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Today Joe highlights a growing problem with news consumption, and warns how it may be destroying your soul.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and if you think that keeping up with news and politics right now is just overwhelming, well, good news. I guess you’re correct and you should know that some of that feeling of being overwhelmed that you’re experiencing is actually by design. Now, Steve Bannon, one of the masterminds behind President Trump’s first campaign, gave a fascinating interview back in 2019 where he talked about feeling like they were up against both the Democratic party and the media and that one of the strategies for keeping the opposition both the media and the other party on the back foot was by doing so much stuff all at once that it was hard to organize any kind of opposition to it. In Bannon’s words, he says this,
CLIP:
In the first a hundred days, every day we’re going to be hitting with either three executive orders or whatever. Number one is that the Democratic party shattered. They don’t know if they’re coming or going, right? They got one group that’s doing identity politics, another group that’s the Clinton Rist. I said, we’ve broken ’em right now. They have no idea they’re going to have their own internal civil war, right? They’ll keep them occupied for a while, so what we’ve got to do is just hit, hit, hit and keep it. It’s momentum, momentum, momentum. The opposition party is the media, and the media can only because they’re dumb and they’re lazy. They can only focus on one thing at a time, and the one thing they’ll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race or once the horse race, who’s ins who’s out. It’s like the high school who are the cool kids in the cafeteria? Because it’s easy. It’s the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time and they won’t do the basic, what are the core things that are going on in the country? I said, all we have to do is flood the zone every day we hit ’em with three things, they’ll bite on one and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, it’s got to hammer. What does it work? Muzzle velocity.
Joe:
So that momentum, minimum momentum, the bang, bang, bang, they hit him with three different things at once every day. Whatever you think of that, that certainly seems to work as a political strategy and moreover is only more amplified this time around. So just to put some numbers on it, in the first Trump presidency, he didn’t literally sign three executive orders a day. In the first a hundred days he was in office, he signed 24 executive orders, but this time around we’re only about halfway through his first a hundred days and he’s already signed 89. So it is much closer to three a day and they’re often on different topics, often in controversial areas, all of which could make a good media story or a good opposition ad. But when there’s so much stuff all at once, it’s overwhelming. Now, I don’t want to talk about it from the political angle.
I understand why it’s happening. I want to talk about the spiritual angle. What does it do to us as human beings to be saturated with this many different stimuli all at once, demanding a response of Congratulations, congratulations, outrage. Something else just to evaluate all these different policies going across so quickly day after day after day after day. And I would suggest that this is much more spiritually damaging to us as individuals than we realize and that this is true literally regardless of the merits of the policies and regardless of what one thinks of President Trump, that I’ll just put it like this, chances are or maybe are someone who talks about all these different political things day after day and you’ve got to form some kind of opinion. This is great because of this. This is horrible. Because of that, you’ve got to stir up they congratulations or the outrage or the outrage at the outrage day after day after day.
Now, if you’re someone who maybe you’ve seen a loved one go down this route, you’ve seen what it’s done to them, the sort of flattening effect it has on one’s personality, the way it makes them less pleasant to be around, and I’m going to suggest that’s not just because maybe you disagree with their politics, even if they share your general political orientation, it’s because it’s doing something else that’s really destructive and really damaging that we may be underappreciate. But to get into that kind of political frame, to analyze it fiercely, we have to actually dig a little deeper and say the underlying problem, political orientation. The underlying problem is that we are way too online right now, that there’s a technological problem that is behind and beneath the political division and outrage and everything else. And maybe the best way to put some numbers on that is just to say we hit a very strange and kind of igneous mark recently, which is we’d been year after year after year increasing more and more and more media. A lot of this is screen time. Not all of this. This is any kind of media consumption. It’s listening to Spotify, it’s listening to the radio, it’s watching tv, it’s being in front of a screen. And recently a weird thing happened. I’m going to let these marketers explain, but the short answer is that number stopped going up, but the reason it stopped going up is because it could not go up anymore.
CLIP:
Our conclusion is that media saturation is here from years and years and years. Sometimes I’ve come on to this podcast talking with you or just in general, this forecast has shown an ever increasing amount of time that Americans spend with media just goes up year after year and we are now pretty much ready to say that the wall is being hit now it’s being hit at a very high level, 12 and a half hours plus an enormous amount of time is spent with media
Joe:
More specifically when he says 12 and a half hours plus the number that came to was 12 hours in 42 minutes per day is what the average American is spending consuming media. And the reason that we’re hitting A is we’ve run out of waking hours in the day. I mean, there’s a certain amount of time when you sort of can’t be in front of a screen or listening to something because you’re asleep or doing something else. We’ve pretty much filled every moment of our waking lives with media and with the consumption of media. Now, hear me out. Not all of that is political. Not all of that is bad, but it’s a lot. It’s too much. And that would be true even if you were just watching nature programming 12 hours and 42 minutes a day, that’d be excessive. Even if you’re watching the most edifying, uplifting, heartening story of puppies finding their mothers, that would be too much.
