1. My favorite read of the week was the New York Times’ sobering and heartfelt reflection on the aging skater boys of Gen X. Conor Dougherty, now 48, gets his exercise a few mornings a week on a skateboard in his local Costco parking lot. Skateboarding has become “a best-selling midlife crisis,” with plenty of 40- and 50-year-olds picking up their childhood hobby again. Dougherty shares how skating has helped him keep friendships, stave off the inhuman techno-world, and cope with his own mortality.
On Friday, July 31, 2020, I drove from Oakland to Napa to skate an outdoor mini ramp in a friend’s backyard. Victor had been texting me about some mystery stomach troubles, but resolved to come out and skate with us.
I parked my Volkswagen S.U.V. with two child car seats next to Victor’s Mini Cooper. As we pulled boards out of our respective trunks, he told me something extraordinary. The start-up he worked for had been sold for a billion dollars. I bluntly asked how much money he had made.
Victor seemed embarrassed by the sudden abundance. He said he would be “pretty good.” I never learned the exact value of “pretty good,” but it was more like buy a house no problem than life of private jets. It was still a life-altering sum, and the supply of good will I felt for Victor was so bottomless and pure, so free of jealousy or status envy, that I wanted to thank whoever bought his company for allowing me to experience it.
Six days later, Victor sent a group text to update his friends on “some news.” His stomach pains had gotten so bad that he had gone to the hospital. The doctors found a tumor. […]
That fall, when I drove north to see him for the last time, friends warned me that he might not be well enough for visitors. They advised that the best chance to say goodbye was to linger near his childhood home, where he was in hospice. So I posted myself at a curb and texted Victor that I was nearby and could come by if he could handle it. A few slappies later, he texted back, and I drove over to yap about skateboarding for an hour. When it was time to go we hugged, pulled tighter, and for the first time in 30 years of friendship, cried in each other’s arms.
It’s not church, but it’s not nothing. There’s something romantic about the California skaters of the ’90s continuing to put their bodies on the line when the consequences of a fall come with a geriatric dread. But that romance seems appropriate — from what we know about sedentary lives, loneliness, and the importance of play, skateboarding without pads and helmets in one’s 40s and 50s may be a less dangerous life choice than many alternatives.
2. If you’ve figured out how to parent without transmitting your personal anxieties to the next generation, let me know. Ellen Cushing at the Atlantic would like to know as well, reflecting on a new generation of screen-free, tech-heavy toys designed to allay fears of excess screen time. The new, hip, (expensive) toys for kiddos have all the AI and tech of a smart device without a screen attached. Stuffies that talk back and play back, Wi-Fi enabled dumb phones, screens that aren’t touch sensitive but play purchased media akin to a VHS player … but all this has Cushing wondering who these toys are actually for:
Like many of my peers, I grew up transfixed by screens too — but they were small, stuck to a wall or mounted on a desk, and designed to be gathered around as a family. The interaction was passive: no swiping, no skipping, no on-demand viewing, no advanced systems built by rooms full of well-paid people all working diligently to deepen rabbit holes and maximize time spent watching ads. YouTube arrived in 2005, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010. In the decade-plus since, entertainment — for both kids and adults — has become much more algorithmic and much more absorbing. People are being directed by the technology, and not the other way around. The devices themselves have become better, more portable, and also completely essential to societal participation.
And many of the adults who survived this transformation have begun to wonder what it did to them. They worry that they’re no longer able to think independently, live authentically. They fret about their lost ability to spend time productively and uninterruptedly — to read a novel, appreciate a sunset, blast through a spreadsheet at work. In recent years, some adults have started to engage in ostentatious acts of self-restraint to reclaim their attention spans and mental real estate, some by buying dumbed-down products designed to import the functionality but not the itchy pull of a screen.
The people who personally experienced the smartphone revolution are precisely those who now have young kids. They are passing down the anxieties of their generation, like every generation does. The parents with Bricks are buying their kids Tin Cans. They (we) are old enough to remember a different world, and to worry about what kind their children are growing up in. I spend an average of five hours and 22 minutes a day staring into my phone. I love my son’s mind more than anything on Earth — the last thing I want is for it to turn out like mine.
