The Feed That Keeps Counting

It learned about her in about four days. That is the part she thinks about.

She watched one, in the spring, because a friend had sent it and it had a thumbnail with a red circle drawn on something, and she watched most of it and thought it was a bit much and moved on.

Then the next one arrived on its own. Then two. Then it worked out what time of day she was most likely to watch, which is between eleven and midnight, lying down, with the light off, and now that is what her evenings end with.

She could not tell you how many she has seen. Three hundred would not be a wild estimate. They have a shape she can recite: a calm voice, an ordinary observation about something in the news, a passage read in a particular tone, and then the pivot to what this means about how close it is.

She is twenty two. She is not stupid and she does not entirely believe them, and if you asked her directly whether anybody can know she would say no, immediately, correctly.

And she watches one more before she sleeps.

What she has noticed, and cannot make anybody understand, is that she has stopped looking forward to things. Not dramatically. She just does not think about next year, and when a friend talks about a plan there is a small delay in her before she can respond to it properly.

She has never said out loud that a phone has done this to her, because it sounds ridiculous, and because she is the one in her friendship group who is sensible about the internet.

Sit down. There is one sentence that ends this and it was said by the only person entitled to say it.

The sentence that closes the subject

Here it is, and the astonishing part is who is included in the not knowing.

But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.Matthew 24:36

Read the list. Not people. Not angels. Not the Son, speaking about Himself, in the middle of a passage where He is the one doing the teaching.

That is not a gap in the information. It is a deliberate closure, stated by Christ, in the strongest terms available, in the very discourse people mine for clues.

Which means every video in your feed is doing something Christ explicitly declined to do. Not a slightly overconfident version of what He did. The opposite thing.

You are not missing information that other people have. Matthew 24:36 puts the day with the Father only, and the Spirit inspired the record of Christ including Himself in the not knowing so that nobody could ever build a countdown out of it and claim His authority.

What the feed is actually doing to you

Now the effect, because it needs naming precisely rather than generally.

The videos are not making anybody believe a date, and the instinct that they are not credible is correct. That is not where the damage is happening.

What they are doing is training a response. Three hundred times, at eleven at night, lying down with the light off, the same emotional shape has gone in: something ordinary, then an implication, then a low background alarm. That does not have to be believed to have an effect. It has to be repeated, which it has been, nightly, for months.

And the effect shows up exactly where you noticed it. Not in your beliefs, in your appetite. A person cannot plan into a future they have been quietly told several hundred times not to count on.

You are not the first person that has happened to and it is not a character weakness. Nothing written anywhere asks anybody to hold a low alarm as a form of faithfulness, and the Spirit is described as producing peace and self control rather than a nightly hum.

Your flatness about next year is not a spiritual condition. Nothing written anywhere makes an inability to look forward a mark of maturity, and the Spirit is not the author of a low hum at eleven at night that makes a twenty two year old stop imagining things.

Giving the day back

Here is the practical part, and it is two things and the second is the harder one.

The first is mechanical. The feed is a machine that gives you more of what you watch. It is not an oracle and it is not persecuting you, and it will stop serving those videos if you stop feeding it, which takes about a week of deliberately not watching and not clicking, and there is no spiritual dimension to that whatsoever.

The second is the sentence. Close the video and say out loud, once, who actually holds the day. That is the whole action. Not a prayer about the future, and not an argument against what the man said.

You are permitted to hand it back. Matthew 24:36 puts the day with the Father only, the Spirit carries that rather than leaving you to hold a question that was never yours, and there is nothing you are supposed to be doing about it in the meantime.

And plan something. Something small that reaches past next year. Write it down. That is not defiance and it is not tempting anything; it is what people do who have been told the day belongs to God rather than to a thumbnail with a red circle on it.

You are free to want things again. Matthew 24:36 hands the day to the Father and hands you back your ordinary week in the same movement, and the Spirit does not produce a person who has stopped imagining anything.

And it is worth knowing that this is not new, however new the delivery is. People have been reading the sky and the news and the empire for two thousand years and arriving at the same confident conclusions, and the record of those conclusions is uninterrupted and uniformly wrong. The format changed. The claim did not, and neither did the sentence that closes it.