Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - How 2020 Is Taking a Toll on Your Soul

Episode Date: August 15, 2020

Alan explains why you’re likely feeling fatigued and frustrated with 2020. He quotes what he believes is the comment of the year because it provides valuable insight into how God made us and what we’re created to handle. This episode is from the STR broadcast when Alan was a guest host.

Welcome to the Standard Reason Broadcast. My name is Alan Schliemann, and I am filling in for Greg, who is not in today. And it's great to be with you on the show. I'm looking forward to sharing with you some of my thoughts about what has been going on lately. And recently, I came across a comment, actually, that I felt expressed a feeling that I didn't realize I was even experiencing. And in fact, I like this comment so much that my guess is that this comment is going to be the comment of the year, at least for me. Now, I know you're probably thinking, well, Alan, wait a minute. It's only half the year has gone by. You still have six months. Maybe somebody's going to say something interesting or exciting or provocative, and you'll like that comment more. It's possible. But what this person said, I thought was so insightful and expressed what's been on my heart and my mind recently that

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's going to be the comment of the year for me. Now, before I get to that comment, I want to offer some background to explain why this comment was so meaningful to me. Because like many of you, the last six months of 2020 have been a whirlwind, right? It's been a roller coaster or a nightmare or whatever. You picked the metaphor. But you know what it's been like. It's been crazy, right?

It's only been six months since 2020 began. And all I can say already is, wow, like I'm exhausted, right? There's been a ton of incredible history-making events, many of which have been rather controversial, right? Back in January, for example, we had the United States kill this Iranian general. And then subsequent to that killing, the Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles and injured a bunch of American soldiers. We had also the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. He was impeached by the House and he was acquitted by the Senate. Donald Trump. He was impeached by the House and he was acquitted by the Senate.

Kobe Bryant and his daughter died in a helicopter crash along with seven other people. We had the United Kingdom withdraw from the European Union. That was Brexit, which I think that was completed around the end of January. Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of sexual assault. And of course, after that whole thing came out, that sort of prompted or fueled the Me Too movement. And so that became a huge thing in our culture and in social media. And of course, by that time, COVID-19 was discovered in different parts of the world. And then, of course, the coronavirus pandemic happened. We had a lockdown. We had stock markets plunge. Unemployment rates began to surge. The Olympics were canceled, or I guess they were postponed or

something until next year. And then even while that was going on, we had the tragic killing of George Floyd. We had the protest, you know, in response to that. Then we've had rioting, we've had looting, and it's just, it's just been going on, right? And this is, this is only the first six months. And so I want to explain my frustration to you about something. And perhaps it's something that's been frustrating you as well. And this will tie into this particular comment that I'll read to you in just a moment. But most of us have witnessed all these events that I've mentioned. And again, I've just touched on just a few of them.

Obviously, there's a lot more. But those are just some of the big things that kind of happened in these first six months. But most of us have witnessed these things on the news, right? Either on television or on the internet. Maybe we just use our browsers to gather the news. Maybe we see these things happen on social media. But basically, because of technology, because of the internet, because of social media, we are given ringside seats to all of these events, to all these tragedies, to all the evils, to all these things happening

around the world. And as all these things are happening, and because we witness them, it feels like we're expected to do three things. And you might say, well, expected by who? It just feels like there's this expectation by our culture, by our friends, by our networks, there's this expectation by our culture, by our friends, by our networks, by our communities to do three things. Number one is this. We're expected to know the exact truth about what happened with each of these events. Number two, we're expected to make an immediate evaluation of kind of what went on. In other words, you know, is what happened, was it right, was it wrong, who's at fault, what's at fault, you know, what's the underlying problem?

We're expected to kind of know that. And then number three, we're expected then to say the right thing about it you know either on social media or conversations or whatever it might be you know and again i think as these things happen and because we are witnessing them through technology through media through tv through the news we're expected to do those three things number one know the exact truth about what happened number two make an immediate evaluation, right? Is the thing right or wrong or who's at fault? And number three, say the right thing about it.

