In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagines the advice of a senior devil, Screwtape, advising a junior tempter on the most effective way of getting Wormwood’s “patient” into hell. There’s a passage in Letter 12 which is, I think, salutary to consider with regard to the real temptations we face day to day. Screwtape notes that the patient, though now a Christian, is vulnerable to attack because he is in a state of vague uneasiness about his spiritual condition: He recognizes “that he hasn’t been doing very well lately,” but his half-conscious state of guilt makes him disinclined to attend fully to his prayers or think about God. This state of mind—and how common it is!—is a boon to the tempter, Screwtape says, who “will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations.” Disinclined to turn his thoughts to reality (that is, his relationship with God), the patient finds that “anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.”
And so, Screwtape advises Wormwood,
You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’ The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
If there is a better description of doomscrolling on social media, I have not found it.
There’s a very large territory of wholesomeness and sanity that we can reclaim for ourselves, if we are willing to make an effort.
The key point here is that distractions are a perennial and perpetual problem for every human being. Social media and the online environment in general has given us new modes by which we can avoid reality and waste our time in dreary and draining ways, but as Lewis pointed out more than eighty years ago, the temptation is the same.
There is, of course, a major difference in the modes by which we are distracted today. Social media in particular is based on extremely sophisticated systems that create an addictive experience. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so on are all set up to feed you more content, more, more, in a seamless experience of clicking and scrolling and watching, so that you start out intending to watch or read one thing, and before you know it, twenty minutes or an hour or two hours have passed, with nothing gained from it. Or worse: Once you’ve started reading or watching one thing, the algorithms will show you more of the same, leading you down rabbit holes that can lead to some very unhealthy places.
I’m no Luddite—but neither am I willing to simply accept the status quo. Constant distraction is not good for us, even if it’s “good” for advertisers and mega-corporations who run the platforms. There’s a very large territory of wholesomeness and sanity that we can reclaim for ourselves, if we are willing to make an effort.
In that spirit, let me offer some suggestions to push back against being—as the poet T.S. Eliot put it—“distracted by distractions from distraction.” These are deliberately small and low key, because that makes them feasible to try. I can also affirm that I do these things, or have done them (and in some cases need to return to them to strengthen my mental and spiritual habits). Doing even one or two of these things really does make a difference.
Advent is a partly penitential season, and it’s also a season in which we are invited to look at reality: the reality that you and I are going to die, sooner or later, and so it matters what our spiritual condition is, and the reality of the Incarnation and the Second Coming. Detaching ourselves even a little bit from the buzz of constant, mostly irrelevant distractions to give ourselves the opportunity to face up to reality is a very good discipline for the season.
Here are seven things to consider trying out:
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Relatively easy:
- Don’t use your smartphone as your alarm clock. Most importantly, get a cheap battery-operated clock for your bedside, and place your smartphone out of reach from bed. That way, you can’t reach for it as the very first thing that you do when you wake up. Then you can make use of this small but significant window of opportunity in your spiritual life. Before your feet even hit the floor, offer up a quick prayer. Bonus: Get an actual physical watch (the old-fashioned timepiece you wear on your wrist—but not a smartwatch!) so that you can check the time during the day without looking at your phone (and getting drawn into distractions).
- Turn off push notifications on your phone. Keep only the most essential, such as text messages or bank alerts. For everything else, make it so that you have to open the app to see any notifications. Instead, deliberately choose when and where you’ll check social media and the news. You are in charge of what you watch!
- Watch or read one thing at a time. Once you’ve read the article or watched the video, rather than click on “next” or allow autoplay, close the browser tab! Keep a book on hand to read (even a few paragraphs or a section) if you find yourself at loose ends.
A little more challenging:
- Add some silence to your life. If you would ordinarily listen to a podcast, an audiobook, or music while you’re driving to work, doing the dishes, exercising, and so on, try taking a few minutes to do this without any extra stimuli. Just allow yourself to think and reflect; let your mind wander.
- Try the twenty-four-hour media fast I explain here. There’s really no wrong way to go about the media fast; even if you do it in a very modified way, such as fasting from just one kind of media or for less than a twenty-four-hour period, you’ll gain valuable insights.
Harder but worth it:
- Try this activity of taking three specific sessions of silent time. It can be emotionally and spiritually challenging, so you might want to enlist a friend to do it as well and compare notes afterwards.
- Cancel streaming video services. Make it harder for yourself to binge-watch or watch things that you don’t really care about. Buy or borrow DVDs instead, or pay individually for online access to a program. It requires a bit more effort and planning, which means you’re less likely to watch something just because it’s there. You’ll also be able to directly signal your support for the programs you watch, rather than putting money into a giant Netflix or Amazon bucket. Note: This really works. I enjoy watching TV and films, and do so regularly, but I cancelled all my streaming services a few years ago and fully and heartily recommend it. It’s a game changer.
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Why not choose one suggestion and give it a try for a few weeks? See what happens in your emotional and spiritual life; see what difference it makes in your capacity for attention. Some of these practices may be difficult, perhaps surprisingly so, or at least slightly unsettling: Habits, even if they’re unhealthy, are comforting by their very familiarity. But it’s worth pushing through some discomfort to become more grounded and more in control of what you consume.
As the very simplest application of the third tip, now that you’ve reached the end of this article, why not close your browser or put away your phone and think about it for a couple of minutes?