AI ain't the problem

On technology, addiction, and the spiritual crisis of never arriving

As the dawn of another technical era of advancement is upon us, I feel continually compelled, as I have been over the last decade, to assess what fruit is growing on the trees of the technology I choose to apply to my life. It might be ironic, indeed it is likely tragic, that the more we surround ourselves with devices designed to save time and make life more efficient, the less time we seem to possess.

The anxiety of time, the crippling nature of busyness, and the chaos of an overscheduled life are not being solved by AI bots and apps. Every day in my office I witness the disease of promised efficiency continuing to sink its fangs into the already overworked. Yes, we may be granted more time, but for the masses, the time we are given is filled with an even greater expectation to produce and accomplish more. The standard of production only continues to rise.

I work a good bit with folks who struggle with substance abuse. It’s not unusual for me to hear sarcastic and negative commentary about addicts who just can’t seem to stop returning to their vice. And yet, when provided with an extra few hours, or even a day in their life, the common man can’t seem to exist without jonesing for, if not fully engaging in, their addiction to production and busyness.

While I think the tech itself absolutely deserves critique, the modern distress in the technological age is not exclusively the fault of the powers that be. It is easy to scapegoat social media and cell phones for our inability to be present in our own lives. Yet the reality is that we have significantly more control over how we respond to the powers that be than we do over those powers themselves, or over what they create and advance next. We can choose to panic over the continued advancements of tech, or we can choose to lean inward and consider what it is within us that cannot seem to respond to these advancements in a more holistic way.

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We move faster than any generation in human history. Information arrives instantly. Communication is immediate. Work follows us home in our pockets. We work, and overwork at a continuous, unrelenting pace. Of course this is not new. This is how we have been existing, over and over, with great momentum. Thomas Merton names this when he writes, “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.” The homie wrote that in 1966.

More tech, providing us more time and space is clearly not the answer. The violence Merton warned us of still persists. We can blame whatever tech we want, but the disease simmers much deeper than the enemy we try to blame our ailments on. Merton, and the many contemplatives before and after him, also seem to be able to name the issue at hand and offer us a holistic path forward. One that we can carry with us, well beyond whatever evolutions of technology continue to persist as we know they will.

The true crisis of our age is not that we do not have enough time, it is that we have forgotten, and for many have never known, how to encounter reality directly. We have developed a belief in arrival and destination that has quietly poisoned our collective soul. Our inability to meet reality in the present moment has produced a longing to work and achieve our way toward the place we believe we are trying to reach.

We live inside a kind of modern spiritual imagination that treats life as a problem to be solved and then transcended. Happiness becomes a horizon line that always shifts forward. Even God, for many, is relocated into the future tense, as something we will finally encounter once we have become enough, healed enough, disciplined enough, successful enough.

We begin to construct pathways of arrival that we convince ourselves will become the foundation of contentment. If I can just earn this amount of money. If I can just lose this weight. If I can just get sober enough. If I can just fix what is broken, then I will arrive. And beneath all of it is the quiet assumption that where I am is not yet life, and who I am is not yet enough to meet it.

Much of contemporary spirituality, even in its more progressive or therapeutic forms, still subtly reinforces this false narrative of becoming. It speaks of healing, growth, alignment, and expansion, yet can still smuggle in the same underlying premise: that presence is something we graduate into, rather than something we awaken to. We turn awakening itself into another achievement, another stage on the ladder of arrival.

Thus, whenever we can efficiently or more impactfully construct a path to wherever we long to arrive, we will take advantage of it. If God, love, or life is something to be achieved, then we must spend every waking moment getting from here to there. Any waking moment not working is a moment wasted, revealing our inability to leverage the space and time we could be afforded to have.

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The actual poison here is not the technology that distracts us. It is the belief systems we have built our lives upon that tell us we must arrive at a particular place. It is the theology, spiritual frameworks, and discipleship pathways that have formed us to believe that God, holiness, and goodness are somewhere out there, rather than right here.

But we would rather point the issue outside of ourselves rather than within, because it is much easier to blame external reality for our inner turmoil than it is to take the longer, more demanding journey inward.

But the deeper invitation, the one echoed across contemplative traditions, is not progress but presence. Not escape from reality, but the courage to finally meet it without mediation. We skim. We scroll. We consume. We react. But we rarely behold. We have never learned to sit in communion. With ourselves, with one another, and especially with God.

