Escaping the Digital Slot Machine

Imagine a slot machine that feeds you shiny treats every time you pull the lever. But these treats are not the sugar-rush of tasty candy. This is a digital slot machine, and instead it offers us another form of ‘treat’, one more existential and much more addictive. Rewards that can simultaneously boost our self-esteem and offer us a burst of distraction from the everyday. Ego-candy.

That’s the devastating image author Cal Newport uses to describe social media: a digital slot machine intentionally designed to turn us into ego-candy junkies. We keep returning to it, swiping and tapping and clicking in the hope of another shiny little treat. Another ‘like’, another notification, another piece of ‘news’ to keep up with. And so we find ourselves hooked.

Time to Re-Evaluate?

Maybe you recognise the truth of that image in your own life? Maybe you find yourself operating with that constant low-level hum of anxiety, impatiently longing for the next hit? Maybe you’re helplessly familiar with the zombie-like cycle of ‘checking in’ to your different accounts, one after the other, desperate for some new notification or ‘like’: Facebook, Instagram, Email, Twitter, WhatsApp… Facebook, Insta…

A number of factors have recently contributed to me wanting to be more intentional with my daily rhythms. And surprise, surprise: social media usage is undoubtedly one of the most significant areas where the reality is so very different to my ‘on paper’ ideal. Yet the idea of making significant changes can seem overwhelming and unrealistic when social media has become so intrinsic to how we operate in everyday life.

Holidays Are The Time

So that’s why I’m so glad for holidays. Typically we’re able to take a summer holiday each year – although I realise that won’t be the case for everyone. And for our last few summer holidays I’ve tried to go into them with a determined social media strategy. This was precipitated one year by knowing that our rental didn’t have any WiFi – and then we discovered there was no local phone signal either. Hey presto, no social media! Admittedly that situation is increasingly becoming a pretty rare occurrence due to better signal coverage and WiFi as standard. Nevertheless, it woke up me to the benefits of re-evaluating social media use for holidays.

Cutting the Cord

Here’s 5 joys from re-evaluating social media use over your holiday and why I reckon holidays are the perfect time to consider cutting the cord:

1. The joy of discovering just how much time you have and just how much can be wasted on phones.

Of course, we shouldn’t need the excuse of a holiday to discover how much time we fritter away on our phones, because the latest smart phones will even tell us our daily average and break it down into categories. I suspect most of us now ignore this function because the results are too depressing to face. But holidays are precious times, so don’t waste them.

2. The joy of a decent attempt at switching off from work, rather than having an extended work-trip at the beach.

Argh, the emails. Ok, I realise it’s not strictly social media, but there’s many of the same ego-candy antics at play. Come on, put on the auto-office reply. Go hard if you want to; a few friends use Andy Crouch’s recommended line: “All emails will be deleted on my return. If you really need me to see this then send again after x date.” And if you desperately need to check something (perhaps seeing if the rest of your holiday party concur on that), then allocate the time now: fifteen minutes half-way through the holiday, or something. But really, is it necessary?

3. The joy of actually enjoying your own holiday, rather than remotely living someone else’s.

All the research suggests regularly checking social media just makes us more miserable and lonely. After all, it’s basically a multi-person compare and contrast exercise. So don’t live someone else’s holiday – because for a start it’s just their edited highlights reel. How is that actually going to help you rest? And while we’re on it, cutting the cords on social media also stops your heavily edited holiday snaps having the same effect on others. Why does the world need to see that? Could it not go in a Whatsapp message to family and close friends? I still believe that apps like Instagram show we were born to praise – but let’s keep checking our hearts as to whether that is our aim as we post.

4. The joy of being present with those you have chosen to be with.

Ok, so holidays are still hard. Take a bunch of people away together and you don’t suddenly stop being people with hang-ups and default character flaws. So this isn’t about pretending if you put your phones away it’ll all be happy-as-Larry. But if you’ve chosen to spend a set period of time in Larry’s company by going on holiday together, then choosing to invest your care and attention in that individual is surely a profound gift. How could you get to know these people better? How could you encourage them during this holiday? How could this time of rest and reflection be a blessing to you all in your relationships together.

5. The joy of remembering that you’re not in control of life back home.

“But what about…” The world will keep spinning. That’s God’s job, after all. Do I really need to give him a help in that department? Allow the absence of social media to help you resist the urge to need to know everything and need to have a hold on it all. There’s something much more healthy, more human, about this.

