I spent 12 years addicted to Facebook. It started innocently enough when I was in my mid-twenties. I reconnected with friends from my time in the Navy and high school, as well as people in my local community. I was finishing up my undergraduate degree, and everyone was jumping on the latest social media bandwagon. I all too happily jumped on it too.
It was also during this time that I started volunteering in politics. This eventually led me to an internship at the conservative Washington, DC-based think-tank, The Heritage Foundation. To work in politics, social media engagement was expected. My strong-willed personality coupled with an intense—albeit too intense—sense of justice made the combination of social media and politics intoxicating.
Social media became a central part of my day. I spent hours posting, commenting, and sharing information. I initially told myself that it was a tool for sharing news and political commentary, which could justify the amount of time I was feeding the machine. It also served as a camera reel of my “greatest hits,” as I posted countless photos and status updates on the most mundane aspects of my life. Every thought needed to be shared. Every event I attended, celebration, hike, and activity had to be posted.
By the time I reverted to the Catholic Church, got married, and had my daughter, I was a full-on addict. After years of work, I became a stay-at-home mom. I was confronted with a level of isolation and loneliness that I wasn’t prepared to experience.
Moms no longer live in close-knit communities where they help one another with children and tasks of the day. In my 13 years as a stay-at-home mom, there have been many weeks when I have not spoken to another adult, especially in the early years of marriage, when my husband was constantly on the road. Even with regular daily Mass attendance, where so many people rush out the door afterwards to return to work or tasks for the day, I wouldn’t engage in conversation with other adults.
Facebook became the all-consuming answer to my loneliness and isolation. It served as an outlet for my intellectual interests and community. In my posting, I started to move further and further away from secular politics as my focus shifted to my Catholic Faith. In actuality, I gave up secular politics for Church politics. I spent hours debating with people. I lost friends over moral issues. I spent hours scrolling while my flesh and blood daughter—the only child my husband and I have been given on this side of eternity—vied for my attention.
My husband begged me to give it up. He saw what it would do to my mood. He saw the dark grip I was trapped in and how the justifications for “connectivity” and “combating loneliness” were lies I was telling myself to justify the addiction. I convinced myself that the people I was friends with on Facebook were real friends.
But what makes a real friend? A friend is someone we can rely on. They are present to us in joys and sorrows. Social media is made for “fair weather friends.” It is easy to ignore the crosses and afflictions of others when they are pixels on a screen. Friendship requires sacrifice. It also requires vulnerability and intimacy, including allowing people to tell us when we are wrong or if certain personality traits or sins are harmful. Friendship from a Christian perspective is meant to help us grow in holiness. Being in a relationship also requires time and commitment. This means that true friendship requires our bodily presence for it to deepen and grow.
One of the greater dangers of social media and the idea that it “connects us” is that by its very nature, virtual communication is dualistic. It separates our body and mind from the nature of communion and communities. We have been convinced for well over a decade that we are more connected than ever, but our local communities and the violent divisions plaguing our society demonstrate otherwise.
The further we move away from our embodied immortal nature, the further we move away from one another. Virtual reality is severing our grasp on true reality, and it is leading us to be more selfish, indifferent, or outright hostile to others. Catholic social media often casts more darkness than light. This virtual reality is leading us to dehumanize one another because it is divorced from our bodily presence, which breaks into our lives in a way images on a screen cannot. We cannot look another person in the eye and say the same things we can behind a keyboard.
We are body and soul. Anything that divides our nature runs the risk of harming us. Social media has in many ways made us much lazier in our relationships. We convince ourselves that using a virtual meeting place is the same thing as being present to people. Instead, it allows us to put very little effort into relationships. We don’t have to get in our car and drive across town to meet. We don’t have to look into the eyes of someone who is suffering and battle through the awkward and difficult aspects of walking with other people.
Virtual relationships don’t require us to confront our own selfishness and sinfulness because we can hide behind a screen. We can present ourselves in a superficial manner. True relationships make us confront ourselves and show us how we need to grow. On social media we can remain at virtual arm’s length by offering our distant thoughts and prayers without costing us much of anything. We can protect ourselves from anything that doesn’t feel good or placate our ego. This means that our relationships ultimately are about satiating our own personal gratification, which is the antithesis of Christian love.
I know all of this because social media made me egotistical. It convinced me that every thought I had needed to be shared. That somehow my “clever” insights and opinions—all of them—mattered. My relationships became a solely intellectual endeavor that I could turn off and on at will. There was no sacrifice on my part. Instead, I could enjoy endless dopamine hits or “righteous” anger at those who disagreed with me. The lies I told myself about the community I formed on Facebook were cover for deeply imbedded deadly sins of pride and anger.
More than anything, my social media addiction turned me away from God. I was posting endlessly about the Catholic Faith, but I was not doing the one thing necessary. I was not seeking the answer to my loneliness in intimate union with Him. Instead, I was selfishly seeking the approval of others through their likes and agreement. I put my ultimate happiness for each day into the hands of well-meaning people who did not actually love me.
How could they? They didn’t know me. The Lord wanted to enter the lonely aching places within me, but I was too fixated on my smartphone to notice. He could not penetrate the depths of my heart because I had relegated him to the realm of ideas and intellect. I placed my self-worth into the hands of strangers rather than the pierced, loving hands of Christ.
I suspect, much like myself back then, that many people who have convinced themselves that social media is authentic community, are terrified to come up against the reality that most of their friends list is filled with people who do not love them in any meaningful way. Love requires intimate knowledge of the other and physical presence to grow because it must be sacrificial.
There are times when separations occur, such as war time or when people move away, but other than familial relationships, most friendships don’t last physical separation. This is a reality of our God-given nature. Deep relationships require a sharing of hearts, time, physical presence, sacrifice, and a willingness to enter dark places together. Joy comes within relationships precisely in the measure we are willing to share our entire selves with one another. This is the same reason why social media does so much damage to our relationship with Christ. We don’t give Him enough time and attention. We would rather scroll endlessly on social media.
The Lord, my husband, and my daughter finally broke through in 2020. While the world was reeling from COVID and spending more and more time in virtual isolation, the Lord called me out of it. I deleted Facebook and Instagram and never looked back. My life is better for it. The Lord used my addiction to show me the authentic communion He desires with me and what He desires for each one of us. Prayer, not social media, brings healing and peace.
As the world goes deeper and deeper into dangerous terrain through artificial intelligence and transhumanism, we need to start confronting the realities of what social media and other forms of communication are doing to our God-given human nature and how they impact our growth in holiness. Catholics need to come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and how our technocratic society is driving us further and further away from God and our nature.
We know the good by its fruits. People are more addicted, lonelier, depressed, anxious, and suicidal. We are more polarized and divided, even to the point of violence. Something very serious is going on. We need to take a brutally honest and hard look at ourselves and consider if social media is leading us away from Christ and others. Does it make us lazier in relationships? Do we dehumanize others? Is social media a cover for pride and anger?
We must be willing to die-to-self by allowing Christ to tear down our virtual kingdoms that so often are nothing more than extensions of our disordered ego. The world desperately needs our witness and rejection of the lies of dualism. The world needs our bodily presence. To be present in a broken world, we need to dwell in the presence of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus where the deep longing to be loved is satisfied.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