But unfortunately, in that 12 hours and 42 minutes per day that you are a consumer being fed products by sophisticated media organizations, they have learned how to market effectively to you by making you angrier and less happy. And so we have a pretty clear, pretty well established addiction to outrage. Now, that’s not a conspiracy. We know that marketers have honed in on this and figured out ways to manipulate you and your emotions to make things rage. Bait is one of the terms that you’ll hear. People get addicted to certain emotions. Now, if you want to see someone promoting this, Jonah Berger has a book called Contagious, why? Things Catch On, and he’s writing from a marketing perspective basically asking why do some things go viral and others don’t? And it’s easy to say, oh, the problem is people respond more to negative emotions than positive ones.
That’s actually wrong. What they respond to are what he calls high arousal emotions. Emotions that get you worked up. Now they could get you worked up in a positive way. Wow, this is so amazing. I’m so excited. I got to go tell everybody or, and this is easier to do. They could get you worked up in a negative way. Like how dare they? And then I feel the need to comment. I’m going to tell everybody I can’t believe they did this. In contrast to high arousal emotions, you have low arousal emotions. These can also be positive or negative. So for instance, a positive low arousal emotion is contentment. Oh, I guess monkeypox wasn’t really the thing people were saying it was going to be. That’s good. You don’t feel the need to go in like, Hey everybody, good news, we don’t have monkeypox. But there’s also negative low arousal emotions, particularly sadness.
You read something, it just bums you about, you don’t want to talk about it. You’re not mad. You’re just like, that’s disappointing. Yeah, I’m not going to go share 30 articles about how the Eagles beat the chiefs in the Super Bowl. I might read them for some reason, but I’m not going to share them because oh, that kind of bums me out. That’s a low arousal negative emotion. So the issue isn’t positive versus negative emotions. The issue is high arousal emotions, and one of the easiest ways to tap into that is with negative high arousal emotions by triggering the fight or flight response. If you can make somebody really angry where they have to lash out, that’s great from a perverted marketing perspective because now they’re going to lash out and spread the word of your product or the thing you’re selling or the article you’re trying to get them to click on.
And Burger teaches people to do this. Here’s how he puts it. He said, when trying to use emotions to drive sharing, remember to pick ones that kindle the fire, select high arousal emotions that drive people to action on the positive side, excite people or inspire them by showing them how they can make a difference. On the negative side, make people mad, not sad. Then he says, simply adding more arousal to a story or add can have a big impact on people’s willingness to share it. In one experiment, we changed the details of a story to make it evoke more anger. In another experiment we made an ad funnier. In both cases, the results were the same. More anger or more humor led to more sharing. Negative emotions can also drive people to talk and share. I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty gross.
In fact, I would say this, you should absolutely smash the like button and the share and comment below and share this to all of your friends to say, isn’t this outrageous that people are purposely stirring up outrage just to get easy clicks and likes and comments and do that without any sense of irony? But in all seriousness, this is something we have to watch out for because it’s not just that we are idly consuming way too much stuff. It’s that we’re consuming things that are calibrated to make us unhappy, and this bears terrible spiritual fruit. And we’re going to get into that in a moment. But before we get there, I want to actually handle a few objections that you might have because as you’re probably seeing, I’m going to say you need to radically curb your media diet. And I say this as a hypocrite, beautiful day outside the day, it’s warm, it feels wonderful.
We’ve had snow recently and it’s almost 70 degrees. And I was on my phone walking to work thinking about what I was going to say about people being on their phones too much and thought, Hmm, physician heal thyself. So I say this with some sense of self-incrimination and I can think of the objections I would give, and these might be the same objections you would give, and they are basically these three, number one, but I need to be politically informed. I keep track of the news so I know what’s going on in the US or in the world or whatever country you’re in. Number two, well, how am I going to stay connected if I radically cut media consumption out of my life? How will I stay connected to those around me? And number three, well, you can spiritualize it. Shouldn’t I be praying for the victims of tragedies around the world?
