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Andy Crouch is a partner for theology and culture at Praxis, a business and non-profit accelerator that supports redemptive entrepreneurs. As the author of five books, he explores culture, power, technology, and the arts. His latest book The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World explores what it means to be a person, and how to flourish in the face of modern challenges. Andy joins the podcast to explain the concept of “effortless power,” and how we can enhance human dignity in the digital age.

Tom: Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy: Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

Tom: I want to start by asking you a personal question: Where did you grow up and, what are some of your favorite childhood memories?

Andy: So, I came of age in Boston, my memories from that time, and there are many, of course, those teenage years and very formative years, but that’s where I discovered, the bicycle as a means of transportation, exercise, and delight in the world. And I just remember biking all around Needham and Wellesley, Massachusetts, where I was living, and eventually much farther afield, all around the Boston area. And I still do that. I was out on my bike two years ago. for 20 miles this morning and it was in those teenagers that I discovered how great it can be to be on two wheels.

Tom: Yes. as a teenager, who are some of the people that you looked up to? I know that’s, the time when mom and dad, our estimation of them often lowers to some degree and we turn our attention outwards,

Andy: That’s an interesting question. So someone I admired at a distance and I find this actually quite embarrassing because I’m not sure I would at all have the same estimation of him now as I did then, but the science fiction of Robert Heinlein was tremendously captivating for me which is interesting because I also, at the beginning of high school, not coming from a particularly religious family at all, had a, very serious and lifelong, as it turns out, conversion to Christian faith. Heinlein, famously an atheist and, humanistic and, kind of the best and worst sense of the word.

Heinlein’s a complicated person. his worldview was not at all that of, the Christian faith that I was adopting. So probably the other, People I was kind of admire, not so much, well known figures. I was not in the Bible belt. I was not part of, Christian culture or Christian subculture that exists in many parts of the United States. It was really like, a couple of musicians who were local. Faith based musicians performing in like church basements and other, non, places, and I really admired a few kids in my high school, who lived differently from the norm. And, my life was shaped by them, probably shaped by them more than Robert Heinlein in the long run.

Tom: Hahaha. so, one possibility in your life is you could have gone to, music school and become a professional musician. what did your studies wind up leading to as an undergrad?

Andy: Oh yeah. Yeah. Music was a very big part of my life. My mother was a classically trained musician and piano teacher. she was my first teacher. By the time I was in high school, I was studying with David DeVoe at the New England Conservatory Preparatory Division. And so, classical piano was, a big part of my life.

And I would have thought as a teenager that I was going to do music with my life. in university, I ended up, attending an AME Zion church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, which is one of the historically black denominations.

I am not black. I’m of European, Anglo, heritage. but I loved black gospel music, and this church helped me transition from someone who loved it to someone who could produce it on the piano.

that was a life changing experience being immersed in the life and the music and the worship of the black church, which is this incredibly culturally fruitful tradition, of course, not just in the United States, but interaction with the history of the United States and the musical history of the United States. And the induction into black gospel was very, very formative for me and plays back into know how I play classical music, because black gospel gives you another way of hearing music that you don’t generally learn through the Western classical tradition, but they meet, I mean, Beethoven would have loved black gospel. and so would Bach, though. I think Bach might’ve had a harder time understanding it, but it helps me understand Bach at least.

Tom: What did your studies wind up leading to as an undergrad?

Andy: A couple things happened to me in high school that, it changed the trajectory of my life. One was this conversion to faith, which got me interested among other things in the Bible. because if you’re a Christian, you take that text very seriously. And specifically, I had some local youth pastors who, knew that the biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek. And I got really interested in the possibility of being able to go back and read these texts in their original language. I never did get to Hebrew, but I went off to college, sure that I wanted to study Greek. The other thing that happened in high school was I had a couple of really, extraordinary English teachers.

And it just opened language to me. So, I went to Cornell University and studied classics, which is the language and literature and history and archeology and philosophy and so forth of the ancient, world, Greek and Roman. I focused mostly on the Greek side. I took like the minimum amount of Latin to have a classic figure, but I did just fall in love with the Greek language.

And, then I discovered homer and Plato for that matter. And, gosh, when you read those in that, the language that they were written in it, there’s something untranslatable about it as with every language. So, I fell in love with that for its own sake.

