Posted on September 30, 2024 by Rev. Jonathan Conner
Mental Health
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Social media is a cesspool, a dumpster fire, a manure pit,¹ and if your kids are average U.S. kids, they’re wallowing in it for nearly five hours per day. And if statistics hold true, you are wallowing in it for longer than you’re willing to admit. It should go without saying, but all this wallowing in the manure pit of social media is not improving our lives.
Perhaps you think my language is too strong. There was a time when I might have agreed, but the real world data disabused me of my delusion. Since 2010, when smartphones became ubiquitous (being in the hands of more than 50% of the U.S. population) and social media usage began to explode, we have seen precipitous increases in loneliness, anxiety, depressive episodes, self-harm, suicide ideation, and suicide attempts among young people. I’ll spare you the graphs, but we’re talking double and triple-digit percentage increases. This is eye-popping and seriously alarming. Imagine if we discovered that something in our water was causing double and triple digit percentage increases in cancer. Would you remain indifferent?
Social media is a contagion causing a cancer in the human soul and in the human character. To pretend it’s no big deal is irresponsible and willfully ignorant.²
It’s so bad that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has recently written, “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency…” And what is at the center of it? Murthy answers: “social media.” Let’s make sure you heard him. He said emergency. In other words, the house is on fire, the tornado siren is sounding, someone has collapsed due to a medical event. This is an emergency.
This is why Murthy has just proposed requiring warning labels to accompany social media (much as warning labels must be printed on tobacco products):
It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.
Whether Congress will have the will to take up his proposal remains to be seen. Whatever they do, we need to wise up to what social media is doing to our kids – and to us – and to what we need to do to save our kids and ourselves. Let’s start by being clear-eyed about the effects of significant social media use. We’ll address what we need to do about it part two of this article.
In order to build cohesiveness, families need to develop a shared story, even a shared language. Our family has taken to calling it a familect (i.e. a family dialect). This is inside stories, idioms, figures of speech, and so forth that are shared and enjoyed by members of the family. This familect, which takes significant time and shared experiences to develop, strengthens the family bond and the family identity. Social media destroys familect because it draws family members into individualized, non-overlapping virtual worlds. Multiple people end up living under the same roof and yet not experiencing the bond that comes through sharing a common way of describing/experiencing the world.
Social media presents disparate scenes of people’s lives (and highly edited ones at that!). Users then patch together in their minds a false version of reality that leads them to believe others are constantly enjoying vacations, getaways, victories, awards, accolades, and significant life accomplishments. Meanwhile, they are left living a middling life of mediocrity and drudgery. In other words, social media presents a false picture of reality that fosters envy, discontentment, grumbling, and more. It’s not hard to see why living with a constant feeling of missing out, of lacking something, of having an unexciting life doesn’t help a person hone the virtue of contentment.
Social media exacerbates body issues. Users are bombarded with highly edited images of bodies and faces that don’t exist in reality – bigger eyes, fuller lips, thinner waistlines, airbrushed skin, altered lighting, etc. And, as you might guess, this produces feelings of insufficiency and inadequacy. Nobody can measure up to these falsified images. Further, users, especially girls and women, are body shamed for not measuring up to an arbitrary and idealized standard. Many are the young girls and women who have been devastated by the hateful and harsh insults and shaming of the social media mob that mercilessly criticizes every perceived imperfection.
People send naked pictures and ask for them. Teens send naked pictures and ask for them. Adults (predators) send naked pictures to teens and children and solicit them in return. Statistics vary, but the problem is real and prevalent whether you believe the lower numbers or the higher. For many teens, receiving and sharing nudes has become a part of the dating culture, even an expectation. Make sure you get this: Sharing nudes is a part of dating. Girls often feel pressured to share nudes to show their commitment to their boyfriend. Teens sometimes send nudes to individuals they’re interested in dating.
As anyone with a fully developed prefrontal cortex could see coming, these images often get shared beyond the original recipient. Not only does this cross legal lines in the producing, storing, and distributing of child pornography, but it demeans and devalues people by reducing them to objects for pleasure. It contributes to the body shaming and body issues mentioned above, to say nothing of the utter horror and embarrassment of having naked pictures of oneself being shared freely and those images never leaving the social media metasphere.
AI can generate images. And people, even teens, have begun using it to generate fake nudes with real faces. They use AI to generate an image of a naked body and then put the face of a real person on it (a classmate, a kid they don’t like, etc.) and then they share it online. Does it take much thinking to realize the damage this can do to a person?
Reels (i.e. short videos) regularly recommend smut. Instagram and Facebook are among the worst with numerous exposés revealing how within minutes their video algorithms recommend racy and explicit content even to children. Any thinking person can see how this leads into more extreme content, addiction, and destructive fantasies.
