Our Whole Lives Are Owed to Tech

The modern world is not only a curse

It’s the easiest thing in the world these days to complain, from behind our screens, about our screens. Writers often become fashionable lamenters in this regard rather than insightfully engaged with reality as it comes to us, and I am not immune to that trap.

I write regularly here about the suffering so common to modern life and would be absolutely remiss to leave out the stark, often negative effects of too much technology. I would be unwise to not note that going to bed too late because of screen addiction, never seeing the sun, and ignoring our friends is destructive, especially among the very young who don’t know a life before the online world became so dominant.

I would be silly not to encourage people to dive in passionately and with full agency into the real world, putting their phones away for hours or perhaps sometimes days on end to become fully present to the world and people around them, and have this as an opportunity to regain a sense of presence, of time, and of the truly central self that is often fragmented by constant distraction.

These things are all true, and I will continue to unpack the difficulties inherent in modern life.

But I don’t want to do any of this from a smug place of ingratitude. Instead, from inside of modern life myself, and an incredible recipient of its many, uncountable goods, I want to help us integrate these technological realities in such a way that they serve us rather than control us.

We must remain human. We must fight to remain human.

But in the meantime, we can also acknowledge the stark truth: that our whole lives are quite literally owed to technology.

Modern technology quietly undergirds nearly everything we love

There are the obvious, foundational realities:

Modern farming from modern equipment (even your favorite hobby farm uses tools and tractors and fertilizers)
Modern transportation (we rarely consider what it means to be able to zoom around in cars like we do)
Modern communications (most of us have now built entire networks of relationships via phone and the internet)
Modern medicine (most of us, no matter how resistant we may be to a lot of current medical excesses, were, in fact, made well by antibiotics)

From my perspective, it becomes quickly laughable for me to only ever critique modern life and its unbelievable advances.

I have learned so much from an online connected world. I have been able to live in multiple countries with relative ease due to the reality of the internet and planes, and, in the last decade, highly dependable, constantly-adjusting GPS. I have grown in business, in spirituality, in skills because of what’s available online. I regularly record music via the utter magic of digitally recorded sound (have we even considered the miracle!) and type my thoughts rapidly via a pleasantly clicking keyboard.

My entire life is built on the reality of technology. And yes—to a large degree, we could have theoretically lived without it, and it’s enjoyable to surmise about life without all of this.

But life isn’t like that. Life is what it is, going back to the dawn of time. In every epoch, all of human life is bent around the technology available to us, acting as a kind of substrate to everything else. It happens in and through technology, and cannot be unraveled from it.

All of life is also a continual algorithm, where way leads to way leads to way leads to way. Technology has always been a part of our lives, and if you pull the string, you can easily see that whatever you think of it now, it cannot ever be dismissed as irrelevant, and certainly not as only a cursse.

Gratitude, wonder, and remaining human in a technological age

My entire life—almost every person I know, nearly every scrap of food I eat, every single thing I value—is in some way undergirded by the reality of technological advancement I rarely consider.

And yours is too.

In some ways, mine may be more dramatic.

But we all have to acknowledge, as honest human beings, that our whole lives, in a very real way, are owed to the realities of tech.

While I hope we can all use our freedom well to integrate these things according to virtue and order, gratitude, wonder, and joyful delight is constantly due at the remarkable age we live in.