This year, I am giving up the iPhone game, “Crash of Cars,” for Lent. Consider this blog post to be the trumpet that I blow before me in the street, announcing my fast, like the hypocrites.
Crash of Cars is basically Mario Kart battle mode, taken to new heights of complication.
It’s a pretty ridiculous waste of time - especially when it makes me watch commercials. In fact, what’s actually more difficult than giving up this game for Lent, is the humiliation of explaining to people that I have played this game so much that it’s an appropriate, life-altering sacrifice to give it up for Lent.
While this is a tech blog and not a “Faith & Spirituality” blog, today’s post has a Lenten focus. I think its merited, because a lot of people give up various types of technology for Lent. Growing up, sugar and and junk food are usually the thing to give up; but as you get older and pay your own dental and medical bills, unhealthy foods tend to become somewhat permanently forsaken. Adults need to get creative finding something else to give up. In my lifetime, the first target has tended to be something from the realm of technology.
On that note, I’d like to share some thoughts on my top three technological fasts over the years. However, in compiling this list of technology I have given up, it came to my attention that the various loopholes I set up were actually more impressive than the fasts. So without further ado, my top three technology fasting loopholes.
3: Television
Giving up TV has lost it’s bite over the years, but there was a time, as a kid in the 90s, when giving up TV felt like Trappist Monk level isolation. I’d give up not only TV, but also the attached Super Nintendo. Our dial-up internet connection provided some respite, but it was nothing like what kids have now. To give up TV was to be totally unplugged in a way which I simply can’t replicate today.
Impressive, right? However, there was one thing, though. Sports were a big part of my world back then. Lent conveniently starts after the football season, before the baseball season, and during the most pointless stretch of the NBA season. So on most days, not much is sacrificed, at least in terms of sports. EXCEPT… March Madness err, the “big basketball tournament of universities!”
When I was a kid, you could just name it by its proper name without paying royalties to CBS, and it was awesome. The tournament always happens during Lent. That’s why I would give myself a pre-agreed dispensation for watching it. It’s such an amazing tournament that missing it felt morally wrong - like missing your child’s first steps, staying inside during a beautiful sunset, or skipping a family reunion when it’s the last time grandma might be there.
I was not going to miss March Madness. No regrets to this day. But the thing is, March Madness would entail binge-watching, in a time before binge-watching was a thing. That first weekend, there was basketball on TV from sunrise to sunset for four straight days. It would be like giving up alcohol for Lent, except understanding at the outset, that on three of the Lenten weekends, you pre-scheduled a 96-hour bender.
2: Facebook
Facebook, like TV, has also lost some punch over the years - although it’s been a more recent slide to irrelevance. But for a while, Facebook was the only game in town. Giving up Facebook was closely akin, for a moment there, to giving up the entire internet.
And so it was always a big target from people giving up technology. It was so popular to give up Facebook, that it almost became a business; various little Catholic media companies would try to promote themselves with branded profile pictures that you could put up to let everybody know you were leaving for Lent.
A fun thing about giving up Facebook for Lent would be making a big deal out of letting people know. You could get away with being pretty dramatic:
“Hey everybody, first of all, I love you. This is not about you. I will miss each and everyone of you dearly, and look forward immensely, to that glorious day, when we will be reunited on Facebook, on Sunday, April 9th. Please do not fill your hearts and minds with concern for me while I am away. I do not wish for you to spend these weeks ahead, wishing that I were here and we were together. Please, be disciplined and think of other things during those dreadful moments of loneliness. If there should be an emergency, and you look to Facebook to contact me, I hope you find this message, and see my Dynamic Catholic (TM) profile picture, explaining my absence, and look to use other means of communication to reach me. To hold you over these 40 days, I’m leaving you with my backup supply of memes, which I am dumping in the comments below. Please use them sparingly, parsing them out of the next 40 days, so as to…”
Anyway, for all my mocking of Facebook fasters, I only tried it once. The trouble always was that, in its prime, Facebook was not only a social media time-wasting site, but also really a valuable social utility. I didn’t have a ton of contacts in my phone. Facebook was my contact database, and my events calendar. And a lot of the groups I was part of would publish events on Facebook and leave it at that. So if I was off of Facebook, I wasn’t just digitally isolated; I’d be physically isolated.
For that reason, it felt unhealthy to completely shut off Facebook. I had enough trouble as an introvert, finding people and making friends. And thus my compromise. The year I “gave up Facebook”, I allowed a 30 minute daily window of use. This window would be used to catch up on the day’s news, and complete all necessary communications. To assist with the discipline, I made this 30 minutes only useable on my computer. The phone app was deleted, to my credit.
So that was my loophole. But the other loophole was that Facebook is terrible and I didn’t really miss the part I gave up. Aside from the contact/calendar utility, there’s not much to like. In fact, two years ago, I deleted my Facebook account and haven’t missed it for one second since.
3: Music/Podcasts
I’ve given up music a couple times, and it’s brutal. There’s nothing worse than going on a long drive in total silence. With a lot of things that I give up for Lent, there’s a “detox” effect, and the fast sort of becomes unnoticeable after a couple weeks. Give up alcohol or sweets, and the first couple weekends I’ll miss it, but then it’s the new normal. But music has a continual pain of loss that does not diminish.
Almost as painful as giving up music, is giving up podcasts. Again, drives become lonely. Monotonous tasks become a recipe for insanity.
I’m proud to say that I’ve given up music and podcasts. Oh, but not both together. And also, if I give up podcasts I can still listen to “religious” podcasts, because it would be messed up to give up listening to Fr. Mike Schmitz, right? And of course I can still listen to “classical” music during Lent. Loopholes galore!
Basically I never truly tried totally giving up any sort of audio media. That sounds horrifying to even try. I’ve always got to get a break from my thoughts. If you’ve read a few of these blog posts, can you blame me? The thought of being alone with my thoughts for prolonged periods of time is nightmare fuel.
In Conclusion
I’ll miss Crash of Cars. I’m truly and totally giving it up though; no loopholes. No “Sundays off” and I won’t even play it on Solemnities or Saint Patrick’s Day. As dumb as it looks, the game really does have some great nuance and there are finer things I appreciate about it. Maybe one day I will do a review of Crash of Cars. Although I suppose that if I were playing Crash of Cars, in order to do research for an article, that could suffice as a valid excuse for breaking my Lent fast... see how my mind works?
Music would be very very hard to give up!