Harnessing the Technology Within: Why Your Internal Capacities Are More Powerful Than Any App

We think of technology as something outside of us. What if the most sophisticated technology you have is already within you?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we’ve slowly handed over in our lives. It’s often not a single, dramatic moment where we decided to stop trusting ourselves.

It’s more of a slow series of small surrenders, each one feeling completely reasonable at the time.

Check the app. Follow the route. Read the summary. Ask the algorithm.

And somewhere in all of that convenience, something in us stopped getting used.

What We’ve Forgotten How to Do

A lot of things that were once common practices have vanished over time as modern gadgets have come in to replace them.

I don’t know how to look at the sun to measure time. I’m not sure I would know how to look at a physical map and know how to get somewhere. Unless I know an area well, I wouldn’t know how to get to someone’s house after going once.

We might look up a summary of a book rather than actually reading the book. Use our GPS when we’ve gone that way a hundred times. Look up reviews about a restaurant that looks good but want validation that it actually is good.

There are valid reasons for doing all of these things, but what do we lose in the process? What do we miss when we read someone else’s impressions of a book? When we don’t know the way around our own town? When we outsource our own judgements to the opinions of others?

Before the tools we have today, we could do all of the things I mentioned. Even though we have naturally strong internal capacities for something, it’s easier to lean towards a tool. And a lot of the time, the tradeoff might feel worth it. But at what cost?

This is the question I want to sit with. Not to argue that GPS is bad or that you should throw out your phone. But to look honestly at the exchange we’re making and whether we’re making it consciously.

What Technology Actually Is

I want to introduce an idea that may feel strange at first. Our internal capacities are a form of technology — what I’m going to call internal technology. All of the tools we create to interact with our world outside of ourselves are also a form of technology — what I call external technology.

Talking about internal vs. external technology is a strange concept in a world where we’ve come to understand technology as digital gadgets. But a quick search online will give you a variety of definitions for technology that don’t even mention iPhones or the Internet.

At its essence, all of the major dictionaries describe technology as the practical application of knowledge. To put it another way, we learn something — acquire knowledge — and then apply it in a certain direction.

I can give countless examples of technology throughout history that don’t look like our modern conception of technology. A major innovation was learning how to build fire, which removed the need for body heat management through movement and shelter-seeking alone. It enabled us to cook our food, which some people claim is a core trait that makes us human because it freed up our body from focusing so much on digestion and allowed us to reroute that energy to our brains.

We learned how to speak and communicate with each other using words. That’s a form of technology. Previously, we relied on nonverbal communication, gestures, and grunts, which is also technology. In the process of learning to speak, we lost the ability to read body language in the same way as we had to when we didn’t have words to express our intentions. Yet, speech unlocked a wealth of abilities to communicate, including storytelling and creative expression, that you simply cannot achieve with only gestures.

Beyond fire and speech, early humans created rudimentary tools to cut, which led to the ability to build homes and cultivate agriculture. The invention of the wheel during the Bronze Age led to the ability to travel greater distances and carry more things. The printing press allowed for ideas to get captured on paper at scale, rather than handwriting everything, transforming reading from an elite pastime to something the masses could do. The modern advances such as the telephone, radio, TV, and the internet made communication much easier and made our world smaller.

The broader human lineage dates back to over 6 million years ago. Each evolution of our species came from an advancement in technology. Most of that was internal technology — learning how to choose the right food to eat, speak, navigate, hunt, gather, defend, build, create. The shift toward external technology accelerated rapidly over time and slowly but surely began to replace a lot of our inherent internal technologies.

We’re in a time unlike any other because a much larger portion of society is not focused on survival. We now have ecosystems built for us so that we have much more free time than we ever had. The luxuries once reserved for the elite — worrying about food, water, and shelter — are now available to a much broader population. We’re freed up to explore interests and fill our time with activities not dependent on surviving. In this manner, our internal technologies are not as necessary anymore for our day to day lives. Now, we’re at a place as a society where we as individuals have the choice as to whether we’d like to invest in our internal technologies.

