Thoughts on Unplugging, Touching Grass, and a Book Recommendation

 I’ve been reading The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen. Well-written, disturbing, and something I know social scientists are beginning to think and warn about, but I’m afraid not enough of us are concerned enough about this topic.  We’re all feeling it, to some extent, I think – this anxiety, loneliness, and loss of real community and connection with real, live, embodied people as our culture becomes more and more reliant on mediated communication and technology that is making our world more virtual and less “in real life” and “in person” than we’ve ever been.

For all the conveniences and good that we truly do see in our smart phones and other technologies, I fear we are losing some things that should not be lost. I think the problem lies in the fact that far too often we move from using these technologies as a helpful tool to using them as a way of life. There is the addictive quality of the online life that I’m finding disturbing. The irony that I’m hashing out these thoughts and sharing them on my social media platforms is not lost on me.

The problem I’m seeing is that these mediated ways of staying in touch just don’t deliver what we hoped they would, but our addiction to them and our alienation from each other continues to grow. Communicating via Zoom or screen or text just isn’t the same and doesn’t fill us with joy the same as being there in the flesh over a cup of coffee or around a meeting table or in a classroom or sitting in the church pew in person. We are losing the ability to read other people’s emotions. The chapter in the book on that topic actually scared me. The author talks about apps that are being developed that use AI to determine how someone you’re interacting with is feeling based on what the AI determines from all the aggregated data it mines about them, etc. She also makes a compelling argument tying some of the trend we are seeing in an uptick in aggressive, even deadly, road rage incidents, to a generalized loss of ability to be patient combined with a loss of empathy in our culture. It is complicated, but think about it. We spend so much time in our personalized worlds, staring at our various screens, communicating in a mediated way through our screens, with our apps and whatnots carefully mining our data and feeding us what the AI determines we want based on our scrolling and too many other data points to even go into, and we demand faster and faster responses and have less and less patience with slow-loading webpages, and then when we venture out into the real world, we want everything there to react the same way. We become the center of our carefully mediated universes and we have little patience for anyone who may inadvertently get in the way of our instant gratification and what we think we deserve. Somehow, we are becoming more irritable and less able to assume the best of others. Not to mention plain old distracted driving. Too many of us can’t exercise the self-control to wait to look at our phones until we are no longer driving. We can’t be alone with our thoughts even for the few minutes we may be stuck at a traffic light.

The chapter on how we wait spoke to me as well. We aren’t able to sit quietly and just think anymore.  Any empty space must be filled with distractions or we feel we are wasting time. I recently complained about people who sit in a waiting room and rudely listen to loud videos on their cell phones. We’re so self-focused we don’t even care that there are people around us who may not want to hear our loud conversation or video. Again, I think we’re becoming conditioned to live in a little personalized bubble that caters to our every desire that our vision is becoming more and more tunneled inward. How often do we look up and away from our screens and truly interact with strangers in these situations anymore? Are we losing the ability to talk to real people we encounter in daily life? How often have you tried to talk to someone and they have one earbud in, even while they sort of talk to you? How can you truly give attention to someone if you’re only half listening? It’s rude, yet I see it all the time. So much of our creativity comes when we are a little bit bored and allow our minds to wander and just sit with our thoughts. But more and more, we spend less and less time doing that. We almost fear boredom these days.

There is so much to think about after reading this book and I have truly not done justice in my rambling here.  I know this.  I’m not sure this post even makes much sense, but what I hope anyone who has followed my rambling to this point takes away is – read this book.  PLEASE.  I confess that as I was reading I felt discouraged because the thought came to me, those who really need to read this, the people who are in danger of being that impatient road rager, for example, will never read this book or even think about what our distracted, virtual addictions are doing to us. Because people don’t read anymore. It’s too long, takes up too much energy, doesn’t feed the dopamine hit that the next round of the game on the phone or stupid video or scroll through the social media feed delivers. But we really, truly need to be thinking much harder about what this all is doing to us as human beings. We really, truly need to think about how much we need real, face-to-face friendships and fellowship.

