12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

The digital world through our phones allows us the tools of self-replication and the hope that we can garner infinite attention and infinite regard from others, and, in that way, achieve a sort of online fame. But online attention proves to be an incapable substitute for true intimacy, and the addiction to a crafted online image renders true intimacy impossible.

Hiding our unflattering features is very natural and easy online, but excruciatingly hard and unnatural offline, in healthy local churches and honest friendships. Self-editing is less possible in genuine face-to-face relationships. There is no Valencia filter for the real-life you. Without honestly acknowledging these online tendencies, we will continue to think local-church awkwardness is a strange feeling to be resisted rather than a precious means to reshape us.

in the online world, we can separate ourselves from people who don’t think like us and gravitate toward people who do.

The Internet can enable us to form connections with people with whom we have extremely particular things in common, making possible highly stimulating, enriching, and deepening interactions. I wouldn’t be where or who I am today were it not for online interactions, sustaining and helping me to develop a perspective that often bears little relation to my immediate contexts over the years. This said, while I have undoubtedly gained an immense amount from these, I have frequently found them to be a retreat from the challenge of actual relationships with Christian neighbors with whom I differ, a temptation amplified for me by virtue of the fact that I can naturally be an extreme introvert, prone to reclusiveness.

We easily settle into digital villages of friends who think just like us and escape from people who are unlike us. Our phones buffer us from diversity,

our online communities of like-minded friends are often marked by a “positive feedback loop,” where “affirmation and assent merely reinforce existing prejudices. In such contexts, communities become insular, echo chambers of accepted opinion, closed to opposing voices,” which means they breed a “homeostatic stifling of difference.”

Maybe this is a key function of church attendance in the digital age. We must withdraw from our online worlds to gather as a body in our local churches. We gather to be seen, to feel awkward, and perhaps to feel a little unheard and underappreciated, all on purpose. In obedience to the biblical command not to forsake meeting together,21 we each come as one small piece, one individual member, one body part, in order to find purpose, life, and value in union with the rest of the living body of Christ.

This feeling of awkwardness, this leaving the safety of our online friendships, this mingling with people we don’t know or understand in our local churches is incredibly valuable for our souls. Church is a place for real encounters with others and for true self-disclosure among other sinners. In the healthy local church, I do not fear rejection. In the healthy local church, I can pursue a spiritual depth that requires agitation, frustration, and the discomfort of being with people who conform not to “my” kingdom but to God’s.

If you follow Christ, the world will unfollow you. You will be shunned. You will be despised. If the glory of man is your god, you will not celebrate the glory of Christ. Or, if you come to Christ and treasure his glory above all other glory, you will be forced to forfeit the buzz of human approval. Christians today still face real-life glory wars and real-life tensions inside the digital world. So what do we fear more, the disapproval of God or the disappearance of our online followers?

The approval and affirmation we seek online is absurd because it misunderstands how approval works in God’s economy.

the itch for human approval ultimately renders faith pointless.24 Why? Because faith is the act of being satisfied with Christ, says John Piper, “and if you are bent on getting your satisfaction from scratching the itch of self-regard, people’s affirmation, you will turn away from Jesus, because you can’t serve two masters.”

the test of authenticity for our lives is not determined by the applause of man, but by the approval of God.26 We cannot commend ourselves. God commends us.27 He searches us. He knows our every motive, even our motives for ministry.

The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation. The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our “highly selective self-representation.”29 We want to be loved and accepted by others, so we wash away our scars and defects. When we put this scrubbed-down representation of ourselves online, we tabulate the human approval in a commodity index of likes and shares. We post an image, then watch the immediate response. We refresh. We watch the stats climb—or stall. We gauge the immediate responses from friends, family members, and strangers. Did what we posted gain the immediate approval of others? We know within minutes. Even the promise of religious approval and the affirmation of other Christians is a gravitational pull that draws us toward our phones.

This approval addiction must be why Jesus expressly warns us not to seek human praise by our obedience. He warns us not to flaunt our works online in order to be praised by others: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 6:1).

