Toilet texting and our fear of being alone with our thoughts…

Depending on which study you read, somewhere between 60-93% of people use their phone when their on toilet. The impact this is having on hygiene is probably staggering, but for now, I’m more interested in the spiritual implications. Something about this isn’t that new, after all, settling in for a long sesh with a newspaper or magazine is a tradition at least as old as our great grandparents. What is new, however, is the content and frequency of what we’re consuming. Maybe a larger than expected proportion of people’s toilet time is devoted to reading long form essays on intellectually enriching subjects…but let’s be honest…it’s almost definitely doom scrolling mind rot from everyone’s favourite dancing Chinese spy-ware app.

Given that the content we consume is contributing so little to our lives…why do we find it so hard to stop and sit with our own thoughts for a minute? Well, apparently, this has been a problem that has plagued humans for a lot longer. 17th century Mathematician and Philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. I don’t know if I fully buy the idea that everything from war to failing to return shopping carts is caused by our inability to sit with our thoughts but I get the idea…we don’t like being alone with our thoughts and if we can avoid it, we probably will.

The unintended consequence is that we are squeezing out the time we need to think deeply about things that really matter…things like God, meaning, morality and eternity. Toilet texting is probably just a symptom of a larger disease, one that is killing our ability to think deeply and clearly about the most important things in life.

This Sunday at City Light Church we’re stopping to ask the question ‘Do We Need God to find Meaning’…it’s a question unlikely to come up in our everyday conversations but one that’s worthy of best thinking and reasoning. It’s an opportunity to stop and consider what really matters and to be challenged to press deeper into the kind of questions we avoid with phone time. It’s going to be a fruitful time for anyone looking for a break from attention-stealing online content.

We start this Sunday (Feb 09) at 10:30AM at Balmain High…until then, maybe we should all heed Pascal’s warning, and bravely accept the challenge of taking on the sheer terror of going to the bathroom without a digital comfort blanket.