This article was going to be about the latest controversy. But I realized that in the few days it’d take from being written to being published, few people would care enough to read about the topic. I wondered if I myself would even want to read about it since, by then, I’d need to be writing about the next next thing.
Every day, we’re handed a new thing to care about. And then we do care about it—truly, sincerely, and passionately—for just long enough to form a strong opinion about it. Having formed the opinion, we lose interest in the thing itself. The caring doesn’t settle into conviction.
We often mistake having an opinion for having taken a position. Then we mistake taking a position for having done something. The result is that we’re the most opinionated Christians in history and yet possibly the least convicted.
Speed of Opinion
This isn’t a new observation. In 2000, journalist Mickey Kaus popularized an observation about American politics, calling it the “Feiler Faster Thesis.” The news cycle, he argued, had sped up because of 24-hour cable news, the web, and an ever-expanding class of pundits hunting for hot takes. Somehow, society was able to keep up and learned to process more information in less time. What once took a month to absorb now takes an afternoon.
The trend Kaus named has only accelerated since then. The web of 2003 (when I first started a blog) was like a horse-drawn carriage compared to the bullet train of information flow of 2026. We’ve all adapted by becoming fast machines for converting events into opinions.
The problem is that conviction doesn’t run at the same speed. Opinions can be generated at the speed of the timeline because opinions are, in the end, merely cognitive updates. We take the new information, compare it to our values, tribal affiliations, and the data we regard as “facts,” and store it away on the appropriate mental shelf.
Conviction is something else entirely. A conviction is a belief that has moved from your head into your life. It’s what you think when no one is watching, what you’d still hold if it became unpopular, and what shows up in your calendar and your bank statement, not just on your timeline.
A conviction is a belief that has moved from your head into your life.
A prime example of this is the pro-life cause. Some of us have awakened to the distressing reality that, in the post-Roe era, many of the neighbors we believed had pro-life convictions merely had pro-life opinions. Someone with pro-life convictions will still refuse to support pro-abortion politicians, will still refuse to support child-killing policies, and is still alarmed by the rise of the abortion pill. Someone who merely had pro-life opinions, however, will wonder why we’re still talking about the issue at all.
But even some once convicted about the cause have started to wonder, quietly, whether they still are. They might wonder whether what they felt was ever a conviction at all. Maybe it was merely a strong opinion they’ve since lost the energy to maintain.
This is the situation we’re now in. The opinion-forming machinery has been upgraded while the conviction-forming apparatus runs at the same speed it always has. The gap between the two is widening, and we’re experiencing the consequences.
We’re Bored, Not Tired
The Christian tradition has a name for what’s happening to us: acedia. The term, which is listed among the seven deadly sins, is sometimes translated as “sloth,” though that doesn’t quite capture the original meaning. “Sloth” in modern English means physical laziness, an unwillingness to get up and work. Acedia is something more spiritually serious: the soul’s refusal to care about what it knows it should care about.
The fourth-century monk Evagrius called it the “noonday demon” (based on Ps. 91:6) because it tended to strike monks in the middle of the day, in the middle of the work they’d taken vows to do. Acedia is the strange feeling of knowing that something matters, knowing you should care, knowing you once did care, and finding that the caring has gone cold. The person afflicted by acedia isn’t ignorant of the good. They’re simply bored by it.
That is, I think, a more accurate diagnosis of our current condition than “outrage fatigue” or “information overload.” We’re not exhausted; we’re bored. We’re bored by the very things we know to be most important. We’re bored in a way that frightens us a little when we notice it, which is why we try not to notice. We let the next thing in the algorithm cover over the boredom by spiking our dopamine.
Discipline of Staying
The desert fathers, who came up with the term “acedia,” also named the remedy. Their solution was to lean into stability. For them, this meant remaining at the work when the work had stopped being interesting, continuing to show up to the people and the prayers and the truths that had ceased to move them. The noonday demon’s whole strategy is to convince the monk that something more interesting is happening elsewhere. The monk’s whole defense is to disagree and stay on task—to stay convicted.
Unfortunately, we have more distractions than ancient monks did. We’re people whose attention has been trained, hour by hour, to believe that something more interesting is always happening somewhere else. FOBO is our default state. And the result is that our convictions are dying of neglect.
We’re people whose attention has been trained, hour by hour, to believe that something more interesting is always happening somewhere else.
The remedy for our form of algorithm-induced acedia, though, is the same as it’s always been: to stay. To stay on the issue after the feed has moved on. To stay in the pew, in the marriage, in the pregnancy resource center. To stay with a question long after the novelty has worn off and the experts have grown tired of debating it. To stay convicted, especially when staying has stopped feeling like anything at all.
Scripture, of course, has been describing this struggle all along, using terms such as “endurance,” “steadfastness,” and “long-suffering.” The writer of Hebrews, for instance, tells a people tempted to drift to “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering” (Heb. 10:23), and then, a chapter later, reminds them they’re surrounded by a cloud of witnesses whose faith was measured not in feeling but in the willingness to keep going long after the feeling might have faded.
We also have the example of Paul, who, near the end of his life, doesn’t say he felt passionately. Instead, he says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7, emphasis added). He stayed. That’s what conviction requires. And that’s what the world needs from us. We need to become a people of whom it can be said that, when the algorithm moved on from the things that mattered, we stayed convicted.
The Gospel Coalition