We often feel mentally tired and believe that distraction will give us a break. In the book referenced below, Paula Huston talks about the importance of the mind and what refreshment for it can look like.
The desert dwellers believed that our souls need proper nourishment -- spiritual food -- in order to achieve clear spiritual vision. Jesus often withdrew into the desert or the mountaintops at night in order to rejuvenate his soul through prayer.
25 years ago Neil Postman wrote an analysis of the way that television was reshaping our view of the world. The problem was that TV had come to dominate the culture, which meant that almost all our experiences were now coming to us as entertainment rather than in the form of serious intellectual, moral, or spiritual questions.
When we watch TV, all we have to do is make a simple, childish choice: is this interesting or boring? If it fails to pass the test, we just flip the channel and move on. It's not surprising that even newscasters have succumbed to the entertainment trend: unless they over-stimulate us or lead us into the escapist fantasies we've come to expect, why would we watch them?
...what would we be free from? Misperception, melodrama, falsehood, artificiality, superficiality, and self-indulgent egoism -- everything the entertainment industry depends upon to hold our attention.
-- Paula Huston, simplifying THE SOUL
She calls this the artificial invigoration of the mind and something that we very easily become addicted to and shares some vivid examples of how far short our cultural forms of distraction fall from what we really need.
