Spiritual effects of technology

Last month, I wrapped up an arc of analysis of our fragmented, lonely society.

We saw how, especially with the digital revolution, our whole lives end up being commodities, not just so that we can make money, but so that we can have (what we have come to call) “community” or “friends.” For this column, I want to draw some conclusions from this and point us toward how to live in the face of it.

One of the more confusing parts of the pressure to commodify ourselves is that it doesn’t feel like pressure. This is because I usually experience the production of my “self” — my online identity — as something I positively want to do. Every click to optimize myself appears as freedom to me. And yet this is just another way that our lives are deeply monopolized by the external systems that make them possible. When turning ourselves into a commodity is the way we express our “freedom,” we have come close to defining the human being by the logic of the factory. To find our joy in selling ourselves amounts to a paradoxical kind of self-exploitation. Workers used to complain about being exploited by people like Taylor; today we Taylorize ourselves and call it self-actualization.

Healthy communities, I wrote several months back, are characterized by internal means of production — shared work — which produces a tangible sense of the common good, durable friendships, confident independence and sense of belonging that undergirds general psychological well-being.

If this is true, it’s no wonder that frenzied production of ourselves as part of a way of life dominated by impersonal external systems is taking a high psychological toll on us. Anxiety and depression are at an all-time high, with growing numbers of our young people affected (see Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” for instance). We feel frustrated in our attempts to live creative, satisfying lives that express our unique personalities. We feel helpless and passive, and paradoxically exhausted and burned-out at the same time.

Much of this malaise, it seems to me, is the fairly predictable result of the cultural dynamics we’ve been describing.

We feel helpless because we are helpless. We can do almost nothing essential to our existence for ourselves. Helplessness is frightening, and so a large proportion of us are anxious much of the time. But we’re also anxious because we are always Taylorizing ourselves, extracting one more thing, getting one more thing done. So, we are always in a hurry. There is never enough. That is not a recipe for peace of soul.

We are depressed because our way of life stunts even the basic development of our God-given human potential. We are made for heroism, creative expression, and active engagement with nature and face-to-face community. Yet we spend most of our lives pushing buttons: on our phones, on our keyboards and interfacing with programs whose pre-set parameters limit our creativity. Being socialized, as we all are, in consumer society, we get used to uncritically receiving standardized packages of goods and services. Whatever the grocery store sells, we eat. Whatever Netflix is showing, we watch. Whatever the doctors recommend, we do.

We never learn real initiative, the ability to be confident shapers of the world we find ourselves in. Our human development is literally pressed down — “de-pressed” — and we feel that way. In place of real human development with others and nature we spend most of our time curating our own identities online, which is to say, thinking about ourselves. This compounds the feeling of depression, as we fall deeper into ourselves. Christian wisdom and psychological insight agree on this point: such narcissism is not the path to happiness.

Finally, this way of life not only makes us anxious and depressed, but, perhaps paradoxically, exhausted. Though in one sense we are passive, in another we are constantly overdone and burned-out from constantly selling ourselves. There are fewer and fewer times when we are not “on” — responding to posts, keeping up with our followers, “liking” and being “liked.”  We never get to rest.

This is the world in which we live. And it is spiritually killing us.

But, you say, to live differently would take a whole new economy, a new society, a regime change, a total alternative way of life. It would take a miracle. Yes, indeed. Thankfully, the kingdom of God Jesus came preaching is nothing short of that. That’s the good news we’ll start in on next month.

Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” published by Ave Maria Press.