Social media is kind of my thing. I met my future spouse through Tumblr, I'm an author who promotes her work on Twitter, and, as some of you may know, I'm the digital communications manager for Fratres Dei Spiritual Direction & Ministries.
Thoroughly a product of the digital age, I've been privileged to witness the best social media has to offer. I've seen friendships forged, beautiful art created, valuable information exchanged, and online spaces for religious expression blossom. However, I've also lost weeks of my life to mindless scrolling, been "dragged" and "cancelled", participated in unwarranted digital pile-ons I still regret, and woken up in a cold sweat from nightmares about being doxxed.
Sometimes, friends, the internet is bad.
At the start of 2019, I knew that something about my relationship to social media had to change. As an increasingly public figure, I was placing too much of my worth in my public persona. My attention was becoming more and more fragmented, and time on social media was the only "leisure" time I was allowing myself away from my day job and writing, even though I viewed social as just another form of work. I had no inner life I didn't perform for the internet. My prayer life was nonexistent, because I couldn't sit still that long, much less devote intentional time to something that didn't have an immediate material benefit or reward.
But what do you do when the internet feels like an increasingly essential, increasingly centralized feature of the human experience, and if, as for many of us, being active on the web is part of your job?
Common sense advises moderation, but I've never been good at finding balance. As I started listening to podcasts about the effects of social media and reading Cal Newport's phenomenal Digital Minimalism, I realized this isn't a Saint-specific compulsion. The majority of Americans have a disordered relationship with social media. Like a gaslighting lover, social demands a glance at our phones every spare moment, yet convinces us to consistently underestimate how many hours a day we devote to the tryst. And as we uncover more about how social media is configured to work on our brains the same way slot machines do, keeping eyes on screens for as many minutes as possible to turn the highest profits for companies, whether or not those minutes wreck our sense of self, warp our view of our political reality, or urge us to throw money down the drain on products we would never otherwise want...The straits get a bit more dire.
As this year's Lenten season commenced, I felt that gentle nudge, that divine voice in the back of my head saying here's your chance. A chance to pull the plug on social for forty days and re-set my inner schema. It wouldn't be a total fast, since I do spend a handful of hours a week managing the Fratres Dei social, but there would be no more browsing, posting, or scrolling from my own accounts for the rest of Lent.
By and large, I've taken God up on the offer, and the results have been quietly astounding. First of all, the jittery fear of missing out (on what? Malicious gossip and highlight reel announcements of rivals’ successes and the thousandth click-bait headline heralding society's demise?) faded in about a week. What followed was overwhelming relief that I didn't have to care about it all. Human empathy is a divine gift, and social media constantly exhausts it. We swing wildly from outrage to apathy, which makes it hard for us to be attentive and compassionate towards the real needs that surround us. Secondly, I got time back I didn't even know I had lost. I started finding hours to cook big, wholesome meals while listening to audiobooks, and since I didn't have the illusion of connection from seeing friend's Instagram posts all the time, I started calling them a lot more. But most of all, I got my focus back.
The fragmented attention created by the noise of social media is really no attention at all. Conversation with a friend, playing with a child, reading a book, and especially listening for the stirrings of God in our lives require real, sustained attention. Constantly flipping from platform to platform, or article to article, trains our brains to make only the most cursory skim of information. Re-training the brain takes time, but we can start by setting aside hours of our day where we leave our phones on the charger, whether we're out for a run, meeting someone for coffee, or scribbling idea in a notebook. It's only in these moments of receptivity that God can press in with soft revelations, interesting food for thought, or divine encouragement.
I observe both the church calendar and the wheel of the year, a cycle of seasonal holidays used by Wiccans and other earthy types. The wheel's holidays usually involve baking, candle-lighting, handicraft, and other things I love to do but never seem to have time for. But when the spring equinox rolled around during Lent, I suddenly had the time, and without the pressure to post aesthetically pleasing pictures and a description of my practice online for the edification of the masses, I didn't experience the usual sense of poor planning or inadequacy. So, I pulled out the yellow candles, put a bit of soda bread and calendula tea out on my altar, and said some prayers praising God for light, and for new life. The ritual existed for no one except me and God, and that, I found, was empowering. For the first time in a long time I didn't worry about how I looked or if I was doing "enough". I just followed my intuition and listened for God.
Like chocolate, long naps, sex, and whisky sours, social media is good, if used in intentional moderation that doesn't throw off the balance of the rest of our lives. It should be a tool that we use, not a corporate-run outrage machine that uses us for clicks and buys. Philippians calls the faithful to turn their thoughts towards "whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable". Personally, I find that hard to do when I spend hours a day being fed an inane stream of war crime, advertisement, callout post, wedding pictures, advertisement, human rights violation, cat picture, bad faith political meme, advertisement through my smart phone.
Now, I haven't jumped off the social media bandwagon entirely. In a move I hope my audience will find charmingly meta I’m currently denouncing social media in a social media post, after all. But for now, I'm enjoying being time-rich and having the space to simply notice my emotions, my relationship to space, and my own breath. I've been noticing God a lot more too, not because God wasn't there when I was scrolling or posting, but simply because I was too tapped in to digital white noise to notice.
Yearning to take better notice of the divine already in your midst? Learn to listen with a spiritual direction session with Fratres Dei.
April 1, 2019 | Denver, Colorado
To keep up with what Saint is writing, follow her on Twitter @s_t_gibson or check out her website stgibson.com.
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