The Habit of Technology with Andy Crouch

Jessica Honegger [00:00:03] Hey, there. Welcome to Going Scared. I'm Jessica Honegger, founder of the world changing brand Noonday Collection, and I'm glad to have you here for today's conversation. Our Going Scared Community gathers here every week for direct and honest conversations that help you live a life of courage by leaving comfort and going scared. Well, we have had an incredible series so far. I don't know about you all, but I have been so inspired to do things like make my bed and drink my water and work out and clean up my piles and make my doctor's appointments. And it has just been inspiring to walk with you all as a community through habits. So, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for sharing this series. It's become the most widely listened to series in our history, so you guys are digging this as well. I'm really excited for today's guest, Andy Crouch. Andy Crouch is actually a mentor of mine, in addition to being an incredible author of four previous books to the one that he just released. Andy is the theology and culture partner at Praxis, which is an organization that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. It's an organization I've been involved with for many, many years now and has been a place of community for me when it comes to starting and running and maintaining a thriving business that leads to human flourishing. Now, Andy has been on the podcast before, and the last time he was on the show, it was a very practical podcast. I even asked him, what’s your cornerstone habit that you have in your life? I remember so many things about that conversation, especially since my daughter Amelie was interviewing him and his daughter with me. I would love for you to go back and listen to that episode. Just all you have to do is search Going Scared Andy Crouch in your podcast app and it will come up. So, this conversation today is a little bit more theoretical, but I think it's really important for us when we talk about technology to understand what our intrinsic motivational forces can be when we are deciding to make moves into being more digitally healthy. I just finished his recently launched book The Life that We Are Looking For, and I highly recommend it. If you are wanting to really have a robust overview on how we can properly view technology in our lives and, more importantly, how we can flourish in our now tech driven society. Oh, Andy, you did it again, I just finished The Life We're Looking For, and you did it. You make me think about how I think, and I hate it and love it. I hate it and love it. And it's like, what do you have? The books need to be this space this far apart because they literally take this far apart for me to just digest and then actually metabolize them. It's just convicting. There's just a lot of convicting things like the story about helping your, you know, getting your friends to help you move and then how money, you know, buys convenience. And it does just, I think, think even with business success, there's so many more things that we've been able to do with money that that takes away that connection. So anyway, Andy, congratulations on yet another just absolutely thought-provoking work. And the last time I had you on your show is with your daughter, Amy.

Andy Crouch [00:04:01] Yes, I remember it was more fun. I prefer that to the solo stuff that I'm doing now for this book. I almost wish I had gotten her to co-write this book with me so that we could do the interviews together.

Jessica Honegger [00:04:13] Oh yeah, OK. Next one. Next one. Yeah. Yeah. So, my daughter Amelie interviewed Amy, so two teenagers interviewing each other about technology. And it really actually I actually specifically remember asking you all about very specific habits. It was a very pragmatic book that you wrote with Amy and then even your book previous to that one, Tech Wise Family, very pragmatic around how we can put tech in its proper place in our lives. We were in the middle of a series on habits, and this is probably the most pragmatic series I've ever done, which, you know, that makes sense because we're talking about movement and making doctors appointments and, you know, the habit of habits. But today, listeners, we're going to depart from that a little bit because really, I feel like you have given us what we want in that last podcast and today what I would, the journey I would love for you to take us on is kind of the journey I just went on is I want our listeners to have a new awareness about their awareness around technology because I do think my listeners, you know, we've had on the start founders, we've done a whole series on digital health. It's something that I feel like my listeners are acquainted with, even thinking about technology. But I considered myself pretty, you know, this is a passionate subject for me. And yet even reading your book, I just became aware of how I'm even thinking. So, we're going to start off with some big philosophical questions. What did you get your undergrad in, by the way?

Andy Crouch [00:05:52] Classics. So that's the languages and literature and culture of the ancient Greco-Roman world, Greece and Rome.

Jessica Honegger [00:05:59] Well, you know, Andy, there is not many times where an undergrad classics degree actually gets utilized. Let me just tell you.