And I don't know about you, but to me, this is a tremendous amount of pressure that I feel to do those things, to be expected to do those things. To do those things, to be expected to do those things. And it's frustrating for me because, you know, I feel this temptation to want to try to get those three things right, you know. And that's why, you know, after these first six months of 2020, you know, I feel frustrated. I feel exhausted. I feel overwhelmed. And I'm thinking to myself, this is only the first half. And so this is where I came across this comment. And again, it's like when I read this comment,

I thought to myself, that's exactly what I feel is true about the circumstances of the world and the culture that we're living in. Now, this particular comment comes from a pastor in Texas. Now, to be honest with you, actually, I don't know this pastor at all. I saw this quote copied from a tweet that he had done and somebody posted on Facebook, and I just kind of read the quote. And then I went and looked up this pastor and I realized, yeah, I don't know who this pastor is and it doesn't matter. You know, he's a Baptist pastor in a city in Texas. To be honest with you, I don't know anything about his theology. I'm assuming he's Orthodox, but it actually doesn't really matter what his theological views are. I'm assuming they're fine, but it's irrelevant for the purpose of my comments here. But I want you to listen to what he said. Okay. This is what he wrote. Could it be that God didn't wire us to carry every event taking place in every part of the world at every moment as if it were ours?

Let me read that to you again, okay? He said, Now, I resonate with this statement a lot. Okay. It seems very true that technology has made it possible for us to witness every event, every tragedy, every evil act committed by anybody. Right. I mean, of course, everything. But so much today has the ability to be recorded and then posted. And so this technology then is allowing us to experience all of these things. And I believe it's not something that we were made by God or created by God to handle all of that. Now, look, obviously we're human beings and we do have a capacity to, you know, endure certain things, right? We can handle our own experiences, our own trauma, right? Tragedy that happens to us, evil that befalls us, right? That's normal, right? We're made to handle something,

right? But we're not made to handle all of it. And we're not certainly made to handle, I believe, all of everything that happens everywhere around the world. And to do it in such rapid succession, that normally, a social media feed or an internet news site is able to, for us, right? And we're certainly not made to handle all those or experience all those as if they were our own, our own tragedies, our own events. I think this goes beyond what our normal sort of teleological capacity is. normal sort of teleological capacity is. Now, in this comment, the pastor made reference to two things. He says that because of this technology, we have a faux omnipresence and a faux omniscience. And I want to comment on both of these because I think they're rather

interesting to think about. So let's just talk about, for example, faux omniscience. I'm sorry, faux omnipresence for a moment. Social media and the Internet really has only been around for, what, like 20 or 30 years, right? I mean, the Internet started back in the 90s. And then it wasn't probably until 2000, like the early 2000s, that we had social media begin. Right. Facebook and Twitter, I think, began in like 2005 or 2004, 2006, somewhere around that first five or six years after the millennium kicked off. But that means for most of all of human history, we have been without that technology.

Up until the last 20 years, we've never had this capacity. And so for thousands of years of human history, we've only had to carry, people have only had to carry events that occur to them, to their family or friends, or to their local community. And it seems like that might be reasonable for us to be able to handle that. But now we have technology, the internet and social media. And so if we miss a tragedy, if we miss some evil event, if we miss something that happens not near us, but on the other side of the world, you know, it's recorded. And then it's replayed endlessly on the internet, on social media until we can't unsee it.

And it's just, you know, you know, seared on our, in our, in our souls. And it's not just one event, you know, it's not just one tragedy, one bad event not just one tragedy one bad event right it's every every event every horrible event that happens to anybody and they're all recorded and they're all funneled through our eyes and into our souls and it happens because we have that capacity through this technology which again it's an amazing technology. And it still amazes me that we have it, but that's what it does. And it doesn't matter where these events happen. They can happen in the next town, the next state, or a completely different country. And because of that, because of that, it's like we are everywhere. This is why I think it was very interesting that the pastor made this comment.