Tom: Tell me after graduating from college with a degree in classics, what did you do next? What was your first big job after, graduating from college?

Andy: I moved back to Boston. I did a divinity degree at Boston University School of Theology. but I found myself really captivated by, the undergraduate season of life. And I joined a campus ministry organization called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And for 10 years, worked for InterVarsity at Harvard College.

So, with undergrads at Harvard, and so I saw two and a half, generations of college students, which are only four years long, come and go and wrestle with faith And I got to be part of that for 10 years as a campus minister, which was amazing. In some ways, the best 10 years of my life. Although the 20s can be great anyway, so I don’t know.

Tom: Yeah, fast forwarding a little bit, you’ve written several books and I imagine, maybe writing the first book is the hardest. Tell me a little bit, what was your inspiration for writing your first book?

Andy: Well, it emerged out of these years of campus ministry. So, my first book is called Culture Making. The subtitle is Recovering Our Creative Calling, and it’s a vision addressed to my fellow Christians of not primarily being critics of culture or consumers of culture, but creators of culture. Culture understood very broadly as what we make of the world as human beings, which is this beautiful phrase that I didn’t make up. I got it from a journalist named Ken Myers that captures the idea that culture is both a very material activity, the stuff we make, but it’s also always at the same time, a meaning making, activity, like what do you make of that?

what does it mean? And culture is the material meaning making activity of human beings. And of course, a university education, not least an undergrad education, part of a larger story of a culture inducting young people into its history and giving them a kind of competence to engage in the work of that culture. and we often think of this through vocations, but it’s a broader thing that you’re getting in college, right? And I realized. Our campus ministry really had very little to say to students about why they were students. We did lots of things that were very valuable, for their spiritual lives, we would hope, and I think that’s true.

But we, really had no theological framework for the thing they were doing, which is apprenticing to a culture, which is what you do as a college student. And I just realized, the Christian community that I was part of didn’t really have a coherent understanding of why you would do that.

So culture making was an attempt after I left that work to go back and make sense of and make sense of for a broader Christian audience, like, what is our cultural responsibility and not framing it in terms of the kind of conflictual narratives, culture war type narratives that are very, influential, but also not abandoning the quest to be part of a meaningful shared human activity that goes beyond. just a religious community because everybody’s involved in this cultural project. And I, I hoped to call people who shared my faith to be more part of that cultural project.

Tom: Great. I want to turn now to your newest book, entitled The Life We’re Looking For, Reclaiming a Relationship in a Technological World. My first question for you, what’s the difference between something that’s personalized and something that’s personal? Yes,

Andy: on in the book. I’m trying to frame what makes our technological moment different from other moments in human history. And I’m really interested in the effect that technology is having on us as persons. But whatever we mean by that very complicated word. And one of the ways to get at it is the difference between a personal letter and a personalized letter.

So, a lot of, our distant acquaintances, my wife’s and I, at the holiday time. send out these holiday letters, like Christmas letters and greetings. And sometimes it’s just a holiday card.

Sometimes it has a picture, so you just sort of summarize the year, usually including the best parts, and then maybe at the bottom, you had your signature. And so, this is personalized. That is, it is aware that there’s a person on the other end, but it isn’t really a personal communication in the way that a handwritten letter would be now, of course.

Our world now is, primarily the personalization is no other people very busily like just appending their signature to a mass newsletter. The personalization is entirely done by a digital technology. So, Siri, if I talk to her, it’s actually very dangerous to say her name aloud because she’ll start talking on this podcast from the various devices that are always listening. Um, that, that assistant will happily say, good morning, Andy, you know? And. The thing is that this assistant has no idea who Andy is, this is just a data representation, but it is crowding out the thing that I think all of us really hunger for, which is personal. And it’s okay with me that my friends send these kinds of personalized letters once a year. But what made them our friends was not, a kind of mediated communication that just fills in the blank with my name, but these very profound encounters that we have at different stages of our lives that make us want to stay in touch. And that personal, experience I think is under quite a bit of threat in a personalized world.

Tom: Looking at our modern technological world, we’ve got a lot of conveniences that we’ve Never had before. I’m sure a person a hundred years ago would look at our lives and think, maybe it’s not the Jetsons, but it’s extraordinary. It’s clear what we gain, but what do we lose with our conveniences that we rely on so much?

