Ideas that looks good on paper often don’t work as expected. Compare a football play drawn in a playbook to what actually happens on the field. These two things rarely, if ever, match perfectly. This problem is the cause of many gray hairs among coaches as their plans fold like a house of cards when put into action in the real world. We live in a time where many ideas look good on paper, or more specifically, on screens, and our mind is easily convinced, that things we’ve tried and have not worked out well, will work if we just try it one more time.

“This time it will be different.”

For example, we know that heavy drinking is a bad idea, but perhaps we’ll try it this weekend. Or, we know that dating multiple partners results is gunpowder and kerosene that results in relationship explosions, but what if, just maybe, everyone who ever lived through a tumultuous love triangle is wrong? Or on a wider scale, we have all observed socialism’s train-wrecks that invariably result in brutal dictatorships, but let’s give it another whirl (this time with feeling)! We get fooled by the fruit on the tree without remembering what happened after the first bite.

We need a plan, a starting point, a model to follow, and everyone is selling a playbook. Many of these plans have been proven to be bad ideas, even in our own experience. Yet we keep trying them, even after we know the likely outcome. In our lives, we know the patterns that fail, but like the stubborn coach we can’t accept that the X’s and O’s in our mind are bad ideas even after repeated attempts that prove it. We’re still convinced our rag-arm quarterback can complete that bootleg rollout cross-body pass despite the last five attempts when it resulted in a pick-six touchdown for the defense. The coach who says, “Let’s run it again,” will be searching for new employment soon.

We privately know that the best model is the one used and put into practice by sober, boring coaches, not wild rebels, but it’s hard to admit. There is a reason that Nick Saban draws the best players to Alabama year after year. He’s sober, he’s boring, and doesn’t run dumb plays. In his sober, boring way, he wins a lot. It works. It has always worked, since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve didn’t like being bored, and that’s where things went south really fast.

Even while we are out testing theories and researching ways of living, we can see that the boring people keep the wheels on the bus. We even rely on it. No child who is out playing wants to come in for dinner if mom or dad is a hot mess that serves a cold meal but forces the family to call it delicious. No, we want a balanced, tasty meal, served hot and on time, by a largely boring cook who follows the recipe, and executes the recipe well. Or, for another example, my accountant may be an alcoholic, but I don’t want him drunk while he’s doing my taxes. I would prefer that he is sober and boring and careful.

In the IT world, compare the sober, boring, careful database administrator who says “no” to everything versus the fresh-out-of-college wired programmer who wants to rip out the old, stodgy system with the latest fad tech pulled down from GitHub. Or, consider a business manager who patiently reviews expense reports versus the lavishly-spending salesperson who is wooing a whale of a client. These roles are all important players on the roster of a business, but the reality is this: someone has to be the jerk, or the business will fold. Someone has to tell the creative person to reign it in, or there will be no business. You need the creative people and the boring gatekeepers. If everyone is nice all the time, and no one ever says, “No,” then the production systems will collapse into disorder and the expense reports will swell until bribery and embezzlement become side-channels of compensation. The moment the lock is removed from the safe, someone will start calling it “petty cash.”

The lawmakers of revolutionary America knew this, and for their various faults, they knew that allowances were needed for those wild-eyed rebels to explore the edges of the frontier, while also realizing that tripwires needed to restrain the majority so that no more Salem witch burnings might ignite. Oddly enough, we’re nearly back to witch hunting, but the witches being cancelled are the Christians. (This may sound shocking but Christians being burned makes a lot more sense. Christians are supposed to be converting witches to the faith through the joyful witness of their lives, and not burning anyone.)

The founders also knew that the morality of the Christian tradition was the bedrock that a stable country could be built upon, even if they were only Deists themselves and Christians-in-name-only. They knew that humans needed some rope, some allowance for both creative and destructive rebellion, but not too much rope. They knew that when the fringe becomes the center, the center becomes the fringe, and that arrangement does not work. I’ve used the sandbox and kitchen metaphor before. When a child’s sandbox is brought into the kitchen, dinner is never the same. Sand gets into the food, hands get burned, the floor gets filthy, and the cat may use it as a litter-box. This is not sustainable. The place for “fun” is not in the operations center of the house.

