We’ve never been busier doing nothing. The average person now spends over two hours daily on social media, thumbs flicking through an endless cascade of content; and yet when asked what they saw, they often can’t remember. This isn’t the lazy afternoon nap our ancestors might have enjoyed. It’s something stranger and more insidious: a culture of perpetual semi-engagement that would have horrified medieval monks who warned against acedia, the spiritual numbness at the heart of sloth.

Social media platforms have engineered a perfect vehicle for modern sloth. The infinite scroll eliminates natural stopping points, while algorithms serve up content designed not to be meaningful but to be just engaging enough to prevent us from leaving. We’re not choosing rest; we’re caught in a kind of digital undertow, aware we should surface but unable to muster the will.

The cruel irony is that this feels nothing like traditional laziness. We’re not lounging in hammocks or staring peacefully at clouds. We’re anxious, overstimulated, vaguely guilty, yet still scrolling. Social media has perfected the art of making us feel simultaneously busy and utterly unproductive, active yet completely passive.

What medieval theologians understood about sloth was that it wasn’t really about inactivity; it was about the inability to care deeply about anything. Social media accelerates this perfectly. Important news blurs together with celebrity gossip, friends’ milestones compete with advertisements, genuine crises sit beside manufactured outrage. Everything flattens into an equivalent stream of content to be consumed and forgotten. When everything demands our attention, nothing truly receives it.

The platforms themselves encourage this apathy through their very design. Meaningful engagement, the kind that requires thought, vulnerability, or sustained attention, doesn’t optimize for ad revenue. Quick reactions do. So we’re nudged toward the thumbs-up, the retweet, the share without comment. Political action becomes posting a black square. Maintaining friendships becomes liking their vacation photos. We perform connection without actually connecting.

Perhaps most troubling is how social media colonizes the time we might otherwise spend in genuine rest or reflection. The moments between tasks, the quiet evening hours, even the bathroom break, all now filled with the scroll. We’re left too scattered for deep work but too stimulated for actual restoration. It’s sloth without even the benefit of rest.

This isn’t to romanticize the past or suggest we abandon technology entirely. But it’s worth recognizing what we’ve traded. The sin of sloth was always about the failure to pursue what truly matters, to develop our gifts, to engage authentically with the world and each other. Social media hasn’t made us lazy. It’s made us something potentially worse: perpetually distracted from our own lives, endlessly busy with nothing, watching the world through a screen we can’t quite look away from.

The medieval cure for sloth was purposeful action, meaningful work, genuine connection. The prescription hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that now we carry the source of our apathy in our pockets, buzzing with notifications, always just one more scroll away from something we’ll immediately forget.