The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

by Andy Crouch

Technology promises that it can provide wonder. Take a picture with the proper filters and you’ll be awestruck—it will look better than real life! But this promise is deceptive. My iPhone’s wonder generators, from Instagram to Temple Run, turn out to be only distractions from the things that really spark wonder. Thanks to tech-wise parenting, I’ve discovered a world out there that is better than anything technology can offer—as close as our front lawn.

Wonder comes from opening your eyes wider, not bringing the screen closer.

Technology is in its proper place when it starts great conversations. It’s out of its proper place when it prevents us from talking with and listening to one another.

We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I’m nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves.

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices.

Because we need not just to understand our place in the world and the faithful way to proceed—we also need the conviction and character to act. And that is what courage is about. The older word for this is virtue, a word that has dwindled, in our common language, into something like “niceness” or, worse, a kind of goody-goody avoidance of bad behavior. But we can’t afford to give up the word’s older and deeper meaning, which is the habits of character that allow us to act courageously in the face of difficulty. Life is difficult. In fact, if you do life properly—with wisdom—life gets more difficult as you go. (Eventually, it gets difficult for everyone, especially for the ones who try to avoid difficulty.) And even though it’s incredibly hard simply to know what we should do, it’s even harder to actually act on what we know we should do. Because almost all the time, the most faithful, the most loving, and the wisest thing to do is scary, hard, and painful—even, in some ways, dangerous.

the way of wisdom has been clear: stay committed, stay faithful, stay hopeful. To actually commit and keep faith and hope has sometimes asked more of us than we could imagine giving.

How can we become the kind of people who have wisdom and courage? The only way to do it is with other people. We need people who know us and the complexities and difficulties of our lives really well—so well that we can’t hide the complexity and difficulty from them. And we need people who love us—who are unreservedly and unconditionally committed to us, our flourishing, and our growth no matter what we do, and who are so committed to us that they won’t let us stay the way we are. If you don’t have people in your life who know you and love you in that radical way, it is very, very unlikely you will develop either wisdom or courage. You may become smart, you might even become successful, but it is very unlikely you will have a deep enough understanding of yourself and your complex calling to actually become either wise or courageous. We just are too good at deceiving ourselves and think too highly of ourselves. The people who know us best see the truth about who we are, even as they also see more clearly who we could become.

Family, for almost all of us, is the setting where we are known and cared for in the fullest and longest-lasting sense. Family was there at your birth. If you are blessed, family will be there at your death. At the most vulnerable moments of your life, you hope that family will be there.

Fill the center of your life together—the literal center, the heart of your home, the place where you spend the most time together—with the things that reward creativity, relationship, and engagement.

Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God. Work requires wisdom—understanding something about the world, its limitations, and its possibilities. And work requires courage, because even work at its best involves risk and effort, and in a fallen world, work is not often at its best. Work also requires wisdom and courage because we always work together with others, and other human beings are never easy to understand or work with. We are meant to work, but we are also meant to rest.

They were called, you might say, to ceasing and feasting: setting aside daily labor and bringing out the best fruits of that work, stored up in the course of the week and the year, for everyone to enjoy.

If technology has failed to deliver us from toil, it has done a great deal to replace rest with leisure—at least for those who can afford it. If toil is fruitless labor, you could think of leisure as fruitless escape from labor. It’s a kind of rest that doesn’t really restore our souls, doesn’t restore our relationships with others or God. And crucially, it is the kind of rest that doesn’t give others the chance to rest. Leisure is purchased from other people who have to work to provide us our experiences of entertainment and rejuvenation.

But when the art of cooking is replaced by meals warmed up in a microwave—something a five-year-old can do as well as a fifty-five-year-old—then children no longer see their mothers or fathers doing something challenging, fruitful, admirable, and ultimately enjoyable. Instead, the family’s life together is reduced to mere consumption, purchasing the results of others’ work or toil. No wonder children at the “peak leisure-home” stage of the 1960s and 1970s stopped admiring their parents.

We are prisoners of our own insecurity (Will I still have a job if I take two solid weeks of vacation?), pride (How can people get along without me?), fantasies (What if I miss an email telling me I’ve won the lottery?), and cultural capitulation (This is just how the world works now, isn’t it?). For us, the door to a better life is only locked from the inside. We prefer our brightly lit cage of toil and leisure (this cage, after all, comes with unlimited Netflix). In this area, as in all of life, the path toward real freedom—including the freedom to actually choose freedom, rather than imprisoning ourselves in our too-small substitutes for real life—is to embrace disciplines. And that is what the practice of Sabbath, whether on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis, can be. The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all disciplines is that they serve as both diagnosis and cure for what is missing in our lives. They both help us recognize the exact nature of our disease and, at the very same time, begin to heal us from our disease.

