Hey everybody this is Steve and the internet is making it really difficult to focus on
Christ.
Back when I was a kid, I loved to read.
I could sit with a book for hours and hours, completely mesmerized by the story.
But now, as an adult, I find it harder to focus on, not just reading, but anything.
Sometimes I ll find myself aimlessly scrolling on my phone, on Reddit or Twitter or something.
After a while I ll put my phone down because I m bored. And then I ll pick it up and scroll
through the very stuff I was scrolling through earlier because, once again, I m bored.
It s this endless cycle of boredom and very short bursts of attention.
I ll even catch myself scrolling on my phone while I m watching a movie!
Not even a boring movie, any movie even one I love!
Other times, I ll find myself going down internet rabbit holes: obsessing over material that
s silly or infuriating.
My attention often feels fractured, my mind pulled in a million different directions.
None of them good.
So today, in the first of the last ever episodes of Be the Bee, we should take a look at our
minds. And how the internet can help pull our minds away from what s important.
I m very blessed to have my buddy Christian Gonzalez join me for these next few episodes.
You know Christian from Be the Bee and Pop Culture Coffee Hour and We are Orthodoxy and
basically everything we ve ever done at Y2AM. But I m excited to say he s moved on to a
new position as Director of Ministry of Orthodox Youth Ministries (or OYM).
I m really excited to see OYM continue the work we started. And that s going to be in
no small part thanks to what Christian has to offer.
Thanks Steve. I m of course happy to be back on Be the Bee, sad to have moved on from Y2AM,
but eager to see what OYM can do moving forward.
Did you know, that around the world people, on average, spend about two and a half hours
per day on social media alone.
As someone who isn t on social media, that s two and half hours out of the day that I
feel like I m better than most people.
And a nice change of pace from the other 21.5 where I feel deeply insignificant.
But I don t cry myself to sleep. I m a big boy.
We should understand what those hours are doing to our minds because, as St Paul tells
us, we re called to have the mind of Christ.
Today, we often lump together the mind and the brain. And each of us sees this thing,
whatever we call it, as fundamentally *me*.
It s the place where my thoughts and ideas originate. And it s the place where, in a
sense, my reality and interactions with the world originate.
The world is what we make of it. The world is whatever we define it to be.
This modern view of the mind reminds me of a quote from George Orwell s 1984.
Now, in the book, it s a pretty sinister quote. But it kind of captures the way we see the
mind today:
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
But this isn t how the Church sees the mind, is it Steve?
No, the Church doesn t see the mind in this modern way, as being fundamentally me.
And we can see what the Church means by mind, not just in the Scripture, but in countless
Church Fathers and Mothers who have written and spoken about the centrality of the mind
in the Christian life.
If you d like to dig into this a little deeper, you can check out the excellent book Orthodox
Psychotherapy by Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, a prolific modern theologian.
And when you dig into all of this, you ll find that the word mind, (or nous in the original
Greek) can mean slightly different things in different contexts.
But, for our purposes today, I want to focus on one specific aspect of the mind: it s our
focus, it s the way we give attention to the world.
In his Precise Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, St John of Damascus puts it very simply:
For, as the eye is to the body, so is the nous (mind) to the soul.
And that image of the eye and body is probably familiar to you. Because it s an image Jesus
uses in the Gospel according to Matthew.
The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be
full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore
the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
In other words, our task as Christians is to focus on good things, the things of Light.
Because that is how we become people of Light who shine with the Light of Christ.
And this basic insight is at the core of the Church s ascetic tradition.
Monks and nuns, for example, spend decades in stillness and prayer so they can focus
their minds on Christ.
They spend a lifetime tearing their attention away from the worries and distractions that
normally consume our minds and instead work to stay focused on Christ in all things.
St Nikiphoros the Monk is one of the authors in the Philokalia, a collection of Orthodox
spiritual texts that compile centuries of saintly wisdom about stillness and prayer.
