5. Learning and Working

WE AIM FOR “NO SCREENS BEFORE DOUBLE DIGITS” AT SCHOOL AND AT HOME

The best and richest experiences of learning, it turns out, are embodied ones. Physically taking notes with a pen or pencil on paper –the act of forming physical letters by hand, with the twists and turns of the letter forms and the accumulating fatigue and need for rest- turns out to aid memorization and learning, even if we never consult the notes again.

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.

 

Dangerously Easy

The last thing you need when you are learning, at any age but especially in childhood, is to have things made too easy. Difficulty and resistance, as long as they are age appropriate and not too discouraging, are actually what press our brains and bodies to adapt and learn. We are designed to thrive on complex, embodied tasks that require the engagement of many senses at once.

The biggest problem with most screen-based activities is that they ask too little of us and make the world too simple. When our children could be making candy, they are playing Candy Crush.

 

Difficult and Rewarding

We most often give our children screens not to make their lives easier but to make our lives easier.

The truth is that our children, just like us, will spend far too much of their lives tethered to glowing rectangles. We owe them, at the very minimum, early years of real, embodied, difficult, rewarding learning, the kind that screens cannot provide. And that is why a family that cares about developing wisdom and courage will exert every effort to avoid the thin simplicity of screens in the first years of life.

What applies to children can apply to us adults as well. Our screen based work will be far more productive if we balance it with plunges back into the complex, three-dimensional physical world that reawakens both our brains and our minds, both our bodies and our souls.

 

6. The Good News about Boredom

WE USE SCREENS FOR A PURPOSE, AND WE USE THEM TOGETHER, RATHER THAN USING THEM AIMLESSLY ALONE.

In the history of the human race, boredom is practically brand new –less than three hundred years old. The English word does not appear until the 1850’s. Boredom –for children and for adults- is a perfectly modern condition. I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

The problem, as with many short-term solutions, is that solving the immediate problem requires leaving a bigger problem unsolved –and actually makes the bigger problem worse.

 

How Videos Bewitch

The entertainment we serve up to our children, and ourselves, constantly fills the screen with movement as swift as the meteor’s and colors as brilliant as the cardinal’s. It is purposefully edited to never require too much concentration or contemplation; instead, it grabs our attention and constantly stimulates our desire and delight in novelty. But in doing so, it gradually desensitizes us as well.

A world in which The Sopranos can seem innocent is a world ratcheting its way toward being unable to be shocked by anything –which is to say, a world completely full of boredom.

The very analog world is itself charged with beauty and surprise.

And the ones who used to be able to see this ordinary abundance in all its glory, in all its full capacity to delight and transfix our attention, were children. Children were the ones who simply went out to play in the ordinary world, even with no toys at all, because they had something far better than toys: grass and dirt, worms and beetles, trees and fields. The world they played in was rich, substantial, and rewarding of attention: the closer you looked, the more you saw; the more you listened, the more you heard.

Technology does little do develop our abilities to wait, pay attention, contemplate, and explore –all needed to discover the abundance of the ordinary.

The first people people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others. They were also, by the way, the very first people to have lawns.

 

Distraction and Delight

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 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.

They have left me, as the ring left Bilbo, feeling “all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”

 

Screens on Purpose

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.

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.

3. Structuring Time

WE ARE DESIGNED FOR A RHYTHM OF WORK AND REST. SO ONE HOUR A DAY, ONE DAY A WEEK, AND ONE WEEK A YEAR, WE TURN OFF OUR DEVICES AND WORSHIP, FEAST, PLAY AND REST TOGETHER.

We are supposed to work, and we are supposed to rest.

We are meant to work, but we are also meant to rest. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work –you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns” (Exod. 20:9-10). One day out of seven –and, even more radically, one year out of seven (Exod. 23:10-11) –the people of God, anyone who depended on them or lived among them, and even their livestock were to cease from work and enjoy rest, restoration, and worship.

