A search for something that never quite satisfies
Why do we scroll so much?
Many will say it’s anxiety, burnout, a sense of being overwhelmed—or, in more classical terms, acedia. Others rightly point to the treacherous design of our favorite online portals, created to capture as much attention as possible, hijacking our chemical, neurological, and even spiritual natures to serve insatiable shareholder demands.
These are likely true as proximate causes and worth discussing.
But I propose that we scroll, fundamentally, because we are infinite beings looking for infinite satisfaction—beings that have had the most normative means of meaning and satisfaction stripped of us in a lot of modern life. In a world where many people feel increasingly overwhelmed and disconnected, the scroll becomes a constant fallback.
What modern life has quietly removed
There are few people outside, few having people into homes, few getting together to discuss poetry or play a sport. We put the phones down only to find the world has fallen asleep while we were dwelling in the abstract land of rapid video and the compulsive thinking out loud that would have signaled insanity a couple of short decades ago.
To whom should we go, truly?
Rarely in our modern lives is our sight directed to the heavens in any organic way. Even Top 40 radio used to bleed out the pressing demands of the human heart, leaking through the production and sheen of the music industry. There was opportunity to remember our hunger and face it with some level of agency.
Our work has been reduced, often, to a disembodied experience of screens interfacing with screens, with the work itself becoming less and less connected to anything tangible or memorable.
Many of us barely have in-person contact in our day to day lives, much less the real care, concern, presence, and love that used to accompany it.
This applies especially to the many yet unattached in marriages and families due to a kind of romantic apocalypse taking place in response to the digital prevalence which has reduced all of us to fungible collections of parts competing in the “sexual marketplace.” No real love can grow in this context, and everyone is continually burned and scarred by a shared self-protective dysfunction.
As a result, we have few of the meaningful distractions that used to fill human life (as imperfect as many of those may have been), and a hollowed-out—if any—sense of the eternal.
To whom and to where should we go?
The false infinity of the scroll
The scroll is always available. And the best of us constantly succumb.
Of course, we don’t truly find that satisfaction in the scroll, but we do seek it there. Instead of pointing us out and up, however, we find ourselves doubling down on the glazed-over stare at the screens as we scroll, scroll, scroll, with a constant promise that the next bit of “content” may sate the deep questions pressing at us from the interior.
We fall into an impressionable kind of theta brain state where everything is bypassing our most meaningful engagements and rewiring our brains around pseudo-depth, false expertise, absurdist entertainment, and surreal-feeling violence of all kinds.
And somehow, we simply can’t stop.
As C.S. Lewis rightly says, we are beings with infinite desires that obviously cannot be filled here; thus, we are made for something beyond the here and now.
Returning to what is real
Life used to offer better approximations, however. There is a sense of the eternal in much of the richest experiences of human life: beautiful music and art; serious, committed relationships ordered to long-term building of family or serious cultural projects; direct encounter with intentionally otherworldly focus in churches.
But somehow, much of this has receded into the backdrop as we have been funneled into living increasingly more of our lives online. And, at an instinctive, intuitive level, it is here we now feel something of the never-ending reality of the infinite.
The only solution is to drown out the counterfeit of infinity in our security-blanket scrolling with the real things that, of themselves, can also not fill us given our infinite nature.
Here is where we can work up the courage to face our infinity again by feeling the gap that never really fades in life, forcing the deeper questions that may counterintuitively set us free to truly live.
We can also feel here—and only here—the true fullness that comes with those things that still serve as real portals to something greater: God, love, relationship, meaning, the poetry of existence, and a grounded, sensible, enfleshed reality.
We have to shake our heads, and make a firm choice to live more deeply in what’s real.
This starts first by recognizing our inescapable need for more as body and soul beings, currently being translated over to our effortlessly but ultimately false infinity in our neon idols.
If we can accept this, we can jump back into our beautiful finitude, making way in the real for the paradoxical fulfillment of desires beyond what we see.
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With or without a religious bent, Gregorian chant is one of the beautiful things that opens us up to a sense of true human expansion and infinity, outside the common thin experience of our lives online:
As part of my collection of music and writing, I recorded some of these chants, and they are available for listening and download inside the private archive, along with other exclusive music.
Access to the archive is complimentary via the button below, and sent by email.
It includes my ongoing writing and occasional invitations to be more deeply involved—made possible by generous patrons.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 