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Of course, not only does this harvest joys in your holiday, but it sets you up to then think through what approach to social media you want on your return to everyday life. I’ve found holidays are an easier time to make more radical changes, but that ‘trial period’ then makes extending them beyond the holiday seem more manageable too.

If you’d love either some practical help or some more persuasive argument for re-evaluating the role of social media in your life, then either of these three books would be a great start:

• 12 ways your phone is changing you by Tony Reinke – imaginative and convicting Christian approach
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport – interesting to hear a compelling non-Christian approach
• The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch – great for thinking through from a family perspective

We’ll have seen them bombarding our newsfeeds and by now we’ve probably done one ourselves. ‘Old age’ profile pictures using an AI-based app, FaceApp, have gone viral over the past couple of days, with users given the opportunity to transform a photo of themselves into an ‘aged’ likeness.

Credit where credit’s due, FaceApp is an impressive piece of AI, using ‘neural networks’ to make remarkably realistic face transformations. And whilst there’s been concerns raised about FaceApp’s privacy statement and what exactly its makers are planning to do with our photo-data, this doesn’t seem to be stopping most of us signing up.

So, what might the popularity of this trend tell us about ourselves?

1. In a culture that idolises youth, we’re strangely fascinated with getting old.

On one level, it’s fairly amusing to see ourselves and others with wrinkles and grey hair. ‘Wow, can you believe it?,’ we might say. And maybe part of us can’t. We live at a time where youthfulness and visual beauty are especially celebrated, but where the elderly are often sidelined, tellingly absent from our screens, homes and ideals. We worship those who embody such youthfulness, but it can mean that we’re desperately trying to do what we can to ‘stay young’.

And so then ageing will always be a strange phenomenon to experience. Maybe this is why nostalgia is increasingly a source of interest and entertainment in our culture, from popular new shows like Stranger Things, to re-discovering old re-runs like Friends. Whilst we like to believe we’re all Peter Pan, we’re simultaneously fascinated with the process of growing up.

FaceApp’s ‘Old Age’ filter is like looking into the mirror thirty, forty, fifty years from now. We’re faced with a striking example of our own mortality and human frailty and it shakes us up from the belief that we’re ‘forever young’. Maybe we have to laugh, because how else have we been taught to respond? Our culture has given us little resources to face that reality. The psalmist asked God to teach him to ‘number his days’, but when was the last time you were encouraged to do that?

2. We’d all love to see into the future, but none of us can control it.

Surely part of the attraction of the FaceApp phenomenon is the possibility of a glimpse into the future. Don’t we all want to be able to fast-forward and see how things will pan out? Of course, even the best AI can’t guarantee what we’ll really look like – although it can’t be denied that the app offers a level of likeness that has been unseen before in readily-available technology. Yet the actual future remains beyond our grasp, for we’re simply not in control of our lives. It’s humbling to think that some of us will never even reach the stage of ‘old age’; others might not even make it past this year.

And I wonder if knowing the future will be especially spellbinding for any culture that focuses so much on the present. Theologian Richard Bauckham has observed how our late-modern culture has reworked the modern narrative of progress: a fixation with entitlement and a distrust of the future means we instead champion a ‘present of endless opportunities’. This was powerfully articulated by Evan Speigel, the founder of the photo-sharing app Snapchat: “We are who we are today, right now”. Ironically, the same app once ran an advert that featured the song ‘Silver Lining’ by Guards, with the line, “I wanna live forever, I don’t care”. But when all that’s offered is an ‘eternal present’, our ticking clocks and ageing bodies soon expose this idea as a facade. Time and tide wait for no man.

James puts it bluntly, alluding to Ecclesiastes: “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 1:14). In the face of uncertainty about our futures, we’re instead encouraged to entrust ourselves to the one who is ‘the first and the last, the beginning and the end’ (Revelation 22:13).

3. For all that we’re told otherwise, we’re intrinsically embodied and finite creatures.

Our culture is strangely contorted when it comes to approaching our bodies. On one level, we give the impression that we hold the human body in high esteem. We emphasise healthy eating and healthy living. We spend significant amounts of time, money and energy on our bodies, be it through gyms, beauty products, or other forms of more permanent bodily enhancement. But whilst this appears to affirm the goodness of the body, Peter Leithart has argued it actually reveals, “for all our carnality, we don’t really like our bodies.”

