Conversatio Divina

Part 15 of 17

Fear of Missing Out

How the Curiosity Culture Confuses Virtue and Vice

Keith Matthews
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Table of Contents

  1. 01.  The Blurring of Virtue and Vice
  2. 02.  A Famous but Unlikely Example
  3. 03.  Moving toward a Transforming Embrace

I was just heading home from a conference near Washington, D.C., and landed in Dallas for a few hours, waiting for my connecting flight back home to Los Angeles. As I waited at the gate with a colleague who joined me at the conference, we reminisced about the excellent presentations and gifted speakers. During the conversation we took a “rabbit trail” about the fears people have about public speaking. He mentioned that often “public speaking” ranks at the top of people’s fears. I protested, saying that certainly couldn’t be the case. 

So what do you do when you face this type of argument? Google, of course. And guess what? He was right! It ranks at the top of most lists. Now, while public speaking ranks high among most people’s fears, I think some other fears that are less obvious but more insidious might prove more dangerous to one’s daily life than giving a speech. 

How about the fear of being left out, not knowing what’s up, not knowing the latest information about friends, family, or whatever interests you—the fear of being irrelevant or out of touch. This constant need for drama and excitement and a sense of connectedness ultimately feeds an insatiable “curiosity.” These fears are definitely embedded in our “twenty-something” generation, but they’re certainly in the water we all drink today, and are fueled by a seductive social media network that is constantly wooing and instantly accessed 24/7. 

As a professor and pastor on a college campus and a father of three “twenty-something” children I have a front row seat to these “benign” fears that have become an unquestioned and dangerous embrace for a new generation and beyond. How many times have I sat in my living room only to look up and find all of my family members either texting or absorbed with their computer screen? While I have been pondering this condition for quite some time, a recent television news program crystallized my thinking this past fall. 

The news magazine show interviewed four female roommates from Southern California. They were all young, working professionals in their twenties. Each was a highly active and socially vibrant young woman. The interviewer asked them, “How much do you use social media, for knowledge and personal interaction?” They all laughed and acknowledged that the social networking world was very important to their life, more than they would care to admit. The story revolved around the reporter following them for seven consecutive days, chronicling their lives without their cell phones or any social media access. In other words, how would life be without a cell phone and computer? 

The experiment was quite telling and deeply painful for these young women. Over the course of the next seven days, the ability of these four women to function in their daily activities of life varied from almost nonfunctional to debilitating to depressed. Certainly, none were thriving. The assignment proved very challenging to say the least, and it revealed a painful reality. The need to know or be in the know when unavailable by wireless technology is a painful condition for many. 

How did this condition emerge, not just in these four young women, but also in our culture at large? Let’s peel back the curtain and see if we can gain some understanding. 

01.  The Blurring of Virtue and Vice

It seems to me that a dangerous embrace has occurred, an unexamined acceptance that “desire” and, particularly, “curiosity” are not only to be satisfied, but are my right to enjoy and indulge. Because of the demise of community within our culture, individual preferences become primary, and we are left without a critical filter to help guide our thoughts and decisions. Individuals across all ages now mediate what is good for them or not. Whereas, before the Internet age, communities (e.g., schools, churches, and parents) filtered and moderated what were acceptable guides, directions, and protections for individual flourishing.Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 117–174. Not so today, especially in our hyperconnected social media culture. 

This was not so in a previous era. Not everything that is current is better. Christian Scripture and theology have always been concerned about the nature of desire, and its ability to take us to destructive places. James 1:12–16 says,  

 

Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when desire has conceived, it engenders sin, and that sin when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers and sisters (NRSVUEScripture quotations marked (NRSVUE) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, copyright © 1989, 2021 The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved., emphasis added). 

 

In contemporary life, desire, in general, is not evil or bad, but only part of the human design. As Christians, we do not embrace the Buddhist teaching that says we should seek to “eliminate desire.” Rather, the Christian position contends that we are called to manage or steward desire, under Christ, knowing this truth—that desire is not self-limiting. In other words, the nature of desire is that it must be restrained, self-limited, and managed, or in the end it will manage us. Desire acts like a “black hole” of need. It always wants more. Desire is a good servant, but a bad master! So it is that we aspire to make possible virtues such as “self-control” or an old term we call “temperance.” 

I contend that we have blurred this understanding, specifically around a form of desire we call “curiosity.” One would think that curiosity is a virtue in today’s world, but this is not the case. Yet, all four of the young women who participated in the seven-day experiment would likely not even admit that unfulfilled desire or curiosity contributed to their distressed condition. 

In the premodern world of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Thomas à Kempis, curiosity was considered a vice, not a virtue! Augustine’s concern about “curiosity” finds its focus in 1 John 2:16, “everything that is in the world—the possessive desire of the flesh, the possessive desire of the gaze, the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world” (from Augustine’s Latin translation). “The possessive desire of the gaze” for him correlates to his belief that “curiosity” is a vice.Paul Griffiths, The Vice of Curiosity: An Essay on Intellectual Appetite (Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2005), 13. This type of curiosity is to be consumed with idle interests that entertain and distract, but does not bring any lasting pleasure or transformation to one’s being. 

