I have been thinking a lot about myself recently. What causes me to sin. What wrong things am I believing which continually drive a wedge between myself and God and why do I keep on doing them when I know they are wrong? Although there are many complications we can bring to this question, the simplicity of its nature can never be overstated. Although our discernment between right and wrong maybe strong, and the consequences for evil are understood, we persist in our own harmful iniquity. What shadowy opponent to our conviction is the cause for this continuous grapple for moral control.

Among many reasons I’m sure one could come up with for this answer, one thing I want to focus on specifically is productivity. The single most reoccurring medium for immoral sexual indulgence and meaningless time consumption is technology. It gets to the point where phones and netflix act as a sedative to the painful realities of life around us. But perhaps it’s even more than that, tech doesn’t just save us from tough situations, it is a simple stimulation when we become idle. Throughout our lives, we innately seek out any kind of experiential pleasure which brings us satisfaction; this is a simple principle of utility. Sure, pleasure should not be that absolute end in any matter, but it serves as a good gauge by which a man makes choices. A man’s instinct is his own good, his drive must be to forget that intuition for the sake of others.

So, these revelations lead me to ask one question further, how do we spend our time? I would argue that one significant reason for why I choose to invest my time in technology and not other activities like, say, reading, writing, prayer, and self reflection is because those things feel unproductive. Working through these things requires undivided attention. That means there cannot be the multiplicity of things being done such as multiple conversations on your phone, a story through tv, and mild homework on the side. A book simply feels futile in the short run because it yields no immediate rewards. In our culture, we label the greatest goods as the most immediate goods. In philosophy, we might say that something is judged worthy while by its ‘propinquity’ to the action or the consequence to the original act. But this ethic is fallible. The nature of goodness cannot be found in a measure of time but of quality. If it were so that time was an authority on right action, then telling an annoying child that he is stupid would be morally correct because the propinquity of your satisfaction would come before the pleasure of not hurting his feelings.  This principle rebounds back to technology because we idolize productivity in the short run so much that we ignore the developed virtues of steadfast activities. It’s almost like a backwards model of classical economics applied to ethics in that real variables are completely ignored at the expense of a focus on the nominal. We irrationally dismiss things which challenge our attention because we perceive them as uninteresting or laborious. However, we implicitly believe these things under the falsely applied justification of “unproductivity.”