Scrolling Away Our Souls: A Practice for Reclaiming Presence
What happens when we trade omniscience for presence? This week’s practice dares us to unplug, pay attention, and remember that we were never meant to know everything.
It’s April! Time for a new deep dive. The next three weeks we’re exploring how technology is forming our lives, and I have spiritual practices lined up to decrease our screen time, increase our awareness of tech's influence, and cultivate a little boredom. I hope you’ll join me!
Do you know the game Name That Actor? You might call it something else, but here’s how it goes: You are watching a show or a movie, and you recognize an actor. You roll through your brain’s personal tv and movie database, and eventually you either figure it out or you give up.
Once upon a time, this is where the game ended. You knew it or you didn’t.
But these days, giving up leads to the game’s second part: Find That Actor. This involves turning to IMDB (International Movie Database) to traipse through episodes and cast lists until you find the actor. Once found, you read through everything they’ve ever been cast in, and then you explore the other actors cast in whatever you’re watching. And if you are really in the mood for a bonus round, you move on to Wikipedia for the actor’s life history.
How do you win the second part? You don’t. By the time you pick up your head from your phone, you have no idea what is happening with what you were originally watching.
Tell me I’m not the only one!
Y’all, what did we do before we had access to all the world’s information via our phones? When our kids asked us questions we didn’t know the answers to? When some trivial tidbit couldn’t be unlocked from the dark recesses of our brains? We had to resign ourselves to not knowing, make semi-educated guesses, or plain make crap up. In so many ways, life was a shoulder-shrugging, I-don’t-know emoji. 🤷
What We Didn’t Know
But not these days. When the Internet launched, when the news cycle became 24/7, when our phones moved to our pockets, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know one day we would have more information available to us every hour than people throughout history had access to throughout their entire lives. We didn’t know our brains would be on constant overload from absorbing, evaluating, and assigning meaning to that information. We didn’t know our attention spans would shrink or that we would come to crave the dopamine hits from videos of cute animals.
In other words, we didn’t know how technology, the Internet, and our phones would come to shape every moment of every day of our lives. I was in my teens and 20s when all of this entered my life. Heck, I was thrilled to have access to these things at all!
What I’m Learning
But now that I’m in my 40s, and–God help me–raising a teenage boy, I look at all this technology and access to information differently. I see how the phone in my pocket distracts me from the most important things in my life. With my phone nearby, it’s difficult to be present in a conversation with my husband. When I need a dad joke about wombats,1 there’s nothing stopping me from opening a new browser tab to look up the answer. Notifications interrupt my train of thought while I write. And it’s so much easier to pick up my phone and scroll than it is to sit down and pray.
This technology and information has shortened my attention span, too. Long-form reading has become a challenge unless I literally leave my phone in another room. My ability to concentrate–even accounting for the distractions from my dog Zelda–often feels like a relic of the past. Where once I could “multitask efficiently,”2 I now have to reign in my willpower to work on one thing at a time.3 It’s often exhausting.
Also exhausting is the access to overwhelming amounts of information. I’ve written about information overload before, so today, I’ll simply say this: Access to all this information tempts us to believe that we can be all-knowing. That we can be like God: Omniscient. And yes, humanity is absolutely made in God’s image, which means we can convey his character and attributes in the world. We can–imperfectly and with an assist from the Holy Spirit–showcase God’s love, patience, joy, wisdom, gentleness to the world. But when he made humanity, he didn’t make us to be any of the omnis: omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), or omnipresent (all-present). When we try to access omniscience, we are swimming into tricky waters.
I can see now that technology, information, and my smartphone have shaped me–formed me, if you like–into someone that I don’t always like. I’m less patient, and I’m more entitled. I am less comfortable with quiet and boredom. Prayer–lovely two-way conversations with God–is less accessible.
What I’m Changing
I started noticing these things several years ago, and since then, I have seasons of concentrated effort to be more intentional with my screen time, to create boundaries around notifications, and to simply be aware of the technology in my life. Let me tell you: It is dang hard and not much fun.
I’ve put up loads of metaphorical fences around these things. I turned off notifications on my phone. I have a Contact Lite list on my phone for texting my VIPs. I took social media apps off my phone. I left my phone in the car when I ran errands. I chose physical books and magazines instead of digital. I left my devices in another room for 80% of my day. I stopped sleeping with my phone on my nightstand. Some worked for a season, some haven’t worked at all, and some I have been able to keep.
But every one of these efforts was worth the discomfort and inconvenience because I became more aware of how tech was affecting every facet of my life. This week’s practice dares us to put away our devices for one hour a day. Just one hour! It challenges us to be the boss of our tech rather than our tech bossing us around. It invites us to become a little bit more aware of the hold our tech has on our lives. And the next time you play Name That Actor and can’t come up with an answer, you can shrug your shoulders and move on with your life.
A Practice for Disconnecting From Our Devices
This week’s practice is out of the ordinary for Steadfast Soul Care because rather than exercising it from our usual silence and solitude, we are putting it to practice as we go about our ordinary days.
But first, let’s reflect a teensy bit on our scrolling habits by considering these questions:
Under what circumstances am I most tempted to pick up my phone and scroll?
How has mindless scrolling made me feel this week?
Where, when, and with whom do I most desire to be more present?
With those answers in mind, pick one hour every day for the next week to turn off all notifications, plug in your phone, and go device free.
You may need to notify your Very Important People, set reminders, and make additional plans. Do that ahead of time! Don’t wait until just before you plug in your phone.
As you are going about those device-free hours, notice when you feel the desire to pick up your device. Invite God into those moments with a breath prayer.
At the end of each day–or at the end of the week–reflect on how those hours away from notifications and devices felt and the impact they seemed to have on you and your Very Important People.
Comments & Community
What’s one way you’ve noticed technology shaping your habits, attention span, or ability to be present? Share in the comments!
Wombats: The cutest, most vicious creature from Down Under with an armored butt. See also: I have a teenage son.
Speaking of the inability to concentrate, here’s a footnote to say that I’m 98% sure scientists have ruled out the brain’s ability to truly do more than one task at a time. Instead, “multitaskers” are actually task- switching from one thing to another at breakneck speed. I could look up a source for this, but even I recognize the temptation to switch to another browser tab and find the answer. And that’s sort of my point, isn’t it?
But seriously, I just wrote the above paragraph, and now I can’t remember my train of thought.