Article originally published on Doorway Publishing

I have tried to write an opening sentence for this post seventeen times in the last four weeks. I write, read, then erase. Delete, delete, delete. Is it a bad case of writer’s block? No, not really. But rather it is the byproduct of a lack of quiet and focused concentration because I have been distracted and undisciplined. Here is how it usually happens: I begin to write and my phone dings notifying me that I have received a message from a friend on Facebook messenger telling me of an article that I must check out. Or my family is texting a streak of funny photos and memes and I have to be a part of it. Or I see another red notifier on my phone pop-up that indicates that I have an urgent email (or a not-so-urgent email), and I hate having those red circles on my email app icon, so I click it.

I cannot let it sit, I must check it out. And two hours later after I finally get done cyber-surfing, I go back to my article and realize I am still on the first sentence of my post. Aggh! So frustrating. So I erase what I wrote, close down my computer, and convince myself that I will try again tomorrow. My state of mind is worse than Sisyphus pushing his giant boulder up the hill — I begin writing, and I get distracted, and I am back to square one again. And there lies the cold and heavy boulder at the bottom of the hill on the other side.

Last month, January of this brave new year, I tuned in online to watch a fascinating message given at Calvin College’s January Series. The subject was titled, “We’ve Been Sneaking Into Your Brain: The True Impact of Social Media” by Max Stossel. Mr. Stossel’s bio states that, “Max started his career as a strategist in charge of social media for multinational brands and later worked for a social media company designing some of the notification structures he now raises awareness about.” In other words, he was paid to distract you through your smartphone, and he made big money doing it.

In his talk, Max revealed how tech companies go to extraordinary lengths just to get a minute of your attention. They figure if they can get you to take a few seconds to look at an app — or keep you surfing on YouTube, or playing some silly video game like Candy Crush — they have you hooked and you will stay on their site for hours which is loaded with advertisements and more opportunities for you to get addicted to their technology.

In fact, all of these new digital inventions are designed to get you to hooked, just like the small red numbers on your apps do. Why do they make them red and not green? Distraction! Urgency! Look at Me! Engineers have spent years inventing the blinking three dots on a text screen alerting you to the fact that someone is typing so you will stay on and stay hooked. Some tech guru constructed the story features on Facebook and Instagram to get you to look and click, again, and again, and again. Mathematical algorithms are hardwired into YouTube software which sets up a viewing playlist that sends you videos they know you will watch. Social Media is created to keep you busy watching, and some of the world’s best scientific minds have designed it that way.

If they can keep you distracted they make more money.

This really got me thinking, especially about my online habits. It reminds me of my obsession with the confectionary wonder, Circus Peanuts. Ever since I was a young sweet-toothed kid, the vibrant orange color and pleasing vanilla smell of those bite-sized candies have called to me. They know me by name. My first encounter with them happened when I was in a hardware store with my dad and I saw a bag of them dangling in all their glorious orange beauty on a hook near the check-out line. “Hey Dad,” I said, “can I get a pack of those orange thingies? They are only 99 cents.” He smiled and threw them on the counter alongside some duct tape and WD-40 he was buying.

On the way out to the car, he handed me the bag of Circus Peanuts and I ripped it open and began to chomp on those soft marshmallow candies as we drove home on a sunny Saturday afternoon with the Ohio State football game playing on the radio. I have loved them ever since.

So whenever I see a pack of orange Circus Peanuts in the store, I am tempted to throw them on the counter of the check-out line, open them up, and remember better days. However, there is one major drawback with Circus Peanuts — they will ruin your appetite for the rest of the day. Once you open the pack you can’t eat just one, they are made to be addictive. One leads to two, and two lead to four. And after you have eaten a half-a-bag of them, they begin to congeal and form a ball of undigestable sugary cement in the bottom of your stomach, and you will then begin to feel nauseous. What goes down slow and easy, soon solidifies and then sickens.

I still love them, but I have grown to hate them as well because they don’t do me any good after the initial thrill.

