I Can’t Not Do This: Addiction or Vocation?

After a busy day tutoring students, editing a paper, and socializing, I am ready to collapse for the night. Do I spend the evening hours quietly unwinding with a book, a movie, or a good friend? No. I isolate myself and disappear into a personally curated virtual world where everything is striving its best to bring me a substitute for my loneliness. 

I have resolved many times that I will stay off the internet. But 8 p.m. hits, my obligations for the day are met, and a familiar yielding feeling catches up with me: “I can’t not do this.” Every night it’s the same: “Tomorrow, I will read something productive. But not yet.” It’s the interior equivalent of starting a diet on Monday. We all know how that story ends.

I don’t want a deathbed on which I finally have to face the fact that countless hours of my life, which could have been used loving God, have instead been squandered chasing the faux promise behind flashing pixels. That promise is a lot like sin: it has negative existence. Wasn’t it Augustine who argued that evil doesn’t exist? Well, I think the mirage that screens present to us as reality is a superlative version of this non-existence. 

This screentime is bothersome to me only because I’ve read about monks. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, because they are proof that human beings are capable of sitting with their thoughts and emerging victorious from the struggles that proceed therefrom. Why should anyone choose to face himself when an easy escape (false ecstasy) presents itself? 

To use technology responsibly requires superhuman self-control. I don’t think there is anything wrong with technology in principle. But there is something wrong with the fact that certain technologies are designed to be addictive, because that steals our freedom, to the point that leaving the house without a phone feels impossible. “I can’t not do this,” the addict cries. “I have nothing else: no one to give my love to, and no one from whom I can receive love.” What a lie, yet so many of us believe it. 

Smartphones are a powerful example of our capacity, as human beings, to exploit and then rationalize our weaknesses. It isn’t bad itself, but it sure does magnify all of the uglier tendencies of man. We are very clever, and at best we are sublimely creative. But we also invent ingenious torture devices—is it too much of an exaggeration to say the internet is a soft form of torture? We aren’t alive in our algorithms. We just think we are. 

The more power we have in absorbing information and manipulating reality, the more virtue is required so those things do not corrupt us. Just because everyone uses the internet does not make it okay. Everyone sins, too. Does that make it okay? And if the phone numbs us to a deep sort of pain that will inevitably catch up to us at the hour of death, then why are we justifying its use? 

Despite all appearances, the internet is not infinite. Happily, there is only One of Whom infinite things could be written, only one thing that satisfies our infinite longing. God is everything, but only the humility of a deep prayer life can wake us up to that fact. That’s hard. Facing God increases our awareness of reality and how sharply and even painfully beautiful it can be. And then, continuing to love God requires a lot of letting go. There’s a lot of accumulated stuff on the boat of the soul that must go overboard with reckless abandon. God will ask us to be generous when we pray. 

Conversion of heart to God, submission to his will, leaves very little room for a life online. The internet too easily becomes all about us (Spotify Wrapped: This Year, It’s All About You!), whereas life was meant to be a series of mysteries that draw us on to God. Conversion of heart leads to the gift of self, in marriage or consecrated life.

A vocation is the fruit of prayer, but we spend a lot of time online that could be spent praying. Is it any wonder we struggle to hear God’s voice? Yet the knowledge of God and self, gained through the practice of prayer, still leads good hearts to a turning point in youth, that fork in the road where God asks the soul to do something. There is a feeling of “I can’t not do this”, very different from the helpless cry of addiction. This is the impulse to love God and our neighbor that Christ speaks of in the Gospels, through a specific vocation. 

All the good married people and religious I know speak of an interior certainty as to their mission in life which they acted upon with courage. It wasn’t the knowledge of guaranteed success that compelled them to decide, but a sense of feeling at home, and a gut feeling that failure to seize such an opportunity would leave them wondering about it for the rest of their lives. Young people today have lost that sense of urgent desire, and the quiet in which such a calling can be discerned has been scattered for them by the constant stream of noise. Instead of chasing something worthwhile, it seems to me that many people imbued with perfect health and a decent amount of talent are wasting away their lives online, courtesy of an eternal litany of excuses afforded by the false abundance of entertainment.

Fighting the draw of technology will create a permanent tension in our lives. But that just acknowledges a tension that exists anyway. Human beings are the sort of creature that always wants more; nothing is ever enough for us. There will always be a tension between heaven and earth; rich and poor; this life and the next. That’s why we never feel quite at rest in this life, even if all is well. “Everything means everything,” as the monk Zosima tells Alyosha. I think we would be happier in accepting the pain created by such a tension, because there is joy underneath it even in “this vale of tears.” 

Part of this pain is acceptance of our finiteness: choosing one thing always means the exclusion of another. Choosing priesthood means foregoing natural fatherhood; marriage to one woman means you cannot marry a different one; and choosing Christ means you can’t compromise with the world, even if you are still living in it. But that’s just how love works: it chooses, it sacrifices, and then it expands through the gift (and the death) of self. The internet promises that we can have love without giving ourselves away, and so we wobble perpetually on the brink of decision yet never take the plunge.

Catholicism is a paradox. Catholics experience life’s joys more deeply because of the knowledge they will not last. Youth, beauty, love, or children: all are precious precisely because of their transience. They are a reminder of heaven, where good things are eternal and no change can mar them.

But it is painful that such things cannot last, so we numb ourselves on algorithms and chase phantoms of youth or beauty or love. That’s a false rest in which we do not know that we are suffering, inert and pacified. The stakes are high and the urgency of salvation cannot be easily dismissed. Yet would life be worth living if the stakes were not so? Is the love of the all-holy God, received and returned, not worth submission to the purifying fire that detaches from all we desire, and gives it back a thousandfold in this life, when truly all we want is God?

The vocational yes, that feeling of “I can’t not do this,” is a slow sort of falling in love with life, together with an obedience to God who is present in all things. That feeling is fragile and can easily be rationalized out of existence. Let’s not rationalize it anymore, and let’s stop distracting ourselves from it through our phone use. Instead, let’s rise early in the morning to pray, and seek the face of God for even a minute, and answer that nagging feeling. And then, let’s engage in a life full of humble, real things that will lead us to heaven.