Let’s consider each of these in turn, because there is some sense in which consuming hours of media consumption a day might make you better politically informed than actually a little more disputed. Because oftentimes people consume things that strengthen their own biases and they end up just more biased and less understanding of the situation. But there’s some evidence that it does some good. But I would just ask this question, is political awareness worth it? And we can look at this in a pretty concrete way because there’s a moment in life which many of you watching this I know will not have reached yet, but should consider there’s a moment in life when people suddenly have a lot more time to consume media and that is retirement. And so Marcel Gars, professor at the University of Hamburg has a journal article called Retirement Consumption of Political Information and Political Knowledge from the European Journal of Political Economy.
But he’s actually looking in many cases at American consumption. So even though he’s writing for a European journal and he’s a European social scientist, nevertheless, here’s what he found. He says, after controlling for the age-related decline in cognitive abilities and other covariates, I’m going to explain what all that means. He found that retirement leads to an increase in the respondents to correctly answered questions. So in other words, they would quiz people about political stuff like who is the Secretary of State? And after they retired, people got better at answering those questions when you adjust for cognitive decline. So people actually got worse, but they got less worse than they would’ve if they were still getting older and not retired. So people get worse as they get older because of cognitive decline. But people who are getting older but are also watching more news because they’re retired, get worse at a slower rate. So this is not a great result to begin with, but kind of unavoidable. You’re just not going to be as sharp at 85 as you are at 55.
But then he said that the effect is larger for questions about issues that are particularly relevant to retirees like health policy and current events rather than general knowledge. So that’s the first thing. You’re not just generally better informed, you’re better informed about the stuff that’s most directly relevant to your life, which okay, fair enough, fine. But then he says, however, I do not find robust evidence of effects on intentions of respondents to vote. So number one, spending hours more watching political news doesn’t make retirees more likely to vote than they would’ve if they weren’t spending hours. So the most obvious thing you could say, the reason I need to watch all this political news is so I can be an informed citizen and go vote, and we just don’t find that effect happening. Instead, we find that people become more committed to the party they were already identified with.
They don’t switch from L to R or from R to L. They don’t switch from Democrat to Republican. They just become more ensconced with whatever they previously believed. And so Gar says, this result likely implies that retirees use the additional spare time to expand their consumption of congenial, partisan news, which strengthens existing beliefs and increases polarization. So I can point to even people in the Catholic online world who went from being not very overtly political to talking positively or negatively about Donald Trump all the time. And it seemed like this was not a political evolution of them switching from one position to another. They just became more and more and more vocal about the position. They already helped and alienated a lot of people who might’ve listened to them on more important issues otherwise. But this is what we find with retirees as well, that as they have this extra time, they’re not getting more nuanced in their political opinions.
They’re not getting more moderate or anything like this. No, it is the opposite. They’re becoming just more partisan because they’re consuming congenial, partisan news that we may tell ourselves that the reason that we are watching the news is to be informed. But if you are spending hours a day watching a political news show that agrees with your political leanings or listening to a podcast that agrees with your political leanings or reading stuff online or watching YouTube videos that agree with your existing leanings, it’s only so convincing to say that this is about education. It seems to be in no small part for entertainment. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with entertainment. But let’s tell the truth. You are spending hours a day entertaining yourself by listening to people who maybe are smarter or more articulate than you telling you why the things you already believe are right.
That can feel really good. Confirmation bias is a heck of a drug, but there’s some real downside to that. And one of the downsides is you’re not really better politically informed except in a trivial sense, like you’re more likely to know what bill is before Congress, but understanding the other side say, you’re not really better at that. You’re if anything seemingly worse at that. And Garza’s words, he says in general, general knowledge is socially beneficial, but affective polarization is likely harmful affective polarization, meaning you are more emotionally detached from and opposed to people with whom you disagree. Thus, the welfare effects of the increase in media consumption due to retirement remain unclear. And then he connects this up to previous findings they have on demographic differences in polarization, namely increased exposure to traditional media in combination with the changing media landscape likely explain why older people have been becoming more polarized than other age groups over the last decades.
Like the radicalization of grandma and grandpa is a result of the political media environment, both traditional things like TV shows and the rise of online stuff. And because there’s a wealth of other stuff showing that this is the one group susceptible to not having a good sense of fake news versus real news. I mean literally non-existent news stories. This is a group most likely to fall for ai, art, all that stuff. These are the people being affected most strongly by that. Now, some of that is generational, some of that is maybe tied to the cognitive decline, but a lot of that is just tied to consuming way too much of this stuff. And so if you are someone, even if you’re not a retiree who finds that you consume a lot of this stuff, you should see maybe it’s having these effects on me as well.
