by Drew Dyck
Of course email is just the tip of the digital iceberg. There’s also social media. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest (hey, it’s for guys too), Google Plus, and LinkedIn, even though I don’t remember signing up for those last two. Most of these services are accessed through my smartphone, my ever-present help in times of boredom. It continually dings and buzzes and beeps, assuring me that I’m connected and popular and entertained. The other day I got stuck in line at Chipotle for twenty minutes and made a horrifying discovery: I didn’t have my phone with me. I grew uneasy. My hand kept searching my pockets in vain for the glowing device. I was shocked by just how hard it was for me to stand there with nothing to do. I got so desperate I almost resorted to talking to the people around me!
I may be exaggerating a little, but every so often I get a glimpse of my digital dependency (usually when my devices are taken away), and it’s not pretty. And I know I’m not alone. Americans check their phones on average 150 times a day and stare at them for approximately a quarter of their waking hours. I know that any discussion of self-control would be incomplete without addressing this issue.
The church father Justin Martyr named four major challenges to discipleship for the early Christians: sexual immorality, magic, wealth, and ethnic hatred.4 Nearly two thousand years later, what has changed? I don’t know about you, but magic isn’t a major temptation for me. At least not the kind of magic that involves wearing pointy hats and casting spells. But author Andy Crouch noted that our technology makes a decent stand-in for the magic that was so alluring to our spiritual ancestors.5 If you swap technology for magic, we pretty much have the same list today.
So how exactly do our magical technologies impact our self-control? The first way: by shoving every conceivable temptation in our face.
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE
The internet hasn’t created any new temptations. It’s just heightened the ones that were there all along. It’s repackaged them, thrown a fancy new bow on top, and delivered them to your doorstep. It’s made sin more accessible. For example, in the past, getting a hold of pornography was a risky, pride-swallowing enterprise. You had to walk into a store, approach the person behind the counter, and pay money for a dirty magazine—all while hoping that no one you knew witnessed the transaction. (“Well, hello Aunt Trudy. What are you doing here?”)
Now thanks to the internet, sexual acts of every sickening variety are a click away—and available to view in the privacy of your home. I won’t rehash all the staggering statistics about online porn, but one I saw recently hit me hard. Between 2015 and 2017, humans watched a total of one million years of porn—on just one website.6 One million years! What a sad statistic. It would be impossible to quantify the minds warped, the marriages wrecked, by such habits. And on top of the destruction, what a colossal waste of time!
I recently heard the story of one courageous young woman who stood in front of her church to share her online struggle. She wasn’t addicted to porn, but her digital activities had led her into sin. After a bad breakup, she downloaded apps and started to have inappropriate interactions with a number of different men. “When I was having a bad day, instead of turning to God to fulfill me, I went to a dating app. I knew there were going to be 50 messages on there from people telling me how great I am. I became addicted to the attention of strangers.”
When she started dating a nice Christian man, she thought her problems were over. But even after they got married, she felt the pull of those dating apps. She was still using them to send photos and have inappropriate conversations. “My husband was telling me every day that he loved me, that I was beautiful, but I was addicted to the constant messages from others.” Freedom only came once she confessed her problem and made the hard decision to delete all of her dating apps and social media accounts. “I can’t even have a LinkedIn account,” she said. “It’s still a struggle for me,” she confessed. “It’s an everyday choice I have to make, to find my worth in God, to know and believe the promises God has given to me.”
Initially, she assumed her challenge was unique. “Maybe I’m a freak,” she said through tears. “What’s wrong with me? How can I still being doing this? But then I started talking to other young married Christian women and found out that I’m far from alone.”
This isn’t the only kind of temptation the internet amplifies; it offers up a host of other allurements as well. Social media is a veritable minefield for the soul. A few years ago I interviewed a group of pastors about their social media habits. One of the pastors sat silently in the meeting. “How about you?” I finally asked him, searching for eye contact. “Are you on Twitter?”
“Well, I used to be,” he said. “But I don’t do that anymore …”
Turns out he’d become so addicted to Twitter, his friends staged an intervention of sorts. The microblogging platform was draining his time and feeding his ego, so he had to let go, cold turkey.
