#29: Where the Gospel Meets Social Media

#29: Where the Gospel Meets Social Media

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey guys, it’s Jesse. Hey, real quick before we get today’s episode started, I wanna remind you one more time that we have an incredible opportunity in front of us. We’ve had some incredible donors step up and give us a $34,000 matching grant. What that means is every dollar that you give between now and the end of the year up to $34,000 will be matched. But, in order for us to get this money, we need your help. If you could, please head over to lovethyneighborhood.org/donate and donate to help us reach this goal. You’re gonna help us continue to make these podcasts, as well as continue to do boots-on-the-ground ministry. I wanna say thank you to everybody that has donated so far. We still have a ways to go. So please, head over to lovethyneighborhood.org/donate. Okay, on to the episode.

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JESSE EUBANKS: So a couple years ago I was really intrigued by this idea of boredom, and so I decided that I would go around and actually ask young adults — what do you do when you’re bored?

AUDIO CLIPS: When I feel myself getting bored, I tend to look at my phone… My first instinct is to, yep, check Facebook or visit a website… Sometimes I look at my phone, um, not always though…

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, for many of us, scrolling on the super computer in our pockets, it’s become an instinctual habit. In fact, studies have shown that about 40% of our daily activities are performed out of habit. Author Gretchen Rubin writes — ‘Habits are the invisible architecture of our lives.’ So what do our habits say about the kind of life that we’re living?

AUDIO CLIP

JESSE EUBANKS: K, let me give you one other scenario. Let’s say you’re at the grocery store and you’re at the checkout line and the person in front of you has a ton of stuff and it’s gonna be awhile. What do you usually do with yourself in that moment? 

ANSWER: Oh yeah, I definitely look at my phone. (laughs) I definitely look at my phone…

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets social media. This episode is in partnership with The Holy Post podcast. And so their co-host Skye Jethani is here with me in the studio today. Hey Skye.

SKYE JETHANI: Hey Jesse. Thanks for having me on. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Always a pleasure to team up with you, Skye. So, y’know, this episode on social media, it was actually your idea. What interests you about this topic?

SKYE JETHANI: Well part of it is I have three teenagers, so this is a constant issue in our home. But I’ve also been a pastor and I’ve recognized that this is a whole new world we’re living in and we’re not talking a lot about the impact it’s having on our spiritual lives.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and so today we’re looking at social media in the form of habits and how these habits are actually having a negative impact on three different relationships in our lives. 

SKYE JETHANI: And as we do that, it’s important to note that it’s hard to separate social media from the broader issue of technology in general. So while our stories today are gonna focus on social media, there are gonna be times when they also refer simply to technology itself.

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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MLK AUDIO CLIP: The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to out-distance the ends for which we live. We have allowed our technology to out-distance our theology…

JESSE EUBANKS: So that’s Martin Luther King, Jr. from a sermon that he gave in the year 1965. 

SKYE JETHANI: And here’s the crazy part Jesse. You know somebody is really prophetic when their words even 50 years later still seem so relevant. So recently the Barna Group put out a new study all about following Jesus in this digital era, and here’s what they found. A typical 15 to 23-year-old churchgoer today spends about 291 hours per year taking in spiritual content. So that means Bible reading, listening to sermons, praying, going to church, etcetera. 291 hours per year. Now, how many hours do you think those same young adults spent looking at their screens?

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean, it’s gotta be a lot. I mean I’ve got two kids at home. They spend a lot of time with a device in their face. So maybe, I don’t know, 500 hours? 

SKYE JETHANI: It’s actually way worse than you think Jesse. The typical 15 to 23 year old spends 2,767 hours per year looking at screen media. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Holy smokes. 2,000 hours. 

SKYE JETHANI: Let me break down the math for you to maybe make it more accessible. That means that they spend roughly half an hour per day on spiritual content — and, to be honest, I think that’s being generous — but they will spend five and a half hours per day on social media content. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Gosh, I mean you think about how that is forming you, y’know? You think about like all these young adults that are only spending a very small portion of time allowing their faith to be formed by Jesus and the Bible and the prayer, but they’re letting the majority of their life be formed by all these other sources. I mean that’s a really serious statistic. And, y’know, these statistics bring us to the first relationship that social media is negatively impacting, and that is our relationship with God. We’re much more prone to be social media followers than we are Christ followers.

SKYE JETHANI: And obviously the Bible doesn’t speak about social media, but it does have a lot to say about what we do with our time and how the management of our time relates to our true desires.

