Lost In A Consumer World

Tiktoker influencer “Clavicular” was recently arrested. Why should we care? His story in the crazed environment of social media reveals a society in desperate need of clarity, which is only found in God. Clavicular went viral as a social influencer from his use of radical rhetoric and extreme actions. He popularized the phrase “looksmaxxing,” where you take your looks to the max because, to him, all that matters in the world is looks. In a bizarre admission, he revealed that to maximize his jaw line, he hit himself in the face with hammers.

In the “looksmaxx” mold, one needs to be decadent, hedonistic, physically attractive, and create one's own meaning before becoming worm food at death. His pitch to his audience is I’m nothing but a pretty face who produces shocking content for attention - and this sums up the entire internet phenomenon.

As is typical of one who engages in provocative content, there is no depth and meaning to Clavicular’s words. He sounds as dumb as a nail when he tries to comment on political and world affairs. Because of his self-absorbed vibe, he has 700,000 Tik-Tok followers and has an enormous following on “kick-stream.” This means there is a whole swath of young people watching his life and treating it as a quasi gospel message on how to dominate the social scene. . 

The Clavicular popularity uncovers the bizarre game in the social media world in which young people attempt to compare themselves to the fake photos, staged experiences, and extreme actions of flashy provocateurs. Here, boys become so obsessed with having a perfect jaw line that they are willing to break it with a hammer, or take drugs to get a buffed-body while at the same time perfectly fine with being empty-headed with their intellectual formation.

This all shouldn't be a surprise. Social media is fertile breeding ground for vanity and self-aggrandizement as it enables attention-seeking behavior. To young people, the internet has become a fishbowl for live-streamers in which the more weird and extreme clips are rewarded with more attention and social pull on others. This, in turn, causes the followers of online “influencers” to get sucked into a fake hyper-reality that distorts their intellectual and creative drive. Probably the most addictive social media platform for teens is Snapchat. Snapchat keeps kids hooked with flashy features like Snap Streaks, the Snap Map, My Eyes Only, and a built-in AI chatbot. Not to mention that Snapchat contains a cesspool of sexual weirdos. In fact, the Haven project set up a fake account as a 13-year-old girl, and within minutes, she was shown sexual content, vandalism videos, and videos comparing school to jail. 

While not as extreme, adults too have turned their attention to gazing at social media, to the tune of 2.5 hours a day, while phone time in general is up to 5 hours a day. Our time in this world is limited and yet we spend hours plastered in front of a screen pursuing entertainment. From this, we inevitably become dragged into an artificial world that has no direct impact on our life. Instead of living our life we are choosing to watch someone else’s peculiar life.

As author Rob Marco points out, the rise of technology has created a passivity among the population. Here, we become spectators and consumers of other people’s lives. In passivity, the desire to think and to have meaningful conversations is stripped away. Rather, we spend our time as spectators listening and admiring other people in podcasts, social media, and streaming videos. In short, as technology advances, it stunts human flourishing and reduces us to a passive bystander in life.

When my kids were toddlers, they would be glued to watching videos of people opening packages of toys. It began to dawn on me that my kids were wasting their free time, watching other people enjoy their free time. As technology allowed influencers, AI, and social media scrolling to explode it has turned us into obedient stooges of the clickbait trap cunningly employed by the algorithm trap. Flowing from this, the populace has become mere consumers of content, all the while being cut off from engaging in an arduous intellectual or spiritual pursuit. As Rob Marco notes, “Reading, thinking—these active and noble enterprises have simply become too hard when compared to the alternative ease of passive consumption.”

God infused our mind an aspiration to explore, to learn, to create, and when we engage our intellectual faculties, we become elevated to the transcendent. St. Augustine declared, “The soul grows by learning.” But the more we turn into consumers in front of a screen, this God-given desire becomes drained. Here, discovery mode is exchanged for the cheaper entertainment mode. In entertainment mode, we just sit and amuse our lower faculties while hampering the intellectual drive in our higher faculties.   

God also imbues us to share in creation by creating families, cultivating the ground, and crafting a society in which His light is manifested. There is a great sense of accomplishment from creating something - a batch of cookies, a shelf, an article, a relationship. But when we consume entertainment, we aren’t creating. Simply put, consuming cuts off creating and erodes our intelligence. 

