The Olympics are coming to close, and the talk of the global town is on the shocking dropout of Simone Biles. Flashback to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro where she became the first female U.S. gymnast to win four gold medals at a single Games, This year, in Tokyo, she was set to dominate the competition; think Michael Jordan in his prime taking on a middle school B team.
But, that didn’t happen.
Biles pulled out of the competition and her reason for doing so flirts with the diabolical. When asked for an explanation for her withdrawal, she said, “As soon as I step on the mat it’s just me and my head… dealing with demons in my head (…) I have to do what’s right for me and focus on my sanity and not compromise my health and my well-being.” She later went on to say she felt like “the weight of the world” was on her shoulders.
Biles has 6.7 million Instagram followers, 1.6 million on Twitter, and another 1.5 million on Facebook. With a simple scroll through those feeds with her chalked up finger, she surely felt trapped; anyone with such a large online following would feel that pressure. It’s enough to plant several seeds of doubt in your head.
That’s what demons do.
Demons are infiltrating the Olympics, and Biles isn’t the first to notice it.
Suni Lee, the eventual All-Around Gold medalist from the U.S., recognized the demons too, but she called them by a different name – social media.
After rising to an all-time high after winning the All-Around events, Lee took to the uneven bars, an event she was heavily favored to win, and managed to win the bronze. After her disappointing finish, she told Insider that she “got distracted and lost focus a little bit when I won the gold medal.” She further explained that it was her massive growth in her social media audiences (1 million followers in one weekend!) that overcame her focus.
Demonic activity is present wherever there is hope. It doesn’t matter if you are a chiseled Olympian seeking gold in Tokyo or a withered widower seeking holiness in an adoration chapel,if you seek to better yourself, the demons are coming for you to distract, divide, and destroy that hope.
Your device (which shares the same latin root word as, you guessed it, demon), is keeping you from the perfection you desire.
To be clear, as I mentioned in my book Detached, “Your phone isn’t the devil. On the contrary, your phone has an immense potential for good, just as it has an equally immense potential for bad. Everything hinges on your ability to contemplate the good that can be produced through the use of your phone. The thing itself isn’t the issue. It is how you choose to use it that makes screen time either a holy encounter or a self-destructive behavior.
Wereached a moment in human history where our digital lives intertwine dangerously into real life. If athletes are recognizing the negative effects of our devices and loosing out on gold medals, maybe we should call out our own screen addictions before we miss out not only on our current lives, but the eternal life to come.
Time to do a digital detox? Please consider getting a copy of my award-winning book, Detached: Put Your Phone in Your Place, a 21 day retreat from your screens.
On Dec. 4th, I took my own advice and started a 21-day social media fast. I know the title of this post seems quite lacking, so much so you are probably thinking “What could you possibly have learned in only 10 days of fasting from something so trivial as social media?”
Actually, a lot.
1. So. Much. Free. Time.
I haven’t completed a social media fast since 2018 when my book Detached came out. In the past two years, but especially during quarantine (and those baby nap 1up moments), I’ve been glued to my phone in a way that led to absolute zero in work/home/creative efficiency. I put out a LOT of content, but man did it suck. Why? Because I sacrificed my contemplation time for what I like to call death scrolling, which is defined as “the mindless act of viewing and/or creating content that has little (if any) positive effect on the soul.”
In 10 days, I’ve eliminated that deluge of spiritual digress and rediscovered pockets of silent, uninterrupted moments of deep connection with myself, creation, and God Himself. As a result, I’ve learned to appreciate this newfound free time that I was so quick to sacrifice to my screens.
2. A Return to Blogging
It’s been a LONG time since I have been mentally able to blog. I found the practice to be a waste of time because, as I thought, “Why write blog posts when I could be spending that time writing something lasting, like a book?”
To a certain degree, I still believe this to be true; books are more important to me than blog posts because they will continue on after I die. This blog will last until my annual payment to my server host runs dry, and then it will disappear.
During this time, however, I realized that a blog does, indeed, have value, a value I hope to discover more perfectly as I become more proficient and writing them.
3. First Movie in Months
I love movies almost as much as my wife does. Here’s the rub, our youngest was born in August and since then, my wife and I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and watch them. We’d start one, but inevitably either the newborn or one of her four siblings would need us. Or, if we managed to get the kiddos to bed early, we’d find ourselves asleep 20 minutes into whatever we were trying to watch.
What does that have to do with social media? Everything.