We can talk about some of those effects. Now, we’ve already talked about a few of them, but the political polarization bears real spiritual fruit and its nasty fruit. So Pew back in 2022 had an article or a report really called as Partisan Hostility grows signs of frustration with the two party system. But despite the headline, the real takeaway is this members who are not just liens Republican or liens democratic, but people who were like, yeah, I definitely am a Republican. I definitely am a Democrat at shocking rates, have come to really hate the other party to view them with genuine antipathy. So when you look at favorable unfavorable on the unfavorables, we want to look specifically at the very unfavorable because obviously you’re going to disagree with the party. You’re not in almost definitionally, you’re not like I’m a Republican, but I think the Democrats have way better ideas or vice versa.
Why wouldn’t you just switch parties? So it’s normal to have some degree of, yeah, we part company and especially as the parties have seemingly moved further apart in some respects, some of this is totally normal, but it’s worth at least recognizing this is the state we’re in and that we were not always in this state because some of you are very much not retirees. Some of you don’t remember like the early nineties because maybe you weren’t alive then. And so you should just know that back in 1994, only about 21% of Republicans had a very unfavorable view of the Democratic party. Now it’s 62%, so it’s roughly tripled. On the flip side, only 17% of Democrats had a very unfavorable view of the Republican party, and now it’s 54%. It’s actually slightly more than tripled. So a majority of Democrats, the majority of Republicans view the other side at least as a party with great hostility.
But again, that by itself, okay, you might just say, well, this is a sign that the political parties have really differentiated one another and they have different policy proposals. Some of those proposals are better than others. My side’s obviously, right? So I view the other side quite unfavorably that by itself isn’t obviously bad, but Pew finds this partisan polarization increasingly means that Republicans and Democrats don’t just view the opposing party, but also the people in that party in a negative light growing shares in each party. Now, describe those in the other party as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans. In fact, this is, I don’t know, I just thought the numbers here were quite shocking. So the questions are framed as, do you think members of opposing party are more closed-minded than the average American? That’s kind of the way it’s framed.
Most Republicans thought Democrats were more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent and lazy than ordinary Americans. Most Democrats thought Republicans were more close-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans. They didn’t interestingly say, lazy. So you might be close-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent, but you work really hard. So that’s something among the just sort of like four or more of these traits where you’d say, oh, yeah, they’re all of the bad things. A majority of Republicans assigned four or more of the five traits, the five negative traits to an ordinary Democrat. Again, not the politicians, just members of the other party like your uncle, that sort of thing. And 43% of Democrats did likewise. So this is when I say it’s making us judge our neighbor in this harsh and uncharitable light. We have the data to show that this is not just a policy difference. This is not just, yeah, we disagree on some major things, but I think you’re a good person who’s mistaken on some important things.
This is, I think you’re an idiot and a liar and evil and close-minded, unlike me very much, not close-minded and maybe lazy depending on which side that’s bad. This is genuinely bad spiritual fruit. And one of the reasons this spiritual fruit exists is because we’re spending hours a day being fed outrageous outraging things to make us mad at each other. And it’s working and it’s working way too effectively and it’s doing real damage, but it’s not just doing damage in how I view my neighbor, even apart from the political thing. Remember, my argument is the root of this is just an overconsumption of media. We also have good evidence that this excessive digital consumption leads to bad mental wellbeing. Now, I’ve not read the book yet, but I know the Anxious Generation by Jonathan Heint explores. So I recommend that this is probably going to be very good because his earlier book, the Coddling of the American Mind, I found very thought provoking.
So I’m going to give a complete blind recommendation for a book I have not yet read to say that if it’s anything like his previous work on this stuff, it’s probably very good and worth checking out. And eventually I’ll get around to actually reading it for now though another European study, this one on Europeans, this one’s called social Media use Loneliness and emotional Distress among young people in Europe from researchers in Italy and Germany and published in the GLO discussion paper. And what they found by looking at data across Europe, and this is I would suspect also true of the us, was that studies consistently indicate an increase in symptoms of sadness, anxiety, and depression when people consume more social media. In addition, recent evidence highlights that loneliness is particularly high among younger populations. And then they say social pressures and comparisons now amplified by continuous digital engagement might be especially harmful for young people during formative years when identity development is critical.
