What's So Bad about Clickbait? [Clickbait Mini-Series #1]

All right, I know what you're thinking. You're not used to seeing me, Chris Alesi. You're used to seeing my dad, Steve Alesi, Pastor Steve to so many. You're used to seeing him as this is the podcast booth for the family business with the Alessis, where family is everybody's business. But the really cool thing about being a part of this particular family business is that we all bring something unique to the table. And one of the things that I've been working on is this book called Clickbait. And so we're going to be doing a little mini-series, I guess, of the family business podcast with something more specific to the book I'm working on. And it's called Clickbait, as you can see over my shoulder. And so we're going to have a couple of episodes where we just talk about some of the things that make this book what it is. And, you know, it's been awesome to see my family get behind it, to see our organization get behind it. It's been incredible. And we're really believing you're going to like this book, Clickbait. And hopefully something said here today makes you think, you know what, I can watch more of these, learn about it, and even grab the book. But the this tagline is actually two taglines for this book of Clickbait. The first is win the war for your mind in the age of distraction. So that kind of gives you a nice picture of exactly what this book is trying to do. We live in a very distracted world, but we're going to war for our thoughts and our mind. The other tagline is much simpler, but it's right voices, right choices. And that really breaks down exactly what we're trying to say. And so in this first episode, I want to give you a unique big picture of clickbait and what it is we're discussing. You know, we live in a clickbait ravaged world. You can't even go on your phone or on social media without finding yourself in some type of video thread. And you're like, how did I even get here? That all these posts are always picking the one part of the video that's going to be the big winner. It's going to be the thing that sells you. And so you grab onto that and then you watch the video and you're like, man, this was literally the biggest waste of time. And that happens in the spiritual. It happens to us all the time in the war for our mind. We buy into things, little thoughts, things pop up in the back of our mind, and we kind of buy into them. And before we know it, we're halfway into a life decision and we're like, man, I don't even know how I got here. And so the clickbait book is really trying to almost take us all into that moment in the garden with Eve. That's really the story that the entire book is uh about. It's really the story that gave me this idea for clickbait because something as harmless as clickbait on your phone really didn't start on social media. It didn't start in the tabloids or the headlines. It started in the garden. And so I actually have this image in my head of like some somebody trying to live stream what's going on in the garden when Eve is now talking to this talking serpent. And I don't think anybody ever realized that the fate of humanity was based on this little interaction. Like if you were thinking of somebody with an iPhone kind of filming it, they probably wouldn't recognize just how much was at stake with this one woman talking to this talking serpent. In the same way, I don't think any of us realize just how much is at stake when it comes to the thoughts that we think. Craig Rochelle says that our life moves in the direction of our strongest thoughts, the thoughts we have the most often. I don't think when it comes to the thoughts we're thinking every single day, I don't think we realize just how much is at stake with those thoughts, which is why it is the battleground for our enemy. It's why so much is lost on the battlefield of our minds. And so when you look at somebody like Eve talking to this serpent, it's kind of natural to ask yourself, like, what would you do in that scenario? When you read some of the stories of the Bible, when you read through the stories of history, when you look at these things, we naturally assume we would do so much better if we were in that circumstance. In fact, if you just watch TV shows nowadays, you think, man, if that was me, you know, I would run away from the killer. I wouldn't try to hide near him or whatever it may be. We always think, what would we do in any given scenario that's being presented to us? But the truth is sometimes when we, when we think we would do better, we forget just how human those people are, just how human we are. Sometimes people actually think that people of the Bible or people of history were just better than us, naturally, better than them. And so they think that they kind of have a demigod glow around the stories that they read. And they, for whatever reason, feel like they couldn't do as good as even those people did. But it's really important if we're going to understand our battle with clickbait and win the war for our mind in the age of distraction. It's really important that we understand that there's no difference between anybody in history and us. There is zero difference between anybody you read through the covers of your Bible, no difference between any of them and you. We're all the same. I say in the book that the only difference between us and them is technology. And even that's really not all that different. But we're the exact same people, which means we're going to struggle with the same things they struggled with. It also means that we can win the same way that many of them won or lose the same way that many of them lost. You see, you and I have a lot more power than we think to really shape the life that we want. And I get into that in chapter two a little bit when I break down the voices that we have to deal with. But it's important to know that we're just like them. Just like them. And the same way that Eve did not realize there was so much at stake in her conversation with the serpent. I don't think you and I recognize how much is at stake with the thoughts that we think, the multi-generational effect that you thinking the thoughts you're thinking could have. And so it's important if we uh are going to talk about clickbait, it's important to define it. Miriam Webster says it's something such as a headline designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink, especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest. Now, dubious actually means it's suspect and shouldn't be relied on. So the cool thing about this definition is that it's saying when the content you're trying to push is suspect and shouldn't be relied on, you have to bait people into taking it because the content won't on its own. In the same way, whenever the enemy is really trying to get in your head, whenever the the lies of the enemy are making their way into your head, because these lies are in fact lies, because the content of what the enemy is saying, the content of that is so poor and suspect, they have to make it debatable at some point. They have to make it somewhat good enough for you to want to actually take it. But it's important to recognize that because one of the things that we say here in the book is if the enemy's talking, he's lying. It's good to understand most of what's going on in your thought life, if it's not leading you to God, is a lie. And that means that the content isn't legitimate. And we'll break that down even more, especially in the book. But there's a couple of things that we have to break down about Eve's interaction with the serpent that teaches us a lot about our own battle with clickbait. The first thing is I don't think Eve ever realized she was stepping into a battle. I think she was just walking around in the cool of the day and all of a sudden she got caught in a conversation. She didn't think, hey, you know what? If I go talk to that guy, bad stuff is gonna happen. I don't think she went with her walls up. I don't even think she knew how to put walls up. And I think that's really uh in line with truth for you and I today, because Ephesians 6.12 says we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers, authorities, cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. This is not an obvious battle. