Think that sounds silly? Think again. As Charles Colson notes in one of his BreakPoint commentaries, psychiatrist and theologian Richard Winter has made a compelling case for just that thesis in his book Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. Here’s Colson quoting and summarizing Winter:
When stimulation comes at us from every side,’ he writes, ‘we reach a point where we cannot respond with much depth to anything. Bombarded with so much that is exciting and demands our attention, we tend to become unable to discriminate and choose from among the many options. The result is that we shut down our attention to everything.’ That is, we get bored.Over-stimulated and bored, we start looking for anything that will give our jaded spirits a lift. Winter says that boredom explains the rise in extreme sports, risk taking, and sexual addiction. ‘The enticements to more exciting things have to get louder to catch our dulled attention,’ he writes.
I think Winter is dead on, but there’s more to be said (which he might well say in his book, for all I know). Speaking theologically, the root sin here is the sin of sloth. Now, we tend to think of sloth as laziness, but there’s more to it; the ancients defined sloth as “the sin of not caring enough about anything.” C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, produced a vivid picture of a person fallen into sloth: “a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off,” because there is nothing that such a person cares about enough to pull them out of such a rut and give zest to life.Sloth, at its peak, is what we know as despair; and if Winter’s analysis is correct—and I believe it is—it’s because sloth has become a major besetting sin of people in our culture. We simply don’t care enough to do the work of engaging the world around us, but we still crave stimulation, and thus we demand stimulation without work; and thus the cycle begins. As to what has created this situation . . . well, I think Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart has done an excellent job of explaining that in his essay “Christ and Nothing.” If you’re up for some serious philosophical reflection, check it out.