Article
Attention
Culture
Digital
Easter
4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.
Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. 

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this. 

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes.  A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them.  The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock.  In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom.  Two in three men did. 

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here.  Our lives are over-stimulated.  To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird.  We don’t need to live like this.  Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’.  Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.   

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older.  But something seems to have changed in the last two decades.  A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there.  It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.   

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline.  And it is working.  Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information.  This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye.  Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped. 

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs.  After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off.  While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook.  As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information. 

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention.  It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive. 

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us.  The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure.  How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer?  There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before.  In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there. 

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church.  A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged.  Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition.  They advise people to: 

  • Avoid technology 
  • Connect with loved ones 
  • Nurture your health 
  • Get outside 
  • Avoid commerce 
  • Light candles 
  • Drink wine 
  • Eat bread 
  • Find silence 
  • Give back 

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.   

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses.  We should also allow our minds to wander.  This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus.  Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention.  It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.   

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire.  But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena.  He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice. 

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current.  The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.    

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Article
AI
Culture
Digital
Education
6 min read

Could thinking and feeling become futile pastimes in the future?

AI, and more, is eroding our agency, we need to act now

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A seated teenager stretches back bored, a phone is on the table in front of them
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Jane Austen is an author universally acknowledged. So much so that she was acknowledged on the £10 note in 2017. The quote the note bore is not the immortal opening sentence from Pride & Prejudice, but something less obvious:  

'I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.' 

So concise, so inspiring. However, the quote belongs to her character Caroline Bingley. She isn't reading for pleasure, she's just trying to impress the dashing Mr Darcy. Jane Austen, well before 2017, has always been on the money. Her parable of disparity shows that despite the odds, Lizzie Bennett has agency as she comes face-to-face with Darcy to thrash out their differences. 

Such human agency is now being lost in many ways, as the art of empathy, reality itself, and even thinking are under attack. 

 Firstly, there's what Simon Burton-Jones startlingly outlined Seen & Unseen recently. Our empathy for our fellow creatures, which is taking a nosedive, has a direct correlation to our lack of seeing each other face-to-face.  

Secondly, he noted that reality, or reality as we've known it up until now, might only be really experienced by the wealthy. The fullness of life that is available to each of us is diluted and diminished because we don't suck the marrow out of life, we simply observe it from afar through digital lenses. 

The next, equally startling way agency is being lost is detailed in Mary Harrington's guest essay in the New York Times about how 'thinking is becoming a luxury good'. Only the Caroline Bingleys, and not the Bennetts of today would be reading and expanding their minds for pleasure: 

'In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures… as new generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly.'

In other words, there's an ever-widening gap. As our digital and real worlds blend, we need to narrow the gap not just between women and men of different classes, but also where our agency truly resides: our appreciation for our own thinking and feeling. 

This is a tall order, given our devaluing of thinking. We shortcut our brains with AI and cut short the careers of those who've been taught to compute and analyse. The edifice on which many have constructed their careers is crumbling. So, there's the equal danger that thinking becomes both elitist and also perceived as futile. 

It might not be a silver bullet, but education can still lead the way. Parents can't delegate responsibility to schools and must surely be part of the solution. And neither is confining thinking and feeling to those who appreciate Shakespeare. As veteran educationalist Sir Ken Robinson noted, there is an inherent creativity, not necessarily academic, in children that is often flattened beyond all recognition by the education system itself. Any parent of small children will know, as I do, that there is an intriguing inquisitiveness and playfulness in our early years. As a father, I want that to come alive in my children. 

Education can close the gap between pleasure and thinking. The teachers I remember well took the kindling of dry subjects and ignited them. Philip Womack recently said, in The Spectator, that children's literature is increasingly becoming 'easily translated, and easily disseminated, but will it sing in a child's mind, or set it alight?'. 'With a massive decline in children reading for pleasure, this trend will become worse, as publishers attempt to lure children away from screens with increasingly desperate pandering.'  

So let's remove the competition: we must implement Jonathan Haidt's pleadings around banning smartphones for the young. They steal away resilience. 

The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition.

But in a reactive world, what else can we adopt to ensure each child grows up with agency over their thoughts and feelings? Where might deeper resources come from that we can build upon? The Christian tradition offers us a solid foundation. This might not seem instinctive, as Christians can take a dualistic approach to thinking and feeling. I've often heard talk about 'head knowledge' and 'heart knowledge', among some of the Christians I hear. The former is dry and irrelevant at best, and something more sinister at worst. Blaise Pascal wouldn't have recognised this. Sadly, sometimes the more exuberant expressions of Christianity have championed anti-intellectualism. The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition. Advertisers have long understood this.  

Looking back historically, there was an understanding that one's heart comprised both the emotions and thinking. Tennyson encouraged us to 'keep your head about you', and someone losing their temper might phrase it as 'I'm losing my mind.' If our heads are online, it's not just our heads that are on the line. 

Further back, St Paul writes about the Gentiles' 'futile' thinking. There's that F word again. He writes that: 

'They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.' 

To be desensitised to an incarnate life is to numb our thinking and feeling. And the numbing that Paul writes of here is to be separated from the life of God. Paul wants his fellow believers to have 'the eyes of their hearts' enlightened. And the enlightening here is the revelation of who God is. 

This was the gift of the printing press at the time of the Reformation - that power resides not in the pulpit, but in the people's hands. We are now at danger of delegating our thinking and feeling not to a priest but to AI. The Bible is not a straightforward life manual that will tell you which school to send your children to or which car to buy. You have to think deeply, to connect the dots of the grand narrative, to engage your head and your heart. This takes us not only deeper into ourselves, but out of ourselves to one another. Paul's letter to the Ephesians emphasised the closing of the gap between types of people made possible by the cross. For this same Bible warns against being too wise in our own eyes. Ultimately, God’s thoughts are higher than ours. In him we ultimately find the place to process and develop our thoughts and feelings. 

As we convulse through another great revolution, we need to take courage that we each have agency to feel and think, if only we give them enough airtime in our crammed headspace. It's enough to make us think. And to rethink. But we can fling open the gate to an enchanting and enriching hinterland we can never fully traverse. 

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