Picture reading an eighty-five-page newspaper. In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being – TV, radio, reading – it amounted to forty newspapers-worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day... The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

- Johann Hari - Stolen focus.

Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once – and by doing this, they ‘overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can’t be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down’. It crashes. This is called a ‘denial-of-service attack’.

James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds. ‘We’re that server, and there’s all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us … It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.’ We are so inundated ‘that it fills up your world, and you can’t find a place to get a view on all of it and realise that you’re so distracted and figure out what to do about it.

It can just colonise your entire world,’ he said. You are left so depleted that ‘you don’t get the space to push back against it’.

Johann Hari - Stolen focus.

“From the very beginning our main objective was how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president.

The average Aussie now spends 5.5 hours per day on their phone, which equates to 16.6 years – or around 33% of their waking life staring at a screen – according to a study by Reviews.org.

The root cause:

Back in Denmark, Sune Lehmann had shown me the evidence that the world is speeding up, and that process is shrinking our collective attention span. He showed that social media is a major accelerant. But he made it clear that this has been happening for a very long time. His study started analysing data from the 1880s, and it showed that every decade since, the way we experience the world has been getting faster, and we have been focusing on any one topic less and less.

I kept puzzling away at this question. Why? Why has this been happening so long? This trend far precedes Facebook, or most of the factors I have written about here. What’s the underlying cause stretching back to the 1880s?

I discussed it with many people, and the most persuasive answer came from the Norwegian scientist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who is a professor of social anthropology. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea – economic growth.

This is the belief that every year, the economy – and each individual company in it – should get bigger and bigger. That’s how we now define success. If a country’s economy grows, its politicians are likely to be reelected. If a company grows, its CEOs are likely garlanded. If a country’s economy or a company’s share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out.

Economic growth is the central organising principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world. Thomas explained that growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets – by inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn’t have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, or to sleep less, then you have found a source of economic growth.

Mostly, he believes, we achieve growth today primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time. To give one example: they want you to watch TV and follow the show on social media. Then you see twice as many ads. This inevitably speeds up life.

If the economy has to grow every year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more and more in the same amount of time. As I read Thomas’s work more deeply, I realised this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going – and that inevitably degrades our attention over time.

In fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about – our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.

I thought about what Dr Charles Czeisler had told me back at Harvard Medical School. If we all went back to sleeping as much as our brains and our bodies need, he said, ‘It would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.

The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.’ This is true of sleep – and it’s true of much more than sleep.

Johann Hari, . Stolen Focus (pp. 310-312).

How strange to use the most airtime at the mountain on the Sabbath command.

The divine utterance must have come as a shock to the listening Israelites. There had been no Sabbath in Egypt, no work stoppage; no work stoppage for Pharaoh who worked day and night to stay atop the pyramid. There had been no work stoppage for the slaves, because they had to gather straw during their time off; no work stoppage of anybody in the Egyptian system, because frantic productivity drove the entire system.

And now YHWH nullifies that entire system of anxious production. There are limits to how much and how long slaves must produce bricks! There are limits to how much food Pharaoh can store and consume and administer. The limit is set by the weekly work pause that breaks the production cycle. And those who participate in it break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor. And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood. The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness. The latter practice does not produce so much; but it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity that redefines the human project.

Brueggemann, Walter. Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide (pp. 27-28). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Sabbath is a day of rest.

To Observe is to conform your action or
practice to something.

Observing Sabbath is a revolutionary act that demonstrates that God, and not you, is the centre of the universe and the source of your hope.

“Sabbath is a deliberate act of interference, an interruption of our work each week, a decree of no-work so that we are able to notice, to attend, to listen, to assimilate this comprehensive and majestic work of God, to orient our work in the work of God.... I don’t see any way out of it: if we are going to live appropriately in the creation we must keep the Sabbath. We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing. We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying. All our ancestors agree that without silence and stillness there is no spirituality, no God-attentive, God-responsive life”

Eugene Peterson

Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgment that what is needed is given and need not be seized.

Walter Brueggemann, . Sabbath as Resistance,

Small Group Questions:

1) Have someone read the first two excerpts from Johann Hari's book. Can you relate to what he is saying?

2) How much time a day are you spending on your phone? How has your usage of the phone changed over the last 10 years?

3) When God gave us the 10 commandments he spent the most time talking about Sabbath. Read Walter Bruggeman's description and talk about the significance of Sabbath.

4) What has been your experience of Sabbath?

5) Is there anything you would like to do differently in regards to a Sabbath?