But they do something that I think is actually really cool here. They distinguish between social media usage and things like instant messaging where you have passive uses when you’re just scrolling through. They find in particular that this sends rates of anxiety and depression and loneliness up because I mean, if you think about it, you’re like Scrooge and the Christmas story where you’re not visible when you’re just watching what everybody else is doing. Imagine how lonely that would be for Ebenezer Scrooge. I don’t mean Scrooge McDuck. In contrast, if you’re using your phone to message somebody else, there’s an actual conversation there. Now, maybe it’s not as rich as it would be in person, but you’re connected. So they don’t find these same trends for people who are on their phone messaging. They do find these trends for people who are scrolling. And so if you are a passive consumer and you’re doing a lot of that, you should be aware that you’re not just feeling worse about the person you disagree with, you’re probably feeling worse about yourself.
So that then leads to that third objection. But wait, don’t I have to pray for other people? And so I want to address that and talk about prayer. And the short answer, I actually floated this objection to my wife yesterday and said, what would you say to this? And she said, well, yeah, you’ve got enough to know to pray for people already. You can pray for everyone who’s a victim of war or injustice or all of that stuff right now around the world. You don’t need to know all of their details. And so there’s this temptation where we use the spiritual guise to really just satiate our own curiosity. And there’s this fight, it’s called curiosity tos or literally the vice of curiosity where it’s just wanting to know things to know them, not because it’s enriching my love of the truth, but it’s want more information.
And similarly, there’s the vice of gossip. And so you can imagine, imagine you’ve got a group of people praying and you say, Hey, say a prayer for my friend Mrs. Smith, she’s having some problems in her marriage. The good reaction is to be like, okay, yeah, I’ll pray for her. The bad reaction is to say, tell me all the details so I can pray for Mrs. Smith. That’s gossip. Watch out for that because you might pretend you’re doing that for her sake. We both know you’re not, and we can do the same thing in political stuff. I need to spend hours a day hearing how horrible the other party is so I can pray for all the people who’ve been hurt by them. No, that’s not what’s going on. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Let’s not give cheap spiritual excuses for our bad behavior, alright? With that, I don’t want to just diagnose the problem, and I know I’ve not even done a very thorough job.
I’m just sketching out the gist of the problem. I trust that you already have some sense of it yourself, and I’m relying on that. I want to get practical about some solutions. And the first thing I’d say is think about this the way you would your real diet, like your diet of food. If you realized, hey, I’m spending 12 hours a day eating junk food. I’m eating food that’s making my stomach upset and it’s not sitting well with me and it’s making me feel bad about myself, et cetera, et cetera, maybe you need to cut all that stuff out completely and we’ll talk about that. But maybe you just need to be smarter about it, radically reduce it, and you can still leave some of it in there because I don’t want to say it’s bad to be politically informed. I think that’s overrated, but I think it’s an authentic good.
I don’t think it’s bad to find out what’s going on in other countries and you can pray for the other people. I think we often use that as a pretext. But those things, while they’re not evil of themselves, they need to be radically reduced. So the solution may not be to get rid of them, but just to reduce them. So I’d ask these questions. Number one, I think you should watch what you’re consuming and why. So ask yourself, how am I spending my day? Maybe even journal, keep track of, I mean, go look at your internet history and just scroll through the tome where you say, I had no idea I went to 500 websites this morning. And then ask, why did I do that? What was I looking for? I mean, maybe you’re looking for some obscure bit of data, that’s often why I do.
But ask the more meaningful question of what am I trying to do in doing that? Why did I think I need to know why Hungary’s, excuse me, national anthem is in minor tonality and et cetera, not necessary, right? Second, how much are you consuming? Because even if it’s good stuff, again, are you consuming too much? Having a digital wellbeing thing on your phone can be really helpful, but be mindful that you’re not just consuming stuff on your phone anymore. Most of us are watching things on two screens or we’re listening to things in one place and watching them somewhere else. Keep track of all of that. If you can’t even watch a movie because you’re too distracted, that might be a sign that something is radically out of whack. Number three, ask, what is it doing to me? So when I watch a lot of this stuff, am I happier?
Am I sad or am I more anxious? What’s going on? And it can be really helpful to have a spouse or a loved one of some kind who can tell you, you become really obnoxious when you watch X, Y, Z. That can be really helpful. It can also be really helpful if you think it’s not affecting you to try cutting it out of your diet completely for a few days and see what that does. I talked to someone who often was one of these people who would do the political news all the time and every time you talked to him it was something political. And then he went on a retreat for three days I think, and silent retreat cut off from all that stuff. And afterwards it was like a whole different person come back until he got reabsorbed into the media ecosphere and it was a night and day difference, and I think even he noticed it.
