No Time for Love But Plenty for Work

Four Observations on Working with Young Hungry Hearts

We know too much of intimacy and not enough of love.¹

“It’s a choo choo train/ A rocket launch/ If we have a hormone race/ I’m bound to finish first.”—Frightened Rabbit²

This weekend, I sat with our college students at church and we talked about sex, but mostly what they wanted to talk about wasn’t sex, but the deeper sedbed of relationships. That young adults have more digital connection and less intimacy, less dating, lower rates of marriage, and more social dissatisfaction is no news.

And so, four interconnected observations from the last 15 years of working with young adults, primarily on the nature of friendship, romance, and connection.

Take with all the grains of salt.

Observation #1: The Need for Trivial Time

The rise of digital connections has not created an increase in social satisfaction³.

The core question of connection remains the same, but the form of digital connection has changed something significant in terms of communication: unserious time.

For connection to take place, you need time: boring, unstructured time. There has to be time in which nothing is happening in particular: time for people to talk and see where the talking goes.

And among other things, this is what novel forms of connection make more difficult: by making us so available to one another, our capacity for being present to one another diminishes, both because everything is already known and because this tendency habituates us to withholding what little private space we have left⁴.

And so, the endless proliferation of social media connections merely exacerbate the problem: with more places to connect through, there is less opportunity for pointless time. It’s just this pointless time that dating is made of, that courtship of an earlier age assumed. “Dating with the intention to marry” doesn’t entirely work because you’re intending someone, not just marriage. And apart from having open-ended time to know the someone, how can you intend them and not just an idea of marriage?

Observation #2: The Loss of Meaningful Time

That we can have something like open-ended time means that there is something like meaningful time. But increasingly, students are working far more than is good for them as students, meaning that their “meaningful time” is the same as work. This isn’t just my anecdotal observation, particularly regarding students who work more than very part-time. That we’ve seen a rise in shortcut programs such as Chat GPT in the same time is not, I think, an accident.

Rev. Jack Franicevich

has written a helpful volume, Sunday, in which he teases out the way in which Sabbath expands across time: it begins with an acknowledgment about creation’s origins, and then becomes celebrated, legislated, and expanded. We are invited, as it were to join our rest with the rest God has given to creation. When we build out a world incapable of rest—requiring more work to live than is sustainable—then what lies at the bottom of the world is not rest, but work. And not just work, but labor, a grinding repetition which loses all meaning outside tasks being accomplished.

The loss of meaningful, orienting time—a world ordered by Sabbath rhythms—is one in which work is what we have as meaningful time, because work takes up all the time there is available. Consequently, anything left over is recovery from work, and governed by the imagination of the “meaningful time”: our time away from work becomes another form of labor-intensity—shows to keep up with, side hustles to manage, self-development plans to keep afloat.

Anything like trivial time—the time necessary to explore and enjoy a new presence—becomes not just difficult, but unthinkable.

Observation #3: Cutting to the Chase

Around the same time that work loads were increasing for students, titles and discussion about “Christian dating” began to plummet, after twenty years of race-to-the-moon growth.

Correlation isn’t causation: two things happening at the same time don’t make them related, and it could very well be that by 2010, there was no need to talk about Christian dating, or that the books didn’t sell well any more, or that there was a hard reaction against the culture of the 1990s-2010. Any of these are plausible.

But the refusal to talk—or write substantively—about a thing goes hand in hand with not knowing about a thing. Whatever baggage adults growing up in the 1990s had around Christian views of dating, a new generation is here that knows not dating. Again, my thesis is something like this: the loss of time, coupled with a previous generation’s feeling like the conversation is tapped out equals that dating itself has declined, while opportunities for connection have not.

During that time, post-2010, you saw the rise of innumerable apps designed to create connection among those folks who are already too busy to have trivial time, and are primed by work to think in terms of efficiency. The rise of “hookup culture”, thus, seems to be not only from a decline of instruction, but a lack of time. Cut to the chase. Seal the deal.

Observation #4: Digital Confirmation

This is where I want to diverge slightly from the thesis that digital culture causes this disconnection, insofar as technology is largely responsive rather than causal. Technologies aren’t bought into if there’s no demand for them—no one buys an A/C if there’s no heat, and no one buys a car when horses and buggies are still doing fine to travel the distances needed to travel.⁵

And so, tech conversations aren’t wrong to note the way that technology amplifies these problems, but it’s initially responding to a different problem than “kids are too lazy to connect with one another” or “kids love their digital devices.” They love them because they were given them by adults eager to not face up to the constrictions of time: that it takes time to parent, to teach, to learn, to become a social creature.

That the tech takes these first trends in crazy directions shouldn’t be a surprise. Once digital devices become embedded in our assumptions of work and time—as opposed to offering a different account of time—then of course they produce new and more insane versions of work. And thus, Tik Tok influencers can buy whole houses, cam girls can make rent, and online-only education becomes the desired standard for how we learn—and all of us are worse off for it.

The digital means become the reinforcer to dynamics already in play. We shouldn’t have expected anything different.

Moving On: Pull the Plugs

Want to see some joyful young adults? Take away their phones, start a bonfire, and pull out a bunch of card games. Every year without fail, they take to them and stay up way past the adults enjoying dumb, pointless time.

It’s my hope that when they see that time doesn’t have to be marching endlessly into a gaping maw of labor, they can begin to pull apart the seams, but it takes building out a culture in which these are the new norms, a culture which cannot just be what a little coterie does by choice. It has to be chimed in by churches, school, friends, adults. It has to grow up in a hundred places until we all say enough.

And only then can we say we want more.

1. Warning: links and footnotes ahead. In the interest of keeping the text clean, I’ll shove all the relevant literature here.

2. I implore you to please go listen to Frightened Rabbit. Scott Hutchison committed suicide in 2018, and left behind several albums worth your attention.

3. Subject to qualifers: the use of digital devices, in at least one study, leads to a loss of satisfaction in our relationships when we use the devices, though we don’t perceive it when others use them. But if our self-perception of satisfaction takes a nose dive, then it’s reasonable to assume others might have a similar outcome.

4. See ch. 3 of this work in particular.

5. Desire, and the power to actualized that desire, precedes demand, which is also why erectile dysfunction medication is far more researched than other forms of medication.