JESSE EUBANKS: The book of Ephesians is a letter the apostle Paul wrote to the churches in the city of Ephesus.

SKYE JETHANI: Right, and Ephesus was a really big deal. It was the commercial hub, and it attracted tourists. It was kind of the New York City of its day. There was a lot going on there, and there was plenty to distract Christians from their faith. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And so Paul reminds them in chapter five — ‘Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.’

SKYE JETHANI: To put this in kind of contemporary language, what Paul is telling people to do is live intentionally, live with a sense of self-awareness, don’t just be carried along by the currents of your culture. So it’s about mindfulness, it’s about intentionality, it’s about discernment.

JESSE EUBANKS: It actually makes me think of this quote from Annie Dillard. She says that ‘how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.’ Y’know, getting swept up by the culture, it’s a really easy thing to do, and that’s exactly what ended up happening to a guy named Justin Earley.

So it all started when one day, in his twenties, Justin felt a calling to go to law school. But not just to go to law school, he really wanted to be a witness for Jesus in the business world. 

JUSTIN EARLEY: That was a real calling in my life where I felt like the Lord was pushing me towards this and actually pushing me towards being a missionary within the vocation of law.

JESSE EUBANKS: So Justin decides he’s going to obey this call, so he goes to Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C. and he works really hard at it.

JUSTIN EARLEY: Graduated at the top of my class and got my dream job in international mergers and acquisitions at a big law firm in Richmond.

JESSE EUBANKS: And Justin like loved his job. Uh, he was a really good lawyer. He ended up getting married, he had two kids, and everything about his life excited him because he knew that he was doing what God had called him to do — be a missionary in the world of law.  But without really noticing it, Justin had actually started to form some new habits.

JUSTIN EARLEY: I think about my morning routine at that time. It would begin immediately with waking up and checking emails, work-related emails. It would proceed by showing up somewhere late. I would often be eating at my desk instead of with people. Um, I would often be calling my wife and say I wasn’t going to make it home for dinner ‘cuz something came up.

JESSE EUBANKS: And of course, deeply intertwined with all that he was doing, was the use of technology. 

JUSTIN EARLEY: My alerts for all of the above, y’know, this could be a social media post, a meme, a text message, an email — y’know, it was all the things coming through. Whatever beeps at me, it’s worth responding to. Y’know, recent things are relevant things and urgent things are important things.

SKYE JETHANI: I’m sure as people listen to Justin they’re thinking this isn’t just a problem for lawyers because it’s something that most of us experience. There was this recent study by IDC that said 79% of smartphone users reach for their phone within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so it’s not like Justin questioned this habit. I mean it’s a normal thing, honestly for all of us.

JUSTIN EARLEY: That’s what we all did. I thought that’s exactly what you were supposed to do to, y’know, be an aspiring young lawyer.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah and so Justin keeps these habits up day after day, month after month, until one night he realizes that something is not right.

JUSTIN EARLEY: I suddenly woke up one evening with what I now know are panic attacks. I just felt this sort of feeling of existential dread in the middle of the night. I didn’t even know why I was awake.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, at first he thought, ‘Oh, I’m just having a bad night. Y’know, I must be worried about something. This’ll go away.’ But when he started going on more than 48 hours with zero to little sleep? He decided he was gonna have to do something about this.

JUSTIN EARLEY: I finally went to the hospital when the doctor told me very anticlimactically that I was experiencing clinical anxiety and that I was really normal and common as if that’s comforting and sends me home with some sleeping pills.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what it meant was that Justin had developed clinical anxiety. 

SKYE JETHANI: I’m sad to say it, but I’m not surprised. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, why is that?

SKYE JETHANI: Well because there’s a lot of troubling research that shows a correlation between social media use and bad mental health.

DREW MOSER: Uh, Generation Z — so the generation that is now taking over our college campuses — are the most stressed-out generation in modern American history.

SKYE JETHANI: This is Drew Moser. He’s the dean of student engagement at Taylor University, and he’s done a ton of research because of what he’s seen on campus on the effects of technology and our well-being.

DREW MOSER: Students come in — and this is nationwide, so not just on my campus — with greater mental health concerns and, uh, higher utilization rates of counseling centers. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that makes sense to me. Y’know, I lead this organization, Love Thy Neighborhood, so we say that we’re like a Peace Corp with Bibles, like we recruit young adults from all over the world to relocate to our city to do urban ministry. And I’ve actually been doing a version of this since 2005, so about 15 years, and there’s no denying the fact that times have changed. Y’know, 15 years ago, young adults just had an easier time of pushing through awkward conversations, talking to strangers, pushing through their anxieties.