A writer friend of mine, Brandon Smith, also decided to board the cold turkey train. He had thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter but didn’t like how social media fed his desire for approval. “I’ve often lived day-to-day spending more time looking at ‘likes’ and ‘retweets” than looking my own family in their eyes,” he confessed.7
He also noticed it was souring his view of others. “Social media feeds my propensity to be cynical and contrarian,” he wrote. “Off social media, I’m generally joyful and accepting. On social media, I’m generally annoyed and dismissive.”8
Quitting social media wasn’t an easy decision for Smith. As a writer he realized deleting his accounts would deprive him of a valuable way to reach readers. But Smith concluded that, for him, the spiritual benefits were worth it. “I’m least like Christ when I’m using social media. And I’ve finally decided to take Jesus’s caution seriously, and cut out my own social media eye rather than lust over the approval and acclaim of others (Mark 9:43ff).”9
These experiences may be the extreme, but they show how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have a way of appealing to our worst instincts. Somehow they fuel pride and insecurity at the same time. Even as we puff ourselves up by posting flattering pictures of ourselves and spotlighting our achievements (subtly of course), we feel a pang of envy as we see the latest accomplishment of a friend or colleague. Why don’t I have a house like that? How are her children so perfect? Why did he get that promotion? What am I doing wrong?
Of course a lot of this discontentment and insecurity is based on a mirage. Sure, some people vacation in Tangier and eat sushi on mountaintops, but most of the time their lives aren’t that glamorous. More often they’re in the burbs eating microwaved chicken nuggets and watching reality TV. They’re just choosing to spotlight those moments to make their lives look as desirable as possible to others. The problem, as one pastor puts it, is that “we’re comparing our behind the scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel.”10 And when we do that, we become miserable. Just think of all the sins that stem from unhealthy comparisons: envy, covetousness, greed, and worry. Nothing fuels the comparison game quite like social media.
The internet creates a similar dynamic when it comes to generating conflict. The Bible warns us against having “anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments” (2 Tim. 2:23). That’s often the first commandment you break when going online. There is a lot of solid, thoughtful exchanges out there—but they rarely get the clicks, the shares, the millions of views, the endless scrolls of comments. Powerful algorithms actually favor more divisive exchanges because they drive traffic. Therefore the content that “wins” online draws us in with gleeful promises that so-and-so gets “owned” at the three-minute mark. Or proclaims that one person “destroys” another. Note how it’s never “makes a good point” or even “wins the argument.” No, destroys! C. S. Lewis wrote the following words about hell, but I can’t help think they make for a pretty accurate description for a lot of social media:
We must picture hell as a stat
e where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.11
Equally ubiquitous are the online takedowns and diatribes with click-bait titles that guarantee to overwhelm our outrage threshold. “Your Jaw Will Hit The Ground!” We may laugh at these transparent ploys to get our attention. Yet too often we fall prey to the hyperpolarized, winner-takes-all, the other-side-is-Hitler attitude. We stop conversing and start fighting. Emboldened by the anonymity the internet affords, we end up saying things to strangers we would never utter face to face.
DISTRACTING OURSELVES TO DEATH
There’s another danger lurking online and it has nothing to do with explicit sins like lust, envy, or trolling—yet it’s also devastating to our self-control. It has to do with what constant diversions and entertainment does to us at a neurological level. It turns out living in a Chuck E. Cheese world seriously undermines our ability to concentrate and engage in more demanding intellectual endeavors.
Recently the bestselling Christian author Philip Yancey made a surprising confession: he can’t read anymore. Well, at least he can’t read like he used to. Before describing his “personal crisis,” he shared how he used to read: three books per week with an entire evening dedicated to consuming classics from the likes of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. But something changed. “I am reading many fewer books these days, and even fewer of the kinds of books that require hard work.”12
What happened? In short, the internet.
The internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around. When I read an online article from The Atlantic or The New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.13
I was well aware of this phenomenon before I read Yancey’s confession. I’d read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, a book that explores how the internet fractures our concentration and shrinks our attention spans. I’d also read a sobering study showing that distraction from constant email and text messages resulted in a ten point temporary drop in IQ, more than double the loss of IQ points someone experiences while high on marijuana.14 But somehow reading about Yancey’s experience was especially unnerving. I expect the internet to dumb down those darn Millennials and “Screenagers.” But Yancey is sixty-something, and a brilliant, prolific author. If his mind has been taken out by the internet, what chance do the rest of us have?
I’ve experienced the internet’s powers of distraction in my own life. Earlier I mentioned how challenging it is for me to write. Even when I’m able to carve out time in my busy schedule, the task itself can be excruciating. And the internet hasn’t made that any easier. Even as I sit here tapping out words on my computer, I hear the siren song of the web. I know that I’m just a click away from checking my email or Twitter or watching NBA highlights or reading the news. Mindlessly surfing the web would be such a welcome reprieve from the arduous task of wrestling words into sentences.
ADDICTIVE BY DESIGN
Why is the internet so addictive and distracting?
Because it’s designed to be.
