is phone addiction a sin?

on our productivity obsession, avoidance mechanisms and acedia

John Holcroft/Getty Images

Hi friends,

It’s Thursday, which means another edition of The Murmuration has reached your inbox. If this is the first time you’ve heard from me in this way, then a special welcome to you—I’m so glad you are here.

Over the past couple of weeks paid subscribers have been reading about dirt and shifting baseline syndrome. It’s also been great to hear your responses to our Earth Day show and tell. Do feel free to add to that thread if you’d like.

This week I’ve been thinking about sin, or sinfulness; about what meaning it holds within our culture and whether or not it has any relevance to those of us living, working and breathing in the 21st century.

Six weeks ago a letter arrived for my husband from the Jury Summons Office. The letter informed him that he was due to attend Crown Court to undertake his civic duty as a Juror. For the past week he has been getting up at some unearthly hour in order to fulfil this obligation, making himself available to pass judgement on someone’s ethical behaviour.

Enclosed with the letter was a brief guide explaining his responsibilities. I was struck by this passage:

When a jury reaches a verdict, they are not only making a decision that affects the individual defendant, they are also making a decision that affects the communities in which they live. It is for this reason that jury service is regarded as one of the most important civic duties that anyone can be asked to perform.

As he waits to see if he is called up he overhears snippets about the kinds of cases currently going through the court. Did this man rape that woman? Did this drugs lord order people to cross the border? Was this person a drink driver?

Perhaps these are the kind of extreme examples you thought of when I first mentioned the word sin. Bad people doing bad things. Or maybe you thought of that time you saw an evangelical preacher with a bullhorn in town, informing you that we are all sinners, and that we must repent before the day of final judgement.

These days, our discussion of sin seems intimately bound up with the word judgement. Perhaps that’s why I instinctively shy away from using it in my day to day life. It feels so loaded with baggage and ripe for misinterpretation; many of my gay friends have found the term weaponised against them by people who don’t really understand what sinfulness is about.

As is often the case, it was my friend Harry who got me thinking about this subject. Not, I might add, because he leads a particularly hedonistic lifestyle, but because he offered a wise reflection on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago, referencing an interview the actress Aimee Lou Wood gave to the Guardian. She had this to say about sin:

People really fucked up that word. In its original sense, it means ‘to miss the point of human existence’. Like you’ve forgotten what life is about, like empathy, compassion, love. But egos took the word over and used it as a way to shame people, so they’re robbed of their power, like: ‘It’s a sin to be gay.’

‘Like you’ve forgotten what life is about’. This struck me as a quite beautiful way of thinking about sin, which is certainly closer to how the term was originally used in early christian communities. During the 4th century AD, Egyptian monks referred to as the ‘Desert Fathers’ started developing a model for coenobium—which translates as community living. They wanted to find ways to live together that would support their spiritual life and help them maintain good relationships with each other.

These communities of men had been influenced by neoplatonic thought, which emphasised the importance of our desires, feelings and mind if we are trying to live in accordance with our ‘true’ nature i.e. the way God intended. They were interested in finding particular habits or practices which would help them live their life in a more spiritual way.

In 420AD, a monk called John Cassian wrote two treatises: De institutes coenobiorum and Conlationes, which distilled many of the rules that the Egyptian Desert Father’s had been following. In De institutes Cassian listed eight vices; gluttony, lust, greed, hubris, wrath, envy, listlessness and boasting. These would latterly be coopted and revised by Pope Gregory I, and eventually became more commonly known as the seven deadly sins.

What I find interesting about Cassian’s original list of vices is the emphasis placed not on the sin itself, but on the impact or consequence of that vice upon the individual and their wider community. Take the vice of acedia, which we might describe today as spiritual negligence or listlessness. For Cassian, succumbing to acedia was bad for a monk because it was about being disengaged (or disconnected) from spiritual life. Instead of focussing on their prayers and spending time with God, the monk might go and visit another brother for a chat, or go into the kitchen in order to distract himself from his own thoughts.