Andy Crouch [00:06:11] Score for all those people, ask me, what are you going to do with that? I'm going to write a book one day and it'll help.

Jessica Honegger [00:06:17] Your score gives you definitely drew from that. That makes sense. I was going to guess philosophy, but what

Andy Crouch [00:06:24] We do that too in classics. Because of course, that was a big part of those cultures. They're the source of Western philosophy.

Jessica Honegger [00:06:29] So that's right. That's right. OK, so we're going to start with that with a big question, which is what does it mean to be a person?

Andy Crouch [00:06:37] Oh my. OK. What does it mean to be a person? Let's actually start with where that word comes from. It originally comes into the world through the Latin word persona, which starts out actually being interestingly, it's from the theater. It's from the masks that actors wore back in thousands of years ago in theater, and it meant that the character in a in a drama. But then it became part of the law and in the law, a persona in Latin, a person was someone the law actually recognized. That is someone that the law would protect, someone who could give evidence and it would count. And most people in the ancient world were not persons in that sense. They were less than persons. They were slaves or they were women, or they were children. And all those categories of people actually would not have been thought of really legally as persons. [00:07:36] So one really notable thing is being a person is something that can be taken away from you in one way by the world around you. People cannot recognize you as a person and can decide that you don't count and in certain settings. And to flip that around to be a person is to count for others. It's for others to actually recognize, you know, that you matter. Pay attention to you. In the ancient world, only a few people had that status. But if you want to look at another way. We have come to believe at least we think we've come to believe that everyone as a person, not just the ones who have status or privilege or power. And the story of how we came to believe that is actually kind of interwoven with the story of this crazy thing called the Christian faith, because it was actually the first Christians who started to see one another as persons without any qualification. If you were male, female slave, free Roman, not Roman, Jew, Greek. And so, to be a person is to be embedded in relationships of recognition. [66.6s] So that's one way to look at it, the other way to look at. I talk about in the book is to go back to a different tradition of the Hebrew Bible, rather than the kind of western tradition to go back to the Hebrew tradition and the Hebrew Bible talks about human beings as heart, soul, mind and strength. And I love this fourfold idea that we are not just a brain without a body that would be like mind without strength. We aren't a body without a soul. We aren't just emotions without cognition, heart without mind. But we aren't thinking without feeling mind, without heart. We're all for heart, soul, mind, strength. [00:09:21] So one way I talk about being a person in the book fundamentally is to be a person is to be a heart, soul, mind strength complex. That is all these things together designed for love. Because the kind of core idea of the Hebrew Bible is You shall love the Lord, your god with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. So, what's a person? A person is a heart so and strength complex designed for love, who really needs to flourish, to be recognized by other persons as a person, and whether or not we get that recognition as much of the drama of human life. [35.7s] Mm-Hmm.

Jessica Honegger [00:09:59] So why in a book about technology, was it so important for you to define personhood?

Andy Crouch [00:10:07] Yes, great question. Because I think what's actually most under threat in our technological world is personhood. The fullness of personhood. I mean, you're a person, whether other people recognize you or not, you're a person, whether you feel like a person or not. But the reality is, a lot of us don't feel like persons a lot of the time. And this is interesting because we're like the most powerful people who have ever lived in the world. And why do we so often feel lonely, disconnected, unseen, unrecognized? Why do we feel like we're not fully ourselves in a world where we have more power, more advantages, more possibilities open to us than almost anyone, anywhere? And to me, that answer is totally bound up with the history of what technology became once we figured out certain things about the world, the way the world worked. [00:10:55] The essential problem is that we built our technological world on what I would call the dream of impersonal power. Of power that doesn't actually require you to be a person to get things done and or power that gets activated in the world without persons. And this dream of getting things done without persons, without kind of human full heart, soul, mind, strength, engagement with the world is the dream of technology. [24.3s] I think it's kind of a mirage, though it also kind of works, but it only kind of works because what it's doing is gradually undermining the conditions for people don't have a heart, soul, mind, strength, life and it's. And so, we can't really talk about like when we talk about technology, you know, we think about screens or devices or Tik Tok or whatever, but it's so much deeper. It's this dream of it's this dream of being able to get things done in the world without having to have personal relationships. And when you can kind of do that, which we can kind of do you start to lose the very things that make the world a good place for persons, which I think is why it feels so strangely distressing to live in the modern world? Hmm.

