I work really hard to keep my children’s innocence. I don’t do scary things as entertainment. They don’t hear swear words – or if they do I explain that we don’t use or play with those words. I keep their screen time to child-safe content that isn’t just mindless garbage.
But what about me? How am I guarding myself as an adult? Am I protecting myself from the modern machine of discontentment?
I’m just like them; I get sucked into the screen vortex and it can be so hard to pull away from watching “one more video.”
But I’m an adult. I can make my own decisions.
So why do I feel like my time has been robbed when I’ve spent the down times of my day consuming content that lasts for 30-120 seconds each?
We are losing our attention span as a society and no one is protecting us from ourselves. Instead it’s being monetized and human viewership is now a commodity.
How can I take those same principles from my parenting and apply it to myself?
I was raised with screen limits, but they were hard to enforce. If I wasn’t playing the video game, but was watching it instead, did that count? If it wasn’t my choice of show, did it really take up my tv time? “I was just waiting!” I’d say, as I was just as glued to the screen as my sibling who did choose the show.
How can I reclaim my own attention? How do I break this addiction to short-nothings that take up hours of my day, days of my month, and weeks of my year?
Quit.
Cold turkey.
I could say that I need YouTube for workout accountability, but the creator of the video has no personal connection to know it was me who watched it.
I have accountability to a different creator. My Creator, your Creator: our Father in Heaven, God Almighty.
“In this world you will have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world.”
Internet and media addictions do not surprise God one bit. They are not something He is oblivious to just because God didn’t make computers when he created Eden (which, also, think about it: when things were actually perfect, there were no computers. Or pants. But I’m talking about computers today.) ((Pants are my sister’s expertise subject.)).
If you look in the Bible, addiction is there. Sodom wasn’t destroyed because or occasional sexual sins: it was an addiction and anyone new who came to that city became a victim to their heinous acts. It is what ultimately led to God destroying that huge city. And why Lot’s wife turned back: she was addicted to sin, too.
Now, I’m not saying all the internet is bad and if you can’t handle one part you shouldn’t handle it at all, but I am trying to draw a conscience to what we let consume our time. How we let our days be taken from us. Why we feel disconnected and numb after seeing strangers on screens while sitting in our living rooms not talking to the people sitting next to us.
So I’m trying.
I’m one day in, I think. Maybe just a few hours.
But I don’t need the chains of YouTube to pull me into a false sense of learning something and giving away my best times of the day.
I don’t want to look back on my children’s childhood and regret the amount of time I spent looking at something in my own hands – unless it was my children! – instead of looking around at the amazing people God made my family from!
My best days are days without my phone. Yes, it does get used, but for actual communication and not entertainment.
Somehow we’ve been tricked into believing that watching videos on our phones are a break that we deserve. It’s not. You are never going to feel more fulfilled by checking out on social media that same way you would if you spent the same 30 seconds checking in with God.
The world doesn’t fulfill you: Christ does.
I don’t need YouTube to work out. I need discipline, time, and dumbbells (we all have to like something!). Watching a video doesn’t move my body for me!
I don’t need YouTube to learn things.
I don’t need to know all of the world news. It doesn’t change that I have dinner to make and friends to catch up with.
Our phones steal our time. And that’s one thing we can’t reel and do over again.