A few small things I’m thinking about changing in response to reading this book are, for one thing, I’ve decided the leave my earphones at home when I go out for a walk. I did that today and it was a vastly different experience, one I quite enjoyed. Listening to the birds, hearing the oh-so-satisfying crunch of the acorns as I felt them under my shoes, even hearing my shoes on the pavement as I walked and enjoyed the peace of the quiet around me was profoundly satisfying in a way my walks haven’t been when I’ve taken them plugged up with my podcasts.  I enjoy those podcasts, but I’m changing up how I listen to them. I need more quiet and undistracted time built into my day. I’m also setting aside time to work again on memorizing scripture.  Taking the time to burrow down and really focus on it. And I’m also making a point to handwrite in my journal – spending the time it takes to get into the flow of writing. That was another insight the author shared – how writing with our hands is a different kind of processing than typing, and it’s another thing we’re losing as a culture  – and she’s right.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post in this space, and this one has ended up being longer than I intended. It’s a little rambly, but it’s all things I wanted to say. I’m a bit rusty, though, and I think my thoughts probably aren’t as fleshed out and clear as I would like them to be. Maybe I need to start blogging again and sharpen up those thinking skills.

Before I go, though this post is already too impossibly long, I wanted to share something that came to mind while reading this book. There is a song that has become popular in the marching band world, and rightly so because it’s a beautiful piece of music. I was reminded of it while reading because the lyrics deal with our discomfort and yet also our eerie draw to the lure of the ubiquitous nature of our virtual technology and datamining social media. The song is “The Hymn of Acxiom” by Vienna Teng. 

To get the full picture I want to share, listen to this adaptation first, which is the marching band version of just the music.

 

Now, read the lyrics by Vienna Teng:

somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.

somebody hears you. you know that inside.

someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to

(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.

here you’re known.

 

leave your life open. you don’t have. you don’t have to.

leave your life open. you don’t have to hide.

someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these

(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.

keep them all.

 

let our formulas find your soul.

we’ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),

marshal feed and force (our machines will)

to design you a perfect love—

or (better still) a perfect lust.

o how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.

 

now we possess you. you’ll own that. you’ll own that.

now we possess you. you’ll own that in time.

now we will build you an endlessly upward world,

(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.

 

is that wrong?

isn’t this what you want?

amen

 

Now listen and watch this video of it being sung:

I think this song brilliantly captures how conflicted I feel about smart technology and social media and how dependent we are on it now. There is the beauty of how useful our media is as a tool for keeping in touch with people, sharing and finding information quickly, yet there are also quite disturbing costs we are only beginning to scratch the surface of coming to terms with, the disturbing ways it is actually changing us and our culture. I hope you can see a bit of the horror I’m beginning to feel with how commodified we, ourselves are becoming. You know the saying – nothing is free. If what they’re offering is free, if there is no “product,” YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. Every smart device we use, every webpage we visit, every social media post we make, every game we play, every video we watch, we are giving them more of ourselves to market and buy. We’ve opened a kind of Pandora’s box, and I don’t think we can go back, but I do hope we can be much, much more mindful and careful and aware of how much it could control us and become a dangerous idol to us. Let’s start thinking about using what good we can as a tool, but dropping it as a way of life. Look up, look out, engage with other embodied human beings face-to-face, with phones put away. Spend time touching grass and taking in all the sensory experiences of touch, sight, smell – see the beauty through your eyes apart from the mediation of a screen. Enjoy something beautiful for the sake of the beautiful, not for the sake of the social media post you could make. Try enjoying a fun experience without posting about it, at least some of the time, let your memory of an event be just that, a beautiful memory without a social media post to go with it.

Think about it.  And go read Christine Rosen’s book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. My thoughts about it may have rambled too much in this post, hers do not. She brings clarity and a needed warning I hope more people will hear.

Book Recommendation: The Christian in Complete Armour

 I am so thankful for pastors who read and recommend good books. Our pastor in Virginia used to recommend a book almost every Sunday night, and if Pastor Jesse recommended it, I didn't even need to question it, I was almost sure to like it or want to read it. I read and really enjoyed a lot of books I never would have encountered had I not known his recommendations for them. 

Well, our pastor here in Texas also has a habit of reading and recommending good books.  Again, if Pastor Josh recommends a book, I am almost always sure I want to read it. This summer he has recommended we read The Christian in Complete Armour, Volume 1 by William Gurnall for a church book club at the end of this month.