This pattern is fundamental to human flourishing, and to the flourishing of the whole world that depends on our care, but it has been disrupted and distorted by human greed and sloth. Instead of work and rest, we have ended up with toil and leisure.

 

Toil and Trouble

How likely is it that any of the employees who now work in that building (a building previously used to make artisanal furniture, now houses a group of techies around a startup company) are creating anything that will be seen as a treasure even five years from now, let alone five hundred years from now?

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.

No amount of leisure can compensate for the sense that your life, whether poorly paid or well paid, is ultimately in vain.

 

Peak Leisure Home

What happens to families when the home becomes a leisure zone? One of the most damaging results, as the philosopher Albert Borgmann has pointed out, is that children never see their parents acting with wisdom and courage in the world of work. Even if the adults’ jobs still require skill and insight, even if those jobs are quite meaningful and rewarding, that work now takes place far from home.

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.

 

Thou Shalt

Honestly, most of us can’t do much to change the nature of our work –or toil. But there is one thing most of us can do –and all of us are meant to do. It is to rediscover rest: real rest, in harmony with one another, our Creator, and all of creation. The biblical word for this kind of rest is Sabbath.

Keeping Sabbath, along with honoring our father and mother, is one of the “thou shalts” –one of the positive things we would have been called to do even if we had never fallen into sin.

A life of abundance, gratitude, rest, and quiet. It will only happen if we choose it, but if we choose it, the experience of our family and many friends has been that God blesses it.

 

One Day a Week – and More

Sabbath was not just a day but an organizing principle. Sabbath will be most powerful and helpful if we let its core pattern of work and rest become the defining pattern of our lives.

Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from the promises and demands of our devices. For many of us, this will most naturally be the dinner hour. For families with small children, the better hour may be the hour just before bedtime, where baths and stories and cuddling can happen without digital distraction.

On a Friday before a vacation, I clean out my email inbox, set up a filter that will send every single message straight to an archive, and activate a “vacation message” with the stark subject line, “Unfortunately I will never read your email.”

And it is gloriously true. For two solid weeks, my inbox stays completely empty. (Part of true rest is not having work accumulate relentlessly while you are resting!)

 

The Brightly Lit Cage

We need to be clear: Sabbathless toil is a violation of God’s intention for our lives and our whole economy. Any serious commitment to Sabbath involves doing our best to ensure that the people who serve us are provided wages and benefits that allow for hourly, weekly, and yearly rhythms of rest.

The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all discipline 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.

 

Legalism and Work

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.

 

4. Waking and Sleeping

WE WAKE UP BEFORE OUR DEVICES DO, AND THE “GO TO BED” BEFORE WE DO.

Sleep seems, in a strange way, to be where the learning required to be a accomplished human beings actually happens. It is the way our bodies deal with the immense complexity and demands of growth of all kinds –intellectual, physical, emotional, and even spiritual. Heart, mind, soul, and strength all are nurtured while we sleep.

A Jewish day begins in the quietness of dusk, sharing the evening meal as the world settles in to rest, lying down to practice the “quietness and confidence” that Isaiah said was the source of true strength (Isa. 30:15 NLT). And then in the morning (neither anxiously early nor slothfully late) we rise to our work. Rather than resting to recover from a hard day’s work, this way of seeing time suggests that we work out of the abundance of a good night’s rest.

 

Bright Nights

Fatigue and isolation compound our immaturity and susceptibility to temptation –especially for teenagers but also for adults. At their best, social media, like all media, substitute distant relationships for close ones.

The devices we carry to bed to make us feel connected and safe actually prevent us from trusting in the One who knows our needs and who alone can protect us through the dangers and sorrows of any night.

There is something for you to discover in these moments just after waking that you will never know if you rush past it –an almost-forgotten dream, a secret fear, a spark of something creative.

Give your devices one more minute in their “beds”. Practice the grateful breath of someone who slept and awakened, given the gift of one more day. You slept and allowed God to be enough. Now, for at least a moment, wake and be still, letting him be enough for this day. Then you can say good morning to whatever the day brings.

