I started my New Year’s resolution months ago. I viewed it as a sort of training before trying to run a marathon. Technically what I’ve been doing is much bigger than a New Year’s resolution. As part of turning 50 I committed myself to practicing a year of Jubilee — the biblical celebration of forgiving debts, healing relationships, restoring what was lost, practicing generosity, and celebrating freedom from all forms of enslavement — which was observed every 50th year in ancient Israel. For me it began a year ago with finally disconnecting from all forms of (anti) social media. I had long known it was harmful to me in so many ways and I decided I was done with self inflicted suffering. That was Phase One, which was very hard to actually practice for a variety of reasons.
One reason, after years of use my brain was literally addicted to it, which is by design. Just as the big tobacco companies knew — and lied under oath — about cigarettes being harmful and addictive, the creators of social media spent billions of dollars researching and designing these devices and their apps to be addictive. If you doubt any of this try to avoid looking at any of your social media accounts for a week and tell me how long you make it. The average person checks one of their platforms every 30 minutes. If you expand it to how frequently people check their phones in some capacity that number increases to every five minutes on average.
Another reason, when virtually everyone in your life uses social media, not using social media is equivalent to being socially Amish. You are disconnected from their reality and it becomes difficult to interact with them at all because almost all of their interactions are digital. You don’t know about the things that are trending, so you aren’t “in the loop”. Look around the public spaces you frequent that used to be hubs of face to face interaction; places where you meet new people and engage in small talk. Most of them are now populated with individuals in their own digital bubbles; sharing space but not interacting.
A final reason, because of the aforementioned reasons, you will find yourself largely oblivious to what is happening in the world until someone brings it up to you. Just the other day someone asked me what I thought about a major news topics that was dominating the public sphere and my reply was that I had no idea what they were talking about. I simply had not heard about it, and frankly, there was no reason why I should have. It was far away and about something that had no impact on my life or the lives of anyone I know. A mere 15 years ago this would have gone completely unknown to almost everyone on the planet and the only reason it was being so widely discussed now was due to algorithms driving interest for the purpose of making people “choose a side” to generate engagement and revenue. When they told me about it the first thought that went through my mind was “Why should I care?” followed by “Why do you care?”
Half a century before the internet and 24 hour cable news, C.S. Lewis said, “I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know). A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others; but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise….we must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”
In their own ways, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the magi disconnected from the insanity that was normalcy in their world. For Mary and Joseph that meant a two week, 90 mile walk from their home in Nazareth to a village in the middle of nowhere known as Bethlehem. For the shepherds it meant abandoning their flocks in the fields so that they might see the lamb of God. For the magi the journey was months long and spanned 900 miles. Each of them had to walk away from “normal” in order to fully encounter Jesus, and once they did, nothing would ever be the same. Everything changed that night in Bethlehem, but save for a small handful of people surrounding the manger, no one in the entire world new anything about it. They went to bed that night in a world dominated by the darkness that is power, status, and wealth and when they woke up the next morning, ego driven emperors and power hungry kings still ruled their worlds. Soldiers marched the streets enforcing the wicked whims of those whose only focus seemed to be amassing more. More money. More land. More power. Most of the people served as fodder and fuel for their exploits and attempts and world domination. People were the foundation upon which their empires and kingdoms were built metaphorically, and it was upon their backs that their palaces and cities were built literally. Christmas came and went and no one was the wiser, but for a few, and yet, for them something had changed. Everything had changed.
Most days it can feel like this for us too. Despite the fact that Christ has come, there is still so much darkness and suffering in the world. No reasonable student of history can conclude that it is not demonstrably better in countless ways when compared to the night Jesus was born, but to borrow a line from Eddie Vedder in his song “Corduroy”
Everything has changed….absolutely nothing’s changed.
Those of us who know the risen King of kings, know that everything changed with His birth. The darkness has been defeated and it is ever retreating. Yes, it does still exist, but that doesn’t mean you should seek it out. I fear many of us have been first seduced and then enslaved to seeking darkness. Jesus cautioned Nicodemus, “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light.”
I think of this when I hear the lyrics from Michael Franti’s song “Good To Be Alive Today”
Every day, I wake up and turn my phone on
I read the news of the day, just as it's coming down
I do my best not to let it get me down
I try to keep my head up, but this is Babylon
If you want to, you can live in a world where it is “always winter and never Christmas” as C.S. Lewis wrote. You have the ability to bury yourself under an avalanche of suffering, misery, and woe of the utmost horrors, at incomprehensible levels, from all around the world at all times, and the algorithms driving our devices are hell bent on ensuring you do…which is where my New Year’s resolution comes back into play.
Once I broke my addiction to social media I set about to breaking my addiction to my phone as a whole. I’ve been practicing this for some time now and — to the annoyance of anyone who tries to call or text me expecting a response within a reasonable time — I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The final step has been beginning my day with prayer, worship, and scripture instead of picking up my phone. If you think quitting social media is hard, try not touching your phone for a single hour after waking up. No emails, no texts, no websites, nothing. 89% of smart phone users check their phone within ten minutes of waking up. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we stare into the darkness it will seem as if nothing has changed, but if we gather around the manger, we cannot deny it has.
To borrow from Leonard Sweet in his essay “Algorithmic Possession”
Before you check the news, read a Psalm.
Before you scroll inside, stroll outside.
Before you consume content, create beauty—even if it’s just arranging flowers or making breakfast with gratitude.
Let Beauty retrain your eyes.
Let Truth recalibrate your mind.
Let Goodness restore your soul.
Fix your eyes on Jesus, and every lesser algorithm loses its power to write your ending.
If you want to, you can go through life as if nothing has changed, seeking out the darkness from every corner of the world, or you can gather with a small group of outsiders, disconnected from the world, but connected to God by basking in His light as it shone down from a star and radiated from a manger. A light that has only spread farther and shone brighter the longer it has radiated. A light that is capable of stealing our attention from the darkness. “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
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