Consider this quotation: “If we are overcome by laziness and negligence and let ourselves be taken up with wicked behaviour and silly conversations, or if we get involved in worldly concerns and unnecessary preoccupations, the result will be as if a kind of weed had sprung up, which will impose harmful labour on our heart.”
Wicked behaviour and silly conversations? I wrote beside it, TikTok. Or YouTube Shorts, which is my particular failing. Worldly concerns and unnecessary preoccupations, yes, that’s it exactly. And the writer has diagnosed exactly what it does to me: harmful labour on my heart, making it so much harder to concentrate on – well, anything, let alone uplifting and godly things.
But it’s not as if I haven’t heard this advice before. It sounds like what I regularly see on YouTube, which is ironic, people making short videos about how we should not watch short videos. We know how bad it is for us. This particular kind of short-form video is particularly distracting, shortens our attention span, makes it much harder to concentrate on anything serious or intellectually challenging. It makes it harder to read books or long articles. Students, even in elite institutions, can no longer read whole books, The Atlantic reported last year: “Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube” (“The Elite College Students who Can’t Read Books”, November 2024).
Connection and community for the lonely
After seeing a poster recently about the problem of loneliness in aged people, I wondered how bad the problem actually …