If every free moment of your day is filled with social media, you forget to do the little things that can give you bigger time gaps later in the day. For example, instead of picking up the living room or doing a load of laundry, you find yourself on Twitter ignoring those responsibilities until the final moments of your day, moments in which you should be relaxing. So, you stay up later than you wanted to and you no longer have that hour-long block you thought you were going to have because you now have to do the thing you couldn’t while you were death scrolling earlier.
4. Schedule Redesign
After our first child was born a decade ago, I quickly discovered that any projects I had on the docket after returning from the hospital with the new edition would have to be left on said docket. I would give myself an ample 18 months before I started anything new.
Usually, I’d find a way to work anyway. I’d find time in the peripheries of life: during my lunch break, waking up an hour earlier, staying up an extra hour before going to bed, etc.
Now, with even less free time, the social media fast has taught me that even my periphery time is disappearing. Sleep has become more important now than it was 10 years ago and consequently, so has physical health. That meant that I needed to prioritize my time into a new schedule to ensure that I can still do my creative work while doing *motions with arms* everything else.
5. 1K a Day
One of the priorities that surged above everything that wasn’t my family or my job was the need to write one thousand words every day. Writing is my means of making sense of the world. The more creative the writing session, the more clarity I derive from the act.
Social media created an outlet for me to write creatively across several different platforms, but each required that I sacrifice something to appease their algorithms. The restrictions of character count totals, pictures, videos, etc. made 1k/day solely on their timelines unattainable.
Now that it’s just me, my story, and the word document, 1k is easily attained during my 30 minute lunch break.
And that’s all I need to feel satisfied.
6. Became a Plotter
As a writer of fiction, you’re either a pantster (no planning, just writing the story points as they come- by the seat of your pants) or a plotter (so much planning). I wrote my first novel as a pantser and loved every minute of it (yes, even the edits!) One of the primary reasons I pantsed that novel was because I wanted to have enough mental freedom to build social media content as I wrote it. I succeeded, but the duality of thought that I had to accomplish likely made my novel slightly worse than it could have been (but don’t worry, I caught the pitfalls in the edits and rose them up like Christ on Easter Sunday).
Without social media, I began the process of planning my second novel it act by act. I’m finding that plotting has made me an even more efficient and lucid writer, but alas, it does require more time at the forefront, time I would typically be using to build social media content.
Will I last as a plotter once this 21 day social media is finished? I sure hope so. Will my novels be better for it? Ditto.
7. Hugs
Now that my hands aren’t connected in a closed circle with my phone as the lynchpin, I can open my arms wide to the physical affection of my wife and children. Not that I denied them cuddles while I was on social media, there’s just more opportunities to do so without an otherwise occupied mind.
8. Less Stress
I’m going to be perfectly transparent here: I work a full-time job as a public school teacher and a part-time job as a graphic designer/web developer. Look, I get it, given the requirements of the first job alone I should be questioning my sanity for having taken the other one. The thing is I could use the money and I have a soft spot in my heart for my boss of job #2.
That being said, there’s a need for all of us (whether we’re working or not) to fill our free time with something that will revive us, something that gives us energy. Too many people fill that time with social media and they find that it has the opposite effect that they intended. They set out to “relax” or to be “entertained,” by their screens, but in reality, their minds are working in the same capacity as it would when trying to solve an advanced math problem. The result: higher stress levels.
Now that I’m off social media (and gaming), my mind has the freedom to get lost in thought or, if it wants, to shut down completely for a moment. This makes life less stressful and more enjoyable.
9. Spiritual Insights
When I was a kid, I had a poster of a baby deer hanging in my room. Beside the resting fawn, the following words were written: “God speaks to us in the silence of our hearts.” In 1995, I actually had the ability to lay on my bed and stare at the peaceful scene and contemplate the essence of the words in the actual silence of my heart.
In 2020, I can barely remain strewn across my bed for 30 seconds before I feel the need to check my email and notifications.
For ten days, however, I’ve recalled that poster in more than a few of my quiet moments with God. Sometimes I’m lost in a book I picked up (I haven’t read a real, physical book since June). Other times it’s in an episode of Ninjago I’m watching with all five of my kids laying across me on the couch. Still others, it’s in the middle of the night after a long day with a fussy baby who won’t go to sleep.
10. New Me
I’m really enjoying my time off social media. I’m a better person. I’m a more efficient creator. I’m more attuned to the needs of my family, students, and self.
I’m contemplating a total redesign of my online habits.
If Thomas Aquinas was alive today, what do you suppose he would think about our use of social media?
