check their smartphones about 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes
of their waking lives.
The impulse is not hard to understand. Our lives
are consolidated on our phones: our calendars, our cameras, our pictures, our
work, our workouts, our reading, our writing, our credit cards, our maps, our
news, our weather, our email, our shopping — all of it can be managed with
state-of-the-art apps in powerful little devices we carry everywhere.
possesses thirty thousand times the processing speed of the seventy-pound
onboard navigational computer that guided Apollo 11 to the surface of the
moon.
It’s no wonder we habitually grab our phones first thing in the
morning, not only to turn off our alarms, but also to check email and social
media in a half-conscious state of sleep inertia before our groggy eyes can
fully open. If the ever-expanding universe is humankind’s final horizon outward,
our phones take us on a limitless voyage inward, and we restart the journey
early every morning.
I am no stranger to this instinctive phone grab, but
I wanted to see if others shared this pattern, so I surveyed eight thousand
Christians about social media routines. More than half of the respondents (54
percent) admitted to checking a smartphone within minutes of waking. When asked
whether they were more likely to check email and social media before or after
spiritual disciplines on a typical morning, 73 percent said before. This reality
is especially concerning if the morning is when we prepare our hearts
spiritually for the day.
Our phones are addictive, and, like addicts, we
seek hits immediately in the morning. And, yes, there’s an app for that.
Unhealthy digital addictions flourish
because we fail to see the consequences, so let’s begin our study by uncovering
three reasons why we succumb to distractions so easily.
First, we use
digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our
vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough
conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers. The average
American college student wastes 20 percent of class time tinkering on a digital
device, doing things unrelated to class (a statistic that seems low to me!).
When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else — anything
else.
Second, we use digital distractions to keep people away. God
has called us to love our neighbors, yet we turn to our phones to withdraw from
our neighbors and to let everyone know we’d rather be somewhere else. In a
meeting or a classroom, if my phone is put away, I am more likely to be
perceived as engaged. If my phone is not in use, but is faceup on the table, I
present myself as engaged for the moment, but possibly disengaged if someone
more important outside the room needs me. And if my phone is in my hand, and I
am responding to texts and scrolling social media, I project open
dismissiveness, because “dividing attention is a typical expression of
disdain.”
In the digital age, we are especially slow to “associate with
the lowly” around us (Rom. 12:16). Instead, we retreat into our phones —
projecting our scorn for complex situations or for boring people. In both cases,
when we grab our phones, we air our sense of superiority to others — often
without knowing it.
Third, we use digital distractions to keep
thoughts of eternity away. Perhaps most subtly, we find it easy to fall into
the trap of digital distractions because, in the most alluring new apps, we find
a welcome escape from our truest, rawest, and most honest self-perceptions. This
was the insight of seventeenth-century Christian, mathematician, and
proverb-making sage Blaise Pascal. When observing distracted souls of his own
day (not unlike those of our time), he noticed that if you “take away their
diversion, you will see them dried up with weariness,” because it is to be
ushered into unhappiness “as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and
have no diversion.” Pascal’s point is a perennial fact: The human appetite for
distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from
the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our
inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and
pleasures.
The Pascal of our generation puts it this way: “We run away
like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our
machines, our slaves, our masters” — clicking, scrolling, tapping, liking,
sharing . . . anything. “We think we want peace and silence and freedom and
leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us.” In fact,
“we want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be
harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain
about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our
hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because
that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”
To numb the sting of this
emptiness, we turn to the “new and powerful antidepressants of a
non-pharmaceutical variety” — our smartphones. But even as we seek escape in
social media, death follows us and haunts those digital diversions in new ways.
“I love the fun and frivolity of much of Twitter. The GIFs. The jokes. The
nested conversations,” admits one honest writer. “The reality is, though, deep
down there’s part of me that’s scared that if I’m out of sight, I’ll be out of
mind, and I won’t matter anymore. In a sense, this is one dimension of the
looming fear of death that most of us in contemporary American society never
want to wrestle with or name anymore.” No, we don’t. All of us find ourselves
uncomfortably close to passing into the mystery of eternity, leaving this place,
and being forgotten in the only home we’ve ever known. So every day we jump back
into the hamster wheel of our digital conversations and muffle the
reality.
The philosophical maxim, “I think, therefore I am,” has been
replaced with a digital motto, “I connect, therefore I am,” leading to a status
desire: “I am ‘liked,’ therefore I am.” But our digital connections and ticks of
approval are flickering pixels that cannot ground the meaning of our lives. And
yet, I seek to satisfy this desire every time I cozy up to the Facebook
barstool, to be where every friend knows my name, where my presence can be
affirmed and reaffirmed at virtual points throughout the day. I want anything to
break the silence that makes me feel the weight of my mortality.
So
here’s an exercise to help ground our self-perception. Once a day, set your
phone down for a moment, hold out your right hand, palm out and fingers to the
sky, and imagine the timeline of history reaching a mile to your left and an
eternity to your right. Your time on earth intersects roughly the width of your
hand (give or take). Nothing puts social media and smartphone habits into
context like the blunt reality of our mortality.
[written by Tony
Reinke]
