Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

by A.J. Swoboda

But instead of nurturing peace in our hearts and minds, informational overloading has led to a kind of gloominess wherein we no longer experience the world as a mysterious world imbued with God’s mystery. As Thomas Merton once remarked, “Man’s unhappiness seems to have grown in proportion to his power over the exterior world.”13 That is, the more power we have (or feel like we have) over the world around us, the less happy we become. The world is not ours. It is a wild world far outside our control. We have not been fulfilled by what control we do have. In fact, this kind of information overload is crushing us and depressing us. In the words of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, “We have found that the men who know the most are the most gloomy.”