iMorning

Good Morning, Sunshine!

Let me describe for you a very possible morning routine in 21st-century America:

Your day begins when the alarm on your phone wakes you. Not at a set time. No no no! Instead, your alarm app tracked your breathing and movement all night through your Apple Watch and woke you at the lightest moment in your sleep cycle, so that you, delicate angel that you are, could experience the least jarring reentry into consciousness possible.

Then, before getting out of bed, you check your phone. Your iPhone has already lined up the apps you are most likely to use as you lie there. Instagram shows you the accounts you engage with most. The New York Times shows you the stories its algorithm predicted you would click on. Spotify has a morning playlist ready, built entirely from your listening history.

When your feet finally hit the floor, that floor is not cold. No it is not. Your Nest thermostat learned that you like it at 68 degrees when you wake up, so it started warming the house an hour ago.

The delicate flower that is you emerges from your blanket cocoon and bravely places one foot upon the heated floor.

Your electric toothbrush app reminds you that you have been neglecting your molars, so you spend a few extra seconds making sure you get all the way to the back.

In the kitchen you notice you are out of your favorite coffee pods, so you tell Alexa to order more. No worries. They will be added to your upcoming delivery and here by dinner.

Then you grab your phone to order coffee for pickup, and your regular order – a venti iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso with an extra shot, light ice, and two pumps of vanilla – is already saved in the Starbucks app.

You then get in your car. As you do, it detects that it is you, and the seat adjusts to your preferred angle, height, and lumbar support. You pull up Waze and it already knows you are headed to work and calculates the fastest route based on your daily driving habits. On the way in, you listen to a podcast suggested by Spotify based on the last four you listened to, and it is, in fact, exactly what you are in the mood for.

And by the time you arrive at work at 9:00am, you have moved through an entire hourslong morning routine in which the world has arranged itself entirely around you. Your comfort. Your preferences. Your rhythms. Your reality.

You are living a life that even George Jetson would find technologically impressive.

Curved In

On one hand, this is impressive. This is a level of accessible consumer technology that that even George Jetson would have found impressive.

On the other hand, this new era of hyper-personalized consumption in which we live is doing something to us. Not dramatically, but through the slow accumulation of a thousand small moments in which the world rearranges itself around what we want.

And what those moments teach us – gently and relentlessly – is that each of us is the center of universe. That our comfort matters most. That our tastes define reality. That the world, at its best, is a machine for giving us what we want, when we want it.

This is not a new phenomenon. It’s just newly efficient.

In the 4th century, Augustine had a phrase for it. He called it homo incurvatus in se – humanity curved in on itself. He thought it was THE fundamental human problem.

Far from proving us more modern and civilized, the phones in our pockets have just made Augustine’s theory easier to confirm.

Augustine could not have foreseen the world that modern technology has created, but he wouldn’t be surprised by it! 

The Cure

The good news is that the cure is not a better, more optimized version of you. It is much simpler than that, and much harder. It is the person standing in front of you. This is more or less what the prophet Isaiah told his own people, a very long time before Augustine ever put it in Latin.

Isaiah’s were a very religious people. They fasted and prayed and did everything a devout person was supposed to do, and they were frustrated that God did not seem to notice. God’s word for them, through Isaiah, was withering.

While you were perfecting your devotional routine, God says, your workers went hungry, people in your community slept outside, people sat in chains, and you walked past all of them on your way to the prayer meeting.

But then Isaiah does something most prophets never bother to do. He stops scolding and tells them exactly what to do instead. Feed people who are hungry. Shelter people who have nowhere to sleep. Clothe people who need clothes. Pay your workers a fair wage. Free people imprisoned unjustly. Stop being cruel to people who have less than you. Show up for your own community. That is the whole program. Not a better you. The person in front of you. Look at them. Love them. Serve them.

And the promise is that this is the thing that finally uncurves you. That a life spent paying attention to other people is the one that opens back up:

Your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly.
You shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water whose waters never fail.
You shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

That is the thing worth turning toward.