Scrolling through various news feeds has become a part of everyday life for most people with access to a mobile device.
Most of us don’t even think about it. We pick-up a smart phone and then immediately start scrolling.
It could be our social media news feed, YouTube, or even our Google search results.
In the abstract there is nothing inherently evil about mindless scrolling. It’s neither good nor bad and has no immediate moral implications.
However, scrolling can quickly become addicting and that is where it can take us away from God.
The scrolling addiction
If we only scrolled through our phone’s feed once a month, it would never pose a problem for us. Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we likely do it dozens of times in a single day.
According to an article in PCMag, “in 2023, people are checking their phones 144 times a day.“
St. Francis de Sales speaks to this addiction (though he never lived to see the invention of the computer) in his Introduction to the Devout Life:
Sports, balls, plays, festivities, pomps, are not in themselves evil, but rather indifferent matters, capable of being used for good or ill…The harm lies, not in doing them, but in the degree to which you care for them.
Wanting to know about all the activities in life by scrolling through your phone is not an evil desire, but what is harmful is the “degree to which you care for them.”
St. Francis de Sales explains that these things (mindless scrolling included) can lead us away from God when we get addicted to them:
[I]f you are much addicted to these things, they will hinder your devotion, and become extremely hurtful and dangerous to you.
He then goes on to write how taking an excessive delight in them can distract us from God:
While I do not forbid the use of these dangerous pleasures, I say that you cannot take an excessive delight in them without their telling upon your devotion…the human heart which is cumbered with useless, superfluous, dangerous clingings, becomes incapacitated for that earnest following after God which is the true life of devotion. No one blames children for running after butterflies, because they are children, but is it not ridiculous and pitiful to see full-grown men eager about such worthless trifles as the worldly amusements before named, which are likely to throw them off their balance and disturb their spiritual life?
Many of us claim that we don’t have time to pray, and yet we do have the time to pick-up our phones 144 times in a day.
We should all evaluate our daily scrolling habits and seriously look at them, discerning whether they lead us closer to God or if we are feeling more empty than we were at the beginning of the day.
And today we celebrate...