In 2017, the founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker, came out with some candid words about the social media giant he helped create. Most people think of Facebook primarily as a vehicle for reconnecting with old friends and family members. Publicly, Facebook speaks in lofty terms about making the world a better place and fostering community. But Parker said that from the outset, the goal was different: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” According to Parker, “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” was the way to accomplish this feat.
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 … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with.15
I don’t know about you, but I find this admission a little spooky. The reason we get addicted to these platforms is no accident. They are sophisticated tools designed to manipulate our minds. Parker referenced dopamine, which is often called the brain’s “feel-good chemical.” It’s released when you exercise, make a discovery, or accomplish something … or when you do drugs or gamble. In a famous experiment, rats could push a level to receive a dopamine boost. The chemical was so powerful that the rats ignored sex and food to keep getting a dopamine boost. They would even walk across an electrified grid, receiving painful shocks with each step, in order to reach the lever.16
Turns out we’re all a little ratlike when it comes to this powerful neurotransmitter. In one study, researchers used MRI scans to study the brains of teenagers as they used social media. When the teens saw that someone “liked” one of their posts or pictures, the reward circuitry of their brains would light up. Lauran Sherman, the study’s lead author, reported “This is the same group of regions responding when we see pictures of a person we love or when we win money.”17 When the teens saw a large number of likes on photos of themselves, the reward areas of the brain were especially active, motivating them to post more often.
The researchers noted that brains of teens are especially sensitive to rewards, but we are all subject to this dynamic. It explains why when we’re feeling down, we’ll often turn to social media. If someone “likes” or shares one of our posts or pictures, the reward area of our brains are stimulated. Of course, highs never last long, so like gamblers pulling the handle on a slot machine in search of the next payout, we keep hitting “refresh,” hoping for another like or comment. Some platforms have been accused of intentionally withholding “likes” to get users to log in more often.18 Social media platforms are dopamine delivery systems.
We call dopamine the brain’s feel-good chemical, but that’s not quite accurate. Dopamine doesn’t deliver pleasure; it makes you anticipate pleasure. It produces a state of arousal and desire. Dopamine floods your brain when you spot that chocolate cake through the restaurant window or see a sexually alluring image. Dopamine directs your focus toward the desired object and urges you to pursue it. But that feeling of excitement isn’t exactly pleasure. In fact, if you can’t fulfill the desire, it makes you miserable.
Remember the poor rats that kept hitting the lever for more dopamine? Researchers assumed that the dopamine hit must have sent the rats to Cloud 9. After all, they preferred it to even sex and food. But when they conducted a similar experiment with humans, they discovered the truth. Like their rodent counterparts, the human subjects kept hitting the button to receive more dopamine, but to the surprise of researchers they didn’t say it felt good. It was just addictive. And it made them miserable, even as they wanted more.19 This is what psychologist Kelly McGonigal calls “the brain’s big lie,” that we “find it nearly impossible to distinguish the promise of reward from whatever pleasure or payoff we are seeking.”20
Social media has capitalized on this deception. It doesn’t leave you content and satiated. Often it leaves you feeling disconnected. After a couple of hours on social media, you don’t feel happy or satisfied.
Another former Facebook executive stepped forward recently to spill the beans about Facebook’s impact. He was even more condemnatory than Parker:
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works…. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in the short term—signals, hearts, likes, thumbs up—and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity
that’s short-term and leaves you even more … vacant and empty before you did it.”21
That description rings true with me. Even if you manage to achieve a “fake brittle popularity” on social media, it often leaves you feeling “vacant and empty.” And it’s designed to leave you that way—it’s what ensures you’ll come back for more.
I’m not saying companies like Facebook and Twitter are sinister organizations bent on ruining the world. They’re just doing what companies do—trying to maximize value for their shareholders by delivering audiences to advertisers. But it’s worth noting that their ability to accomplish these goals involves capturing as much of your time and attention as possible. Google has taken the quest for our attention to absurd new heights. Beginning in the early 2000s, they pioneered A/B testing that strained even the patience of their engineers. They would test as many as forty-one shades of blue on their homepage to see which color encouraged greater engagement with their site.22
These are the lengths tech companies are going to grab and keep your attention. And it’s unprecedented. For the first time in history, there are geniuses armed with limitless funds, mountains of data, powerful algorithms, and a profound understanding of human psychology. Their sole purpose is to steal as much of your time as possible. You’ve been warned.
THE TOLL ON YOUR SOUL
This constant distraction takes a heavy toll on your spiritual life. The internet isn’t just after your brain; it wants your soul too.
When we talk about sin, we usually focus on understanding temptation. And for good reason: knowing your vulnerabilities is vital. It enables you to guard against enticements to which you’re uniquely vulnerable. An alcoholic shouldn’t hang out in bars. The shopping addict should avoid malls—and Amazon.com.