In his book Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps For a Fulfilling Life, Abbot Christopher Jamison writes that:

Acedia involves filling up my inner space with everything other than the desire to recognise and overcome the other seven thoughts. We have an interior space, our soul, which is a space that we can fill with endless distractions and avoidance mechanisms. If we can remove some of the avoidance mechanisms then our self-awareness will grow quite naturally.

Today the language employed by self-help and productivity gurus like like Ali Abdaal can often sound uncannily similar to the language of acedia. On his Youtube channel, Abdaal offers advice and ‘hacks’ which will lead us to ‘happier, healthier and more productive lives’. The reason you are so unhappy, he seems to suggest, is because you haven’t optimised your life well enough! You are wasting your time on inefficient distractions, but by adopting this new productivity hack you can find the time to be happy again.

On a surface level this sounds plausible enough. But when we dig deeper into Abdaal’s content, it becomes clear that his brand of productivity is simply intended to create more time in your life in which to work harder and make more money. So we’re not avoiding distractions because they are bad for our soul, but because they deprive us of opportunities to make money. Hmm.

Abbot Jamison points out that

Many people immerse themselves in their work and are good at it, only to return to personal situations that they find too painful to face. The danger is that hard work and even good works become painkillers that fix the symptoms but leave the sickness untreated.

In other words, the solution to being overworked is not to do more work, but to learn how to be with yourself and your own thoughts, as painful as that might be. When we create space in our life to be alone we are left to confront the things about ourselves that we don’t like, and to deal with them. We’re left to think about the way we treat other people, like that time we ignored our friend or laughed at someone’s misfortune behind their back.

Since having a baby I have become much more aware of the amount of time I spend on my phone, and the way in which I use it as an ‘avoidance mechanism’ whilst I am caring for her. When I’m breastfeeding I automatically find myself reaching into my back pocket and scrolling through Instagram. The (breast)feed normally takes less than ten minutes, but it seems I cannot bear the thought of being alone with my thoughts (and my daughter) for that length of time.

I suppose this is what Jamison describes as an avoidance mechanism, which I’m using in order to evade my interior world. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking that I’m ‘working’ when I’m on Twitter, but the truth is that I’m looking for that quick dopamine hit, or that moment of recognition, which serves to distract me from my life in real time.

But is it a sin? Well, in the sense that it takes me away from myself and my family and enables me to ignore my internal needs, I suppose it is a form of acedia. It’s the thing I do when I don’t want to do other things, when I’m sat on a train and want to ignore the stranger opposite me. It pulls me out of my physical community and allows me to disengage from those nagging feelings I’ve been trying to ignore.

Jamison argues that we are losing our spiritual awareness altogether, and growing up in a period of ‘collective acedia’. I’m not sure this is totally the case, as I find myself having almost daily conversations with people who are spiritually curious. But I do think we would be well advised to renegotiate our understanding of sin for the contemporary age—in a time of deep disconnection I believe it ultimately offers a path back to ourselves, and to each other.

My husband still has a week of Jury duty left, and I’m struck by the possibility that he might have to pass judgement on a drug lord who is spiritually more available to his family and loved ones than I am.

If any of you have found a way to be online and not lose yourself to it, please let me know in the comments.

Here are some of the things I’ve found helpful as I try to spend less time in front of the screen:

• Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps For a Fulfilling Life by Abbot Christopher Jamison

  A brilliant primer on the ideas underpinning Christian monasticism. Christopher Jamison first came to public attention for a documentary called The Monastery in which normal people spent time living according to the rules of St. Benedict.

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

  Jenny has a new book out this week called ‘Saving Time’, but I highly recommend her debut, which helped to kick-start a public discourse about disconnection in the attention economy.

• On Connection by Kae Tempest

  A long essay on the relationship between creativity and connection by the much-lauded poet and writer.

Thanks so much for reading.

Grace

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