology. I’m not just thinking about laptops or iPads or smartphones. I’m thinking less about any one device as about a pattern that runs through all our devices. There is a widely held view of technology that says, in essence, human beings have always had tools. We’ve always taken the world and reshaped it in ways that extended our capacities. Technology is simply our latest set of tools.

Up to a point, I share this view. The history of humanity is the history of persons—a person being, I would venture to say, a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love. From the very dawn of personal existence, human beings have sought to extend their heart, soul, mind, and strength in various ways—tools in the broadest sense.

Tools most obviously extend our strength—a hammer, for example, can focus the energy available to your arm and hand in order to fasten two objects together. Such a tool not only extends your strength, it also develops it with use. But tools, in this broadest sense, extend more than just our strength. Writing, for example, extends our innate human capacity for language in a new way, allowing our minds, hearts, and maybe even our souls to speak into the world in more extensive ways than we could before we invented it.

Among its other uses, writing is a tool for memory, a way of extending and supplementing our human capacity to remember. Could it be that technology is simply a new set of more powerful tools? I recently held up my own iPhone in a room of about a thousand people. If I handed this to you, I asked, how many of you could dial your mother, or your closest living older relative? About half the room could remember their mother’s number (and so would have been able to dial her number on the phone)—but the other half could not. Assuming that they all can and do regularly call their mother, the other half of the room relies on their own smartphone, or equivalent device, to do the mental work of remembering for them.

So is the smartphone, with its prodigious capacity for memory, just another tool? Perhaps. But there is something we ought to weigh before deciding that there is no real discontinuity between the tools of the past and the technology of today: we came up with a new word. We’ve had the word tool all along, and we still readily use it in certain contexts. But roughly a century ago we added the word technology. Could it be that we invented this new word because something really significant had changed?

Albert Borgmann is the philosopher of technology who has most influenced my thinking on these matters. Borgmann suggests that what changed at the dawn of the technological era was the move from what we call tools to what he calls devices.³ Devices function like tools to some extent, in that they augment human capabilities. But unlike tools, devices do not extend our heart-soul-mind-strength capacities as much as replace them.

So for many tools, the era of technology gave us a corresponding device that operates in a distinctly different manner. The device that corresponds to the hammer is the nail gun, an electrically actuated, pneumatic hammer that operates at a pace and with force that no carpenter, no matter how skilled, can match. Indeed, the beautiful thing about the nail gun is that it requires much less skill to use at a rudimentary level. I’m not very good with a hammer, but give me a nail gun and I can get some fastening done.

What is it about the nail gun that’s different from the hammer? The difference is the degree to which it can operate at least semi-autonomously. The hammer requires me to make each movement, with a fair amount of skill and strength. When I try to use a hammer for any length of time, I discover how undeveloped my skill and strength really are.

Not so with the nail gun, which is much closer to a device. It allows me to, more or less, just point it at the requisite location, release a safety catch, pull a trigger or push a lever, and unleash a barrage of nails. Using it is categorically different from the experience of wielding a hammer, verging on an ease and efficacy that seems almost god-like: “Let there be nails.”

Now, as technology “progresses” (as we say), these devices “improve” (as we say)—which means they become more and more autonomous, more and more capable of operating on their own, and they ask less and less of us. This is why I’ve come to think that the end state of technology, the direction we all want it to go—and the reason we choose to “upgrade” from one device to the next—is the pursuit of easy everywhere.

Easy everywhere is our dream. When this dream is fulfilled, activities that started out being challenging for us, requiring strength, skill, attention, and effort—if not outright impossible for ordinary human beings—now happen at our merest wish or command. What would be the ultimate version of the nail gun in the easy-everywhere progression? What comes to mind is my Roomba vacuum—a semi-autonomous robot that vacuums our floors. The ultimate, easy-everywhere version of the nail gun would surely be a nail-gun Roomba. Instead of getting up on the roof to nail down shingles, you would just place this imaginary device on the roof. It would whir back and forth, nailing with speed and precision, as the homeowner remained on the ground, presumably with a beer in hand. Who would not want this in our arsenal of devices?

