Overstimulated

In today’s hyperconnected world, information comes at us fast and furious, from every direction – earthquakes, wars, culture wars. Because we are human and emotionally wired, it’s natural that these things provoke us and inflame our hearts to want to do something. Yet what can we do with this abundance of troublesome information aside from being informed about it? We are overstimulated but underactivated. I’m convinced this dynamic is one of the major sources of anxiety and mental unhealth in today’s information age, and it’s something Neil Postman warned about.

Five years after publishing Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman gave a speech titled “Informing Ourselves to Death” [that] described how, for the average person in 1990, “information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.” How much more are we glutted with information today? What happens to us when we’re overinformed but underactivated? From my experience and observations, some common side effects occur. We become anxious, angry, addicted, numb, lonely, delusional and detached from reality. Perhaps C. S. Lewis sums it up best in this letter to a friend, when he laments the dynamics of an information-action disconnect: “It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.) A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is” (Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis, p.119).

Not only is Lewis right to challenge the social merit attached to “the mere state of being worried” (i.e., the social capital of awareness), but he hits the nail on the head when he says we should avoid fixing our minds on problems we can’t solve. This not only burdens us in all the ways described above but tends to distract us from the local problems we can help fix.

Neglecting the local

With all the energy we devote to keeping up with the goings-on of the world, we might neglect the people we can love and the problems we can address in our own backyards. For Christians called to love our neighbors and tangibly pursue mercy and justice, this is the crux of what’s wrong with an imbalanced information-action ratio. Online hashtag actions are well intentioned. And maybe the viral power of such “collective online action” makes some difference. But as Lewis points out, the danger is that such actions “become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.” There are many reasons why everyone should strive for a more balanced information-action ratio. It’ll help your mental health and ground you in local life and embodied community. For Christians specifically, it’ll remind you of your creaturely limits and deepen your trust in a sovereign God who is omni-aware in ways you can never be. And it’ll present more fruitful avenues for loving your neighbor and being a faithful witness in the particular place where God has situated you.

Beauty of the activated church

For much of my adult life, I was an overinformed news junkie. The onset of social media amplified this addiction – and my soul suffered as a result. Thankfully, I found a healthier way to live, in no small part because I rediscovered the beauty and necessity of the local church. The tangibly activated local church is a far more satisfying and functional community than the virtually aware community of social media. Whether they’re distributing food in partnership with local food banks, mobilizing volunteers for a local foster and adoption agency, or simply rallying the congregation around the needs of the community, a church’s localized, tangible action is beautiful to behold.

When troublesome news from distant places does reach our corner of the world – as it invariably will – the local church is where I go first to process and pray through it, even if no other “action” is possible in response. For centuries, the church’s “prayers of the people” liturgies have borne witness to the fact that in those instances where we can’t “do” anything with our hands to help, we can always drop to our knees and pray. Christians can model a different mode of living in an overinformed, underactivated world. It’s a mode that isn’t numb or ambivalent to the countless problems that plague our world but realistic about our limited scope and where we can best be used. It’s a mode that leads to calmer minds, more focused souls, and more engaged bodies. It’s a mode that syncs up with how we were created and resists the digital era’s many temptations toward godlike limitlessness.

This article is an excerpt, taken and adapted from Scrolling Ourselves to Death by Brett McCraken and Ivan Mesa, Copyright © 2025, Chapter 11. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, crossway.org.