The more humans have become enamored with technology, the more we’ve become enamored with magic. The two are actually the same thing: A desire to control and change our circumstances.
Contrary to popular belief, the age of science wasn’t preceded by an age of magic. According to C.S. Lewis, both emerged at the same time and for the same reason.
Innovation has always been an element in human experience, but it’s been the increasing dissatisfaction with our lives and our world which has caused us to be less attached to them and more willing to manipulate and change them.
We just might be the least satisfied human beings in all of history.
The phone we thought was amazing two years ago is sadly out of date and needs to be upgraded.
Our bodies aren’t good enough. So, we exercise and diet and color our hair (if we have any) and get tattoos. Our bodies need an upgrade.
My 16-year-old was asking me last night if there were any musicians whose music was the same from album to album. (The only band I could think of was AC/DC.) He wondered why they felt compelled to continually reinvent themselves. But then he answered his own question this morning when he told me about a music style that was all the rage two years ago and is almost completely passé today. Reinvent or die.
Music has always changed over time, but technological change has sped it up.
Strangely, the magic of technology has taken away a lot of the magic in our lives, magic in this second sense not being about control but about wonder and joy.
In our hyper tech-oriented culture, is it possible to regain a sense of satisfaction? Is it OK to slip into irrelevance? Is it OK to be content with kitchens and clothes and hairstyles that are out of date?
Some of my happiest years were living in Lebanon, Oregon, a sleepy, unimpressive town. We had few stores, so I didn’t want anything. Nobody was telling me I ought to want anything. Every time I visited friends in Seattle, though, I felt the urge to buy stuff because there was so much stuff to be bought.
But tech and magic aren’t just about change, they’re about control. And I wonder: Have we humans ever been so control-obsessed as we are now?
We monitor kids incessantly.
Their friends. Their grades. Their screen time. Their sleep. Their sports. Their diet.
We’ve taken helicopter parenting to new heights. And new lows.
And yet we feel more out-of-control than ever before. Internet news feeds make us feel like our world is out of control and so we’ve become increasingly politicized in our attempts to regain some of that control. It’s not working. (Remember when politics was a taboo subject? And now it’s splattered all over our Facebook feeds. I’m for depoliticizing.)
We all want to go to Hogwarts to learn magic, so we can grab ahold of our runaway world.
What previous generations had which we lack is a sense of a God running the world. They had a sense that God was guiding history toward a goal he had established and would unfailingly lead us to. They had a sense that change and control were best when in his hands.
I’m trying to return to that. As a child of the tech age who grew up loving the idea of magic, I’m not very good at being content. But I want to learn it. I need to learn it.