Andy: this is, A direction I was sent many years ago now by reading philosopher named Albert Borgmann, who’s one of the most important philosophers of technology of the 20th century, though his life and work continued into the 21st and Borgmann observes that over and over in the technological story for the sake of convenience, we’ve replaced Activities, that are formative and, focal for human beings, focal as in the word focus.

In fact, the word focus is an example of this because focus is the Latin word for hearth or fireplace. We replace, something like the fireplace. which was a formative activity in that you had to become a certain kind of person to safely have a hearth in your home. Often you must get the wood for it yourself, you certainly must, Stoke the wood, you must keep the fire going, you must cover the fire overnight so there’s still a fire in the morning if you’re in a cold climate,

and we had these processes and patterns of life that were formative and central, you could say, to our lives. and so, the family would gather around the hearth, it was also multifunctional. You would cook over it, you would, tell stories around it, you’d warm yourself by it, these kinds of things have been replaced one by one by things like furnaces. My furnace provides the same commodity, that is, heat for my home, but in a totally non central way.

My furnace is way down in the basement, tucked away as far as it can be from the normal life of the house. It asks nothing of me, and this means that not only is it not central in any way, but no one also gathers around their furnace, to like to enjoy the war.

No one tells stories by the furnace, also of course, it doesn’t form me in any way. I’m not shaped at all by the fact that I have a furnace. well, maybe I’m shaped a little bit in that It’s one more reason not to have physical activity in my life, so over time, my body will change shape, usually in an expanding direction, and will lose function because I’m not doing these activities that, these devices have replaced. And we’re very happy to make that trade., certainly in the moment we’re happy to, and when I’m feeling lazy, I’d much rather just turn up the furnace, than go out and, chop a bunch of wood. But in the long run, among many other things, the home itself becomes a site entirely of consumption, not of formation. That is, parents and children alike show up from their daily activities and enjoy some leisure and some rest before going back out into the world. The home used to be the center of formative Activity and that’s gone and what are we losing as people when there’s no longer for something for us to gather around,

and I’m just trying to call attention with lots of other people like Albert Borgmann and Marshall McLuhan and other, much more foundational thinkers in this. How do we feel about the bargain we’ve made? How do we feel about what we’ve lost? What we no longer can do because every innovation is sold with now, you’ll be able to do this, and you’ll no longer have to do this. But there’s this kind of thing that I call the innovation bargain which is that

you’ll lose some capacities. And there’s very often a compulsory capacity. component to it. Now you’ll have to have a smartphone to function in many areas of society. And all these conveniences also come with compulsion. And how do we feel about that

Tom: give you one other example, and it relates, I think, to Sir John Templeton’s kind of, Loves and interests, artificial light means that you’ll no longer have to move through a dark world.

Andy: But of course, the side effect is you will no longer be able to see the stars. Every human being.

to first approximation, up to about 200 years ago, had the experience of a moonless night, looking up at this extraordinary canopy of stars that you see on a clear, low humidity night,

And now, bare majority of human beings, I wouldn’t be surprised certainly have never seen the Milky Way cast shadow and may never have seen the Milky Way we’ve

made this bargain with artificial light in our built environment. And you can do all this now, but you just can’t do this one thing. That perhaps more than any other single thing awakens the sense of wonder, of smallness, of humility, of, curiosity about the bigger picture of the world. And again, that’s now available, to a certain extent as a luxury experience, Wow,

what a trade. I mean, wow. what trade have we made here? Do we want to keep making these trades? Like, how many more trades are we going to make like this? and will there be people allowed in the world where we’ve made all the trades?

Tom: Coming up…

I’m going to turn to another question, a basic one. What does it mean to be fully human? you, attended this question in an interesting way by quoting a passage from Jewish scripture. Every human person is a heart, soul, mind, strength, complex designed for love. Now, Andy, begin by saying it sounds way better in Deuteronomy, but the phrasing that you gave, the clunkiness there actually is very effective, I think, in making us stop and think word by word, what is this guy telling us? So, putting those words together with. Hyphens is something that I have not seen before. So, I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit. So, this, we can hear, from your vantage point, what a full human being is comprised of.

Andy: Wow, I’m so glad you brought this up. And it’s very related to the thread even of the last topic. So, yes, this is,

called by its first words in Hebrew, the Shema Yisrael. It’s the foundational text of Jewish life. and when Jesus, the rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua of Nazareth, was asked What’s the greatest commandment? It’s the only time he gives the expected answer to a question.

