Your Interior Life Hates Facebook -Part I

We’re called to sanctify ourselves and the world around us through our relationships with God (the first great commandment) and our neighbor (the second great commandment).  We do this first by growing our interior life (through a relationship with God) so that we can best engage in our human relationships through our exterior activities.  Mental prayer (meditation and contemplation) is an indispensable component of our relationship with God.

The BIG Issues

A big problem we all face with mental prayer is our brain.  We distinguish our brain (gray squishy stuff) from our mind (with its spiritual powers of intellect and will).  Part and parcel with Homo Sapiens is opposable thumbs, walking upright, and having extremely distractable brains.  We are naturally pulled hither and yon by random thoughts, memories, and imaginings.

A major part of our spiritual battle in this life is to discipline our lower nature (emotions, memory, imagination, and instincts) with our higher spiritual powers – all by God’s grace.  We are called to carefully filter what we allow in our brain so that we are “not conformed to this age, but transformed by the renewal of our mind.”  If we don’t watch gratuitous R-rated movies, we don’t have R-rated images and vulgarity feeding our imagination.  If we don’t indulge in gossip we’re not tempted to reflect back and savor petty details.  It’s no mystery how this works, but that doesn’t make the battle any easier.

Rather than helping us in this all-important battle, most of social media (and secular media in general) is like a 24-hour cruise ship buffet of junk food laced with strychnine and sprinkled with crack cocaine; tasty, addictive, and spiritually deadly.

Not only does social media degrade the quality of our mental prayer, it also works to diminish, demean, and trivialize our relationships with God and neighbor.

And that is why our interior life hates Facebook (and most all social media).

What is in a Word?

Titles are meant to be eye-catching and the title of this article is no different.  But is it hyperbole?

It hinges on that volatile word – hate.

Hate can be meant in a nuanced way, as in “whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  We are certainly meant to love our life (it is a gift from God).  St. John Chrysostom teaches that we hate any disordered aspect of our life that separates us from God, and also that when we learn to look heavenwards and see how good heaven is, that we despise this life in comparison.

Hate can also mean hate as in toast that is dropped butter-side down.  I hate that.  There is nothing good or redeeming about it; there is no spiritual nuance (yes, I can “offer it up”, but I still hate it as I do so!)

Along the spectrum from toast-hate to hate-anything-that-separates-you-from-God hate, social media is 95% – 99% toast hate.  There is virtually nothing loveable, fruitful, or redeeming about social media.

The main point is this – whether you know it or not, your interior life hates social media with a deep, abiding, well-founded, visceral loathing.

As St. Paul teaches, our spirit expresses itself through groanings that we may not perceive.  In fact, Paul says they are “inexpressible” groanings.  Well, for kicks, let’s try to express them.  Permit me to set the table…

Imagine a special occasion, like your Instagram account just hit 1,000 likes.  You splurge by going to your favorite steak house for dinner.

You start with Ceasar salad.  Just right.  The romaine hearts nicely chilled; crisp and tender at the same time.  And the dressing tangy and creamy.  You order a wonderful Zinfandel – mouthwatering and literally crafted to go with steak as if someone whispered “angus” to the grapes as they grew.  Then comes the piece de resistance.  A perfection of medium-rare goodness, with the outside dark and caramelized just so.  You ease your fork into what will be your first mouthful and it separates so easily you don’t even feel the knife slide through it.  The anticipation is unbearable, and you quickly direct the prize to your mouth and take in that first marvelous taste.  Mmmm.  Smooth, rich, tender, and … moving?   You look down to see the writhing and slithering awfulness of maggots oozing out of the steak where you sliced into it – wriggling blindly in the liquid on the plate.  You can hear them too, “squelch, thlack, glutk”.   As you eject the contents of your mouth a howl rises up from deep within you – as it erupts from your mouth glass shatters and outside small animals drop dead (to paraphrase Stephen King).

And there we go.  A small taste of the “inexpressible groanings” social media causes in your soul.

If, for the rest of your life, you have the unbidden image of maggots writhing on your dinner plate whenever you hear the term “social media” – well, think of that as a bonus.

Many of you reading this are probably way ahead of me regarding social media.  In which case may this article serve to affirm you and perhaps provide additional talking points to share with others.

If you are of the mind that social media isn’t so bad – well, please read on and keep an open mind.  Can a few legitimate cases be made for the use of social media?  Yes, and we’ll take a look at those.  But am I going to take the wishy-washy view that “ok, you can dabble with it, but only if you play nice?”  I hope not.  I’m not here to leave you in that phony comfort zone, you’re too important.  And, after all, I’m the guy who brings the maggots.  So let’s start with those.

How Social Media Damages Your Brain

Social media’s evils are legion.  Here we are going to focus on how it damages your brain.  As fate would have it, Netflix got the ball rolling with a recent documentary titled “The Social Dilemma.”  It comes with this caption: “This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.”