Easy everywhere is the paradigm of our technological world (what Borgmann calls “the device paradigm”). It became the paradigm, the pattern of our thinking and expectation, when we crossed the line, initially in our imagination and then in our technological realization, from tools that required us to operate them to things that did not require us at all. They don’t require our skill—instead, they work for us.

***

The device paradigm has affected both sides of one of the essential rhythms of human life: work and rest. Such a rhythm, the opening lines of Genesis suggest, is essential to bearing the image of God, the Creator who “works” for six days and then “rests” on the seventh.

A rhythm of work and rest characterizes our lives at their best. We are meant to work. We find satisfaction when we work, the appropriate pride of having brought something worthwhile into the world. And we are also meant to rest: to cease from work and enjoy the fruits of our work, just as God did in creation.

The device paradigm has affected both sides of one of the essential rhythms of human life: work and rest. Such a rhythm, the opening lines of Genesis suggest, is essential to bearing the image of God...The device paradigm of easy everywhere has undermined this human pattern, and it is helpful to remember how abrupt the change has been. My own grandparents on both my mother’s and father’s sides were farmers—small landholders in one case and sharecroppers in the other. There is no doubt that their lives involved hard work (including on Sundays), but agricultural work has built-in rhythms of work and rest. There are seasons when you can plant, and seasons when you cannot. There are times when the animals are awake and times when they are not. The biblical pattern of sabbath corresponds well to this agrarian pattern.

But our world no longer has such clear rhythms. The industrial revolution, built on factories, had a far less natural rhythm of work and rest, but at least industrial workers had to “go to work” and then “go home” (something my farming grandparents, who lived on the land they worked, would have never seen as a clear dichotomy), balancing the work and domestic spheres. In the easy-everywhere world, thanks to computation and communication, part of what has become easy everywhere is work, all the time, anywhere.

***

Indeed, there is an inescapable sense, in precisely the parts of the world where technology is most thoroughly established, that even as most of us work much less hard physically than our forebears did, we have somehow increased the amount of toil. Think of toil as fruitless work, work that is draining rather than restorative, work that does not prompt glad celebration when it is done. At its best, toil falls far short of work, which is the glad transformation of the world into greater and greater abundance. Toil is work that simply reaches a dead end, accomplishing nothing in the end.

There has always been toil in the human story, but technology’s promise of easy everywhere is at least somewhat belied by how much toil is found in our technological world. I was wandering down the aisles of a grocery store a few years ago in the month of October. October, of course, is the month when residents of my country prepare for our second-largest economic holiday (after Christmas): Halloween. On one set of shelves in that grocery were countless bags full of black plastic spiders. I started thinking about the person whose job it was to make the plastic spiders. You will not have any trouble guessing where these plastic spiders were made. For the last generation or so, China has become the world’s factory, the place that has taken over low-margin industrial production. Somewhere in China, there is a plastic spider factory (or perhaps, there are multiple competing plastic spider factories—an online search for them produces dozens of distinct products). Someone’s job is to wake up in the morning, go to work, and all day supervise the machinery that churns out and packages plastic spiders for sale to American shoppers.

I couldn’t help wondering, “What do they think America is like?” And I also wondered about their lives. To be sure, there is a measure of dignity in any job well and faithfully done. But is this good work? Is this not a kind of toil, to turn out plastic spiders for the momentary frightening of eleven-year-olds in a land an ocean away from your own? Is this what human beings were made to do?

There is a great deal of this kind of toil in our world—and worryingly, it exists not simply in the absence of technology (which, after all, promises to reduce human toil), but seemingly as a result of technology’s expansion. The fact that much of this toil takes place in places distant from our own, and is undertaken by people whose faces we have never seen and whose lives we can barely imagine, is all the more unsettling. How much toil is actually required to purchase the end state of easy everywhere?

There are those of us at the other end of the value chain, the ones on the receiving end of plastic spider shipments from other parts of the world. In May 2019, technology analyst Benedict Evans posted this on Twitter (spelling and punctuation sic):

Calendars allocate time slots, but without any actions.

Todo lists allocate actions, but without time slots.