And he puts it very simply:
Let us return, brethren, to ourselves...For we cannot be reconciled with God and assimilated
to Him unless we first return, or rather, enter into ourselves... For the miracle consists
in tearing ourselves away from the distraction and vain concerns of the world and in this
way relentlessly seizing hold of the kingdom of heaven within us.
So, in a sense, a main goal in our lives as Christians is to develop the ability to stay
focused on Christ at all times.
Christ in our private prayer. Christ in the Eucharist. Christ in our neighbor.
But distractions get in the way of that.
And we live at a time where we all carry an infinite number of distractions in our pockets
all the time.
That s why it s so important that we understand the nature of those distractions, so we can
know how to deal with them.
The TV and movies we watch, the podcasts we listen to, the internet we scroll, the books
we read: that s all media.
And most of us tend to consume digital media (videos and podcasts and apps) more than anything
else.
That word, media, is important to understand. Because it literally means something in the
middle.
And if it s used well, that something can bring us together.
Saint Paul sent letters to cities that he couldn t visit, for example. Those letters
were a form of media that helped bring people together in the Lord s name.
But that same form of media, that something in the middle, can also tear us apart.
Because media can just as easily be a barrier that divides us as it is a bridge that unites
us.
And there s something about the internet and digital media that makes it very effective
at not simply dividing us as people but dividing each and every one of us internally: scattering
our attention and making us focus on very unhealthy things.
There s a saying that we explored in episode 135 of Pop Culture Coffee Hour, a saying that
s key to understanding how the internet is structured today.
You re not the customer; you re the product.
We ve all taken it for granted that the internet is free.
We don t pay for email, we don t pay for social media, we don t pay for news.
But all those companies are still making money off us: not because of the money we spend
on things like subscriptions, but because of the money companies pay to serve us advertisements.
So a social media company like Facebook, for example, is incentivized to do its best to
keep us on its website for as long as possible.
Because the more it can capture our attention, the more advertisements we see, and the more
money they make.
And last year, a whistleblower [SC13]told the world how companies like Facebook command
our attention for so long.
In short, social media companies know that posts which provoke strong emotions lead to
the most engagement.
This could be a meme that makes you laugh, or an article on a topic you re passionate
about.
You re more likely to engage with something that provokes a strong positive response and
share it with your friends.
But media can also create a strong negative response.
And it s actually that kind of material things that outrage and infuriate us that actually
lead to even higher engagement.
It s a process that CGP Grey explained in this great video [SC14]from back in 2015.
The link, as always, is down in the doobley doo.
And it s that second category the angry content that's so great at pushing our buttons and
leading us to share it
That's the stuff that s particularly troubling.
Facebook s data scientists warned that this content was likely to include misinformation
and outright toxicity.
But it kept people on the website, so Facebook kept pushing content that pushed people s
buttons.
Remember that Facebook whistleblower we mentioned earlier? Here s how she described the place
negative content has in social media:
Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook.
I should be clear, it s not just Facebook.
Social media platforms from Twitter to Tik Tok also gets lots of engagement from lots
of very destructive content.
But remember that, as Christians, one of our primary tasks is to control our attention
and keep it focused on love of God and love of neighbor.
The trouble is, we spend hours a day on platforms that are designed to capture that same attention
that is supposed to be focused on the greatest commandment, and keep it for as long as they
possibly can.
And these platforms do so, not by exposing us to good things, but by exposing us to shallow
and even toxic things.
All this data really fits my experience of the internet over the past decade.
As an Orthodox Christian, I can t help but notice that so much of what is successful
follows a pretty silly formula.
If you make a meme with a random picture of an unknown monk and a random, out-of-context
quote from a Church Father, I can almost guarantee you that a lot of people are going to see
it and share it.
But we re not called to be a people who engage with memes long enough to double tap and share
them.
We re called to drink deeply of the Church s wisdom so we can master our attention and
see Christ at work in all things.
But a quick glance at a random icon or out-of-context quote as you re scrolling through picture
of your neighbor s new cat ...