The dabblers having fun in the sandbox - the tourists, the experience-seekers, the addicts - are trying on ways of life. They are trying to run plays from a playbook that is full of bad ideas. But even if told, they will run those same plays. To err is human. We know people will go there, and if you take away the playbook or the field they practice on, they will find a new place to play and invent new plays. Explorers explore. We want to taste and try things on, and we’re steered to drinking, sex, and the pursuit of money daily by the images set before our eyes. We are tempted to seek, and told that our desires are our identity. The manufacturing of seekers (consumers) is the primary goal of advertising and Hollywood writers. “Try everything” by Shakira is suggesting kids really try everything, from skydiving to fantasy football to sodomy to Fentanyl. Go for it! You are only the sum of your desires! That is how you will find rest, or so we are told. Next time you hear Shakira’s song, substitute the word Fentanyl for Everything.

There is an alternate option here, offered by Jesus, which we tend to consider last, where he says, “Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.” What’s interesting is that Jesus not only “looks good on paper” like a shiny product or football play in X’s and O’s, but he can execute the play and give a proper meaning and shape to your life, while he also gives you rest. He also has many friends for you to meet, both here and hereafter. The only problem is that Jesus gives it for free, so marketing and Hollywood are not needed. Shakira would have been wise to add a third verse to “Try Everything” that provided the proper ending to what she’s suggesting.

I tried it all, God, why am I still so lost? 

Now my fears are here, and there’s nowhere to turn. 

I tried it all, to fill this hole inside,

Help: Draw me, Lord, and we will run.

Country music, and some rap music, is better about tying up the loose ends of story songs. Pop music tends to pretend that there is no Act III to their stories, but there is always at least three acts in every story, otherwise it’s not much of a story.

In producing a nation of consumers, also known as seekers, we have hit peak depression because people bought the tale that a life that resembles a hedonistic rave will be fun forever. This is why you see people bouncing like pinballs from one wellness idea to the next, one diet to the next, one “way of life” to the next. You see it in Christians who bounce from one church to the next because the Pastor isn’t “feeding them.” (Again, if you are going to Mass to get something instead of to give, and that is to give glory to God, you don’t understand why St. Peter or Notre Dame or any other church was built in the first place.) If you are expecting to be fed and be constantly entertained, you will always be in the pinball machine, bouncing around, never at rest.

What we really want is meaning, purpose, and community, all of which are given, all at once, when faith in Christ settles into your bones and into your soul. Then you will find rest. When you follow him, the person of Jesus, the construction worker who is God, you will get what you really wanted, especially when you realize that you wanted all the wrong things. Bonus: you get community and people who will open up and talk about real things. These people tend to talk about more than how many reps they did today or how many grams of protein meets their macro requirements.

Entertainment and consumption are the great distractions today. These are patterns that need to be shattered, and Jesus will do all that for you - for free - you just have to ask him, and keep asking. These habits are hard to break, but they are the shackles you put on every day by choice.

Seekers get to learn the hard way because the school of life and hard knocks is brutally honest. There comes a day when the Netflix binge no longer brings joy but crushing sadness. That’s the finger of God pressing on you while you lay on the couch.

Fortunate souls learn by watching others’ bad behavior. Take for example: Those who grew up with parents who, following Shakira’s advice “Try everything,” often conclude that trying everything leads to a thousand sessions of therapy. This is why both AA and Al-Anon exist. The first is for those who “Try everything” and keep burning their hand on the hot stove. The second is for those who had to figure out how to live with those who “Try everything” and keep burning their hand on the hot stove.

If you never leave the land of play, you get stuck there. The longer you play in the sandbox, the more the voice of the conscience becomes muffled. The sandbox plays by different rules, often no rules, which is exactly why the sandbox is out in the yard and not in the kitchen. The education of a child in the sandbox teaches valuable lessons that may not be taught while helping prepare dinner in the kitchen. In places without established order, you learn to fight or flee. You learn to lead, follow, or get out of the way. You learn your strengths and weaknesses.

