Saving The Soul Of Technology

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
— Anaïs Nin

We so rarely feel our souls, but mine awoke on December 17, 2020. It awoke with a splash of cold water to the face, slapped by death’s stinging needles. I got a call from my anguished parents. “Devon is dead.” Vacation was interrupted. Life was interrupted.

My brother died in a car accident. Life’s meaning was rudely awoken. The meaninglessness of everything that we live for every day was unzipped like a big plastic cartoon costume. Inside, I found the small throbbing goop that was my tender self, “the part that’s uniquely me.” My soul.

Death has a way of reminding us of “what matters.” The closer it is to us, the more it reminds us. Does it have to take death to make us live? Perhaps, because for me the answer was yes. My question to my brother is constantly: “How can I keep that within me?” “Keep me alive, Devon.”

Sometimes it feels as if I am answering the same prayer from him to me. Keep me alive, Matt.

As strange as it sounds, his answer to me is so often, movement. Do as he did. Work out. I do my versions. Yoga. Running. Dancing. I find my soul in movement. I find my soul in stillness. In meditation, in prayer, in retreat. I find it in union, in chanting to a song along with a crowd of ten thousand, in looking into my wife’s eyes on a beautiful day, in reading with my son sitting in my lap, in laughing with friends. I find it in church, and in the books that remind me of the soul.

One of those books is The Artist’s Way. It is about the act of creating. My soul comes bubbling to the surface in my ideas, in my visioneering, in imagining all of the things that I could make. Everyone has their version. Inspiration. Creativity. The brush strokes of ideas made real.

The Artist’s Way says, “there is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life - including ourselves.” It describes the act of making as “a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator.” Another book on the act of creation, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, imagines ideas as their own form of souls whose only purpose is to be made real. They bounce around the world seeking someone to manifest them. “The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.” The creative process is our souls connecting to something outside of ourselves, helping it emerge into the world.

The Talmud says that “every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘grow, grow.’” We all have the angels of creation bending over us urging us to whisper to our ideas, “grow, grow”. I found that, as my ideas grow, my soul grows. The creative act is my soul opening as it releases light into the cosmos.

This is why Endless is all about kindling creativity. Because it is about bringing forth our light.

The Heavy Internet
The internet seems to subdue each of these sources of our soul.

Elon Musk tweeted "Instagram makes people depressed & Twitter makes people angry. Which is better?" Why does it have to be a choice between these two things? Why can’t we have a digital home that makes us feel happy, creative, inspired, that gets us into a collaborative, connected state of flow? Why have we given up the hope that this is possible? If the best we can do is choose between depressed and angry, what’s the point of all of this technology? Technology today is digital fentanyl, so pleasurable, so numbing, and so often soul-destroying.

A belly laugh with a friend is replaced by a “like”. Maybe an emoji or comment if you really care. A longing look into the eyes of a loved one is replaced by a swipe to the right. There is so much digital temptation. It isn’t just in the form of porn or the clickbait that consumes countless hours of our week if we let it. It is in every ad, every recommended video that tells us “look over here, you could be doing this,” or that seeds us with doubt, chipping away at our self-confidence. “You could look like this,” or, “this is what greatness really is, because it isn’t you.”

Is it just me that feels this way?

When I showed my wife that sentence, “is it just me”, my wife pointed me to a video called, Are You Lost In The World Like Me? It’s an old original Disney-style animation of a little boy walking around watching a world full of people living vacant existences, side by side, in their smartphones. An entire society for whom companionship, fluffy and lively and loving, has been replaced by digital. Digital dating. Digital self-esteem. Digital expositions of the beautiful digital lives they live. Everyone, ensnared by the glow of their screens. “Connected” yet profoundly alone, adrift. It starts with a row of people staring at their screen, falling into a manhole. It closes with a scene of swarms of people staring at their phone walking towards a cliff.

Are You Lost In The World Like Me? I guess I am not alone.

Everyone wants to think that they are the little superhero of that short film, but we are not. When we are numb to our souls, we make decisions that shatter glass across the most precious parts of our lives and we are left picking up the pieces. The stakes are so high. They are our life.

Where is the internet that starts to strengthen the voice inside of us, that helps us say, “This, this is me.” Where is the call to come as we are, the nudge to find our voice, and the handholding to put our hands on a pen and start drawing, literally making, manifesting our inner selves?

The Tree of Life
I had a dream in which I climbed to the top of a cliff and I could see a beautiful tree. It was the Tree of Life. It glimmered with beauty, values, goodness, truth, god. The tree was atop a cliff. There was a city below. When I looked back, there was a tower in between the city and this tree. A concrete and cold tower that stood between the tree and the city below. Somehow I knew that the tower represented Google. The people in the city could not see the tree of life anymore. The tower was blocking it.

My dream spoke to this and so much more. Articulating my dream in a few words feels like I’m putting a few brush strokes on a painting that is infinitely deep. But at its core, it’s quite simple. We are all blocked from seeing our tree of life by the great contraption of the millions of pixels in front of our eyes and the billions of nodes that so magnificently show us whatever we want to see, but that occludes from us the most important thing: the magnificent light inside of us.

I cannot imagine the sadness of a future in which there is never again a society that is not blocked by the Great Tower of Google. I woke up and meditated. What can I do about it?

I got my answer later that day when I had a call with a good friend of mine in China. Both of us have gone through our own tech burnout path and we were calling to catch up. She has walked down a profoundly spiritual, almost monk-like, path. So I asked her. She closed her eyes. I did not expect an answer, but this dream turned into hope the moment her eyes opened.

“I imagined that tower, which today is cold and concrete and soulless, in the future flourishing with the greenery of foliage, with great trees and plants bursting from it.”

What if the soul of the tree behind the tower were to grow into it, to wrap itself around the tower? To embody it. If every person’s soul were to come alive in a piece of greenery, a plant, a tree, or a flower, bursting forth from this tower, enshrining it. What a beautiful tower that would be. That would require that everyone find their voice, their way of contributing to and growing it.

I feel odd writing about such a dream. And yet it is my soul bubbling up into my consciousness, and those bubbles reflect the way that I think about what I am doing with my life. To the degree that you ever touch a product that has my fingerprints on it, I want to tell you why I am doing it.

The vision of the trees of life wrapping themselves around the towers of technology can be real. If the pixels in front of us cultivate the light within us, the towers will grow over with each of our verdant, shining selves. We are trying to do that with Endless Studios. We are trying to urge the tower to grow over, to consume the sterile concrete beneath, covering it with our creative souls.

When I write that in the game we’re building, “players will fight to defend the soul of technology,” I mean it very deeply. Technology is shaping our souls, one by one, like dominos tipping. We, collectively, are the soul of society. What will the soul of society look like in a few decades?

The answer will have something to do with what technology looks like tomorrow.