Sloth

Che Guevara is known internationally as a Marxist revolutionary. As he recruited for his guerilla operations in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia he often encountered the half-heartedness of his volunteers.

Author John Lee Anderson quotes Che’s sarcastic evaluation of the freshly trained recruits who had just arrived to fight in the Congo:

In a ludicrous sideshow, the captain had also brought over forty new Congolese rebel ‘graduates,’ fresh from a training course in the Soviet Union. Like their Bulgarian and Chinese-trained predecessors, they immediately requested two weeks of vacation, while also complaining that they had nowhere to put their luggage. Che wrote, ‘It would be a little comic if it weren’t so sad, to see the disposition of these boys in whom the revolution had deposited its faith.’

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church also faces the same issue with those who are called to follow our Savior. We are not called to be part-time disciples looking for a life of leisure. Jesus calls for us to “take your cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He also promises to give us immense rewards stored up in heaven for the sacrifices we make for his cause (Matt. 19:29).

A man from Scotland noticed positive changes in his lifestyle after he decided to stop watching television in the evening. 41-year-old Stephen Clarke said, “Now I spend my time creating the reality I want rather than numbing myself from the one I have.”

Mr. Clarke grew up watching television at home as it seemed like a normal thing for him to do. After completing work, he would watch movies or DVDs. Since he already followed a healthy lifestyle, he didn’t experience any glaring negative effects from watching television, but it was the “not-so-obvious side effects” that he eventually became aware of.

Mr. Clarke noticed, “I could feel the energy I was taking on board from the movies and shows I was watching. The drama, the violence, the stress, not to mention the blue light from screens late at night activating and heightening my nervous system and exaggerating all of this.”

Describing television as a “hypnosis machine,” Mr. Clarke said the blue light along with the flashing images that constantly change at a fast pace makes the narrative a part of your subconscious. “The news is constantly giving us reason to be scared, why we’re different from one another, and why we all need to shield and protect ourselves.”

He also felt that while watching television, he wasn’t processing his own thoughts, but rather numbing them, his emotions, and his energy. Instead of working through them, he began blurring his clarity and vision for life. “I experienced big transitions in my life, and I was numbing the feelings of that with screens in the evening, rather than doing what I should have been doing.”

Knowing this, he was keen on making a change.

The father of three began to learn new things such as wood carving, playing a musical instrument, and more. Additionally, he was able to spend more time reading books, cooking, and going on adventures.

He said, “Every month that passes without constant TV exposure gives me more clarity on what I’m doing and how I choose to live my life. My relationships are transforming as well as my working life.”

Mr. Clarke hasn’t cut television out of his life completely, but when he does watch it, he tries to bring value to what he is watching.

The gaming industry, valued at around 257 billion US dollars as of 2024, is on a winning streak. As the pandemic ceased, the competition among gaming platforms and the abundance of game choices dominated the entertainment market.

• Approximately 3.26 billion people worldwide play video games (40% of world population).
• 89.5% of video game sales happen in the digital world.
• In 2022, there were approximately 90 billion mobile game downloads from app stores.
• People between 18 and 34 comprise 38% of gamers globally.
• By 2025, the mobile games industry will reach 138 billion US dollars.
• Around 85% of all revenue in the digital game industry comes from free-to-play games.
• 8.4% of children and teens have problems with game addiction
• Approximately 69% of US households have at least one member playing video games.
• Approximately 77% of parents play games with their children because it allows them to spend time together and to socialize with their kids.

Editor’s Note: You can read the original article which cites many more statistics from a large number of sources here.

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recognized "internet gaming disorder" (IGD). Addicts play pathologically. They can't stop—they play even after their mental health and careers have suffered great harm. The WHO estimates that at least 60 million people worldwide suffer this condition. Fortnite, a combat, survival and violent online video game is the most played of all time, boasting over 500 million registered users.

Today, games are less expensive, more accessible, and more technically advanced than ever before. Psychology professor Jeffrey Derevensky, who advised the WHO panel, said, "Kids are walking around with a mini-console in their pockets. Gaming is a hidden addiction. You can't smell it on their breath and you can't see it in their eyes. And so parents are often totally unaware of what their children are doing."

Maclean's magazine writer and former addict Luc Rinaldi describes how playing, and especially winning, can meet basic needs:

I replayed Resident Evil 4 a dozen times because there's something endlessly satisfying about blowing up a zombie's head. But my favorite games were the ones that offered something my real life lacked. Exploring the fantasy world of Skyrim, I wasn't just some kid in the suburbs of Toronto; I was a noble swordsman on an epic quest to save the realm. In a video game, even a loner can feel like a king … The high was intoxicating.