The buzz of social approval has conditioned us to feed on “regular micro-bursts of validation given by every like, favorite, retweet, or link.”31 This new physiological conditioning means that our lives become more dependent on the moment-by-moment approval of others. The problem is not just that we need to turn away from these micro-bursts of approval, but that we must deprogram ourselves from this online hunger.

If we don’t detox these habits, we will go on seeking intimacy by reproducing ourselves, bingeing on man’s approval, and starting each day with an approval hangover. Then we need the antidote of new affirmation from our friends to keep convincing ourselves that our lives are meaningful. This is tragic. This is wasted reward. The solid praise we expect from God is based on actions now largely unseen; the whimsical praise we seek online is based on what we project.32 We cannot neglect this contrast.

We cannot continually chase the lure of public praise and affirmation by self-replication. Such a desire will kill us spiritually, and Paul signaled why. In God’s economy, approval is something we must wait for. Those who feed on little nibbles of immediate approval from man will eternally starve. But those who aim their entire lives toward the glory and approval of God will find, in Christ, eternal approval.33

Our entire faith is built on a book, and inside that book are sixty-six smaller books. Our spiritual life is fed by books within books, like Ezekiel’s wheels inside wheels. And new Christian books are released every day around the world. Books are a big deal for Christians. We treasure the press. Publishing is part of gospel mission. Wherever the gospel has spread, so has literacy.1 Yet in the digital age, books have become more vulnerable to the label boring. Compared to the latest game or streaming television series, staring at black and white shapes (like these) for several hours seems like a silly investment. We have been initiated into a kind of entertainment-convenience that makes books feel downright outdated, inconvenient, and far too demanding. The statistics show that Christians who struggle to read books are struggling to break free from poor smartphone habits as one root cause.

poor digital reading was not a result of the medium, “but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.”5 With digital text on our phones, we are conditioned to skim quickly. With a printed book in hand, we naturally read more slowly, at a pace realistic for retention. Simply put, “If you want to internalize a piece of knowledge, you’ve got to linger over it.”6 But we have been trained to not linger over digital texts.

Our lack of self-control with digital marshmallows malnourishes our sustained linear concentration.

So whatever the medium (paper or pixels), and whatever the weakness of the medium’s users (forgetfulness or hastiness), we must become mindful and slow our pace.

God has given us the power of concentration in order for us to see and avoid what is false, fake, and transient—so that we may gaze directly at what is true, stable, and eternal. It is part of our creatureliness that we are easily distracted; it is part of our sinfulness that we are easily lured by what is vain and trivial.

“The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake, to lose ourselves in the passion for a game, a story, or a person.”

Bible reading is incredibly demanding work, yet I find much comfort and hope in knowing the Bible calls me to lifelong engagement. The Bible is not a book to “get through,” to read cover to cover and then put on a shelf; neither is it a book to browse or skim. The Bible is our open door to hear God’s voice both alone and together in community. It is intended to be bottomless in its profundity and endless in its relevance. It is less of a book and more of a world of revelation in which we live and move and have our being. This book gives us life, and it moves and pushes God’s redemptive plan forward. In fact, “the whole purpose of God for the universe stands or falls on the book. If the book fails, everything fails.”

We must be aware that all the content on the “small screen” of our phones is intermediated. This is not good or bad, just a reality that calls for discernment and discretion. On our phones, we have high-definition portals into the vast beauties and glories of creation, but every message we receive has been cut, edited, and produced for a purpose. This distinction also keeps our smartphone screens in proper context when it comes to God’s massive glories—seen and unseen—that surround our lives.

“People used to do things and then post them, and the approval you gained from whatever you were putting out there was a byproduct of the actual activity. Now the anticipated approval is what’s driving the behavior or the activity, so there’s just sort of been this reversal.”18 Phones with social connections transform us—and our friends and children—into actors.

What if the point-and-shoot cameras in our phones make us less capable of retaining discrete memories? One psychologist calls this camera-induced amnesia the “photo-taking impairment effect,”

we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—that is, to enjoy each moment of life without feeling compelled to “capture” it.

