By Mallory Mattingly
Are Americans suffering from a case of zoochosis? Professor Alan Noble thinks so.
But what exactly is zoochosis?
In his book You Are Not Your Own, Noble describes the portmanteau of “zoo” and “psychosis” as “combination of anxiety and boredom that afflicts zoo animals due to the fact that they spend their lives in an environment for which they weren’t designed,” The Daily Economy reported. And Americans live under a similar system, attempting to survive and flourish in a framework we weren’t created for.
We weren’t designed to work all the time, but many of us do. We have easy access to laptops and cellular devices that our grandparents never had, which means that work is always easily accessible — mornings, evenings and weekends.
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In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 30% of employed Americans worked on the weekends last year, which is about 40 million people.
But humans were not made to work all day, every day; we were made to have downtime with family and friends and moments of rest, following the example God set in Genesis 2.
Similarly, God didn’t design us to be constantly connected to everything happening around the world, which the internet enables to our and our children’s detriment.
“By the time children reach middle school, they may have watched as many as 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of virtual violence through the media,” the American Academy of Pediatrics reported. These images leave a lasting imprint on our minds.
The internet also increases the opportunity for isolation. We can order food online, work online and get our groceries delivered to our house. We could live without ever having to leave the comfort of our homes.
“Ask an honest parent, student, or employee and they’ll tell you that their goal for the day is to survive — to ‘get through the day,’ or ‘make it through,'” Noble writes. “Existence is a thing to be tolerated; time is a burden to be carried. And while there are moments of joy, nobody seems to be actually flourishing — except on Instagram, which only makes us feel worse. Strikingly, even as our standard of living in the West continues to rise, our quality of life doesn’t.”
But that’s not the way God intended for us.
Instead, “the Christian gospel offers a strikingly different vision,” the synopsis of Noble’s book encourages.
“As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, ‘I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.’…this simple truth reframes the way we understand ourselves, our families, our society, and God. Contrasting these two visions of life, he invites us past the sickness of contemporary life into a better understanding of who we are and to whom we belong,” the synopsis continues.
Instead of letting the systems of the world control our lives, we should embrace the rhythms of rest, work and worship that God created for us. It is only through the hope we have in Jesus that we will find true and everlasting peace and comfort.
Read Next: Are You Creating Rhythms of Rest in Your Home? Here’s Why You Need To
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