If you are seeking after God, in some small way hoping to get to know the Creator just a fraction as well as the Creator knows you, then the modern age is flooded with distractions, fall roads, preoccupations and ordinary occupations that require so much waking attention that the quiet voice of eternity is hard to notice, even if you are listening and looking for it. Each life stage in one's trajectory comes with its own sources of anxiety, joy, and distractions. But on top of those biological and social sequences there are financial pitfalls and quicksands of detail that swallow up your time and attention. Way more substances are available for abuse and self-medication. Increasingly solitary lives thin out the once close-at-hand social connections and cross-references that held a person in place for firmly that before, both for good and for ill. Above all else the consumerism of the past 80 or 90 years that mass produced, mass distributed, and made possible mass consumption of material thing, as well as services also took up more an more of one's mind.
In the days when a person had a room or two of Earthly possessions, upon death these were shared out simply. But now there are hoarders with barnfuls and storage units filled with ever more accumulation. Decision making becomes habituated to calculating the price per unit of brand A versus brand B; or for the less mathematically inclined a purchase decision may be shaped by the more recent encounter with a coupon or advertisement, if not in print or broadcast then personalized to one's Internet browser or mobile phone. But whatever explanation seems strongest, the people of today in the economically developed countries, at least, seem to have more obstacles that separate them from the Creator. So any pursuit of God's ways must involve overcoming the ordinary preoccupations with time schedule, car maintenance, coordinating to children's programmed lives, and so on. Much of what really matters in the Kingdom cannot be priced or valued in consumer terms. The concept of the "head fake" that is used to describe football, soccer, basketball, among others may shed some like on this problem of distraction and misguided effort.
The move is crude but often effective against one's opponent or person who is in pursuit of the ball. The person who performs the head fake gives the false impression of turning in one direction by the normal signal of moving one's eyes and head to the place to go next. The pursuer sometimes believes that indeed is the direction to get ready to go. But then the double-thinking player who is in possession of the ball does something unexpected by moving in a different direction, contrary to the way the eyes or head were indicating. In much the same way most people rely on signals and signs to know what to expect next; what direction things will move to next; where to pay one's attention. And yet so much of modern conveniences and the mantras of advertisers that you should buy their product or service to save time, money, or maybe the biggest motivator of all, to reduce inconvenience and effort. By measuring one's life by those yardsticks it is possible to imagine some sort of increase or rising value. But all that is beside the point; those preoccupations are a sort-of "head fake" that we are tricked by. Years pass and then one day we awake and wonder where the time has gone and what was it all about, anyway? What to do.
Like the folks in the 12-step self-help plans begin with, "the first step in solving a problem is to know that there is a problem." So this modern life 'head fake' can be tackled first be looking out for it, identifying it, being deliberate instead of "auto-pilot" in reaching for your money to scratch whatever itch you may feel (or be told by advertisers that you may be feeling right now). After becoming self-conscious about the cost of giving up one's own thinking and accepting what is advertised to be 'normal' and desirable, then at least there is some space available to look around for God in all this modern life and to stop long enough to listen or even to think. Moving aside the baggage of modern daily concern out of the way makes it possible to seek after God with less fetters. It is a good start and one that also brings you to a similar playing field that your ancestors may have walked up; a place less cluttered, although filled with its own sources of anxiety and distraction, no doubt.
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