However, you can’t live your while life in the sandbox, because imaginary games and child’s play are not intended to become permanent ways of life. Eventually, if you are sixty years old and still playing in the sandbox, it becomes pathetic to see a grown man or woman still making mudpies and calling it cake. Other adults no longer think it’s cute or funny. If you’ve ever seen a sixty year old man in a college bar checking out the sophomores, you know exactly what I’m talking about. A sore thumb sticks out because it’s not healthy. A fish out of water is out of place. The presence of an old person in a young person’s environment draws eyes because it doesn’t make sense and we know it by instinct. There is a popular lie going around claiming that, “Age is just a state of mind,” which is exactly what the middle-age creep in the nightclub is claiming while he sucks on the straw of his rail drink. Age is an immutable fact of time and space, while mind is malleable to a mood or desire or how much sleep you had the night before.

Once, while training for a half-marathon, I convinced myself that running a pace of seven minute miles was a “just a state of mind.” When the race began, I kept telling myself, “It’s just a state of mind, pace is just a state of mind.” Then I learned in the race, around the fifth mile, that I was a liar, and I crashed. I gasped, “Nope, it’s biology. Pace is related to biology.” My mile pace might be somewhat related to what my mind had decided, as I could motivate myself with encouragement, but my VO2 Max was where the rubber met the road.

As we’ve become more accustomed to virtual lives through screens and interfaces, we put far more credence in our imagined states than reality can support. I had trained hard for the race, thinking that what I decided in my head could be realized, but physiology had a different fact, presenting reality abruptly to my mind, compliments of my lungs and legs.

This is the same thing that happens in pursuit of bad ideas tended to in your mind, usually extending from some sickly tentacle from a seed of advertising that fertilized your desire for money, power, escape, or sex. We can not live as just a soul, nor just a mind, nor just a body, because none of these make up the whole of our self. We are watering and feeding whatever our is planted in our mind, what we are told to like, and we are surprised when the fruit is rotten at reaping. The reason for the rottenness is that we have elevated the mind over the body and soul, which are who we actually are. Our desires are not who we are. That is the great lie. We must seek to be whole, body and soul, with mind as the point of connection. When we focus too much on “mindfulness” we can easily forget that we have a body and a soul, and that is who we really are, made in the image and likeness of God.

As I’ve mentioned before (quoting Peter Kreeft), the reason that horror movies focus on either ghosts or corpses is because in the first, the soul lacks a body, and in the second, the body lacks a soul. These terrify us because body and soul go together. Mind is where we connect body and soul, and staring in a phone we end up a zombie, neither body nor soul. The reason zombies need to have their brain destroyed to die is because they are staring into their inner phones, drooling over their desire, and neither body nor soul. They are just rotting bodies without a soul, lumbering toward their insatiable desire. Can anyone deny that someone staring into their phone looks like a a zombie?

With luck or divine intervention, an awakening occurs, or a savior arrives. Rescue operations need to be present at all times to accept those with casualties returning from the sandbox, but some will reject any hand offered, and some never reach for the hand. Until someone is ready to quit the sandbox, they do not understand the need for rescue.

Getting lost in the imagination is the cause of our mental illness pandemic in the age of screens. When we separate our body from our mind, we are no longer whole. The great irony is that the solution being presented is “more mind”: more apps, zoom meetings, more interactions with technology.

Whenever we look at the screen, we sever our mind from our body and soul and enter into a false reality. This happens with any gadget interaction, including virtual reality, which is where we are now headed, compliments of our tech overlords. The isolation of the mind happens whether you are scrolling websites or on a zoom with real people. The mind engages with the screen and the screen reflects the self. The person on the other end of the screen could just as well be a robot or software application. But what looks good on paper, or screen, doesn’t often play out well. Unless you follow the patterns of tried-and-tested usage, practice in time and space, with body and soul, you are winging it by following only words and feelings. The testing grounds for ideas is in the world, on the court, on the field, not what the X’s and O’s show on the screen. Any gray-haired coach can tell you that.

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