I don’t know why I do always do this, but whenever I think about reading a Puritan author, my first thought is that it will be difficult, dense reading, so that’s what I was afraid of when I took up this book to start it. But, just like with The Valley of Vision prayers, I was pleasantly surprised that reading this Puritan felt extremely current and relevant. The Puritans are NOT dry and dusty. They are NOT the dour, legalistic, unlikable, uncharitable people you were mistakenly led to believe they were in your high school history and English classes. They were real, joyful, lively Christians who wrote about the real Christian life, and this book was so extremely timely as I read it (and just finished it today). How encouraging it is to read from believers who lived a long time ago, but who experienced the same Christian life and loved, worshiped, and followed the same Jesus that we do today. Sure we have technologies and lifestyles and things that on the surface seem very different from life back in the 1600’s, but get beyond those surface differences, and people are just people. We have the same heart issues and we aren’t really all that different. Same goes for the people in the Bible. They are real people, not really all that different from us. And we all need the same Savior, who never changes, who loves His people and works with us and in us the same as He does with all of His people.

I’m thinking I am going to take the discussion questions and type out some of my reactions, for the book club, but it’s a little bit daunting, because I think I underlined something or marked up almost every single page of the book. Good thing I finished with some time to spare.  Haha.

All that to say two things:

1.  Read this book.  You will be glad you did. It is so encouraging. The author is practical and compassionately pastoral as he takes the reader through his logical and carefully made arguments for being a watchful, armor-clad Christian who stands firm in the face of temptations and trials. I walk away from it so encouraged that I have a Savior who intercedes for me and who will never let go of me.

2.  If you have a pastor who reads and recommends good books – listen to him and be thankful! If he’s recommending good books, it’s because he cares for your soul and wants to see you grow in the grace and knowledge of your Savior.

A Short Review of a Netflix Disappointment

 My daughter and I both recently finished reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and we both loved it.  She was reading it for school and kept saying I just had to read it, so I did, and we have had some wonderful discussions about it along the way. It is a great book, very beautifully written, heart-wrenching story, and it left us both feeling a bit melancholy at the end. The Pulitzer Prize it won is well-deserved. So, loving it as we did, we thought we'd try watching the miniseries Netflix recently released.

My advice if you loved the book: DO NOT BOTHER with the Netflix travesty. 

My advice if you haven't read the book yet: Read the book, skip the Netflix mess. 

It's too bad, really, because the casting for the miniseries was excellent, but the screenwriting for the adaptation was terrible, in my opinion. I understand that movie adaptations are difficult and they will necessarily have to leave some things out. But this was just quite bad. The book does a wonderful job going back and forth between flashbacks and the present day of the story to let the reader understand the characters and learn important plot reveals slowly and at the appropriate time to make for a beautiful, heartbreaking story. The miniseries changes important plot points and reveals things much too early that you didn't read until well into the book, such that in the miniseries they just don't make any sense without the background build up, and if you hadn't read the book, I'm not sure you'd even know what was going on or why it was all that significant. It just ends up being a confusing mess, and you don't really feel much of anything for the characters, whereas, in the book, you grow to love and understand them. Werner's character is especially flat in the miniseries, and that is just inexcusable. His character growth arc is one of THE major significant points of the book, and by episode 3, I am not seeing ANYTHING about him yet that hints that the show will be getting any better. Granted, we've only made it to episode 3, but I hate it enough that I just don't care. I am done with it. If it hasn't been able to win me over by this point, well, life is just too short to waste any more time on it, in my opinion.

Read the book. It is very much worth the time spent. The miniseries is really just NOT. And that is a shame. 

Meditating on The Word - Navigating Our New Life Season

 While reading Genesis 1-2 yesterday morning, I got to thinking about Genesis 2:24, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” It had never occurred to me before that this is before the fall, before sin entered the world. Which is significant. This means that this concept of a man leaving his father and mother and joining his wife is inherently good, good by design, which also means, if we think this through, that the so-called “empty nest” is a good and proper and expected thing, good and designed to be the way families work before the fall. It means that this is something that is in how our Creator has designed us and our relationships with each other. The thing is, though, that the fall and our now sin nature taints everything. We tend to take something beautiful and good and right and forget how to live in it as good and beautiful and right.

My husband and I are entering the phase of life where we are about to be empty-nesters, with one son having gotten married last May, one son who, having become recently engaged and will, Lord willing, most likely be married before the end of this year, and our youngest daughter about to graduate high school and, again, Lord willing, planning to leave for college in the Fall.  As I meditate on this biblical thought here at the beginning of a new year and at the cusp of our new season of life, I want to think and behave righteously.  Also, as I meditate on this, I find myself thinking about it from a different angle than I did as a newly wed just starting out and learning how to start our new family together. Now I’m thinking about it, not from the standpoint of the one leaving, but of the one being left.

How often do we see the “empty nest” concept as a negative thing, as something to mourn and complain about, among our friends and on our social media and in our entertainment?

