Several years ago there was a challenge on social media where you posted your favorite Bible verse and tagged others so that they could continue the challenge.

I reflected on this for a moment.  I wondered the same question “What is your favorite Bible verse?” came up in the context of a visit or a hangout, would the same people be able to answer what their favorite Bible verses are?

I became suspicious when people participated in the challenge that many of them did not even have an actual favorite Bible verse, but they participated in the challenge using the following steps:

1. Thinking of a Biblical topic
2. Googling “Bible verses on [insert topic]”
3. Finding something at that moment (maybe something they half-remembered)
4. Posting it as one’s favorite verse

The reality was hidden. The same person would likely be unable to answer this question of their favorite verse in real life because it would require true contemplation on their part.  Years later it hit me!  This is the algorithm of fakeness.

It made me realize, this generation is characterized by fakeness.

Why is this the case?  This is because the traits that people developed by truly existing in community with one another have disappeared because real community has disappeared.  These traits include vulnerability, immediacy, and dialogue.  These traits have disappeared because when someone hides behind a profile or does not answer a text in a reasonable amount of time, people have become isolated, and isolation does not allow for vulnerability, immediacy, and dialogue.  The result of this hiding is that everyone also tries to be something they are not.  The people of this generation have become skilled actors while pretending to be real.

Image by Fauxels

From Pexels

Trait # 1: Vulnerability

The first trait that this generation lost due to the breakdown of community and the rise of social media and technology is that there is no more vulnerability in conversation.  When people call us, many times we’ll screen the call.  Other times, if they text, we think about when to return the text after spending many hours (or days) thinking about an answer to a question that would otherwise have been answered immediately and with authenticity and vulnerability if we were face to face.  This could be for many reasons.

It could be that we try to hide behind our devices in order not to show how empty or how weak we are because it is tough to realize that we may need to invest in ourselves.  When we are vulnerable, we grow as persons and learn how to exist with others.  But when we hide behind our devices, we take refuge in ourselves even if there are undesirable traits in us, even if we know and do not like these traits in ourselves.  We become powerless to change because of the inability to exist in the community.

Vulnerability leads to many other traits in us such as trustworthiness, reliability, and attentiveness.  These cannot be developed easily (and possibly not at all) behind a device.

Trait # 2: Immediacy

But a second issue after vulnerability arises, which we are more familiar with: we lose immediacy and thus we are never fully present in any setting.  We avoid having to be present with anyone or in any event unless we have an emotional high or enough energy to present ourselves as something we are not.

This again could be for many reasons, but I will digress for a moment.

Every single year I have taught, and in every single class I have had, at least 10% of the students were diagnosed with ADHD.  This is in line with the percentage of children diagnosed with ADHD in the population.  This percentage has doubled in the past 17 years.  The interesting thing is that ADHD is not actually a disorder of the attention, but is a disorder of executive functioning meaning that a person who has this condition has difficulty determining what is the most important thing to do at the moment when faced with many things to do.  On the flip side, if someone who has ADHD is interested in something, then a condition called “hyperfocus” manifests itself.  In hyperfocus, the person who has ADHD exhibits executive attention [the attention required to complete a task] better than any of us by canceling everything else out.

How is ADHD related to anything about community and the fakest generation? It’s because the increasing isolation and lack of community in this generation has aggravated people’s susceptibility to ADHD and made it much more pronounced.  If we all valued beyond any doubt that time spent with our families around the dinner table as the most important community event of the day and church attendance as the most important community event of the week, then I suspect that people who have ADHD would have less severe manifestations of “inattentiveness” because their executive functioning would work better because they will know what is most important to do at the moment.

I think it is actually a symptom of society’s problems that people who have ADHD are struggling more so these days than during the past.  The breakdown of values (and the hierarchy of values) in society has made executive functioning more difficult for those with ADHD.  I mean how can they determine what is most important when their parents are not together, or don’t model love between spouses, or attention to one another or to their children, and everyone’s idea of a good nighttime meal is eating chips on the couch watching Netflix and scrolling endlessly on their phones afterward?!  It’s enough to make the best people in society stop functioning!