The three key decisions of a tech-wise family is wether:

1. We develop wisdom and courage together as family.
2. We want to create more than we consume.
3. We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest.

1. Choosing Character

1. We develop wisdom and courage together as a family.

We need to understand what makes technology so different from any previous human invention. We also need to understand what family is for, which is something radically ancient and in grave danger of being forgotten.

What is Family for?

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Family shapes us in countless ways. Family helps form us into persons who have acquired wisdom and courage.

“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion” – Proverbs 18:2 -which also sounds a lot like social media.

All the really important things we do as families involve developing wisdom. You can’t search for wisdom -at least, not online. And it’s as rare and precious as ever- maybe, given how complex our lives have become, rarer and more precious than before.

The Faithful, Scary Thing to Do

We need the conviction and character to act. And that is what courage is about. 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.

The way of wisdom has been clear: stay committed, stay faithful, stay hopeful.

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.

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

It’s only recently, and in a small corner of the world, that “family” has primarily meant a father, a mother, and their biological children living together in a “single-family” home. According to the US Census Bureau it describes less than 20 percent of US households as of 2012.

“…whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” Matthew 12:48-50. The first family for everyone who wants wisdom and courage in the way of Jesus is the church. The church is the place we learn to become the persons we were meant to be.

But if the church is to be our first family, it cannot just be a friendly, weekly gathering. The first Christians met in homes, and those homes were not single-family dwellings but Greaco-Roman “households” that often included several generations as well as uncles and aunts, clients, and indentured servants of the “paterfamilias”. The church too was a household -a gathering of related and unrelated persons all bound together by grace and the pursuit of holiness. It is important to notice that the first Christians had a multi-generational church, a church for the whole family together, not separated by different age groups. 

If our families are to be all that they are meant to be -schools of wisdom and courage- they will have to become more like the church, households where we are actively formed into something more than our culture would ask us to be. And if our churches are to be all they are meant to be, they will have to become more like family -household-like contexts of daily life where we are all nurtured and developed into the persons we are meant to be and can become.

We’ve always needed community wider than the solitary, nuclear family to thrive, and we surely need it now.

Hollow Fruit

Without a doubt, compared to human beings just one century ago, we are more globally connected, better informed about many aspects of the world, in certain respects more productive, and -thanks to GPS and Google Maps- certainly less lost. But are we more patient, kind, forgiving, fearless, committed, creative than they were? And if we are, how much credit should technology receive?

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.

Does technology make me the kind of human being who could contribute something of lasting value to my family, my neighbors, my society, and our broken world?

Technology is good at serving human beings. It does almost nothing to actually form human beings.

Anything that offers easy everywhere does nothing (well, almost nothing) to actually form human capacities.

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 ofter, undermining the real work of becoming persons of wisdom and courage.

Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

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. We will tell them -and show them- that noting matters more to our family than creating a home where all of us can be known, loved, and called to grow. 

2. Shaping Space

WE WANT TO CREATE MORE THAN WE CONSUME. SO WE FILL THE CENTER OF OUR HOME WITH THINGS THAT REWARD SKILL AND ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT.

 

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. Push technology and cheap thrills to the edges; move deeper and more lasting things to the core.

Homes still need a center, and the best things to put in the center of our homes are engaging things –things that require attention, reward skill, and draw us together the way the hearth once did.

Priceless Things

If you do only one thing in response to this blog series, I urge you to make it this: Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location –and ideally a less comfortable one. And begin filling the space that is left over with opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk.

This is the central nudge of the tech-wise life: to make the place where we spend the most time the place where easy everywhere is hardest to find. This simple nudge, all by itself, is a powerful antidote to consumer culture, the way of life that finds satisfaction mostly in enjoying what other people have made.

A single pencil can produce more “colors” of gray and black than the most high-tech screen can reproduce.

For a child’s creative development, the inexpensive, deep, organic thing is far better than the expensive, broad, electronic thing.

In the center, put the things that both adults and children will find endlessly engaging, demanding, and delightful.