Jessica Honegger [00:12:01] Well, and I know it's no accident that you're using this word recognition. And I think, you know, we have a shared friend, Curt Thompson, and he talks about, we're born into the world looking for someone looking for us. Yes. And that is personhood to the core of our ultimate desire is to be known and to know. And then here our iPhones recognize our faces that the AI recognizes our voices. And so, it's like a trick that that we're being treated as persons, but it's actually not because it's impersonal.

Andy Crouch [00:12:42] It's a simulation, a very effective simulation that is actually kind of satisfying and maybe a little safer than other persons. Like when you see me and recognize me in person that's a beautiful thing, but also a vulnerable thing. When my iPhone recognizes me like that doesn't feel vulnerable, you know, that just feels powerful. Like, oh, it did recognize my face I'm in, you know. [00:13:05] So this is the difference between personalization or personalized and personal, personalized is the world of computers. The computer does not know you're a person, the computer is not a person. The computer will never be a person. What you really long for and need most is that other person looking for me. I'm looking for a person looking for me. The computer simulates that in such powerful ways that it's very attractive because it's kind of all the upside without the vulnerability. But it also is very empty because in fact, this device knows very little about me. It's what it can sense of me is so inadequate to really respond to me. [38.3s] And we all I mean, you can kind of tell when you talk to Siri, like she's not really there, she said of the halfway there. She's sometimes useful or he's Siri can be such to male or female voices. But either way, Siri does not get you. You know the way a person gets you.

Jessica Honegger [00:13:59] Yeah, it's just it's I love how we you're taking these words and I know you're very careful with words and we're going to get more into that. But then really, you know, because we use the word personalized so much and that can trick us, and it becomes it becomes quite tricky. And it's why we are feeling empty. You know that we the promise of technology ultimately isn't offering its promise. OK. I wanted you to describe superpower versus flow.

