“I think at one level Ecclesiastes is always right,” Sasse answered. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
“We’re always wrestling with the same things, and we’re always tempted to build idol factories,” he said, “and [trying] to build a storehouse which says, ‘I can be independent. I don’t need to rely on God anymore. I don’t need to acknowledge the fact that I have finitude.’”
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“But I do think there is something unique that happens when we’ve got super tools in our pockets, right?” said Sasse, referencing previous remarks from Pratt about how Pratt and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, restrict their children’s screen time.
“There is something weird that happens when you take a super tool [that allows] our consciousness to escape the time and place where we actually live, and it creates a constant lusting in our souls,” Sasse said. “Middle-class Americans are the richest people [in] any time and place in all of human history. And yet this generation relative to the previous four is the first one who believes they have it much, much worse than people who’ve come before them.”
Some parts of modern American life are more difficult than they used to be, Sasse acknowledged, noting the difficulty people now have in purchasing a first-time home. But even with regard to that, “we all think we need a McMansion now,” he said. “And so the phones do create a sense of constant, limitless lust in our soul. The denominator keeps growing of what we expect is the normal experience.”
Sasse noted the loneliness and isolation people are dealing with and that money does not solve those problems. “You can have a lot more money and still have a lot less community. And it turns out more money doesn’t actually make you happier,” he said. “You need enough to not have your tummy hurt when you go to bed at night. But you really want thick community and breaking bread with people around you.”
Sasse also pointed out to Pratt that, because Pratt’s children will not have a problem with financial stability, the actor will “have to manufacture a sense that the grid of their work is necessary because everybody knows your bank account’s going to last a few generations if you want to do it that way.”
“So looking at this, can you imagine in your mind any solutions to some of the problems that we face?” Pratt asked. “I mean, I hear your first point that the answer is in God. Are there secular, governmental solutions to this that can exist outside of potentially, like a big, nationwide spiritual revival?”
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“I think the mediating institutions are a really important question that is not all the way to theological revival,” Sasse answered, “but is a lot more than just the secular tools of power.”
“And so I’ll start with family, but I think there are a bunch of small platoons,” he said, “which are about those local, thick communities where people learn what it’s like to actually have an expansive enough sense of self that you take joy when other people are thriving and you feel pain when they’re hurting.”
That pain comes, said Sasse, “not because somebody mandated you to do it, but just because you love them. Family is the placeholder for all other communities.”
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