Nothing is new under the sun. Human history recycles the same themes, though the details may change.

Sometimes it appears as if modernity has revisited in new wrapping paper of information technology and other buzz phrases like big data and artificial intelligence. We once again think our lives, coupled with enough data, technical progress, and systematization, can be advanced to a higher quality at least and a type of collective utopia at best.

Present standard bearers like efficiency, quantification, and innovation have become idols of our times. We are told that with the right data holdings and algorithms that new insights and hidden truths can be unlocked to spur humanity’s progress forward. Tasks have true meaning only if they can be tracked and measured. Value comes when human inefficiencies are identified and eliminated. Our algorithms are outperforming humans in areas like medical diagnoses, music composition, and geopolitical analysis. Instantly searchable information is supplanting the need for human memory and rigorous study. Identifying a soul mate has its best success rate if left to the computers. Progress, then, demands a productive existence where hallmarks like learning from our mistakes, finding opportunity in crises, and communing with the divine subtract from our measurable output.  

This phenomena has been called by various names but all point to the same underlying message. Jacques Ellul called it “technique,” the never ending search for the “one best way” to achieve any designated objective. Neil Postman labeled it “technopoly,” which emphasizes progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. Evgeny Morozov used the term “solutionism,” to describe the recasting of all problems with definite computable solutions. “Touristification” is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s way to describe treating humans like washing machines to increase predictability and reduce uncertainty for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

Geriatric studies identify the numerous ways a person dies long before the body begins to shut down. The elderly incrementally winnow the variety in their daily routines and limit what choices they make. Their social circles get smaller. The distance and frequency of travel from their homes diminishes. Their knowledge expansion dims. They are increasingly less willing to accept risk or try something new.

Our zeitgeist is doing just that, killing components of our humanness long before our bodies are ready to return to dust. Our increased screen time has diluted our attention span, focus, and memory, as documented in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, leading to lower thought quality. Jaron Lanier, in You Are Not a Gadget, plays on a similar theme that consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence, in part, because humans are being overly defined and restricted to what can be represented in a computer. Carr’s later writings went on to identify a growing skepticism of solitude, inactivity, and apparent purposelessness. Our field of choice is being narrowed into “comfort zones” where we can surround ourselves with like minds and ideas, as Christopher Steiner pointed out in Automate This, because of information overload, algorithms that reinforce making the same choice, and click rates that attract us to popular, though not necessarily more valuable, information. The more we try to reduce trial and error in our lives with more data, more structure, more planning, then the more likely we are to be ill prepared for randomness and the less likely we are to strengthen our minds and be adaptable to life’s variability, as documented in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile.

Our relationships naturally suffer as a consequence of our predilection toward the sterility of mechanized and clinical living. We are becoming increasingly desensitized to identifying nuances of human emotion. Our conversational skills are being eroded by preferences for digital interaction. Our written forms of communication are faring much worse as the fast pace of communication undermines the quality of our prose. Dictum to multitask and squeeze more from our day encourage production line thinking where others become stages of an assembly line where people are the means and not the end. Seeking technical solutions for moral and aesthetic insight inhibits us from exercising uniquely human traits.

Overabundant pursuit of productivity makes imagination, reflection, and ambiguity enemies. But Ellul rightly points out, in Technological Society, that these are things to embrace as having potential to lead to “transcendingly important elements of personality formation, choice, personal experience, and spontaneous participation in creative activity.” Albert Einstein credited his mentally shallow, daydream inducing job in the patent office as the breeding ground for his ideas on relativity.

But the cascading effect of most concern is “the more objective reliability the less inwardness,” as Kierkegaard phrased it. The soul is what animates our lives and spurs us onward through potentiality into vitality and vibrancy. An inner being gives us the Ernest Shackletons of the world who, against all odds, saved the lives of all his men on a disastrous Antarctic expedition. An inner spirit gives us a person like Albert Woodfox, who overcame an unprecedented four decades of solitary confinement to emerge in freedom with a sterling sense of hope and purpose. No objective approach could comprehend, let alone adequately inspire, these men to emerge in triumph.

Karl Jaspers’ “unconditional imperative” reads more and more like an antidote to our times. It stands in contrast to object knowledge which is conditional, fixed, and transient. Such knowledge can only sustain the outward self and should not be our guiding principle – lest we find ourselves mired in emptiness. Conditional imperatives make us dependent on something outside of us – practical aims or authority. The unconditional imperative, in contrast, has its origin in the self and sustains inward being. It determines our aims but is not an object of knowledge. Hence, it defies definition but seems to be capable of infinite description and potential. It is our authentic being, our means to attain transcendence and relish the sublime.

A calculated and planned world and the lives it produces erode so much potential from life. We cannot plan moments where time fades as we lose ourselves in a book, though we have to be willing to let the elapsed time not fall under the inspection of productivity. Spontaneously leaving for a moment’s notice weekend getaway does not carry the same exuberance as scripting our travels through positive reviews on a popular website, though we may not be able to maximize activities. Organizing colleagues to gather around a co-worker’s desk to applaud her recent accomplishment far exceeds a text message with a thumbs up emoji, though we would need to ignore urges for a more expedient method and have made effort away from measurable productivity to learn she values peer recognition. Seeing appreciation in the eyes of needy families as we help them find items in a charity’s pantry feeds the soul in a way paycheck deductions to support the same charity cannot, though we may have to sacrifice timely completion of a work project we took home over the weekend.

One theory on why the US populace was able to weather the severity of the Great Depression was because the vast majority of the affected population was only one generation removed from being a people of the land. In other words, people could recall a childhood or a parent who demonstrated rugged individualism, navigating scarce resources, and improvising during uncertainty. But live through another Great Depression-like era today and we would find those skills are long gone for the majority of us.

The further along we go in this epoch that celebrates efficiency and the mechanized life, the less likely we are to recall the value of an inner life and our corresponding “skills” to use it for human flourishing. When our technological epoch fades, what kind of people will remain?

We should resist the temptation to systematize more and more categories of our lives. Wider margins in our day to day schedules will increase the likelihood that life will happen instead of dictating how it will or should happen. Invite a random person on your contact list for coffee; reduce the contents of your calendar so you feel less burdened when you follow spontaneity’s call; ask your boss to allow you to make up work at the end of the day because you want to take breaks to seek solitude; learn a skill with your hands; volunteer more. We are only limited by our own imagination.

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