Facebook Obsession and the Anguish of Boredom
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Facebook has never been more addictive.
In 2013, it was 63 percent of Facebook users who checked in daily. In
2014, that number shot up to 70 percent. If you check Facebook day
after day, you join over 864 million others with the same compulsive
routine.
For many of us, Facebook is a kind of addiction, a default habit that is now rewiring our brains.
Ofir Turel, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton, has the research
to prove it. To make his point, he says Facebook addicts driving a car
are more likely to respond faster to a push notification alert on their
phone than to street signs. “That’s the power of Facebook,” he said.
Turel co-authored a study showing Facebook addiction engages the same
impulsive regions of the mind as drug addicts, but with one significant
difference. Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the
ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the
motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe,” he wrote.
Many of you use Facebook and Twitter for noble ends, and this is to be applauded. Many of you are reading this post
because of
Facebook. But the self-evident reality is that Facebook addiction, like
many addictions, is boredom-induced. Facebook is a place to turn when
life gets drab, a digital slot machine we pull to win tokens of
interesting news or funny videos. It’s designed to be this.
For many users, Facebook is the object we turn to in order to satisfy
our Boredom-Induced Distraction-Addiction (BIDA). This is when it
becomes problematic.
Unhealthy Facebook addiction flourishes because we fail to see the
cost on our lives. So what are the consequences of boredom-induced
compulsive behaviors? Here are three to consider.
1. Facebook addiction stifles prayer.
There seems to be no study comparing the amount of time spent on
social media to the satisfaction of one’s prayer life, but all
indications are that there’s a problem brewing.
I recently asked Tim Keller, pastor and author of the new bestselling
book on prayer, how widespread prayerlessness is. “This is anecdotal,
but everybody I talk to seems so busy, and is communicating so
incessantly around the clock, that I do think there is more and more
prayerlessness, less and less time where people go into a solitary time
or place to pray. I am sure we are more prayerless than we have been in
the past.” So what does that say about our spiritual health? “Our
spiritual health,” he responded candidly, “is in freefall.”
When life gets boring, we increasingly turn to the surprises (and diversions) of our newsfeeds, not to prayer.
2. Facebook addiction clouds our self-perception.
Second, BIDAs like Facebook cloud our self-perception. This was the
insight of 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal. When observing the
youth in his day, he noticed if you “take away their diversion, you will
see them dried up with weariness” because “it is indeed to be unhappy …
as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion.”
Undistractedness and silence come with a heaviness we try to
alleviate with frivolity, Pascal said. And so we are lured to
distractions like Facebook to be entertained, to fit in, to
self-express—anything to break the weight of the silence.
Later, Pascal writes, “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be
completely at rest, without passions, without business, without
diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his
forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his
emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart
weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.”
Without disconnected solitude, we cannot feel the weight of our need;
we cannot taste our desperation for God. The weight of boredom is
intended to open us to our insufficiency and to awaken us to our hunger
for grace.
3. Facebook addiction blinds us to beauty.
As Facebook strategists know well, human beings cannot make peace with monotony. Try it. Your heart won’t allow it.
We were not created to live in boredom. Our boredom follows from our
sin, and our unalleviated boredom will eventually make us tremendously
vulnerable to the lure of trivial distractions and corrupting
allurements.
Sam Storms writes, “Boredom is contrary to the natural, God-given
impulse for fascination, excitement, pleasure and exhilaration.” He
warns, when faced with a life of boredom, you either die emotionally or
“madly rush to whatever extreme and extravagant thrill you can find to
replace your misery with pleasure, whether it be pornography, adultery,
drugs, or fantasies of fame and power.” Or in your boredom, you will
turn to distractions that seem so innocuous as entertainment and the
digital slot machine called Facebook.
How we respond to boredom says a lot about our hearts and explains
why we are so prone to addictive lifestyles and habits, Storms writes:
Many people who fall into sinful addictions are people
who were once terminally bored. The reason why addictions are so
powerful is that they tap into that place in our hearts that was made
for transcendent communion and spiritual romance. These addictive habits
either dull and deaden our yearnings for a satisfaction we fear we’ll
never find, or they provide an alternative counterfeit fulfillment that
we think will bring long-term happiness—counterfeits like cocaine,
overeating, illicit affairs, busyness, efficiency, image or obsession
with physical beauty. They all find their power in the inescapable
yearning of the human heart to be fascinated and pleased and enthralled.
Our hearts will invariably lead us either to the fleeting pleasures of
addiction or to God.
This same allurement is behind the “big” addictions, the “little”
addictions and every addiction in between. In the words of an old axiom,
idle hands do the devil’s work. But more fundamentally, the
bored are quick to make peace with sin. Whatever distraction temporarily
alleviates our boredom becomes our ethical blindspot. There’s the
problem.
The Cure for Our Boredom
For creatures like us, created to adore glory, we must find an object
worthy of our worship. The cure for boredom is not diversion or
distraction but substantive enthrallment, says John Piper. We must
encounter God “to be intellectually and emotionally staggered by the
infinite, everlasting, unchanging supremacy of Christ in all things.”
Which means that trying to silence our boredom with the compulsive
habit of pulling the lever on the slot machine called Facebook is a
habit that can be broken. But that will only happen if our compelling
vision of God is grand enough to see him as beautiful and “infinitely
creative,” so creative that for those who worship him, Piper says,
“there will be no boredom for the next trillion ages of millenniums.”
For more on this topic, see “Six Ways Your iPhone Is Changing You.”
Sources for this article:
- Rebecca Strong, “Brain Scans Show How Facebook and Cocaine Addictions Are the Same,” BostInno (February 3, 2015)
- Drake Baer, “The Science Behind Why Facebook Is So Addictive,” Business Insider (November 13, 2014)
- Tony Reinke, “10 Questions on Prayer with Tim Keller,” desiringGod.org (October 31, 2014)
- Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works (New York; 1910), 51, 63
- Sam Storms, Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Enjoying God (NavPress; 2011)
- John Piper, “God’s Design for History: The Glory of His Mercy,” desiringGod.org (March 14, 2004)
- John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Multnomah; 2000), 188
Tony Reinke serves as the
editorial and research assistant to C.J. Mahaney. He wrote a book called
Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books (Crossway). It will be
published in September 2011. In the book he addresses four main topics:
(1) why Christians prioritize book reading in the first place, (2) how
to personally select the best books to read, (3) tips and tricks on how
to go about reading them, and (4) how to overcome common challenges to
book reading.
More from Tony Reinke or visit Tony at
http://spurgeon.wordpress.com/
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