Andy Crouch [00:14:32] So what do we get from like why if technology isn't really that good for us? Why do we want it? Well, one way to put it is technology gives us superpowers, and this is like something people selling technology really like to say. Like, I have been amazed at how often and I bet you'll start noticing now that you read the book, you're going to start noticing how often, especially in a certain kind of like web services and email programs, the stuff they're like this gives you such and such superpowers. It's really common these days, and it's very appealing because so [00:15:04] superpower is basically extra power with less effort. So, the thing that makes something a superpower is that you actually don't have to exert yourself very much. It's not hard. And yet you get this kind of outsized result. [14.6s] So Superman can fly through the air without really seeming to work at it, you know? And that's why it's a superpower. I mean, just having a like a three-foot vertical leap like or whatever the right, you know, whatever an impressive vertical leap is, I don't know what it is four feet, two feet, that's just a normal power. But if you could like just sort of wish and elevate yourself and then fly through the air, that would be a superpower. So, technology gives us feelings like, wow, I've got a superpower right now, like I am getting things done and I'm making a difference and I matter in the world and I'm not trying very hard. That's a great feeling. And when we saw that, for me, a classic example, this is why boys and particular girls sometimes boys a lot. Love, love, love video games, because what a video game gives you is way more ability than you have in the real heart, soul, mind, strength world that you were born into. When you step into the world or sort of plug into the world of the video game. You have abilities and options and power that you don't have as a 10-year-old. You know you're suddenly a navy seal like landing on a beach and you're mowing guys down with your machine gun and you're like jumping over walls and or you're a football player, you know, or a soccer player. And you're like moving down a regulation FIFA soccer field and you're, you know, incredibly good. And when you go out on the real soccer field, it's way harder, way less satisfying, right? So, the video game experience is one of heightened capabilities, but it's actually way easier than mastering real life soccer or, for goodness sakes, training to be a navy seal or something like that. So, the superpowers zone I talk about the superpower zone in the book Is this zone we get in where we just feel like we are flying one way or another. And I get this like when I sort of been pounding through my email or when I'm scrolling on social media, I'm like, Ooh, I'm just absorbing all the all these friends on Instagram, all this information, you know? And it simulates something that researchers, most notably this Hungarian researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow and flow is a related phenomenon that has been observed and documented in people who have mastered certain kinds of skills and do things that at peak performance. So, a real-life soccer player say in the, you know, Major League Soccer player who goes out on the field when they are really in the intensity of a game, and they're fully engaged in it. They experience this kind of psychological state of being just fully present. Time sort of seems to stop working the same way they just feel kind of fully alive in in a very, sometimes very, very challenging situation, right? So that's really similar to the superpower zone, except they're totally different. [00:18:16] And first of all, flow happens in the real embodied world of three human dimensions and of heart, soul, mind and strength all being exerted at the same time. The superpower zone almost always has you a lot of times you're just very, very still like, you're sitting playing the video game. Your body's not doing very much. Your mind is going a thousand miles a minute, but your body's not that involved. So, the flow is in the real world. Flow requires genuine practice and mastery to get to it, whereas the superpower zone has achieved very easily. [32.4s] And then another fascinating thing is how they end. So, flow ends. So, I'm not I'm not anywhere near a professional soccer player, but the place I probably most often experience. Flow is on my bike. I go, I bike 20 miles a day when it's about 50 degrees or so outside. When I'm in the middle of that twenty-mile bike ride I, I enter into this just amazing state of serenity, and I'm working really hard, but I feel very able to keep going and it's just a different way of being. It's so good. And interestingly, when it ends, you just feel grateful. When I get off my bike, I'm tired. I don't necessarily want to ride another 20 miles. Like, wow, I started this bike ride depressed. I started this bike ride anxious. I started it elated. I started and all kinds of ways, but I ended up just calm and grateful. Anyone who's interrupted a 10-year-old playing a video game knows that is not how you exit the superpower zone. You never want to leave. You are very angry when it's disrupted. And then the weird thing is you don't feel any gratitude once it's gone. You feel this hollow sense of, oh, I wish I had that back. And yet what you wish you had back was not actually really real, and you can't quite remember it. And this is true of all addictions. It's and it's true of so much of life, our technological world, it's it seems so real at the time. And then you get out of it and you're like, it’s gone. What was it? I don't. I can't reclaim it. I'm worse off.

Jessica Honegger [00:20:23] Yeah, that distinction on how those two superpowers versus flow end really was sticky for me. We're in the middle of Lent right now, and I committed to my Lenten practice is to turn off my phone at seven pm and it'll turn back on at eight p.m. And I love flow. I live to get into flow. I think flow. I mean, I just it's just, you know, and so I have a lot of work because my work is so creative. I there's many flow opportunities within my work, but I at home because my husband is so good about this. He'll just go into his garage at night and spin a bowl. And even my kids are much better about this, whereas I had gotten to more of a habit of scrolling, especially over the last year or so, I've been challenging myself, you know, OK, well, in the absence of turning my phone off, what can I turn to and to experience flow? So. So yeah, I might. My Holden is going to its gardening season has begun. You know, God bless Texas. So, I'm going to I'm going. See, this is very different for me, but I think I'm going to garden and I'm saying this out loud. Yeah. And my husband, we have, you know, a thousand-piece puzzle on our dining table at all times. And I found like 10 pieces last night for the puzzle.

Andy Crouch [00:21:59] That's the depth of flow, as you can see.

Jessica Honegger [00:22:02] You know, you are right because you're always like, you're not thinking about time. You're just like and you're right, you don't leave it feeling like exhausted, like, oh, why did I just do that? You know which I do that a lot when it comes to scrolling. I really appreciated that part. OK, we're going to go to mammon and then we're going to end on a good note here. So first of all, I just love how you personified and brought to life this idea of money and made it almost feel like an actual animate force in our lives as opposed to this, you know, exchange. I think that was really important for me. And you say that mammon produces abundance without dependance. So now I know you're going to need to break down mammon for our listeners because they're like, what? Go back to the classics and our undergraduate days. So, break down mammon. And then, yeah, this idea of abundance without dependance.