I don’t know any parent who doesn’t try to improve the next generation, but at what point does that drive for improvement exist as a token of our own self-loathing? Cushing is right to ask whether the desire to keep kids screen free is best-practices wisdom or a manifestation of our own discomfort with our own screen addictions. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. (I’m told that my dad quit smoking at the news of my conception and impending arrival. Was that choice was inspired by his own discomfort with his tobacco habit or some new study about infants and secondhand smoke? I didn’t end up a smoker, but I nonetheless have my own vices that I developed without his modeling them for me.)
It makes me even more curious to see how the writers land things with Toy Story 5. Is there an emotionally satisfying answer to the conundrum? In Pixar we trust, I guess.
3. Freya India has been checking out Christianity, and her Gen-Z perspective on matters of faith and church remain invaluable for someone like me who’s been “in it” since age sixteen. Her concerns about “The Commodification Of Christianity” are valid, though in some ways, Christianity wasn’t less commercialized when I joined the party 25 years ago in a megachurch setting (see: Lifeway Christian bookstores). Still, the technology is different: apps and podcasts and YouTube channels present a different kind of commodification than the CDs and books and t-shirts of my youth, and Ms. India is on it with the problems this can cause:
Being new to Christianity, I can’t pretend it’s not convenient. I’ve never read the Bible all the way through but I have an app that summarises it for me, that texts me a passage every day. I use #Bible and Hallow and Glorify. And I’m sure this kind of thing has attracted more young people, that it helps to meet a generation where they are. But I don’t know, lately I’m beginning to feel as if Christianity has become another thing to do on my phone. Now I need my faith fast and convenient. I can pray as I go. I can stay prayed up. I’ve got a Streak going.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that using a prayer app is as bad as scrolling through TikTok. I just think this is only useful if you have been Christian for a while. If you were raised religious, if you already have a prayer routine and a habit of going to church, then the Hallow app is probably great! It’s an extra reminder to pray, an accessory to your spiritual life. But I don’t think this helps new Christians, especially not Gen Z Christians. The problem with religious apps is the same problem we have with Instagram communities or with online porn, we encounter the virtual version of everything first, before the real thing. And so that becomes our standard. Supplements become substitutes. For us, faith is the live-streams and prayer apps and podcasts. “Connect with God in a New Way,” we’re told. But what if this is our first way, the only way we have ever known, through apps and algorithms? […]
Of course I understand the intent. By far the most intimidating part of approaching faith, at least for me, is stepping into church as a complete outsider. So I get trying to make that easier, trying to encourage young people to dip their toes in first and start online. But after a while the real thing becomes even more daunting. There seems to be this paradox in modern life, we make things so convenient we assume they will happen more and more, but it’s almost as if they become too available, we start wondering what’s the point, we can’t be bothered. There’s always an easier way. There’s an Alpha course near my house but there’s also one on the App Store. I tell myself I’m watching the Sunday live-stream to get used to the idea of going to church, then I’ll actually go. But this is the trap, and trust me on this, if you are trying to reach a generation that has spent more time on screens than face-to-face with other human beings, do not make it any easier to do things inside.
In my fan-mail reply to this article, I would assure her that a) no apps are needed to be a Christian, b) many/most mature Christians aren’t using these apps, c) her concerns about forming the wrong habits are valid, and d) she would really benefit from downloading the free Mockingbird App, available for IOS and in alpha testing for Android right now. I kid, but she’s right to point out that the greater questions of tech and faith, of media and message, have yet to be resolved, but top minds are working on it! (See the final article linked below, as well as the New Yorker’s exploration of The Chosen’s success and its wider media impact).
4. In humor this week, the depths and riches of apology and public embarrassment were explored in McSweeney’s “Honey, I’m Sorry I Messed Up Our Moment on the Kiss Cam.”
I’m sorry I mouthed “That’s my sister!” and made a face like yuck while jerking my thumb at you, my loving wife of thirty-one years. I’m sorry I couldn’t look you in the eye and, instead, doubled-down and began talking loudly about our shared childhood, even though there is no audio on the kiss cam.
It only gets better from there. Other laughs this week: “I’ll Take This Costco Sample, but Only So I Can Make an Informed Purchasing Decision” is relatable, as is “Boomer Dad loses Asian restaurant privileges.” And if the skateboarding reflection above wasn’t enough to warm your nostalgia-addled heart, these “Relics of the Not-So-Distant Past” will do the trick. 