Social media sickens as well. And just like Circus Peanuts, it is designed to get me to bite. But that one bite always seems to lead to more and more. One quick news story on YouTube can so easily turn into two hours of mindless surfing. Another morning ruined. Some people will say, “But at least you are up on the news.” Or, “Surfing is a chance for you to get away from a world gone crazy.” But I wonder, am I getting away from the crazy, or has all my social media viewing created the crazy? Maybe all of this digital distraction is the problem. In fact, I know it is.

I have done some serious meditation on how social media obsession sickens, and here is what I have concluded:

(1) Social Media addiction feeds off my Anger.

(2) Social Media addiction fuels my Anxiety.

(3) Social Media addiction fosters my Confirmed Bias.

ANGER

In the book, “Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator”, the writer, Ryan Holiday who was a master at media manipulation for publications like Gawker and Buzzfeed, says that “if an article doesn’t spread, it is dead!” And he writes, “The most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes…The angrier an article makes the reader, the better.” Think about that, people who write online news stories write them to get you angry. And they want you angry because anger sells. You are being played for a fool, and anger blinds you to your own folly. No wonder I feel like I just ate a whole bag of Circus Peanuts after spending two hours surfing online — the designers of the technology want me sick.

How angry have you been of late? Why are you angry? Who has you been persuaded to hate? That is exactly why politics makes up so much of our online discussion — it is a sport of hate. Two sides, two teams. And the angrier I can get at the other side, the more I will read about them.

ANXIETY

Another thing that sells is the message that the “Sky is falling!” The only way Chicken Little can get an audience is by scaring them half-to-death. Recently I have been listening to the Harry Potter series on an audible book format, and one of the funniest characters is Sybill Trelawny, the professor of divination at Hogwarts. She was supposed to teach her students about predicting the future, but she was not good at it whatsoever. So she figured the best way to gain credibility in the class was to predict doom and imminent death. Predicting doom always got the student’s attention, so in feigned seriousness, she always predicted the worse. And if a student disagreed with her or was not interested, a prognostication of doom always painted the prophet as the most caring and compassionate.

In our media circus, doom sells. The person who has the worse predictions seems to get the most press. Here is a quote from an article called, “Forcasting for COVID-19 has Failed”; it is about how wrong the scientists were about the COVID-19 threat:

“Early on, experienced modelers drew parallels between COVID-19 and the Spanish flu that caused >50 million deaths with mean age of death being 28. We all lament the current loss of life. However, as of June 18, the total fatalities are ∼450,000 with median age ∼80 and typically multiple comorbidities.”

So why were they so off? The article points to a lot of reasons, but one is that those who predict the worst are often listened to the most. The logic is a simple axiom, “Better to be safe than sorry, right?” Well, for the last two years we were inundated with worst-case scenarios spiking fear quotients across the country. And the more people read these articles, the more anxiety spread. The truth is “fear” was the real pandemic. And it is all by design.

CONFIRMATION BIAS

People read the articles that they agree with. Because of the toxicity of online articles that are purposely soaked in anger and fear, I want to avoid the ones that are angry with me at all costs. So I will swing to the side I naturally agree with. The problem with reading articles I agree with is that they too are still soaked with just as much anger and fear as the other side. But I will read them because at least they are for me.

Confirmation bias is an interesting, but dangerous, thing. While it makes you feel safe, it still ticks you off and shrinks the soul. And it still gets you to worry. This too makes you sick.

SOLUTION

So what is the solution? Do I just ignore the world, buy a little house, and be a hermit? Or do I try to engage? But how do I engage? My solution is simple:

READ GOOD BOOKS!

I have found that a well-written book is like eating a good meal. Whereas social media is like Circus Peanuts, a good book is like being served a good cut of prime rib steak. It is both satisfying and nutritious. And it doesn’t make you sick. A good book takes time. You have to stay awhile and meditate. Instead of eliciting a quick shot of anger, or being provoked into senseless worry, a good book makes a substantive argument based on reason and logic. Something is true not because of how you feel, but because the writer takes time to make his case. Reason is like protein — it builds the mind just as good food strengthens the bones. Sugar from candy burns quick, as does anger and anxiety does from a three-minute news article online.

