I learned a new phrase this week while reading the book, Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. It’s called, “cruel optimism.”
To understand the idea, think about the total assault on our attention that comes from technology, news, and social media. I think we can all agree that these forces are purposefully monetizing our attention spans and designing their systems to maximize pulling us into their world.
With companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok all working to capture as many minutes of our day as possible, since more eyes on their ads equal more revenue, it seems like the scales are heavily tipped in their favor, and against us.
Cruel optimism comes in when you express these challenges to someone, maybe because you feel addicted to the screens or just want to spend more of your day observing real life rather than the digital representation, and they offer you the simple advice:
Just look at your phone less.
The optimism built into that statement makes you feel like the answer is simple. Just, look at your phone less, and you will accomplish all the things you are hoping for. Piece of cake.
The reason why it’s a cruel optimism is that that advice won’t work. It’s a false, nigh meaningless sense of optimism. An oversimplification of the problem for the sake of offering quick advice that actually hurts us in the long run.
And worse, it shifts blame from the multi-billion dollar companies with thousands of programmers all working to manipulate your attention and places it all on you.
If you ever hear advice that sounds like, “all you have to do is,” that’s cruel optimism. And the church is excellent at dolling out cruel optimism.
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