Trans ideology is pushed heavily through social media influencers. This is leading to an alarming spike (another triple-digit percentage increase) in young people identifying as trans, non-binary, queer, etc. These adopted identities often lead to social transitioning, hormonal transitioning, and then surgical transitioning. In the long run, this leaves young people confused, depressed, mutilated, and permanently scarred (emotionally and physically). These influencers coach teens on how to work around their parents, what to say to doctors to ensure a trans diagnosis, how to obtain cross sex hormones, and what mantras to repeat over and over to protect them from the reasoned objections of loved ones.
In other words, people suffering from a delusional fantasy that denies the reality and patterned purpose of the body are coaching children on how to enter the same delusional fantasy. It’s heartbreaking. And if an individual in a friend group identities as trans, the likelihood of another child in the group following suit skyrockets. It’s why many are referring to the social media driven trans identity craze as a social contagion. It’s a socially driven contagious lie and an alarming number of young people (especially girls, who are especially drawn to social media) are falling for it.
Maintaining a social media presence requires branding yourself. This brand has to be kept fresh and relevant to fend off the dreaded status of irrelevance. This has proved to be a crushing burden for untold social media users who have suffered severe burnout, depression, and disillusionment. Social media can make a person immediately famous and then forget them (and turn on them) equally fast. The “relevance” social media gives, social media quickly takes away. For those building their identity and worth on this relevance, its sudden and inevitable removal is devastating.
Instead of inviting children into a world of open-ended play where they create entire imaginative worlds (of cops and robbers, ninjas and bandits, detectives and spies), social media co-opts children’s (and adults’) imaginations and conditions them to think the way its algorithms have been programmed to make them to think. It’s kind of like when you read a book and it fills your mind with all kinds of imaginative possibilities and then you watch the movie that was based on it and your imagination is immediately limited by the producers’ depiction of the book.
Social media slices the world into little unrelated bits and snippets that diffract our focus in a thousand different directions, ensuring that we think deeply about none of them. In fact, social media teaches us not to think, but merely to like or dislike – love this, hate this, get upset about this, laugh at this! It puts emotions squarely in the driver’s seat and supercharges the engine. Discernment, wisdom, reflection, meditation on truth claims, and prolonged and nuanced thinking are hogtied, gagged, and locked in the trunk.
This is not merely a problem for the young; it has juvenilized the minds of untold adults. It’s utterly tragic how many adults whose minds have been diminished and diffracted by the ungodly number of hours they have spent scrolling social media memes, reels, and ads. It’s not just wreaking havoc on their bodies, atrophying their muscles and ensuring they remain inactive and physically lethargic (which leads to all kinds of medical problems), it has diminished their minds, making them incapable of following a prolonged argument, of listening to a pastor exegete a Biblical text for 20 minutes, of reading a thoughtful essay or literary work.
They simply can’t focus that long. So deeply has social media affected them that they actually believe it’s not possible to focus that long. So they live lethargic, unthinking lives under the influence of social media’s lie. It surely has to be one of the great tragedies of our modern age. Many minds and lives have been lost in the shallow meaninglessness of social media.
Social media is a sleep thief, a sinister, surreptitious, cunning, and devious sleep thief. Tragically, it’s the last thing many people see before they close their eyes at night. (And it’s keeping them from closing their eyes at night because it never stops promising excitement under the next click, happiness below the next scroll – a promise it never actually keeps.) Then, it’s the first thing they see when they open their eyes in the morning. So we have cranky adults and sleep deprived children who suffer academically, socially, emotionally, and physically because of it.
Social media presents a fantasy world, a world detached from reality, a world that presents the illusion of anonymity (an invisible cloak of sorts), of secret conversations, of covert relationships, of invented identities. Imaginative play (done independently of social media) is good for children. It helps them imagine how to handle various situations in the real world. Social media, however, offers the lie that fantasies can become real and exist independently of the real world. It’s an all too common tragedy today to hear of relationships, marriages, and families undermined by the sinister secret fantasies fabricated by social media.
It’s strangely easy to forget, but humans are embodied creatures. We use our bodies to communicate. A large percentage of our communication is done not through words, but through subtle inflections and variations in and of the face and body. Social media removes the face and body from communication and this is destroying people’s ability to communicate in three dimensions. Emojis attempt to bridge this gap, but can only go so far.
As a result, many young people struggle to look a person in the eye, to carry out a meaningful conversation in person, even to understand non-verbal cues. Communicating online is easier, but such online communication forgets the embodied person. It encourages saying things (actually, typing them) that a person would never say in person because it keeps the one posting or sharing from actually seeing the impact of their words in the face of the one about whom they are commenting.
Social media is destroying the development of young people’s executive function (i.e. their ability to make and complete plans, manage time, and control impulses). This ensures that the maturation from the impulse centers of the brain to the discernment centers doesn’t happen. Social media is like handing a young person a supercharged sports car and cutting the brakes: All impulse, no control.