Good books mature you. They address the whole man. They challenge your worldview, they convince you of the deep realities that are more nuanced than a polarized political world. Good books help make you better. Let me tell you about my own relationship with good books. Growing up I avoided a book over 100 pages like the plague, I had better things to do — entertainment to consume, movies to enjoy, and I especially liked the comic section of the newspaper. (Does anybody remember newspapers?)

One day my dear old mother, a book reader of the highest order, pulled me aside, handed me a book, and said, “Read!” The book she plunked into my lap was no easy cliff-notes beginners read, it was Shogun, an 1152 page fictional-historical wonder. Holding that monstrosity in my hand, I looked at her with a wrinkled brow and said, “Mom, you have got to be kidding me!” She gave me a soft smile and said with an air of quiet calm, “Chris, once you start, you won’t be able to stop. And it will do you some good.” She then went back to the book she was reading at the kitchen table while drinking a fresh cup of coffee and chomping on a large Bavarian pretzel.

I sat across from her and said, “Hand me a pretzel.” I took a large bite off the top end of the hard salty pastry (takes much more effort to eat than a Circus Peanut), opened to the first page, and began to read. That was 35 years ago, and I haven’t stopped reading since. She was right, it has done me some good, real good, and I have now joined her in the mighty ranks as a Knight of the Kitchen Table. I love to read and let me give you a list of things reading good books has done for a once rock-headed dolt:

(1) I learned how to think. A well-written book demands that you follow the author’s line of reasoning and thought. It forces you to focus, not jump from one idea to another like a teenager looking at Tik Tok videos, but rather a miner that patiently uncovers the gold hidden in the bowels of a mountain. Reading sharpens your attention span and makes you look closely at an argument. Quick entertainment is robbing young people of reason. Why else do so many of them embrace socialistic communism? Karl Marx was a horrible man, but it takes reading to uncover that.

(2) Reading has given me courage to face the difficulties of life. There is nothing like reading biographies. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alexander the Great, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther, Margaret Thatcher, Johnny Cash, Ernest Shackleton, Amy Carmichael, C.S. Lewis, Adolph Hitler, Elizabeth Báthory, and Tommy Wiseau. There is so much to learn from the true lives of history’s heroes and villains. As Mark Twain once quipped, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” And when you see those same rhythms and chords in your own life you learn to persevere through them and carry on. As Romans 5:3-4 writes, “Because we know that suffering produces perseverance;  perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame!” That is the one thing that social media is not designed to do — offer hope. But a good book does.

(3) Reading helps me to contemplate true beauty and grace. Good books with well-crafted stories, and writing that soars the heavens and plunges down near the fringes of hell expands a soul. Creating beauty takes time, and some books take a lifetime to craft. Classics of literature tell truths that are written in the fabric of existence, they resonate because they are real. A person’s whole life of thought can be bound in the pages of one marvelous story told. Good writing gives you a sneak peek into the best and worst of people, and those insights stay with you through life. But Social media is like the mist, it is only relevant for today and most of it is forgotten by tomorrow. What a waste.

And all because my mom convinced me to pick up a book and read, I am a different person. I appreciate the world around me in ways I never did before. Life is deeper, richer, more mysterious, and much more interesting. I have learned that living is not about winning or disparaging the other side, or even laughing at someone else’s expense, it is about finding God in the nooks and crannies of everyday existence. Good books help you do that.

Why are we so attracted to the quick and easy? Just like the sugary orange Circus Peanut that please the eye, why do we reach for the silly slanted article that infuriates the soul? It will never truly satisfy our hunger. If you truly want a nutritious treat that leads to soul expansion, my suggestion is this: Turn off the world and grab a good book.