The obsession runs deep. One North Carolina boy kept playing as a tornado was leveling his town. A study published in Nature showed that gaming can more than double a player's baseline dopamine levels. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman claims that, for some players, “gaming can increase dopamine levels as much as having sex or snorting cocaine. Our brains are programmed to seek out more of these hits, which is what drives gamers to keep gaming.”

Like all addictions, there comes the inevitable crash. The trouble is that the euphoric feelings don't last. Gamers develop tolerances. They need to play more to achieve the same rush. After overloading their brains with happy signals, an equal and opposite reaction occurs. Their baseline dopamine level drops. They get angry, sad, and apathetic.

A burst of recent editorials have criticized AI tools like ChatGPT as a threat to educational goals over concerns that students would abuse the technology. However, educators are beginning to come around to the value of artificial intelligence – not for students, but for the teachers themselves.

Kansas high school teacher Mike Harris said that normally, designing a 16-week drama class that adheres to state standards would take him at least a full workday. He asked ChatGPT to engage the task, however, and he said he had a workable outline in a few minutes. He also used it to break down the class into daily lesson plans. The 10-year veteran drama teacher said, “To me, that’s the wonder of the tool. This is one of those once-in-a-millennia technology changes.”

Experts recommend using caution when applying AI tools to complex tasks, particularly in the field of education, because the technology is still prone to making errors. Still, many educators would rather use their time rigorously fact-checking the output of an AI rather than starting from scratch.

Sarah Alvick is a social studies teacher who says AI is also helpful for teachers having difficulty engaging students with the task of writing. She said, “You’ll have a kid who sits for a whole week, saying, ‘I don’t know what to write about.’” With AI, she tells students to use it “to assist you, not to do it for you.” She is concerned about the loss of critical thinking, but seems to feel that the positives outweigh the negatives.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Technology constantly brings changes to the way we do things. We need to wisely put it to use as a tool, without it becoming a crutch or a way to avoid hard work.

Do you realize that 30 percent of all men of working age in this culture are not working? There are many reasons for this. Some workers lack the skills needed for all but the lowest-paid jobs. Some jobs have been eliminated because of technology advances or cheaper overseas labor. Some have discovered government benefits that enable them to avoid working.

A study for the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, reports that “75 percent of inactive prime-age men are in a household that received some form of government transfer payment.” The researcher believes that government disability benefits in particular are one reason for the lack of interest in work.

Another trend toward irresponsibility is the growth of the video-gaming culture in our society. Many young men and women are spending countless hours every day or many hours of the night just gaming away. They may lose sleep, college opportunities, and work advancement with addictions to meaningless competitions that consume time and energy but produce nothing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What would you call a pastime where a person spends all their time, all their money, all their resources, pursuing things that are not real and that never will benefit them or society? We would call it slavery. And those who are enslaved by such meaningless pursuits ultimately lose all respect for themselves. Work gives us dignity, because work itself is dignified.

Two school officials have been suspended after a firestorm of controversy involving a single email. Nicole Joseph and Hasina Mohyuddin are the associate dean and assistant dean, respectively, at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. The pair of staffers were required to “temporarily step back from their positions,” after they authored an all-campus email responding to the mass shooting at Michigan State University just days earlier. The email sparked outrage because some of the text was credited as having been written by ChatGPT, the popular AI writing tool.

It’s ironic that both deans worked in the college’s Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, because most of the complaints stemmed from the fact that students didn’t feel the emails were particularly inclusive or equitable. On the contrary, student Bethanie Stauffer felt it was “disgusting.” She said, “There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself.”

The next day, Joseph sent an apology email, but the damage had been done. Senior Laith Kayat said, “Deans, provosts, and the chancellor: Do more. Do anything. And lead us into a better future with genuine, human empathy, not a robot. [Administrators] only care about perception and their institutional politics of saving face.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is better to be authentic and make an effort to communicate, rather than using shortcuts. Leaders must demonstrate a commitment to serving and resist thoughtless communication.

"There's an app for that"--yes, even if "that" means each one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the classic vices of Christian moral teaching.

Lust: Tinder

Gluttony: Yelp

Greed: LinkedIn

Sloth: Netflix

Wrath: Twitter

Envy: Facebook

Pride: Instagram

You can view the slide shared at the Mockingbird Festival here.

Leonardo da Vinci is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. As an artist, he is known for The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa among others. However, his total output in painting is really rather small. There are less than 17 surviving paintings that can be definitely attributed to him, and several of them are unfinished.

The small number of surviving paintings is due in part to his chronic procrastination. He often required a sharp threat by his patrons that they were about to withhold payment to motivate him. The Mona Lisa took over 15 years for him to finish. Worse was The Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned with a seven-month deadline. Da Vinci finished it 25 years later. Da Vinci apologized on his deathbed "to God and Man for leaving so much undone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

God calls his people to build his kingdom--to transform people in the name of Jesus. However, many of us procrastinate. Other “more important” things get in the way. There will come a day when we may look back upon our lives with regret for the things left unfinished.