5. Humanism — so hot right now. Most critiques of the expected techno-future of VR, AI, individualism, consumerism, and robot labor ring the same alarm from most corners: it’s a future that is “not human,” which begs the follow-up question: “what is a human?” At the Hedgehog Review, David Polansky tries to pin down a kind of humanism that can inoculate society from a future of tech dominance. It’s not, he writes, humanism à la the positivism and optimism of the New Atheists, nor is it the development of humanistic political institutions. Instead, writes Polansky, there’s a cautious humanism that is grounded and realistic, and not faith averse, that scratches our intuitive itch:
In spite of that cautious tone and tentative method, however, certain recurring themes reveal themselves in the writings of these humanists. One of these is a portrait of humanity that neither idealizes nor denigrates its subject. The shift in perspective that places humans at the center of things did not entail the kind of quasi deification of man that one finds in the writings of later futurists or crude Nietzscheans such as Ayn Rand. More’s Utopia and Montaigne’s essays are replete with examples of how our passions and selfish interests delude us intellectually even as the imperfections and decay of our bodies betray us physically…
Related to this recognition of human nature as something various and only provisionally or imperfectly defined, Pico della Mirandola refers to the human as a “chameleon” and “a creature of indeterminate image.” Ours is not some stable essence; rather, we span a wide spectrum between the subhuman and the superhuman. He goes on: “Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.” One finds in these writers an understanding of human nature as something neither fixed nor entirely plastic in a way that does justice to real human experience.
At the same time, one of humanism’s core wagers is that man is not an infinitely malleable being but possesses a certain range of characteristic tendencies that cannot be regularly exceeded without their “snapping back” as it were. We cannot be pulled too far in the direction of transcendence without warping ourselves beyond recognition. So saints and Stoics are problematic models for us. But we also remain unsatisfied by purely reductive or animalistic accounts of what we are—as when the otherwise deeply cynical Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar realizes his ethical principles were real after all, or, even more, when the villainous Edmund in King Lear finds relief in a natural order that punishes his misdeeds in the end.
Finally, despite their insistence on the distinctiveness of human beings, these humanists nonetheless maintained a strong sense of our belonging in the world. An underlying premise of Enlightenment thought, which would guide so much of our activity during the past four centuries, was that we are in some essential way insufficient… Yet the humanists denied that we are less fitted for the world—whether physically or psychologically—than any other animal. What the early moderns saw as an inadequacy in need of correction and modernists saw as a source of despair, the cooler humanists simply treat as our natural condition.
To summarize: humans are neither animals nor gods. We exist in a range in between them, and the further we stretch ourselves toward being an animal or a god, the more likely we are to regress back to the mean. We are also sufficient to the needs of this life: we don’t need to transcend ourselves to thrive. It’s a good start, and the changing times are only going to invite more reflection in this direction, theologically or otherwise…
6. The last word this week goes to the big man in Rome himself. Leo XIV jumped into the AI debate with the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and apart from a few jaded tech bros telling the pontiff to stay in his lane, it’s been well received by most for its advocacy of the embodied, normal, human life. There’s a lot to reflect on in the letter, but Leo’s insights about human limitation — and the blessedness of that limitation — are about as countercultural as anything he writes about in the rest of the document. It would have been a fine essay in our “Love and Death” edition of The Mockingbird Magazine.
118. Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. The light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the “contingency” of the things of this world. While it is right to strive to alleviate the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude, knowing that “religious experience, and in particular Christian faith, propose that we live, without oversimplification, this ambivalence between human greatness and limitation, interpreting it in the light of our original and fundamental relationship with God.”
119. It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God. We see this at many moments when our limits become tangible: when we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord.
120. Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny or suppress it, but to integrate it. To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.
Strays
- Via recent NYC conference speaker Ryan Tinetti: “What is the Good News of the Ascension?“
- Over at Plough, Clare Coffey pegs Hildegard of Bingen as a medieval wellness influencer. Who knew she was into crystals?
- A follow up to that last article: “Pope Leo Schooled the Tech Bros on Tolkien”
- A new track from John Van Deusen featuring Jon Guerra? Yes please! (See vid above)