Ironically, our technology even tells us we’ve become dumber because of the tech overload. A quick AI search on whether U.S. students are becoming smarter or dumber reveals AI’s response that: “students show lower academic performance, reduced attention spans, and lower proficiency levels due to factors like tech distraction and learning disruptions.” The data shows a dumbing-down trend. Across a wide range of tests, grade levels, and subject areas, achievement scores have been getting worse. The main culprit among researchers, as if it is a surprise, is cell phones. Studies continuously point out that smartphones ruin our ability to think, limit our self-control, responsibility, and follow-through. 

Technology produces efficiency and convenience in trivial things, but the fallout from its dependency is making us incoherent in discerning things of a higher order. As Cardinal Sarah sums up, “Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing.”

With this, we can comprehend the canvas of the human portrait which we are painting on - the sad state of our entertainment obsessed lifestyle has us lurching towards intellectual depravity. Here, we stand where technology and entertainment mold together to stunt our pursuit of reason and creative drive that God implanted in us. This forging alliance of technology and entertainment has all the hallmarks of a demonic source that seeks to entice us with dopamine hits, turning us into ignorant stooges as we walk in a zombie-like trance into the devil’s lair. By making you dumber, he can better control what you think, cutting off your God-infused reasoning power.

In his masterpiece, "Screwtape Letters", CS Lewis shows how the senior demon trains the junior demon on the subtle yet deadly strategy of distracting people so they can eventually snatch their souls. One of the more interesting suggestions Screwtape offers to Wormwood is to distract his patient not from thinking, but from the nature of critical thought itself. He advises Wormwood to make sure his patient does not “think of doctrines as primarily true or false, but as academic or practical, outworn or contemporary."

The objective for a demon is to litter his patient with a stream of useless drama that appeals to the patient’s sensual response. In this, the patient becomes addicted to the latest gossip of what’s going on in politics, who is the latest trending influencer, and what is the newest moral outrage that provokes constant emotional banter on social media. The demons' goal is to place us in a passive state of a consumer of content, where our attention spans become grounded to dust by the algorithm saw. One wonders if Screwtape himself was behind the naming of the social media “feed.”

This environment, in which we flock to content that is reduced to soundbite fragments, cuts off our critical thinking to mere emotional reaction to the most clever slogan. Rather than initiate anything that invokes intellectual grit and creative grappling, we’ve fallen for the cheaper, easier mold of the bored consumer who takes in other people’s artificial content while realizing he has lost his creative power.    

Demons have brokered a disastrous trade for us. They have us outsource our ability to think, to ponder the truth, the mysterious, to creative influencers who are enhanced in the algorithm world of screen seduction. The advantage they tell us is it will be easier. Yes, but the easy way, as Jesus insinuated, is the “way to destruction.” Author John Mac Ghilonn sums up the dilemma: “We’re witnessing a corruption of human consciousness that hinders our ability for lingering, for deep thought, for wonder and contemplation—the natural prerequisites of attentiveness and conversion.” Sadly, we don’t create independent thoughts, strike up conversations about meaningful topics, but simply reach for digital content that arouses our sensual faculties.

Being pulled down to a consumer-only version of oneself, the left brain’s overuse essentially mutes active right-brain use. Here, the more task oriented left brain has a consumer-focused person view life as one giant “to-do list” while the right side of the brain, which invokes meaning and purpose, goes silent. However, God has created both sides of the brain in harmony for once we know who we are and the purpose of our life stamped in the right side, then the left side’s logic and task focus can place our actions in congruence to our end. 

If demons have created this enormously sophisticated megaphone of distractions in our culture, it behooves us to ponder what they want to distract us from. As one exorcist commented, “The demon's motto is anything but God.” In short, they throw a thousand shiny things your way so you don’t focus on God. Any spiritual quest inevitably becomes dispersed among infinite distractions in our tech-crazed society. The faith cannot grow in a consumer tech environment. While there has been an uptick in pockets of Catholicism recently, overall religious engagement in the U.S. remains low - as a recent Gallup survey shows.

Knowing all this, prayer is the ultimate antidote to loosen the demonic vice grip. Rather than consuming loud attention-seeking rhetoric and images on the internet, in prayer, we consume God’s message in the Scripture. 

