My first class in college was an introduction to fine arts. You could have easily renamed the class “Introduction to Beauty.” One day, our professor took us to the Dallas Museum of Art and gave a guided tour through the different eras and cultures on display. Our assignment was simple: Select one piece of art that captures our attention, study it for as long as necessary, take notes, and write a report on it. Amid all the sculptures, paintings, and installations, I found two that stood out.
The first was Frederic Edwin Church’s painting, The Icebergs. If you’ve never been to the Dallas Museum of Art, you can’t quite understand what it’s like to stand in front of this painting. It stands nearly five and a half feet tall and is almost nine and a half feet wide. Of course, it’s hanging on the wall so it seems even taller. As you turn the corner and enter the room it is in, you don’t expect to see a painting its size waiting for you. You walk towards it, stand in front of it, hands clasped behind your back, and it takes up nearly your entire field of vision. You can almost feel the chills from the icy water. Looking at The Icebergs in person is a visually immersive experience.
But I didn’t write my report on The Icebergs. I wrote it on a different painting, one from an artist that is decidedly more controversial. I wrote my report on Jackson Pollock’s Portrait of a Dream.
Pollock painted Portrait of a Dream almost one hundred years after Frederic Edwin Church painted The Icebergs. Looking at the two paintings side by side should make it obvious why Pollock was and remains so controversial. The Icebergs is a mammoth Romantic landscape that captures the beauty of the scene, plays elegantly with light and composition, and is clearly a masterpiece. Pollock, on the other hand, looks mostly like someone who just threw his wet paintbrush at the canvas.
And yet, as I studied the Pollock painting, I found myself drawn to it more and more. To my surprise, I saw myself in it. The painting is called Portrait of a Dream, after all, and I realized that it did, in fact, resemble the ways that I had processed, or “dreamed,” about my life. The dark, chaotic mess that was somehow distant from but also connected to me. I saw the darkness, but only partially. Glimmers of light created warmth on my skin, but my sight was still tainted by the effects of the darkness. Half-seeing, half-blind. Light mixed with dark. Disoriented by the darkness that I knew was there but unable to make heads or tails of it. Only trying to live in the light of what I could see, which wasn’t much.
I’m not sure if that is what Pollock had in mind when he painted this or not. It could have been a portrayal of the bipolar disorder that he was believed to have. But I was surprised to find a rather accurate portrayal of my inner world in some seemingly haphazard splatter paint. To many people, Pollock represents the degradation of art in the century between the Romantics and the Abstract Expressionism of the mid-1900s. In some ways, I might agree. And yet, I will never forget the ways that sitting in front of Portrait of a Dream, studying it, taking notes on it, and writing about it, helped me understand my own story.
My experiences with these paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art are far from my only experiences with art. In high school choir, I had the privilege of singing songs like Amor De Mi Alma in the Meyerson Symphony Center and Danny Boy in Irish Cathedrals. Was I any good? Hardly. But these were remarkably transcendent experiences; ones that I’m not sure I fully appreciated at the time. Looking back, I understand now how profoundly formative they were.
Several years ago during a trip to Portland, my wife and I went to a small Mediterranean restaurant we had heard about. Our order was simple: pita bread and hummus. To this day, my taste buds still haven’t had anything like it. I didn’t even know pita bread and hummus could taste like that. I think about it way more than I’d like to admit. That pita bread and hummus, in their own way, were art.
In the food, I tasted beauty. In the songs, I participated in beauty. In the paintings, I beheld beauty. And this beauty pointed me beyond the mere material in ways that would reverberate throughout my life. Once you’ve tasted, seen, heard, sang, and felt true beauty, you spend the rest of your life seeking it. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen, unhear what you’ve heard, or forget what you felt. Through beauty, you’ve been exposed to a reality beyond yourself. In beauty, in art, you touch the transcendent.
