Somewhere along the way, content stopped being something we went looking for and became something that chases us. News alerts, videos, newsletters, podcasts, devotionals, forwarded messages. Pick up your phone for ten seconds and something is already waiting for you.
And now that AI can produce articles, images and videos in a few seconds, the pile is growing faster than ever. I create content myself, so I'm not pointing fingers from the outside. But I think it's time we asked an honest question: is all of this actually helping us?
How much is out there?
The numbers are hard to wrap your head around. One estimate says the world creates, captures, copies and consumes about 402 million terabytes of data every day, and that the yearly total is heading toward 221 zettabytes in 2026, up from 181 in 2025. People send hundreds of billions of emails daily, and more than 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single day.
To be fair, a lot of that "data" is backups, streaming traffic and machine activity, not articles and sermons meant for you. But even if you shave off most of it, the direction is obvious. There is far more than any person could ever take in, and more of it is being aimed at you every year.
The result is a fight for your attention. Everyone wants a piece of it, and most of us are running out.
What it does to us
I used to think of this as an annoyance. The research says it is more than that.
In one US survey of about 1,100 adults, roughly 16.5% showed what the researchers called "severely problematic" news habits. Nearly three out of four of those people reported real mental health struggles, such as anxiety and stress, compared with about 8% of everyone else. Over 60% of them also reported physical problems. What caught my attention is that the researchers said the issue wasn't simply how much news people read. It was whether they felt trapped in it, unable to stop and unable to step away.
Another study looked at what happened after the Boston Marathon bombing. People who watched more than six hours of coverage a day were about nine times more likely to show signs of high acute stress. And researchers at University College London described a kind of loop: the worse people felt, the more negative content they went looking for, and the more negative content they consumed, the worse they felt.
A caution here. Most of these studies show a link, not proof that one thing causes the other. But I doubt many of us need a study to tell us what it feels like. You read about one tragedy after another, you can't do anything about most of them, and you go to bed with a heavy heart and a busy mind.
The same news, five times over
Here's something I see all the time. Plenty of people belong to several WhatsApp groups run by different news outlets and agencies. The same story shows up in one group, then another, then another, each with a slightly different headline and each asking for your attention.
You haven't learned anything new. You've just been told the same thing five times and felt the same worry five times. That isn't being informed. That's being worn down.
Even the short stuff is too much now
This next part may sound backwards, because the whole world is moving toward shorter and faster content. Reels, shorts, clips, ten-second takes. The idea is that it fits our busy lives and our shrinking attention spans. But I think we've reached the point where even the short stuff is too much.
There is so much of it, and it's pushed so hard, that many people can't get through it anymore. They swipe, swipe, swipe, and a minute later they couldn't tell you what they just watched. One clip has barely started before the next one is lined up. Our attention is being asked to jump so many times a minute that it never gets the chance to settle on anything.
And I'd say that's the real problem with short-form media. It's not only that it's shallow. It's that we forget it. When you take in too much, too quickly, nothing has time to sink in.
Researchers are starting to see this too. In one set of experiments published in Communications Psychology, people who learned from short videos remembered less accurately than those who watched longer ones, and brain scans showed less coordinated activity in regions tied to attention and memory. Another study, from Francesco Chiossi and colleagues, found that scrolling a TikTok-style feed made it harder for people to hold on to a task they had meant to do afterward. They were more likely to forget what they were supposed to be doing.
I want to be fair about this. This research is still young. Many of the studies are small, many involve young adults or students, and nobody can yet say what years of this will do to us. And I'm not saying a short video can never be useful. A good short clip can be helpful or encouraging.
But what I notice in my own life matches what I'm reading. When I sit down with a long conversation, a full sermon, a chapter of a book or a good teaching, I can usually tell you something from it a week later. When I've scrolled for twenty minutes, I'm lucky if I can name one thing. Long-form takes more effort, but it's the kind that stays with us. I know that goes against where the trend is headed, but I think it's true, and I think it's something we should say out loud.
What Jesus did
I keep coming back to the Lord's own example. Nobody has ever had a busier ministry than Jesus. Crowds followed him, the sick were brought to him, and the needs never stopped. And yet the Gospels keep showing us the same thing. In Mark 1:35, he got up while it was still dark and went off to a quiet place to pray. Luke 5:16 says he often withdrew to lonely places. In Mark 6:31, when the disciples were overwhelmed, he told them, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest."
He didn't wait until the work was finished to rest, because the work was never going to be finished. He made quiet a regular part of his life. I wonder how many of us can say the same. Most of us now carry the noise with us, even to the quiet place.
What church life used to look like
Think about an ordinary Christian fifty years ago or so. They went to church, heard a message, and probably had a Bible at home that they read each day. That was most of their spiritual diet. It wasn't much compared to what we have, but they lived with it, chewed on it and acted on it.
Today we have more sermons, clips, devotionals, podcasts and commentary than anyone could finish in many lifetimes, and a lot of it gets pushed at us whether we asked or not. So here's the question I can't shake. Is it all making us more like Christ, or is it just making our lives louder? Having more access does not automatically give us more depth. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10) is a hard verse to obey when your phone buzzes every few minutes.
To those of us who create content
Most of us started with a good reason. We wanted to help people. But if the pace and volume of what we publish, added to everyone else's, ends up burying the people we hoped to help, then we've worked against our own purpose.
I know some people create content for income, and that comes with pressures I won't pretend to understand. But for those of us who do it out of a genuine desire to serve, here are a few things I'm trying to keep in mind:
- Say it when you have something to say. Posting every day because the platform rewards it is not the same as having a daily word worth sharing.
- Ask whether it adds anything. If the same point has been made a hundred times this week, maybe wait.
- Respect people's attention. Skip the false urgency and the alarming headlines, and don't blast the same thing into every group you can find.
- Think before you forward. Passing along something you haven't weighed just adds to the pile.
- Rest. Content that comes out of an exhausted, empty place rarely helps anyone, including the person writing it.
For the rest of us, a few simple steps
If you're on the receiving end, you can't control how much gets pushed at you, but you can control what gets through. These are things I'd encourage:
- Choose your sources. A few trustworthy ones are better than twenty. Leave the extra news groups. You won't miss anything you truly needed.
- Check at set times. Look at the news once or twice a day on purpose, rather than every time something lights up.
- Pay attention to how you feel. If a source regularly leaves you anxious, angry or helpless, take that seriously.
- Guard the first hour. Give your first moments to Scripture and prayer before the phone. It's the same pattern Jesus followed.
- Plan real retreats. An afternoon, a day or a weekend with no screens. Treat it as a spiritual discipline, not a luxury.
- Go deeper with less. Read one book slowly. Stay with one passage for a week. Put a sermon into practice before you listen to the next one.
- Let technology help you. This is where I think AI can actually be useful. An AI assistant can filter and summarize things by rules you set, so you get one short daily brief instead of fifty alerts, or only what matches what you've decided matters. Used well, it can cut down the flood. Used carelessly, it just adds to it. The point is that you're in charge of the tool, not the other way around.
Where this leaves us
I don't think the goal is to know everything. I think it's to know what matters, and above all to know God. A life with fewer inputs leaves room to listen, to rest, and to hear what the Lord is saying.
Jesus went to quiet places because he knew he needed them. We need them too.
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