There I was, 12:30 a.m., lying in bed, “doomscrolling” like the stereotypical college student, when suddenly (a feat I genuinely attribute to the Holy Spirit) my eyes were opened and I deleted LinkedIn off my phone.
Not everything needs to be a game—least of all, acquaintanceship. Too often our social lives, work, and even chores can take on a game-like nature—taking the form of a fun or exciting activity. Still, I deleted LinkedIn for this very reason: I was tired of turning my friendships into a game.
There’s a gradual, dehumanizing endeavor brewing from Silicon Valley. Social media apps, like Facebook and Instagram, are run by the larger collective known as Meta. When you’re in their apps, you’ve joined “the Metaverse.” In the Metaverse, relationships are reduced to small icons, flittering digital bubbles, and customizable name tags. Life becomes introspective and a strange bond forms with the electronic device that lets me socialize. It lets me play their game, the necessary entry fee being our attention.
You win the game by accruing the “likes” of others. You lose if you’re unnoticed. Meaning, subconsciously or not, users begin to think in terms of social competition.
These digital interactions, camouflaged as genuine social exchange, are game-like. Your ranking requires the good opinions of others—keep in mind that you don’t talk with them in person. There is no competition requiring active strength or fitness. Rather, you remain “active” on social media by posting, often only to be perceived well by others. It’s no surprise then that a myriad of studies reveal the detrimental effects of social media on teenagers.
As a Christian, I reject the social media lie. I don’t live for the opinions of others, I live for Jesus Christ. I’ll grant that people make prudential decisions and justifications about where they want to draw their line with social media.
Maybe you truly believe social media doesn’t affect you. Maybe it is just a way to stay connected with your friends and family. But I’d argue social media doesn’t even do that. There is no physical communion with our friends. We’re looking through a screen. There’s a middleman in our friendship (and lest we forget, they can see everything). In the end, we’re left with digital abstract communities and a social game. And now I have a similar concern about the LinkedIn app.
I must admit that LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for businesses and for building networks of acquaintances. Now, we’re not friends with our “connections,” and we don’t claim to be. But we’re here as a resource and “willing to network.” This is the benefit of a capitalist society full of young entrepreneurial men and women. We can make acquaintances in our fields easier than ever before. We can rely on them and they on us, without the façade of friendship.
Acquaintances are good, and LinkedIn helps us make them. The concern, however, is that apps like LinkedIn take real acquaintances and commodify them. They’re no longer my acquaintances in the flesh but dehumanized “connections” I use for my benefit. Acquaintances become transactional when they lose their humanity.
The other remarkable thing about LinkedIn is that it can be accessed on our computers. I can network, congratulate my peers, and then turn off my laptop. I don’t need to drag that game of work with me into my personal life, as we so often do with social media. It’s a tool, after all. I can watch a basketball game with my friends without the need to read, “Congrats!” some acquaintance left on some random person’s new project announcement. It’s cool, I guess, but I don’t know them. I’m not their friend. They’re not mine. We’re acquaintances for work at best. When put in its proper place, LinkedIn becomes mundane. And this is good. This is a proper acquaintanceship. By and large, I spent very minimal time on LinkedIn for this very reason. And then they released LinkedIn reels: short, TikTok formatted videos only available on their app. Game changer.
These reels transform the app into another social media site. Once you’re on, you’re on for a while.
So there I was, 12:30 a.m., lying in bed, “doomscrolling” LinkedIn reels like it was TikTok.
I’m ashamed to admit that I found myself mindlessly scrolling through videos of marketing tactics, investment opportunities, and entrepreneurial autobiographies. I’d hit the flow state on rebranded YouTube shorts. That’s embarrassing. I have to wake up, I realized. These aren’t even funny. It was simply sapping away my sleep and, much more importantly, my attention.
Our mind is significant. When we do a task without appearing conscious of it, we’ll say we did it mindlessly. That night, I was scrolling mindlessly. Or consider how we’ll look at someone doing something flippant, dangerous, or stupid and declare, “Have you lost your mind?” They’re acting without sound judgment or reason. They’ve lost their minds.
Apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are designed to seduce us. They’re games that suck our attention. They grab our minds and keep us hooked. More than just a general marketing scheme like billboards or catchy jingles, social media’s algorithms are customized. We’re becoming addicted. And sharing the mental cocaine with our toddlers. Modern Americans have normalized this addiction. In most circles, it’s weird if you’re not on social media.
These addictions almost look like a kind of possession. Like Tolkien’s ring of power, you often find your hand drawn to your pocket, your eyes to the blue glow of a screen, and your ears attuned to unfelt vibrations. Did I get a notification? Did I get a like? Or, more embarrassingly for me, was that a connection?
We know these apps. And they know us. There is a strange communion one begins to experience with these apps. What starts as an innocent game becomes something more nefarious. A kind of spiritual nature emerges as we ritualize our phone usage. Again, how frequently do people go to bed right after scrolling social media of some kind? How many people begin their day with it? How often does social media become our morning and evening prayer?
Existentialist Simone Weil writes extensively on attention. In her novel Gravity and Grace, Weil writes, “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.”
Here, Weil connects our attention with something much deeper than mere dopamine levels. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love…Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Our attention matters. What we attend to is what we prioritize. If you value fitness, you go to the gym. If you value your family, you spend time with them. If you value Jesus Christ, you abide with Him. Thus, we ought to be careful with how we attend to these apps unless they become household idols.
Now, I’ll grant that my LinkedIn story is a bit tongue-in-cheek. It’s not as though it was a one-night stand, and I’m in a confessional. Yet perhaps it was and I am. It’s good to be mildly ashamed because you “doomscrolled” for an hour. We’ve wasted our attention, prostituting it to various social media algorithms. Still, there is a simple solution to our idolatrous attention: eliminate the idols.
We all pray to something or someone. Something will always be the recipient of our concentrated attention. We control what that thing is. It may be an app, it may be a pagan god, or it may be Jesus Christ.
We need the mundane tools to remain mundane. It’s good that digital acquaintances are blander than in-person experiences. We must take control of our attention. We cannot pray to God if we’re too busy sucked into a game.
So, delete the app. Or at least move it off your home screen. Put it in its proper place—as a tool, not a temple.
