CHAPTER 1

The Power of Distraction

The Lord said to her, "My dear Martha, you are worried and upset over all these details! There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her."

LUKE 10:41-42 NLT

Distracted by What?

When Jesus and his disciples stopped at the home of Mary and Martha on his way to Jerusalem, the two sisters had different responses to Jesus' presence: "Mary.sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made" (Luke 10:39-40).

Imagine having the creator of the universe sitting in your home, and the whole town is coming to see him. You are so excited that he is there, but you are thinking of all the things on the checklist that you need to do to make sure you are ready for so many guests in your home. God is literally in the same room with you, and you have found many other "important" things to do.

This is the reality of life today. God is literally as close as the next breath we take. He is waiting to show us things we cannot imagine. He longs to teach us things that would blow us away. He has ways of living that are countercultural and produce life if we would only listen and adopt them into our lifestyles.

Meanwhile, we cannot hear or perceive that he is right there waiting to share treasures with us because we have a thousand alerts per day pinging us on various devices. We volley from one distraction to another. We are often so excited that we cannot even wait for the next notification, so we keep checking our feeds for any updates, likes, or comments before we even get an alert. Since we clearly need more distractions, we sign up for more social media platforms, follow more people, and get alerts with updates while joining email lists of our favorite stores, artists, or sports teams. We must know what all the influencers are up to, so we follow anyone we think will show us what a great life looks like and cannot wait for the advice they give to help make ours better.

Yet God is in the room just waiting-waiting for us to get so full of all the things we crave that we realize we are still empty. We look for life and validation from all the stimuli we have attached ourselves to while the giver of life quietly assumes a humble position near us, wanting to be invited into our daily lives.

We have belittled our existence to live by the tyranny of the urgent and have neglected who is the most important.

We have all become Martha.

Continuous Partial Attention

It seems that humans have always found something to distract them from the important, but something dramatically shifted in 2006 and 2007. When Twitter (now called X) launched and Facebook opened up to anyone with an email in 2006, no one could have imagined the impact these social platforms would have on the world and on personal relationships. Then, in 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, and the revolution truly launched. We then had the ability to carry the entire world in our pockets and had access to distraction twenty-four seven. Just like we remember the 1440s for the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and its historic impact, so will 2006 and 2007 be known as a season of exponential, unpredictable impact.

Social media, the iPhone, and other technologies have brought so many contributions to our world. Who doesn't want to use Uber now and then or FaceTime a friend or family member across the world? We have all enjoyed instant media or deliveries and mobile orders. Who doesn't want to conveniently know what the weather is going to be today or next week, at home or anywhere in the world? However, the unintended consequences of these advancements have also taken a toll on our families and personal relationships. Continuous partial attention, a term coined by researcher Linda Stone, refers to how many ways our attention is pulled at any given moment, making it nearly impossible to fully focus. In the digital age, this is the new norm. Here are some of the documented realities.

In Reviews.org's 2023 survey, American adults reported that

75 percent check their phones within five minutes of receiving a notification,

75 percent use their phones while on the toilet,

69 percent have texted someone in the same room as them,

60 percent sleep with their phones,

57 percent consider themselves addicted to their phones, and

55 percent have never gone longer than twenty-four hours without their cell phones.1

According to an American company's research that recent Flemish studies have confirmed, "smartphone users touch, tap, or swipe their devices an average of 2,617 times a day."2 Yet adults aren't the only ones who struggle to stay away from their phones. Here are some statistics regarding teens and their phones:

Teens average over eight-and-a-half hours of media each day, including all screen time except use for schoolwork.3

Over half of teens in one study received 237 or more notifications each day on their smartphones.4

Some kids check their notifications up to 498 times in twenty-four hours.5

Some young people interviewed about their phone usage described their lives as a series of impulses that pull them toward every single notification. With smartphones as constant companions, many have felt they literally cannot put their phones down. Many young people look at their phones to alleviate negative emotions and find it especially hard to disengage from apps like TikTok.6

By looking at their phones first thing in the morning, they feel an all-day compulsion that is difficult to control, and if they can't access their phones, it can feel like being deprived of oxygen. " [If the] first hit of dopamine that you get is from scrolling.your brain is gonna want to do that for the rest of the day. I feel like many of us have experienced the immobilization that comes with scrolling in the morning," noted one TikTok user named Meredith.7

Twenty-four-year-old Shelby said, "Our brain constantly thrives on dopamine hits. We're always looking for the next little bit of recognition or excitement. If you wake up and the first thing that you reach for is your phone, your brain becomes reliant on the dopamine hits that you receive.through notifications, text messages [and] scrolling on TikTok."8

While previous generations experienced boredom while growing up, it has become a dreaded state of mind for many of today's youth-and adults. Those times when we are waiting in line with nothing to do can allow our minds to process, slow down, and decompress. Now those moments of waiting no longer exist.

We Are All Pavlov's Dogs

Beware that no one distracts you or intimidates you in their attempt to lead you away from Christ's fullness by pretending to be full of wisdom when they're filled with endless arguments of human logic. For they operate with humanistic and clouded judgments based on the mindset of this world system, and not the anointed truths of the Anointed One.

COLOSSIANS 2:8 TPT

Engagement: get people to stay on the site as long as possible.

Growth: get people to invite friends to keep spreading the web of engagement.

Advertisement: make as much money for advertisers as possible by keeping the users on the site for as long as possible and showing them ads based on their preferences.9

Once the algorithms learn your preferences, they can keep you on the site or platform longer and longer by feeding you what they know you want. The programmers behind social media then use this question as a mantra: "How can we use everything we know about persuading people and put it into technology?"10 They specifically program the algorithms to give you a fresh, unique-to-you feed every time you refresh the page. Refreshing turns into an unconscious habit. Like someone at a slot machine, we keep hoping that something new will come up and give us another endorphin hit.

By using scientific A/B testing, creators developed the most optimal ways to get users to do what they want them to do. For example, when you are tagged in a photo, the platform sends you a notification that someone tagged you, and instead of showing you the photo you're tagged in, you have to go back into the app or website to see who tagged you and who commented on it. Media developers program subliminal cues to take advantage of people without ever triggering the user's awareness. Now feeling remorse, programmers from several social media companies interviewed for The Social Dilemma admit they wrote programming designed to figure out how to psychologically manipulate you and then give you back a dopamine hit.

Having read this, you may now understand that social media of all forms is not simply a tool to help you stay connected to friends but is also a tool in the hands of social media developers to psychologically manipulate you, seducing you to even more levels of engagement on their platforms. We are all lab rats now. The inventors of this techno-induced drug-like euphoria freely admit that even they have gotten addicted to the endorphins,...