It creates for us a full omnipresence. It's a full omnipresence, though, because we're not actually there. We're not actually everywhere, obviously. But we're made to experience the event like we were there. Because we see it on TV. We see it on the internet. We see it on social media. We think we were there because we see it on TV, we see it on the internet, we see it on social media. We think we're there. And we think we're there in a sense, obviously, and then we soak it in and we feel the pain. We experience the pain that other people feel, obviously not to the same

degree, but probably to a lesser degree, but we still feel it. And then we will scroll through our newsfeed, and then we experience another event, and feel that, and sympathize, or try to empathize, or whatever, you know. And then we scroll a little bit more, we see, click on another event, or it's just multiple events, multiple evils, multiple tragedies, all in a matter of minutes. At least we have the capacity to experience them all in a matter of minutes if we just simply scroll through our social media feed or through our browser. Now, maybe God, who is actually omnipresent, right? Maybe he can handle it. Well, of course not, not maybe he obviously can handle it, right? He has the emotional and the psychological bandwidth to be able to take

that all in and not get negatively affected. But I don't think that's the case for us, right? We're not made that way, but yet through this technology, we're made to be, or made to feel like we're omnipresent, therefore still experiencing those particular events. And I think that's why I was very intrigued by this comment that it, that this technology creates for us a faux omnipresence. And I believe that's hurting us. Now he said that there's a, there's a faux omnipresence going on, but that also we have a faux omniscience. And I believe the first faux leads to the second faux.

In other words, the faux omnipresence is what leads us to experience this faux omniscience. Because thinking we were there makes us think that we understand what happened. It makes us believe that we have almost like complete access to the event, right? Maybe, you know, like with these police tragedies, we see body cam footage, right? Or, you know, there's a tsunami happening and somebody's got a camera on their phone and we can see that, right? Or, you know, there's a tsunami happening and if somebody's got a, you know, a camera on their phone and we can see that, right? And we see it in clarity. We see it in HD and 4K. It's like incredibly clear. It's so clear. It feels like we're there, right? And we think that we're seeing it and understanding it exactly how it happened because look, there's video footage of

it. So we think we know it. We think we understand it. And so consequently, that gives us this false confidence to comment about it, to say that we know what happened. We post about it. We emote. We argue about it with other people. And then we divide over it. And I think this just simply adds another layer of stress. And again, that's just for one tragedy. That's just for one evil. That's just for one horrible thing that we see. But we do it for everything else.

And this is why I think it's true that our faux omniscience is hurting us as well. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not a Luddite. I love technology. I'm not against technology. I remember even before I was, I worked as a physical therapist for 10 years, but even before that, I was a computer science major. And the reason I was a computer science major in college was because I loved computers. I grew up, I had, you know, my parents bought me like an Atari, I think it was a 400, then I got an 800 XL. And these were like little, you know, gaming consoles that had keyboards built into them because they had the capacity to have a very rudimentary, you know, ability to program them and create code and all that stuff like that. And so I love that.

And I've been doing that. I did that for years growing up. I thought I wanted to be a computer science major, although I changed for other reasons. But even afterwards, I still am a fan of technology. I use technology regularly. I still tinker with computers. I build my own systems. And I love it. So don't get me wrong. I am tinker with computers. I, you know, build my own systems and I love it, you know, so don't get me wrong. I am a fan of technology and there's a lot of