SKYE JETHANI: So here’s the deal. The people who really want to defend social media and phone use will often point out that there is no direct evidence that says phone use or social media directly causes mental health problems or anxiety. That’s true. However, there is a lot of evidence — and it’s growing — that there is a strong correlation between the two. So do you know what year the iPhone was invented?

JESSE EUBANKS: I feel like it was around, y’know, maybe late 2007?

SKYE JETHANI: Right, it was 2007, and that’s sort of seen as the beginning of the smartphone era. Now in 2007, right before smartphones came out, about 3.5% of kids under 17 had diagnosed anxiety disorders. But today, 12 years after smartphones have been introduced, the number of kids diagnosed with anxiety has more than doubled to 7.1%. 

JESSE EUBANKS: What do you think’s causing that anxiety?

SKYE JETHANI: Again, here’s Drew Moser.

DREW MOSER: For one, we talk about, uh, the comparison trap. 

SKYE JETHANI: Comparing constantly the unglorious parts of your life to the fantastically curated images that everyone else is putting up on social media.

DREW MOSER: When you think about what we put on our Instagram feeds, we don’t put, y’know, the box of saltine crackers. We typically, y’know, we put — when we’re at a nice restaurant and the meal looks amazing and it’s plated well, we’ll snap a picture of it. Multiply that by, y’know, maybe a hundred people that are also out to eat in various locations all over the world, and you start to realize that ‘Oh, my box of crackers doesn’t — it seems really woefully insufficient to what I’m seeing on my feed.’

JESSE EUBANKS: And this is the second relationship that’s being negatively impacted by social media. So the first relationship was our relationship with God. The second relationship is our relationship with ourselves. Y’know, going back to Justin, the whole reason that he became a lawyer in the first place was because he wanted to share Christ in the business world, but now he found himself struggling to get healthy mentally, struggling to get out of bed, struggling to maintain relationships. And this wasn’t just like for a few weeks. Y’know, this went on for a whole year.

JUSTIN EARLEY: So I went from sort of crisis of anxiety to true mental health crisis where I was starting to, y’know, have these awful nightmares and huge daytime mood swings, and even suicidal thoughts were creeping in. And it was this, this question — how did the missionary become converted? 

JESSE EUBANKS: And as Justin thought about it, he came to realize that at least part of the answer — it was actually in his habits. And part of those habits involved his screen time. 

JUSTIN EARLEY: I had assimilated to all the usual cultural habits.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, these habits that said that every time that he had a free minute, y’know, he was gonna check his email, he was gonna check his Facebook. Uh, oh, you got a new notification? Open it now. You feel anxious? Scroll through Instagram. If you’re waiting in line, y’know, send a Snapchat. Oh, you can’t sleep? Better watch YouTube. So this habit of whatever comes at us in our day, we approach it phone in hand and fully connected. 

SKYE JETHANI: But here’s the question that’s really haunting me — why? Why can’t we operate without this technology? Why can’t we unplug?

JESSE EUBANKS: You mean like we know that it’s bad for us because all these studies are showing that but we’re doing it anyway.

SKYE JETHANI: Exactly.  

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, I, I don’t know. I mean do you have an answer for that?

SKYE JETHANI: Well I’ve got thoughts, but I would rather talk to the people who have been thinking and studying on this stuff because they have some interesting answers. And they tell us that ultimately we don’t just need to look at the technology but we have to examine the technology behind the technology. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Coming up — pulling back the curtain on Facebook. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

SKYE JETHANI: And I’m Skye Jethani. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets social media.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve been telling the story of Justin Earley. Justin felt God call him to be a missionary among law firms, so he went to school, became a lawyer. And now, instead of seeing anyone convert to Christianity, he’s the one who’s been converted — to a life that’s always connected online. And along with that actually came a serious breakdown in his mental health. So I guess the question becomes — if so much social media or online usage isn’t all that healthy for us, why do we do it?

SKYE JETHANI: Well to begin to answer that, here’s a clip from CBS News of the founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker.

AUDIO CLIP (SEAN PARKER): Y’know if the thought process that went into building these applications — Facebook being the first of them to really understand it — that thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while.

JESSE EUBANKS: Dopamine hit? That’s like drug addict language.

