(Google) Searching for Peace?

Summer vacations are here, and my family recently headed into the eastern Sierra Nevadas for ours. We stayed in a low-amenities cabin in a small resort on the shores of a beautiful mountain lake, booked several months ago in the most analog process I’ve encountered in some time. With no online reservation option, we had to call and talk to an actual human to make the reservation. Then we were snail mailed a slip of paper that served as both the receipt for our deposit and our reservation confirmation. I don’t think they ever asked for an email address.

The sans-technology vibe didn’t end with the booking process. At this lake, there’s no cell service, you have to pay for Wi-Fi per day or week on each device you want to use it with, and connectivity drops off if you try to use it too far from the main office.

Crazy, right? But also … amazing?

Though the tech-free aspect was accidental to the location we wanted to visit and not an intentional choice on our part, we decided to try and get by without the internet for most of the week we were there. In the first few days when it felt the most strange having a largely useless smartphone, I found myself surprised at what I missed most. It wasn’t the social media, texts and emails, or streaming choices. It was Google search.

It started immediately after arriving at the lake. What elevation are we at? Is there a trail to walk around the lake? What’s that peak we can see right now? Is it possible we just saw an otter or beaver in that stream? What are the Yelp reviews for the café at the resort down the road? Do they have pizza? And on and on.

It felt weird not being able to look up all our questions and immediately have answers. The first day, stressed about all that not-knowing, I had the psychotic idea to start a note to write down every single unanswered question we had. Then once we drove to an area with cell service, I could look them up one by one and know the answers, and then my life would be complete!

You see the problem, yes?

I reflected a bit about why it was hard for me to go without my beloved internet knowledge base. I’m in my early forties, so it’s not like I don’t remember a time before smartphones and the internet, a time where we’d wonder about something and just shrug off the mystery. But once you have that ability to know, it’s hard to go back.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the internet to answer all manner of questions as we go through life. And with all of the Big Things of life that are truly out of our control, who could begrudge us that little peace of mind that comes with a quick definitive answer?

But I sense that habituating myself to instant answers has some downsides. For one, it feeds that part of my ego that foolishly prides itself on being a Decently Intelligent Person. (As Augustine would remind me, what do I have that hasn’t been given me?) I like knowing things, often just for the sake of knowing things, and I want to be seen as an interesting and knowledgeable person. But there are not enough internet searches in a lifetime that can actually accomplish this for me. I can never know everything. And in reality, the things I’m generally seeking to know fall within a very narrow slice of human experience. Furthermore, what percent of the information that’s supposedly feeding my knowledge actually sticks? (I’ve asked the interwebs what temperature to bake a potato or what the population of my city is about fifty times, and I still don’t remember the answers.)

The constant stream of information also feeds an illusion of control and weakens our tolerance for mystery and humility in the face of things we don’t know. Asking the internet a question and getting an immediate answer is so satisfying because for that moment in time, there is certainty. Our feet stay firmly on the ground, we don’t have to be left wondering, and the world seems well within the bounds of something we understand and see clearly. Again, is it wrong to google things, especially something straightforward like the number of tablespoons in a cup? Of course not. But over time, I wonder if it’s building an unhelpful mental framework: There are always answers. They are simple, and all I have to do is type in a few words! Perhaps this is part of the reason why even the smallest amount of friction in our lives seems so difficult now. We’ve become accustomed to simple, immediate answers in so many questions of daily life. And when hard, messy, inexplicable things come, as they inevitably do, it feels like a bug and not a feature of life.

In those moments, the temptation of quick, pat answers and the counterfeit peace of more information is especially alluring. Who among us hasn’t googled information pertaining to big questions about our health, our marriages, our kids, the sovereignty of God, even as some part of us knows that whatever we read is simply words on a screen that can’t bring any real peace or help or change in circumstances? Knowledge is power but only to a certain extent. Knowing the nature of my child’s illness doesn’t alleviate their suffering. Knowing the ways my husband and I are contributing to our conflict still leaves the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation and the need for grace. Reading a theological explanation of the sovereignty of God doesn’t take away the pain of my circumstances or my unease at the amount of suffering in the world.

Yet time and time again, we find ourselves googling things, not in an earnest attempt for necessary information but in an attempt to force a feeling of perceived control or to get the quick hit of validation for our opinions. It often feels easier and more tangible than entrusting ourselves to a God who is beyond comprehension—a God who, while we can google a list of his attributes or read hundreds of scholars’ takes on the incarnation, is wholly beyond even collective humanity’s efforts to completely understand his wisdom and his ways after millennia of study and contemplation. And there’s the paradox. That inexplicable God full of mystery, whose foolishness is wiser than our best human efforts, has drawn near to us and is the only harbor of true peace, wisdom, and safe surrender.

***

Let’s be honest, I’m not going to stop googling stuff about mundane and big questions any time soon, even as I sense that habit might be malforming me in some ways. But it was a gift to be forced for a week to consider the hold that practice has on me. To be more present in God’s gifts of beautiful mountain lakes and vistas without needing to know extraneous details. To be reminded that being able or unable to google something produces neither a real deficit nor surplus in my knowledge and control, and it changes nothing about my fundamental state: I am a frail human who knows and controls far less than she thinks she does, and I exist via the grace of a wise and loving Father who proved his love by joining us in our suffering, the only real source of rest and peace.