What I Want To Do

What a treat that I got to see all of you this weekend, even briefly. I don’t mean to taunt anyone who couldn’t be there on Saturday morning, but when I got to Zoe’s apartment to pick up Katie after she stayed over to watch the Olympics, there was coffee cake just coming out of the oven, and it was SO GOOD!Katie and I stayed there at Zoe’s apartment and chitchatted with her and her roommates just long enough for the coffee cake to be ready to eat, and we watched one of them play a couple rounds of Mario Kart in the living roomIt gave me such a powerful wave of nostalgia. I told them all that thirty years ago, my roommates and I were doing the exact same thing, playing Mario Kart in the living room of our college apartment, although I will confess that Zoe and her roommates are a little neater than we were. We even had younger siblings visit us!The apartment my roommates and I rented was the upper two floors of a house, and I lived there until I moved to DC right at the beginning of 2001. This was before the days of ubiquitous wifi connections being fast enough for video games, so when we would play something like Age of Empires, we would string ethernet cables through the hallways and network our computers the old fashioned way. One of my favorite memories of that game was starting a game one Saturday night and getting so lost in it that when I next looked up it was time for me to get to the Sunday School class I was teaching.Most of the time, watching TV or playing video games was a fun and healthy way to disconnect, and no matter what jokes people make about screenagers and their screens, we had plenty of screens in our apartment, they were just a bigger, and at least one of my roommates watched TV almost all the time when he was awake and at home.But all good things must come to an end, and I moved to DC, where I was both busy and lonely, well, at least until I met your mama, but shortly after I moved to DC, I started playing a very silly arcade style game I found on the Internet that was, for whatever reason, extremely addictive for me. There were times I would play it for twelve hours at a time, times when I really wanted to be doing work, but it was just hard for me to unplug. I still don’t know exactly why, it just released the exact right little dopamine hit every time I captured some bees inside of a bubble, which was literally the whole premise of the game.Whenever I’ve gotten that obsessed with anything, whether it be a silly video game or something else, it’s always such a strange experience. I want to be doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing. In my mid twenties the thing I was supposed to be doing was usually writing code, and I did spend a lot of time doing that, but sometimes instead of doing the thing I was supposed to be doing or that I wanted to be doing, I was staring at my screen, capturing flying bumblebees with a bubble wand.Most the time, an obsession like that one just kind of runs its course. Either it gets boring, or it eventually becomes enough of a problem that it becomes urgent to deal with. Quitting is hard, not quite as hard as it was to quit cigarettes, maybe, but still hard. And made harder by the fact that it was always just a click away.I’ve been having the same kind of problem with my phone recently, which is a little more dangerous than a single arcade game, because it’s effectively bottomless. And for me lately it’s been the problem of having all these places where I can just scroll through short videos effectively forever. You kids have never experienced this, but it’s not unlike flipping channels in the old days, where you’d have fifty cable channels and a remote and just browse from show to show to show, except the short videos take longer to get boring than channel surfing did.I’ve tried a few tricks that have helped. I put my phone on black and white mode, which surprisingly makes it a lot less interesting. I use the focus friend app, you wouldn’t believe how nice my bean’s apartment is, it’s like getting obsessed with that almost fills my need to be obsessive. The thing is, I don’t really get much from scrolling on my phone, and almost anything that I could be doing instead is what I’d rather be doing.As I was thinking about writing for today’s Meeting, I kept returning back to the book of Romans, which has lots of gems in it, but I’m going to read a verse from chapter seven now:I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.This is written by the Apostle Paul, and he’s talking about himself, and it might be the most relatable thing in all of his letters. “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”Yikes!I guess I’m not the very first person who’s had a problem with being able to control my own attentions and desires. Someone else has run into the same problem.Paul winds up talking a lot about the difference between the Spirit and the Body, which is very much in keeping with a first-century-CE idea, but it’s not too dissimilar to a way we have of thinking about addiction and obsessiveness now. Our bodies can become reliant on something, whether it be the aforementioned cigarette, which I became physically addicted to in my twenties, or if it be a silly video game that titrates out just the right amount of dopamine, or if it be a pocket-based supercomputer that trillionaires have spent ungodly sums of money to make it as easy as possible to flip through short videos.When I think of the Spirit in this context, the Spirit is the part of me that wanted to not smoke a cigarette, or the part of me that wants to put my phone down. And the part that doesn’t want to is, well, my blood chemistry and my eyeballs and my silly fingers who just aren’t cooperating.I’m suspicious of mind-body dualism, this idea that there’s a me and another me, and one of them is separate from the other one. And I’m especially suspicious of the idea that is present there in the book of Romans that the capital-f-Flesh is bad. Later in chapter eight, Paul says it like this:Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.When I think about it with my own modern sensibilities, circling back to what we said before, I definitely have blood, and my blood definitely has chemicals in it, and sometimes that blood chemistry seems… I dunno… determined, if blood chemistry can be determined, that blood chemistry seems determined to get me to smoke a cigarette or scroll on my phone or whatever other thing that my higher desires would like to resist.How do I know they’re higher desires? Well, because when the higher desires win out, I feel better, I do better, for others, for myself.Before we light our candles, we’ll end on an even more optimistic note from this same part of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul outlines this whole thing about the ongoing battle between the spirit and the body, but then tells them “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.”I love all you children of God so much, and I hope you’re always able to do what you want to do. Katie reminded me earlier that this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Seems like it might be a good time for me to give up staring at my phone, I’ll have to think about that a little more. Let’s light our candles and think about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com