There’s been a fair amount of handwringing and alarm-sounding in recent years—and rightly so—about technology and its baleful influences on human life and experience. Books, articles, studies, documentaries—all about things like smart phones and social media and how they’re making us dumb and anti-social. And even suicidal. I recently watched the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” and it scared me to death. “Dilemma” is putting it mildly. Naturally I intend to make my teenage children watch it too, because it’s only right that I make them scared to death along with me. Or try, anyway. It’s what parents of teenagers do. It’s our calling.
In any case, I’ve been thinking about tech lately in the context of my efforts to make some personal changes of my own. Here’s the line of thinking that’s emerged…
It helps me (and yeah, it scares me) to think about the number of times during the day when I “touch” my tech. Reach for my phone, check for messages and updates and news and notifications, walk upstairs and check the same things on my laptop, etc. (TV too, although it’s not quite the same.) It helps me to think about these as so many “tech touches” in the course of a day. Of course, there’s the literal touch of handling this or that device, but it’s more than that: there’s also the mental and emotional connection that’s created. Tech touches.
And the thing about touches is that they create friction, and friction (I seem to recall from high school physics) slows things down. And in this case, I have in mind a slowing down that’s not a good thing, unlike the slowing down of patience that I wrote about a few days ago, and that I’m trying to cultivate. In this case I’m thinking about a slowing down that’s like the harsh grinding of gears in what’s otherwise supposed to be a well-oiled and smoothly running machine.
And that’s true of all those frequent tech touches. I’ve realized they have the effect of sapping me of strength, because they take energy, and reducing the freedom and smoothness with which I ought to go about my day. Conversely, and happily, I’ve noticed lately as I’ve made an effort to reduce those unnecessary touches (and that’s just it: they’re unnecessary) that my efficiency throughout the day has shot up. I’m freeing up time, and getting more done with the time I have. So yay for that.
But then to keep going, it needs to be said that the goal isn’t just efficiency and time-saving for their own sakes. My aim isn’t to become one of those Industrial Revolution-era factory efficiency experts, standing there with a clipboard and a stopwatch, dressed in a white lab coat, observing the factory workers and trying to devise different movements and devices for them that will save 1.5 seconds on the hour in the manufacturing of widgets. (Indeed, related to the topic of patience a few days ago, it’s actually been liberating to realize that routine and efficiency aren’t everything, and that I should expect a certain messiness about the day, and then I’m not thrown and frustrated when I find that routines are interrupted and things take time and I need to stop and think through what tasks and movements come next because there’s no flow chart in place that tells me.)
No, the real goal in reducing touches and friction in some areas is to free ourselves up for the contact and good friction of meaningful human relationships. The goal, in short, is love. If I can become the kind of man who doesn’t go back upstairs in the evening to my laptop to see what email might be waiting for me (especially work-related email) so that I get sucked into stuff that can wait till tomorrow, then I can more easily become the kind of father who takes his kids out for ice cream instead, or the kind of friend who meets someone for coffee and catching up. That’s the goal. Reduce the contact that grinds away and wears down, and replace it with the contact that reaches out and spends time and nurtures relationships. (Yes, I realize that this better contact can involve the use of…tech! Maybe I send an email that asks for a lunch date. But it’s an entirely different kind of touch, altogether.)
An analogy: several years ago a professional organization I belong to radically overhauled the way we go about our quarterly regional meetings. They used to be painful, interminable affairs, in which we’d take nearly the whole day on organization business and end up having accomplished far less than we should have. I dreaded those meetings. And I wasn’t the only one. So what was the solution? Counterintuitively, we made the change of actually reducing the time we spend on organization business, devoting the mornings to teaching and hangout time instead, and then streamlining the way we go about our business in the afternoon. The result? We’ve ended up accomplishing just as much (if not more) in those few hours in the afternoon than we used to in a whole day, plus time has been freed up for relationships and encouragement. Marvelous.
So I’m hoping I can keep up this habit of reducing my daily tech touches. When I set the phone down and look up and look around—lo and behold, I see other PEOPLE. Imagine that. And I’ve even got time to reach out to them. I want to get back to that place where tech is a tool off to the side that serves me when I reach for it, and not a tyrant that’s taken over whether I like it or not. Sadly, it does feel like the latter is where I’ve ended up, along with the rest of the world.
And yes, I’m acutely aware of the irony of yet another blog post written on my laptop and read by others on their phones in which I wring my hands over tech. It is what it is. And now I’m done, and I’ll close my laptop and let go and walk away and hug my daughter.
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