Posted on by Abe Austin

Taking Accountability- Clicks and Views

Self Inventory)

In my last post I made the point that I want to find my own personal responsibility in regard to the murder of Charlie Kirk and take accountability for it. Perhaps it would be possible to conduct that inventory, and genuinely find no fault whatsoever, and then I could have a completely clean conscience and continue living exactly as I was.

That, however, is not the case in this event. As I have examined my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, I found something that I would like to do differently moving forward. There is a prominent regret that I have, one which I believe helped feed into the culture that led to his death.

Divisive Social Media)

And it all has to do with the social media that I choose to engage with. As I look at the big picture of things, I do believe that there is a great, terrible machine in our culture, one that I have been a part of.

In social media, content that is angry, that warns of imminent threat, that gives a simplistic view of an enemy group, is typically the content to get the most clicks and views, which results in more revenue for those channels, which encourages the platform-owner to recommended it other people as well. We are fed content, not because it is true, or virtuous, or good for us, but because it is most likely to get a reaction. And when we give it that reaction, it only encourages the algorithm to amplify that rhetoric even further.

And, like I said, I have been part of that cycle, too. I have watched videos because the titles were provocative, because they stoked my sense of righteous indignation, because they gave me a rush of dopamine.

And it wasn’t even that these channels were doing anything obviously evil, like making calls for violence. But they did still paint the world in terms of “us vs them.” They were still painting an entire group of people as fundamentally wrong and dangerous. They were still increasing anger and division. That alone is enough to push people into desperate patterns of thought, where extreme solutions seem to be the only option. That was the type of content that I regularly engaged with, but I’m here to say that I don’t want to be a part of that anymore.

The Value of Attention)

One of the greatest things that we have to give, is our attention. It is limited, it is finite, and where we point it directs all the rest of our lives. For this reason, it is extremely valuable, and very hotly contested for. Channels become powerful purely by their ability to win our attention from us, and if we do not give those channels our attention any longer, they wither away and die.

So, from this point on, I want to be very careful about whom I give my attention to. I do not want to sell it to voices that are coarse, divisive, and loud. And I already know other channels where the discourse is much more rational, much more open to finding solutions other than domination of “the other side.” I’d like to give my attention to them instead. As such, I have already cancelled a great many of subscriptions and will tell the algorithms to stop recommending those channels when they pop back up on my feed.

Anyway, this was the response that I had from looking at the murder of Charlie Kirk and asking myself what I had done to contribute to it. My answer is, “I gave my attention to the voices of division,” and my personal solution is to not do that anymore.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Prepared to Fail- Common Patterns

I recently concluded a study related to false moral dilemmas, where I sought to dispel the notion that there might ever be a time where we have to make a morally compromising choice. I asserted that there are always the options for finding an outside-the-box moral solution, or the ability to refused to engage with the situation entirely and still keep one’s conscience intact.

As I did this study, I started to notice something else, something that I was going to write about then and there, but I realized it warranted a study all its own. It is a theme that is even larger and broader, something that false moral dilemmas is but a subset of. What I have noticed is that our Western culture and media seem to be preparing us to give up on our ideals when certain triggers are met. Not only the false moral dilemmas that I already explored, but any time that there is a threat of torture or harm to a loved one.

Usually when either of these occur in our modern stories, the victim gives in to what the villains want. Obviously, it serves a narrative purpose to have a way for the villains to obtain their desire at certain points of the story, but the fact that it so commonly comes as a result of these specific methods is very interesting. We may view these sorts of stories passively, but each time we see the pattern repeated it is as if our minds are rehearsing that trigger and response, training itself to make the same surrender if we ever face the same sort of opposition.

In my next post I will examine these movie tropes of how the hero is forced to surrender his ideals, and what the long-term effects of repeated exposure to this pattern might spell for us. I’ll see you there.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Virtue of Remembering- Personal Example

At the start of this month I shared a personal goal for myself: to cut down on my use of media and entertainment. Now when I first made that commitment to myself I was thoroughly convinced on it. I knew that it was the right thing to do and I was actually excited to get started.

The next day I started to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake.