That s not drinking deeply of the Church s wisdom.
It may briefly remind of us of where our focus should be, but double-tapping a few Orthodox
memes and quotes doesn t transform us in Christ.
In fact, this superficially Orthodox content that gets attention on social media can even
delude us and lead us astray.
There are so many accounts on every conceivable platform who twist the words of Scripture
and the Fathers to back up their own twisted agendas.
I ve seen self-proclaimed catechumens (with no actual connection to a parish, mind you)
offering Orthodoxy 101 classes online.
I ve seen people on the internet publicly present themselves as teachers in direct disobedience
of their clergy.
I ve seen people anathematize anyone and everyone they can as if they are some kind of supreme
authority in the Church.
Remember the whistleblower who leaked important documents about Facebook? Well, those documents
included a particularly sobering statement from one employee:
I think Facebook is hurting people at scale. (Max Wang[SC19])
And this evaluation makes me feel the need to say something that may not be very popular...
I think social media is hurting the Church and Christians at scale, too.
This isn t to say that everything on the internet is bad, of course. I mean, we re speaking
to you on the internet.
And we ve spent the last 9 years making so many videos and podcasts and social media
posts.
But in a world where 55 thousand posts are shared on Facebook and Instagram every second,
500 hours of video are posted to YouTube every minute, and 20 million tweets are tweeted
each and every hour, there s going to be plenty of toxic stuff online,
Even if we are trying to be the bee and focus on the good stuff.
Because the internet is, whether we like it or not, designed to capture our attention.
And it does so by feeding us media that s superficial at best or toxic at worst.
And none of that is helpful when we re trying to keep our attention on Christ and find Him
in all places and in all things.
In the next two episodes, Christian and I are going to continue to wrestle with this
question of the internet and how it relates to our spiritual lives. But this is a good
place to end for now.
And we want to leave you with three simple questions.
Three questions to help you maintain your focus on Christ despite the distractions of
the internet.
First, what are the limits you re placing on your social media use?
Are there days and times when you stay off your phone and computer? Is there certain
content that you avoid?
Back in episode 157, for example, we talked about fasting from social media. You should
check out that episode if you haven t. And do your best to apply it in your everyday
life.
Second, is your life centered in real communities or artificial internet communities?
The Church is a collection of real people in real spaces seeking the real and living
God.
The internet is great at capturing our attention with really unhealthy stuff. And, as we'll
explore in the series finale, the communities that develop online tend to develop in a similarly
unhealthy way.
And third, how does the stuff you re watching or reading or listening to on the internet
help you keep your attention on Christ?
Be honest here, because if you re just aimlessly scrolling through memes, is that really helping
you focus on the Lord?
Or if you re listening to long discourses on theology and the Orthodox way of life yet
still getting into stupid internet fights with people, are you really focusing on the
Lord?
Remember, media can be a bridge or a barrier. And if it s not actually redirecting our attention
to Christ, then it s a barrier.
A barrier that we re not only slamming ourselves into, but our neighbor as well.
Be honest about these questions, because if we re not putting limits around our use of
technology,
If we re spending more time in virtual spaces than real spaces.
If we re not actually being the bee and seeking to find and imitate Christ in all things all
the time, then something is very wrong.
It means we re letting our attention be captured by material that is either superficial at
best or toxic at worst.
It means we re darkening our souls and not growing into people who radiate the Light
of Christ.
So, with all that in mind, let s end, once again, with the words of St Nikiphoros the
Monk:
We cannot be reconciled with God and assimilated to Him unless we first return, or rather,
enter into ourselves... For the miracle consists in tearing ourselves away from the distraction
and vain concerns of the world and in this way relentlessly seizing hold of the kingdom
of heaven within us.
So let s be the bee and focus our minds on Christ and His Kingdom all the time.
Be the Bee, and Live Orthodoxy.
Remember to like and subscribe and share.
We ll see you all next week.