Andy Crouch [00:22:57] Mammon is the word that comes to us through one of the most memorable things, Jesus of Nazareth said, which is you cannot serve God and. And then the question is, what does he say? What's the word he uses, and he uses this, it's an Aramaic word. Aramaic was the word that Jesus probably spoke himself. It was kind of a Semitic language related deeper. And it says, mammon, it's just a Semitic word that roughly means money. But the gospel writers, the people who wrote down Jesus's words, they were writing in another language in Greek, and normally they translated what he said into Greek. But in this case, they left the word, which I think means that he's using it as kind of something more than just a regular noun, and it can be just translated mammon. [00:23:37] But I think what Jesus was getting it and the reason his biographers didn't translate it is that Mammon actually describes something more than just an idea or a thing like money. And it actually describes kind of a personal, quasi personal will at work in the world. And the way I would put it, and I mean, if you want to get a little weird, you will say kind of a demonic power that is a transpersonal spiritual force that has an intention for ill and whether or not you believe in such things precisely. I do think maybe Jesus did. And when he says you cannot serve God and mammon and he doesn't just mean, you know, money is bad. I think money insofar as is just a medium of exchange that identifies value and allows people to exchange value, that sort of just a thing. But there's this will at work in the world behind money that animates money and that especially animates our love of money. And that's what Jesus called Mammon. [58.0s] And it's it is this dream and this in a way intention to have abundance without dependance to have. And by the way, [00:24:44] I got that phrase from a pastor named John Tyson. It's a beautiful, powerful and disturbing, unsettling phrase abundance without dependance. It's the dream of having more and more with less and less relationship, less and less vulnerability, less and less uncertainty. Basically, being able to snap my fingers and have what I want, and mammon says, oh, I have a way for you to do that, and money is the way. [24.8s] And this is so at one level, it's a dream that I think functions at the personal at our own personal level. Like we somehow, we can fall into that dream and think, well, if I just had money, I could get, you know, whatever I want. And if I had more money, I could get more. But I also see it actually as something that goes way beyond any individual and actually drives a lot of the way technology is designed. It explains so much of why technology is not doesn't actually seem designed to help me be a better human being. Ultimately, it seems designed for some other purpose, and I think it's designed to create a whole world that's chasing abundance without dependance and power without relationship. [00:25:51] So Mammon is like the actual thing technology, as it is currently being developed, is mostly serving as channeled through the profits of these major corporations, to be sure, and their investors and their owners and so forth. But ultimately, it's not even just serving those investors and the balance sheet. It's serving this principle that's at work in the world that says, wouldn't you like to have everything you want without being entangled with other people? [25.6s] So that's the deep dream. And none of us, really, I don't think any of us most want that, but I think it is what technology most wants. And so, we really have to be very careful how we take all these devices into our lives because they're not they're not designed for our flourishing. They're designed for some other purpose that transcends any person. And in many ways is out to get rid of persons in the world. It would rather there were no persons in the world and would rather that the world be full of things and people worshiping things. So that's the essence.

Jessica Honegger [00:26:52] Lest we hear some naysayers, there is technology that elevates and dignifies human worth.