Donelan Andrews was rewarded with $10,000 by his travel insurance company, all for doing something he teaches students to do every day: read carefully. Squaremouth intentionally added language in its policy documentation offering a reward for anyone who was still reading the details. Their intent was to promote the idea of reading the details carefully, because failure to understand the details of what their policies cover is the number one reason why travel insurance claims are denied.

Of course, a denied claim is only one example of the kind of loss lurking in the fine print. In the United Kingdom, Manchester-based firm Purple provided free Wi-Fi access in 2017 for over 22,000 people. Buried in their terms of service was a commitment to a thousand hours of community service, which could include “cleaning toilets and relieving sewer blockages.” In a story with The Guardian, representatives from Purple explained that they inserted the clause “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free Wi-Fi.”

But even a thousand hours of service is a mere pittance compared to what Londoners gave up when they consented to the “Herod clause” of security firm F-Secure’s Wi-Fi experiment. That clause provided service only if “the recipient agreed to assign their firstborn child to us for the duration of eternity.”

Not to be outdone, British retailer GameStation once changed its license agreement to a pre-checked box. Unless users unchecked the box, they granted the company “a nontransferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul."

Potential Preaching Angles: (1) God wants disciples who will willingly count the cost of discipleship, not be suckered into it because they weren't paying attention. (2) The details of Scripture matter to God. It is a matter of obedience or disobedience. Of course God cares about the details because he loves us, not because he’s trying to trick us.

Celebrity chef, writer, and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, who wore a tattoo on his arm that read in ancient Greek, "I am certain of nothing," committed suicide on June 8, 2018, at the age of 61. In an interview for Men's Journal from 2014, Bourdain was asked: What are the benefits of hedonism, and what are the risks?

Bourdain replied, "Look, I understand that inside me there is a greedy, gluttonous, lazy, hippie—you know? I understand that. … there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons, and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy. … I'm aware of my appetites, and I don't let them take charge."

When asked: How should a man handle regret? And what's your biggest regret?

Bourdain replied, "Regret is something you've got to just live with, you can't drink it away. You can't run away from it. You can't trick yourself out of it. You've just got to own it. I've disappointed and hurt people in my life, and that's just something I'm going to have to live with. … You eat that guilt and you live with it. And you own it. You own it for life."

Law professor and technology expert Tim Lu claims that there's an underestimated force that drives our daily lives—convenience. We want nearly everything about our lives to be convenient, efficient, and easy. Wu calls convenience "the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies." He writes:

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, "Convenience decides everything." Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I "prefer.") Easy is better, easiest is best.

Of course there are benefits to some of life's conveniences, but he also warns that there can be a dark side. Wu argues:

With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us … When we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Possible Preaching Angles: Discipleship; Disciples—Jesus did not offer convenience in following him. He warned us to count the cost and at times to do what is inconvenient in order to follow him.

In the ongoing battle against oversleeping, humanity has devised some clever alarm clocks. But for all their clever designs, most alarm clocks still suffer from a common drawback: the fact that they're not designed for multiple users. When one person's alarm goes off, other people in the room or throughout the house have to wake up too. Most alarm clocks have no way to selectively wake up one person and leave the other person undisturbed. Until now, that is.

Wake is a new breed of alarm that targets individual users and wakes up one sleeper without rousing others. Here's how it works. After it's mounted to the wall above the bed, the device uses an infrared temperature sensor and special body-tracking software to discern where each person is lying (without a camera). When it's time to wake one person up, Wake silently takes aim, rotates into position, and then directs a tight burst of light and sound at their face.

To keep from rousing other sleepers, the device uses a set of parametric speakers capable of focusing sound into a narrow beam. Think of it as a spotlight for noise. If Wake is pointed straight at your head you'll hear it loud and clear, but if you're outside of the beam's small radius, the sound will be extremely faint.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) God calls you to wake up and live the Christian life, don't sleep through it; (2) The voice of God is personal and heard only by each individual, like Paul on the road to Damascus, to young Samuel in his sleep.

In the mid-'70s, an unknown editor named Gary Dahl was talking with his friends, who were complaining about all the work involved in caring for pets—feeding them, walking them, cleaning up after them. Dahl kidded that he had a pet that never caused him any trouble—a pet rock.