Something has gone wrong with our disciplines when we become more obsessed with the mechanics and mechanisms of fulfilling them than with the gift they are meant to give.

Physical activity engages our brains in ways that mere thought or contemplation does not—indeed, there is reason to believe there is no such thing as “mere thought.” All human thought requires embodiment, and without bodies we could not think. We can have a faint idea or hunch in our mind, but it is only when we speak or write it that it becomes clear, not just to others but to ourselves as well. We are made to live and learn in a physical world.

The English word does not appear until the 1850s, and its parent word bore (as a noun—“he is such a bore”) appears only a century earlier. The French word ennui begins to mean what we call “boredom” around the same time.1 Before the eighteenth century, there simply wasn’t a common word for that feeling of frustration and lassitude that overtakes so many of us so often—not just in long lines at the grocery store or the airport but in our own homes as well. Could it be that modern life is boring in a way that premodern life was not?

that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

As screens—movies, TV, video games—present a world far more colorful and energetic than the created world itself, they not only ratchet up our expectations for what is significant and entertaining; they also undermine our ability to enjoy what we could call the abundance of the ordinary.

We are not bored, exactly, just as someone eating potato chips is not hungry, exactly. But overconsumption of distraction is just as unsatisfying, and ultimately sickening, as overconsumption of junk food.

This is why our short-term solution to the witching hour—to bewitch our children with technological distraction—in the long run just makes things worse.

Those hours have been spent avoiding suffering—avoiding the suffering of our banal, boring modern world with its airport security lines and traffic jams and parking lots, but also avoiding the suffering of learning patience, wisdom, and virtue and putting them into practice.

The path to health is not encasing our children in some kind of germ-free sterile environment that they will inevitably try to flee; rather, it is having healthy immune systems that equip us to resist and reject things that do not lead to health. Everything up to this point in the book has been about creating that kind of healthy immune system for everyone in our homes—becoming the kind of people who see technology’s shallow pleasures for what they are and set their sights on pursuing something better and deeper, together.

so worship is the most important thing a family can do. It is the most important thing to teach our children and the most important thing to rehearse throughout our lives.

You may or may not be able to learn to sing on pitch, but you can learn to sing with heart, mind, soul, and strength. The best time to begin to learn is in childhood, when our brains are primed for learning, our neuromuscular system is most able to be trained to connect mind with strength, and we are fearlessly willing to try something new.

Somehow, in that small service, where some members of the congregation are too old to sing with full voice, our kids can grasp more easily that they matter to the life of the church—that worship won’t happen unless all the generations show up with their heart, mind, soul, and strength.

We show up in person for the big events of life. We learn how to be human by being fully present at our moments of greatest vulnerability.

When wedding invitations have arrived over the years, or we have learned of someone’s death and the family’s desire to have us there for their funeral, we haven’t had to decide whether to go. The question is simply how. Though there have been a few times when it was, to our great regret, impossible for us to travel, this already-made decision has served us well over and over and given us some of the most memorable and transformative experiences of our lives. One of the great gifts of technology is the simulation of presence at a distance. Starting with the telephone (which literally means “distant speech”), and continuing in recent years with Skype and FaceTime, we have been able to communicate, with higher and higher fidelity, with people far away.

Any sort of mediated presence is the palest shadow of what it is like to be with another person in person—that is, present in the fullness of what our bodies make possible. This is why Catherine and I decided that being present, in person, at the moments in human life that are truly unique and unrepeatable was worth any sacrifice of time or money. Only by showing up in person can we feel and grasp the full weight, joy, and vulnerability of the most important experiences in human life.

So the last, best commitment we can make in our mediated world is to show up, especially for the moments when we are most deeply human—which

Showing up in person at a wedding, even just as a guest, is a way of honoring that bodily commitment, just as showing up in person at a funeral is a way of honoring the fullness of the one we loved. And these public moments are so significant because they correspond to even more profoundly intimate bodily realities. Though these invitations are rarer, for good reasons, there is nothing so holy as to be present for a birth—or for a death.

And indeed, in all kinds of ways technology has given many of us, for long seasons of life, something close to easy-everywhere health—antibiotics that almost magically halt the invasion of bacteria, anesthesia that makes possible procedures that would have been inconceivable before, even various ways to stave off the most obvious forms and signs of aging.

The actual result of a technological pursuit of everlasting life will be, for many who attempt it, a life that is ultimately not worth living: ending one’s days not at home in the care of family but in the purposely sterile, impersonal, technology-stuffed environment of a hospital, at incredible expense, enduring ever more invasive “heroic” measures until we finally expire.

Something has gone wrong when atheists and secular people are more able to face the inevitable reality of death than the people who should believe that death has been conquered and does not have to be feared.

We will put love into practice in the most profound possible way, by being present with one another in person at the greatest and most difficult moments of life.