Even if we are not dealing with someone who has ADHD (there is a 90% chance we are not), we feel that everybody is distant even when they are sitting in front of us, especially if they are on their phones.  The irony of it all is that smartphones and social media were supposed to bring us closer together, but instead they have destroyed our ability to determine that whomever is sitting in front of us is the most important person at the moment.  We traded values (of love, assurance, and presentness) for connectedness.  And now we’re more likely to scroll than talk.

Trait # 3: Dialogue

The third and most consequential of community traits this generation has lost is the ability to dialogue.  This is highlighted best by the phenomenon of TikTok as the final celebration of self-absorption.  Everybody thinks they are a celebrity and treats others like they are their fans.  No more family, no more friends, no more acquaintances, only followers.  And perhaps the term “follower,” while yet not precise enough to describe what is going on on social media, is closer to the truth than the other terms that were formerly used on social media such as “friend.”

I remember teaching a lesson on connotation last year, and when I asked students to state what came to mind when they heard TikTok, among the answers they gave were: stupid videos, ‘sheesh’, ridiculous, toxic, dangerous, judging, bullies, not funny, cancel culture, drama, edgy teens incarnate, 90% trash, everyone gets offended, a waste of time scrolling for nothing, addicting, wastes sleep and you can lose track of time, problematic, distracting, ‘it’s the dark ages of the modern times,’ annoying, endless.  Again, these are secular teenagers’ opinions about TikTok.

They did note some positives, but with so many negatives pointed out, it made me realize that our generation is doing something that they know is harmful for their own well-being which can (and often does) take away their peace.

The problem with social media in general is that it makes everyone think they are a celebrity and everyone takes the stage to give a monologue and never takes the time to dialogue with others.  In the words of Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute, “there is no more dialogue, but parallel monologues.”

The definition of dialogue is “a discussion between two or more people or groups, especially one directed toward exploration of a particular subject or resolution of a problem.”

We no longer engage in exploration and connection because we believe we already know everything.  When someone goes on to social media and makes a video or post, it is because they believe they have something valuable to share, and depending on the person and their background, they very well could.  But oftentimes due to fear of missing out, it ends up becoming a big mess rather than having any benefit.

Yet, the “between” part of dialogue is how we build community.  I mean, how is it that a family grows close and loves one another?  It is through sitting with each other and exploring something about life together, and that could be after they have read a book, watched a movie, or shared an experience they have gone through.

This is one way we build community.  This is also how the Church developed its community.  They explored in dialogue the person of our Lord Jesus Christ and the scriptures. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul did with both Jews and Gentiles in the Book of Acts when he went to the synagogues week by week and reasoned from the Scriptures. In the case of the Gentiles, he reasoned from the order of the world.  The word “reasoned” in Greek is dialegomai from which we get the English word “dialogue.”  And this is what missionaries have done since the beginning of the Church.

We can’t build community, or develop as persons, or preach the Gospel without vulnerability, immediacy, and dialogue.

But the theatrical monologues that have taken the stage since social media has proliferated the world manifest fakeness.

The Algorithms of Fakeness

The fakeness has gone far beyond people acting like celebrities, but people no longer know their places or roles.  Celebrities do not dialogue; they only give monologues, and that is what people are doing using social media.  Celebrities also do not really have community beginning with home life, where they have much higher divorce rates and multiple re-marriages than the rest of the population. Here are some common examples monological fakeness that you all have definitely seen:

1. When a father or mother tries to be “cool” and to be their children’s best friends, but in reality, children have many friends, but only two parents (if they are lucky enough to have the two). Who will teach children right from wrong and how they should navigate and stand in this world? 
2. When schools no longer teach children how to think, imagine, and the breadth and depth of our civilization, but they only push currently popular opinions. In reality, school is supposed to teach you how to think fairly and reasonably, how to explore the world, and how to realize which points of discussion in society are well-supported and which are not.
3. When the people who are living paycheck to paycheck give financial advice to others, but in reality, they don’t know the principles of saving, investing, and living within their means, but they believe they can give what they never had and will never have.
4. When you have a couple post a nice picture on their wedding anniversary accompanied by a post of how much they love their spouse and how their spouse has restored their hope in life and love, but in reality, they do nothing but berate, belittle, and complain about each other every time you meet them.
5. When you have a young person act sweet, friendly, and well-put together so they can befriend many people, but in reality, they are afraid of being alone, so their solution is to act differently based on whichever “friends” they are with at the moment, so they can be accepted by those not worth being accepted by.
6. When you have children write an inspirational post on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, but in reality, their own mother and father have not even heard from them that day, and are disregarded most of the time by them.
7. When you have priests who don’t read the Bible and don’t read the Church Fathers and talk about how hard it is to read.  (Yes, this is happening). In reality, they are ordained to be the guardians of the Apostolic tradition.  How can they do so if they never go to the fountain and streams of that tradition?
8. When you have the “faithful” spending all day arguing online in social media groups and branding anyone who disagrees with them as “heretics” and blocking them from the groups thus perpetuating the confirmation bias that the algorithm promotes.  In reality, the same internet armchair warriors do not go to church, or have a father confessor, or read the Bible or any book of spirituality nor are they active in a real-life community at all.  (Although, the people you are interacting with in these groups could very well be troll farms based on this internal report from Facebook).
9. When you have monastics with smart phones who are active on social media.  (Yes, this is happening). In reality, the monks and nuns withdrew to the desert or to the mountains in order to have solitude and to focus on inner spirituality.  If one cannot extend this understanding to preclude smart phones and social media because they connect us to the city again and take us out of the desert, then I don’t know whether we should laugh or cry at such actions from monastics.
10. When you have nuns asking a young woman about the man she is dating and how she should bring him to the monastery so they could meet him.  (Yes, this is happening).  In reality, such behavior is out of place and not fitting for the station of life of a nun much like how a 5 year old being serious and stressing about marriage and how they have to prepare now or like a 25 year old getting their affairs in order and preparing for their funeral and preparing their will even though they are fully healthy are out of place and not fitting for the station of life for a 5 year old and a 25 year old.

All this fakeness shows how things are out of place.  Community has collapsed.

As you can see from all of the above toxic patterns, people give monologues and are self-absorbed. These things have become commonplace due to the proliferation of social media. We can call this way of living and being “monological self-absorption.”

When we interact with such individuals, it can never be dialogue because dialogue is an exploration of something by discussion between two or more people.  All of the above examples are people announcing and declaring, not discussing.

Where is community?  How can we ever have vulnerability, immediacy, and dialogue when we are surrounded by such fakeness?  The only way to live in such a community is to be faker than those around us.  It becomes a competition of fakeness.

How Then Shall We Live?

On Netflix (ironically) one of the few series with some type of life messages is Mr. Iglesias.  Mr. Iglesias stars the comedian Gabriel Iglesias as a high school history teacher. The show was partially inspired by the positive impact Iglesias’s speech pathologist had on his life.  In one of the episodes, Mr. Iglesias orders his students to work without tablets and phones. The end result is that they learn how to better communicate with one another, listen to each other, build confidence, and community.

It’s that simple.  Nothing more, nothing less.  No research required.  No 500 page book written by an expert.

Social media and the media of electronics makes us present ourselves other than we really are.  We present an image of ourselves less real than the plastic and the glass that make up our phones and computers.

Let us learn how to sit with vulnerability, with immediacy, and in dialogue around the dinner table with our families, in our living room couches with our families, or at the lunch tables at school, or at tables at the restaurant, or at the table of the Lord on Sunday mornings.  In short, let us attend.

If you found benefit from this blog entry, click here to like my Facebook page here OR sign up to my email list to receive my latest blog entries every week in your inboxes, and you will also receive my free eBook The Way of Christ.  Click here to sign up.