The Life We're Looking For
Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Tech-Wise Family
'A fascinating and eye-opening book' - Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
Our greatest need is to be recognised - to be seen, loved, and embedded in rich relationships with the people around us. But for the last century, we've displaced that need with the ease of technology. We've dreamed of power that doesn't require relationship (what the premodern world called magic) and abundance that doesn't require dependence (what Jesus called Mammon). Yet even before a pandemic disrupted that quest, we felt threatened and strangely out of place: lonely, anxious, bored amid endless options, oddly disconnected amid infinite connections.
In The Life We're Looking For, bestselling author and cultural critic Andy Crouch reveals how we traded lives of rich relationship for a world of impersonal power - and how each of us can fight back. From the generosity of early Christians to the efforts of entrepreneurs working to create more humane technology, Crouch shows how we can restore true community and put people first in a world dominated by money, power and devices.
There is a way out of our impersonal world, into a world where knowing and being known is the heartbeat of our days, our households, and our economies. Where our human vulnerabilities are seen not as something to be escaped but the actual key to our becoming who were made to be together. Where technology serves us rather than masters us - and helps us become more human, not less.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crouch (The Tech-Wise Family), an entrepreneur and former executive editor at Christianity Today, reconsiders human dependence on technology in this impassioned critique. Crouch laments that "we have become embedded in a world of money, machines, and devices," and recommends that readers push back against the inherently alienating nature of technology. The author argues that modern technology gives users impressive abilities with little effort, but he suggests this effortlessness "diminishes us as much as it delights us." He also decries "Mammon" (the drive to worship money as if it were God) as the engine behind society's ills, writing that money enables people to buy services or goods without forming the relationships that would be otherwise required to receive them. By way of remedy, Crouch urges his readers to live in "households that extend beyond family," which generate bonds of interdependence; cultivate "canopies of trust," which foster solidarity; and create communities of the "unuseful," which reject the transactional nature of the modern world by valuing those with little to trade. Crouch's cross-disciplinary approach impresses, jumping from scripture to Roman history to psychology with aplomb, but his focus on the individual does little to address the systemic roots of the problems he identifies. This provocative if imperfect treatise makes some original contributions to an oft-discussed topic.
