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I do know this: if we don’t learn to put technology, in all its forms, in its proper place, we will miss out on many of the best parts of life in a family.
Technology is in its proper place when it helps us bond with the real people we have been given to love. It’s out of its proper place when we end up bonding with people at a distance, like celebrities, whom we will never meet. 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. Technology is in its proper place when it helps us take care of the fragile bodies we inhabit. It’s out of its proper place when it promises to help us escape the limits and vulnerabilities of those bodies
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Older kids know the sick-to-the-stomach feeling of having binged on a video game for days on end (just as their parents know that queasy too-much-Netflix feeling). They’ve watched as their most media-savvy peers, the ones with a thousand followers from their high school or a million followers from all over the world, first expose themselves, then overexpose themselves, and go from reveling in the attention to breaking under the weight of others’ expectations and derision.
nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to make or want others to make.2 Nudges don’t generally make us do anything, but they make certain choices easier and more likely.
Every notification that comes in on your smartphone is a nudge—not a command or demand, but something that makes it easier to stop whatever you’re currently doing and divert your attention to your screen.
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.
But nudges will never, on their own, build the wisdom and courage we need—partly because we often can’t control our environment, no matter how much we’d like to. We need to change something inside of us as well: to develop the strength to make good choices even when everything around us is nudging, or pushing, us in the wrong direction. And for that we need disciplines.
the person who has not experienced or cannot bear silence does not understand what they hear and has little to offer when they speak.
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. This is especially true with technology. Technology comes with a powerful set of nudges—the default settings of our “easy-everywhere” culture. Because technology is devoted primarily to making our lives easier, it discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself.
because the best choice often requires strength and courage, we’ll build in periods of intense effort or demanding withdrawal that help us make the right choice when it’s not easy at all.
The first and deepest is to choose character—to make the mission of our family, for children and adults alike, the cultivation of wisdom and courage.
The second is to shape space—to make choices about the place where we live that put the development of character and creativity at the heart of our home. And the third is to structure time—to build rhythms into our lives, on a daily, weekly, and annual basis, that make it possible for us to get to know one another, God, and our world in deeper and deeper ways.
Even though tools made human work easier, they weren’t necessarily easy to use. Ask anyone who’s tried to use a hammer skillfully, let alone a chain saw. Learning to use a tool requires patience and practice.
In its early days, the internet was more like a tool. People would “go online.” It was someplace you had to “go.” And it was finicky—slow and complicated. Now it just works. And it’s not somewhere you go. It’s like air. It’s everywhere.
Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of God. But while in one sense a person is simply what we are as human beings, we are also able to become—to grow in capacities that are only potentially present within us at first.
Family helps form us into persons who have acquired wisdom and courage. Wisdom is not just knowledge—mastering information about particular aspects of the world. Wisdom is understanding. It’s the kind of understanding, specifically, that guides action. It’s knowing, in a tremendously complex world, what the right thing to do is—what will be most honoring of our Creator and our fellow creatures.
(“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion” [Prov. 18:2]—which also sounds a lot like social media.)
amazing thing happens in families at their best. Our foolishness is seen and forgiven, and it is also seen and loved.
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.
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.
Family, for almost all of us, is the setting where we are known and cared for in the fullest and longest-lasting sense.
The first family for everyone who wants wisdom and courage in the way of Jesus is the church—the community of disciples who are looking to Jesus to reshape their understanding and their character. And the church is, and can be, family for everyone in a way that biological families cannot. No matter whether your parents are still living—or whether they were ever loving—no matter whether you have a spouse or children or siblings or cousins, you have a family in the church.
Technology is the latest, and in many ways most astonishingly good, example of the fruit our image bearing was meant to produce. But technology is only very good if it can help us become the persons we were meant to be.
In countless ways our lives are easier than our grandparents’. But in what really matters—for example, wisdom and courage—it seems very hard to argue that our lives are overall better. Perhaps, just perhaps, they are no worse. But this is exactly what we would expect if the things that really matter in becoming a person have nothing to do with how easy our life is—and if they have a great deal to do with how we handle the difficulty that comes our way.
Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.
In the most intimate setting of the household, where the deepest human work of our lives is meant to take place, technology distracts and displaces us far too often, undermining the real work of becoming persons of wisdom and courage.
We will have to teach our children, from early on, that we are not here as parents to make their lives easier but to make them better.
(Part of true rest is not having work accumulate relentlessly while you are resting!)
make no mistake: the videos we put on for our kids—or the video games we pull up on our phones in our own moments of boredom—are designed, unconsciously or consciously, to produce a bewitching effect. And that effect is achieved by filling a screen with a level of vividness and velocity that does not exist in the real world—or only very rarely. Because it is rare, we instinctively respond to it, and indeed take delight in it.
They do little to develop our abilities to wait, pay attention, contemplate, and explore—all needed to discover the abundance of the ordinary.
Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign—as important in its own way as physical pain. It’s a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted.
We now have the technology to be perpetually distracted from boredom, and thus we never realize how bored we really are.
I am horrified at the hours I have spent, often in the face of demanding creative work, scrolling aimlessly through social media and news updates, clicking briefly on countless vaguely titillating updates about people I barely know and situations I have no control over, feeling dim, thin versions of interest, attraction, dissatisfaction, and dislike. Those hours have been spent avoiding suffering—avoiding
The problem isn’t with our devices themselves—it’s with the way we use them. We simply have to turn off the easy fixes and make media something we use on purpose and rarely rather than aimlessly and frequently. So when we do sit down in front of a TV screen, it will be for a specific purpose and with a specific hope, not just of entertainment or distraction but of wonder and exploration.
We will never, ever figure out how to help our children—and ourselves—survive that maddening half hour before dinner if we always settle for the screen.
The good news is that the more often we resist the easy solution, the easier the solution will be to find—because our children (and we ourselves) will start to develop capacities to explore and discover that will make them less prone to be bored in the first place.
when we do put on a video or otherwise fire up a screen for a purpose, we’ll follow another principle: never entertain your children with anything you find unsatisfying, just like you shouldn’t feed your children anything you don’t enjoy eating yourself. Feed them with food that is both tasty and nutritious—and entertain them with movies, books, and stories that are both tasty and nutritious too.
that’s exactly what character is made of—daily, slow, sometimes-painstaking steps toward handling everyday challenges with courage and grace.
by the most widely cited estimate, for 30 percent of all internet traffic—pornography provides and portrays a world where sex is easy.
All addictions feed on, and are strengthened by, emptiness. When our lives are empty of relationships, porn’s relationship-free vision of sex rushes in to fill the void. When our lives are empty of meaning, porn dangles before us a sense of purpose and possibility. When our lives have few deep satisfactions, porn at least promises pleasure and release. Nearly half of teenagers who use porn, according to Barna’s research, say they do so out of boredom—higher than for any other age group (see the chart “Reasons Teens Search for Porn”).
So the best defense against porn, for every member of our family, is a full life—the kind of life that technology cannot provide on its own. This is why the most important things we will do to prevent porn from taking over our own lives and our children’s lives have nothing to do with sex. A home where wisdom and courage come first; where our central spaces are full of satisfying, demanding opportunities for creativity; where we have regular breaks from technology and opportunities for deep rest and refreshment (where devices “sleep” somewhere other than our bedrooms and where both adults and
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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.
All sin begins with separation—hiding from our fellow human beings and our Creator, even if, at first, we simply hide in the “privacy” of our own thoughts, fears, and fantasies. Anything that short-circuits our separation, that reinforces our connection to one another and our need for one another, also cuts off the energy supply for cherishing and cultivating patterns of sin.
