We're Wasting Our Lives

A case for cutting a lot of things out of our lives

The esteemed Anglican revivalist and cleric John Wesley once walked unannounced into a church fellowship hall to find a group of women gathered around a table, playing cards. The parson walked over to the table, collected the cards, and shredded them.

Women in 18th century English dresses, playing cards while sitting at a table generated by Substack’s AI art generator

What a story, right? Mr. Wesley seems to have been quite the killjoy. It is easy to dismiss the man as overly harsh. The man didn’t marry until late in life, had a miserable marriage, didn’t partake in any pastimes that we are aware of, outside of prayer, scripture, singing hymns, and leading the revival in various other forms. The man did, according to his own account, manage to sleep. Even so, his personal balance in life radically differs from ours today.

People in 18th century Great Britain didn’t have the many diversions we have. No electricity meant so televisions, smart phones, movie theaters, or video games. The average American spends a little over seven hours per day looking at screens. That is a little less than 1/3 of our lives spent in a way that premodern people didn’t. If our minds and bodies are fine tuned to be in sync with a constant way of life, then we have clearly created a new synthetic lifestyle that has massive implications. The way we spend our time is a reflection of who we are. We are a synthetic people.

The General Rules of the United Societies was the fundamental document lining out the conduct and shared way of life of anyone who wanted to be considered part of the “United Societies” of Methodism. The first General Rule was to “Do no harm,” which was then spelled out at length as to all the sample ways that persons can ‘do harm.’ Of those explicit harmful references was “The singing those songs, or reading those books, which do not tend to the knowledge or love of God."

What they knew, what we conveniently don’t think about, is that the way we spend our time matters. It informs our habitus, or way of life. Wesley and the people called Methodist were a people concerned spending the whole of these short lives of ours praising God and serving humanity. When Mr. Wesley had spare time on cold winter evenings, he went house to house to find homes without enough heat, bringing them blankets. When we have spare time on a cold winter night, we make some hot coco and watch a movie. We are not the same.

It isn’t just that we are wasting time. We are indoctrinating ourselves in harmful ways of life. TV dramas that get the highest views are full of dysfunctional people. People who escalate and get violent or petty when frustrated. People who scream and throw things in arguments with family. It makes for great TV, but it has now taught an entire generation to be functionally retarded in their communication methods.

Video games are a form of escapism undergirded by the presupposition that our lives are something banal from which we need an escape. They create a warped sense of power while engaged, which results in a warped sense of powerlessness when they put it down. Young men, in particular, are plagued by the impotence that this commonly engenders.

We have indeed invented a number of synthetic ways to participate in a very common historical inclination towards diversion and pleasure-seeking. We have simultaneously increased our capacity for more traditional means of being unserious: taking trips for pleasure, playing games, sports leagues, hobbies, gambling, drinking alcohol and carousing, etc. How much of our time is spent meeting creature comforts or otherwise distracting ourselves from sober adult living? Conversely, how much of our time is spent pursuing righteousness, seeking wisdom, increasing in stature? Do we really imagine that this extreme lifestyle we have created in America pleases the Lord?

It is worth noting that there are no stories in the bible of Jesus engaging in diversions. The man rested, and taught the importance of rest, but this holy rest is a far cry from the hedonistic pleasure-seeking of our present age. His disciples spent their entire lives as peasant itinerant preachers, harassed and abused wherever they went until they were killed. This notion that one can seek pleasure and distraction while also pleasing God is a very new and self-justifying notion. Faithful Christian leaders of every age have called people to sobriety and repentance. In previous ages, in some cultures, they hearkened to the warnings of those cutting up the playing cards. In Ancient Rome, where many spent their days watching all manner of crazy things at the colosseum, the harsh call to sobriety and holy living was answered by calls for blood.

As I am regularly highlighting, the Christian call is to model and advocate for an alternative way of life that is directly at odds with the world. Part of that is expressed in how we spend our time. A big part. We would be wise not to assume that our own culture stands at the pinnacle of human civilization. Rather, it is likely that we have left things behind that are necessary for holy, quality living.

Lest I seem unscripturally strict (Col. 2:21-22), I should say there is clearly a role for play in holy life. Studies on mice show that baby mice that aren’t allowed to play while young grow up to be adults that cannot take risks. When a cat lies in wait around the corner, rather than risking a dash across the room, they will rather sit and fear, eventually dying of dehydration. Similarly, Christians should allow our children to engage in the unsupervised free play that children of every age have. As Jesus said, we believers are released into the world as sheep among wolves, so we must be innocent as doves and cunning as serpents. That means dealing shrewdly (Luke 16:1-9) with our generation. This is surely a form of play, in which we need to be equipped to engage and prevail.

Even so, as Dr. Jonathan Haidt substantiates in his ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’ the form of play we engage in with video games, gambling, or other common diversions really don’t help us to grow in such necessary musculature. Rather, like the synthetic ‘food’ our culture increasingly eats, modern forms of play carry the form but not the power that is needed. Kids that are “playing” with phones or video games are actually less equipped to navigate life dynamically than previous generations. It turns out that nature knows better than we do. We need to eat true food. We need to engage in true play. Not playing cards, but laboring in the field of Christ. Work and play aren’t really opposites. Rather, work at its best is a form of play, as we delight in creatively and ingeniously working within structures to generate something new or order something chaotic. It is one of the ways, I believe, that we are made in the image of God.

Listen, our culture is sick. This is one of the ways. Do you ever notice that after watching a movie for two hours, you don’t feel any more rested? It’s because our nature is to truly rest and then truly work, the same as God (Genesis 1-2). We cannot change our nature. Our true nature, the nature which Christ has given us, is that of the divine.

We need to reckon with the fact that we live in a population that has been culled by corporate interests to make us better consumers. Corporations want to make money off you. They make more money if you are convinced that you need their products in order to be happy. We need to be reminded that no product can give that ‘peace that surpasses all understanding.’ Only the faith of Christ Jesus can do that. When we give our time, our resources, our money to pursuit of worldly pleasure, we belie our faith.

So I propose that modern Christians consider the ways in which our lives are unserious, resolving to give more of our time to those things that edify us as warriors for Christ, bringing glory to his name.

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“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness.”
- Luke 11:34-35

“Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.’”
- Matthew 9:37-38

“And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’”
- John 5:16-17

““Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed,’ and begins to beat his fellow servants and eats and drinks with drunkards, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know and will cut him in pieces and put him with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.””
- Matthew 24:45-51

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Note: For the record, I actually do think John Wesley was wrong in his understandings around how to rest, be at peace in his relationships, and how to facilitate this balance in others. I used him as a counterbalance in this piece; I don’t want him to be the model off which we base ourselves. Jesus, on the other hand, does seem to have rested better, and we should seek to perfectly reflect his way of life in the world.