Always Thursday Night

We didn’t have a television in our home in my early childhood. I think my parents (wisely) had principled objections to it and so we were left to read books, listen to their music (the Beatles’ “Revolution” may have started a lifelong love affair with distortion guitars!), play ball hockey or ping pong (until this led to warfare with my brother), and probably be bored now and then. I remember drawing pictures and custom designing hockey uniforms and even entire leagues on paper. It’s amazing what you’ll come up with when TV isn’t an option.

Eventually, I suppose we wore our parents down. As kids do (I’ve heard). We got a little black and white TV with three channels. I could now watch Hockey Night in Canada (one game per week, usually involving Toronto or Montreal which cemented a life-long hatred of both). I could watch a show called Video Hits on CBC after school where if you were lucky you could see the videos of four or five songs, one or two of which you might actually like. Eventually, the little black and white TV gave way to a slightly larger colour version. And then there were two hockey games on Saturday nights, which seemed a luxury beyond comprehension to me.

And then as I got older, I started watching weekday evening programming. I don’t why, but Thursday was the night you looked forward to. I don’t even remember which shows were on, but I do remember thinking that Mon-Wed was a bit lean, and you looked forward to a good show coming on Thursday night. There was anticipation. You planned around something you wanted to watch. Your options were limited. You had to adapt to the tv schedule, not it to you.

The world I am describing likely sounds incomprehensible to anyone thirty or younger. We now live in the age of infinite scroll and limitless content. We collapse into our couches after work and listlessly drift around our various streaming platforms trying to find something to watch in an ocean of entertainment. Or give up in frustration after forty minutes of searching. Where once I had to wait until Saturday night to watch a single hockey game, it’s now a rare night where there aren’t at least two to choose from (to say nothing of all the other sports that clog our channels and platforms). Where once I listened to my parents’ same half dozen or so records or my own modest collection of cassette tapes, now Apple Music or Spotify deliver all the music ever made whenever we want it.

And of course, I am revealing myself to be a fossil in even talking about watching entire films or sporting events or listening to whole albums. Many attention spans have been conditioned to only digest reel-sized content or snippets of songs or TikTok shorts or whatever (I don’t even know the terminology). Little bite-sized morsels of content that are consumed, one after the other. A few seconds on this, a few on that, there’s always more coming. And we just. Keep. Going. And going. And going.

We are quite literally drowning in content. There is always a new series to watch, game to see, podcast to listen to, Substack to follow (until it’s paywalled). And this is to say nothing of the hellscapes of social media and online dating, which reduce human beings to consumable options on a screen. The key thing is that all of this content will never stop coming because attention is the currency of the digital age and because it is enormously profitable to keep us tethered to our devices. As Ian Harber put it in a recent article, “In the digital age, attention is the new oil and algorithms are the drills that extract it.”

It’s one thing to lament what the digital age is doing to our attention spans and how it is turning us into easily manipulable passive consumers of content. But is always having the world at our fingertips on demand actually bringing us more joy? The answer clearly seems to be a resounding no. There is the well-known data around how we are more depressed, anxious, and addicted than we’ve ever been despite having so much of what we (think we) want available on demand. I’ve also had conversations with people who are starting to experience even entertainment as a burden! This seems counterintuitive, but I recognize this in my own life. If you would have told my fourteen year old self that there would come a day when I could watch hockey every night of the week and have literally album that I could ever want to listen to available with top quality sound via a device I could carry in my pocket, I might have thought you were describing the New Jerusalem. But too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing. Eventually you start to lose pleasure in what you once enjoyed, not least because it didn’t come in limitless form. When every night is Thursday night, no night is worth looking forward to. Anticipation is obliterated and moderation is swallowed whole.

To return to the Ian Harber article linked to above, this quote has stuck with me:

We need interior wells deeper than attention frackers can drill. We need spaces in our soul that are reserved for God and can’t be siphoned off for corporate profit. We must listen for the soft whisper of God’s voice in all that is true, good, and beautiful.

In a month or so, I will be going on a very long walk as part of a three-month sabbatical. A few friends and I are doing the Camino de Santiago. I’m looking forward to this for many reasons, not least for the opportunity it presents to step away from the madness of the infinite scroll and recalibrate a bit. What will I do when I can’t zone out in front of the game in the evening? What possibilities might present themselves when the screens aren’t always buzzing in the background? When there isn’t something that I have to see, have to listen to, have to read, should probably file away for a future sermon, talk, article, etc., etc.? When there isn’t some glittery thing always trying to commandeer my attention?

Perhaps my interior well will deepen. Perhaps I’ll hear the whisper of God in new ways, in all that is true, good, and beautiful, and be reminded that these things are not merely content to consume, but gifts to be received in their time.