When you are drawn to time-wasting and distracting online content, you will do well to model your prayer on Moses’ words (Psalm 90:12): Lord, please teach me to number my days, hours, minutes, and seconds, that I may get a heart of wisdom. Or we could pray the words of the ageless hymn: “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”

The average person’s thumb travels the equivalent of two marathons a year, scrolling through social media. The average person; not just teens or twenty-somethings! What would the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes have said of the amount of time we spend on TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram? He had everything he desired—pleasure, possessions, passion, and palaces—and denied himself nothing. Any millennial influencer would drool in envy. Yet, as he considered all he had acquired and achieved under the sun, he lamented that it failed to provide meaning (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3). Pointless. Unfulfilling. A chasing of the wind. How much more so the endless scrolling we do on our phones?

So what is it that keeps us coming back? Why are we so drawn to online content? To “social” media? How can we be more wise and discerning? 

Social media isn’t so much designed to engage us as it is to retain us. The deeper we go and more time we spend the greater their revenue. Their algorithms are fine-tuned to identify what we like while also taking into consideration what or who we follow—information we freely share—to hold our attention. Social media platforms typically want a single thing: to make us scroll through one more image, meme, or video. Then another. And the next one.

What Are You Filling Your Eyes and Heart With?

The Internet and social media are, of course, neither good or evil. They’re neutral. They can be beneficial and enabling when used wisely. We can maintain contact with distant friends and family. And we can keep up to date with happenings in the industry we work in. Furthermore, with feeds, we can follow favourite blogs, hobbies, and sports teams. You may have come upon this article via Facebook or Instagram. 

But the subtle temptation is to enter the social media maze and get sucked into a time-wasting vortex of distractions.

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