So then the fourth thing I would say isn’t really a question which just consume better things. Be mindful about what you’re consuming and fill your diet with better things. Now this is incomplete. There’s something else we’re going to want to fill in the space there, which silence, we’re going to get to that in a minute. But one of the things you should be doing is saying, okay, even if a particular story is worth me knowing about how much time and attention does it deserve, I’m going to give you an example from this morning. My producer metal Mike sent me this Tim pool from his Tim cast news thing, and at the time he sent it to me, it had 57,000 views, 37 minutes after it had been streamed. And now when I went like half an hour later, it had 63,000 views. And the headline is Democrat impeachment campaign against Trump begins as party collapses.
Voters quit party. Now if you actually find out what he’s really talking about, an online petition got 250,000 signatures saying the president should be impeached. And a good question, is this a new story I need to know about? The answer is no, that’s not going anywhere. But there’s no clear line where we get from, yeah, there is an online petition to the president is no longer the president and now the vice president becomes, it’s not how things work. And if you’re really politically informed, you already know this is a total non-story. But even if you think it is a story, even if you say, I should find out about that, you could do what I did and just Google that and find a paragraphs worth of information that tells you the basic gist and you realize this is nobody in Congress, this is not a party led thing.
This is just a random online petition and there are a million read on online petitions for anything you want to find and then ask yourself, okay, Tim pool’s stream was an hour and one minute and 50 seconds. Is there any way that the story I just described to you justifies an hour of my life? And I would suggest once you start asking those questions, you start realizing like, oh yeah, maybe I’m wasting my life on some of this stuff regardless. I mean, this is not me weighing in on the merits of any of that. It’s me just saying, spending an hour on a non-story designed to get people worked up and outraged is not a good use of your life or good to do to yourself spiritually. It is certainly not worth 61 minutes and 50 seconds. Alright, there is actual biblical guidance on this and this is what I want to give you.
That St. Paul in Philippians chapter four says this. He says, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice now that’s top line. He’s going to then tell you how to get there. How do you get in a place where you can be rejoicing always. And a lot of it is having a healthy spiritual diet of what you’re consuming. He’s not going to use terms like new media. He’s solidly old media, but he is going to tell you to figure out what it is you’re consuming. So listen to that as we get there first. So he’s going to say, let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand, have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Hold on, we just got a solution step. If you are struggling with anxiety, stop watching things that make you anxious on purpose.
Start spending more time in prayer. And then he says, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, we’ll keep you hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, that there are actual spiritual remedies to this that aren’t just, I need to consume more media junk food. But then he’s going to get very particular. He’s going to say, finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there’s any excellence, if there’s anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And I would add, watch these things. Listen to these things. It is easy to obsess about the negative stuff. It’s actually very easy not just for other people to gin up the negative emotional arousal, but for you to gin it up in yourself by stressing about things you have no control over by getting worried about the state of the world by thinking about all of the tragedies that are out there that are real tragedies.
But how are you making the world a better place by spending hours of your day fretting about things you have no control over? I would argue you’re not. And I think St. Paul would argue the same thing, that you should fill your internal diet in terms of what you’re thinking about, praying about focusing on, and also your external diet. What is coming into your body? What is coming into your mind? It should be things that are true, honorable, just pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and praiseworthy. And if the stuff that you’re consuming that doesn’t sound like it, you probably need to be consuming better stuff. Finally, it says what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me do and the God of peace will be with you. Notice the way he contrasts a godly peace from a worldly anxiety. And so many of us have fallen into worldly anxiety because we haven’t allowed ourselves to be sated by godly peace.
Now, I want to say a word on this, and I know part of this is just being married to a marriage and family therapist. My wife deals with people who have actual underlying psychological issues where they have anxiety and all of that. St. Paul’s not talking about that. There’s a level of anxiety you can’t control. Your fight or flight response is miscalibrated. And so you go into fight or flight mode and things easily trigger it. And so you feel more agita, more anxiety. That’s a different thing. That’s not, Paul is not condemning that. He’s instead condemning the rest of us who are purposely making ourselves upset and allowing ourselves to be carried away by the kind of distressing thoughts. So don’t read that as an anti, like don’t take your anxiety medicine, don’t get treated. No. And much less is it condemning someone for something they have no control over.