Tom: ha

Andy: recorded Jesus generally gives very unpredictable answers but, in this case, he says what all rabbis then and I would say the greatest commandment is you shall love the Lord your God Although, interestingly, the Shema in Hebrew in Deuteronomy has three terms, which we roughly translate as

heart, mind, and strength. Jesus, for whatever reason tells it with four, heart, soul, mind, and strength in the Greek of the New Testament. And I think that the question, what’s the greatest commandment, is the first century of the common era Jewish way of asking the question, what is human flourishing?

that’s a Greek question. that derives ultimately from Aristotle, but for a Jew, the way you would reframe that, I think is, well, what is the greatest thing that God has called his people to, Aspire to and embody

And I think that’s sort of how heart, soul, mind and strength ought to work as we think about what it is to be human. So, heart, is like the capacity for emotion and will, the ability to be drawn by something and pursue it.

Soul is the hardest one to define, but having been apprenticed in the black church, I learned there’s a way of making music that doesn’t have soul, and there’s a way that does, and it’s something like depth of self. The only way I know to talk about it is like, way down deep inside of you, there is a self that if allowed to fully speak and sing in the world, it’s just different than if you operate in the shallows.

And I think soul is an invitation to speak. identify something like that in human life. Mind, our kind of rational cognitive capacity, and then strength, our embodied capacity. And of course, all of these are designed for love. They’re meant to be kind of unified in the pursuit of loving God. And then Jesus, of course, adds, to the Shema, love your neighbor as yourself.

So, the reason I find this so fruitful is to look at our current technology and ask, is it designed to help us love with illness of heart and soul and mind and strength when I purchase a furnace? Am I buying that because I’m going to grow in these capacities?

And I think the answer is clearly that is not what technology is primarily trying to do. Now, I think there is technology that could do that. But right now, the kind of technological emporium that we all visit is not really attending to us as heart, soul, mind, strength creatures. It’s not primarily attending to us as creatures who are designed for love., it’s attended to us as creatures who seek power, who seek mastery, who seek convenience, who seek ease, who seek money, but who seek love. that’s just not the design specification for our current technological environment.

it leads us to ask some tough questions about what we’re adopting and deploying and making compulsory in our world because it’s very rarely things that develop heart and soul and mind and strength. in the way that maybe we are capable if we took another path.

Tom: I want to explore a little bit more with technology. you gave a name to something that has been bothering me my whole life, but I have not had a term for it. And the term that you gave it is effortless power.

Andy: Can you, for our listeners, just kind of describe your illustration of effortless power? Okay.

Yeah, I think this is the quintessential technological experience. I mentioned cycling early on you know, I’m out on my bike on public roads and sometimes I’ll be passed by people also on two wheels, also enjoying the world and hey, I don’t begrudge them this at all.

but you know, folks will pass me on a motorcycle and they’re often accelerating. And the way they’re accelerating is by like minutely adjusting the angle of their right hand, I guess, whichever hand it is that controls the accelerator on the motorcycle.

And I’m on my bike, you know, every. quantum of speed or incline. I feel it right. But the glory of a motorcycle is when you want to go up that hill or accelerate down that road a little faster. All you do is without notable effort. I mean, minimal effort. You just twist that handle and you’re off, right?

And you can feel as they pass me, I sense their delight in it. I just there. Oh, this is amazing, right? And you net, now you feel that bike going downhill, but every downhill is purchased at the price of an uphill on a bike. And paid for with previous effort that you now cash in from potential to kinetic energy.

That’s completely different from the def. Technological experience, which is I get this often quite spectacular result, and it’s. Incredibly intoxicating. And I will also say, I suppose it has its uses. I make use of effortless power quite a lot,

Tom: yeah, tell me some of the downsides we know the upsides convenience, the ability to do things, on a tight schedule. There’s a lot of upsides and they’re obvious that’s why we buy these devices. what are the downsides of relying on effortless power throughout maybe every dimension of our lives?

Andy: know, I’m hesitating because I, I’m not sure I can persuade. in any given case that there are enough downsides that they should care. I think our, society has decided this is what we want. I will say there are cracks that show in it. So, there’s a lot of attention, as you and I are recording this, in 2024, there’s a gradual inexorable accumulation of data that, bringing this kind of.

