Five Swipes
I was scrolling the other day when I noticed something.
Within five swipes, I had witnessed a new birth, a teenager’s birthday party, a wedding, a long-awaited retirement, and someone’s passing.
A beginning, a milestone, a promise, a season fulfilled, and an ending.
All of it appeared inside the same small rectangle. Each moment was given the same amount of space, the same few seconds of attention, and the same simple movement of a thumb before it disappeared.
That stayed with me.
A screen has no sense of proportion. It cannot distinguish between a moment that should make us smile and one that should make us stop. It places celebration beside sorrow, a new life beside a final goodbye, someone’s greatest joy beside another family’s deepest grief.
The algorithm understands what keeps us looking. It knows what makes us pause, what makes us angry, what makes us curious, and what makes us click.
But it does not understand weight.
It cannot feel the years behind that retirement. It does not know how long that couple prayed for the child in the photograph. It cannot measure the hope carried into a wedding or the silence left behind by a death.
To the screen, they are all content.
To the people living them, they are everything.
Perhaps this is part of why so many of us feel emotionally exhausted. The human heart was never designed to travel through the full range of human experience in less than a minute. Before breakfast, we may encounter joy, grief, envy, fear, outrage, laughter, and longing.
Then an advertisement appears, and the scroll continues.
Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Those words were written about seasons of life, moments that were entered slowly and carried deeply.
Now those seasons can appear side by side.
We cannot stop the scroll from flattening everything into the same frame. But we can choose not to let it flatten us.
The next time a life-changing moment appears on your screen, pause long enough to feel its weight. Celebrate the joy. Sit with the grief. Say the prayer. Make the call.
Do not let the movement of your thumb decide what your heart has time to honor.
Everything may be the same size on a screen.
It is not the same weight in a soul.
If this made you pause, share it with someone who may need the reminder.
#FirstLight #FaithAndCulture #Perspective #SlowDown #BePresent #Wisdom #MeaningfulLife