My son was at a Super Bowl party on Sunday night with school friends. How great is that? Guy friends hanging out. All together. Or not. It seems that throughout the game, and especially during the historic comeback by the Patriots, many of the guys were busy “snapchatting” about their experience. For them, it was more exciting and hip,(not to mention emotionally “safer”) to be sending out messages via their phones about what a great night they were having then it was to actually be there and have a great night. These days, our children are learning to be more excited by, and interested in, orchestrating false and hyped-up versions of their lives. They are more enlivened at the prospect of playacting about how amazing it all is as soon as the cameras started rolling.The moments of our children’s lives are being drained away and reduced down to little more than times manufactured; as times captured by a screen, as opposed to actually living those times.

Afterwards, my son observed that “everybody changes” as soon as the phones come out and the videos start flowing. This so speaks to what we are all up against. We as people already struggle enough with all of the ways that we will shift ourselves when we feel observed or are trying to fit in. No age suffers this more than teenagers. Now, though, with the assistance of the technologies, our children can fabricate and spin themselves and their lives in ways unprecedented until now. They can build representations of themselves based on illusions, scripts, and made-up representations of what is happening or how they want it to look.They use the devices to try and get others to see them the way they want to be seen.

This taps into such a vulnerable place in all of us; that part of us that wants to control how others see us. The technologies are exploiting and magnifying the false notion that by presenting things a certain way, via the screens, we can manage and influence how others see us, and therefore, feel about us. In the meantime, the realities of the fears and insecurities we all experience around this, and that must get addressed if we are to feel secure in ourselves and in our relationships, gets paved over. So yes, the devices afford a momentary fix to the discomforts of how we are seen, but ultimately creates a dangerous false sense of security that some parts of us, way down deep, is absolutely aware of and uneasy with, despite how great we present ourselves to others.

It is exhausting our children for them to be living as if they need to be bigger than life. It is soul-sucking to have to smile broader and convey more excitement than you are actually feeling. They are growing up believing that life is supposed to be a reality TV show/rock video that they are starring in. And we all know far too well exactly what happens to those among us who lack the capacity for living the ordinary, unobserved, non-staged, hum-drum moments of life. How will they manage if they switch their feelings off and on based on whether or not they are being watched? How will they know the truth of their experience separate from the pretending, the mask, the camera ready face they so quickly take off and on?

“The only thing that Orwell failed to predict was that we would install the telescreens ourselves, and that our greatest fear would be that no one was watching.”

Poster In Louis’ Class at PVPA

My childhood home had an enormous pine tree that grew in one corner of our backyard. It towered over the rose bushes, the fence, the bird house on a pole, our garage, and other trees. It felt to my little girl self as tall as a mountain. Amongst the shelter of its lower branches I felt safe. And known. The great pine and the ground beneath it was sacred to me, though that was not a word I knew or would have used back then. Over the years fallen needles had accumulated to build layers and layers of softness and comfort. When you walked under this magnificent tree, the ground was literally different than anything else you would walk on. It felt otherworldly to me. The layers of built up and decaying needles made it easy for a small girl to dig into the earth to bury things in her life that had died. It was here that I would come when our home and the ways of the world would overwhelm me. I felt held here. I felt heard here.

I never talked about my experiences in this place with anyone. There were no words for it. It was different than church where someone told me what to want and to feel and to pray for and to be ashamed of. In this place, there were no rules, obligations, expectations or have-to’s. Just a yearning revealed, recognized and met; one that I did not even consciously know I had. This experience was beyond the world. It was a way of being seen though there were no eyes. It was a place where I felt something way down deep that I did not feel anywhere else. At the time I thought it was the tree, which is why when it became infested and there was talk of needing to cut it down, I felt cleaved down the middle. I did not know then that while yes, something did exist there in that place, it was also in me. And while in the times to come that place would lie dormant and forgotten within me for many years, when the time was right, it was as though a seed that had been planted and forgotten suddenly found its way into its day in the sun.

The technologies consume our children’s hearts, bodies and minds while asking nothing of them and returning nothing to them by way of their spirits. To be so engaged and enthralled with something that requires so little of you is not the recipe for a strong moral character. It is instead the makings of a spiritual brat. Our children are being warped and drained spiritually at a very tender age. When they are young, a felt sense of the Great Mystery of Life is not something that has to be taught. They are it. Sadly enough though, what they come in embodying can be unlearned, which is what happens when we make the biggest and most meaningful thing in our children’s lives come from a machine. As Father Gregory Boyle writes, “God can get tiny, if we’re not careful.”

If there was ever an argument for avoiding and limiting screens in childhood this could be The One. Spirit sick and soul hungry children make for very unbalanced and unhappy grown-ups, no matter what their facility with technology is.

I read this week that the video game Pokeman Go had 45 million players in its first 12 days, and that among a host of problems related to the scavenger hunt nature of the game in the real world, was that 110,000 distracted driving-related incidents had been reported in the first 10 days. I am left wondering so very many things. Things like what would it be like to garner 45 million people’s time and energies to devote to….?  Fill in the blank. Things like, are we so out of our minds with the siren’s call of the technologies that we would jeopardize innocent lives on the road? Things like, why do we have plenty of time for this, but often so little for what really matters most?

If there was one question that I could ask All of Eternity, it would be; “Why is it so hard to remember who we are and what it most important?” Why does it seem easier to forget than to remember? Why does it seem so “natural” to get distracted and to lose track of really important things like self-care, self-love, the health of the planet and the importance of each other? And why is that even when we want to do things differently, it can be so hard to change?

Almost 30 years ago I had the worst birthday of my life. It was my 25th. What made it so awful was that I became utterly unnerved and unhinged that a quarter of a century had gone by and that I had been asleep at the wheel. I hadn’t done anything worth mentioning. I hadn’t a clue about how precious and short-lived Life really is. After this difficult revelation, I made some changes. Some things stayed the same. Maybe even most things stayed the same. It was hard for me to line up in my own mind why it was that I saw the need to change, and that I wanted to change, but still found it so difficult to do so. It was just so easy to get distracted. It was just so easy to forget. For a,long time I beat myself up about not doing better, believing it to be some failing on my part that I could not just get to where it was I most wanted to be.

I see things differently now. Sure, there is lots and lots of research about how and why people change, and why they don’t. My sense, though, is that there is more at play than we usually recognize around what creates change. Something that is beyond the obvious of A+B=C. Something that is beyond a human hypothesis. Something that is beyond will and intention. Maybe it is built into us for some reason beyond our knowing to struggle like this. Maybe it is so the Universe gets to create through us. Maybe it is about choice at some level far deeper than most of us go. Maybe it is to learn forgiveness, or to ask for help. Maybe it has to do with some evolutionary shift that will occur in its own time no matter what we do. And maybe there is no reason at all.

Through all of this unknown around how it is that we remember to pay attention to our precious lives and how to keep shifting towards the expression of our truest nature, I know one thing for sure: The technologies are exploiting our weaknesses in ways too numerous to mention. By this I mean, all of the daily ways we use our devices to miss our lives, our health and one another. All of the ways that we do not know how to say no despite what it is doing to us. All of the ways that we can squander away our time here, living as if what we do does not matter, or does not amount to any more than chasing down digital creatures in the real world. If on our own we struggle with being here and with what is most precious, how will we fare with something that magnifies our tendencies to forget?