Ease and convenience into social life through what we call social media is not great for human beings. And specifically, that’s not great for adolescents. There’s increasing concern about some real hockey stick like, changes for the worse in adolescent mental health. And I think what’s behind that is that, the digital world for children and adolescence is about two kinds of effortless power in two different domains, and it tends to go, with the primary motivations of girls as they come of age and the primary motivations of boys and for girls, It’s, I think, well established, and again, this is a generalization an overall pattern, not a characterization of limiting what it is to be female or characterizing any particular girl, but it is the case that girls are often very motivated to connect socially and to establish alliances and friendships and friend groups and to find their place in a, relational and social world.

And of course, that now is tremendously facilitated, you might say, by the effortlessness of social media, where you get all kinds of real time feedback you never used to get about your popularity and influence and other things like your attractiveness and whatever. And it’s very frictionless, right?

You don’t have to get together with your friends to figure out where you stand, you’re constantly in this frictionless exchange of texts and images and so forth. we have a lot of evidence now that this turns out to be terrible. And I think it’s terrible because of the friction lessness.

it’s not just made. Influence and popularity easier. It’s made bullying and betrayal and diminishment and undermining easier. And, even between friends who can hurt each other in kind of frictionless ways, not even intending it, that would not happen in person because in the friction of personal encounter, you kind of sense

the injury even before it fully happens to another person, and you move to repair it all of that is removed by the friction lessness of social media.

Now, on the boy side, boys tend to invest their time digitally in video games, which are a perfect illustration without the gas exhaust of effortless power.

Because what is it to become truly adept at, Association football, which in the US we call soccer. It’s to master a whole set of very complex bodily abilities combined with social abilities and spatial and relational intelligence. You might say that normally play themselves out through years and years of very, difficult and to parents, extremely tedious practice on the soccer field.

Well, now you can do that as a video game, and the video game is designed to give you the sensation of mastering this thing called soccer, but on a very shallow curve.

That is a very shallow learning curve. It doesn’t take nearly as much time or effort to become good at FIFA football, the video game, as it would to go out and play even just basic high school soccer, let alone actually play for FIFA, and what is this doing to boys?

we don’t see such terrible, mental health effects for boys, who play a lot of video games, sometimes they get very addicted, mostly not. it’s not so bad cause you kind of get what boys are looking for, which is to impress your, friends with your skill at something, but those skills do not translate at all into the real world, FIFA football gives you no mastery at all in the physical world.

Hasn’t trained you to use your body or. with other people in the real game that we’re all playing. And we’re seeing terrible outcomes for young men. And I think it’s because they’ve spent their adolescence on shallow mastery, on effortless power.

you’ve, spent 15 formative years of your life practicing effortlessness, but that’s not life. So, I, I think the stakes are actually very high for what we’re missing out on, and what our kids are missing out on as effortless power becomes the dominant, model of what we’re looking for in the world.

Tom: Yeah.

Well, we just talked about the various ways that technology can diminish us. Talk to me a little bit about how technology or certain forms of technology can help us become more human rather than less.

Andy: believe this is another part of the story. I just wish it were more a part of the direction we were going, So I’m married to an experimental physicist, Katherine Crouch, and she does condense or did in her, initial research condensed matter physics, which is, of course, built on these extraordinary technological apparatuses,

But the difference is that no scientist, no research scientists would say this is making my work effortless. Now they would say it’s making my work possible because we kind of build the frontier of knowledge on previous scientific and technological discoveries. But it’s enabling the scientist to, bring, and I really would say their heart, their soul, their mind and their strength to the inquiry that they’re pursuing.

So, there’s a kind of technology. That doesn’t displace human beings or just put us on the couch, but that helps us fully engage with the world. And I think the best word for this as a category is instruments. pause

So, one of the interesting things about our smartphones is Almost every category of the phone. It can either be like the ultimate effortless power or the ultimate instrument, depending on how you intend your use of it. And that’s why I’m hopeful that we might, decide we don’t want more effortless power. We want more engagement with the world. And if we do, our general-purpose computers are very capable of being instruments if we choose to want that, but we must want it.

Tom: So, I want to, highlight a point that you made there. There’s a difference between a device and an instrument, but any given thing, any given technology, could play either role. so can you just maybe once again, for the audience tell us, this is what it means to use a device, and this is what it means to use something as an instrument or as a tool.