 In our fallenness, we are prone to a self-centered, selfish way of viewing life, and we often don’t even realize it. I know for a fact, as I sit here at the beginning of this season of life, that I did not consider my parents and in-laws enough in how they might be experiencing our leaving and cleaving.  I think, through the years, we have had a pretty good relationship with our respective parents, and I am very grateful for that. But there can sometimes be a tendency as we spread our wings to see our parents more as adversaries as we break free rather than as allies to help us fly. It can be especially hard for the in-law relationship if we, as young people, forget that these people loved and raised our spouse, have sought the best interests of our spouse, loved them as a tiny baby and loved them as they grew to adulthood, and love them still now that they are leaving the nest to go start their own nest.  

On the other hand, we parents can have just as much of a tendency to be self-centered and selfish, because we, too, are sinners. Again, how many times have you known people in real life and in our movies and TV shows who cling too hard to their grown children or who meddle too much or make demands/expectations or offer too much unsolicited/unwelcome comments or who just make it difficult for adult children to leave their parents and cleave to their spouses? There is a reason the meddling, difficult in-law joke is a common trope.

What I’m getting at is that as we navigate different life seasons, we would do well to remember that this notion of children growing up and leaving father and mother to form their own home and family is not an evil, not a thing to mourn, but to embrace, celebrate, and handle wisely. It is good. But as we remember this, we also need to remember that in our sinfulness, we can ruin that good thing if we do not have the right attitude about it and forget that all good things are meant to glorify our God and help us to enjoy Him in this life.

While pondering these things, I also read Proverbs 1 yesterday, where I came across verse 8-9, “Hear, my son, your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching; indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head and ornaments about your neck.” So, I got to thinking about this in light of the Genesis 2:24 verse, that leaving and cleaving doesn’t mean forgetting all that came before. Our parents loved us, taught us, raised us, and, hopefully, if done well, we still want them to be part of our lives. They don’t stop loving us and wanting what’s best for us when we grow up and leave the nest. The training and instruction they instilled in us during our growing up doesn’t lose its importance when we leave their home. But the relationship does change. Hopefully, if we are both wanting to seek God and honor Him, we can move from having the authority relationship of parent to child to having more of a friendship of parent to adult child. 

So, as I follow the encouragement my pastor gave us on Sunday to meditate on God’s Word, and as I enter this season of parent to adult children, having once been that young adult child and now the parent of young adult children, here are a few thoughts I would like to consider, for the young just starting out and for me, the older person wanting to honor the Lord and love my sons and daughter well (and the new daughters who love my sons and the, hopefully one day, young man, who will love my daughter) as they learn to spread their wings.

As a young person, try really hard not to start out viewing your parents and in-laws as adversaries who you need to immediately set up boundaries against.  Try seeing them as allies who love your spouse and want very much to love you. We parents will make mistakes. We won’t want to, but we will. Please be patient with us as we seek to be patient with you. Please choose to assume the very best motives you can, rather than assuming bad motives. How you choose to see your parents and in-laws will very much color how you are able to hear, see, interact, and love them. This is something I wish I had understood better when I was young.

As a parent, God helping me and looking to Jesus, my Savior, and trusting the Holy Spirit as He conforms me to the image of Christ, I intend to choose to treat my children and their spouses as allies, not adversaries, and to try very hard not to give them reason to feel we are adversaries rather than allies. Again, how we assume motives goes a long way to how we then interact with each other. I must always put the best construction on comments and actions that I possibly can, assume the best and choose never to hold a grudge. Our family is not shrinking because our kids are flying from the nest, it is expanding. We get to love new people who, though different, are very, very special and worth knowing well. I intend to see the empty nest, not as a time to grieve what was when the kids were little and life was very busy with all their activities, but as a new season in which to find new interests and new traditions and new places and people in which to serve God’s Kingdom.  I intend to encourage my kids in positive ways, and to try very hard not to put undue expectations or burdens on them. Of course I hope in the years to come that they will want to spend time with us, so I am praying often that I will invest in being the kind of person they will want to spend time with. I don’t want to hinder that for them or make it difficult to love us, and I also very much want them to be free to start their lives together, with our blessing, not our complaining.

May we seek to honor God in how we love each other. May we be loving, forgiving, full of grace and understanding as we navigate new seasons of life together, because we have been forgiven so much by our loving Savior, Jesus Christ.

I am entering this new year of 2024 very grateful for the people God has graciously brought into our lives through the years. May we love them all well.