Why We Feel So Tired and Confused by What We See Online

We’re Disconnected

We feel tired and confused by what we see online, primarily because there’s no real way to connect with it. Everything that is online is presented at a distance. For example, some time ago I had to realize something about this person whose medical journey was on social media. I was following what was going on with their family, and I realized that this was really taking an emotional toll on me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I didn’t know these people. I couldn’t minister to them. Even the way I would pray for them was oddly uninformed. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to try to emotionally join with people who are far away, but one of the things that’s true about the internet is that it presents everything as immediate to us.

Digital Liturgies

Samuel D. James

People search for heaven in all the wrong places, and the internet is no exception. Digital Liturgies warns readers of technology’s damaging effects and offers a fulfilling alternative through Scripture and rest in God’s perfect design.

The internet makes no distinction between what is relevant to us or what is not relevant to us, what is part of the life that we’re supposed to live or what doesn’t really matter. The internet just presents everything like a fire hose at us. And so first of all, it’s exhausting to sift through that. Every day there’s just so much. There’s a new status, a new photo, a new video, a new controversy. It’s just nonstop. And that’s exhausting.

It matters that we’re anchoring ourselves regularly in God’s word—which is a permanent thing that stabilizes our hope and why.

And it’s confusing emotionally because we will step away from a session where we’re really immersed in social media and we just feel very confused because we’re not emotionally centered. We feel like our mind is in one place, but our bodies are in another place. So that dislocating effect is one reason why we’re so tired and confused and one reason why it matters that we’re anchoring ourselves regularly in God’s word—which is a permanent thing that stabilizes our hope and why. We’re also bringing our attention to the people and the things that God has put near us, not digitally spreading ourselves emotionally thin.

Samuel D. James is the author of Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age.

Samuel James is the associate acquisitions editor at Crossway. He is the author of Digital Liturgies, a regular newsletter on Christianity, technology, and culture. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Emily, and their three children.

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Our work, education, relationships, and even worship are increasingly happening digitally. Our tendency is often to think of these technologies as just neutral “tools." But this is not quite right.