Why I Don’t Own a Microwave
Here’s a familiar scene that plays out in our household…
Friends are over for dinner. Everyone is milling about the kitchen, prepping food, grabbing glasses, heating up tortillas (because, tacos, obviously), talking.
Someone scans our kitchen, pauses, then asks: Wait, where’s your microwave? You don’t have one?
We don’t have one.
Why?
We just don’t.
They process for a second. Sometimes there’s a followup question: How do you live without one?
It’s not that hard!
Other times a full-on intervention ensues.
Case in point: once we hosted a movie night in our backyard, and a friend actually brought her own microwave to our house, so she could heat up the nacho cheese! Afterwards, she offered to leave her microwave at our house. [1]
So why doesn’t my family own a microwave? (Hear me out, I promise this is going somewhere!)
The Backstory
The first reason is, it wasn't really intentional. [2]
We've moved several times in the last five years, and somewhere along the way, we ditched our microwave. Our current house, built in 1958, has a tiny galley kitchen with limited counter space, which is always cluttered with drying dishes (we don’t have a dishwasher either).
Reason #2: Emily has always been a bit squirrelly about microwaves. Far from a paranoid Luddite, she’s just never been a microwave user, and doesn’t mind spending a few extra minutes preparing food.
I admit, while scientifically fascinating一the magnetron, vibrating water molecules in food, etc一she’s onto something. The ability to heat up food in 30 seconds is cool, I guess, but what sort of nuclear voodoo is needed to make that happen? [3]
The fact that people refer to "nuking" food in the microwave isn’t reassuring.
I mean, why is it assumed that a tacky eggshell-colored box, with all its buzzing and beeping, and its stale odor that reminds you what you ate three days ago, belongs in our home?
Over time, our microwave-less existence一which began incidentally as we purged appliances mid-move一has slowly grown into a conviction.
It's funny, the more people pester you about something, the more you dig your heels in.
Convenience: A Venerated Virtue
For me, the microwave’s popularity comes down to one word: convenience.
That’s what if offers, plain and simple. Press a few buttons, and your kitchen transforms into a fast food joint, minus the drive-thru line or the indifferent twentysomething worker who always shorts you an item.
Convenience isn’t inherently evil. It would be hypocritical to decry the blissful realities technology makes possible一just today I drove a car, heated up tea in an electric kettle, typed on a laptop (cell phone beside me on the desk), flipped on the lights, and adjusted the heater temp, which now hums quietly in the background.
But convenience has become an untested assumption. If it’s easier, faster, less work, it must be better.
And yet, as technological advancement increases, so do rates of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and dissatisfaction. For all the ease our gizmos promise, we don’t seem to be “at ease.”
Convenience Is Not Always Beneficial
Convenience, while making it easier to live, sometimes makes it harder to live well.
See if this irony grabs you too:
Even though microwaves are the fastest option, when I use them I’m less patient than when I use an oven or stove. I find myself fidgeting, pacing, evil-eyeing that countdown, which一although mere seconds一feels like an unjust eternity.
Why is this taking forever?!
An appliance intended to save time makes me feel like I have no time.
John Mark Comer writes: “In spite of smartphones and programmable coffee pots and laundry machines and toasters, most of us feel like we have less time, not more.” [4]
This is the shaping power of technology: it conditions our expectations and reorients our routines, for better or worse.
Technology…
Doesn’t just change our lifestyles; it changes us in the process.
Saves time, but also resizes our patience threshold.
Empowers us to do more, without asking if we should do more, or to what extent.
Forecasts a better future, never considering what may be lost in the rear view.
The point isn’t to eye all technological innovation suspiciously. Most of us are thrilled when a new gadget contributes to our efficiency and creativity. Truth be told, we’re counting down the days until we finally get a dishwasher!
The point is to weigh the pros and cons, to intentionally look beyond the marketers pulling the strings of your hearts and desires, and to discern how it’s affecting you.
Few of us take the time to ask questions. Neil Postman, one of my favorite writers on technology, sums it up well:
Technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences. It is the kind of friend that asks for trust and obedience, which most people are inclined to give because its gifts are truly bountiful. But, of course, there is a dark side to this friend. It’s gifts are not without a heavy cost… It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that. [5]
Technology: burden and blessing.
Be assured, you will hear more in our consumerist world about the blessings. Those evaluating the burdens will be written off as technophobes who slow down progress.
Convenience, while making it easier to live, sometimes makes it harder to live well.
So on one hand, this whole diatribe about microwaves may seem pointless: Give me a break, it’s just a kitchen appliance.
But on the other hand, it’s exactly what Postman suggests: it’s especially those technologies that are wholesale embraced by the masses that demand our most precise discernment.
Roll your eyes if you must, so long as your eyes are open.
Convenience Is Not Always More Enjoyable
Another promise of convenience, besides efficiency, is enjoyment.
Thus, the microwave, as it nukes your dinner in T-minus 60 seconds, allows you to enjoy meals more because you didn’t slave away in the kitchen, right?
