By John Melnikov
Not so long ago, walking into my classroom each day presented the beautiful challenge not only of faithfully teaching my theology curriculum, but of doing so in an energetic, dynamic, and engaging way. Today, if I set my shoes on fire and asked my students to throw water balloons to put them out, there’s more than a fifty percent chance I’d be reduced to charcoal before they’d even tied the first balloon. Faces and voices that once responded with enthusiasm, laughter, and genuine interest are now completely buried in the endless chaos of blue light from their devices.
Although my school has strict rules about technology use in the classroom, teenagers, like water, have a natural talent for finding ways around obstacles. While I’ve recently been studying in depth the spiritual aspects of technological obsession and addiction among adolescents, several other concerns have emerged. One of those dangers is that constant digital stimulation makes the real world seem insufficiently stimulating or interesting. The result is a strange youthful apathy that leads to a general disinterest in everything. We’re raising kids with access to unlimited entertainment who seem increasingly bored with everything.
Young children naturally possess a dizzying amount of enthusiasm for the most harmless and everyday things. A new baseball, a snow day off from school, or a pizza unleashes unrestrained bursts of energy and joy. Teenagers are naturally more cynical. But even teenage cynicism used to conceal immense energy. Music, sports, dating, cars, movies, arguments, pranks, and wandering around doing absolutely nothing were all part of the teenage ecosystem. And when boredom or moments of wandering disinterest arose, they usually translated into action.
Now they translate into scrolling. Previous generations got bored and, because of that, did something. They explored, created, fell in love, got into trouble, and discerned who they were and what they wanted from life. They thought about the divine and wondered what place it occupied in their lives and to what their Creator was calling them.
After especially long days in the trenches of high school teaching, it’s natural to analyze what went right and what went wrong. Anyone with authority over kids naturally tends to look inward and mull over the teaching methods employed. But the truth is that today’s kids aren’t withdrawing due to a lack of stimulation on our part, but because of an excess of stimuli.
Today’s kids have access to every song ever recorded, every movie ever produced, every game ever designed, to comedy, sports, pornography, fights, news, and much more. The average American teenager today has more entertainment and distraction than any emperor, king, queen, president, or historical figure throughout all of human history. And yet, they remain bored.
The problem isn’t that reality has become boring. It’s that we’ve recalibrated kids’ sense of entertainment and expectations of stimulation. Teachers, coaches, and parents can’t tell stories that compete with the pace of TikTok. Sports can’t compete with highlight reels, and conversations can’t offer the same endorphin rush as notifications.
Girls are forced to compete with thousands of digitally perfected women, while boys learn to be boyfriends by watching obscene material that offers everything except what a man must do to be a good partner. Even friendship has to compete with an endless stream of more attractive personalities. Kids can simply swipe to discard what doesn’t hold their attention for more than a few seconds, and with each swipe, a little bit of what makes adolescence such a wonderfully dynamic and formative stage erodes away.
And for a Catholic, it’s sobering to realize that Christianity itself depends heavily on the capacities that endless technological consumption is now erasing. However, this situation is neither insurmountable nor hopeless. The peaceful and humble nature of Christianity offers today’s teenagers a welcome respite from the pace of their lives. Catholicism doesn’t require its faithful to shout “look at me” all the time. On the contrary, it offers the peace and silence of prayer.
The transcendent metaphysical realities of the Mass and the power of the Eucharist offer real, real-time examples of genuine spiritual transformation. While the algorithm says, “Look at what’s new,” Our Lord says, “I make all things new.”
These are radically different conceptions and ways of life. One demands the endless consumption of what is considered new; the other gives us new eyes to perceive reality and overcome our fears, limitations, and failures. The Catholic life precisely educates those faculties that our technological culture insidiously strives to exhaust until they’re extinguished. Namely: attention, patience, contemplation, and wonder.
That’s why the response to the current crisis cannot simply consist of better and more engaging apps, more entertaining classrooms and classes, or parents frantically searching for something capable of competing with the algorithm’s appeal and defeating it. We can’t out-entertain machines designed by billion-dollar corporations to capture attention, nor should we try.
Instead, we need to give kids back the opportunity to get bored and create something from that boredom. It’s an idea that’s becoming increasingly foreign to them. Let them be without screens. Let them throw a ball, wander through the woods, talk to someone who occasionally tells a boring story, stare at a fire, pray in silence, or spend an afternoon with absolutely nothing planned except to let themselves be carried along.
We’ve spent years trying to make childhood an endless entertainment. The result is a generation that seems bored with absolutely everything. Maybe our teenagers don’t need more things demanding their attention. Maybe they need enough silence to discover that the world God created has been infinitely interesting all along.
About the author
John Melnikov is a Catholic writer and theology teacher whose work has appeared in Crisis Magazine and Catholic Exchange. He holds a master’s degree in Christian Leadership and has been teaching Catholic theology in the Diocese of Bridgeport for fifteen years.