SKYE JETHANI: Exactly, because social media is designed to be addicting. Neuroimaging studies have clearly shown which portions of the brain are involved when we engage social media, and one of them is what scientists refer to as the reward center. So in that clip Sean Parker talked about dopamine, and one Huffington Post article says that dopamine is like our brain’s “pleasure chemical.” It’s stimulated by unpredictability and by getting small bits of information and by little reward cues, all of which are characteristic of social media use. Again, here’s the founding Facebook president Sean Parker.

AUDIO CLIP (SEAN PARKER): I mean it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in, in human psychology. And I just, I think that the inventors, creators, understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, I hear all this and it, it actually makes me think of big tobacco. You know, the big tobacco companies, when they figured out that they could put nicotine into their products and that those products would still give us cancer but if they could make us addicts that it would make them profits, I mean there is just, there is not a whole lot of difference between what cigarette companies did and what these social media companies are doing. They’re designed to make us addicted.

SKYE JETHANI: Right, and any addictive substance is the best business model you can possibly find because what it does is it bypasses the person’s will. It bypasses their rationality. It bypasses the very thing that would stop a person from purchasing or engaging in the product. And once you own that part of the person’s brain, you own everything about them. Check out this other interview, this time with former Facebook vice president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya on CNBC.

AUDIO CLIP

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: We know for a fact that what all of these systems do, every single one, is it exploits our own natural tendencies in human beings to get and want feedback, and that feedback, chemically speaking, is the release of dopamine in your brain. And so what these feedback loops do — and they exist everywhere, in Call of Duty, in other video games, in social networking sites — they get you to react. And I think that if you get too desensitized and you need it over and over and over again, then you become actually detached from the world in which you live —

INTERVIEWER: …You become callous, you become crude… 

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: — and you live in front of your screen…

SKYE JETHANI: So they talked about living in front of our screens and how we become a different person when we’re in front of our screen. Here’s Drew Moser again, the dean from Taylor University, who talked about it this way.

DREW MOSER: I have a kid in high school and I was at a recent soccer game of his this past fall and there were other of his classmates who were at the game watching and there was probably six to eight of ‘em and they spent probably most of the game on their phones — sitting right next to each other, but on their phones. 

SKYE JETHANI: And all this living in front of our screens is something that Drew Moser sees as a real problem when it comes to living in Christian community and the church. 

DREW MOSER: I think what is at stake is a core facet of Christian theology, which is that we are an embodied people meant to be together in community. If all we’re doing — if we are so connected that we are pulled from that reality and from that sense of calling to our local neighborhoods, then I think that is what is at risk. And it’s — the impact is tremendous. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Which actually brings us to the third relationship that’s suffering from social media. So the first relationship that’s suffering is our relationship with God, the second one is our relationship with ourselves, and the third one, of course, it’s our relationship with other people. Y’know, experiencing so much of our life through our screens, it’s made us lose the ability to do real-life relationships. So something that we did when we were reporting for this episode is we actually asked our listeners to call in and tell us about a time when social media negatively impacted a relationship, and so I’d like to share a couple of those with you. So the first one is from a guy named Ellis.

ELLIS: Um, there was a time when I was talking to this girl back in high school and I faced a lot of rejection because, um, I would rely heavily on like her response time on social media. And I noticed that, um, if I texted her, I would get on Facebook or get on Snapchat to see if she was active and to see if she was rejecting me or not, just very toxic and not healthy in a manner of like, um, relying on my happiness being impacted by the response of someone else.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we did this poll where we asked our listeners — what’s something you do online that you would never do in real life? And over half the responses were actually stalking people. So like what Ellis is talking about totally makes sense. I mean we go online and we’re like into this, y’know, into this guy or this girl and we’re like ‘Oh, what are they up to today?’ Y’know, ‘Are they talking about me? Who else’s post are they liking? Is it a sign that there’s something romantic going on between them?’ And so, y’know, social media like makes us weird little stalker people and neurotic, like it’s totally not healthy at all. Okay, so that’s the first story. The second story I wanna share with you is actually from a listener who wanted to remain anonymous.

ANONYMOUS LISTENER: A friend of mine and her husband are very passionate about foster care and she asked me to be a referral for the foster care agency, um, that they were going to be working with, but I also knew that she and her husband were struggling because, um, he was spending a lot of time at work. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so she tells her friend she’s not sure she can recommend her, she’s not sure how the friend’s going to respond, and then shortly after she actually goes online and she’s kind of shocked by what she comes across. 