Thomas à Kempis echoes Augustine’s concern in his classic, The Imitation of Christ. À Kempis says, “Seek a suitable time for leisure and meditate often on the loving kindness of God. Leave curiosities alone. Study such things that move your heart to devotion. If you withdraw yourself from unnecessary talking and idle running about, from listening to gossip and rumors, you will find enough time that is suitable to meditate on holy things” (emphasis added).Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), 50. Strong but wise words of experience from brother Thomas to our postmodern times. 

In Paul Griffith’s book, The Vice of Curiosity, he speaks of the negative side of curiosity when he says, 

 

Curiosity is not an unalloyed good. We criticize or condemn those whose passion for knowledge leads them to the forbidden. Being curious about how our neighbor looks when she considers herself to be alone; wanting to study the face of another as he suffers torture to death—an appetite for these and similar kinds of knowledge would be for most of us forbidden or at least improper. We also pity and try to cure those whose curious gaze becomes fixated upon trivialities unworthy of obsessive pursuit. The person who spends all their waking energy on baseball statistics or politics, we are likely to think, gives excessive care to these matters even when one arrives at new knowledge by doing so.Griffiths, Vice of Curiosity, 4.

 

Could the same be said of our social media obsession with Facebook or Twitter? Do I really need to know what Kim Kardasian is doing for lunch? Or the ongoing news feed of CNN? Or mindless texting that too often provides nothing more than trivial relational connection, while distracting us throughout the day from the people right in front of us? 

Could it be that these unchallenged activities that we now embrace as commonplace might, for many of us, be a destructive vice that needs to be reexamined? Might we need to recognize the ways we have embraced these unexamined mindsets that have so subtly, and seductively, invaded our daily patterns for living life? 

I find it interesting that the four young women who participated in the week-long “fast” of social media all came to some of these realizations. It’s amazing how this “imposed discipline” of going without social media for seven days for the television program brought about an awareness or new understanding of their captive condition. Some of the women made a committed change to not be enslaved to social media. Did they choose to give it up entirely? No, but they did attempt to “make it their servant, and not their master.” 

Clarity in knowing the difference between virtue and vice, which in our contemporary times has become at best a blur, or at worst an archaic or forgotten concept, is really critical for becoming a good person. Virtues (think fruit the Spirit) and vices (think the seven deadly sins) are markers for the health of our soul. Here the “spiritual disciplines” are a means of virtue development toward this end. 

02.  A Famous but Unlikely Example

In the eighteenth century, the battle of ideas was raging in the formation of our nation. There was a great debate as to which values and ideals Americans would embrace and embody. One key voice was of great influence. His name was Benjamin Franklin. We have a gift that he left us in his autobiography, written over the course of roughly twenty years (1770–90). Not only was Franklin one of the brilliant architects of our country’s democratic formation, but he was also deeply concerned about character and the public good. English historian William E. H. Lecky says of Franklin: he was 

 

one of the very small class of men who can be said to have added something of real value to the art of living. Very few writers have left so many profound and original observations on the causes of success in life, and on the best means of cultivating the intellect and character.William E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, III (London, 1887), 375–76.

 

To be sure, Franklin was no modern evangelical, yet he was baptized and educated as a Presbyterian, had a strong moral foundation for living, and developed a personal strategy for embodying virtue. Although he was an eighteenth-century Deist, he was a unique sort. He spoke about having a private prayer life, though he struggled with church attendance, yet was a frequent financial contributor to various religious groups. Franklin believed deeply in family, community, and working for the common good of all people. 

Franklin lived within the clear values of his generation. It was said of him: 

 

he accepted without question and expressed without effort all the characteristic ideas of his century—its aversion to superstition, its dislike for dim perspectives, its healthy skepticism, its passion for freedom, its preoccupation with a world that is evident to the senses; its profound faith in common sense, and its commitment to reason.The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 15.

 

These values included a healthy knowledge of both virtue and vice. He understood that the only means for a country to be good was if its people knew how to become good. He believed this was not only possible, but critical for a community and a nation to be sustained. 

I suggest this is the underlying issue we face today— there is no basis but individual preference for deciding “what is good.” Therefore, what is good for you might not be good for me. Yet, no matter, I’ll live my life; you live yours. Concern or even interest in the “public good” no longer exists in our current state of affairs. No wonder there is a blurring of virtue and vice. 

Not so for Franklin. Franklin’s life is interesting to me not because he was a model Christian. He was certainly no great theologian. Yet, he did demonstrate a daily piety and was a person in touch with his own need to become a better man, not just for himself and his family, but for the good of others and the good of his society, and yes, even for the good of his country. 

