The problem of distraction

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).

So it’s not surprising that our author from the first paragraph would chastise us as he did. But he wasn’t talking about TikTok. Because he was writing in the fourth century.

This is from John Cassian’s Conferences, the reports he wrote after visiting many different desert fathers, those who had devoted their lives to godliness. This is advice from men who sought to obey Paul’s command to pray without ceasing, and spent their lives working out how to do that. One issue they keep coming back to, that they keep being asked about, is distraction. How does one keep the mind on prayer? Or on Scripture, when we are reading it? One disciple’s question resonated especially with me: “The mind is constantly whirling from psalm to psalm, leaping from a Gospel text to a reading from the Apostle, wandering from this to the prophesies and thence being carried away to certain spiritual histories, tossed about fickle and aimless through the whole body of Scripture.”

Yes, that’s describing me as I try to do my quiet time. One thought sparks another, and when I’m trying to concentrate on the passage in front of me I’m reminded of other passages and verses. That might (occasionally) be useful for cross-references, but more often it’s just distractibility.

At least if that happens, my mind is still considering Scripture. But it’s all too common that my attention also wanders to other things: “And so the mind, always aimlessly on the move, is distracted by different things … When it is doing a reading it is thinking of what it wished to do and what it wished it had done. Thus it receives and rejects nothing in a disciplined and proper manner, and it seems to react to chance incursions, not having the ability to hold fast to the things that please it nor to remain in them.”

A complaint from a fourth-century monk, but it could be describing me. We have always been distractable. The difference is, we now deliberately create technology, which we then pay to use, specifically designed to distract us. The thing recognised as very, very bad for us, all through human history, we now put huge resources into producing.

Is there any further need for proof of our fallen state? Our huge lack of wisdom? Perhaps we should consider that God has been merciful; that for millennia He kept us from fulfilling our potential in our ability to create technology. Because this is what we use it for. Not just to challenge Him – we’ve been trying that since the beginning – but trying to destroy ourselves as well.

The fourth-century monk advises we take to heart Psalm 70v1. “Hasten, O God, to save me; come quickly, Lord, to help me.” A great verse. We need it more than ever.