What is Man, that Google (or Meta, Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT) is Mindful of Him?
by Bishop William Joensen | March 30, 2026
It is increasingly difficult to find folks who have a holistic regard for the human condition. In fact, social trending is toward a much more reductive view of human identity, dissociating body and soul, the physical and intellectual aspects of our personhood. Big Tech giants like Google, Meta, and the wave of new AI kids on the block break us down into a bundle of subjective desires and data that are gauged and goaded by algorithmic prompts.
They trace our “allergic” reactions to certain political views and beliefs and steer us in polar opposite directions, fueling our appetites for experiences that have at best a remote purchase on reality. They export their own skewed sense of human nature and reduce us to a collection of parts that never quite hang together, since there is no regard for an original author or goal of our striving that might integrate our hearts and hopes, our thoughts and our yearnings.
The perennial question of the Psalmist, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:5), turns us outward to the God who alone can reveal us to ourselves. In contrast, Big Tech would leave us literally to our own devices. We become accomplices who drain life of mystery, doom-scroll ourselves into a stupor, and introduce a more acute host of existential problems: isolation, loneliness, depression, addiction, anomie, disgust at ourselves and at life in general.
We risk remaining stuck as mere apprentices of our own happiness, technicians of misery, rather than becoming collaborative artists who ponder patiently, who labor diligently, and then bring the beauty of the human condition to light. We can abdicate our own Olympian potentials to become agents who make a difference in the world, who do not deny or falsify reality but shape it in such way that it can be shared with others for our mutual flourishing. A healthier regard for human nature is able to take delight in contemplative moments where we discover meanings that draw us closer to one another in natural respect, friendship, and Spirit-led solidarity.
These observations are hardly original; they follow on the heels of modernity and have elicited stacks of commentary. But the claims I relate here represent a personal distillation and summary of Christine Rosen’s astute analysis in her book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen is a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
I won’t supply a serial analysis of Rosen’s claims, but we may be inclined to sustain our Lenten disciplines through Easter and beyond (which might well include periodic fasting from technology, more moments lingering in prayer, and sustained acts of charity where the only ignorance of self is when our left hand does not keep track of what our right hand is doing). In complementary fashion, Rosen affirms forms of experience that might cut across the grain of our sensibilities. She suggests we try to lean into rather than flee the experience of boredom and its prospective outcomes: greater patience and the ability to daydream.
The cranky 19th-century writer Ambrose Bierce “once described patience as ‘a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue’” (Extinction, p. 90). But in contrast to the coping mechanism at the onset of boredom to reach for our phones, Rosen asks, “Might boredom have a purpose?” She cites the clinical psychologist and boredom researcher Dr. John Eastwood of York University, who notes our propensity to be passively entertained: “We have changed our understanding of the human condition as one of a vessel that needs to be filled” (pp. 94-95).
Absent habits of self-regulation, we gorge ourselves on information so that we don’t have to cope with boredom—in fact, we feel entitled never to experience boredom. We reduce our capacity to devote our undivided attention to people and objects, where we would allow them to elicit our patience, generosity and empathy.
Further (and though it is even hard for this former classroom teacher to swallow!), boredom can be a precondition for daydreaming, where new creative, constructive ideas surface—the “aha!” moments upon which scientific breakthroughs and artistic insights depend. The farmer and the Iowa cyclist can appreciate the counsel of the English poet William Wordsworth, who believed that one moment can give more than 500 hours of reason, and that we should make our way “voluptuously” through rural fields, asking “no record of the hours given up to vacant musing.”
Such a disposition is neither lazy nor useless; it is a cultivation of the future akin to the freedom found in monastic silence. For as Thomas Merton advises, “It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard.” Silent anticipation awaiting the voice of God is a joyful affair, which is a very different form of flow and pleasure than that derived from endless clicks (see Rosen 99-101).
“Harvard art historian Jennifer L. Roberts makes her students spend three hours examining a single painting or work of art before they attempt to analyze it.” Roberts maintains, “Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean you have seen it.” She “believes patience is crucial for navigating the modern world.” “Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that controls us. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment. Perhaps patience is power” (Rosen, p. 156).
I’m still working on cultivating such patience in the face of situations where I do not feel I have much control. Ironically, one situation occurred a few months ago when after five years, I decided it was time to upgrade my mobile phone. In the store where I checked in to see a customer service agent, I was listed as fourth in line. “Not bad,” I thought—until after two-and-a-half hours of standing in place, I still had yet to be attended. It took me a while, but any pending sense of boredom yielded to daydreaming. Where could my mind go? To refugees spending 20 years in camps awaiting resettlement? To infertile couples longing for years to conceive a child? To my Mom, who at 93 years of age in her semi-paralyzed condition following a stroke three years ago, spends day and night in the same recliner, tended by home aides and my brother David?
And one can dream of Jesus, whose three hours on the cross would have been an eternity for us. But this long-suffering servant, whose patience corresponds with the mercy that forgives those who “know not what they do,” reveals the deeper truth of our humanity. It is a truth intuited by the same Psalmist who poses to God the question of how God regards us, and then answers his own question, “You have made him little less than a god, crowned him with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:6).