To speak brainily for a moment, the maturing brains need to eliminate unused synapses and myelinate (reinforce/pave) the ones needed for mature adulthood. This is critical for the brain’s ability to develop higher-level cognitive skills (problem solving, executive function, emotional regulation, etc.). Think of it as building routes for transporting goods across a country. You want to build efficient and reliable routes. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but social media is designed to be brain-dead easy. It doesn’t require higher-level cognitive skills, so these skills aren’t being developed. And guess what the brain does to the neural pathways not being used (i.e., the ones necessary for functioning as a mature adult). It prunes them! The neural pathways responsible for real-world problem solving, executive function, and emotional regulation are being pruned!
Imagine trying to focus on a lecture or a book or a prolonged thought and having someone continually poking you or saying, Hey, look at this! Did you see this? Could you focus? This is what social media does to children in school. Teachers face it every day as the children in their classrooms are continually interrupted by notifications, texts, and the mental possibilities on TikTok or Instagram.
Appreciate the last point. It’s not just that they are being interrupted by notifications or texts. Their imaginations are owned by social media’s promise of entertainment and escape. Watching a funny video is exceedingly more alluring than listening to a lecture on the Emancipation Proclamation. In other words, the urge to open social media and start scrolling is intense. And when they do, it doesn’t just distract the child using the device. It creates a zone of distraction for every child within eyeshot of the device.
Putting the phones in caddies in the room during class helps some, but research shows that it takes several minutes for children’s brains to leave what they were viewing just before class started and it’s not hard to imagine how the urge to see what they’ve missed builds during class. So they spend the first part of class thinking about what they left and the last part thinking about what they missed.
Social media is driven by algorithms (programmed instructions) that are concerned about one thing: maximizing engagement. In other words, keeping your eyes and your children’s eyes on the screen as long as possible. Why? To monetize them. To sell them to advertisers. Writing algorithms that prioritized careful, nuanced, and even-keeled content, would result in fewer eyes watching for less time, and that would mean fewer advertisers and less money. We must remember that we are the product social media is selling. And they’re really good at selling us, our attention, to advertisers eager to sell us their products. Advertising and selling products isn’t necessarily a problem. Surreptitiously and subtly selling people and their minds to turn a profit is.
Social media reduces people to users. Sit with that thought. You are viewed as a user. Social media producers provide the drug to hook you and keep you coming back for the next hit. They have spent millions learning how to exploit your brain’s dopaminergic response to the possibility of something new, something different. So they market their drug under the guise of an endless array of birthday presents just waiting to be opened and revealed, an endless dopamine shot of pleasure, and it keeps us hooked.
Social media has cheapened the definition of friend. Instead of referring to a small number of in-person and in-depth relationships that are built on deep trust, it has been stretched so thin as to mean nearly nothing. A friend has been reduced to someone who will view your highly edited photos/videos and random thoughts (or even heartfelt thoughts) on a screen and offer an emoji or a nearly meaningless lol, rofl, or haha in response.
Ask yourself: Would a thousand thumbs ups from people you know barely (if at all) mean as much to you as one sincere and thoughtful word of encouragement or praise from someone who truly cares about you? And does knowing that people largely offer their emojis and thumbs-ups because they think they have to post something lest they be viewed as being unfriendly make you feel like they really care? The multiplying of “friends” has not built meaningful relationships, but left us lonelier than ever. We are awash in emojis and bereft of true friends.
Before social media, a child could escape the school bully by going home. Now, that bully can haunt and stalk that child incessantly, and he or she can do it largely out of the view of any adult. Ignoring the bully doesn’t make his or her words go away because the bully’s words or images can be seen by anyone with an internet connection. Imagine no escape and no help. What would this do to a child?
Now what do you think? Do you see the emergency? Should our young people, whose brains have not yet matured, spend hours a day on social media? Should adults spend hours a day on social media?
Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting social media can have no place in a Christian’s life. As I acknowledged in the footnote earlier, social media has several positive possibilities, just like manure. None of us, however, are suggesting it would be wise to roll in manure for hours every day. We need to approach it sober-minded and clear-eyed. That’s what I’m driving after in this article. I want to get your attention, for you to see the emergency, to start asking whether it’s time we made some changes as individuals, as parents, as communities, as schools, as Christians. Don’t you think our young people are worth it? That your mind is worth it? Don’t you think your family, your church, and your school are worth it?
In part two I’ll offer concrete steps that you can take to start making those changes. If you’d like to read what thoughtful researchers and authors are saying on this, I recommend the following books:
If you’d like to talk or if you would like Lutheran Family Service to present on this topic to your group or congregation, we have counselors and speakers available. Contact us today for scheduling.
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