ANONYMOUS LISTENER: And I went online and saw, um, something she had posted on her Facebook about how she was very upset with people who were not being supportive with their foster care decision and were expressing concerns, and I felt like ‘Well why didn’t you come to me and talk to me about it, about how you felt about what I said?’

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the thing, like I think that this friend probably would’ve had this attitude without social media and she probably would’ve even maybe gossiped even without social media, but the reality is that this girl would not have come across it and it wouldn’t have been put out there for literally every person that her friend knew to hear about.

ANONYMOUS LISTENER: From that point on, I thought, y’know, if she’s not willing to tell me when she’s upset about something but she’s going to go and talk about it on social media, then I think I want to move away from this relationship. We no longer have a close relationship. We share a lot of the same friends, but I would say that there’s still some things between us. I look back and I wish that I had confronted her about social media posts or at least asked her about it and tried to talk to her about it.

SKYE JETHANI: I think it’s important to realize that social media doesn’t make us into bad people. I think what it sadly does is it reveals and amplifies what’s already there. It takes unhealthy social dynamics, unhealthy relationships, and kind of pours gasoline on it and makes it so much worse. It reminds me of the Captain America movie when Steve Rogers is still that little soldier who is kind of the twerp that got beat up all the time and he’s talking to the scientist who’s gonna give him the super serum and the scientist was explaining why he chose Steve Rogers and he said ‘because this serum takes whatever’s in you and makes it more. If you’re bad, it’ll make it worse. And if you’re good, it’ll make you better.’ And I think that’s a little bit what we see happening with social media.

JESSE EUBANKS: So I guess the question still on the table is — what do we do? I wanna tell you a story about this college professor, and he came up with what he thought was a solution that was pretty radical. 

READ SCHUCHARDT: Give up the phone itself and don’t replace it for the entire semester, and I’ll guarantee you an A in the class.

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Read Schuchardt. Uh, he is actually a communications professor at Wheaton College. But the ironic thing is, though he teaches communications, Read actually lives his entire life without the primary communication device of his time — a cell phone. 

READ SCHUCHARDT: One of the biggest questions I always get is, y’know, either jokingly or seriously, they say something like ‘Well you sound Amish.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: But Read actually lives this way on purpose. Uh, he likens it to a fish trying to explain water. I mean if he wants to be able to understand and teach communications, then he feels like he needs to approach it from the outside looking in. But as you might imagine, y’know, life in 2019 without a cell phone of any kind, it often gets very inconvenient.

READ SCHUCHARDT: It’s now to the point where there’s certain parking meters in certain cities where you have to have an app on a smartphone to pay for the parking, and the assumption is that everybody has a phone.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and because Read has also been seeing the negative effects of social media on his campus, he decided to offer his students an optional assignment — go the whole semester without your phone and I will guarantee you an A in class.

READ SCHUCHARDT: You still have to come to class. You still have to do the work. It’s not a free skip or pass, y’know, get out of the semester from doing the work. But what I said was, ‘If you give up your smartphone, you’ll actually become an A student because you’ll actually have the time to focus on your studies. You’ll actually have the time to do the reading. You’ll have the time to think and reflect on, y’know, what you’re studying here.

JESSE EUBANKS: So Skye, as Read was telling me about this, I thought, y’know — what would it look like for us to run this experiment ourselves, sort of to test this in-house? 

SKYE JETHANI: And I’m assuming you offered to give up your phone, right Jesse? 

JESSE EUBANKS: So actually no. Instead I actually had our producer Rachel Szabo give up her phone. 

AUDIO CLIP

(Phone ring)

RACHEL SZABO’S MOM: Hello?

RACHEL SZABO: Hi mom.

RACHEL SZABO’S MOM: What’s going on?

RACHEL SZABO: Uh, do you still have that old alarm clock in the bedroom at your house?

RACHEL SZABO’S MOM: Yeah, the same clock that’s always in there.

RACHEL SZABO: So I’m gonna need it so I can wake up in the morning because I can no longer use my phone.

RACHEL SZABO’S MOM: (laughs)

JESSE EUBANKS: So stay with us.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

SKYE JETHANI: And I’m Skye Jethani. Today — where the gospel meets social media.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve looked at some of the negative effects of constant screen use and now the question is — what do we do about it? And one college professor offered for his students to give up their smartphone for the whole semester in exchange for an A. And I thought this was a pretty good idea, so I had our producer Rachel Szabo try it out. So, I’ve asked Rachel to come in and to talk about her experience. So she’s actually with us here in the studio right now. Hey Rach.