But a lot of this stuff we have control over and there’s great data to suggest that we have control over it. Paul is then going to give us some symptoms to watch out for the good and bad spiritual fruit. In Galatians chapter five, he says that the works of the flesh are plain and then he lists several of them. I want to highlight a few immorality. Obviously one of the ways you can emotionally arouse someone is through things that are salacious and provocative, sensual and impurity similarly, but those are just the first two he mentions. He then turns to things like enmity, strife, jealousy. How much of social media is built up on dividing people and making you jealous of what somebody else’s life looks like on a screen? How much is built on cultivating anger, selfishness, dissension, seemingly a lot of outrage. Culture is very much like that.
And particularly as we’re looking at the political media landscape, how much is motivated by dissension party spirit and the like? Likewise, he’s going to talk about envy and drunkenness and carousing. I don’t think we need to worry about drunkenness and carousing here, but envy again, certainly comes up. So if you look at how am I scrolling? What feelings is it bringing up in me? And St. Paul just gave you a checklist of them, that’s a sign that you need to change something pretty radical. On the flip side, the positive symptoms, what he calls the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. If the things that you’re watching and listening to and imbibing make you feel a greater sense of those things, that’s probably a good sign. That’s probably a sign that this is what you should be consuming.
That’s the first thing. Change your diet accordingly. And again, it might not mean an elimination diet, it might mean that you just do a lot less that way. You still have a little bit of junk food, but it’s more proportionate to what it should be in the old food pyramid charts, that top little use sparingly, I would say use sparingly here. But next I’m going to pivot and just say touch grass. Now if you’re not super online, this is a super online way of saying don’t be super online. Touch grass just means actually go outside. And it turns out there’s an actual peer reviewed journal of electronic gaming and eSports, which is already very funny of itself. And there’s an article in there talking about how you should touch grass instead of playing eSports. If you want to really have psychological excellence, the authors say nature exposure generally is linked to greater performance and wellbeing across psychological and psychophysiological research.
Academic and organizational psychology research have shown that nature exposure, again, touching grass, improved performance and wellbeing, outdoor nature exposure has improved task related attention and reduced mental fatigue in students and improved workers’ recovery, stress reduction and coping. Put it another way. You were not created to spend your life behind a desk in an office or behind a desk in a school or behind a desk in front of a screen. That last one is dating me. I know people use laptops now, but I was going with a desk theme. The point there is you need to actually go outside and go outside in a screen, free content, take the headphones out, don’t have your phone in front of you, enjoy nature sort of way. Now some of you live in better places for that, others don’t, but getting in the habit of going outside can be very helpful for a lot of things.
One, it can help you sort of mentally decompress. I will tell you frequently when I hit writer’s block in terms of scripting episodes, if I just walk around, even if I’m not intentionally thinking about whatever it is, that is frequently what I need to do to sort of clear up those mental blocks. And the reason has to do with complicated physical and psychological, just the nature of humans as humans, but those different components, again, you weren’t meant to just sit there and think, in fact, we have this on good authority going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. They had what were called the Paracetic teachers. People like Socrates, Plato, who would teach while walking. That’s what paracetic means. I dunno why they didn’t just say walking, but hey, because there’s this idea that when you walk and have conversation, I don’t know, there’s just something that engages you in a different way.
And I know certain people, especially if you have attention problems, doing something where you can focus by doing something mindless and that might just be walking through nature can often help that feeling of being overwhelmed and drawn in 20 different directions that can be totally exhausting by itself. So as much as you’re possible, as much as it’s possible for you, I should say go outside, go spend time in nature, I think it’s good for you. Alright, the last point, make space for God in silence. I want to give you a few examples from the Bible on this. And the first one is a pretty famous story of Elijah. And this is from one Kings 19. So Elijah has a lot going on in his life. His life is being threatened. I’m going to let you read the backstory to how we got there. But Elijah comes to a cave and the word of the Lord comes to him and says, what are you doing here, Elijah?
And he says, I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant thrown down my altars and slaying their prophets with the sword. And I even, I only am left and they seek my life to take it away. So enter into that place. You’ve probably felt that sense that I’m trying to stand up for what is right and I feel completely alone. And that’s where Elijah is. And our Lord is going to give him good advice, not consume every look at these idiot prophets of ball content, get more worked up, more upset, more outraged. No, the outrage are real. I mean everything he’s talking about, there are real reasons to be outraged, but it’s not good for him to stay in a state of perpetual outrage. And so God says to him, go forth and stand upon the Mount before the Lord.