Email is a todo list anyone can edit, but without actions or time slots allocated

Then people use calendar invites as email, and email for calendering 

In this humorous tweet, which could almost pass for free verse, Evans captures the slightly desperate life of the modern knowledge worker, ensnared in far too many would-be helpful devices for organizing time and work. Easily the most poignant sentence is, “Email is a to-do list anyone can edit.” Making communication easy, everywhere, for everyone, has turned out to be overwhelming.

Why is email producing toil for so many of us? Because it’s so easy. Of course, public figures have complained about their letter-writing burden for centuries. But before email, there was at least some friction interposed between the reader of, say, Mere Christianity and C. S. Lewis—the trouble of writing or typing a letter, affixing a stamp to an envelope, and conveying that envelope to the postal service. Now, you can email. What is “easy everywhere” for one side paradoxically produces more toil and more difficulty on the other side.

Easy everywhere, it turns out, doesn’t just make things we want easier, it also removes the friction from many things we don’t want. My friend Tish Harrison Warren published a beautiful book called Liturgy of the Ordinary, for which I happened to write the foreword, and it was named Book of the Year by Christianity Today in 2018. The week before this lecture was delivered, Tish learned from her publisher that counterfeiters, probably based in China, had produced a nearly indistinguishable copy of Liturgy of the Ordinary and sold $240,000 USD worth of copies as third-party sellers on Amazon. It is extraordinary that someone found it worthwhile to counterfeit this book that was selling to a relatively niche audience. But nearly a quarter of a million dollars in revenue is a big deal to Tish and her publisher. Fraud, too, has become easy everywhere.

In sum—there is a great deal of toil in the easy-everywhere economy. And this is true even before we consider the toil upstream from our devices, at the pit faces where lithium, cobalt, and the other raw materials essential for our devices are extracted from the earth. There’s nothing easy about the jobs at the origin of the easy-everywhere supply chain. Easy everywhere is dependent on toil somewhere.

***

In a world so full of toil, we go in search of respite, and in place of rest, the device paradigm offers us leisure. If rest is the glad celebration of work well done, leisure is more like inactivity, often exhausted inactivity, purchased at the price of someone else’s work.

Rest is intrinsically connected to the fruit of work. We have worked; now we enjoy. We’ve done the work to prepare a meal; now we sit down and enjoy it with family and friends. But leisure is disconnected from our own work. At best it is purchased with the financial fruits of our work, but that is its only link to the work we do.

Leisure is when we’re too tired to cook, so we go out to eat. Someone else is working very hard, perhaps working with great creativity and skill, in the back of the restaurant, but we get to sit in the front of the house and enjoy, perhaps saying aloud, “I’m so glad we didn’t have to cook tonight.” That’s leisure, not rest.

Just as toil is unsatisfying work, so leisure ultimately is unsatisfying rest. Unlike rest, leisure doesn’t actually restore. At best it gives us respite from the constant demands of our lives. But it often leaves us feeling strangely unsatisfied, or in the worst case, with that too-much-binging feeling after one too many episodes have auto-played on Netflix. At the beginning, we were having fun—now we feel a little sick. Leisure does not restore in the same way as rest, because it is not real rest. And whereas real rest can in principle be enjoyed by everyone in a community (at least that is the intent of the Sabbath commandment, which explicitly includes the entire household, the aliens and sojourners in the land, and even the domestic animals), for us to enjoy leisure, someone else has to work.

The paradoxical companion of leisure is boredom, which is “the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest, as in the boredom of a long car trip.”⁴  It’s a word that comes into the English language only in 1853. Before the nineteenth century, we had no way to talk about this quintessentially modern experience—the experience of having so much leisure, so little activity, that you are weary and restless. The cognate words in other languages, such as the French ennui, do not come to mean our sense of listless boredom until the modern era—before the nineteenth century, the meaning of ennui is exactly like its cognate in English, annoyance. Only in the modern era does ennui become “boredom.” That timing is no coincidence.

Significantly, boredom entered the English language through the leisured classes. The first people to talk about being bored were the people who never prepared their own meals. The first uses of boredom refer to the burden of making conversation in the drawing room—someone who is tedious and unskilled at such chatter would be called a “bore.”

