If you’re part of a church that observes Lent, you know the drill. Every year you think about the 40 day period between Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, or whatever you know it as, and Easter, and consider what you might either take on or give up as a spiritual discipline; a way of growing closer to God by giving up something that stands may be a distraction or an obstacle between you and the Divine. For those of you who are less familiar with Lent, it’s worth noting that this could be (look into this Chris!) based on Jesus’ 40 days of being tempted in the wilderness, but is also based on Jesus’ turn towards Jerusalem in (scripture text here) and the days leading up to his crucifixion.
- Often this can be a difficult and arbitrary decision for me. It can be hard to know (or admit to ourselves?) what we need to give up or take on to truly grow closer to God. This year I knew exactly what I was going to pick.
- Giving up streaming services: Music and Video
- Several reasons: I spend too much time on them (MCU phases 1 – 4 as a good example), I don’t get much out of them, not using them as much makes me think when I do use them: Is this really a good use of my time? Is there something else I should be doing instead? Lastly, their environmental impact. While proponents of streaming often point out the Each type of streaming services has it’s own treasure trove of data that need backed up across massive data centers throughout the country. Spotify has millions of songs (as well as Pandora, Bandcamp, Tidal, and all their other competitors) and of course, each of these services is a multinational business, so that means each of them has servers across the many countries they operate in. Of course, tv and movie streaming is the same: Netflix also has millions of tv shows and movies, as do Hulu, Apple TV, Disney +, and all their competitors.
- Stats on the environmental impact of Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube.
- Although social media wasn’t part of my commitment for Lent, it certainly could be. Social media and streaming services aren’t the same thing, but we often use both of them more as fairly passive ways to waste time, and many social media platforms have become more oriented towards consuming content than actually interacting with other people, so much so that people with a prolific social media presence are now called “content creators.”
- Has it been difficult? Yes, people are constantly using streaming services around me. I had made exceptions for certain things. I am becoming much more aware of how I spend my time.