Andy: I mean, very fundamentally, if I use it as advice, it’s to make my life easier and to disengage me and do something on my behalf so that I don’t have to do it. And especially I don’t have to change to do it or grow or be formed to use it as an instrument is to seek to stay fully engaged with the world through the new medium that the technological layer opens up.

There’s a really, Simple, beautiful example of this from the world of social photography. So, one of the things we do with our phones is share pictures. And, the dominant app, at least for quite a while now has been Instagram.

And when you open Instagram, what Instagram makes easiest for you is to, take a picture of yourself. And the selfie camera is the default camera when you open Instagram. So, it’s looking back at you. And so, the invitation is. broadcast yourself, broadcast your influence, easy influence everywhere.

There’s a competing app that had a very different philosophy, called VSCO, V S C O, that also has achieved some market, penetration though nothing like Instagram, but has a very devoted community of users. And one of the very simple design decisions and completely intentional decisions, the VSCO designers made is when you open the VSCO app.

The camera that’s active is not the one facing you, one facing the world. And so VSCO by its design says, use this to show your friends, your audience, something you’re seeing. Use it as an artist rather than use it as what we’ve come to call an influencer. And now, can you use VSCO to become an influencer?

You absolutely can and people have. Can you use Instagram to become an artist and to share art? Absolutely, people have. But the default settings. create some very strong grooves to move in. So, yeah, I want us to look at everything. And

I’ll just say we, we heat a lot more with wood, after a few years of reflecting on this than we did before. I want to rely on my furnace less. I want to, chop the wood more, honestly.

as a kind of a maxim to take the direction of tools and instruments rather than the direction of devices, I think is in the direction that every human being wants to go.

Tom: Mm Hmm. so, we as listeners hearing this conversation, if we think that yeah, you know what? I want to live more with my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Where can we start doing that better? Do you have any, concise advice there to get us for the first couple steps?

Andy: Hmm. Yeah, I would start at home. I think the home is, the environment that other things being equal, we have the most ability to affect. You know, I can’t really change the technological empire I’m part of, but I can make some choices within my home. and so tell you, a very, practical thing that my wife and I did as we were raising young Children is we decided to move all the things that operated by themselves, or entertained us by themselves to the edges of our home, and if you sit down at dinner with us, especially if it’s any kind of special occasion, we actually turn off the electric lights, which are effortless illumination, and we light candles because something different and better happens at a meal by candlelight than by electric light.

I think the other thing I, that I always recommend is a kind of rhythm. we’re not going to get these devices out of our lives, but we can have a rhythm of how we use them. in our home, we have a pretty, established rhythm of. One hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, where we just basically turn off everything with a switch.

on Sundays, we minimize our use of, all electric and electronic things. And then there’s one, week a year where we have the good fortune to be able to go somewhere where we can be outside hiking, biking, can grill. And if you have a rhythm in your life of use and nonuse, I think that changes the way you relate. to the technology the rest of the day, the week and the year.

Tom: One last question for you, Andy. What gives you hope as you look at our increasingly technological world?

Andy: I think the thing that gives me the greatest hope is, the birth of babies. So, we have this amazing, endowment, you might call it, as human beings that’s present from the very beginning of our human lives. And is reflected in all kinds of things like how quickly the baby opens his or her eyes and looks for a human being.

We do not arrive in the world looking for a screen. We arrive in the world looking for a person and at least to date we have not modified the human genetic endowment such that we arrive wishing we could have easy everywhere or effortless power.

We acquire that, but we don’t start with it. The baby and the young child want to. Explore. they engage with the world pre technologically. It’s only as we hand them screens that they’re, ambitious  questions it’s diminished, but the initial endowment and the initial impulse is to personal connection, wonder and curiosity and exploration of and about and for the world, and the fact that babies keep getting born who start out, not as blank slates, very inaccurate metaphor, but as, deeply primed for real life, is just this perpetual, Renewal force in human societies because we also are drawn to them and care for them and we see when they become distressed and we’ve been through this like 20 year experiment and giving them a lot of screens and a lot of people are saying that’s not good.

They’re not growing up as happy and healthy as the pre technological generations did. So, I just take great hope. That we get fresh starts, as new generations are born and that we can learn as we care for them what we aspire to ourselves.