Early in the semester, the campus ministry priest and I made the decision to move our outreach away from a social media focus and towards physical presence and in-person social engagements.
Many were convinced that to build successful engagement we needed to be on people’s Tik Tok and Instagram feeds, vying for the attention of our college students. I knew from keeping up with our Instagram page that we weren’t getting much engagement there, and devoting more time and resources towards it would be a waste. So we nudged them away from that focus, and we’re already seeing its positive impact in our students.
Instead of wasting hours in Canva designing attractive social media posts, we switched to using social media only to post upcoming events and occasional photos from them. We started encouraging our students to eat together after Mass and to invite others to do so. We asked them to focus on face-to-face engagement with classmates rather than the hands-off approach that is social media. We asked them to walk around the cafeteria in order to invite students personally to our events.
As time has gone on, I have started seeing students build relationships that didn’t blossom last semester. They knew each other but barely spoke. Some of the guys who went on fall retreat started hanging out on their own. By the end, they were sitting on campus eating dinner together conversing energetically on a wide range of topics with a smattering of Catholic theology thrown in. It was remarkable. It was truly human.
I have felt the fracturing of our culture through social media for years. Writers like Paul Kingsnorth have helped me understand what I feel in my bones about what this technocratic age is doing to us.
I walked by two women on the Greenway the other day talking about someone they were “friends with on Facebook.” That is how they described this friend. What this really means is they are digital acquaintances. There is very little investment in the relationship. If we are honest with ourselves, we would start to see that social media has made our relationships more and more shallow. When I left Facebook, not a single person kept up with me. I don’t hold this against them. It’s the nature of the system.
We spend a lot of time trying to reach young people through constant social media engagement. But what this does is “feed the Machine,” to use Kingsnorth’s, and many other writers’, image for technology. Rather than spending our time trying to build meaningful relationships, we settle for the easier path of convincing ourselves that “Likes” and “Comments” are building community. If this was true, young people would not be as depressed, anxious, and suicidal as they are at present.
As relationships grow with my students, I can see anxiety decreasing and joy increasing. They no longer feel like a cog in a disincarnate reality; instead, they feel connected to brothers and sisters in Christ. They are seen in their full humanity rather than being dehumanized by technologies that have been created to atomize and isolate them.
These relationships are the opposite of “bed rot.” My students taught me this term. It is when someone spends hours or days in their bed scrolling on social media. It is so bad that they may not even leave to eat. This fractures human beings. It leaves us isolated, anxious, and afraid. Depending on the algorithm, young people are inundated with news of violence, wars, injustices, and the evils of this world. Their young brains—and any brain—simply cannot handle the onslaught, so they no longer live in reality. They live in an algorithm-driven unreality in the virtual world.
One of the most important answers to what ails young people, and all people, is to reclaim a true sense of community. I have believed for years that social media is an inversion of what the Mystical Body is supposed to be. We are not made for disincarnate, technological relationships predicated on the dualist experiment. We are body and soul. We are made for communion as flesh-and-blood human beings. We are meant to look into the eyes of others. To gaze upon and listen to the laughter of another and to witness their tears and grief. A screen doesn’t allow us to do this, which is why so many people are desensitized to the sufferings of others.
If the Church wants to reach into the lives of suicidal, depressed, and anxious young people, then we must stop blindly following our technocratic culture. Instead, we must start living as Catholics who understand the depths of human nature—how our physical bodies united to our rational, immortal souls are essential in building friendships and community. We must reach into the heart of the isolation many young people—and all people—are experiencing in this confusing, dizzying age. We must help them shutoff their smartphones, or at least put them down for a while.
To reach people, we must resist the temptation to follow along with the zeitgeist. The saints knew how to read the signs of the times to draw lines in the sand or to abandon altogether harmful projects. We need to draw a hard line in the sand when it comes to accepting that human relationships flourish in digital spaces. Superficial relationships, including those based on hours of theological discussion, populate social media. It is when we can physically and spiritually walk with another that true human relationships form.
I’m watching anxious people come out of their shells because they are being taught what real relationships look like. I would rather have a small group of dedicated students who enjoy praying and spending time together than thousands or millions of Tik Tok followers. One is richly leading people to grow as disciples of the Lord, while the other is a distraction from prayer, close relationships, and the spiritual life.
We are not required to go along with every movement that comes along. In fact, the Church is meant to prudently discern if a way of living is good for us or not. There has been very little prayerful discernment about the digital world and how much it is ripping body and soul apart. The terrible fruits are evident in the mental health of young people.
It’s time to return to authentic human relationships. We need to live the Church’s teachings on solidarity, subsidiarity, and human nature. It’s time for us as a Church to abandon the clarion call of constant “digital communion” in order to build up the Mystical Body in a rich, fruitful manner.
Countless young people are trapped by the glowing screen of their smartphone. What they need is a reason to put them down in order to look into the smiling face of a brother or sister in Christ who can lead them to meaningful relationships grounded in the Lord and in freedom from a disincarnate digital world.