The Small World of Social Media
In October 2024, NPR released a report titled, “TikTok executives know about app’s effect on teens, lawsuit documents allege.” Let’s just say that the report was shocking, but not surprising. To make this abundantly clear, these are findings that come from TikTok’s internal reports, meaning TikTok knows these things about itself. Here are some of the things revealed in the report:
- TikTok users can become ‘addicted’ in 35 minutes (or after 260 videos)
- TikTok demoted people it deemed unattractive on its feed
- TikTok’s algorithm could deprive kids of opportunities like sleeping, eating, and looking at someone in the eyes
- TikTok’s internal estimate indicate that 95% of smartphone users under 17 use TikTok
- TikTok pushes users into filter bubbles like ‘painhub’ and ‘sadnotes’
- TikTok’s content moderation misses self-harm and eating disorder content
- TikTok is slow to remove users under 13, despite company policy
- TikTok is in crisis mode after reports on TikTok Live being a ‘strip club filled with 15-year-olds’
Of course, while TikTok’s algorithm seems to have a unique potency to it, this isn’t unique to TikTok. The negative social and mental health effects of social media in general are well documented. Jonathan Haidt’s much-acclaimed book The Anxious Generation is the best resource for seeing such data. TikTok only stands as the starkest example of the harm social media causes. The worst part is that this is by design. In the digital age, attention is the new oil and algorithms are the drills that extract it.
“What’s the problem with watching a few funny videos?” Well, nothing. Until you understand that the medium you’re watching the videos on isn’t neutral or harmless. These attention frackers don’t want you to just watch a few funny videos; they want you to never close the app. What we perceive as simply taking it easy and watching a few funny videos is actually allowing corporate (and potentially foreign national) interests to, metaphorically of course, drill holes in our brains and siphon our attention for profit. It’s a fundamentally different medium than say, film or television. Movies and TV shows have a definite run time. At some point it’s going to end, whether that is in thirty minutes or three hours. However, even auto-play features on streaming services blur those lines. Regardless, there is an endpoint built into the media.
Social media, on the other hand, is infinite scrolling. It’s well documented that the infinite scroll of social media is based on the design of slot machines in casinos. One more pull and you might strike gold. It is these factors and more coming together—ease of access, elimination of choice, infinite scroll, promise of serendipity, illusion of community, quick information, etc—that make social media addicting in ways no other medium is.
Other mediums require you to give your attention and, like books, paintings, songs, and even food, sometimes will point you to the transcendent. That’s what art does. But our phones are different. They’re black holes for attention. Social media, when it is primarily used to consume content instead of connecting with others, takes your attention and gives you nothing back.
You can see what this does to us in how our language has changed. Much has been written about the death of boredom. When we picture boredom, we might think of a middle schooler in the 90s bouncing a ball off their wall over and over again. We almost never speak of being bored like this anymore, but it’s exactly this kind of boredom that sows the seeds of something greater. Understimulated boredom pushes us into a different kind of life. If we are bored and want to stop being bored, we must use our creativity. The Catholic philosopher Byung-Chul Han connects boredom with contemplation in his work, The Burnout Society.
We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change in focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process.
As Han points out, achievements in culture and creativity are downstream of boredom. It’s in the moments when we aren’t overstimulated, or hyperattentive as he calls it, that we can access the contemplative life and, ultimately true relaxation. Boredom allows us to be generative; to produce life beyond ourselves. Han goes on, “If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.
Contrast this with Oxford’s 2024 word of the year: brain rot. Oxford defines Brain Rot as:
(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.
Whereas boredom produces words like contemplation, culture, and creativity, hyperattention to a constant stream of online content produces words like rot, deterioration, and unchallenging. Boredom is generative while hyperattention is degenerative.
Consider this in the context of Psalm 1. The wicked are characterized by walking, standing, and sitting. You might say it’s a kind of movement that degenerates to non-movement. But the blessed one is like a tree planted by a stream bearing fruit and never withering. You might say that flourishing looks, paradoxically, like stationary activity. The tree doesn’t move, and yet it is active in the seasonal fruit it produces and resilient in how its leaves are alive and well.