We cannot suppress our souls’ appetite for what is awe-inspiring. The goal is not to mute all smartphone media but to feed ourselves on the right media. We were created to behold, see, taste, and delight in the richness of God’s glory—and that glory often comes refracted to us through skilled artists. Our insatiable appetite for viral videos, memes, and tweets is the product of an appetite for glory that God gave us. And he created a delicious world of media marvels so that we may delight in, embrace, and cherish anything that is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, or worthy of praise.25 This will keep us very busy marveling at Scripture, at nature, and at God’s grace in the people he created.

our smartphone addiction leads to creational blindness. It is only in the absence of constant digital flattery that we can feel small and less significant, more human, liberated to encounter the world we are called to love.

In other words, what we think others think of us profoundly shapes our sense of identity and our search for belonging. This complex social dynamic further proves that we don’t find our identity in ourselves.

We are composites of the people we want to conform to, and this conformity defines one of the most powerful lures of our smartphones. Digital technology now accelerates and particularizes our search for belonging.

no matter how fiercely independent we are, we never find our identity within ourselves. We must always look outside of ourselves for identity, to our group fit and to our loves. Both dynamics reveal the truth: we are becoming like what we see. We are becoming like what we worship. Or, to put this in Facebook terms directly, we are becoming like what we like.

“God didn’t create you as an end in yourself. He is the end; you are the means. And the reason that’s such good news is because the best way to show that God is infinitely valuable is to be supremely happy in him. If God’s people are bored with God, they are really bad images. God is not unhappy about himself. He is infinitely excited about his own glory.”

To be made in God’s image means we exist for two reasons: (1) to be satisfied in the infinite worth of the Creator and (2) to show the world how precious and deeply satisfying he is. Our “fit,” our “loves,” and our “belonging” all converge in him. Our identity hinges on him, and in him we find the Spirit-given power to reject all identities projected on us.15 But if people see us bored with God, absorbed with ourselves, and conformed to worldly celebrities, they will not see the image of Jesus reflected in us. If we fail to reflect Christ, we fail to be what God created us to be; we lose our purpose.

This form of idolatry—submitting human ends to the available technological means—is called reverse adaptation.17 In the digital age, we idolize our phones when we lose the ability to ask if they help us (or hurt us) in reaching our spiritual goals. We grow so fascinated with technological glitz that we become captive to the wonderful means of our phones—their speed, organization, and efficiency—and these means themselves become sufficient ends. Our destination remains foggy because we are fixated on the speed of our travel. We mistakenly submit human and spiritual goals to our technological possibilities. This is reverse adaptation.

Our idolatrous impulses make us easily trapped by this worldliness, the loss of our purpose. We often don’t stand over our phones and direct them, based on our calling to image God; instead, we bow to our phones as worlds of digital possibilities, never asking the questions of our ultimate aims. When the means become our aimless habits, this is techno-idolatry.

The smartphone is causing a social reversal: the desire to be alone in public and never alone in seclusion. We can be shielded in public and surrounded in isolation, meaning we can escape the awkwardness of human interaction on the street and the boredom of solitude in our homes. Or so we think.

And when it comes to interacting with strangers, social media emerges as a safe place to do it. Perhaps it’s not going too far to say that we love social media “because it comes without the hazards and commitments of a real-world community” or because we really harbor “a deep disappointment with human beings, who are flawed and forgetful, needy and unpredictable, in ways that machines are wired not to be.”14 It is safer to approach one another from behind a machine.

Friction is the path to genuine authenticity, and no amount of online communication can overcome a lack of real integrity. We must be real with the people God puts into our lives. We must tell the truth. We must be honest at school. We must be wise with our money. We must be trusted friends. We must be reliable at work. The world needs what we must be: God-centered, joyful, and trustworthy men and women. We are not flawless; we are fallen repenters who require relational friction to grow and mature. We are authentic believers who are committed to replacing easy relationships with authentic ones.