Andy Crouch [00:26:57] There is. There is. And this is the really beautiful. And also, sad thing is that we could have, we could have way more of it. So, in the book, I talk about it and maybe this gets us toward that positive thing. Like we basically we need to ask technology to do something different. So, we've built a lot of devices which make life very easy and also fill life with superpowers. But we could have asked for and we could still ask for what in the book I call instruments. So, if you think about like scientific instruments or medical instruments or musical instruments, all of these, some sometimes they're made of super sophisticated technology in a way. But the key thing about an instrument is it always involves a person using heart, soul, mind and strength. So even the da Vinci surgical system, which is like this robot, this laparoscopic robot that does these beautifully intricate operations through very small incisions, it's a huge gift to people who need certain kinds of surgery. We call it a robot, but it actually just assists a human being, and it assists a highly skilled human being to do things with less damage to the human body. More precision. And that surgeon has to bring all of her heart, soul, mind and strength to the work. Any serious doctor uses all of those things and the work they do, and the technology just adds a layer of capability but doesn't take away that person and doesn't take away the personal relationship with the patient being treated. We could build our world around instruments and the [00:28:24] the great thing about your iPhone is it can be the ultimate superpower like zone scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. But you can also decide I'm only going to use this as an instrument, so I'm only going to turn this on when I'm going to do some sort of heart, soul, mind, strength, fully engaged activity. And no, that's not how we're trained to use it. That's not the default settings of it, but we can use it that way. And we could have a very different dream that we started to build technology around, and I think we'd call them instruments rather than devices. [32.3s]

Jessica Honegger [00:28:58] So as we close and as I was closing your book, I'm thinking, OK, where is Andy taking us in all of this? And I'll tell you my takeaway or one of my takeaways, but I would love for you as the writer, what your intention was for your reader was ultimately to call us to be a person and to practice personhood. And I love this part in your book where you say you kind of describe what it means to love, and you describe this chain of genuine love. And then you basically say, if you made it this far in the book, you can be this kind of person for someone else. And you're calling us really to practice personhood and being present with other people and be connected with other people. That's what my takeaway is and what I would challenge our listeners to do as far as a habit that they can practice from this would be to practice, saying people's names looking him in the eyes. I had this moment the other day at a restaurant where the hostess said, Candice is going to be serving you tonight. And so, when we sat down and Candice came up, I said, Hey, Candice. And she was just blown, you know, just because I said her name. But it's because we're living in a society that is so transactional because technology really drives this transactional mentality. And so, in that respect, Andy, I read tech books and I just I can feel guilty. I can feel I use technology. My business does Facebook ads, you know what I mean? Like, there's so much complexity. But I just felt a lot of grace and I thought, Yeah, that's all I can do that I can go practice that. So, what was what would be your primary intention for your reader?

Andy Crouch [00:30:46] Oh, man. I mean, you got you got it. It's too we have to let go of the dream of power without relationship, abundance without dependance, and take up the I don't know if dream is the right word, the calling that we were all [00:31:00]the sort of secret of this book is we knew what we were looking for the moment we were born, we were looking for a face and we were looking for someone to see us and know us and not turn away from us. And then we went through all the traumas of childhood, some inevitable, some that could have been averted, and we started choosing other things. And we're like, gosh, I kind of would prefer superpowers. I'd kind of prefer to withdraw. And in some ways, what I'm trying to do in this book is call us back to the thing we were looking for the moment we are born. And except now we choose it on the other side of pain, which is on the other side of vulnerability. [37.6s] We choose it with people who we wouldn't have to choose it like you did with Candice. Like you could have just frankly treated her as a servant. And it's not bad to have a job, you know, as a waitstaff in a restaurant. But wow, it changes when the people that you're serving actually see you and know you and take time and appropriate ways to just honor who you are. You're not just here as a servant, you know you're here as a person. So, we now get the chance to be that for other people, because however much pain we've suffered, we every I bet every day, literally every one of us, like today, I've been in my house all day. Thanks, COVID and other things. You know, lots it. But I was on the phone with a call center representative say I guarantee, frankly, that I have more recognition and care in my life than that person does, just knowing their circumstances on their job and where I could kind of guess they live in the world. And man, if I can in in that little interaction with that person, just indicate I heard your name. I care that you're a person. I'm not just here for what you can do for me, I value you as a person. There's all these ways to do it without having to say all of that. That makes a huge difference, not just for them, but for us. It restores the life we were looking for all of us.

Jessica Honegger [00:33:01] You can find out more about Andy Crouch at Andy-Crouch.com, and you can find his books wherever books are sold, The Life We're Looking For. The music from today's podcast episode is by Ellie Holcomb, and I'm Jessica Honegger. Until next time let's take each other by the hand and keep going scared.