RACHEL SZABO: Hey.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, okay, so you did a version of Read’s assignment. You gave up your phone for how long?

RACHEL SZABO: So I did it for a month. The assignment that Read gave, for the whole semester, that would have been maybe like three months or something, but, y’know, I have a job and we have production schedules and deadlines to meet, and so. But I did it for a month.

JESSE EUBANKS: And how did it go?

RACHEL SZABO: Well, so what I did during that month is I kept an audio journal of how it was going and I brought some of those clips in to share with you. 

AUDIO CLIP: Alright, day 1 with no phone. It’s weird not grabbing my phone because what’s the first thing you do in the morning is you grab your phone and you check your email, you check your Facebook, you check your Instagram. So yeah, like it feels weird in my body to not reach my arm out and grab my phone and look at it…

Okay, day 2, no smartphone. I do miss being able to listen to music at any point at any time using Spotify, so I did dig up my old, super old mp3 player, which surprisingly still works, so I can at least listen to music while I’m walking to and from work.

JESSE EUBANKS: You still have an mp3 player?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so I had to dig it like out of the archives of my bedroom and all the songs on it were from like college.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, so it wasn’t even new music. What was on there?

RACHEL SZABO: Uh, DC Talk. (laughter) Okay moving on. We’re moving on.

AUDIO CLIP: Day 5, no phone. I definitely feel less weighed down, like I feel like my brain doesn’t have to be in so many different places at once or like my brain doesn’t have to intake so much information all the time, which I’ve actually found rather refreshing.

SKYE JETHANI: This is exactly what we were talking about earlier, about how we’re always in this mode of multitasking and how it’s exhausting and can contribute to anxiety.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah absolutely. There was definitely a sense of freedom and almost like a weight lifted that came along with it. However, it wasn’t all awesome and liberating.

AUDIO CLIP: Day 12. It’s 4 a.m. and I can’t sleep and I really just want to put on YouTube right now, but instead I’m laying here in the quiet.

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, so normally when you can watch YouTube, what is it that you watch on YouTube at 4 a.m.? 

RACHEL SZABO (chuckling): I like to watch Bob Ross. He’s very calming.

JESSE EUBANKS: I’ve done that before. Yeah, he helps put me to sleep too.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, but so fast forward a few days and here’s where the experiment actually gets interesting.

AUDIO CLIP: Alright, day 15. Actually had to use my phone today. So I do the music for the kids at church on Sunday, like I help lead their music time, and today we didn’t have our keyboardist who is usually there to play with us. I didn’t realize that we had new songs, uh, starting this week with them, and I did not know them. So yeah, I had to get my phone out and learn them, uh, real fast. My life without a phone apparently cannot be done.

JESSE EUBANKS: So you made it 15 days? 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, essentially I failed the experiment. I couldn’t, I couldn’t do a month without my phone.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so was that the end? Like you got to 15 days and you like shut it down?

RACHEL SZABO: Well no, I kept going. I finished out the month, but also I thought it was rather telling, like I can only go 15 days without having to use my phone for something. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so what did you reflect on? What did you learn from it? Any insights from the month?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so actually I’ve, uh, made some changes to, uh, my phone since doing that month without it. So I’ve actually turned off all my notifications, so I don’t get notifications anymore for emails or Instagram or anything like that. And the other thing that I’ve done is I’ve noticed I’m a lot more prone to set my phone somewhere and just leave it there. So like if I’m at work, I’ll set my phone on my desk and I’ll leave it there. Or when I go home sometimes, I set it in my room and I leave it there and I don’t come back to it until like I’m going to bed or something like that.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you’re treating it almost like it’s an answering machine from the 1980’s.

RACHEL SZABO: Yes.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s a very different relationship.

RACHEL SZABO: Uh-huh.

SKYE JETHANI: The one question I did have is — Read was gonna give his students an A if they gave up their phone. Did you promise Rachel anything if she successfully gave up hers?

RACHEL SZABO: I didn’t get anything.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, uh, how about this then? Later I’ll take you out and I’ll buy you a DC Talk CD and a Bob Ross bobblehead.

RACHEL SZABO (laughs): Okay.

