sin and my smartphone

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I really like systems and rules and structures. Clear, explicit expectations for my performance are reassuring and comfortable, and vague instructions make me anxious and tense.

So the major cause of my stress during this Lent is that, for the most part, I don’t have a nice clear set of rules to follow. Let me explain:

I need to break my addiction to my smartphone, particularly Facebook. For a long time, my phone became the thing to flip open when I was so stressed I couldn’t think—when I was dealing with an existential crisis and a dissertation and if left to sit in silence my choices were to doubt the existence of God or to doubt the existence of a valid argument in chapter three. In those situations, a Candy Crush or bubble shooter app is essential for maintaining sanity. And you know, I don’t begrudge myself that coping mechanism. It wasn’t optimal, but coping mechanisms usually aren’t—they’re for dealing with non-optimal situations, after all! But it became a habit, and now that the stress is gone, I still have a phone in my pocket that I pull out every time Things stop happening for more than fifteen seconds or so. Or even if the Things in question just don’t seem to require my full and undivided attention, which has given me the sinking feeling for some time that a lot of Life is happening when I’m not looking.

There are a couple of problems with simply giving my phone up for six weeks. For one thing, my smartphone IS MY PHONE. We don’t have a home phone. So why not just give up Facebook? Well, me giving up Facebook for Lent would also mean forcing my family and friends to give up news and pictures of grandkids for Lent (I mentioned this to my mom, and she assures me that not giving up Facebook is the right choice :-P) Living three (or more) hours away from all my people limits my options as far as cutting myself off from temptation goes.

So for the past week I’ve been making little rules for myself about when using my phone is and isn’t ok. Like, “Ok, you can check Facebook once during the day while you’re nursing Blaise before his nap, but then no more!” or “Don’t do anything online once Margaret is home from school!” or—well, you get my drift. But then I check Facebook real quick in the morning while I’m waiting for the water to boil for coffee and the kids are in the living room looking at books anyway, or I have to get online to look up the recipe for tikka masala for dinner after Margaret’s home (because that’s a lot of spices that I never remember), and then I feel like a failure.

The other day I read this blog post on Lent, which on the one hand felt very familiar to me with the sense of shame at failing an easy fast (neither this blogger nor I are Catherine of Sienna!) and on the other hand just felt very off. I remembered a friend who had posted on Facebook on Ash Wednesday, “Giving stuff up is to Lent as Christmas shopping is to Advent. ‪#‎notthepoint.” While Voskamp’s conclusion, that “[g]rief is what cultivates the soil for the seeds of joy,” is true and beautiful, I can’t help but think that spending our days trying to beat ourselves into perfection and then feeling bad when we fail isn’t actually what we need. There’s already enough grief in the world to cultivate vast acres of joy without deliberately increasing our reservoir.

The point isn’t that I shouldn’t be using Facebook—it’s that I should be present and listening to God and to the other people around me, and Facebook distracts me from that. Feeling guilty over checking Facebook, on the other hand, doesn’t make me more present. It just makes me more distracted and depressed over my failure.

Then what am I doing to make myself present? So far what has worked best is simply not keeping the phone in my pocket. It’s on the kitchen table, where I can get to it easily if I need to, but I can’t indulge the reflex every time life slows down (which is frequently these days).

I would like to think there are broader implications here than just Lent. What do you think?