And then these things happen. Behold, the Lord passed by and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broken pieces, the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake and after the earthquake of fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still small voice. And Elijah the prophet, he’s used to discerning the voice of God. And so when Elijah hears the still small voice, only then does he come out. He wraps his face in his mantle, goes out and stands at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, what are you doing here, Elijah? So Elijah is attentive enough to discerning the voice of the Lord, to know he’s not going to find God in the chaos, in the mighty wind, in the earthquake, in the fire.
He’s going to instead find him in the still small voice. Now we live in a culture that creates mighty winds, that creates earthquakes, that creates fires. I’m not making any weird conspiracy theory about weather control. I mean this metaphorically. And we can become consumed by the avalanche of information, by the absolute tsunami of dissenting voices and news things that are encouraging us to work up an opinion and especially get outraged about the latest and greatest or the latest and worst thing that has come down from on high. But that is not where we find God. We find God in those moments of quiet and peace. And that still small voice, Elijah points us to that. But you know who else points us to that? Jesus, I give you several examples from the life of Christ. The first is the story of Mary and Martha. Now if you remember the story, Jesus goes to his friend’s, Mary and Martha’s house, and Martha is busy trying to do good things, but she’s trying to do good things.
While she should be there with Jesus, she’s getting the house ready while the guest is there. Mary, in contrast, is sitting at Jesus’ feet and is quite clear that Mary has chosen the better part, that even trying to do good things for God can become a distraction from actually stopping to listen to God. And we would do well to analyze what am I doing and who am I listening to if I’m not listening to God? But then you have Christ’s own passion. He is tormented, people are mocking him, and he stays silent. He goes on trial before Pilate, he’s accused and in the midst of all this chaos, he stays silent and he’s teaching us by his silence as much by his words. This is a point that I think Cardinal Sarrah makes really well in his book, the Power of Silence against the Dictatorship of Noise.
He says, we often forget that Christ loved to be silent. He set out for the desert not to go into exile but to encounter God. Now if you’re celebrating Lent, this is very much the theme of Lent going into the place of silence, be with God, getting rid of all the distractions in life, all the material comforts that might keep us away from God to be with God more. And then he says, and at the most crucial moment in his life when there was screaming on all sides, covering him with all sorts of lies and ies, when the high priest asked him, have you no answer to make Jesus preferred silence. But then he warns. He says, this is a case of true amnesia. Catholics no longer know that silence is sacred. It is God’s dwelling place. And he asks, how can we recover the sense of silence as a manifestation of God?
This is the tragedy of the modern world. Man separates himself from God because he no longer believes in the value of silence. In other words, it is very hard to be in a place where there’s built in silence and majesty, for instance, imaginal rural environment. Before you have the chaos of smartphones and satellites and everything else where you’re just alone with your thoughts. It’s very hard in that environment not to know that God exists. It is much easier, and you see this in the numbers, it’s much easier in a big city where there’s more chaos and distraction to be an atheist because you can hide from silence a lot more effectively in a large urban area than you can in a rural one. Well now with smartphones, you can hide from silence Anywhere in the world, you can be on a plane and have eight hours worth of movies. So you don’t even have to be alone with your thoughts. Even there, you don’t even have to be alone with God. Even there that whereas before we would say, where can we hide from you? God? Now it’s where can’t we hide from you? Where can we not run from silence? Where can we not run from the voice of God? That still small voice. We can drown it out wherever we are, and that’s a problem. And we as Catholics, not just the rest of the world, we as Catholics can fall into that.
The last thing that Cardinal Saro says, I mean the last thing I’m going to quote, he says, more than this, in the book, without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more oppressive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness. And I would give that as kind of a bit of, if you want to call it Linton encouragement or life advice to just say, notice how noisy and chaotic your life is. And again, maybe the noise and chaos isn’t inherently evil, but it is inherently noisy and chaotic, and as a result, we should work to reduce it. As a result, we should try to eliminate it from our lives and at least create more spaces to hear that still small voice. I think if you take that practice, if you reduce the amount of time you’re scrolling, if you reduce the amount of time you’re imbibing stuff designed to make you outrage, if you reduce the amount of time designed to make you hate people of a different political orientation than you, and you increase the amount of time you have for silence and for prayer, you’ll find your life is radically better.
I’ve never seen someone try that and come away saying, you know what? I think I spent too much time in silence and prayer and not listening to talking heads on cable TV or reading controversial articles. I’ve never seen it happen. Maybe it’ll be the first. If you are, I’d love to hear it. For Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, thank you and God bless you.