Internal vs. External Technology

Going back to the definition of technology as the practical application of knowledge, we can say that internal technology is applied knowledge within your body, mind, and soul. External technology can be thought of as applied knowledge in tools outside of yourself.

Internal technology is the innate abilities that we’re all born with. Some of us have different talents than others. However, we all have them. We all have basic human instincts. We all have intuition. We all have empathy. We all have feelings. The way we cultivate our connection to them varies. There’s the conscious decisions you make like calculating a tip or navigating a city. Then there’s your body’s technology: the wisdom of running itself every day, breathing, fighting off disease. All of these are internal technologies.

External technology is every form of technology that’s outside of us. Most of us think of it as digital: software, apps, platforms, AI tools, algorithms, social media, search engines, streaming services. But external technology is also physical including our devices and machines, vehicles, kitchen appliances, HVAC systems, power tools, computers. And then there are systems technologies, the invisible infrastructure we mostly ignore: the food supply, municipal water systems, factories, waste management, the electrical grid, roads, the postal system. We interact with all three categories every day, mostly without noticing.

I would argue that most external technologies that we have are capabilities we can do within. Yet, the external technologies can usually do something instantaneously and initially more reliably. Learning how to cook without following a recipe requires a lot of trial and error. Yet, when you experiment, make mistakes, and truly learn the relationships between ingredients, you become a master chef. Anyone can do it. They have to be okay with failure. And, as a society, we’re becoming less and less okay with failure.

The more we reach for the external tool that gets it right the first time, the more we quietly reinforce the belief that our own capacity — slower, messier, more uncertain — isn’t worth developing. We start to trust the tool more than we trust ourselves. And that gap widens without us ever deciding it should.

What We Lose in the Process

I had to work really hard in math throughout my education because it was an ability I had to work hard to cultivate. I’m grateful that I did, because I gained the ability to convert currency in my head, calculate distances, approximate whether I’m getting a good deal or not, and manage my finances.

My brother and I both played musical instruments in high school. His talent looked different than mine. He naturally had a better sense of rhythm and counting. He also had a great ear for hearing a song and being able to replicate it: play by ear. Those aspects frustrated me. I could read music with ease and once I heard how it was supposed to be played, I could get it quickly.

The point I’m trying to make is: I could teach myself to learn to play by ear. I actually really want to. It’s a skill I think is super cool. But it’s going to be harder and more frustrating for me than it was for my brother who naturally had a stronger capacity for it than me.

I probably could now get an AI tool to convert a song into sheet music for me, but in the process I would be losing the skill of learning to hear the notes and transform it into expression from my clarinet.

If I used a tool to generate music for me, I would be playing songs a lot quicker. But I wouldn’t have the experience of building the relationship between the music I hear and the music I play.

I wouldn’t be an adaptive musician at that point. I would be a musical robot: only able to play the notes given to me, but not able to create something new, improvise, or express.

A lot of external technologies have come in to help us. My parents talk about having the phone numbers of their friends memorized. Now we have contacts stored in our phones. Maybe that’s not a big deal, but I also wonder if it means we’re becoming less and less able to memorize information as more becomes available to us at the press of a screen.

We can send a text or email now for a conversation we don’t want to have in person. We lose interpersonal skills the more we interact through a screen. I remember having a horrible experience with this in middle school when instant messaging became a big thing. I was chatting with two of my friends and I played around with font sizes. One of my “friends” thought I was yelling at her, the other friend took her side, and they ganged up on me and cut me off from being their friend.

I observe more and more how uncomfortable people are becoming with IRL conversations. I’ve caught myself in this too.

For every internal capacity, there’s an external tool that can do it for us. These external tools feel faster, reliable, and lack the discomfort of getting it wrong. I’m not saying external technology is bad. Some external technologies genuinely save lives, like pacemakers. Those are innovations that have extended life.

However, I do invite you to consider which external technologies you use in your life that replace your internal technologies. When did you last do math in your head on purpose? When did you last sit with not knowing instead of Googling? When did you last drive somewhere without using your GPS?

Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it. Perhaps it’s not.