This is why contemplation is not merely a spiritual practice among other spiritual practices. It is an act of resistance. Perhaps one of the last acts of resistance still available to us in the modern age.

To become contemplative is to refuse the tyranny of constant stimulation. It is to reject the assumption that a meaningful life can be assembled from endless inputs and endless activity. It is to challenge the modern myth that our value is determined by our usefulness or our arrival. To be contemplative is to believe that we are the beloved right here in this moment, even if we didn’t achieve one additional task.

I don’t think we are victims to the way technology can capture our attention as much as we often claim. We are victims, more deeply, to our inability to sit still without something filling our space. We are victims to a theology that tells us we must be busy in all things in order to earn our worth and satisfaction. We are victims to a society that measures worth by what is done and consumed, rather than who we are on the inside.

Technology is simply the common person’s heroin, numbing us from the pain of not knowing who we are in the silence. We want to pin modern tech as the disease, when in reality it is the drug numbing us away from our inner exile.

You can complain about data centers or about how scrolling has been engineered to keep us addicted, but what might it look like to let go of the landscape evolving at rates we cannot control, even for a moment, and see what it might look like to liberate yourself from the system?

Until we can retrain our inner world for contentment beyond accomplishment and the constant need for action, we will remain tethered to the tech.

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The issue at hand is as old as time. As long as we believe our arrival is anywhere but here, we will remain addicted to the hustle. And as long as we are addicted to the hustle, our addictions will persist, especially the ones that keep us doing more and more and more, filling every gap with production over presence.

Eve believed it was in the fruit, that if she could just reach for that extra knowledge, then she would be complete. Leaders, ancient and new, have believed it is found in conquest, in land, in political power. In the modern age we believe it is in the next promotion, the next achievement, the next accumulation of net worth. Much of spiritual life can fall into the same pattern, oriented toward a life beyond this one rather than the life already here.

While the issue is ancient, so too is the solution. It begins with a shift in consciousness from a spirituality of arrival to a spirituality of presence, one that learns to see God, heaven, and wholeness not as destinations to reach, but as realities to be encountered here, in this moment, as it is.

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The deeper invitation, then, is not to reject technology, nor to romanticize a pre-digital past, but to see more clearly what has always been at stake beneath every age of acceleration. The tools change, but the human tendency remains: to live as though life is elsewhere, just ahead of us, just beyond our current capacity, just beyond this moment. When we believe this, we will use whatever tool is available to bridge the imagined gap, whether it is a piece of fruit or a large language model, always trying to fill the distance we feel within ourselves.

Technology, in this sense, is not the root problem. It is a mirror held up to a deeper restlessness. It amplifies what is already present within us. If there is anxiety, it accelerates it. If there is hunger for distraction, it provides an endless feed. If there is a belief that worth must be earned through production, it offers infinite opportunity to produce. The machine is not simply shaping us. It is revealing us.

And so the question is not ultimately what we will do with technology, but what kind of inner life we are cultivating while we use it. Because no external system, no matter how advanced or addictive, can fully account for a person who has learned to remain present to their own existence. The real spiritual crisis is not new technology. It is attentional exile. We are estranged from the present moment, and therefore estranged from ourselves.

The contemplative path is not an escape from the modern world but a return to it. The contemplative sees what the hurried mind cannot: that reality is not delayed, that God is not deferred, that life is not withheld until we finally become enough. Contemplation is the practice of learning to see what is here, as it is, in all areas of life, and to discover that what we are seeking has never been absent.

The freedom available here is the freedom of noticing. The freedom of returning. The freedom of choosing presence. We can go to war with the many forms of escape we use to avoid the present moment, or we can do the deeper work of learning how to stay, how to be with what is, and in that staying, rediscover love itself as immediacy rather than destination.

The machines, technologies, and tools of escape will continue to evolve. The pace will increase, and the noise will not go away. But beneath it all, we can learn to stand still. Not in withdrawal, but in wakefulness. Awake to who we are beyond the constant pursuit of proving our worth, beyond the restless attempt to arrive elsewhere.

And when we slow down enough to truly see, we begin to recognize what the contemplatives have always pointed toward: that the divine is not waiting at the end of striving, but is already here, woven into the fabric of this moment. And in that recognition, even efficiency can be redeemed, no longer a tool for escape into more doing, but a means of freeing space for more being.