Why I Stopped Phoning It In on Sundays

This article was originally written by Sean Johnson for LDS.org. The following is an excerpt. 

I start my day leisurely fighting zombies in my bedroom. You know, the usual morning routine.

Then my favorite indie pop band shows up to play my favorite song, a surprise living room concert for one—until breaking news interrupts the party: “Cat Does Adorable Thing You Won’t Want to Miss!”

This isn’t a cheesy dream sequence in a bad movie. It’s a typical scene from my hyper-distracted, perpetually-connected existence, lived one phone charge at a time. It’s never boring. It’s frequently exhausting. And we haven’t even reached breakfast yet.

I Pledge Allegiance to My Phone

From the moment I wake until the moment I doze off at night, half listening to a podcast, I’m swimming in distractions. My phone, which may as well be grafted to my hand at this point, is an endless stream of status updates and selfies, retweets and reblogs, emails and every episode of my favorite 90s sitcom. Each buzz or beep heralds the arrival of some exciting novelty, pulling my attention to the screen’s friendly glow. I absolutely love it.

But love comes with a cost. With my head so frequently in the cloud, I’ve become an expert at being somewhere without actually being there. If attention is the currency of our lives, and each of has a finite amount to give, then my account is overdrawn. My attention span has been poked and push-notified to death.

The Big Hang Up

This story isn’t about phones though. It doesn’t end with some profound personal breakthrough, either, where I power down my devices and suddenly achieve perfect mindfulness. It’s smaller and simpler than that—and it’s about signs.

Read Johnson’s full article on LDS.org.