SKYE JETHANI: So here’s the thing. I’m not convinced that going cold turkey and just cutting off our screens is the right way to go, that it’s addressing the real problem, partly because even if we get off of our devices, we live in a society that uses them all the time and we can’t — and Rachel’s experiment proved this — you can’t really isolate yourself entirely. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah for sure. I mean when we take our interns on retreats, we actually do tech-free retreats, but, y’know, that’s only for three days. And I’m not sure that if we made it three months that that would actually be a real solution. Y’know, small windows of time, that’s good, but, uh, y’know, no technology as a lifestyle, I’m not sure that’s really a good long-term solution. 

SKYE JETHANI: This whole time we’ve been talking about habits, and if you get rid of the phone, it’s not necessarily gonna change the habits that you’ve had unless you build new habits to replace them. So yes, part of the problem is the technology itself, but part of the problem — and maybe the real problem — is learning how to better handle the technology that we can’t live without.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I think this is a good opportunity for us to go back to Justin Earley, the stressed out lawyer from earlier. Y’know, when we last left him, he was struggling with his mental health and struggling with his relationships. Uh, in fact, here’s another story that he told me. So part of his job was to work with a partner law firm in London. And of course, London — it’s five hours ahead.

JUSTIN EARLEY: Unconsciously began to roll over and check my email every morning ‘cuz London was already halfway through the day, so I’d wake up to half a day’s worth of emails and it never seemed to me to be a problem until one morning I got up because I heard my son cry. But five minutes later, I was sitting on the side of my bed checking emails and I still hadn’t gone to help him and I had one of those wake up moments of ‘How did I become that guy?’ I didn’t mean to be like this. Nobody does. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So at this point Justin starts to realize that, y’know, not only his own mental health was suffering, but his family was suffering too. And so, one night, in sort of a last ditch effort, he asks some of his friends to meet him.

JUSTIN EARLEY: I sat down with some friends one night at a restaurant and I remember putting a piece of paper on the table and it had a program of daily and weekly habits on it.

JESSE EUBANKS: So he shows them this piece of paper, and it has a list of habits on it that he and his wife had come up with based on things that they had learned in counseling and talking with experts. 

JUSTIN EARLEY: So I was asking my friends that night to keep me accountable to these daily and weekly habits.

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s what he wrote down. These four habits were on the list.

So Habit #1 — Kneeling Prayer. So three times a day, Justin’s going to stop and pray. It didn’t need to be elaborate. It could be one sentence. But he would pray out loud.

SKYE JETHANI: This is actually a very ancient practice that dates back to the Old Testament. You see it in the book of Daniel, where he would regularly stop throughout the day and face Jerusalem to pray. It’s a practice that has shaped God’s people for a long, long time that is a good one to recover.

JESSE EUBANKS: Habit #2 — Every day he would share at least one meal with other people. Here’s Justin.

JUSTIN EARLEY: Having a meal with somebody every day, which was designed to counter that sort of, um, fast food, microwavable pace of life and actually sit down at the table with either my family or somebody at work each day and have one communal meal.

SKYE JETHANI: It’s interesting that for most of Christian history gathering for a meal was the centerpiece of Christian worship. It was the Lord’s Supper or the communion table. And that says something not just about the way God wants us to worship him, but what we’re called to with one another. And so incorporating this practice is just a basic way of making sure we have incarnate human engagement with one another.

JESSE EUBANKS: Habit #3 — At least one hour a day, he would turn his phone off. So, here’s the deal. Justin really found it hard to be present with his kids, with his wife, with his friends, with his neighbors because there were always notifications or posts or emails demanding his attention.

JUSTIN EARLEY: My presence was constantly fractured because by thinking that I could be in multiple places — that is, sort of half at the office and half at home — I ended up being no place at all.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so for one hour a day, the phone would be completely turned off. Not on silent — it would be turned off.

SKYE JETHANI: This is I think probably the most sinister temptation that these devices offer to us. They give us the illusion of omnipresence, almost the illusion of being God-like, where we are not limited by our bodies anymore and through our devices we can be anywhere and everywhere all at once, which is really a divine quality but it’s an illusion. We can’t be everywhere at once, and part of God’s good gift to us is recognizing our limitations, recognizing we can only be present where we are. And by turning off the phone, we kind of shatter the illusion of our omnipresence and learn what it means to be human again. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I have a good friend who says if you wanna know what it felt like for Frodo to carry the one ring, put your phone around your neck and never look every time it dings.

SKYE JETHANI (chuckling): I like that. That’s great.