And indeed, to have other people doing all the cooking, all the care of the house, all the care of the land, would be the essence of boredom. It would be much like, in fact, being a passenger on a long car trip. There is a reason we are rushing to install DVD players in our minivans and hand tablets to our two year olds in the car seat in back. There’s a lot of boredom in the technological world, a great deal of weariness and restlessness in a world that seems like it should be so exhilarating.

***

There is a real human cost to our world of toil and leisure. Though it is difficult to tease out cause and effect, an ever-growing catalogue of research documents significant impairments in the mental and emotional health of the very people who are supposed to be the greatest beneficiaries of “easy everywhere”—above all, children and adolescents. Among the countless articles one could cite, a recent one is “Sex- and Age-Specific Increases in Suicide Attempts by Self-Poisoning in the United States among Youth and Young Adults from 2000 to 2018,” in the Journal of Pediatrics.⁵

The article is full of alarming graphs, but perhaps the most extraordinary depicts attempted deaths by poisoning among ten to twelve year olds over the opening years of the twenty-first century. In middle-class North America, these “tween” years are often considered a beautiful in-between time, the golden years before children enter the vicissitudes of adolescence. Yet as documented in this article, there has been a hockey-stick like spike in suicide attempts among both boys and girls of this age since 2011, from a rate that remained stable for a decade of roughly 8 attempts per 100,000 population for boys and 20 attempts for girls, to a rapid increase beginning in 2012 that reached roughly 12 attempts for boys and 65 for girls in 2018. Similar distressing spikes, as the psychologist Jean Twenge continues to document through her writing and social media postings, are showing up across all kinds of measurements of mental health.

What is going on? To be sure, complex social phenomena like these are multi-factor, longitudinal affairs for which it is almost impossible to obtain definitive evidence of cause and effect. We cannot prove that the introduction of any single element, even something as evidently culture-shaping as smartphones, is the causal factor. Yet something is clearly wrong. The chaplain of a major Christian college, an institution that enrolls unusually talented and privileged students, told me recently that 33 percent of their entering students report that they have been professionally treated for some mental health difficulty—reflecting a similar hockey-stick increase in just the past few years.

If I were speaking to that student body, I would want to say, “The emotional challenges one-third of you have faced are not because a third of you are bad people, or weak people, or even sick people. You are actually having a normal, healthy reaction to a sick environment.” They are reacting to the diminution of work, the loss of a sense of engagement connected with skill and personal development; watching their own parents, as nominally successful as they may be, engaging in the new economy’s particularly soulless toil; and medicating it all with far too much leisure.

***

There is a better way. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5 NRSV). (The gospels, in which Jesus affirms this text as the greatest commandment, add another clause: “with all your mind,” Mark 12:30; Matt. 22:37.) “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut. 6:6–9 NRSV).

This text, called the Shema Yisrael, is the central instruction of God for the flourishing of God’s people, and indeed for human flourishing generally. Flourishing is to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. This is a vision of a totally engaged life, a life that requires “all” of our capacities, in which all that we are as human persons is meant to be developed and expressed to its fullest.

The great wrong turn in the history of technology was that we wanted lives that were easy. Instead, we should want, and deep down do truly want, lives that are full.The text does not simply say that we should love God with whatever heart, soul, mind, or strength we may happen to have available today. Instead, it commands a development of human capacities. How much heart would you like to have? How much heart could you have? What would it mean to love with all your heart? How much strength could you have, how much acuity of mind, how much depth of soul, if every day you were developing your capacities in such a way that you were available to love God with your embodied self and to love your neighbour as well?

The great wrong turn in the history of technology was that we wanted lives that were easy. Instead, we should want, and deep down do truly want, lives that are full. When human beings really thrive, it’s not because our lives are easy. It’s because they’re full. What can we do, in a world of easy everywhere, to pursue the fullness, or the “allness” if you will, of the greatest commandment?

There are two broad things we can do to recover the fully engaged life, and while the first is more obvious, the second may be more important. I will call the first strategy subtraction, and the second the pursuit of instruments.

To some extent, we can and ought to engage in a strategic subtraction of devices from our lives. We can choose to work once again with tools, even when they are superficially less powerful or convenient than devices. Maybe it’s not so great to have easy everywhere all the time. Indeed, there is a modest but real resurgence of communities in our time, from CrossFit to craft brewing clubs, built around intentionally low-tech activities that require heart, soul, mind, and strength, replacing the passivity of leisure with the delight of hobbies that fully engage us.

