Reality is Not Easy

Technology does not make life easier

My family moved across a few states a few weeks ago, and I am, in a word, exhausted. I feel it in my bones: not just a physical, but a spiritual exhaustion. I am grateful to be returning to a place that I love, but ready to truly settle in and call it home. Packing, unpacking, recovering from illness, renting until repairs are done on our house, running around town to pick up random items from Facebook Marketplace for said house—my body feels the unsettling.

It’s moments like these that smart technology comes most in handy, whether that’s GPS, looking up a local coffee shop, or simply scrolling to forget that “unsettled” feeling. I feel an itch, one that is somewhat scratched by overuse of my computer. I close it and still feel exhausted, though I went to it hoping for an escape. It didn’t work—it never does.

To be honest, it’s seasons like this where I both wish I had more seamless technology in my life, and where I realize why I never can. The added chaotic moments to the last, already-exhausting few weeks—getting lost in search of a coffee shop, delays at our house closing because we couldn’t pull a bank link up on a smartphone, being unable to stick a screen in front of a toddler on a 7-hour drive—feel like they’re pushing me to the brink in the moment. I can’t solve problems in the way the world wants me to without a smartphone, because so many solutions are dependent upon them.

My husband, a high school theology teacher, regularly encounters this in his approach to the classroom. Both schools he’s taught at are 1-1 iPad schools, and he prefers to avoid their use as much as possible. The arguments in favor of them have the same thread: simply, that they are “easier.”

If people push back on my personal choice to pursue more and more digital minimalism, or our choice to prioritize it as a family, this is at the basis of their opposition—technology, especially “smart” technologies, make life “easier”. And why on God’s green earth would I choose something hard?

Ease is becoming a cultural value, one that has massive repercussions for our agency, and therefore our virtue. Beneath what we outsource to technology is our desire for seamlessness, speed, and comfort. A toddler whining on a 7-hour car ride (which…same?) is uncomfortable, and should be fixed. Printing out readings for a class takes several minutes, so it shouldn’t happen. Getting lost is a waste of time. There are products—or rather, one product—that can solve all of these issues, and supposedly I’m the idiot for resisting it.

I’m realizing, in the midst of the chaos of the last few weeks, that yes—technology does make something easier, but it isn’t life. It may make logistics easier, but it makes me avoidant and complacent. While it settles inconveniences and time into a steady, mindless stream, it fragments me, my attention, and my time. As Matthew Crawford writes, “As our mental lives become more fragmented, what is at stake often seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self.”

In other words, “smart” technology does not make living easier. It does not make being easier. Reality is not easy, being is not easy, and in order to be their fullest, they never can be. The amount of discipline it now takes simply to focus one’s attention enough to pray, to build intimate relationships, to engage in an activity without a screen is evidence enough—technology does not make the things that make life worth living easier. It makes us fight even more in order to truly live, and many, many, many people do not choose to fight.

I can live my life at technology’s speed and dictation, or I can choose my own path. I can park where it tells me I have to park because of a QR code, or I can choose to take the hike for an extra 3 blocks. I can obey it and pacify my toddler instead of choosing to engage, and teaching her to engage. I can let it tell me where the closest, most convenient coffee shop is, or I can choose to get lost and maybe find one with a far better latte, after all.

The small moments of discomfort, of wasting time, of creatively finding a new solution that may involve more steps than we originally wished—they are not inconsequential. They prepare me for the moments of great suffering, joy, and profound meaning that will inevitably come, because those moments are real. When those most crucial moments arrive, I do not want to find in myself an inability to really be in them. I believe my virtue, my happiness, my very self depends on it. Reality is not easy, but as Luigi Giussani said, it will never betray you. It will shape you into the person God intends you to become, if you stay in it. I do not want to be in the practice of going where tech tells me to go, doing what it tells me to do, and solving problems the way it says I must. I do not want to be a slave to ease—I want to risk being the idiot, the keyword there being…being.

Despite modernity’s continual restructuring of normalcy around technology’s capabilities, we do still have a choice of what we will let it claim. For me, I am not interested in a life where technology has free claim on my time, attention, spiritual life, relationships, or home. I do not want it to tell me what or how to write (i.e., this is my promise that I will never use AI for this newsletter). I do not want it to tell me where to park, or where to eat, or what is generally most convenient. I do not want it to tell me how to think, or how to live, frankly—because its definition of thought is consumption and conformity, and its definition of life is one of ease.

In all of the chaos of the past few weeks, I’ve had many moments of crumbling under the back-and-forth, exhausting unsettledness. But, in turn, I’ve felt something like a sprout in me—something creative, something real. Maybe that’s why I’m writing a bit more than usual, and caring a bit less about how it sounds, or why I chose an adventurous paint color for my home office. Inconvenience, discomfort, and seemingly wasted time may bring something to bear, if we let it. Reality is not easy, but it is good—and the inconvenience to stay in it is worth it.

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