Can an App Actually Help You Be More Human?

For ten years I have watched the same thing happen in my office, and it never announces itself as the problem. Someone sits down to tell me about a grief, a marriage, a fear with a shape — and underneath the story there is a second affliction they never name, because it doesn’t feel like affliction. It feels like ordinary life. They cannot stay with anything. The hand moves to the phone before the mind has decided — the way a drowning man reaches for the surface. Not a choice. A reflex against the unbearable experience of being alone with themselves.

You already know this is happening to you. You can feel that the thing in your pocket is forming you against your own will, teaching you to want things you never chose to want. And you are right to be suspicious of what comes next — because what comes next is almost always another app. An “AI,” even. One more glowing rectangle promising to fix what the glowing rectangles did.

Let me tell you why I built one anyway.

When Israel finally walked out of Egypt, they did not leave empty-handed. They left wearing Egypt’s gold — they “asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold,” the book of Exodus says, “and so they plundered the Egyptians.” They carried the wealth of their captivity into the desert. And that same gold became two different things. At the foot of the mountain, while Moses was away, some of it was melted into a calf, and they fell down and worshipped it. And some of it — the very same metal — was beaten into the Ark and the furnishings of the Tabernacle, the place where God came down to dwell with them.

The gold was never the problem. The difference between the calf and the Tabernacle was not the metal. It was what the people knelt to.

The screen is the gold of our Egypt. We are not going to put it down — that exodus is not on the table for most of us, with our work and our families and our whole lives now living inside the thing. The question was never whether we would carry it out with us. The question is what we will beat it into.

What the feed is really doing

The feed is not wasting your time. I wish it were only that. It is catechizing you. Every scroll is a small liturgy, and a liturgy forms what you love. The old monks had a name for the restlessness that makes a soul unable to stay — acedia, the noonday demon — and we have built an entire economy on it and called it engagement.

Attention is not a neutral resource. It is the faculty by which you love. You cannot love a God you will not turn toward, or a person you will not look at. What holds your attention is deciding, slowly and without your permission, who you become. There are buildings full of brilliant people whose whole work is to take that faculty from you and sell it. I am not angry at them. I am only no longer willing to hand it over without a fight.

The oldest attention practice we have

Long before anyone measured screen time, the Church already had a tool for watching where a soul’s attention had gone. The examination of conscience. The Ignatian examen — that quiet walk back through your day, asking where love was present and where you turned away.

It is the original attention practice. To examine your conscience is to ask the one question the feed will never let you ask: where did my attention actually go today, and who was I becoming through it?

So I built one

So I built a small thing, and I gave it a name I almost couldn’t stand to use. Examen AI.

It does three things, and none of them want anything from you. It will walk you, gently and honestly, through an examination of conscience to prepare for confession — through the seven capital sins or the Ten Commandments, with a short guide for when you kneel down and have forgotten how to begin, and an Act of Contrition when the words won’t come. It will pray a nightly examen with you. And it carries the Attention Examen, the thirty-day practice I wrote, now made daily and alive: each evening it watches with you where your attention went and who formed you through it, then hands you back a written reflection drawn from your own words. Not a score. Not a verdict. A mirror.

Here is the part that matters most, and the part that makes it strange. Every other app you have ever opened sends what you type somewhere — to a server, a model, a profile with your name on it. This one sends nothing. Nothing you write ever leaves your phone. No account, no login, no one watching.

For an examination of conscience, that is not a feature. It is the seal. What you bring before God in the quiet of your own soul was never meant to be uploaded. An AI that refuses to harvest you turns out to be the strangest thing you can build right now — a piece of Egypt’s gold, beaten the other way.

The calf and the Tabernacle were the same gold. They always were. The difference was only ever what the people fell down before.

The thing in your pocket will keep asking you to kneel. This is one small attempt to turn a little of that gold back toward the only One worth kneeling to — and to hand it to you, to see what you’ll make of it.

If you’d like to try it, it lives here: drseantobin.github.io/examen. It works on any phone — open it and add it to your home screen like any app. The examination of conscience, the confession guide, and the nightly examen are free. The full thirty-day “Attention Examen” is available to unlock, while the first three days are open so you can feel what it asks of you before you decide. And if ten dollars is what stands between you and it, write to me — no one should be kept from this by the price.

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