As you know, I’m a huge Thomas fan. I’m also a big proponent AND critic of tech use when it comes to advancing ourselves spiritually. So, I figured the Angelic Doctor wouldn’t mind if I stole his via negativa strategy to lay out the arguments of how social media affects the soul.
This was a TON of fun to write.
Aquinas on Social Media’s Effect on the Soul
Secunda Tertia Pars
Question 91
Article 1. Whether social media is good for the soul
Objection 1. It would seem that social media harms the soul due to its innate temptation toward narcissism on behalf of the soul that uses it. Accounts are opened willfully through the use of one’s intellect and posts are curated to provide an audience only the positive actualizations that befit one’s progress toward attaining “likes” and “followers.”
Objection 2. Such platforms create within one’s soul a higher degree of digital connectivity with other users leaving access to real-world communities ignored and, to a certain extent, avoidable. This occurring because the social media user prefers their curated digital communities over the flesh-and-blood connections, partly because of the ease that social media provides them and partly because they lack the social skills to flourish in an actual one-on-one interaction with other human beings.
Objection 3. Further, social media is said to be addictive by nature. Its constantly streaming colors and sounds appeal to the senses and create within the soul a mental dependency which overcomes the agent intellect and produces behavioral addictions based on social cravings and communal acceptance.
Objection 4. Social media is the primary source of communication for human life. Under the guise of being the most efficient, progressive, and easy way to advance ideas, humanity has degraded oration and intercommunicative operations as secondary means to articulating present realities.
On the contrary, It is written “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks” (Lk. 6:45).
I answer that, social media use and, consequently, those who use it are able to garner from it sufficient meritorious value if governed by the virtues of prudence and temperance. According to Pius VI, “The Church recognizes that these media, if properly utilized, can be of great service to mankind, since they greatly contribute to men’s entertainment and instruction as well as to the spread and support of the Kingdom of God,” and “the Church recognizes, too, that men can employ these media contrary to the plan of the Creator and to their own loss” (Inter Mirifica).
It holds then, that social media can and should be used as a unique tool to advance personal sanctification through the intake and production of content that is suitable to actualize one’s state from one potentiality to another of a higher degree. Hence, the use of social media, and by cross-activity with other platforms within the Internet, the soul can grow in knowledge, relationships, and evangelistic zeal when the content is proportioned to advance the souls sanctity.
But, one must be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mat. 10:16) when using such tools. Constant and consistent reflection of conscious can help determine if the soul’s current state is in danger of falling into any number of temptations brought upon it by the evil one. Hence, it belongs to the virtues of prudence (II-II q.47) and temperance (II-II q.141) that the soul is able to find use for the digital tools as opposed to having the tools use it.
Reply to Objection 1. Narcissism is a product of a soul who has deprived itself of pure goodness. If social media use is governed by virtuous prudence and temperance, it becomes an act of worship, a means to glorify God in both thought and deed. Such effects are the fruits of a soul who has been given the Divine grace of wisdom and right judgement.
Reply to Objection 2. Love manifests itself in a myriad of ways, but all degrees in which love is given are overshadowed by God, who “is love.” If prudence temperance rightly govern social media use, the soul’s longing for love, both through digital connectivity and flesh-and-blood interactions, will find their total reality in God. As St. Paul states, their “hearts may be encouraged as they are brought together in love, to have all the richness of fully assured understanding, for the knowledge of the mystery of God, Christ in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:2-3).
Reply to Objection 3. Addiction is caused by a lack of self-control in a soul. Attachment to social media is comparable to attachment to food, drink, lust, etc. Hence, St. Paul encourages ”Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect” (Rom.12:2). In avoiding sin and pursuing virtue, social media becomes a manned tool of agent intellect and not a dictator of reason.
Reply to Objection 4. As stated in I q.34 a.1, “according to the Philosopher (Peri Herm. i) vocal sound signifies the concept of the intellect. Again the vocal sound proceeds from the signification or the imagination, as stated in De Anima ii, text 90. The vocal sound, which has no signification cannot be called a word: wherefore the exterior vocal sound is called a word from the fact the it signifies the interior concept of the mind.” Since vocal words have this apparent reality, the same applies to written words and inferred meanings from pictographics. They can, therefore, be used for the betterment or detriment of one’s soul based on whether the mind from which they come is motivated by virtue or by vice.
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I grew up in the 80s and 90s. My childhood was spent playing outside, dabbling in Sega Genesis and the original Nintendo, and watching everything from the Simpsons to Rocko’s Modern Life on TV.
When it rained, I stayed inside. When I had beaten my video games, I had to wait for (and earn money to pay for) the next game I wanted to get. When my shows weren’t on, I had to find something else to do. Boredom, then, became the interlude between the many activities of my daily routine.