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it's not obvious. The stuff that we're gonna dive into, the thoughts that are taking you captive, because you know, we're supposed to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. But what actually happens is most thoughts take us captive and make us be obedient to it. So it's not obvious. If it was obvious, if the enemy's lies were clearly lies, we wouldn't be giving in to them at all. Which is why it's important to understand that this battle against clickbait is not obvious. It's not something that's gonna uh you're not gonna wake up today and say, Oh, I gotta fight some clickbait today. It's not really obvious. That I don't think Eve realized she was stepping into a battle. But the second thing is, is it's interesting to see that the devil, the serpent, doesn't introduce himself. And that's really cool too. You know, the enemy can't have your enemy as his Instagram handle. He can't say, Hey man, hey, how you doing? Okay, here's my elevator pitch. I'm trying to rob you blind. He has to be more subtle than that. He can't show up and introduce himself. So not only is it a hard battle, but it's hard to even identify sometimes where he is, where he's at in all of it. And so the purpose of this clickbait is not book, is it's not to help you, you know, win outright this battle with clickbait, because it's always gonna be hard to know where the battle is. It's always gonna be hard to know where the enemy is when it comes to your thoughts. So it's not really about winning it once and for all as much as it's managing this fight. You see, when it comes to the thoughts in your head, you gotta recognize that most of the time you're really just trying to manage and you're gonna let God win that war for you. So in the book, we break down five clickbaits, and I want to just give them to you off the top, but it's the clickbait of offense. We all get offended. Everyone's trying not to, and we're all offended. Reminiscing. I know it sounds like it's super, you know, uh harmless to reminisce, but there's a danger in looking backwards for too long. My mom likes to say, if you're gonna look back, wrap it up in gratitude. Because if you look back in anything else, you're gonna get stuck in some clickbait where you start to believe some things that aren't true. Self-diagnosis. And this is one of the first ones that I would have uh kind of pinpointed both in scripture and in life, as something that we all have to discuss. We all self-diagnose. I'm really bad at it. I can't be sick for more than a day without thinking something bad has happened. My wife, I don't know how she does it, and I don't know how my parents did it for so many years because self-diagnosis. But we've all done that. We have a generation right now that's obsessed with self-diagnosis all the way down to gender. People want to diagnose. But where does that come from? It starts with some clickbait, some thought in the back of our head. The fourth one is is probably the most interesting to me. It's the clickbait of maybe. And this is hard to really explain. You've got to dive into the book to understand it. But many of us think that because faith is technically uncertain, we think that if we step into something uncertain that that is faith, but that's not really what it is. You see, the life of faith is the life of obedience. It's not of doing crazy things knowing God will catch us. That's not faith. It's not taking a leap knowing God's good, you know, we say a leap of faith. You don't really see that in scripture. That's not really what faith is. Faith is being certain. So a lot of people like to say, oh, you know, maybe this is what God is doing, or maybe I should go here and maybe that's what God's gonna do in me. And we think that operating in that because the future isn't clear, we think that's faith. But that's not. That's actually not how God wants us to operate at all. And the enemy will use the clickbait of maybe to get you to step into things God never told you to step into. And the last one is self-pity. This is the most annoying by far. I think it's the one I struggle with the most, to be honest, but it's feeling sorry for yourself. Nothing has ever been won on the battlefield of self-pity. No one's ever won anything feeling sorry for themselves. And so it's important to understand that in all five of these, they're very normal. All five of these seem harmless, and to some degree, they are. They won't kill you. But you see, one of the big things about clickbait is it's not a knockout punch of any sort. The enemy's not not really coming and trying today to knock you flat on your back. The enemy's trying to use the death by a thousand cuts method. It's to get you to buy into small thoughts today, tomorrow, tomorrow, the next day, small thought after small thought until eventually you're you're you're you're you've run dry and you've got nothing left because you've been fighting off these little things day after day after day. So they might not sound too scary, but the truth is there's no real test of how clogged your arteries are. The only reason, the only way to know something's wrong is when something bad has happened. And the same thing happens in our thought life. We don't have a test in the church or a test in the world in the body of Christ. We don't have a test that's like, hey, have you bought into any lies recently? Hey, let's just run through your mind and see if there's anything that you shouldn't be thinking. We don't really have a test for that. So sadly, sometimes the only way to know that we've bought into a lie is when something terrible has already happened and it's a little bit too late. So the truth is, this is what the overall idea of clickbait is. We have so many voices coming at us left and right. But the cool thing and the encouraging thing for you right now is this we are not responsible for all the voices clamoring for our attention. We're only responsible for the voices we listen to. So that's clickbait. That is clickbait, the beginning of it, the introduction to it. That's basically my elevator pitch for you for the overall thought. And I hope you'll lock into the rest of these episodes and even grab yourself a copy of the book because I think it'll really bless you. So that's been the episode one of the clickbait miniseries of the Family Business Podcast with the Alessis. Hope you stick around for the next one. Hey there. If you enjoyed this episode of the Family Business Podcast with the Alesssies, then you'll want to know. 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