As a thought experiment, let’s contrast the experience of cooking with an oven vs. cooking with a microwave:
When you open an oven, you breathe in deeply, inhaling the aroma of warm cookies, baking pizza, or rising cinnamon rolls. When you open a microwave, you hold your breath.
When you cook in an oven, food slowly warms, crisps, bubbles, melts. In a microwave, food spatters, pops, hisses, and vacillates unpredictably between icy and molten.
You check periodically on food in an oven, eager to see the cooking progress. With a microwave, you cautiously open the door, praying the contents didn’t splatter the walls [6].
We tell children not to touch ovens because they’re hot. We order them to stand back from microwaves so their brains don’t fry.
Part II
Part two of our thought experiment: here’s a few sentences you will never hear:
Gordon Ramsey instructing Master Chef contestants to “microwave the food.” [7]
Anyone ever: “This tastes so much better cooked in the microwave!”
A restaurant menu: “Proudly serving 100% microwaved food.”
Someone (maybe grandma) who slaved for hours to create a home-cooked meal: “Dear family, this bounty before you was nuked with love for your enjoyment. Bon appétit!”
It’s no secret that the frozen, made-for-the-microwave food isle offers the lowest-grade food available一packed with preservatives and freezer burn.
Exhibit A: Hungry Man Frozen Dinners.
Sadly, it’s the young and old in society who fall prey to unhealthy frozen meals most often.
We satiate cranky kids with personal-size, zappable pizzas and Kraft Easy Mac, while the Greatest Generation, who grew up cooking from scratch and spent their lifetime building a recipe repertoire, settle in their final years for TV dinners.
It’s a sad ending to a lifetime of savoring. They deserve better. [8]
Call me crazy, but I’m totally ok that my kids prefer things like zucchini or real ice cream rather than Shrek-shaped nuggets and “swamp pudding” that promises to turn their tongues green.
Anyone with me?
Sometimes, instead of increasing enjoyment, convenience kills it. Sometimes slower is better. Convenience isn’t always king.
Keeping Convenience In Check
Rather than speed and ease, sometimes enjoyment rests on things like:
Waiting
Taking the slightly longer way (not the shortcut)
Doing something the harder way (not the fastest way)
Researching how to fix something yourself (not hiring a professional)
Again, convenience isn’t the enemy. It’s something to steward, not demonize.
But without exception…
Unless you intentionally (and counterculturally) push back on the constant creep of convenience一weighing the burdens and blessings of the technology in your life一your thoughts, habits, and desires are being molded by a dollar-driven, character-deforming technopoly. [9]
For you, that might have nothing to do with microwaves. That’s fine, I won’t judge you. [10]
We may disagree on which technologies are worthwhile, but discernment somewhere is the goal. For us, not having a microwave is a low-cost, simple reminder that we can do without and be just fine.
Stuff is not just stuff. Technology is not neutral. It’s easy to assume devices exist to serve us, and while that’s true, they also shape us—especially when we utilize them daily. We become like the things that fill our lives.
That’s why, in the Shema (the foundational prayer that ancient Jews recited multiple times every day), God instructs them to be absolutely obsessive about his good commands.
These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.
Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
The principle is: saturate your life with things that make you more like Jesus. As your environment is, so your soul will be.
As modern people, it’s tempting to read the Shema skeptically: Wow, does God really expect me to think about scripture that much?
But hauntingly, the very devotion we’re reluctant to give to God’s Word, for fear of being an uptight fundamentalist, we willingly grant to technology with Shema-level consistency:
We impress TV shows on our children to give ourselves a break.
We swipe, talk, text, and stare into on our phones when we’re at home, on the road, as we fall asleep, and the moment we wake up.
We don’t physically tie our phones to our hands, but we’re so attached we suffer from phantom vibration syndrome when we’re away from them.
Our doorframes and gates are outfitted with Ring cameras, waking us in the night or pinging us all hours of the day.
Three Simple Questions
Take an inventory of the devices in your life, especially the ones you use every day, and consider their longterm impact on your soul.
I think three diagnostic questions help us navigate the technopoly of the modern age:
Where do I need to sit out? (Totally eliminate technology that threatens your ability to love God and neighbor, or inhibits your mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual health)
Where do I need to slow down? (Put limits on technology that you tend to overuse, distract yourself with, or rely too much on)
Where do I need to steward technology better? (Strategize how to use technology differently, so it’s a blessing, not a burden)
Something like smartphones might employ all three of these strategies. For me, I don’t use social media (sit out), silence my phone for hours every day (slow down), and use the Dwell Bible listening app to feed my soul in the mornings (steward).
I’m still figuring this out. My relationship with technology is complicated on most days, wise-ish on select days.
Start your own experiment—your own mini tech-revolution. Go for a week, or a month, without using technology you normally depend on every day.
Send me a message and let me know how it’s going. I’d love to learn from you.
