preface
“The young are born to the human condition more than to their time, and they face mainly the same trials and obligations as their elders have faced.”
— Wendell Berry
No one chooses when they live, which means that each generation of young people is shaped by innovations and events far beyond their control. For whatever reason, we weren’t tasked with living through the Great Depression, the arrival of the atomic age, or the Vietnam War protests, but rather the introduction of social media.
This means that social media, as Wendell Berry explains in the quote above, is the setting where young people today wrestle with the human condition and work through the enduring trials and obligations of life.
Like most young people, I welcomed social media into my life with open arms and enjoyed using it. But as I spent more and more time on social media, things began to change. I found myself struggling in unexpected ways, as I went through the emotional ups and downs of trying to get likes and gain followers.
While this was happening, I had an apartment cleaning business in New York City. As I cleaned apartments, I’d fill the time by listening to sermons and reflecting on them. One day, as I finished cleaning another apartment, it dawned on me: the gospel applications from the sermons that I was listening to addressed the exact issues that I was struggling with on social media.
Through these sermons, God used the gospel to change my heart and transform how I used social media. He showed me that I needed to look to Him, and not social media, for my satisfaction in life.
As I did this, I found myself using social media differently, in ways that were both healthier for me and more honoring to God. So that’s why I wrote this book, to show you how the gospel can change your heart and transform how you use social media.
To do this, we need to see how we’re using social media to try to replace God and flourish on our own. This is why I’ve built this book around a core idea. I believe that...
Social media wasn’t a random innovation that just happened to become popular. Instead, social media has taken over our lives because it promises to give you what your heart needs to thrive, namely approval, identity, meaning, purpose, and significance.
You were created by God to get these desires fulfilled by Him, but since you live in a culture that no longer believes in God, you’ve turned to social media to replace Him and solve your heart’s longings on your own. This causes you to use social media, something that can be good, in ways that damage your life and relationships.
As you go through this book, each chapter will help you see a different way that you’re using social media to replace God. After we look at the root cause of our social media problems in the introduction…
Chapters 1-5 will explore what happens when we try to use social media to solve our searches for approval, identity, meaning, purpose, and significance on our own.
Chapters 6 and 7 will look at the two ways we pursue these searches on social media, either through being cool or being beautiful.
Chapters 8-11 will examine the four major problems that flow out of using social media to replace God: the problems of perfectionism, pride, comparison, and envy.
Each chapter will use insights from different sociologists, philosophers, historians, pastors, and artists to dig into your life so you can understand what’s going on in your heart when you use social media.
We’ll then see how the gospel can solve your issues with social media and transform you into the kind of person who can use social media in a healthy, gospel-saturated way.
Through all of this, I hope that the gospel will change your heart and bring new life to your social media practices. I believe that if you look to God to satisfy the longings of your heart, then social media can be a helpful tool for your good and His glory.