So the digital age presents us with two contrasting ways of life to consider that are new expressions of the choices that have always been before us. Psalm 1 calls it wickedness or blessedness. Byung-Chul Han calls it hyperattention or boredom. We might call it flourishing or rotting. Those who want to flourish must reject the digital age’s rotten habits and pursue the Psalm 1 life instead. A life of contemplation, creativity, generativity, and yes, even boredom.
The problem with social media isn’t that it’s too much, it’s that it’s too little in all the ways that matter. It doesn’t expand our world, it shrinks it. To look at my phone, I hunch my neck, lowering my eyes, and curving in on myself. To look at The Icebergs, I stand back, clasp my hands behind me, widen my stance, and look up. To see myself in Portrait of a Dream, I must stand still, concentrate, contemplate, and be okay being uncomfortable. My phone makes me smaller even as it promises more access to the world. Beauty makes me bigger even as I’m swallowed up in a world much larger than I.
What social media provides in information, it lacks in substance. We would do better with less information that is more substantive. The path we walk should take our feet away from the small world of our screens and into, as C.S. Lewis described in his preface to On The Incarnation, “the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.” In other words, transcendent and eternal realities. You might find that in a book, a symphony hall, an art gallery, a concert, or a restaurant. You’ll certainly find it in prayer, scripture, and a healthy local church. But you won’t find it on the For You feed.
Mark Sayers notices this in his book, Reappearing Church, when he writes, “We now live in a media-drenched landscape in which endless promises of improvement accompany us throughout our lives. The promises are a post-Christian vision of personal renewal. Emptied of the transcendent, we now reach for reduced visions of the good life, from the quest for physical health to the quest for safety and emotional security in an increasingly risky world.”
The vision of the good life we are “drenched” in will form our imagination of what is normal and calibrate the coordinates of our lives in its direction. We won’t even realize who we’ve been walking with until we’re sitting down in their vision of life, not our vision for our lives, and certainly not God’s vision for our lives. Social media is the straight and narrow for secondhand living.
Swimming Upstream
Few things capture this dynamic better than Ted Gioia’s widely praised essay, The State of the Culture, 2024. It still applies today. In it, Gioia illustrated the present situation like this:
Silicon Valley created apps that have taken us beyond art and beyond even entertainment. They distracted us until they finally addicted us. Gioia demonstrates in simple terms how the feedback loop between stimulus, dopamine release, a desire for more, and habit formation has created this addiction. The fish illustration is apt; this is the water we swim in now.
It seems to me that in order to not just survive, but flourish in an age of algorithmic addiction, the only way to go forward is to go backward. To swim upstream. We have to acquire new tastes that won’t be served to us on the platter of the For You feed. Instead of walking into the algorithmic restaurant of information, we have to become hunter-gatherers who go out and find it for ourselves, starting in the places where people said they once found a bounty.
This is going to be uncomfortable, require patience and new skills, and make us seem weird to some of our peers, but as far as I can tell it’s the only way out. In The Intellectual Life, the French priest A. G. Sertillanges writes, “Do not be ashamed not to know what you could only know at the cost of scattering your attention. Be humble about it, yes, for it shows our limitations; but to accept our limitations is a part of virtue and gives us a great dignity, that of the man who lives according to his law and plays his part.”
If we’re going to swim upstream, break our addictions, and make our way back to art, we need some concept of what that could look like. There’s a vast number of ways that it could look, but Gioia put together another helpful chart that shows this progression in multiple areas of life.
We might not be in the same place in every category. We might be at Dopamine Culture for Journalism and at Fast Modern Culture for Sports. Regardless, I believe Gioia not only diagnoses the problem but helps us find our way out. For all of the talk about having a Rule of Life right now, this chart should be part of our consideration when we think about our habits and the ways we organize our lives. We should honestly consider where we are on this chart and what it looks like, practically speaking, to go backward. We don’t need to do everything in one fell swoop and we’ll still need to calibrate it for the reality of our lives (will we really go back to only handwritten letters?). Like Gioia himself said, “We need a slowness revolution in our whole culture right now.”
