Smart Ass Take:
The burnout epidemic isn’t a personal failing — it’s a systems failure. Technology, especially the phone in your pocket, was engineered to colonize your attention, and it’s working exactly as designed. John Mark Comer frames this as a specifically Christian problem with a specifically Christian solution, and I don’t entirely agree with that framing. But you don’t have to share his theology to recognize that the diagnosis is correct: the gnawing sense that there’s always something else you should be doing, that quiet is a problem to be solved rather than a state to be sought. Whether your path to stillness runs through the Gospel of Matthew or a long walk with no earbuds, the destination is the same. Hurry less. Reflect more. Your soul — secular, sacred, or somewhere embarrassingly in between — will thank you.
Article Excerpt:
“Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurtling oneself through each day; a schedule that makes little room for God. Technology has only exacerbated the problem. Comer calls the modern world ‘a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.'”
Article Summary:
John Mark Comer is one of the most influential pastors in America right now, which you might not have noticed because he doesn’t really want to be found. No contact page, no morning phone checks, auto-deletes his email over Christmas. His best-selling book, *The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry*, argues that the great enemy of spiritual life isn’t sin or doubt — it’s the frantic, grinding pace of modern existence, turbocharged by smartphones and social media.
Comer’s pitch lands somewhere between Andrew Huberman and the Sermon on the Mount. He preaches to packed rooms of burned-out millennials and Gen Z-ers in cities like New York, opens with Anne Helen Petersen’s famous burnout essay, and then pivots to Matthew 11. The practical advice — delete social media, go grayscale, observe a phone-free Sabbath — sounds like every digital detox article you’ve already ignored. The difference is he frames it as discipleship, not self-optimization.
His critics wonder if Comer is just selling baptized wellness: spiritual language draped over lifestyle content for affluent young people who can afford to slow down. His defenders point out that the practices he’s recommending — solitude, fasting, Sabbath, silence — are ancient, not trendy, and that the Church mostly forgot them.
The deeper question the article quietly circles without fully answering: Does it matter *why* you slow down, or just that you do? Comer would say yes, it matters enormously. Which is a reasonable position. And also a convenient one for a pastor.