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