Where can we replace short-form with long-form? Where can we replace digital with physical? Where can we replace loud with quiet? New with old? Fast with slow? Sedentary with activity? Isolation with relationship?
This isn’t a mere self-improvement exercise; this is a practical attempt to live the Psalm 1 life and obey the command given to us in James, “My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, for human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness. Therefore, ridding yourselves of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent, humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:20-21).
This also isn’t a luddite rant against everything digital. This is about breaking free from the soul-shriveling tyranny of our devices and breathing the clean air of God’s good world again. This isn’t about burning everything down; it’s about making sure we’re operating it more than it is operating us. Myles Werntz is right when he wrote here in Mere Orthodoxy,
“It is here that the point of resistance begins—not with piloting alternative living arrangements or economic systems for their own sake—but living in accordance with [what] is needed for the soul to flourish. And by living in this way, we will find that we no longer need the Machine, but that the Machine always and ever needed us to flourish. What is a social media company without users, or an industrial complex without consumers? It is a hulking shell waiting to be repurposed, buried, and raised again to new life.”
The Buzzing Of The World
It should strike us that one of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control. That, as we walk in step with the Spirit, one characteristic we should expect is greater levels of mastery over ourselves. A growing ability to handle ourselves from an internal locus of control as opposed to being tossed to and fro by the waves of everything around us. Shortly before he was executed, Boethius wrote, “If you are in possession of yourself you will possess something you would never wish to lose and something Fortune could never take away.” No matter our station in life regarding our wealth, status, power, or pleasure, if we are in control of ourselves, we have something that can never be taken from us.
What’s easy to miss here is that self-control is the end of the list that begins with love, joy, and peace. The end goal of self-control is not apathy or even tranquility, as in mere Stoicism, but aims toward a life filled with love, joy, and peace. Self-control is a prerequisite of self-forgetfulness. Without self-control, you’re forced by necessity to think about yourself more than others when you’re battered by the wind and waves of circumstances. But when your house is built on a firm foundation, you can withstand the waves and “in humility consider others as more important than yourself” (Philippians 2:3).
This is why it’s crucial for us to take back our agency from the algorithms and cultivate a deep interior life that’s free from the constant march of content on our feeds, not for vague notions of personal responsibility or the sovereign individual, but to walk in step with the Spirit of Christ, becoming people of love who obey the greatest commandments, and cultivate the virtues of faith, hope, and love in our lives, bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.
This is going to require us to get back to the basics. Daily prayer and scripture. Regular church attendance. Frequent conversations with friends we know in real life. Putting our phones down and reading books, nonfiction and fiction alike. The older the better. How can we tend to the weighty matters of the world when we can’t tend to our own soul before God?
Thomas À Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ, “Blessed are the ears that are attuned to the soft whisper of God’s voice and that ignore the buzzing of the world.” Maybe the word we need for today is simply that.
Blessed are the ears that ignore the buzzing of the world.
Blessed are the ears that are attuned to the soft whisper of God’s voice.
We need interior wells deeper than attention frackers can drill. We need spaces in our soul that are reserved for God and can’t be siphoned off for corporate profit. We must listen for the soft whisper of God’s voice in all that is true, good, and beautiful. We must allow ourselves to be captured by beauty, and ignore the buzz in our pockets.
Once more, Thomas speaks to us, “Use the things of the world, but long for the things of eternity.” Social media may be of some use to us, I have no doubt about that. But our longings, the words of our mouths, and the meditation of our hearts must be eternal. For eternity has been placed in our hearts, and if we can lift our eyes from the screen to the hills, with full attention, patiently waiting on the Lord, we will see everything made beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
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