This is a very generalized thought, and it probably won’t apply in all situations. If you could forgive my narrow focus, I’ll write it down.

When I think about the difference between an exciting story I would see when I would read a book or watch a movie and real life, I notice a difference in what technology we focus on.
I’m here to give a warning to technology’s possibility of taking over our lives with three key words: ease, flow, and strain.

In a situation where technology would take over, we would be putting our hope in technology rather than in what we could do. There is ease in going for something that is tried and true, but how does that affect the flow of what you do?

Imagine a story where characters go on an adventure to do something. Let’s say that the “something” is to save the world from an alien. When there’s a situation that big and desperate, I don’t think they’re going to be sitting back looking at their phones for entertainment. It’s as if their lives are already entertaining. Do they go in and say, let me go look at my social media before this alien comes and attacks? No, those brave souls go out and fight as if that is the one purpose their lives are for. They know what is important… and they go for it, even if it is not in their ease. They go for the flow of something important. Their life goal is their purpose… that is their entertainment. They don’t need to stop and think that their lives aren’t exciting, because their lives ARE exciting. They’re fighting battles with entities, they’re on a quest to win because they know that winning is the right thing to do.

Of course, I have to keep repeating that this isn’t every storyline. This is just a common storyline that I remember. Sometimes, the heroes are doing it to compete with other people or to gain a bigger status. In other words, they have more external motivators rather than internal motivation. But either way, they’re not going to sit back and watch entertainment. Their lives are their journeys.

In the flow of events, hard things come at them automatically. Maybe they want to go back to how it used to be when life seemed easy. Maybe they say, “I wish I could have something else happen, but I realize how important this thing is to me now.”

But in all of it, they live as if their previous life is over. They prioritize what they want to get to… a certain goal. They prioritize victory and their health and safety.

Watch out though, because in prioritizing health and safety, we can get stuck in a loophole. They want to make a balance between health and risks.

The ultimate question comes down to asking, “What is health for?” Maybe in their eyes, their health is to power up their life, to assist them to live a good life. If so, they’re going to have to balance that with taking risks if they want to save the world. Surely, to save the world might cause injury or death of a hero. But that’s what makes the hero the hero, isn’t it? The hero left the zone of safety to come save the world. The hero took a risk, even if it cost some aspect of health.

And in that, the story lit up, and the heroic person became a hero, through spending health. Yes, the heroes had to go through strain… there was a lot of effort put into something to get a great result. That’s no strange idea. We know that to get to our biggest goals, we have to put our biggest efforts.

I’m afraid that one of the things holding us back from having this great type of excitement these days is our technology. Our technology gives us a sense of safety. Sure, there are many dangers we can encounter with technology, but if we were to avoid those dangers and just consider technology with its positive goals, we could still have a problem.

Think about some of the uses of technology in that alien-fighting type of story I mentioned above. I could imagine a storyline where the heroes would have to take a spaceship to get to the planet to fight off some aliens, or something. Their technology is there to help them get to their goal. But their technology does not define them. That’s part of their rescue mission, it isn’t the rescue mission. It’s a journey that takes effort.

For many of us, using technology takes away a big deal of effort that could be used in making a good story. Going on a days long journey to find the enemy alien could make a good storyline, but to us, we can make a seconds-long pilgrimage to the refrigerator and the microwave to warm up a meal. We can make a hike up the mountain to the upstairs computer.

We can make a trek down to the car door. And that’s what our technology does for us… making things less difficult.

That’s what technology is supposed to do, right? It’s making our lives easier. But compare that to a storyline where characters are on another planet and have to go out and hunt for food. It takes more effort, but their food and the meaning behind it is much more purposeful. It’s for their survival, and since they’re the heroes, it’s for the survival of the entire generation.
And for the survival of the entire generation, that’s important.

What could that mean for us? Well, our daily things like taking care of health by our little habits are streamlined by technology. Think about what we would have to do without it. I don’t have to hike miles each day to get food. I have a refrigerator that stores food for me. I don’t have to take an incredible journey many miles to communicate with anyone. I can just dial a number on the phone, and I can connect. Things are so much easier.

Yet, with all of this technology, the world still has many problems. What’s going on? Perhaps in all the lack of hunting for food, we’ve become more hungry for something else: things like meaning, entertainment, and excitement. We’re confessing that our lives aren’t entertaining enough so we have to spend our money entertaining ourselves and making ourselves feel good. Sometimes, that comes at the cost of other people’s health and well-being.

Is that a good thing? That is life. Is life good? I was told that life is not just good but very good. It’s good to be alive. But for a life spent hunting for meaning, entertainment, and excitement, what can we do?

If we prioritize being healthy, especially emotionally and mentally healthy, there should be some point where we have a good supply of meaning, entertainment, and excitement. We should find a way to find peace.

We do have an exciting story waiting for us. One story I’m seeing is that the world is so demanding, and we’re here to be heroes that can take back peace. It’s like an alien, the technology, came and took over, with the illusion that life would be better, when in reality, it made things more complicated. Sure, in this case, it wouldn’t work to just get rid of the aliens completely, so we would work to bring back what they took from us… peace.

Speaking of demands, we have so much noise… so much stimulation… so much access… so much flood. And one of the things that we can do is try to find peace… peace from devices, peace from social media, peace from the overwhelming complexities of technology.

If you don’t keep up with technology, you might feel like you’ll fall behind the rest of the world. Some might be necessary for you, but we don’t have time for it all. There’s an illusion that we all have to keep up with instant social media communication. Well, if you keep keeping up with the constant information being pounded out on the internet, you could be overwhelmed. If you don’t keep up, you could be missing out. It’s going to end up feeling horrible either way, because in some of it, you will be losing your peace.

I definitely can’t keep up with all of the media stuff. That’s because I’m here typing up a set of thoughts. Look, I’m trying to find the way to peace. Don’t worry about falling behind and lacking. I have you in mind because I am that type of person, and the aura that my motives stand for will be watching out for you. Don’t worry about it!

When I sit down with a laptop, the weight of the world (in the form of the internet) gets pushed onto my lap. That’s a lot to handle. Where is my peace?

There’s an ease of access. There’s a flow of habits and information. There’s a strain on my eyes.
It’s something that I do day after day, but is it really helping me to make my life more exciting? If I’m working toward a particularly important goal, it seems like a good idea. If I don’t have a particularly meaningful goal in mind, it feels worthless.

But based on what I’ve just put down, I realize that an exciting Internal Experience revolves around meaning, excitement, and entertainment. These are the things that I long for. How am I going to get there?

That’s the question that I try to answer through all of the Internal Experience notes. I can’t wrap it up in one paragraph or even in one page. It’s just idea after idea, building progress, toward some unspeakable conclusion. The reason it is unspeakable is because it’s very multifaceted and complex.

Help me get to some conclusion by reading onward… to the part where I start mentioning God and everything seems a lot more confusing.