Of course, all the reasons to make this transformation in my life were still valid, but I just couldn’t make myself care about them anymore. In fact, it wasn’t long before I caught myself breaking my commitment, and not even maliciously, I had simply forgotten about the things that had once seemed so important.

Children of God are like this. We have real moments of grandeur where we sincerely want all that is good…followed by a long reversion back into our default “meh” state.

Now with my personal example, once I started thinking again about what my commitment had been and why I had made it, some of that old fire started to rekindle. It really felt like blowing on the coals, bit-by-bit getting the heat back into them until they could ignite again.

As such I’ve instituted a regular “blowing on the coals” practice into my day. Every couple hours an alarm goes off on my phone, reminding me to recite back my commitments and the reasons for why I am doing them. (Yes, the irony of using an alarm on my phone to remind me to not use digital media is not lost on me!)

I hope that in time I will learn to be a better rememberer. But even if I do, I suspect I will always require a time of refreshing, recommitting, and renewing. It is okay that we forget, we just have to be sure, then, to remind ourselves.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Personal Commitment: Month 0

Today I start a new series in this blog, one where I commit to living the principles of the gospel more fully, and keep myself accountable by sharing the results of so trying in each succeeding entry. I do recognize the need to handle this with utmost delicacy, for I know that the cultivation of one’s soul is a very sacred, personal thing, and I do not want to tarnish it through over-exposure.

As such, these commitments are not going to be expressed as crude checklists, or detailed out in every degree. Some parts of my spiritual cultivation I simply will not discuss at all.

Still, I believe that if one handles such matters with thoughtfulness, a great deal of good can come about by having a bit more vulnerability to one another. Being able to honestly talk about where we are at with our own conscience, and to admit that there are things we are still working on, can help us reach for our better natures together.

I’d like to start the ball rolling by stating that I am a millennial, and I am over-saturated in media. Hardly surprising, I know! But just because a trend is common or understandable does not mean it should be condoned. I have felt for a while like I need to take a stance against my own over-consumption of the digital world, and I would rather that this part of my life be a pleasant seasoning, and not the main course.

Of course, excessive media use is never explicitly called out in the scriptures as a sin. And yet, my conscience tells me that it is an idol that at times I have placed before God. To check-in with my conscience now, I would say that I feel like I use media as a crutch to get through times of boredom and stress. I have noted how even after I turn off the screen, I can remain in a dazed state, unable to fully engage with the other aspects of my life. I do not feel that this is how I was meant to live.

Thus I have set some expectations for myself in how I would like to limit the role of media in my life. Some things are being sworn off entirely, others are being limited to specific times and situations. But more than all that, I just intend to follow my conscience, more than my “need” to look up that article or video. One month from now I will share how I have progressed in that journey, and what the effects of it have been. If anything particularly notable happens along the way, I will make note of it at the time.

Thank you.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Making Time for God- Question

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and we have a lot of wheels squeaking in our lives! The smartphone chirps at us, social media rants at us, the television blares at us. Life is a dashboard full of meters constantly draining towards empty, and we rush about frantically trying to fill them all.

We’re afraid of losing things, of missing out, of leaving opportunities on the table. Our lives become machine-like, incessantly servicing all the many calls for our attention.

God, meanwhile, doesn’t squeak at us at all. He’s much too dignified to stoop to that level. This shows what great respect He has for us, but also makes it easy to lose sight of Him amidst the din of the world. Still He waits, patiently, for however long it takes. He waits for us to come to Him. Usually when we do, we’re the ones squeaking now. Squeaking in pain!

Well, God has grease for His in-pain, squeaky-wheel-children. He commiserates with us, then soothes us, and finally heals us. Then we, eternally grateful, skip away happily and promptly lose sight of Him once more. We’re caught back up in the world, we’ll come back when we’ve scraped our knees again.

It’s a way to live life, and I suppose it could be worse…but also it could be better. God invites us to make Him a more permanent fixture in our lives, to give Him time each and every day to heal and strengthen us. He offers to be with us every hour.

With this study we’ll consider how to push some of the world’s clutter off of our shelves and make space for God. We’ll examine what tricks the adversary uses to distract us from the things that really matter. Before we get started, though, I’d love to hear in what ways you’ve found yourself overwhelmed by the noise of the world, and how you were able to make a time and place for holiness.