In other words, we’ve so emphasised our freedom to self-define ourselves, that we’re actually championing the belief that we can transcend our bodies. The true self is instead within: the mind, desire and will. As Tim Keller puts it, the “self-actualization of the individual has become an absolute.” Inevitably the body is relegated to nothing more than ‘cultural plastic’, to cite feminist thinker Susan Bordo. Rather than being embodied creatures with a Creator, we are instead our own “master sculptors of that plastic”. Andy Crouch has labelled this the “irrelevance of our bodies”. Or as Matthew Lee Anderson puts it in his brilliant book, Earthern Vessels, our bodies become merely raw material to be moulded for the sake of pleasure, a ‘project’, constructed by personal wills. 

But there’s nothing like seeing an image of my predicted seventy-year old self to remind me that I am intrisically embodied and finite. Sure, I am not just my body, but I am certainly not less than my body. Yes, I can nip and tuck, sculpt and shape. I can believe everything is fluid. But nothing can stop me from ageing. No matter how much we elevate the self, we can’t escape the createdness of these bodies, nor their slow de-creation. As Mumford & Sons put it in their track ‘Awake My Soul’, “In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die.”

As such, embodiment is not a curse to be overcome, but rather is intrinsic to what it means to be a creature. If anything, the Bible presents disembodiment as a curse. The FaceApp ‘Old Age’ craze is a palpable reminder that our bodies do count. They encapsulate what it means to be a finite creature, and yet staggeringly the Bible shows us this is part of being made in the image of God. God becoming man in Jesus Christ further underlines the goodness of the body, as well as the body’s need for redemption, and the future hope of restoration for the body. Our bodies are creation categories that define us, and therefore resurrection categories that await us too.

Coram App or Coram Deo

For all that the FaceApp ‘Old Age’ challenge seems a harmless bit of trivial fun and impressive technology, maybe we should also be glad of this opportunity to see ourselves as mortal, time-bound, embodied creatures. In that sense, FaceApp is less a window into the future and more a window into reality.

For centuries Christians have used the Latin phrase ‘Coram deo’, meaning ‘before the face of God’, to encapsulate this sense of living our whole lives before God. That’s what defines us; not age nor self-definition nor our grasp of the future. And as we see the reality of ourselves, then we see afresh the majesty of God – and vice-versa.

So as we face up to the truth of our humanity, let us throw ourselves into the arms of our Creator, who wonderfully doesn’t change, but whose mercies are new every morning. As the hymn-writer Timothy Dudley-Smith put it, “His mercy sure, from age to age the same; His holy name, the Lord, the mighty one.”

Phil Neville, coach for England Women’s World Cup team, has caused controversy this week, because, according to The Times, he said that his team (who finished fourth) did not deserve a heroes’ welcome or an open top bus tour because “they’ve not earned it … a bus-top tour or a trip to Downing Street would be celebrating failure.”

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To be honest, I’m sure Neville would be the first to say there’s been much to celebrate for England this World Cup: the Lionesses have won the nations’ hearts, their semi-final had more TV viewers than anything else in 2019, and seeing local girl Georgia Stanway on the international stage was brilliant! For the legacy of women’s football, it’s a big win.

But back to Neville’s point, why lower the bar? If the team haven’t won, then for all that we might salute their accomplishments, surely we can’t say they deserve to be treated as winners? You’ve either won or you haven’t.

It raises an interesting point about who deserves what. As a Christian I’m thankful that God’s love doesn’t work like a football competition. I think often people assume God will love us if we put on a good show – being better than the next person, etc. But if God related to us like that then – if we’re honest – none of us could say we’ve perfectly met his standards.

But at the heart of the Christian faith is the message of God’s grace: an undeserved love. So we can be honest about our failings, knowing that God loves us in spite of what we’re like.

It’s sometimes said that we live in an ‘entitlement generation’. Like the L’Oreal adverts, it’s not that we think we’ve earned our rights, it’s that we just think we’re worth them. Maybe that’s why Neville’s words have touched a nerve. But in the cold light of day, we all know how ugly a sense of misplaced entitlement can be.

So well played to the Lionesses! And here’s to celebrating Christianity as the liberating news that God loves us in Jesus Christ, not because we’ve deserved it – in fact it’s clear we haven’t – but rather because it’s a gift to be received.

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This post first appeared as part of a weekly Podium Page in a local newspaper (South-West Cumbria’s The Mail), in which three people are invited to contribute a brief response to a trending issue.