technological advancements that have helped our world, that have helped people, right? Helped us to communicate, help us to stay connected, help us to protect other people, help us to care for other people in better ways. And this is all because, you know, technology has advanced and that's generally a good thing. I guess I just think that with any kind of progress, there's also going to be some downsides. And I think this revolution of technology that allows us to experience and see things as if they were our own, to carry these events and tragedies as if they were our own, I think there is a downside to this. And this is what I think this pastor was commenting on and I think really resonates with how we see things as well. there's a, um, there's a movie called inherit the wind, which is an older movie that was produced, um, to, um, well, allegedly to retell the story of the scopes monkey trial, right? So scopes monkey trial was a famous trial that happened where this, um, man was, uh, it was

back in the time when evolution was, it was illegal to teach on evolution. And so this guy, this biology teacher begins teaching evolution and of course people protest and the whole case goes to a court and there's a trial. And so the movie Inherit the Wind is not really accurately telling the story of the Scopes Monkey trial. It's an incredibly biased and distorted piece of propaganda that in no way I believe represents what happened. It's still a very fascinating movie because of its just amazing propaganda. And I do enjoy the movie for a whole bunch of other reasons. It's just amazing propaganda. And I do enjoy the movie for a whole bunch of other reasons.

But there's something that's said in that movie that I found very relevant to what we're talking about here. So one of the attorneys in the case who is actually defending the teacher who is teaching evolution, his character's name is Henry Drummond. And in a particular speech that he's given during the trial, he talks about the price of progress. So, of course, the context is that evolution is progress. We are out with the old ways of believing that God explains everything. And now we have science to tell us what really is happening. And that's the progress. But even though he's making this point, he just kind of comments about the price of progress. Listen to what he says in the movie.

He says, progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, all right, you can have a telephone. But you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline. Now, I think it's totally true, right? Think about it for a moment, right? It's hard to imagine, for example, the wonder of flight that birds effortlessly enjoy. Why?

Because we've all grown up in a world with planes, with airplanes, right? We can sit in a cushy airplane, having a soda, eating some chicken, which granted doesn't taste very good, but okay, let's just still. We can sit there zipping by at 600 miles an hour, however fast airplanes fly, seeing cities just fly by us at 38,000 feet in the air. And we think, yeah, flying, what's the big deal? A flying bird, no big deal. We can fly faster, we can fly higher. There's something lost about the fact that we have this capacity now, because progress comes with a price. And I think this is totally true with regards to technology. There is a price to pay for the amazing benefits that technology gives us, right? TV, internet, social media. It certainly is progress in one sense of the word, but I think we do pay for it in another way. And we pay for it precisely because we experience a faux omnipresence

and a faux omniscience. Thereby, we're experiencing and carrying all the hurts in the world. And we're carrying them as if they were our own. And I think that's the price we pay for this particular technology. I don't think we're made for that. Now, I know people say, I mean, there's all kinds of objections that can be raised. I even was raising objections in my own mind thinking, yeah, but Alan, come on. We need to have this technology. We need to have the capacity to be able to see anything that happens anywhere. There's so much good that can come from it. And I understand this.

For example, one of my hobbies is photography. And I love especially wildlife and do some photography. And people I see all the time are always praising the excitement they feel about technology because it allows us to see things that we wouldn't normally see. So for example, in the context of photography, with the internet, you can see a magical waterfall in South America or see some amazing volcano in Hawaii without ever going there. And so people will take pictures of it, will post it, will post video of it, and we can kind of experience it without ever leaving the safety of our own home. And people say this is great because you can see those things that you would normally never be able to see. You know, I personally don't do very well underwater. I can snorkel for a bit, but I've tried to scuba dive and I can't do it. I panic and I get claustrophobic and I'm

just not good at it. So I don't think I'll ever be good at scuba diving. And to me, that's a bummer because I would love to scuba dive. I think it's amazing going underwater when I snorkel and seeing all kinds of wildlife. It's just awesome. But I'll probably never be able to be good at it, you know. And so people say, see, Alan, you get to experience something that you never would normally, you know, be able to experience because of whatever limitations, money or fear or whatever. But see, even with this, I don't think I agree, you know, because first of all, I've, I've had the privilege to visit some amazing places in my time, you know,

with, you know, in my, my line of work at STR, I get invited to teach at a lot of places and some of them are very remote parts of the world that I normally wouldn't get to go to. And so I'll oftentimes take a little time to go visit some and sightsee some places. But the thing is, is after I visited them and I've come back home and I've seen those same things, those same places, those same waterfalls or whatever they might be on the internet,

