How to Keep Technology From Running Your Life

Listen to "Made For This with Jennie Allen" on Spreaker.

This week on the podcast I got to interview someone who I've admired from afar for a long time - Andy Crouch. One of the topics he's handled with grace and authority is technology. It is a beast of a topic to understand. Andy shares some really practical tools on what it looks like to approach technology for ourselves and our families as we reset this fall. 

IS THIS JUST A PROBLEM FOR KIDS?

A lot of us have kids in our lives in one way or another, and Andy mentioned an interesting statistic. If you ask teenagers and kids one thing they wish they could change in their relationship with their parents, the most common answer is, "I wish my parents would spend less time on their phone and more time talking to me." 

"I wrote this book about technology and family life, and people think it will be about screen time limits for kids. It's not about that and not even for people who have kids in the house. It's for all of us in the places where we spend the most formative time of our lives - the home. The home is the most formative place, and it's the place that technology has most invaded and changed the dynamics and the ways we relate. 

This is not just for families, it's for all of us. 

BEFORE YOU PICK UP YOUR PHONE, GET IN NATURE

There's one practical tip in Andy's book that I just can't shake: before you pick up your phone, get in nature. Without even choosing to, picking up our phone first thing in the morning becomes a habit. Andy talks about the process of breaking that habit and choosing a new one.

"The backstory to this is, I was not doing this at all when I started writing the book. These things just creep into your life without really being chosen. I was getting up, making my tea, and spending those four minutes while it was steeping looking at my phone. It is such a bad way to start the day. While I was writing this book, I knew there had to be a better way to start the morning. So I decided I would finish my tea and just walk outside. For the first two weeks that I tried this, every morning I would feel like my phone was calling to me. Don't you wanna check me? Don't you need to find out? But then, I would walk outside and suddenly you're in this bigger world. It's this amazing reset. I'm a creature and I'm in the midst of creation and there's a creator...Two weeks into it, I went downstairs, and I heard the whisper of the phone and something had totally flipped. What had been this temptation and lure to resist was now this thing I so greatly wanted to avoid. I didn't want my phone! I wanted the outdoors. Since then, it feels so natural. It's just so good."

We are all craving freedom from our phones, but a lot of the time we don't know how to go about setting those standards. I know especially as a parent, I can almost feel guilty for abandoning my phone. Andy let us in on some rhythms he has set for his family and how to plan for emergencies.  

SETTING SOME BASIC RHYTHMS

"One of the basic rhythms I recommend is one hour a day, one day a week, one week a year, finding ways to turn off all technology. For our family, dinner time is the hour, Sunday is the day of the week. Then on family vacation one week a year we turn off everything. The guilt thing is real and this is a question people ask a lot: what if people need to get in touch with me? I think we need to remember this is not made to be legalistic. The point is not rules and laws. It's more about having a basic rhythm in our lives that then of course has to be adjusted at particular seasons of life. There's only a handful of people that have to reach you right away. My daughter is in college and she lives very far away. If something urgent happens, she needs to have people in her life that can get there right away if it's that urgent. My daughter knows around dinner she can't reach me. For that hour she can find other support. We have parents right in town, my wife's parents, and they have some real health challenges. They know they can reach us, we still have a landline, almost specifically so her parents could reach us anytime. Because we could get there right away. Once your family knows what your rhythms are and you can give them another way to reach you, you're free from this device that brings with it so many distractions." 

TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNITY

Everyone seems to be living with so much stress. We have access to 24-hour news, every emergency, and constant communication with each other. Sometimes we don't take steps to mitigate these stressors and simply act as victims to our phones. We have the power to take steps toward a healthy relationship with technology, but it takes intentionality and thinking creatively about those things. This even goes back to this entire season of talking about community. When we live in community, we can fight for each other's rest.

"You actually can serve people so much better if you have a rhythm of sabbath and rest. It only works if we make it possible for each other. Someone does need to be available 24/7 in some care situations. But the way that is meant to happen is in community with other people that can bear each other's burdens. Rather than, it's all on me and I've always got to be available."

TAKE YOUR PHONE OUT OF YOUR BEDROOM

One practice Andy believes is incredibly important is keeping your phone outside of your bedroom. I'll admit, Zac and I aren't the best at this. We're incorporating this habit back into our lives, and I think after reading Andy's thoughts on this, you'll want to make this a habit as well!

"It really is one of the most important things. This is in some way the biggest damage that phones are doing in our homes. It's invading our bedrooms. A British research survey asked kids, "if you could get help from your parents on one area or wish they knew about your phone use, what would it be?" Parents often worry about kids with phones in the bedroom is sexual content and other things that aren't appropriate. What the kid said is, "I wish my parents knew how much this is interfering with my sleep." It really is true. When you have this expectation that I could be interrupted, it's so hard to rest. If we aren't really careful with our notifications, they do interrupt us! They light up, buzz, make sounds. We can legitimately say at this point with research that it's dangerous for kids. It's disrupting our lives. We don't really understand how adolescents are sending each other messages all night. Often those messages are very high octane. Even if it's not sexual, it's emotional. Kids are being asked to manage each other's adolescent emotions all by themselves. In their bedrooms, they have kids feeling suicidal and upset. There's no way a 13-year-old can handle that emotional intensity 24/7. I still need a break. It has been revolutionary in our family to leave the phones downstairs and it makes this gift of rest much more likely and peaceful."

THIS IS A DEEPER ISSUE 
The issue of technology use in our world is not just one about distractions and simple habits to develop, it really goes deeper to how we cope with the world. 

"I think the addiction goes deeper than just our phones. The deepest layer I've been able to uncover is this belief in magic. The belief in magic is that there's some trick that'll make the universe work smoothly for me. It's a lie. The world is not designed that way. For whatever reason, God designed this world as this journey of suffering and of joy that is not magically summonable. When we start this journey of realizing that light switch is a little piece of magic, so is my car, and my A/C, and my phone. We press a button and makes our lives better and easier. Those things work in a tiny little domain, but it's not the life I'm meant for. It gets harder before it gets easier. We become aware of our own sin and shortcomings and fears and fantasies and all kinds of things become very real. On the other side of that is God shows up in those moments. Other people show up too if we let them. We taste real life. Which is not about easy everywhere, not about magic, but about this beautiful, painful journey of becoming human. We have let this thing into our lives that doesn't help us become human, and we have to put it back in its place."