JESSE EUBANKS: Alright, habit #4 —  in the morning, before he checks his phone, he’ll spend time in Scripture. So actually on his website, Justin wrote this. He said, ‘Daily immersion in the Scriptures resists the anxiety of emails, the anger of news, and the envy of social media. Instead it forms us daily in our true identity as children of the King, dearly loved.’

SKYE JETHANI: I love the list that Justin’s come up with, but my question is — how did it go? Did it actually change the way he lived?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so it can be kind of daunting, y’know, to think about implementing all of these habits simultaneously, but one at a time, slowly, Justin’s started to implement them and he didn’t do them just for a month or three months. He actually ended up implementing these over the course of a year. And after this year, y’know, Justin really started to begin to see things change. 

JUSTIN EARLEY: I had no idea how much this smallest, most ordinary routines actually do affect our mental life, our spiritual life, our emotional life, even our souls, in deep and powerful ways, but I do feel much, much more rooted, much, much more rooted.

JESSE EUBANKS: So in fact Justin still lives by these habits today, and he wrote them down in a book to help others reshape their own technology habits. His book is called The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction.

JUSTIN EARLEY: Our sense of community, our sense of presence, our sense of love, our whole spiritual being, our sense of can we and how we talk to God — all these things I think are actually either threatened or encouraged by our technology habits. And that’s a serious — I think that’s why we need to take them as a serious component of discipleship.

JESSE EUBANKS: And I just wanna point out, like this isn’t meant to be legalism, y’know, and that isn’t what Justin is advocating for in his list of habits.

JUSTIN EARLEY: Our habits will never, ever change God’s love for us. That is completely clear. However, God’s love for us can, and it should — in fact, I would say it must — change our habits. Y’know, we’re gonna bear someone’s yoke, either Jesus or something else. And when we bear the yoke of social media, it’s really important to know that the creators of these things — they don’t love us. They’re not out for our good like Jesus is, and so I would much rather bear the yoke of the gentle, kind master who loves me and wants my good.

JESSE EUBANKS: So if you hear what Justin’s doing here, what he’s doing is exactly what Paul was getting at in Ephesians, which was to walk not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time. 

SKYE JETHANI: I think it, I think it’s important to remember that going back to Paul’s words to the Ephesians, Paul wasn’t writing those things to individuals. He was talking to a community of Christians. And it’s a way of remembering that if we want to change our habits, if we want to change our daily routines, it’s a really difficult thing to do alone and it’s a lot easier when we have people around us, our families, our households, our churches, our sisters and brothers in Christ, who together all want that deeper experience of life with God and each other, and so we can together practice these things.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, at LTN we’ll talk oftentimes — and I’ll tell my kids this — I’ll say like ‘people over pixels.’ Y’know, people are more important than pixels, and pixels can never fulfill you and make your life meaningful in the way that people can. I think the biggest thing that’s terrifying about our relationship to social media is that we believe social media will make our life meaningful when the reality is that only flesh and blood relationships and only our faith in God can give our life meaning.

JUSTIN EARLEY: I used to think only what we quote unquote believed and talk about what we believed mattered, um, as if true belief was only what you say it is when you’re asked to explain it. And now I see belief, y’know, as much more of an intertwined, um, what you say and what you habitually do without thinking, so just sort of the kind of gut reactions. I’ve found that my habits, my unconscious habits, are actually a much better indicator of what I really believe.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so for us, it means that we need to do some self-examination. What do our habits say about what and who we love and who we live for? Because of course, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you’d like to learn more about Justin Earley’s daily habits, check out his website at thecommonrule.org. For even more resources on this topic or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Justin Earley, Drew Moser, Read Schuchardt, and Rachel Szabo. Special thanks also to our listeners who responded to our poll as well as called in with their own personal stories. Also special thank you to the young adults who let me ask them about what happens when they’re bored — Taylor Lindsey, Hong Shu, and Janelle Dawkins.

SKYE JETHANI: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Skye Jethani from The Holy Post podcast. Skye, thanks so much for joining us today.

SKYE JETHANI: It was a pleasure.

JESSE EUBANKS: Listen, check out Skye’s show The Holy Post. It really is one of my favorite podcasts. It is one of the few podcasts that almost all of the LTN staff listen to consistently. You can find The Holy Post wherever it is that you listen to podcasts.

SKYE JETHANI: And our producer, technical director, editor, and president of the DC Talk’s fan club is Rachel Szabo.

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Scott Holmes, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

SKYE JETHANI: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’