St. John Damascene put it simply, “Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God.” While the solution of prayer sounds simple, the movement from the screen world to a deep spiritual encounter is like a casual runner being thrust into an Ironman triathlon. If your thoughts have mainly consumed secular entertainment in the digital world, your mind is loaded with trivial content that is designed to entice your sensual response. And this constant drip of notifications that alert our senses and trigger our attention away from focused thought towards spiritual silence is enough to make prayer downright impossible.  

In this digital consumer-induced fog, prayer initially becomes boring and hard for the secular mind. Try as you may, you can’t segue from the immediate gratification in entertainment mode to seeking out mysteries of the divine precisely because our faith stands in opposition to modern-day tendencies. Prayer is not flashy like the attention-seeking content on social media. Prayer is rooted in supernatural needs. The prayer that Jesus gave us in the Our Father is not glitzy and is not going to initially arouse the senses the way notification blasts do. God traditionally reveals Himself in silence, stillness, and meditation on sacred mysteries. Well, this all becomes boring to one with a fragmented attention from the digital world.

The catechism expressed that “prayer is a battle.” Here, prayer delves into a battle of our thoughts. The battle in prayer pits the instant gratification thoughts of the digital-consumer world, going up against the stillness of divine mystery. Simply put, there is a battle going on over your thoughts. The battle lines up as the secular thoughts versus the sacred thoughts, and right now, the secular thoughts are advancing in number.

As John Mac Ghilonn eloquently presents our situation on prayer.  “Prayer requires the presence of body, mind, and spirit. That unity is cultivated through patience and discipline. Yet patience and discipline are the very virtues our digital age diminishes, dilutes, and dissolves. Years of dopamine-driven digital habits have done significant harm. Bodies fidget, trained by constant stimulation to recoil from stillness. Minds split into restless pieces, skipping across screens like stones over water. Spirits short-circuit before they can settle into sacred rhythms, the flicker of transcendence extinguished by the glow of a notification."

Prayer is when one stubbornly flushes out the loud messages from the consumer world and allows God’s holy thoughts to enter in. Prayer demands an inner quiet to hear the hidden message of God. This only happens when your external and internal clamoring goes way down for focus and silence are prerequisites in prayer. Yes, in prayer we are often reciting words, but those words, when hyper- concentrated on God, allow holy thoughts and images to seep into the mind. 

The first step in our crisis is to recognize the problem - we are trapped in a technology-induced consumer haze that has muted our intellectual and creative drive. Once we realize our conundrum, we can begin to prepare for the grueling solution - to fast from the digital consumer world and transition into a monkish mind frame. Vocal prayer or meditative prayer at first will seem as foreign as learning a new language. Anyone who engages in mental prayer knows that it is neither easy nor passive; rather, it is an active working of the will to the mind of God. Like a taxing workout, we'll want to tap out early, but if we keep grinding rep after rep, spiritual understanding and that drive of divine mission will surface. The whisper of God will begin to echo in our soul.

In Plato's famous allegory of the Cave, he depicts prisoners chained in a dark cave since birth, mistaking shadows on an outer wall for reality. The shadows are projected on the outer wall by people who are invisible to the chained prisoners. These mysterious figures walk along an inner wall with a fire behind them, creating shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. All the prisoners' experience in the cave is the shadows in front of them so to them the shadows are reality. However, one day, a prisoner escapes the cave and ventures to the outside world. In the real world, the prisoner takes in all the colors, sights, and sounds of nature so as to experience the true essence of reality. When the prisoner returns to the cave to inform the other prisoners of his great discovery in this new world, they reject him.

Our situation today parallels Plato's allegory. The digital world of consumer content is a mere shadow of reality. And behind the wall, the veil, demons are projecting these shadowy tech-induced senses. Is it not highly ironic that the logo of the most popular tech device has an apple with a bite out of it - almost signaling itself in alliance with the forbidden fruit. The strong man is the one who begins to pray. In prayer, he is like the prisoner who breaks free from the cave and is caught up in the beauty of the outside world.

With the dumbing down nature in the consumer world, prayer opens the horizon and ushers in wisdom and lasting delights. Our move from a consumer in the digital space to prayer is a move from frantic noise to a sacred silence. Yes, it is a drastic move but a necessary move. Cardinal Sarah comments ring true. “Through silence, we return to our heavenly origin, where there is nothing but calm, peace, repose, silent contemplation, and adoration of the radiant face of God.”