But for me, driving is one of my only chances to think. It’s just that, in between other forms of content I’ve prioritized (mostly books, movies, and music), I usually only have a few “in between” moments left in my day when I might squeeze in a podcast. I have nothing against podcasts as a form-like anything, they can be great and they can be terrible. This is why I don’t really listen to podcasts. It’s making us sick, as I observe in chapter one (“Information Gluttony”) of my new book, The Wisdom Pyramid. So it is with the unfathomably large “content buffet” that is the internet.
A buffet of the healthiest organic food in the world would still make you sick if you went back to fill up your plate too many times. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We can thus justify content gluttony in the name of noble desires to be grown, equipped, resourced, and informed. There are only so many hours in a day, but so much still to learn. The Protestant evangelical tendency to want to “redeem the time” by optimizing every minute is understandable. It’s not that our motives are always bad. And stillness is a prerequisite for wisdom. So it is with consuming information.įoolishness is rampant today in part because we’re rarely stationary enough to experience stillness. Eating fast food constantly throughout the day would make you sick. Can these things be valuable for our wisdom? Of course! But not when we’re relentlessly going from one piece of content to the next, without giving our souls pauses to let inputs percolate and be absorbed as nutrition. There’s always another video to watch, article to read, podcast to listen to, book to read. We have to be intentional about choosing silence and stillness in a noisy, fidgety age. Unmediated space and quiet stillness are hugely rewarding. In his helpful book The Common Rule, Justin Earley suggests our spare moments should not be filled with aimless online wandering, but rather “reserved for staring at walls, which is infinitely more useful.” 9:10).įoolishness is rampant today in part because we’re rarely stationary enough to experience stillness. And this awestruck, stunned-into-silence awareness is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. Only in stillness can we begin to apprehend the bracing power and holiness of God. Verse 10 contains one of my favorite phrases in Scripture: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Being still-the stoppage of constant striving, frenetic noise, and distraction-is fundamentally connected to knowing. I return to Psalm 46 often to ground me in God’s changeless sovereignty in unsteady times. Whatever the reason, our aversion to stillness is not good for our spiritual growth and the development of wisdom. Why is present-tense stillness so stressful? Maybe silence unsettles because the constant hum of noise distracts us from realities (e.g., death) we’d rather not confront. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. There’s always something productive we should be doing, right?īlaise Pascal, in Pensées, ponders why we fill our minds with the past and future but rarely take time to be still in the moment: We’re restless and fidgety, never fully at home in the present. The internet’s algorithms are just tapping into a dynamic of our falleness that has plagued humanity for time immemorial: we hate stillness. Here’s one small thing we can all do to become a bit more wise, then: carve out some space- any space-to be silent, still, and unmediated rather than letting every inch of your attention be colonized by content. The algorithms are designed to commandeer our attention not just partially, but totally. Click this! Watch this next! Listen to this podcast! The algorithms are designed to commandeer our attention not just partially, but totally. Yet the smartphone era is quickly obliterating these things, beckoning us to fill every spare second of life with something. To become wise, we need emptiness in our days time to think space to synthesize moments to be still mental breaks.
It’s that the elimination of every last shred of unmediated space in our lives makes us foolish. The main problem isn’t that what I find in those snippets of scrolling is largely foolish (though that’s certainly a problem). The more I’ve become aware of this often unconscious habit, the more it disturbs me.
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