Reestablish Control in the Digital Age

 A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
 
     To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
 
    Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable.
 
    This argument sounds absurd to digital minimalists, because they believe that the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help. Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Autonomy in the Digital Age

 As argued, our current unease with new technologies is not really about whether or not they’re useful. It’s instead about autonomy. We signed up for these services and bought these devices for minor reasons—to look up friends’ relationship statuses or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.
 
    The fact that our humanity was routed by these tools over the past decade should come as no surprise. As I just detailed, we’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods.
 
    When Bill Maher joked that the App Store was coming for our souls, he was actually onto something. As Socrates explained to Phaedrus in Plato’s famous chariot metaphor, our soul can be understood as a chariot driver struggling to rein two horses, one representing our better nature and the other our baser impulses. When we increasingly cede autonomy to the digital, we energize the latter horse and make the chariot driver’s struggle to steer increasingly difficult—a diminishing of our soul’s authority.
 
    When seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that this is a battle we must fight. But to do so, we need a more serious strategy, something custom built to swat aside the forces manipulating us toward behavioral addictions and that offers a concrete plan about how to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations and not against them. Digital minimalism is one such strategy. It’s toward its details that we now turn our attention.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Digital Addiction

Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

 
I. Intermittent Positive Reinforcement
 
We begin with the first force: intermittent positive reinforcement. Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving. The original Zeiler experiment had pigeons pecking a button that unpredictably released a food pellet. As Adam Alter points out, this same basic behavior is replicated in the feedback buttons that have accompanied most social media posts since Facebook introduced the “Like” icon in 2009.
 
“It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use,” Alter writes. “What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons.” Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates what one Facebook engineer calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” while the latter feels bad. Either way, the outcome is hard to predict, which, as the psychology of addiction teaches us, makes the whole activity of posting and checking maddeningly appealing.
 
Social media feedback, however, is not the only online activity with this property of unpredictable reinforcement. Many people have the experience of visiting a content website for a specific purpose—say, for example, going to a newspaper site to check the weather forecast—and then find themselves thirty minutes later still mindlessly following trails of links, skipping from one headline to another. This behavior can also be sparked by unpredictable feedback: most articles end up duds, but occasionally you’ll land on one that creates a strong emotion, be it righteous anger or laughter. Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.
 
II. The Drive for Social Approval
 
The second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval.
 
Consider, once again, social media feedback buttons. In addition to delivering unpredictable feedback, as discussed above, this feedback also concerns other people’s approval. If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave. The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this “vital” information. 
 
The power of this drive for social approval should not be underestimated.

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Is Technology Neutral?

 Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. The topics are usually political. This was not the case, however, on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said:
 
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
 

“There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—”

“Technology is not neutral?”

“It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”

 
Bill Maher, for his part, thought this interview seemed familiar. After playing a clip of the Harris interview for his HBO audience, Maher quips: “Where have I heard this before?” He then cuts to Mike Wallace’s famous 1995 interview with Jeffrey Wigand—the whistleblower who confirmed for the world what most already suspected: that the big tobacco companies engineered cigarettes to be more addictive.
 
“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.”

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport

Fastings and Prayers

 “[Anna] did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” —Luke 2:37 (nkjv)

God. In Luke 2:37, we learn that Anna served God with “fastings and prayers.” To fast is to go without food, right? Well, not exactly. Going without food is just an expression of fasting. The Aramaic word used for “fastings” is tsom (םוצ), which is identical to the Hebrew word tsom (םוצ). The Greek word used in this verse is nesteials, and the Septuagint* (the Old Testament translated into Greek) uses the word nesteials for the Hebrew word tsom (םוצ). The Aramaic word tsom (םוצ), with its Hebrew equivalent, does offer some insight. In its Semitic form, the Aramaic and Hebrew word tsom (םוצ) has the idea of submitting the very necessities of one’s life in order to receive some knowledge. 

In ancient times, the term was used for a soldier who gave up his life to be recognized by one of his gods and receive the knowledge of the gods. In the biblical context, it means to submit to God’s will in order to bring about a transformation through the revelation of His hidden knowledge. That is the very essence of fasting. It is why going without food, the very basic necessity of life, is one of the most common expressions of fasting. But there are other ways to fast.

Anna lived a fasted lifestyle. She continually stayed in the temple, denying herself fleshly desires to pursue God’s will. This was called a service to God.

The meaning of prayer in the Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew is not only prayers of petition, but also intercessory prayers—prayers of petition for others rather than oneself. Anna continually remained in the temple living a life of fleshly denial and interceding for others day and night. That also is called a service to God. It was not being a prophetess that was called her service; it was her “fastings and prayers.”

- Chaim Bentorah & Laura Bertone, Hebrew Word Study , Vol 2.

The Lord's Prayer Leads to Theological Reflection

A prayer is always also a theological statement and a tool for theological instruction. Not only serving as a means for communicating with God, prayers are vehicles of theology informing those who pray. Prayers therefore were always a component of catechetical instruction. This is true also of the Lord's Prayer. Having been learned and internalized, the Lord's Prayer leads to further theological reflection. This is how the instructions on prayer, in which the Prayer is now embedded, came about, a process that continued into church history and the history of theology down to the present. If, as already pointed out, the Lord's Prayer stands in the middle of the SM, this prominent location is not an accident.

- Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount,1995

What is the greatest threat to Christian churches today?

In most of the world churches are liable to be swamped by the so-called prosperity gospel, and in the richer parts of the world churches struggle to guard the gospel against metamorphosing into what we might call the therapeutic gospel. These two closely-related pseudo-gospels threaten to displace the authentic Christian and Biblical gospel.
 
The prosperity gospel, in its crudest form, is the message that God wants you to be rich, and if you trust him and ask him, he will make you rich. Preachers tell the congregation how God wants them to be rich and then richer and richer.
 
What happens to the prosperity gospel when I already enjoy prosperity? It metamorphoses into the therapeutic gospel. In its simplest form, this false gospel says that if I feel empty and I come to Jesus, Jesus will fill me. The promise of objective goods (money, wife, husband, children) metamorphoses into the claiming of subjective benefits. I feel depressed, and Jesus promises to lift my spirits. I feel aimless, and Jesus commits himself to giving me purpose in life. I feel empty inside, and Jesus will fill me.
 
This chimes perfectly with prosperous twenty-first-century society. While writing this, I had a survey from our gas supplier asking for customer feedback after a repair job. The survey began with the words, “We want to know how we left you feeling.” That is very contemporary. Not “We want to know whether we made your gas heating work, whether we did it promptly and efficiently” and so on (objective criteria), but “We want to know how we left you feeling” (the subjective focus). Did we help you feel good?
 
The therapeutic gospel is the gospel of self-fulfillment. It makes me, already healthy and wealthy, feel good. The book of Job addresses in a deep and unsettling way both the pseudo-gospel of prosperity and the pseudo-gospel of feeling good.

--- Ash, C. Job: The Wisdom of the Cross.