Likewise, there are movements toward subtraction in the work world, like the practices recommended by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. Newport provides simple, concrete ways to resist the lure of the easy everywhere of our devices, engaging in work in ways that require and reward our full presence.

There are even efforts to create what you might call “subtraction devices.” A few years ago I got to hear a presentation by Kaiwei Tang, one of the designers of the Light Phone, now being released in its second generation.⁶  Its original tag line was, “Your phone away from phone”—a phone to carry when a smartphone would be distracting or overkill, which turns out to be most of the time. The most recent version adds text messaging, but the first Light Phone’s only capability was actual phone calls.

Tang’s description of the design of the Light Phone was a kind of call-and-response liturgy of subtraction. “We took away the camera,” he said—to light applause from the audience. Then, “We took away the GPS”—applause and a few cheers. “We took away social networking”—widespread cheers. In the famous 2007 keynote address where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he worked up the audience to a frenzy with an accumulation of features: “a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device.”⁷  Tang’s presentation was like running the tape of Jobs’s announcement in reverse, with more and more enthusiasm the more subtractions he announced.

Subtraction is an essential strategy. As I describe in The Tech-Wise Family, our family has adopted a Sabbath rhythm: one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off anything in our home that has an off switch, extending even to the electric lights. Indeed, for a full two weeks a year, I disconnect from almost all devices, setting an autoresponder on my email account with the delicious subject line, “Unfortunately, I will never read your email.”

Subtraction is the pathway to rest, not just leisure. Even the minimal discipline of subtracting devices from our lives for a short amount of time unlocks a remarkable level of flourishing. When we return to the world of devices, we find we are less owned by them.

And yet subtraction, as essential a strategy as it is, is only part of the way forward in our technological world. We also need something additive—a new way of approaching technology and its possibilities. And it turns out that this new way has been present, and possible, all along, even as we drifted further and further into the dull world of easy everywhere.

For there is another kind of technology that is not a device. While it is high technology, in the sense of being complex and beyond the direct comprehension of its end user, it doesn’t disengage the end user. This kind of technology further engages us. It asks something more of us, and it gives us something more to do in the world.

This kind of technology is in fact an extension of the tool, in a way that devices are not. Devices are a substitute for tools, and for tools’ human users, but there are high-tech tools that very much involve and require our highest skill. And the best word for this kind of technology is instruments. My wife, Catherine, for example, is an experimental physicist. She works with very complex technological equipment in her research, but the pieces of equipment she uses are largely not devices in Borgmann’s sense, but scientific instruments. When scientists work with their instruments, they themselves are intensely involved in the work, with all of their skill. Indeed, the best research, especially on the experimental side of science, involves all the faculties named in the greatest commandment—heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Instruments of this kind are highly technological, built on the applied science of the last 150 years. But they are fully engaging. They lead to discovery, understanding, and wonder, as well as many concrete benefits for humanity as a whole. And scientific instruments are just one example of technology that functions in an instrument-like way. Medical instruments allow a physician to examine and intervene in the systems of the body in ways that lead to healing. But they require the wise and skilled engagement of a person, rather than displacing and replacing such a person. And musical instruments, perhaps above all, allow us to exercise and develop our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And what of the computational devices that so fascinated me as a twelve year old, and still bring me and many others great engagement and delight? The truth about computers, whether on our desks or in our pockets, is that they can either become the ultimate device, thoroughly displacing and disengaging us, leaving us mired in toil and leisure and disconnected from ourselves and others—or they can be the ultimate instrument, fully engaging us in creative and worthwhile work and giving us ways to love God and neighbour.

It just depends on which kind of technology we ask and expect them to be, and whether we have enough disciplines of subtraction in our lives to free us from the distracting dream of easy everywhere. That dream, it turns out, was never much of a dream, and its results in our lives are more the stuff of nightmares. But there is still a chance—in both our homes and our workplaces—to repent of asking technology to give us devices, to take up our core human calling of full engagement with the world once more, and to begin to ask for instruments instead.