McDonald’s gives me one less item than I order almost every visit, but it’s the TV 📺 that upsets me more: Out of 50 movies or TV shows, only 1 leaves me feeling glad I watched. But more and more I let my hair down and relax with a good…Netflix series.

Did you think I was gonna end that previous sentence 👆🏾 “…with a good book?” Probably not 📚 😒

22The light of the body is the eye: if therefore your eye be sound, your whole body shall be full of light. 23But if your eye be evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Matthew 6 (King James 2000.) That verse is talking about what we’re eating to feed our hunger. Are we feeding it with good things or, bad things? Too often we are gaming and watching ourselves into disturbing oblivion. We yell at screens. We disturb our sleep with the notions and language we’ve consumed through our eye 👁 gates. The verse above makes me think there’s a reason that a hole inside me seems to get bigger and bigger with the more empty (read: dissatisfying) things I’m cramming down, trying to fill myself in.

A friend of mine started logging her screen time (disturbing just because an app exists that allows you to measure such a thing) and found out that she spent way more time than she feels comfortable with in front of screens.

I would never want to measure my screen time. I’m afraid it would have to come in at something like 25 out of 24 hours a day.

Let it be known: I do not consider myself a hypocrite because I wrote this on my phone. I’m not scrolling and clicking and engaging in virtual rhetorical battle or buying. I didn’t swipe left or right. I wrote this, and that’s who I am – a writer 🙏🏾 

Though everyone should take a couple of days to binge Great British Baking Show and learn the fundamentals of proper bakes and patisserie (for instance, how to discern where the butter has leaked out and left the layers gaping apart), there are other things to fill up on. Christ, for one… And great books – the tactile experience of learning in a fantasy or non-fiction classroom called a real book… Actually looking into the eyes of people in your household – during a conversation or across a chess board… For me, there’s all of that…and writing.

What would you do if you weren’t posting and scrolling obsessively, trying to hide out from FOMO? What is your actual hunger, and what will truly feed it? There are other things to be – other than watchers, and there is more to reality than building one in a virtual environment to see how our fictional characters do life.

Please forgive my lecture-y tone.