I did not watch the documentary because it was produced by Netflix and as we’ve learned from their horrifying “Cuties”, they have a fetish for exploiting young girls.  But the docudrama’s caption says it all.

On a side note – the big tech companies are going to position themselves as white knights who will charge in and save us from the dangers of social media.  There are words for that.  They rhyme with Munchausen and Stockholm.

Getting back to the maggots, let’s look at the now-familiar issues of addiction and dopamine.  Here’s Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, from a 2017 interview, telling how social media is designed to be addictive:

“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?  …  And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments.  It’s a social-validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

There is also a naturally egotistical and antisocial bias that develops and undermines the “social” aspect of social media.  Here’s a representative quote from associate professor of psychology and neuroscience Sabrina Grondhuis:  “We wind up being in an echo chamber where we just end up feeding back on what we already know. We call that confirmation bias also because we are just looking for things to confirm our existing beliefs instead of trying to go out to see other viewpoints and have that back-and-forth dialogue …   So what ultimately winds up happening is we wind up believing that way more people agree with us and are consistent with what our own beliefs are than what is true in actual reality.”

Here’s an interesting take on the intersection of egocentrism and dopamine: “Social media creates an almost entirely ego-centric culture, and everything about the culture just continues to feed it. In conversations with other people, we are likely to talk about ourselves 30-40% of the time, whereas when we’re using social media websites that number jumps to 80%. Add in constant stimulation in the form of ‘likes’, ‘followers’, ‘shares’, ‘comments’ and the dopamine just keeps increasing until we’re drowning in a sea of feel-good hormones generated entirely by our egocentric Internet culture.”

Much more can be said about the ills of social media, and we’ll return to that in Part II.

Social Media and Your Interior Life

Now let’s look closer at the potential negative effects of social media on your interior life, which is to say your relationship with God, your relationship with yourself, and how you process your relationships with others.  Books could be written on this, we’ll just touch on some of the low points.

Our Relationship with Ourself

In “Lift Up Your Heart”, a magnificent treatise on the intersection of spirituality and psychology, Fulton Sheen defines the evolution of interior life as first centered on our ego (our false self), then centered on the “I” (our true self, our God-given personality), and ultimately centered on God and making His will our will.  These equate to the three ages of the interior life – purgative, illuminative and unitive.  As we detach from the flesh and the world, we extinguish our ego.  As we attach to God, we more and more mold ourselves to his divine image – “it is no longer I that live, but God within me.”

By and large, social media opposes this transformation from ego to “I” to God-centered living.

Because it is immersive, consuming, and saturated with all elements of vice, social media zeros in on our root sin (also referred to as our core wound or predominant fault), drags us down to our ego-level, and traps us there.

Just pick your root sin.  Sloth? – social media provides endless entertainment and distractions from the God-given work we are meant to be doing.  Vanity? – post the most alluring picture of yourself and check out all those likes, upvotes, and retweets.  Pride? – you are so much better than that dud on Facebook.  Lust? – need I go on…

And social media distorts our image of ourself, because of artificial comparisons with others and our efforts to manipulate the image we present to the world.  Which brings us to our next point.

Relationships with Others

Most all our social media interactions are artificial partly because it is almost impossible to prevent pride and vanity from entering into the equation with social media.  Do we present our “true self” to the world?  No.  We work hard to select just the right photo and selectively choose the facets of ourselves and the words that we share.  To be certain, we should be very selective about what we share online – but most often it’s a matter of pride and vanity to look as good as we can rather than prudence to avoid inappropriate social interactions.

Likewise, the communications that we receive through social media can be very harmful.  Because the human element is lost in social media, people post things they would never say face-to-face.  Criticism can be quick and cruel.  Or, what was meant as a benign remark might instead come across as insensitive and cutting because it lacks all of the other human, nonverbal cues (emoji’s don’t cut it…).

And we must contend with the innate reaction we have to social media feedback in the forms of likes, dislikes, upvotes, downvotes, and retweets.  We simply can’t help but attach some of our self-esteem on whether we get as many likes on our latest post as we did on the one before it – or as many as our peers seem to rack up.

And, of course, social media steals time from authentic, in-person relationships.

Relationship with God

Not only does social media rob us of time spent with others, it robs us of time spent with God.  It fractures and distracts our brain so that our ability to enter into deep meditative prayer is severely inhibited if and when we do carve out time for God.

And we come to God with a brain that is polluted and conditioned by social media.  Polluted by all the objectionable images and messages that slither in with even “good” social media.  And conditioned by social media’s manipulation of the pleasure and reward mechanisms in our brain.

It is not for nothing at that in his letter to the Philippians (chapter 4) St. Paul urges us to train our minds on “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  We will find precious little to fit that bill on social media.  So, we should look elsewhere, because St. Paul continues that when we do, “Then the God of peace will be with you.”

In Part II we will test some of the common justifications for using social media and rules of engagement to protect our soul if and when we do enter the social media jungle.