But then we reach for another hit. This addiction now plagues Facebook’s entire user base of two billion people, he said. All by design. “You don’t realize it but you are being programmed,” Palihapitiya warned, disavowing the students of the idea that high intelligence and education will immunize from the plague. They don’t.
So what’s the answer?
“You must decide how much of your intellectual independence you’re willing to give,” he said. “I don’t have a good solution. My solution is: I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”
Social-Media Addicts
Sounds good. Sounds simple. Just turn social media off. But of course that’s not how it works. Christians know deeper desires are at work behind the digital addictions. For all the social-media habits that plague our lives, for all the inattention we give to those around us, most of us would never seriously consider deactivating our social platforms (even Palihapitiya keeps an active Facebook account!).
“Social media is a brew of emotionally stimulating drugs we mix for ourselves.”
Social media addicts each of us — we love matching wits in Facebook comments, nesting the perfect GIF into Twitter, or spreading another throwaway selfie on Snapchat. The allure of social media is the desire to be seen, omnisciently seen, if not always affirmed, at least always put in view of others. Smartphones promise to protect us from athazagoraphobia — the fear of being forgotten. So we impulsively connect, from the moment we wake up to the moment we must surrender ourselves to sleep.
All of it conditions our digital behavior to benefit social platforms as they reach for billions of dollars in profit. Our emotions are conditioned — self-conditioned. We do it to ourselves. As one writer put it, “Each social media platform is a drug we self-prescribe and consume in order to regulate our emotional life, and we are constantly experimenting with the cocktail.”
Facing the Silence
Social media is a brew of emotionally stimulating drugs we mix for ourselves. And it means to leave social media, even for a few days or just a couple weeks, is to encounter the harsh reality that we will be un-missed on our absence, un-noticed in our silence, and even un-anticipated upon our return back. To escape social media is to taste the bitter sting of oblivion, a little hint of elderly loneliness or the midlife identity-crisis brought down now into every age demographic.
Stop attempting to be seen in social media and you vanish entirely. We dare not stop. And that’s why the first step away from social media — that first day disconnected — tastes bitter. It tastes bitter because we use the noise of media in our lives to drown out two things we’d rather not face.
Silence and the Self
In his sermon on Psalm 62:1 — “For God alone my soul waits in silence” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer took time to explain the modern fear of silence, and to show how modern man has avoided it by media, a phenomenon operating in late 1920s Germany.
First, he said, we seek new noise to avoid ourselves.
“We flee silence,” Bonhoeffer said. “We race from activity to activity to avoid having to be alone with ourselves for even a moment, to avoid having to look at ourselves in the mirror. We are bored with ourselves, and often the most desperate, wasted hours are those we are forced to spend by ourselves” (Works 10:503).
“We use the noise of media in our lives to drown out the things we’d rather not face.”
We hate it. Silence inevitably forces uncomfortable truths back into our vision. Who we are, who we have become, the good and the bad and the revolting and the boring — all things about our lives, the things we would love to change, the memories and events and the scars we would never expose on social media. In the silence, nothing about us remains hidden; everything bubbles again to the surface. Taking and sharing new selfies is always easier than the fearful unknown of what will emerge if everything becomes silent.
But our fear of quiet solitude exposes something even deeper.
Silence and the Lamb
Repeatedly in Scripture, silence is a demonstration of our steadied faith, a resolved trust in the Redeemer to move and act and deliver. When the temptations and dangers increase, the godly can hush the noisy alarmists around them and reclaim silence.
- “In quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15).
- “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7).
- “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken” (Psalm 62:1–2).
- “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him” (Psalm 62:5).
Silence is confidence in God.
Silence is also a divine invitation. And that’s the deeper modern fear.
“Not only are we afraid of ourselves, of discovering and unmasking ourselves,” Bonhoeffer writes, “but even more we are afraid of God, that he might disturb our aloneness and discover and unmask us, that God might draw us into partnership and do with us whatever he wants. Because we fear such unnerving, lonely encounters with God, we avoid them, avoid even the thought of God lest he suddenly get too close to us. Suddenly having to look into God’s eyes, having to be accountable before him, is too dreadful a notion; our perpetual smile might fade, things might get completely serious in a way to which we are not at all accustomed.”
Fake brittle popularity or God’s serious presence drawn close — what sounds more appealing in the digital age? So we wake up and check our phones immediately in bed.
This anxiety characterizes our entire age. We live in perpetual fear of suddenly being seized and called to task by the infinite and would rather socialize or go to the movies or theater until we are finally carried to our grave, anything rather than having to bear a single minute before God. (Works 10:503)