But boredom was so much more than that. It was the catalyst to a slew of brain activity and imaginative thought. When I was bored, I would think outside my television box and discover new ways to do things. I’d draw. I’d read. I’d play board games with my family. On top of that, I’d contemplate the world and my place in it. In the end, I’d find my way to realizing God’s presence in my life because in the silence and solitude of my boredom, I’d pray.
People have an inert necessity for silence and solitude.
We also have a natural inclination to avoid boredom.
Prior to the tech revolution and the development of smart devices, our minds would use boredom to its advantage. In the silence and solitude of our lives, we would…
organize our day
plan our lives
balance our emotions
rationalize our being
and contemplate our God.
This would lead to being more fully alive. Boredom was, and still is, the crux of our mental health.
Now, the smart device has kidnapped our mental stability. When moments of silence and solitude present themselves, we tend to glance at our smartphones and, in an instant, we activate our mental powers and become one with the constant humming of digital noise and constant companionship. This makes silence and solitude an optional virtue; no longer a necessary ally in attaining a great life. When the screen is on, our curiosity takes control and our minds and intellects are kidnapped by a desire to view content from invisible, digital people.
As a result,
our days become less organized
our lives less complete
our emotions imbalanced
our beings questioned
and our God ignored.
If the digital addiction continues, our intellects will have never contemplated truth, beauty, and goodness by His natural design as we will have chosen the light from a screen as opposed to the light of Christ. We will arrive at the point of such mental stress that life will become unbearable and the God in whom we find the very essence of our being will cease to exist in our overly digitized minds.
Pixels will overcome prayer.
Code will overwhelm Divine inspiration.
Likes will replace true love.
Technology is a very formidable servant, but it is tyrant of a ruler. We need silence and solitude in our lives. We need moments of boredom to internalize our emotions as well as rest our minds. It is time to rediscover the great advantages that boredom provides of our lives by dethroning the current king of our attention that is our screens.
It is time to learn how to use technology to grow spiritually, live efficiently, and become more fully alive.
If you liked this post, you are going to love my latest book, Detached: Put Your Phone in its Place. With Lent coming up, it is the perfect time to take a retreat from social media and other apps to focus on building up your spirituality. It only takes 21 days to learn how to use your screens to make your life better instead of allowing it to weaken your intellect, your will, and ultimately your soul.
I had the great pleasure of chatting with Jen Fulwiler on her Sirius XM radio show about my book, Detached.
It. Was. Hilarious. And Great. And all the wonderful things they say about Jen are true.
We talked about the evilness of yellow starbursts, the idea of resistance and how it holds us back from being awesome, and the fact that Jen loves her cell phone… a lot (but for good reasons!)
Listen in. You won’t be disappointed.
Also, if you want to take advantage of my pre-order bonus and get 3 books for the price of one, here’s how to do it.
You can preorder Detached right now either through Amazon or through my publisher, Our Sunday Visitor.
Once you receive your receipt, forward it to me at tj@dominicaninstitute.com and I’ll send you a free ecopy of my book, 30 Minutes: Less Cell Phone. More Beauty (Paperback: $8.99 on Amazon) as well as a copy of God’s Wifi: How to be Happier and Holier in the Digital Age.
Remember, this offer expires on Oct. 1st, so preorder you copy of Detached now before it is too late.
Today marks the beginning of something special- my book Detached is available for preorder. I’m so excited about this book, I want to give you a bonus to everyone who preorders it.
Here’s how it works:
You can preorder the book right now either through Amazon or through my publisher, Our Sunday Visitor.
30 Minutes is the final installment of my trilogy on the intersection of technology and spirituality. The first book, God’s WiFi, is free for all and can be downloaded at GodsWiFi.com. The second book, Detached: Put Your Phone in Its Place, will be released on Oct. 1st. The final piece to the puzzle is 30 Minutes, which builds on the other two books and completes the spiritual journey through technology use for Christians in today’s rapidly changing world.
If you preorder your copy of Detached, you’ll get BOTH of the remaining books in the trilogy absolutely FREE. So, if you buy one, you’ll get all three! (Very trinitarian, right?!) This deal will end on Oct. 1st, so make sure you get your order in soon.
Here’s a bit more about 30 Minutes:
Be sure to preorder your copy of Detached today so you can get not one, not two, but THREE books for the price of one.
Don’t forget to forward me your receipt before Oct. 1st so I can send you your free ebooks, 30 Minutes and God’s WiFi.