Surprisingly, the joke started to take off. Dahl recruited two colleagues as investors, visited a building-supply store and bought a load of smooth Mexican beach stones at about a penny apiece. The Pet Rock hit the marketplace in time for Christmas 1975. In a matter of months, some 1.5 million rocks were sold. It was a craze to rival the Hula-Hoop. For a mere three dollars and 95 cents, a consumer could buy … a rock—a plain, ordinary, egg-shaped rock of the kind one could dig up in almost any backyard.

For a few frenzied months in 1975, more than a million consumers did, becoming the proud—if slightly abashed—owners of Pet Rocks, the fad that Newsweek later called "one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever." When Dahl died in March 2015, his New York Times obituary claimed "the concept of a 'pet' that required no actual work and no real commitment resonated with the self-indulgent '70s, and before long a cultural phenomenon was born."

Pet Rocks made Dahl a millionaire practically overnight, but despite the boon Pet Rocks brought him he came to regret his success. The Pet Rock craze went the way of all fads—it died out and was replaced by the next fad. After his sudden wealth, he went through three marriages, a law suit, and failed attempts to match his previous success. At one point he said, "Sometimes I look back and wonder if my life wouldn't have been simpler if I hadn't done it."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Success; Ambition; Achievement; Emptiness—all of the success in the world can't satisfy our heart's need for Jesus Christ. (2) Conformity; Worldliness—It's amazing how a silly fad—a Pet Rock—can take off and become a worldwide craze.

The busyness of life has propelled many of us to get more rest. It's often a case of survival in the midst of unrelenting pressure. Research studies have been showing how essential sleep is to our mental and physical health. Now a new study on sleep says this: Wake Up! This latest study suggests that an overly long night's sleep could be just as bad for you as not getting enough sleep.

The study concludes, "… adults who usually sleep for less than six hours or more than eight, are at risk of dying earlier than those sleep for between six and eight hours." So, the magic number from these studies is 7 hours of sleep.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Maybe Hamlet had it right all along when he said, "Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come."

An article in The Wall Street Journal points to research that proves what many workers already know: employees fake a positive outlook when the boss is around, and all that fakery can be exhausting. The research, reported first in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, concluded that workers tended to put on smiles and fake happiness when higher-ups were in the room. By contrast, when workers hold meetings with peers or with lower-status employees, they tend to express themselves more honestly.

In one experiment, researchers selected nearly 150 full-time employees who regularly attended workplace meetings. The participants filled out surveys about meetings they recently attended. After the researchers collected the data, it was obvious that when superiors were in the room the participants reported that they tended to hide their authentic feelings during the meetings.

The Wall Street Journal article went to say, "All this faking can be exhausting: those who feigned positive feelings actually felt less satisfied when a meeting ended, researchers found. [As one of the researchers said], 'Even if they act positive, those underlying negative feelings are still there. They feel inauthentic, which could result in lower satisfaction, or, eventually, burnout.'"

Possible Preaching Angles: Yes, this research may seem like common sense, but it still shows our need to work for the Lord without impressing others as we live before "an audience of one."

Everyone knows that a letter carrier has one job—deliver the mail. Apparently a Brooklyn mailman spent a decade avoiding his job by intentionally hoarding over 40,000 pieces of mail over a ten-year period. In September 2014, Joseph Brucato admitted hiding over a ton of mail (2,500 pounds to be exact) meant for customers in Flatbush since 2005, according to a Brooklyn federal court complaint.

A postal supervisor became suspicious that Brucato was up to something weird when he noticed his personal car was stuffed with undelivered letters. Investigators pressed Brucato about the letter cache, and he admitted hoarding priority, first-class, and regular mail that had once been headed for Brooklyn businesses and residents in Flatbush. It took five postal agents five hours to remove the massive stash of purloined letters from his apartment. If convicted, Brucato faces up to five years in prison.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Evangelism; Outreach—There's something far more absurd and outrageous than hoarding mail: hoarding the Good News of Christ. (2) Money; Generosity—There's something far more outrageous or absurd than hoarding the mail: hoarding our money. Our resources don't belong to us.

You may not like your job, but I'm willing to bet that you're nowhere near as good at avoiding it as an Italian coal miner was recently revealed to be. According to The Telegraph, "Carlo Cani started work as a miner in 1980 but soon found that he suffered from claustrophobia and hated being underground.

Cani started doing everything he could to avoid hacking away at the coal face, inventing an imaginative range of excuses for not venturing down the mine in Sardinia where he was employed. He pretended to be suffering from amnesia and hemorrhoids, rubbed coal dust into his eyes to feign an infection and on occasion staggered around pretending to be drunk. The miner, now aged 60, managed to accumulate years of sick leave, apparently with the help of compliant doctors, and was able to stay at home to indulge his passion for jazz."

Possible Preaching Angle:

I'd probably rather play jazz than mine coal too, but what's wrong with our ideas about work when our vocation becomes something that we spend a career avoiding?