So, how did he intend to become this better person? First was his honest realization that he wasn’t the kind of person he intended to be in his words and actions. He cites numerous interactions whereby he invited feedback from others in his life and realized there was definite need for improvement. Second, he made a plan for his own moral development. In other words, he strategically designed the specific virtues he wanted to embody and vices he wanted to uproot that prevented this intention. Then, he employed practical disciplines (training) to create the change he desired. 

Now you might be thinking, This is all well and good if change all depends on your “will.” But where are Jesus, the power of the Holy Spirit, and grace? Great questions. I’m not sure whether or how the Holy Spirit operated in Franklin’s life, but I am absolutely convinced that his moral conviction and process were correct—ones that we could learn from today. 

So, let’s take a look at Franklin’s plan for “moral improvement.” Based on his personal assessment of his vices and his desire to become more virtuous, Franklin identified thirteen virtues (or precepts) that he wanted to embody. Here they are with his corresponding definitions: 

  1. Temperance—Eat not to dullness. Drink not to elevation. 
  2. Silence—Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation. 
  3. Order—Let all things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time. 
  4. Resolution—Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve. 
  5. Frugality—Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself. Waste nothing. 
  6. Industry—Lose no time. Be always doing something useful. 
  7. Sincerity—Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 
  8. Justice—Wrong none, but doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 
  9. Moderation—Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 
  10. Cleanliness—Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation. 
  11. Tranquility—Be not disturbed by trivialities, or common distractions. 
  12. Chastity—Don’t use intimacy out of boredom, weakness or out of injury to your own or another’s peace or reputation. 
  13. Humility—Imitate Jesus and Socrates.Benjamin Franklin, 150.

 

Franklin’s plan (a kind of Rule of Life, if you will) to embody these virtues was to create a simple but clear chart that tracked which virtue or vice he would work on each day of the week. That gave him a sort of rubric to evaluate his improvement. In his autobiography, he shares the practical challenges he faced. 

 

I sought to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer that naturally inclined. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found that I had undertaken a task more difficult that I imagined. While my attention was taken up in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another. Habit took the advantage of inattention. Inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I realized that habits must be broken and good ones acquired and established before we can have any dependence on a steady uniform conduct of behavior.Benjamin Franklin, 148.

 

Franklin also he gives us his honest assessment of how this plan worked. 

 

In truth I found myself incorrigible with respect to my plan, and I am now grown old, and my memory bad. But on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was by the endeavor a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it.Benjamin Franklin, 156.

03.  Moving toward a Transforming Embrace

Franklin’s virtues may not be things you aspire to, but they give us a wonderful example of his attempts toward moral improvement, for his good and the good of others. The fact is unless and until we become aware of our need to change, we won’t change. And, unless or until we make a plan for our own transformation, in concert with the grace of God, we will certainly not become who we want to be.  

So, how do we mediate these two very different worldviews, of both the present “social media” world, the world dominated by the fear of missing out, and the world of Ben Franklin? 

I think we need to begin by becoming aware of ourselves, of what drives us, and what our fears expose about our current state of living. The four young women who participated in the television show experiment became aware of their fears through the experience itself. They weren’t seeking this knowledge, nor were they aware of their fears going into it. This is like many of us. In the same way, until we are put into a new situation or put ourselves into one, we often aren’t aware of our true condition. 

So, I suggest we take time to reflect on the fears that drive us, and in light of the social media culture, we should examine whether our desires or curiosities have attained an inordinate hold on our lives, and what shape that hold is taking. Ideally, this should be done in community, where we invite others to speak into our lives—those who know us and love us, who can mirror for us what we ourselves cannot see, or are too close to see accurately. 

Then, like Franklin, we need to make a plan. This is where knowledge of virtue and vice and applied spiritual disciplines are critical. 

For example, if I were one of the women who realized her dependency and fear were driving her social media addiction, then a good course of action might be to take on a kind of strategic “fasting” from her computer or phone at certain times of the day and use that time to reflect on God’s sufficiency for her needs and desires. Or, it may be that she takes on the discipline of service to others in some form to offset the temptation to endlessly search the Web. These are just a few examples of the countless spiritual discipline strategies that could be used as transformational tools for becoming a person who is not driven by fear, but instead finds fulfillment in God. The results are always the development of good in ourselves and seeking to benefit others. 

Remember that the goal in this endeavor is not becoming perfect people, but good people. Such people actually live life the way God intended it to be—full of joy and abundance in Jesus. 

May it be that we turn a “dangerous embrace” into a “transforming embrace,” as we renew our minds and engage our wills in becoming a mature disciple of Jesus whose desire is to become a virtuous person, living life in the words of the apostle Paul,  

 

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things (Philippians 4:8, NRSVUE). 

Footnotes

Keith J. Matthews is Chair and Professor of Spiritual Formation and Contemporary Culture in the Graduate School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University.

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