I can say for certainty that if you've never been to those places, you are missing something significant missing something significant about them. And it's not just a matter of degree. It's just like it's a completely different experience when you're actually there. And seeing that same place on the internet later on in a video or in even my own pictures is not the same. video, or even my own pictures is not the same. Now, I've also experienced this the other way around, where I've first seen a remote place on the internet because I've searched for it and looked for it. I thought, okay, I want to go there. And then at some later time, I went to visit it.

And when I got there, I felt like there was a little bit of a letdown because the preview that I experienced on the Internet before I went to the place diminished my experience when I got there. And I know that's the case because when I've not seen a place on the Internet first and then gone to visit it after I was just told, Alan, you have to go to this place. To me, experiencing the full magnitude and beauty of it for the first time with my own eyes when I'm there is a far more magnificent experience than if I first get a preview of it before I go and experience it. And by the way, this is why my family and friends hate me because I never will want to watch a preview of a movie, right? If the television's on or if I'm at a restaurant and I see a preview, I have to look away. And they're all staring at the preview

of this new Star Wars movie or new Avengers movie. And I'm like, I don't want to look at it because I don't want a preview of it. I want to experience the movie when I see it for the first time and not get little snippets of it ahead of time, which to me just diminishes the magnitude of the enjoyment that I'll experience when I'm there. So I don't know if even getting a preview of things that you see on video is necessarily a good thing. I actually don't prefer it. I wish that I could just simply be told the places that are beautiful and I go and visit and experience them for the first time when I'm there. You know, now you might say, but now this isn't about, you know, you're not talking about seeing good things and beautiful things. You know, we were, you were talking earlier about tragedies. And I get that. And I think the other objection that, you know, I raised in my own mind about

what I've said so far is that, well, yeah, technology gives us access to see, to experience, to see what's going on in the rest of the world. And this helps us to stay abreast of current affairs and current events, right? And that's important. You know, the world needs to be able to learn from our collective experience, you know? And, you know, again, generally speaking, I agree with that.

I think it is important for us to learn from events and tragedies that happen outside of our own personal lives, outside of our own families, outside of our own community. You know, events that happen elsewhere in the world are important for us to know. You know, it's why we study history. It's why it's a valuable subject in school. But I, so yeah, so I don't, I don't want to take away from that objection. I think that's, there's merit to there's merit to what people are saying there. All I'm saying is I think there's just a downside to all of it.

Like Henry Drummond says, progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. constant access and digestion of video and images, and especially when it comes to tragedies and events that we experience and carry like they are ours. I just don't think we're made, we're designed by God to handle all of it to that degree. So all I'm saying is perhaps we can recognize the toll it takes on us. And maybe we can just simply learn to take breaks, vacations, vacations, not just like

traveling somewhere, but I mean, the vacation from media, you know, fasting from media, fasting from social media, fasting from the news. I think that's okay. And I don't think we should be criticized for it. In fact, I feel like I need to do it more often. I think that's okay. And I don't think we should be criticized for it. In fact, I feel like I need to do it more often. I think I already do it a lot, but I feel like I don't do it enough. So anyways, that's what I wanted to tell you is if you're feeling frustrated, if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're feeling exhausted, perhaps it's because you weren't made to carry all of 2020 and all the tragedies that have happened all over your city, your state, your country, and our world. Perhaps we weren't made to handle all that. It's given us a faux

omniscience, a faux omnipresence, and I think it's taking a toll on us. So, yeah, take a break if you can. And I think it'll do your soul good.