The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

by John Mark Comer

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

A recent study found that the average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day. Each user is on his or her phone for two and a half hours over seventy-six sessions.

just being in the same room as our phones (even if they are turned off) “will reduce someone’s working memory and problem-solving skills.”

the phone is addictive. And small moments—a text here, a scroll through Instagram there, a quick email scan, dinking around online—it all adds up to an extraordinary amount of time.

started a nonprofit with the sole goal of advocating for a Hippocratic oath for software designers, because right now everything is being intentionally designed for distraction and addiction.

It’s a social-validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

Before any of this started, way back in 1936, another literary prophet, Aldous Huxley, wrote of “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”26 In his prescient novel Brave New World, he envisioned a future dystopia not of dictatorship but of distraction, where sex, entertainment, and busyness tear apart the fabric of society.

Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things…. Every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.

Technological, and even economic, progress does not necessarily equal human progress.

What looks like progression is often regression with an agenda.

Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.”

A malaise in which a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.

A continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.

Irritability—You get mad, frustrated, or just annoyed way too easily. Little, normal things irk you.

Point is, the ordinary problems of life this side of Eden have a disproportionate effect on your emotional well-being and relational grace.

You watch TV but simultaneously check your phone, fold laundry, and get into a spat on Twitter (okay, maybe you just answer an email).

You live in this kind of constant fugue.

When we’re too tired to do what’s actually life giving for our souls, we each turn to our distraction of choice: overeating, overdrinking, binge-watching Netflix, browsing social media, surfing the web, looking at porn—name your preferred cultural narcotic. Narcotics are good, healthy even, on an occasional and short-term basis when they shield us from unnecessary pain; but when we abuse them to escape from reality, they eat us alive. You find yourself stuck in the negative feedback loop of socially acceptable addictions.

when you get overbusy, the things that are truly life giving for your soul are the first to go rather than your first go to—such as a quiet time in the morning, Scripture, prayer, Sabbath, worship on Sunday, a meal with your community, and so on. Because in an ironic catch-22, the things that make for rest actually take a bit of emotional energy and self-discipline. When we get overbusy, we get overtired, and when we get overtired, we don’t have the energy or discipline to do what we need most for our souls. Repeat.

A very poor substitute. Not because time wasted on TV is the great Satan but because we rarely get done binge-watching anything (or posting to social media, or overeating Five Guys burgers and fries, etc.) and feel awake and alive from the soul outward, rested, refreshed, and ready for a new day.

Isolation—You feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul. On those rare times when you actually stop to pray (and by pray I don’t mean ask God for stuff; I mean sit with God in the quiet), you’re so stressed and distracted that your mind can’t settle down long enough to enjoy the Father’s company. Same with your friends: when you’re with them, you’re also with your phone or a million miles away in your mind, running down the to-do list. And even when you’re alone, you come face to face with the void that is your soul and immediately run back to the familiar groove of busyness and digital distraction.

Psychologists tell us anxiety is often the canary in the coal mine, our souls’ way of telling us something is deeply wrong and we need to fix it, fast.

hurry is a threat not only to our emotional health but to our spiritual lives as well.

“the rush and pressure of modern life” a “pervasive form of contemporary violence.”9 Violence is the perfect word.

Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it. It kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment. It kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wait for it—wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm. Hurry kills all that we hold dear: spirituality, health, marriag...

A “successful” life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits;

war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous;

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

attention is our scarcest resource.

Because attention leads to awareness. All the contemplatives agree. The mystics point out that what’s missing is awareness. Meaning, in the chronic problem of human beings’ felt experience of distance from God, God isn’t usually the culprit. God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute.

Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.

“Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”

the solution is not more time.

even if God were a Robin Williams-esque genie in a bottle, there to make my every wish come true, and he were to alter the structure of the universe to give me ten more hours in a day, what would I likely do with those ten hours? The same thing most people would do—fill them up with even more things, and then I would be even more tired and burned out and emotionally frayed and spiritually at risk than I am now.

the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.

listen to every podcast, read every new book (and don’t forget the classics!),

What is it about the human condition that makes it well-nigh impossible for many of us to celebrate both those who are more gifted than we are and our own best work?

Many have noted that most of us are money-poor when we’re young, but we have time. Especially when we’re single. But as we age and pick the constraints that define our lives, it flips: many of us now have money but are time-poor.

“We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Philip Zimbardo’s recent research on the “Demise of Guys” (i.e., the crisis of masculinity in Western culture) has concluded the average guy spends ten thousand hours playing video games by age twenty-one.15 Ten thousand hours. My mind jumps to the research around this rule; in ten thousand hours, you could master any craft or become an expert in any field—from Sumerian archeology to Olympic water polo. You could get your bachelor’s degree and your master’s degree. You could memorize the New Testament. Or, you could beat level four of Call of Duty.

The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV…2,737.5 hours.

Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We have all the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.16 If this is true of reading, how much more is it true of our lives with God?

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.17

If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.

Now, I run, but I’m not a runner. You know what I mean? These people are runners. And frequently, early in the morning as I’m sitting there drinking my coffee and praying, I see them file out the front door to go for a sunrise run. Naturally, they are all wearing tights, and trust me, they look good. Single-digit body fat. That lean-but-muscular look. Impeccable posture: shoulders back, chin up. And then, they start to prance…I mean, run. They look more antelope than human. Seriously, their warm-up is faster than my speed workout. (Granted, my speed workout is in need of a pick-me-up, but still.) And regularly as they run off, I think to myself, I want that. I want to look good in spandex. (Sadly, Runner’s World still hasn’t called for a photo shoot.) I want to run a six-minute mile without breaking a sweat. I want that level of health and energy and vitality. I want that life. But then I think about the lifestyle behind it. While I was up watching The Man in the High Castle and drinking red wine until midnight (hypothetical scenario, I promise…), they ate celery and water for dinner and went to bed at 9 p.m. While I was sipping my Kenyan single origin in my bathrobe, they were out sweating through the humid goop of summer and ice of winter. When I run, I catch up on a podcast or stare off into space thinking about my teaching for Sunday; they run intervals every four hundred meters and stretch their lungs to the breaking point. I run a cost-benefit analysis and quickly de...

the Western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of dos and don’ts (what we call ethics).

Your life is the by-product of your lifestyle. By life I mean your experience of the human condition, and by lifestyle I mean the rhythms and routines that make up your day-to-day existence. The way you organize your time. Spend your money.

We get a vision of the kind of life that is possible in Jesus; we go to church or read a book or listen to a podcast; we catch a glimpse of the kind of life we ache for—one of emotional health and spiritual life. Our gut immediately says, Yes. God, I want that life. We head home from church with all the willpower we can muster and set out to change. But then we go right back to living the exact same lifestyle. And nothing changes. It’s the same cycle on repeat: stress, tiredness, distraction. We feel stuck yet again. And then we wonder, What am I missing?

But Jesus realizes that the most restful gift he can give the tired is a new way to carry life, a fresh way to bear responsibilities…. Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens; we cannot get away from them; thus instead of offering escape, Jesus offers equipment. Jesus means that obedience to his Sermon on the Mount [his yoke] will develop in us a balance and a “way” of carrying life that will give more rest than the way we have been living.8