And when it comes to the morning hours, Charles Spurgeon was right: “Permit not your minds to be easily distracted, or you will often have your devotion destroyed.”26 Vital to our spiritual health, we must listen and hear God’s voice saying to us, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Every morning we must take time to stop, to be still, to know that God is God and that we are his children. Digital technology must not fill up all the silent gaps of life.

So as Christians, we push back our phones in the morning—in order to protect our solitude so that we can know God and so that we can reflect him as his children. And we push back our phones during the day—in order to build authentic eye-to-eye trust with the people in our lives and in order to be sharpened by hard relationships. Without these two guards in place, our displacedness dominates, isolation shelters us, we can find ourselves becoming more and more lonely, and our gospel mission will eventually stall out.

Technology does this—it makes us think we can indulge in anonymous vices, even conceptually, without any future consequences. Anonymity is where sin flourishes, and anonymity is the most pervasive lie of the digital age. The clicks of our fingertips reveal the dark motives of our hearts, and every sin—every double-tap and every click—will be accounted for.

Pornography is the web’s largest industry, and the medium fits the vice. But the sobering fact is that our private sexual practices measure our proximity to God.

Only Scripture tells us what’s ultimately at stake here. Data breaches by hackers, shocked discoveries by wounded spouses, and even the self-murder of aspiring adulterers—each of these tragic fallouts of secret sin serves as a mere prophetic hint of an impending reckoning. One day, every sinner who lived in so-called “anonymous” sin will stand before God. There is no such thing as anonymity. It is only a matter of time. Every lurid detail, sleazy fantasy, lazy word, and idle click will be broadcast in the court of the Creator. All of the things done in secrecy and darkness will be brought into the light, and every intent of the heart will be disclosed.13 It will be the ultimate humiliation. It will be the ultimate exposing of our hearts’ intents. It will spark the ultimate panic. It will cause the ultimate knot in the soul and the ultimate desire to run and hide and die from the guilt and shame of being exposed.

All of this is mysterious to the world, but invisible realities govern our consuming. We are all hungry, thirsty, and needy for sustenance outside of us, but we give our attention and wealth to trying to satisfy our most essential longings with the goods and the vices so easily tapped on our phones. Therapeutic materialism is a scam. We order boxes of new goods that will never heal us and we buy bags of comfort food that will never truly comfort us, all because we are blind to the free gifts of God offered in his Son, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood have been given to us to sustain our eternal life and to feed the flourishing of our unceasing joy.20 Jesus quenches the deep thirst that consumerism cannot slake.

In the end, I wonder if most of the self-destructive patterns in our lives—from overeating to worrying to fighting to overspending to grabbing our phones first thing in the morning—are the result of starved imaginations, malnourished of hope. When we live for what is visible and ignore what is invisible, we illustrate the definition of faithlessness. True faith lives for what is invisible and undisclosed. Every generation of the church faces its own unique struggle to focus on God and on the things not seen. The struggle is real—whether it is with the latest iPhone or the ancient household idol. When I grow bored with Christ, I become bored with life—and when that happens, I often turn to my phone for a new consumable digital thrill. It is my default habit. “To become habituated to an iPhone is to implicitly treat the world as ‘available’ to me and at my disposal—to constitute the world as ‘at-hand’ for me, to be selected, scaled, scanned, tapped, and enjoyed.”28 In our phones, the digital age and the consumerist age merge, and our screens offer us everything we can see or desire, even “anonymous” compulsions and lurid fantasies.

Our challenge in the digital age is twofold: 1. On the external front: Are we safeguarding ourselves and practicing smartphone self-denial? 2. On the internal front: Are we simultaneously seeking to satisfy our hearts with divine glory that is, for now, largely invisible?

To live an abundant life in this insatiable consumer society, we must plead in prayer for God-given power to turn our eyes away from the gigs of digital garbage endlessly offered in our phones and tune our ears to hear sublime echoes of an eternal enthrallment with the transcendent beauties we “see” in Scripture.

Our phones draw us into unhealthy habits not because we want unlimited information, but because we want to stay relevant and entertained. We want to be humored and liked.